Samuel Finer, History of Government, Conceptual Prologue [Parts 3 & 4]
'Religion and Religious Institutions' plus 'Belief Systems, Social Stratification, and Political Institutions' [17 mins.]
Michael curates today’s Social Science Files selection:
In his The History of Government From the Earliest Times, Samuel Finer wrote:
… CONTINUING from the archived Part 2 …
1.2. Military Formats and Forms of Government
1.3. Religion and Religious Institutions
Religions, however defined, are a subspecies of the main species, which is 'beliefsystems'. This broader category will be dealt with in the next section [1.4 BELOW].
In relating religion to political systems I have initially relied on the fivefold classification of R. N. Bellah ['Religious Evolution', in R. Robertson (ed.), Sociology of Religion (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1969)].
The first of the stages that Bellah recognizes, and which he calls 'primitive religion', does not concern us here; it is the religion of very simple societies like the Bushmen and the Dinka. Then follow, respectively, the stages of Archaic religions and the Historic religions, which concern us very much in this section. Bellah's fourth stage, which he calls 'Early Modern', is based, as he himself acknowledges, on one (though major) case: the European Reformation. This is much more pertinent to the discussion of 'belief systems' than it is here, and is postponed accordingly. The fifth stage of 'Modern' religion is problematical and so I have declined to borrow it.
In Archaic religion, according to this scheme, the religious symbol system has moved beyond that of primitive religion, where the powers of nature are mythical, identified in some way with the living, and are not gods—though they may be, so to speak, demigods. Here, those mythical beings have been objectified. They are conceived of as actively controlling the world. Their interrelationships are formulated into what can become an elaborate hierarchy of control. A vast cosmology accompanies this, into which all things are fitted. Sometimes, where literacy prevails, the internal logic of all this can take the religion into speculations and themes that lead out of and beyond Archaic religion.
The characteristic action in Archaic religion is the cult. In this cult, man and the gods are distinguished from one another. Hence some interaction system is required. This interaction is served by the institutions of worship and of sacrifice. The organization which characterizes this type of religion is one of a proliferation of cults, the reason being that every group in archaic society has a cultic aspect—and such groups have multiplied as compared with the primitive stage of society. Moreover, the social systems to which Archaic religion responds are ones which may be deemed 'two-class', in so far as the upper class which monopolizes military and political power also usually claims superior religious status. The extreme case is that of the divine king, like the Egyptian pharaoh, acting as the link between gods and man, the cosmos and the world. But kings never completely divest themselves of religious leadership. Although priesthoods develop, sometimes to marked degree, adherents do not. The temples provide for a transient clientele, one, moreover, that observes rather than participates, and is not organized as a collectivity.
Finally, Bellah describes the social and political implications of this stage of religion and reaches conclusions with which we can agree. He points out that here, society and the individual are both merged into a natural, divine cosmos. The traditional structures and social practices are all held to be grounded in this divine cosmic order. In this way social conformity is at every point reinforced with religious sanctions.
The next stage in religious evolution, the Historic religions, begins in the first millennium BC and endures for some 2,000 years. Bellah calls them Historic (he really means 'historical') because they are all relatively recent, having emerged in literate societies, so that they are studied by historians rather than by archaeologists and anthropologists. This kind of religion differs from the preceding, Archaic type in that it is always in some sense transcendental: the cosmological monism of Archaic religion is here replaced by a sharp dualism between this world and the supernatural world which is also the world of the hereafter. This involves the rejection of this world in favour of a more real one, beyond and above it.
Consequently the symbol systems are different. All the Historic religions are dualistic: like the Archaic religions, they arrange reality in a hierarchical order, but this has been reduced to the supernatural, which is above, and the natural, which is below. The central religious preoccupation of the masses is the world after death, hence salvation (whatever that may mean). The many gods of the Archaic religions are reduced to one, the supreme Creator; and at the same time, salvation is open to everybody. The religions are universalistic, not localized or sectionalized into cults.
Religious action is above all that which is necessary for salvation. The ideal of the religious life becomes separation from the world; and for the layman, piety is modelled on the behaviour of the religious. The dualism we have noted is reflected in the characteristic religious organization; that is, into two practically independent hierarchies—the political and the religious. The monarch can no longer monopolize religious leadership, hence the problem of legitimating power shifts into a new gear. This problem extends down into the masses of pious laymen, and consequently, the role of believer and of subject become distinct, even if de facto rather than de jure.
The implications are profound: a new kind of tension arises between the political and religious—the king versus the prophets, the ulema versus the sultan, the pope versus the emperor. Religion now provides the ideology and social cohesion for rebellion and reform movements at just the same time as it serves to legitimate and reinforce the social order, as of ancient times.
This last point is the one which is stressed in this History, but I put it in a somewhat different way. The 'historic' religions, of which the supreme examples are Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism and (bringing up the rear for reasons that will be explained) Hinduism, are distinguished from the Archaic religions in that they are (1) Salvation religions which preach a definite code of conduct; (2) they are universalistic: they are held to apply to all humans as such; (3) they are dogmatic (but much less so in the case of Hinduism, which is why it trails the others in sociopolitical consequences).
By 'dogmatic' I mean that they hold that theirs is the only true way to salvation, and the best they will offer rival religions is a grudging toleration, at worst active persecution of the most horrible kinds.
Finally—and this is the chief point, already made by Bellah but not strongly enough—they are what I call kahal religions. Kahal and edah are the two words which are used in the Old Testament to signify 'congregation'. In the New Testament this is translated as ekklesia—hence the Latin ecclesia and all its derivatives. In Islam the word that most nearly approximates to this idea is the umma—the (Muslim) community.
In the Archaic religions there is no congregation; in the Egyptian and Middle Eastern variants, individuals were not permitted to pray in the temples, only the priests. The laity brought offerings to the shrine, yes, and they gathered and shrank in awe as the sacred model of the deity was brought out of the temple precinct to make a progress through the fields. But they did not participate. In Greek and Roman religion the layman might indeed enter a temple and pray; but as Bellah has justly observed, the laymen who did this were transients, not a collectivity.
In the kahal, on the other hand, the individual participated in the worship of the single supreme deity qua individual with his own inalienable tie-line to that deity, and he was also part of an organized collectivity, a stable community of fellow-believers. In it, the ruler had no superior status. He was one with his fellow-believers, however humble and however politically subject, in having to obey the divine law. And this code was one he himself had had no part in enacting. On the contrary, it was divine, given from the outside, the product of religious revelation—ineluctable, unchangeable, necessary. This is what Bellah means when he says that the status of religious believer becomes distinct from that of political subject; and he is right again when he points out the tension that arose out of the conflict between the two opposing roles.
The point is that, for the first time in history, kings were not omnipotent but were confined by divine restraints. The Jews invented this doctrine; they thereby invented the notion of 'limited monarchy'. There were areas the king himself might not touch, might not amend. For he was there simply to administer the divine law, and since everybody was equally bound to this, so everybody might have an opinion on whether the ruler was interpreting it correctly or even abrogating it.
In Jewish history this provoked famous tensions between the prophets and the kings, the kahal and the priestarchy, until, after the Dispersion, the religion fell into the hands of holy men who were recognized as teachers by a congregation (a knesset, or meeting, translated as 'synagogue' from the Greek, 'to bring together').
In Christianity the tensions weakened and helped to dissolve the Byzantine Empire, since the Egyptians were Monophysites who could not tolerate the Orthodoxy of Byzantium, any more than could the Nestorians of the Middle East. Later the rump of that empire was further disrupted by the Iconoclastic controversy. Only after this did the congregation and the ruling authorities come together in a moreorless tensionfree relationship.
In the West, however, the struggle of the Papacy and the Church against the princes, kings, and the emperor himself is notorious. Similar tensions arose in Islam; the great split between the Shi'ites and the Sunni, the sectarian strife among both rival persuasions, permitted and legitimized revolt in the name of the Prophet as, for instance, the destruction of the Ummayads of Syria at the hands of the politicoreligious rebellion of the Abbasids.
In Buddhism the conflict was not necessarily as marked, because here the congregation was not as wide as in the former three religions. The true congregation was the monkhood, the sangha. They indeed did struggle with authority at times—in China, in Korea, and in Japan—but the wider community was not involved in the same intense way as in the other three religions.
Hinduism did not have the same divisive effect. That religion was not exclusive in the way the others were, nor did it create a single kahal as they did. Hinduism was cultic; it consisted of groups clustered around a holy man, and it was also remarkably syncretic.
The more rigid the religious organization, the greater the potential for a clash with the political organization or state. Rokkan, worked out a schema which is of value here. ['Cities, States and Nations', in S. N. Eisenstadt and S. Rokkan (eds.), Building States and Nations (Sage, London, 1973)]
It is entitled Secular-Religious differentiation, and runs as follows:
MINIMAL = Local religions only. Traditional Tropical Africa.
INTERMEDIATE = local religion closely fused with political system.
(a) No corporate church, Hindu India. (b) Weakly incorporated church, Moslem Empires.MAXIMAL = Church differentiated and strongly incorporated.
(a) Separate from society, Buddhist political systems. (b) Closely fused with political system, but supraterritorial, Greek Orthodox Church. (c) Supraterritorial organization, potentially in opposition to political authority, Medieval Catholic Church. (d) Nationally fused, Protestant state churches. (e) Separate from national political system, Protestant sects.
We are not bound by the examples that Rokkan gives. For one thing, he was not interested in the religions of antiquity, which largely predate what he calls 'churches' but which I call the kahal religions. If we were to follow his classification, then, under the 'minimal-differentiation' rubric I should place the religions of Egypt and Mesopotamia, which are essentially palace cults or palace-licensed cults; also the religions of Greece and Rome, which are likewise local cults.
The kahal religions begin with Hinduism. Under the 'weakly incorporated' one might place Judaism at the time of the Hebrew kingdoms and, again, under the Second Commonwealth. But after this, when it becomes rabbinical-synagogal Judaism, uprooted from any native political system whatsoever, it would be classed in the same position as the Protestant sects in the schema above.
The struggles between the Jewish religious institution and the state during the period of the kings was extremely fierce, despite the description of it here as being but 'weakly incorporated' (or, for that matter, classed as 'no corporate church', for this classification is very broad), and exactly the same remarks apply to the collision between the Moslem religious institution and the sultans and other local rulers. Because it was always a potential opposition, it restrained the ruler; but because its organization was nonexistent or very feeble, it lacked anything like the compulsive and continuous directing power of the medieval Roman Catholic Church at the height of its influence in the thirteenth century.
Here, as this History shows, the confrontation between the religious and the secular authorities was unique. The idea that a Supreme Pontiff should direct and regulate the secular rulers of mankind ought to astound us. The only reason it does not is because most of us have grown up with the story and take it for granted. Yet nowhere else at any time did anything else like this obtain.
One final word on religions concerns the highly peculiar status of Confucianism. Confucianism in its pure state—uncontaminated by popular Buddhist and Taoist elements—sets no store by the supernatural. It is a moral code, a philosophy, and a cosmology, but it is not a religion in the sense that it requires a belief in a supernatural world beyond and better than our own.
Furthermore, there was no single Confucian organization; only schools, academies, and private groups. Confucianism shaped the literati, and by virtue of that fact these were the statesmen and the civil servants. The Confucian Classics were something like the Bible in that they incorporated history, poetry, philosophy, cosmology, and a system of ethics. Rather than religion, it ought perhaps be called the Confucian 'persuasion'. In the earliest days of the empire it was confined to the governing circles. Even then, it often brought them into collision with the emperor. It enjoyed its great revival as Neo-Confucianism under the Sung (AD 976-1279). Under the Ch'ing (1644 onwards), it became the persuasion of the local gentry, while the central government prepared a sort of short catechism of Confucianist principles for the masses. The consequence was the permeation of the entire society by this philosophy. So, although it was not, ever, a religion, and never a church in any sense either, yet it was the functional equivalent of the Church in Western Europe. It suffused the entire society; China was Confucian in the way Europe was Christian. And one of the most amazing things about it is that, although it did not rest upon a belief in the afterlife, zealous Confucianists were prepared to face the most insufferable tortures in opposing their principles to the wishes of the emperor, notably in the persecution of the Tunglin Academy in the last days of the Ming dynasty.
1.4. Belief Systems, Social Stratification, and Political Institutions
It seems to be common ground among scholars that the precondition for regime stability, possibly for the survival of the political community itself, is a certain congruence between social stratification and the political institutions. More problematical is the relationship of both these things to the belief-systems of the society.
'Belief-systems' goes wider than religion, usually, although some religions more or less encompass the totality of the belief systems; the medieval European Catholic Church could lay a fair claim to have done just this. But take Confucianism. We have already shown that this was not a religion, but there can be no doubt whatsoever that it was a belief-system as all-encompassing as that of medieval Roman Catholicism.
Yet it seems to me beyond a doubt that rulers cannot maintain their authority unless they are legitimated, and that they are legitimated by belief systems.
It would be completely useless for a British monarch today to claim absolute powers on the grounds that these had been conferred on him by God, but this was taken as read in Archaic Egypt and Mesopotamia. Where the claim of the ruler to authority is out of kilter with the prevalent belief-systems of the society, he must either 'change his plea', that is, make himself acceptable in terms of that belief-system, or else delegitimize himself and fall.
The belief-systems are stronger than the ruling authorities because it is by their virtue that rulers rule.
Much the same can be said of the relationship between the belief-systems and the social stratification of society. A belief-system which envisages the cosmos as arranged in a hierarchy, and humans as a part of that cosmos, will accept social inequality as natural. A belief-system which, per contra, starts with the unproven and unprovable axiom that 'all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, etc. etc', will not accept such inequality gladly, if at all.
There is, then, a three-way relationship between the belief-system, the social stratification, and the political institutions of a community. The hypothesis I advance here is that in some societies all three are tightly congruent and that, where this is so, though the authorities may be changed with some rapidity, the regime and the political community attain enormously longlived stability. By contrast, where one or other of the elements is out of kilter with the others, change and political instability occur.
Two examples of the 'threefold cord which is not easily broken' will make the point. The first is Archaic Egypt, and indeed the Middle East as a whole. Here the rulers are the link between the human and the cosmos; hence we never find a republic, only monarchies. The human order reflects that of the gods. They must be placated and so priests have to come in as intermediaries to offer the necessary sacrifices and perform the rituals. The monarch himself is above them, either as a god—the 'divine Horus, living for ever'—or as the ishakku or vicar of god. As to the common folk, they are not a kahal; they are observers and worshippers in the priests' cultic rituals. Thus the religion justifies and reinforces social conformity in every detail and by the same token every aspect of society: the kingship, the architecture, the art, the script, the mathematical formulae, the calendar were all invested with its same, quintessential sacredness. This is true of all and each of the diverse societies in Egypt and the Middle East down to the middle of the first millennium BC (excepting only the Jews, as already shown).
Confucianism offers another example. It justified the role of the emperor as the link between the cosmos and the sublunary world; but it also justified the elaborate social stratification that is to be seen in China from very earliest times, in so far as Confucianism is unabashedly a doctrine of inequality. The 'five relationships' which it preaches as the basis for all social interaction are all relationships of subordination: wife to husband, son to father, younger to older brother, and friend, and all to the emperor. The highly stratified and unequal society was legitimated by the Confucianist canon, and both together legitimated the absolutism of the emperor.
If we sought a contrast, we could find it in what Bellah called 'Early Modern religion' which, as he has rather ruefully to admit, is really the European Reformation by another name. The currents of social criticism that began to spring up from the fourteenth century were expressed in religious form, but the Church was remarkably adept at accommodating these. So, diversity was preserved in a new, albeit more protean unity, for in all this the central tenet of the Church was never questioned— that it and its priests mediated between man and God. But with Luther the heresy was pronounced that every man was his own priest.
This was a political Pandora's box. For the logical consequence of every man being his own priest was that they could each interpret the Bible in their own way. Thus the unity of the prevalent Roman Catholic belief system collapsed. A gap opened between the now-protean belief-systems—we must use the plural— and the political institutions. The Reformation set in train an incongruence which has continued to this very day. The mobile thrustfulness and everlasting change in political institutions which is as characteristic of the West as it is absent in China and Islam, until their systems were in turn undermined by the western ideas one hundred years ago, is due to Europe's incongruence between its beliefsystems and political institutions, and between both of these and its social stratification.
[You have now reached the end of this Social Science Files exhibit.]
The Source has been:
S. E. Finer, The History of Government From the Earliest Times: Volume I, Ancient Monarchies and Empires, Oxford University Press 1997
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