What is called "religion" today was non-existent for people in the ancient and medieval worlds. There was ritual.
It was in the 16th and 17th century that the concept of "religion" as we know it was invented.
Holy texts such as the Bible or the Quran never identified people by their private transcendental/supernatural beliefs.
Belief and religious knowledge was thought about in very different ways.
Are rituals practiced to shape a community to receive beliefs a certain way ? Do we participate in God, relate to Him as a person in song and praise to know Him ? Or can we simply affirm a creed ?
But then the demons also believe, and have perfect theology in terms of mere knowledge.
To what extent is belief propositional (subscribing to a set of claims) and to what extent is it relational (placing your faith in someone or something outside yourself)? Can it be one without the other?
Is knowledge transformative or informative ? Is it something done communally in ritual ? Right practice = right belief ?
As this article HERE says, Ethan Shagan in his book The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment says :
"..the biggest transformation in the history of religion in the West was not the rise of unbelief but the transformation of belief itself...
In this interview he says,
"Luther and his allies did indeed insist that their own beliefs were genuine, and that their own consciences were inviolable. But in the very act of making this claim for themselves, they insisted that all other beliefs were not simply false, they were not even beliefs at all.
When early modern Protestants claimed the right to believe as they would, they were creating a new and exclusive category of belief to which others did not have access.
Whereas Catholics disciplined people to believe, Protestants accepted that belief was rare, and instead disciplined unbelievers."
The Enlightenment asked upon what grounds should I believe?
There were many different answers in the Enlightenment—as there remain today—but the task of Enlightenment religion was to tear down the medieval architecture of the mind which had strictly separated belief, knowledge, and opinion, and had thus made the question itself virtually meaningless. Enlightenment Christianity established what the Reformation had not: the sovereignty of the believing subject."
His book delineates the process by which belief became synonymous with subjective and sovereign individual judgement.
Medieval belief was, as he says, “amphibious”: “a kind of knowledge-claim without implying knowledge”. We believe precisely because some truths are too immense to be known by human minds. In that sense, belief is both easy and hard. Like a dog watching its owner cook, we do not need to understand what is going on to have faith in it.
Then, along came the Reformation. Protestantism’s doctrine of salvation by faith alone made belief into a rarefied faculty — indeed, something humanly impossible, a gift that only God could give. “I believe”, Luther’s catechism stated, “that by my own understanding or strength I cannot believe.”
For Roman Catholics too now, the answer was to redefine belief as simple submission to the Church’s authority. So, belief became either unattainable or an act of the will disconnected from one’s own opinions.
This led to the emergence of the distinctively modern phenomenon that he calls “sovereign judgement”. We now say “I believe in . . .” (God, Brexit, human rights, a flat earth) as a way of ending a conversation. “I assert this; I will not be persuaded out of it; I do not really expect to persuade anyone else.” To say I believe is not to assert a fact about the world, but about yourself.
So belief and opinion were once opposites, and are now synonyms, eventually evolving into its contemporary meaning as we know it: “individual, propositional assent based upon whatever criteria the believer finds most convincing” - “sovereign judgement.”
In the wake of the Reformation, “the rival confessions of Christianity, unwilling to grant belief to their enemies or to dissidents and backsliders in their ranks, participated in a common project to make belief hard, denying belief-status to most putative Christians and their religious claims” .
Suddenly, faced with a profusion of Christianities—each of which implicitly threatened to undermine one’s own standing in the eyes of God—both Catholics and Protestants devised new theological means by which to demarcate “real Christians” from pretenders and heretics.
One common tactic in this theological boundary-maintenance was to articulate formulations of belief that made it difficult to achieve—so difficult, in fact, and so adamantly restricted to a select few—that only the members of one’s own sect could possibly be said to be “true believers.”
The consequence was the transformation of belief from a state of mind that most Christians had been able to take for granted into a practice that was challenging, exacting, hard.
This, Shagan argues, was as true for Catholics as for Protestants
‘The Reformation and Counter-Reformation participated in parallel projects of religious discipline: while Catholics disciplined populations to believe, Protestants disciplined populations of unbelievers.’
Belief in the modern sense of the word was bred of the resulting strain.
He suggests instead that the modern world has seen a transformation in the meaning of belief, which has “become a synonym for opinion or judgment: a space of autonomy rather than a prescription for its exercise.
In Shagan’s analysis, belief had little to do with “individual views of religion” but “was instead some form of participation in the collective and indubitable credenda of the Church”
The author argues that the Reformers and the Catholic authorities sought “to make belief hard' drawing increasingly delimited boundaries around what they considered to be true belief.
The Protestant doctrine of assurance and the Catholic commitment to obedience racked Christian souls with the ‘unbearable weight of believing’
For Catholics, any ecstasy of having one’s belief informed through spiritual experience was tempered by the agony of only being able to own beliefs that had been officially sanctioned by the Church: a most terrible predicament that was exemplified in the life and writing of St Teresa of Avila (1515–1582).
The Reformers stressed the importance of individuals understanding precisely what they believed, instituting the teaching of belief through catechisms and limiting “saving faith” to “the community of the elect”
This transformation meant that religious belief became “no different from any other truth-claim” , as both scientiffic hypotheses and theological assertions—both results of sovereign judgment—gained “parallel epistemological status”
As “boundaries between belief, knowledge, and opinion” collapsed , a new understanding of belief emerged. What Shagan calls “a common project of belief” involved “not agreement about what should be believed […] but rather a second-order commitment to the autonomous judgment of the believing subject”
I've written HERE how according to the great historian of religion, Peter Harrison, religion itself is a modern construction, “the expression ‘the true religion’ places the primary focus on the beliefs themselves, and religion thus becomes primarily an existing thing in the world, rather than an interior disposition” as it was for Aquinas.
During the seventeenth century, the definite article became much more common, with the unintended result of making “explicit belief and creedal knowledge” the content of religion .
And “true religion” no longer means genuine piety or devotion, but is the answer to the question “which religion corresponds to the facts?”
For Orthodox Christianity, for theological knowledge, We practice rituals to know, not logic.
Knowing requires participation, and theological knowledge requires enacting the life of a servant of God.
Clinical distance neither improves knowledge through objectivity nor renders knowledge that can be known only in relationship.
Knowledge begins in embodied ritual practices and grows to skilled discernment through ritual repetition in a community.
Just so, religious sacraments have the same purpose: we practice rites to know.
I've written about that HERE
On religion being a modern concept HERE
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