RELIGION (IN MORAL THEOLOGY). - I. DEFINITION. - From the Latin religio, whose meaning varies according to whether it is derived from relegere ("to consider, to treat with diligence"), following Cicero's morphologically most correct interpretation: "qui omnia quae ad cultum deorum pertinetent diligenter retractant et quasi relegent, sunt dicti religiosi ex relegendo, ut ex eligendo elegentes, tanquam ex diligendo diligentes" (De natura deorum, II, 28); or according to Lactantius's derivation from religare, "to bind, to tie": "hoc vinculo pietatis obstricti Deo et religati sumus, unde ipsa Religio nomen accepit, non ut Cicero interpretatus est, a relegendo" (Div. Inst., IV, 28), followed by St. Augustine (Retract., I, 13), who nevertheless also inclines toward Cicero's derivation (De civ. Dei, X, 3). It should be noted that before Cicero consecrated its meaning of worship rendered to the divinity, the word originally meant rather "fear," "superstitious scruple" provoked by the presence or contact of that which, as sacred and mysterious, is forbidden to the profane: "dies religiosi," "loca religiosa," "fingere sibi religionem" (Caesar, De bello Gall., VI, 36), "animus multiplex religio invasit" (Livy, IV, 30). It has been rightly observed that perhaps because of this primitive and inferior meaning of its own, Religio was never deified in the official cult of the Romans, as Pietas was instead. Christianity has adopted and exalted the meaning of the bond that unites man to the divinity.
The term r., in its broadest acceptation, applicable to every type of r., primitive or higher, natural or revealed, denotes a bond of dependence that ties man anew to one or more superior Powers on which he feels and knows he depends and to which he renders acts of worship, both individual and collective.
Essential elements. — This definition includes all the essential elements that constitute r., namely 1) the belief (intellectual element) in the superior Powers which, according to the various types and degrees of r., may be one or more, personal or impersonal; 2) the bond of dependence, of whatever kind and provoked by whatever element, that links man to them; 3) the practical manner in which this bond manifests itself and which constitutes that body of rites and ceremonies through which r. takes concrete form in human groupings and expresses their sentiments and their needs.
The bond of dependence had already been pointed out as specific to r. by the Protestant theologian F. Schleiermacher (v.) with the aim of reacting at the same time against the subjectivism of Fichte and the Enlightenment rationalism of the 18th century. This bond, which is not that of a slave toward his master, is suggested by the experienced recognition of one's own nothingness that the human creature feels before something that is outside of it and that transcends it: R. Otto (v.) called it "Kreaturgefühl," an epithet accepted also by eminent Catholic theologians; "the religious sentiment can well be called the sentiment of the creature, that is, the sentiment of the nothingness from which God has drawn us and into which we are always in the act of falling; from which, however, the divine omnipotence continually saves us" (Graneris).
St. Thomas Aquinas had already, with admirable insight, recognized in the sense of our fundamental deficiency the metaphysical root of r., which modern theology, enriched by the contribution of psychological research and by the findings of ethnology, has confirmed: "human reason tells man to submit to some Being superior to himself because of the deficiencies that he experiences in himself ("propter defectus quos in seipso sentit"), in regard to which he feels the need to be helped and directed by some superior Being; and, whoever it may be, it is the Being that among all is called God" (Sum. Theol., 2ᵃ-2ᵃc. 85, 1).
In the recognition of the two elements resulting from the definition, which are found in every r., namely the objective one, that is, the complex of relations between God and men, and the subjective one, that is, the disposition of the mind to render to God the worship owed to him, all scholars of the religious phenomenon agree: ancient and modern Catholic theologians; cf. Ad. Tanqueray (Synopsis Theol. Dogm. Fund., I, De vera religione, 12th ed., Rome 1908, p. 26); E.-H. Pinard de la Boullaye (L'étude comparée des religions, 3rd ed., II, Paris 1925, p. 5); J. G. Frazer, Protestant ethnologist (The Golden Bough, I, London 1913, p. 222); A. Loisy, rationalist historian of religion (La religion, Paris 1917, p. 49).
II. CLASSIFICATION
Religions can be classified from different points of view: a) theological, proper to those that derive from a founder or reformer, who gave them a sacred Book that is the source of their dogmatic teaching and of their ethical norm. The Qur'an (22, 9) calls them "religions of the Book." Such are the biblical religions (v. BIBLE), Judaism and Christianity, which owe their dogmatic content to a Revelation (v.) of God begun in the Old Testament and completed in the New; Islam, whose sacred book, the Qur'an, given by Muhammad as a revelation of God, is considered by Muslims as the source of their theology, philosophy, law and ethics; Zoroastrianism, whose sacred book, the Avesta, was given by Zarathustra as a revelation of the Wise Lord, Ahura Mazda. It should be noted, however, that not all the sacred scriptures in the possession of the various peoples have a revealed character: neither the Kojiki, Nihongi, Engishiki, of Japanese Shintoism (v. SHINTO); nor the five King of Confucian China (v.); nor the Tao-te-King of Laotse (v. TAOISM); nor the Siddhanta of Jainism (v.); nor the Tripitaka of Buddhism; although all of them serve as a norm for the religious life of the peoples who venerate them.
b) philosophical, which evaluates religions according to their intellectual and moral content; well known is Hegel's division into natural religions of spiritual individuality and of free subjectivity (Judaism, Greece, Rome) and religions of absolute finality (Christianity). The modern phenomenological current headed by L. van der Leeuw prefers to study the various religious phenomena in themselves, considered as ideal types, without concern for time or causal connection or intellectual evaluation. And here the categories multiply, since the points of view to be considered as typical are quite rare: object and subject of religion; their reciprocal action, both external and internal; the historical figures in which religion is concretized: religions of monism and of dualism, of struggle and of quiet, of works and of Grace, etc. (van der Leeuw); or the various racial types: Nordic, Armenid (=Mediterranean), Mongoloid (Menschling). The typological criterion must be used with caution, both that of van der Leeuw, which prescinds too much from history, in which the various types acquire life and color, and that of Menschling, because the pure and exclusive type, as it is not found in religions, is likewise not found even in races.
c) historical in the broad sense, that is, corresponding to the historical-social development of human groups, which presents three phases: tribal, characterized by animistic manifestations; national, characterized by the polytheism of the great religions of antiquity: Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, Rome; supranational or universal, characterized by monotheism: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.
The first two phases belong to the so-called natural religions, which are a complex of practices rather than of doctrines, which have no determined formula of faith, do not appeal to the person of a founder, or if a name is invoked it is that of a codifier of rites, e.g., Numa, not of a revealer of a religious system. Religions of the third type are born within pre-existing religions. They are truly due to the work of a divine founder (Jesus) or of a reformer who lived in the full light of history (Buddha, Muhammad), and then they present themselves as a reaction against the prevailing religion and claim a superior ethic in function of a universalistic concept of the divinity, a ritual purified of animistic elements, an eschatology that guarantees to the faithful the fruit of the good actions performed in life. Or else these religions, the better to express the tendency from which they result and the better to lend credit to their content, link themselves to a mythical founder of divine nature (Dionysus, Osiris, Mithra, etc.) into whose service one enters through a special initiation kept secret from the profane; in whose life (which contains events of suffering, death and resurrection, generally due to the original agrarian meaning of these divinities) the whole faith and morality of the adept is summed up; in whose sacrificial celebration, at once efficacious and commemorative, is placed the key of salvation and therefore the certain faith in a blessed immortality (v. MYSTERIES).
III. CULT AND THEOLOGY
In religion, therefore, two elements are found: one practical and one theoretical, also called, according to the various points from which they are examined, worship and belief, liturgy and theology, movement (of the body) and representation (mental), rite and myth.
These, although well distinct from one another, are indissoluble when the religious act is posited, because the ritual action that the religious man performs with regard to the higher Powers is determined by the idea he has of them. In the act of worship a special relationship is established between the individual (or the group) and the higher Powers, almost a sacred atmosphere that envelops both and thanks to which both end up becoming actors, to the point that in some rites an individual or a group, qualified for this function, take on the parts of the divinity represented by symbols or masks, or else personified by the one who presides over the ceremony and by his acolytes; this precisely distinguishes a rite from a theatrical performance.
The cultic elements of a religion can be grouped around four points: 1) the places of worship, which range from a simple clearing in the depths of a forest to the most sumptuous building (v. TEMPIO); 2) the persons, that is, the priesthood in its most varied categories, from the medicine man to the priest invested with high specific functions (v. SACERDOZIO); 3) the times, that is, the feasts of the sacred calendar that mark a rhythm for the religious life of the group (v. CALENDARIO); 4) the rites, that is, all those gestures and movements and formulas by means of which the individual and the group put themselves in contact with the higher Powers (v. RITO).
The theoretical element develops around two topics, a source of very rich developments: 1) God, who in natural religions has given rise to the most varied mythical creations referring to the creation of the gods (theogony), of the world (cosmogony), of man (anthropogony), and in the historical religions proper to an environment of high culture has given rise to the profound and sometimes sublime speculations of theology and mysticism; 2) the soul and its destiny (v. ESCATOLOGIA; REDENZIONE).
IV. RELIGION ACCORDING TO CATHOLIC THEOLOGY
Religion, considered objectively according to its substance and the manner in which it is communicated, is either natural or supernatural. The existence of God, his creative and provident action, the moral law engraved in the heart of man are all truths that human reason can reach on its own: in this case religion is natural in substance and in the manner by which it is attained. If those truths are confirmed to us either directly or indirectly by God, religion, natural in substance, becomes supernatural by the manner of its communication. If, however, it is a question of truths that the human mind cannot reach by deducing them from the consideration of created things, but only on the basis of a revelation from God — for example, regarding the mysteries of the Unity and Trinity of God and of the Incarnation and Death of the Redeemer — then we have supernatural religion, and therefore revealed also as to its substance (v. RIVELAZIONE).
Religion is also considered by Catholic theology as a moral virtue insofar as it is subordinate to the cardinal virtue of justice, since it is an obligation of justice to render to God the homage that is due to him: indeed it is the most excellent of the moral virtues because more than any other it brings one close to him, working both in the interior of the soul and in the exterior of individual and social life all that most directly relates to divine worship (St. Thomas, Sum. Theol., 2a-2ae, 81, 8). V. CULTO.
From this twofold point of view the acts of the virtue of religion are divided into internal and external. Internal are devotion, that is, the act of man's will which offers himself to God in order to serve him; an act that is expressed in prayer (v.) and in adoration (v.), which may be purely internal or may manifest itself externally with some gesture of the body: prostration, genuflection, bowing, joining or spreading of the hands, etc. External are those in which the body is also employed, as in the collective manifestations of religion, such as the sanctification of feasts, offerings, the Sacrifice of the Mass, and the acts in which the individual commits himself before God, such as the oath, the vow, the choral office.
Against religion one can sin by defect or by excess, that is, with acts of irreligion or of superstition. Irreligious are those acts against the worship of God that sin by defect and therefore dishonor him and are reduced to practical indifference, the tempting of God, simony and sacrilege. Superstitions are those acts that sin by excess, that is, they are abuses and deviations from religion, and are reduced to idolatry, vain observance, divination, magic, spiritism (v. the individual entries).
V. RELIGION AND CIVILIZATION
Only thanks to the absolute obligatoriness imposed by religion on the moral law — an imposition that cannot be the effect of acquired habits or of agreed human conventions, but of the will of a transcendent legislator who can reward and punish — is the existence of an ordered society made possible. Religion is therefore the foundation on which the social edifice rests, which ensures its cohesion and promotes, together with civil progress, intellectual progress as well, that is, the whole complex of elements that constitute civilization. And the latter deserves this name all the more the more the religious sentiment remains associated with the intellectual one, together with which it was born; since it is precisely the rational element that determines the superiority of a religion and keeps it equally far from the stupid ignorance of fanaticism and from the blind pride of rationalism.
On the development of religion within ancient and modern human groups, and on the most appropriate method in this kind of study, see PRIMITIVI, religione dei; RELIGIONI, studio comparato delle.
Bibliography26 works
Nicola Turchi