Religious Foundations of Western Civilization: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

By Jacob Neusner

World Religions

Religious Foundations of Western Civilization introduces students to the major Western world religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—their beliefs, key concepts, history, as well as the fundamental role they have played, and continue to play, in Western culture.

Contributors include: Jacob Neusner, Alan J. Avery-Peck, Bruce D. Chilton, Th. Emil Homerin, Jon D. Levenson, William Scott Green, Seymour Feldman, Elliot R. Wolfson, James A. Brundage, Olivia Remie Constable, and Amila Buturovic.

"This book provides a superb source of information for scientists and scholars from all disciplines who are trying to understand religion in the context of human cultural evolution."
David Sloan Wilson, Professor, Departments of Biology and Anthropology, Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York

This is the right book at the right time. Globalization, religious revivalism, and international politics have made it more important than ever to appreciate the significant contributions of the Children of Abraham to the formation and development of Western civilization.

John L. Esposito, University Professor and Founding Director of the Center for Muslm-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.



Jacob Neusner is Research Professor of Religion and Theology, and Senior Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Theology at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

General Interest/Other Religions/Comparative Religion

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781426719417

Jacob Neusner

Jacob Neusner is Distinguished Service Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism; Senior Fellow, Institute of Advanced Theology, Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Book preview

RELIGIOUS

FOUNDATIONS of

WESTERN

CIVILIZATION

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

JACOB NEUSNER, EDITOR

Abingdon Press

Nashville

RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION JUDAISM, CHRISTIANITY, AND ISLAM

Copyright © 2006 by Abingdon Press

All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission can be addressed to Abingdon Press, P.O. Box 801, 201 Eighth Avenue South, Nashville, TN 37202-0801, or e-mailed to [e-mail].

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Religious foundations of Western civilization : Judaism, Christianity, and Islam / Jacob Neusner, editor.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-687-33202-8 (binding: pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Western countries—Religion. 2. Civilization, Western. 3. Christianity.

4. Judaism. 5. Islam.

I. Neusner, Jacob, 1932-

BL689.R46 2005

200'.9182'1—dc22

2005019409

All scripture quotations, unless noted otherwise, are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations noted NEB are taken from The New English Bible. Copyright © The Delegates of the Oxford University Press and The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press, 1961, 1970. Reprinted by permission.

Scripture quotations noted RSV are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, coyright © 1946, 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Torah from Our Sages: A New American Translation and Explanation, by Jacob Neusner, copyright © Behrman House, Inc., reprinted with permission. www.behrmanhouse.com

Excerpts from The Crusades: Ideal and Reality, by Louise and Jonathan Riley-Smith, Hodder Arnold, 1981. Reproduced by permission of Edward Arnold.

Excerpts from Covenant & Polity in Biblical Israel, by Daniel J. Elazar, copyright © 1995 by Transaction Publishers. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15—10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Excerpts reprinted by permission of the publisher from Law and Revolution: The Formation of Western Legal Tradition, by Harold J. Berman,. pp. 2-4, 85-89, 165-66, 194-98, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1985 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Excerpts from Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources, edited by Olivia Remie Constable, copyright © 1997 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Excerpts from Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader, by James A. Brundage, copyright © 1969. Reprinted by permission of The University of Wisconsin Press.

Excerpts from The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France Around the Year 1000, edited by Thomas Head and Richard Landes. Copyright © 1992. Cornell University. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.

Excerpts from The Guide of the Perplexed, by Moses Maimonides, translated by Shlomo Pines, Copyright © 1963 by the University of Chicago Press.

Excerpts from Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, edited by Anton C. Pegis, copyright © 1997 by Hackett Publishing. Reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Book of Tradition, by Abraham Ibn Daud, 1967 © The Jewish Publication Society with the permission of the publisher, The Jewish Publication Society.

Excerpts from Islamic Modernism: Its Scope, Method, and Alternatives, by Fazlur Rahman, printed in International Journal of Middle East Studies, copyright © 1970 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

Excerpts from Anthology of Somali Poetry, edited by B. W. Andrzejewski and Sheila Andrzejewski, copyright © 1993 by the Indiana University Press.

Excerpts from Women's and Men's Liberation, edited by Leonard Grob, Riffat Hassan, and Haim Gordon, copyright © 1991 by Greenwood Press. Reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT.

Excerpts from So That You May Know One Another, by Ali S. Asani, printed in Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science, vol. 58, July 2003, pp. 40-51, copyright © 2003 by Sage Publications. Preprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Inc.

Excerpts from Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople, Volume 2: Religion and Society, edited by Bernard Lewis, translated by Bernard Lewis, copyright © 1987 by Bernard Lewis. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.

FRONT COVER PHOTO CREDITS: (Top) 19th century CE; Megillat Esther with case. France, 1892. Location: Juedisches Museum der Schweiz, Basel, Switzerland. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. (Middle) Gothic stained glass. Placidus meets a stag with a cross between the antlers and becomes a Christian. Detail from the window of St. Eustace, north side of the nave of Chartres. 1210-1215. Location: Cathedral, Chartres, France. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. (Bottom) Interior view. 1153-54. Almohad dynasty. Location: Mosque, Tinmel, Morocco. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

CONTENTS

Preface

Jacob Neusner

PART ONE

DEFINING THE TERMS

1. What Do We Mean by Religion and

Western Civilization?

William Scott Green

PART TWO

RELIGIONS OF THE WEST

2. Judaism

Jacob Neusner

3. Christianity: What It Is and How It Defines

Western Civilization

Bruce Chilton

4. Islam: What It Is and How It Has

Interacted with Western Civilization

Th. Emil Homerin

PART THREE

HISTORIC COMMON INTERESTS

5. Religion, Politics, Culture, Law, and Society

Judaism

Alan J. Avery-Peck

Christianity

Bruce Chilton

Islam

Th. Emil Homerin

6. Philosophy: Averroes, Maimonides, and Aquinas

Seymour Feldman

7. Mysticism as a Meeting Ground: Seeing the Unseen

Elliot R. Wolfson

PART FOUR

HISTORIC ENCOUNTERS

8. Latin Christianity, the Crusades, and the Islamic Response

James A. Brundage

9. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Spain from the Eighth

to the Fifteenth Centuries

Olivia Remie Constable

10. Christianity and Islam in the Balkans from the Fifteenth to

the Twentieth Centuries

Amila Buturovic

11. Zionism, Imperialism, and Nationalism

Zionism

Jacob Neusner

Christian Imperialism

Bruce Chilton

Political Islam

Th. Emil Homerin

PART FIVE

MODERNITY AND RELIGION IN THE WEST:

NEGOTIATING CHANGE

12. The Modernization of Christianity

Bruce Chilton

13. The Modernization of Judaism

Jacob Neusner

14. The Modernization of Islam

Th. Emil Homerin

PART SIX

RELIGION AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION

IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

15. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in

Their Contemporary Encounters

Judaism Addresses Christianity

Jon D. Levenson

Christianity Meets Other Religions

Bruce Chilton

Islam and Pluralism

Th. Emil Homerin

Timeline

Compiled by Cory Berry-Whitlock

Notes

Contributors

Index

PREFACE

Religion defines the foundations of the West. Christianity, meeting at specific times and places with Judaism and Islam, from ancient times to the present day, has formed the basis for Western civilization. The confrontation between Islam and Christianity brought centuries of strife, the conflict between Judaism and Christianity precipitated an unending debate, full of recrimination. But the three religions that, in unequal proportions to be sure, defined for the West the human situation and determined the goals of the social order also engaged with one another in religious, not only in political, terms. They concurred that God is one and is made manifest to humanity through revealed books and through the prophets that write them or cause them to be recorded. And, as we shall see, Christianity acknowledged its beginnings in Judaism, and Islam accorded recognition to the prophets of Judaism and Christianity. So the religious traditions that form the foundations of Western civilization respond to one another and so define the issues of shared debate, the categories of culture.

Religiosity and Spirituality:

The Public and the Personal

To understand the role of religion in the social order of the West, to begin with we have to distinguish spirituality from religion, and personal experience from public and shared enterprise. For that distinction will indicate not only what we study, but also what we do not study. We study public facts of the social order and cultural construction of groups of people, facts accessible to objective description, analysis, and interpretation. We do not study private affirmations or opinions, which are not available for public inquiry but can only be recorded.

Religion is public, a fact of society and culture, not private or personal. Spirituality refers to attitudes, experiences, and feelings that are private and individual. Religiosity is a matter not of attitude or personal conviction, but of public activity; it is what people do together. The difference is, we can study what a group does, but only acknowledge the report concerning what an individual believes in private. What a group affirms can be examined in context, derived from the interplay of contemporary opinion and the heritage of doctrine and normative deed through the ages. What an individual professes can only be noted. Of spirituality one may use the language my 'Judaism' or my 'personal encounter with Christ,' but of religion one speaks of what is shared and public: Judaism teaches . . . , Christianity maintains . . . , Islam holds . . . .

This leads to the definition of a religion in the setting of an entire civilization. A religion is a cultural system resting on belief in a supernatural being, a system composed by an account of (1) the way of life and (2) the worldview of (3) a group of people that sees itself as set apart for divine service. The group may call itself a people, a church, a community, or a nation; but it will always see itself as holy, distinct from the rest of humanity; and it will invariably regard its distinctive way of life and worldview as expressions of the sanctity of the group.

But if religions are public and shared in community, that does not mean defining them is simple. For over time world religions with long histories such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam produce variation. There is no single community of Judaism or a uniform community of Christianity or a single monolithic Islam. The diversity of what Muslims understand as Islam has made its mark. In today's terms, Christianity encompasses Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant divisions, among many; and the same is so for diversity within Judaism, ancient and modern, and Islam in its complex history. Most people are aware that the communities of Judaism are divided, in modern times, into Reform and Orthodox Judaisms, among many, and Orthodox Judaism is itself diverse. Islam is divided into Sunni and Shiite branches with their various permutations.

In this book we will learn more about Reform and Orthodox Judaisms, Sunni and Shiite Islams, as well as the range of Christianities that havetaken shape over time and shaped the character of Western civilization. Each community of a given religious tradition has its own narrative or worldview, its own distinguishing patterns of conduct or way of life, and its own account of itself as a social entity. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each constitutes a species of the genus—religion—and each furthermore yields many subspecies.

The Religion Factor in

Western Civilization

Religion has written much of the history of the West. Decisive events—the Crusades, the expansion of Europe to the Western hemisphere—invoked religious goals. The Crusades meant to recover for Christianity the once-Christian lands conquered by Islam. The goal of bringing Christianity to unknown lands animated the great explorations, Columbus to the west, the Portuguese to the east. Religious conflict provoked wars within Europe, for example, the wars of the Reformation.

Religion shaped the arts and architecture, the music and literature and culture and politics of the West. The Bible supplied facts deemed beyond dispute, and much of science began inquiry in dialogue with the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. The narrative of religions sustained long-term enterprises, for example, the building of cathedrals that required centuries of construction. Because great cathedral builders conceived of light as representing God, they struggled to admit light to their massive foundations. Representing scriptural narrative through light and shadow brought into being the sublime works of stained glass and fabric art characteristic of medieval architecture. Islamic mosques formed a principal medium of aesthetic experimentation and religious expression as well. Illuminated manuscripts of Judaic holy books formed a counterpart in Judaism to the aesthetic adventure of Christianity and Islam: representing God in the media of culture.

Learning—philosophy and science and technology alike—depended on the sponsorship of religious institutions, and universities began under religious auspices. The intellectual life of the West not only has been carried out by Christian, Judaic, and Islamic faithful. It also has been nourished by their convictions about God, the rationality conveyed by God's self-revelation in Scripture, and what God requires of the social order.

Religion and Politics in the West

Much of this book focuses on the shaping by religion of the institutions and ideas of politics in the West. That is because politics—the theory of legitimate violence—appeals to religious belief and narrative for legitimacy. We realize that many peoples have commonly defined themselves by appeal to shared religious loyalties, Orthodox Christianity in Romania, Greece, and Bulgaria; Roman Catholic Christianity in Hungary, Austria, Ireland, and Poland, for example. And in Islam and Judaism, no distinction was drawn between politics and religion, between institutions of this-worldly power and those that exercised the otherworldly kind.

Modern times brought new, secular approaches to both culture and politics. Until the eighteenth century, religion was the single decisive force shaping politics, culture, and society in the West. After that time, religion met competition from other sources of sensibility and intellect. In many parts of the world, and in much of the West, religion has more than held its own, and it remains a principal part of the consciousness and normative conduct of the West. Churches, synagogues, and mosques abound, and appeal to stories told by religion and imperatives imposed thereby define important components of the social order of the West. But even if religion played no role whatsoever in today's Western politics and culture, the landscape is studded with enduring monuments to its power. There is no understanding the world as we know it today without a clear account of what religion has been and has done, what it is and does today.

That is because, as a matter of fact, after two centuries of secularization, religion continues to fuel the engine of contemporary politics. Certain conceptions of jihad encourage battle with the Christian West and the state of Israel, and some leading figures in Islam preach anti-Semitism. Christianity fuels Serb attacks on Bosnian Muslims and defines issues of public debate in the United States and many other nations. Judaism forms one of the principal sources for the aspiration of the Jewish people to maintain the Jewish state, the State of Israel. But it also has inspired irredentist policies espoused by some in the conflict with Palestine. Similarly, Islam forms the ideological basis for the Shiite state of Iran, not to mention the founding of Pakistan in the division of the British Raj in India. Many of the intractable conflicts of the age—Islam and Hinduism in Pakistan and India, Hinduism and Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Islam and Christianity in the Balkans, the culture wars of the United States— derive from religious convictions or at least use the vocabulary of religion. Nationality, religion, and culture converge and cause conflict.

That is not to assign to religion the unique position in shaping strife over public policy. For the past two centuries, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the three religions of Western civilization, have contended with secularism, nationalism, Nazism and Communism, Socialism and humanism, and other definitive bodies of social thought. But after seventy-five years of state-sponsored atheism, religion renews itself in Russia and the other former Soviet states. Orthodox Christianity survived in Russia, and Islam in Kazakhstan and the other Islamic possessions of the former USSR. So the fact remains that after two hundred years of struggle, in modern times religion has held its own and continues to shape the politics and culture of much of the West.

The Approach of This Book

This is a volume of description. We mean to give just the facts. We answer questions that describe, analyze, and interpret those facts. The editor and authors of this book engage in no act of advocacy in behalf of (or against) religion or a particular religion. The sole norm we espouse is an intellectual one: to tell the tale as objectively and descriptively as we are able. All concur that we cannot fully understand Western civilization without engaging with the religion factor, past and present, in its history and contemporary life too. We, therefore, have selected high points in the history of Western civilization that are defined by the religions of that civilization, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These define many of the decisive moments in Western civilization, from the beginning to the present.

That leads to the question systematically answered in these pages. What, specifically, are the religious traditions that have shaped the West? They are, in order of appearance, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, covered in chapters 3, 4, and 5. And how are we to identify principal events in which those traditions made history? Here we have selected critical chapters in the history of the culture of the West, its philosophy, mysticism, and in the politics of the West as defined by competing religions, both in history and today. Finally, what role has religion defined for itself in the world today?

To answer those questions, this textbook accomplishes two tasks. First, we define the classical forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Since Christianity has constituted the principal religious force in the shaping of the history of the West, we lay somewhat heavier emphasis on its history and cultural role than on those of Judaism or Islam, but Islam and Judaism do figure as well. Second, we outline some of the important points at which these religions have directly intersected with one another in the West.

Parts One and Two

The order of the presentation is simple and logical. After William Green's definition, in part 1, of the terms religious, foundations, West, and civilization, in part 2, we present three systematic accounts of the origins and main traits of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These chapters presuppose no detailed knowledge of those religious traditions.

Part Three

Then we turn to the chapters in Western history written by the three religions in dialogue on common interests. They have shared a totalizing approach to society, philosophy, and mysticism, and the commonalities are portrayed. In philosophy they argued with one another about a common agendum of problems of thought. In mysticism they shared the direct encounter with God that mystics seek, and they told one another what they had learned, respectively, about meeting with God in prayer and in meditation. We want to know how in the past they have worked together and enriched one another. We invoke the medieval dialogue in philosophy as a model for the relationships, in the twenty-first century, of the three religions of the West.

Part Four

From shared cultural agenda, we proceed in part 4 to principal moments of conflict in politics among Christianity and Islam and Judaism, with special attention to the Crusades, the contest over Spain, the Islamic-Christian struggle for the Balkans, and the political contention among the three religions of the West in modern times, reprexivsented by issues of religion and nationalism: Christian imperialism, Judaic Zionism, and Islamic Jihad.

Part Five

We turn in part 5 to what has happened in modern times in Christianity and Judaism, and to the response of Islam to the challenges of modernity. Here Christianity defined the pattern, in the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment, with Judaism in Europe responding to the Christian model. Islam in the West has now begun to encounter those problems of modern sensibility and culture that Christianity and then Judaism have confronted for two hundred years.

Part Six

We conclude part 6, with accounts of how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have formed theories of the other, their competition. We answer the question, how has this religion thought about the neighboring one(s). We pay specific attention to efforts at forming a theological foundation for religious toleration in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

In this way we present the principal religions of the West in two ways. First, we see them as religious systems, each with its own traits and history. These we define and outline. Second, we trace how their interactions have shaped important chapters in the history of Western civilization. These two distinct tasks, the editor and authors hope, will make this textbook serviceable in courses in religion, history, Western civilization, and humanities courses in general education programs.

Each chapter contains a few study questions to focus class discussion.

As between exposition of topics and presenting the subject through primary sources, we have given the authors of the chapters leeway. The participants have presented their topics in more than a single way. Some authors stress systematic exposition, others illustration through sources. All the chapters contain both expositions and illustrations. But the proportions vary.

The vocabulary of the academic study of religion serves in these pages. One special use requires attention, the use of the word myth. Religions may express their truth claims in philosophical ways, as generalizations about God, or they may state those same claims in narrative form. In the academic study of religion, we use the word myth to mean truth in narrative form, and not to mean untruth.

Acknowledgments

Professors Neusner and Chilton used this book in its initial form as the textbook for their joint course, Religion 123, Religious Foundations of Western Civilization, at Bard College in 2003–04 Semester Two. Professor Green presented the opening lecture. The students read the chapters in manuscript. They were asked to supply comments on each chapter, which the several authors considered in producing the final draft of their chapters, respectively. The students also alerted us to problems of clarity and accessibility that we otherwise would have missed. Not only so, but our colleague in the study of Islam at Bard College, Professor Nerina Rustomji, participated in three of the sessions, while other members of the Program in Religion and other programs at Bard College helped as called upon. Bard's Institute of Advanced Theology sponsored several public events in connection with the experimental course. Professors Karen Sullivan (medieval literature), Leon Botstein (musicology), Daniel Berthold (philosophy), Paul Murray (religion), and John Pruitt (cinema) helped us with the medieval and modern units of the course. The book reflects our experience in teaching a one-semester course on the foundations of its sixteen chapters.

The fact that such an investment of resources would go into this project attests to the commitment of Bard College to the academic study of religion. This textbook aims at realizing Bard College's larger goal of serving the public interest through the enlightened negotiation of social and cultural differences. Simply put, this college, like its counterparts through American higher education in the liberal arts, means to foster tolerance even when fiercely held conviction concerning God is concerned.

Jacob Neusner

PART  ONE

---

DEFINING THE TERMS

CHAPTER 1

---

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY

RELIGION AND "WESTERN

CIVILIZATION"?

William Scott Green

On September 11, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four American airplanes and engaged in devastating terrorist attacks against basic governmental and commercial institutions and centers of the United States. The attacks resulted in the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City and caused extensive damage to the Pentagon, the center of the American military. The fourth plane, which was forced down by American passengers, was believed to be destined for the White House. The attacks murdered more than three thousand people, from nearly all backgrounds and persuasions. All the evidence suggests that the people who sponsored and carried out the attacks did so because they deeply oppose what they see as the behavior and values of America and the West and that their opposition in significant ways was motivated by, and expressed in the religious language of, a particular strain of Islam. The events of September 11 made people in America and the West look at ourselves afresh. They show us how and why the questions in this book matter to our lives today.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the American author Robert Stone wrote in the New York Times: We witnessed . . . the violent assault of one narrative system upon another. . . . The power of narrative is shattering, overwhelming. We are the stories we believe; we are who we believe we are.¹ Stone suggests that the events of September 11 are the result of divergent stories that recount and explain who America and the West and their enemies are. That is, the events of September 11 are the result of conflicting narratives about our conceptions of ourselves and about the meaning of the way we conduct our lives. Stone's observations raise the key questions this book and this course intend to examine.

Because the narrative of the West is under assault, it is important to ask what is at stake in that narrative. What is Western civilization, and what is the story that it tells? Equally, since the assault on that civilization is in some basic sense religious, what is the place of religion in Western civilization? In what sense can we say religion grounds a Western worldview? Finally, since the assault on the Western narrative system was made in the name of Islam, how does Islam fit into the framework of Western civilization and Western religion?

Defining Western Civilization

To guide us in thinking about the meaning of Western civilization, we turn to Professor Samuel P. Huntington, whose book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, is among the most important meditations on the nature of today's global politics. Professor Huntington's basic theme is that culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post–Cold War world.²

Huntington explains that we should think of civilization as an integrated cultural entity. He writes, Civilizations are the biggest 'we' within which we feel culturally at home as distinguished from all the other 'thems' out there. A civilization, therefore, grounds peoples' sense of who they are and provides a framework that helps them distinguish themselves from others. In Stone's terms, we might think of a civilization as people's most comprehensive story, their big picture, what Huntington calls their broadest level of identification. Being part of a civilization, therefore, is fundamental to being human. Huntington notes that civilizations are adaptable and long-lasting, though they can disappear. He explains that the crucial distinctions among human groups concern their values, beliefs, institutions, and social structures, not their physical size, head shapes, and skin colors.³ Therefore, civilizations transcend race, ethnicity, governments, and nations. He suggests that there are eight major contemporary civilizations: Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Western, Latin American, and African. Of special importance for this book. Huntington points out that religion is a central defining characteristic of civilizations.⁴ In the pages to come, we will explore the meaning of this last generalization for the West.

What, precisely, is the meaning of West or Western civilization? Huntingon astutely observes that although the West sounds like a geographic location, it cannot be. Unlike north and south, east and west have no fixed reference points. They are relative locations. Rather, historically, Western civilization is European civilization, and the West refers to what was once called Western Christendom. In modern times, Western civilization is Euroamerican or north Atlantic civilization. This designation will serve as a useful guide for the rest of our study. A useful corollary to Huntington is supplied by an author whose work we will read in the next chapter. Professor Harold Berman, perhaps the leading scholar of the Western legal tradition, has views similar to those of Huntington, with some additions particularly useful for this project. Berman's succinct statement follows:

The West . . . is not to be found by recourse to a compass. . . . The West is, rather, a cultural term, but with a very strong diachronic dimension. It is not, however, simply an idea; it is a community. It implies both a historical structure and a structured history. For many centuries it could be identified very simply as the people of Western Christendom. Indeed, from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries the community of those people was manifested in their common allegiance to a single spiritual authority, the Church of Rome.

As a historical culture, a civilization, the West is to be distinguished not only from the East but also from pre-Western cultures to which it returned in various periods of renaissance. Such returns and revivals are characteristics of the West. They are not to be confused with the models on which they drew for inspiration. Israel, Greece, and Rome became spiritual ancestors of the West not primarily by a process of survival or succession but primarily by a process of adoption: the West adopted them as ancestors. Moreover, it adopted them selectively—different parts at different times. Cotton Mather was no Hebrew. Erasmus was no Greek. The Roman lawyers of the University of Bologna were no Romans.

Some Roman law, to be sure, survived in the Germanic folklaw and, more important, in the law of the church; some Greek philosophy also survived, also in the church; the Hebrew Bible, of course, survived as the Old Testament. But such survivals only account for a small part of their influence on Western law, Western philosophy, and Western theology. What accounted for the major part of their influence were the rediscoveries, reexaminations, and receptions of the ancient texts. Even to the extent that the ancient learning may be said to have survived without interruption, it was inevitably transformed. . . .

The West, from this perspective, is not Greece and Rome and Israel but the peoples of Western Europe turning to the Greek and Roman and Hebrew texts for inspiration, and transforming those texts in ways that would have astonished their authors. Nor, of course, is Islam part of the West, although there were strong Arabic influences on Western philosophy and science—though not on Western legal institutions. . . .

Indeed, each of the ancient ingredients of Western culture was transformed by being mixed with the others. The amazing thing is that such antagonistic elements could be brought together into a single world view. The Hebrew culture would not tolerate Greek philosophy or Roman law; the Greek culture would not tolerate Roman law or Hebrew theology; the Roman culture would not tolerate Hebrew theology, and it resisted large parts of Greek philosophy. Yet the West in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries combined all three, and thereby transformed each one.⁵

Professor Huntington suggests that religion is a central defining characteristic of civilizations. He also observes that the West produced no major religion and developed a distinctive political system in which national political interests outweigh religious ones. If both of these statements are accurate, how can religion be a foundation of Western civilization? To address this question, let us turn first to Professor Huntington's important observation about politics and religion in Western civilization. He explains:

The great political ideologies of the twentieth century include liberalism, socialism, anarchism, corporatism, Marxism, communism, social democracy, conservatism, nationalism, fascism, and Christian democracy. They all share one thing in common: they are the products of Western civilization. No other civilization has generated a significant political ideology. The West, however, has never generated a major religion. The great religions of the world are all products of non-Western civilizations and, in most cases, antedate Western civilization. As the world moves out of its Western phase, the ideologies which typified late Western civilization decline, and their place is taken by religions and other culturally based forms of identity and commitment. The Westphalian separation of religion and international politics, an idiosyncratic product of Western civilization is coming to an end, and religion, as Edward Mortimer suggests, is increasingly likely to intrude into international affairs. The intracivilizational clash of political ideas spawned by the West is being supplanted by an international clash of culture and religion.⁶

The Peace of Westphalia, 1648, ended the religious wars of Europe⁷ and led to the emergence of the network of nation-states that define the modern West. After Westphalia, Europeans fought one another over national rather than theological concerns, secular political issues rather than religious ones. That is why the West produced political ideologies rather than a major religion. Professor Huntington calls this separation of religion and international politics—what we might call the distinction between the religious and the secular—an idiosyncratic product of Western civilization. In other words, it is both distinctive and specific to the West.

If all this is so, then in what sense can we say that Western civilization has a religious foundation? If the dominant intellectual and cultural product of Western civilization are secular ideologies rather than religious ones, and if the political and social structures of the West transcend religious structures, what sense does it make to say that religion founds Western civilization at all? Is the distinction between religion and secularity—which is distinctive to the West—a product of religion? Let us turn to these specific issues.

Defining Religion

To begin to answer them, it is important to be clear about what we mean by religion. This term is so fundamental to the way Americans imagine our lives, that achieving some clarity about it is essential if we are to achieve useful results in our study. For this project, we will use the definition of religion developed by the anthropologist Melford Spiro. He defines religion as an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings.⁸ Let us unpack this definition to see what is at stake in it.

The definition speaks of superhuman beings. A superhuman being is a being more powerful than humans but not necessarily qualitatively different from them. Superhuman is not the same as supernatural. A superhuman being can do things for, and to, humans.

Next, the definition speaks not of random superhuman beings, but of beings that are culturally postulated. That is a concise academic way of saying that different cultures, or different civilizations, envision different kinds of superhuman beings. For instance, some cultures envision multiple superhuman beings; others envision only one. In some cultures, people worship deceased ancestors; in others, it would make no sense to do so. Culturally postulated is a way of saying that people cannot worship a being that everyone in the world they inhabit says is nonsensical. The superhuman beings that people worship must fit within and reflect the values of the culture.

According to the definition, religion entails a culturally patterned interaction with the superhuman beings. This means that just as the superhuman beings are conditioned by the cultures from which they spring or in which people live, so too the ways of interacting with those superhuman beings are conditioned by those cultures. Interaction can mean a range of things. Interaction can be speech or ethical action. It can be prayer or obedience. It can be anguish or contemplation. The gods are known through such interaction. When Spiro's definition says culturally patterned interaction, it means a kind of interaction that people find plausible and sensible. For example, in Western civilization, it does not make sense to imagine people having sexual relations with God. But in ancient Greece, the gods were believed to assume earthly forms, impregnate humans, and produce people who are half god and half human. Having sex with a god is a perfectly legitimate kind of interaction, but it is culturally patterned for ancient Greece, not for Western civilization. How people imagine their gods will interact with them, and what their gods can expect from them, has much to do with how a religion can shape a civilization.

For our purposes, Spiro's definition is important for two reasons. First, it acknowledges that religions must fit and reflect the cultures in which they exist. It does not suppose that religion looks the same everywhere, any more than civilizations are the same everywhere. Second, it uses the concept of superhuman being as the variable that distinguishes religion from not-religion, from politics or philosophy, for instance. In this definition, religion is not the same as the approach to life one values most highly. If people structure their lives around ideas or philosophies that do not involve superhuman beings, they are living secular, not religious, lives. So when we ask about the religious foundations of Western civilization, we are asking how the interactions between people and their deities shaped the values and institutions of the culture.⁹

The Biblical Foundations of

Religion in the West

Following on Spiro's definition, we can refine our inquiry to ask, How do Western ideas of, and human interactions with, God shape the Western idea of the distinction between religion and state?

To begin to answer that question, we must acknowledge that in Western civilization, religion is fundamentally and resolutely biblical. The foundation of religion in the West is the Hebrew Bible, known in Judaism as Tanakh, in Christianity as the Old Testament, and in Islam as Tawrat.¹⁰ The Hebrew Bible depicts God's relationship to the People of Israel and Israel's interactions with God. It contains various kinds of writing. The Torah (the Pentateuch, which includes the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) recounts Israel's early history and contains the core of Jewish religious practice. Historical books¹¹ describe Israel's life in its land and the behavior of its kings. The works of the prophets¹² contain sayings and visions attributed to Israel's inspired preachers. Other books contain wisdom sayings, stories of the Jews in exile, and the account of their return to the land of Israel.¹³ As a whole, the books of the Hebrew Bible tell the story of God's creation of the cosmos, selection of Israel, redemption of Israel from Egypt, revelation of commandments in the desert, the conquest of the land of Israel, formation of a unified monarchy under King David, a civil war in Israel, the destruction of part of Israel by Assyria, the destruction of the Temple (the center of Israel's worship) in 586 B.C.E. by the Babylonians, the return of the Jews in the Persian period to the Land of Israel to rebuild the destroyed temple (538–515 B.C.E.).

The contents of the Hebrew Bible reach far back in antiquity. Versions of all of its books except Esther were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls; so the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible can be dated at least to the first century C.E., and some are two centuries earlier. The contents of the Hebrew Bible are even older. Although it strains historical credibility to trace Israel's tradition to the figure of Abraham, ca. around 2000 B.C.E., the foundation of the book of Deuteronomy was likely written in 621 B.C.E., and the contours of biblical monotheism were established by one of Israel's greatest prophets, Second Isaiah, by 540 B.C.E. In contrast, Socrates was tried in 399 B.C.E., and Plato and Aristotle followed later, more than two centuries after Deuteronomy and about 140 years after Second Isaiah. A charitable but responsible reckoning could take Israel's tradition back at least three thousand years, if we count to the time of King David.

The Hebrew Bible is Judaism's scripture, and Judaism both shaped and was shaped by the Hebrew Bible's contents. Early traditions of Israel grounded Judaism's worldview; and throughout antiquity Jews transformed those traditions into texts that have been used in Judaic worship and study unto today.¹⁴ In this sense Judaism is the oldest continuous religion in the West. The scriptures of Christianity and Islam contain additional writings, the New Testament and the Qur'an, respectively,¹⁵ which produce interpretations of the Hebrew Bible that are different from Judaism's and from one another's. But both Christianity and Islam accept the contents of Judaism's scripture as part of their own religious legacy and heritage. Both religions presuppose Judaism and its scripture, morphology, and rituals, even as they read that scripture differently and adopted novel forms and religious behaviors. Christianity and Islam are inconceivable without their Judaic foundation. In this precise and focused way, Western civilization draws on Judaism as it does on no other religion.

How does the Hebrew Bible depict God and the way humans should interact with the deity? In Spiro's terms, how does Israelite culture postulate its superhuman being, and what are some key elements of their culturally patterned interactions with that deity? For the purposes of our work, the answer comes in two parts. First, the Hebrew Bible supposes that there exists only one deity, who has created the cosmos and humanity. Second, it envisions that deity as willingly limiting his powers to enter into a relationship with the creatures he created. In the culture of the Hebrew Bible's world, God does not reveal divine teaching to humanity at random or as a whole. Rather, in the Hebrew Bible's worldview, there is one God, with one message, which the deity communicates through a single community. Thus, the sole deity, the creator of heaven and earth, selects Israel as the medium of divine communication to humanity. In other words, there is only one god, and that is Israel's. From a biblical perspective, the fate of the world in some fundamental way depends on and is a function of the relationship between God and Israel.

The form of the relationship between God and Israel is the covenant, an agreement in which God and Israel stipulate their obligations to each other. There are multiple covenants in the Hebrew Bible. In Genesis 17, God establishes the identity of Israel by entering into an eternal covenant with Abraham and his descendants. In Exodus 20:1-17, God defines the character of Israel as a covenanted community through the revelation of the Ten Commandments, which address both how Israel is to relate to God and how the Israelites are to relate to one another. Exodus 24 reports Israel's assent to participation in the covenant. The covenants thus establish both the nature of the divine-human relationship and the conditions of legitimate human community in the created order. The covenants make clear that God and Israel, and therefore humanity, are unfulfilled in isolation. Interrelatedness is the distinguishing mark of God's created order.

Professor Daniel Elazar spells out the implications of the Hebrew Bible's covenant agreements for the distinction between religion and politics that characterizes Western civilization.

The covenants of the Bible are the founding covenants of Western civilization. Perforce, they have to do with God. They have their beginnings in the need to establish clear and binding relationships between God and humans and among humans, relationships that must be understood to be political far more than theological in character, designed to establish lines of authority, distributions of power, bodies politic, and systems of law. It is indeed the genius of the idea and its biblical source that it seeks both to legitimize political life and to direct it into the right paths; to use theopolitical relationships to build a bridge between heaven and earth—and there is nothing more earthly than politics even in its highest form—without letting either swallow up the other.

The covenant idea has within it the seeds of modern constitutionalism in that it emphasizes the mutually accepted limitations in the power of all parties to it, a limitation not inherent in nature but involving willed concessions. This idea of limiting power is of first importance in the biblical worldview and for humanity as a whole since it helps explain why an omnipotent God does not exercise his omnipotence in the affairs of humans. In covenanting with humans, God at least partially withdraws from controlling their lives. He offers humans freedom under the terms of the covenant, retaining the covenantal authority to reward or punish the consequences of that freedom at some future date. By the same token, humans who bind themselves through the covenant accept its limits in Puritan terms, abandoning natural for federal liberty in order to live up to the terms of their covenants. Beyond that, the leaders of the people are limited in their governmental powers to serving the people under the terms of the covenant. Thus the idea of constitutional or limited government is derived from the idea of the covenant.¹⁶

To translate Elazar's observations into the terms of Spiro's definition of religion: The culture of the Hebrew Bible postulates a superhuman being who limits his powers in order to relate to his creation, and the Bible's cultural pattern of interaction with that superhuman being is humanity's free assent to the relationship and to the consequences for violating it. The covenantal relationship assumes that Israelites have a significant measure of control over themselves and, consequently, that their actions and motivations matter. Through concrete, this-worldly actions—moral and physical, ethical and ritual, individual and communal—Israel nurtures and maintains the covenant. This means, as Elazar suggests, that the Bible conceives the relationship between humans and God to be one of mutuality and choice, not of force or coercion. For the covenant to work, humans must be free to enter into it. For humans to be free, God must restrain his control over their lives and activities.

The idea that God restrains the exercise of omnipotence in order to allow humans the freedom to respond to God may help explain why the Hebrew Bible—and in this case the New Testament as well—do not imagine that religion must exercise political power in order to achieve its aims. Neither the Hebrew Bible, nor Judaism, nor Christianity assumes that the religious life requires political control as well.¹⁷ The Torah, for example, depicts a cult without a kingdom—a pure religion in its own realm. In the Torah's narrative, the Israelites receive their revelation from God in the desert, which is the opposite of governed territory. Although they are a community and a nation, they constitute neither a state nor a kingdom. Indeed, the Torah barely mentions a king for Israel, and it assumes that the monarch will consult the Torah before acting. In the texts, Israel's king plays no role in Israel's worship or cult. More important, the Hebrew Bible as a whole supposes that although God can be king, the Israelite king cannot be a god. If the king could be god, his power would be absolute, not limited. In addition to this evidence from the Torah, the books of Esther and Daniel both assume that it is possible for a Jew to be a loyal subject of a pagan king and remain true to his or her religious convictions. The Hebrew Bible draws a clear distinction between the institutions and realms of religion and politics. Jesus' famous admonition (Matt 22:21), Then pay Caesar what is due to Caesar, and pay God what is due to God, assumes and applies—but does not argue for—the Hebrew Bible's distinction. It assumes that Caesar is not (and cannot be) God and thus presupposes this biblical distinction.

Religion and Secularism:

Two Realms of Western Civilization

The Hebrew Bible's distinction between the realms of religion and politics was fundamental to Christianity, the dominant religion of Western civilization. As Professor Bernard Lewis points out, Christianity made secularism—the idea that religion and political authority, church and state, are different, and can or should be separated—fundamental in Western civilization. The idea was justified not only by Jesus' teaching cited above, but also by the experience of Christianity itself.

For three centuries, Christianity was a persecuted religion—different from, sometimes opposed to, and often oppressed by the state authority. In the course of their long struggle, Christians developed a distinctive institution—the church, with its own laws and courts, its own hierarchy and chain of authority. Throughout Christian history, and in almost all Christian lands, church and state continued to exist side by side as different institutions, each with its own laws and jurisdictions, its own hierarchy and chain of authority. The two may be joined, or, in modern times, separated. Their relationship may be one of cooperation, of confrontation, or of conflict. Sometimes they may be coequal, more often one or the other may prevail in a struggle for domination of the polity. In the course of the centuries, Christian jurists and theologians devised or adapted pairs of terms to denote the dichotomy of jurisdiction: sacred and profane, spiritual and temporal, religious and secular, ecclesiastical and lay.¹⁸

Lewis points out that Islam has a different perspective from that of the Hebrew Bible and Christianity.

The idea that any group of persons, any kind of activities, any part of human life is in any sense outside the scope of religious law and jurisdiction is alien to Muslim thought. There is, for example, no distinction between canon law and civil law, between the law of the church and the law of the state, crucial in Christian history. There is only a single law, the shari'a, accepted by Muslims as of divine origin and regulating all aspects of human life: civil, commercial, criminal, constitutional, as well as matters more specifically concerned with religion in the limited, Christian sense of that word.¹⁹

Lewis's description of the differences between Christianity and Islam on the matter of secularism shows how Islam can be Western in the sense that it shares texts with Judaism and Christianity, but also non-Western in its political and legal experience. Islamic teaching, the Qur'an in particular, has a distinct perspective on the biblical heritage that Judaism and Christianity understand differently.

This brings us back to the questions raised at the outset of this chapter: In what sense can we say that Western civilization has a religious foundation? If the dominant intellectual and cultural products of Western civilization are secular ideologies rather than religious ones, and if the political and social structures of the West transcend religious structures, what sense does it make to say that religion founds Western civilization at all? Is the distinction between religion and secularity—which is distinctive to the West—a product of religion? In the readings that follow, Professor Harold Berman, whom we met in the first chapter, addresses precisely these issues. He explains how the Christian distinction between the religious and the secular, which derives from the Hebrew Bible, became institutionalized in Western civilization in the institution of law.

The conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine to Christianity in the fourth century gave Christianity a political power—control of the secular realm—for which its theology had not prepared it and offered no instruction. The uneasy and often cloudy relationship between the religion and state began to achieve clarity in the eleventh century when Pope Gregory VII removed the church from state control and gave it an autonomous existence. As Berman observes, this change led to the development of the institutions of law that have come to define the West.

Among the peoples of Western Europe in the period prior to the eleventh century, law did not exist as a distinct system of regulation or as a distinct system of thought. Each people had, to be sure, its own legal order, which included occasional legal enactments by central authorities as well as innumerable unwritten legal rules and institutions, both secular and ecclesiastical. A considerable number of individual legal terms and rules had been inherited from the earlier Roman law and could be found in the canons and decrees of local ecclesiastical councils and of individual bishops as well as in some royal legislation and in customary law. Lacking, however, in both the secular and the ecclesiastical spheres, was a clear separation of law from other processes of social control and from other types of intellectual concern. Secular law as a whole was not disembedded from general tribal, local, and feudal custom or from the general custom of royal and imperial households. Similarly, the law of the church was largely diffused throughout the life of the church—throughout its structures of authority as well as throughout its theology, its moral precepts, its liturgy—and it, too, was primarily local and regional and primarily customary rather than centralized or enacted. There were no professional judges or lawyers. There were no hierarchies of courts.

Also lacking was a perception of law as a distinct body of rules and concepts. There were no law schools. There were no great legal texts dealing with basic legal categories such as jurisdiction, procedure, crime, contract, property, and the other subjects that eventually came to form structural elements in Western legal systems. There were no developed theories of the sources of law, of the relation of divine and natural law to human law, of ecclesiastical law to secular law, of enacted law to customary law, or of the various kinds of secular law—feudal, royal, urban—to one another.

The relatively unsystematized character of legal regulation and the relatively undeveloped state of legal science were closely connected with the prevailing political, economic, and social conditions. These included the predominantly local character of tribal, village, and feudal communities; their relatively high degree of economic self-sufficiency; the fusion of authorities within each; the relative weakness of the political and economic control exercised by the central imperial and royal authorities; the essentially military and religious character of the control exercised by the imperial and royal authorities; and the relative strength of informal community bonds of kinship and soil and of military comradeship.

In the late eleventh, the twelfth, and the early thirteenth centuries a fundamental change took place in Western Europe in the very nature of law both as a political institution and as an intellectual concept. Law became disembedded. Politically, there emerged for the first time strong central authorities, both ecclesiastical and secular, whose control reached down, through delegated officials, from the center to the localities. Partly in connection with that, there emerged a class of professional jurists, including professional judges and practicing lawyers. Intellectually, Western Europe experienced at the same time the creation of its first law schools, the writing of its first legal treatises, the conscious ordering of the huge mass of inherited legal materials, and the development of the concept of law as an autonomous, integrated, developing body of legal principles and procedures.

The combination of these two factors, the political and the intellectual, helped produce modern Western legal systems, of which the first was the new system of canon law of the Roman Catholic Church (then regularly called for the first time jus canonicum). It was also at that time divided into old law (jus antiquum), consisting of earlier texts and canons, and new law (jus novum), consisting of contemporary legislation and decisions as well as contemporary interpretations of the earlier texts and canons. Against the background of the new system of canon law, and often in rivalry with it, the European kingdoms and other polities began to create their own secular legal systems. At the same time there emerged in most parts of Europe free cities, each with its own governmental and legal institutions, forming a new type of urban law. In addition, feudal (lord-vassal) and manorial (lord-peasant) legal institutions underwent systematization, and a new system of mercantile law was developed to meet the needs of merchants engaged in intercity, interregional, and international trade. The emergence of these systems of feudal law, manorial law, mercantile law, and urban law clearly indicates that not only political and intellectual but also social and economic factors were at work in producing what can only be called a revolutionary development of legal institutions. In other words, the creation of modern legal systems in the late eleventh, twelfth, and early thirteenth centuries was not only an implementation of policies and theories of central elites, but also a response to social and economic changes on the ground.

Religious factors were at work, as well. The creation of modern legal systems was, in the first instance, a response to a revolutionary change within the church and in the relation of the church to the secular authorities. And here the word revolutionary has all the modern connotations of class struggle and violence. In 1075, after some twenty-five years of agitation and propaganda by the papal party, Pope Gregory VII declared the political and legal supremacy of the papacy over the entire Church and the independence of the clergy from secular control. Gregory also asserted the ultimate supremacy of the pope in secular matters, including the authority to depose emperors and kings. The emperor—Henry IV of Saxony— responded with military action. Civil war between the papal and imperial parties raged sporadically throughout Europe until 1122, when a final compromise was reached by a concordat signed in the German city of Worms. In England and Normandy, the Concordat of Bec in 1107 provided a temporary respite, but the matter was not finally resolved there until the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170.

The great changes that took place in the life of the Western church and in the relations between the ecclesiastical and the secular authorities during the latter part of the eleventh and the first part of the twelfth centuries have traditionally been called the Hildebrand Reform, or the Gregorian Reform, after the monk Hildebrand, who was a leader of the papal party in the period after 1050 and who ruled as Pope Gregory VII from 1073 to 1085. However, the term "Reform" is a serious understatement, reflecting in part the desire of the papal party itself—and of later Roman Catholic historians—to play down the magnitude of the discontinuity between what had gone before and what came after. The original Latin term, reformatio, may suggest a more substantial break in continuity by recalling the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. Another term used to denote the same era, namely, the Investiture Struggle, is not so much an understatement as an oblique statement: by pointing to the struggle of the papacy to wrest from emperor and kings the power to invest bishops with the symbols of their authority, the phrase connects the conflict between the papal and imperial (or royal) parties with the principal slogan of the papal reformers: the freedom of the church. What was involved ultimately was, in Peter Brown's words, the disengagement of the two spheres of the sacred and the profane, from which there stemmed a release of energy and creativity analogous to a process of nuclear fission.[20]²¹

Berman then explains how Christian religious ideas served as the basis for secular law:

It is impossible to understand the revolutionary quality of the Western legal tradition without exploring its religious dimension. It has been said that the metaphors of the day before yesterday are the analogies of yesterday and the concepts of today. So the eleventh-century legal metaphors were the twelfth-century legal analogies and the thirteenth-century legal concepts. The legal metaphors that lay at the foundation of the legal analogies and concepts were chiefly of a religious nature. They were metaphors of the Last Judgment and of purgatory, of Christ's atonement for Adam's fall, of the transubstantiation of bread and wine in the sacrament of the Eucharist, of the absolution of sins in the sacrament of penance, and of the power of the priesthood to bind and to loose—that is, to impose of remit eternal punishment. Other legal metaphors were chiefly feudal, though they had religious overtones—metaphors of honor, of satisfaction for violation of honor, of pledge of faith, of reciprocal bonds of service and protection. All of these metaphors were part of a unified structure of rituals and myths. (The word myth is used here not in the old sense of fable but rather in the opposite, now widely accepted, sense of sacred truth.)[22]

What such an exploration shows is that basic institutions, concepts, and values of Western legal systems have their sources in religious rituals, liturgies, and doctrines of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, reflecting new attitudes toward death, sin, punishment, forgiveness, and salvation, as well as new assumptions