Hart recently offered an essay in which he observes that "There was a moment when the word came to bear the indefinite article – as in ‘Christianity is
a religion’ " – and so to refer to some supposedly stable empirical object or ideal essence.
This is where we are today. People think religion and a whole packaged item comes to mind. A mixed bundle of understandings, misunderstandings, prejudices, fancies, uncomprehensions and assumptions.
There was a time when the term,
religio or
cultus, theosebeia, thrēskeia or
latreia, was understood to refer to a practice, not a thing designated by credo and dogma, not an order of identity posed over against other analogous but alien identities.
When, in the fifteenth century, Nicholas of Cusa wrote
De Vera Religione, he was not writing about 'the' true faith but rather true religion in the sense of the highest virtue in seeking God. Only well into the modern period did it become normal for us to speak of ‘religions’ in the plural, classed as instances of a universal category or kind.
Strict division among religions is principally a modern Western prejudice. In East Asia it's quite possible to be at once Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist, or Confucian, Buddhist and Shintoist ... there are distinct creeds, but very few that are mutually impermeable in every regard, and this occasions less anxiety in the faithful than it often does in the West. (Alhough we ought not diminish the contention between Muslims and Hindus, gort example.)
The problem with the modern category is that it tends to assume artificial lines of demarkation, enforcing an often fictional uniformity or identity that rarely withstands serious scrutiny. It creates division where, if one were to look, there are actually profound commonalities and even universally shared experiences.
The idea of Christendom, for example, evokes images of Medieval Europe, as if that;s where Christianity originated, or found its home.
There is no such thing as a single 'Christian identity', nor has there ever been a single 'Christian religion'. There have always been pluralities, fluid and variable, diverse except when forced by external political or social pressures into rigid institutional or cultural forms.
Thus Christianity, throughout the European Middle Ages, rubbed shoulders with the 'pagan' world without too much bother. Brigid of Ireland stepped through the veil to serve as midwife at the nativity, and so on ... it's not a case of appropriation or assimilation – rather it's a case of seeing the truth where and how it manifests itself, not in one thing only, but in all things.
To discuss 'the purpose of religion' will first require the shedding of a body of assumptions, and stripping the ideas right back to their essences.
