parlance) ‘‘embedded.’’ Similarities between this unified conception of religion and
society and the modern sociological theory of coherence are only apparent. While
sociologists argue that religion and society are complicit, they presume discrete
regions of behavior.
The idea of religion as a distinguishable realm of human activity becomes promin-
ent in the sixth century BC with the philosopher Xenophanes. So, for example, he
observes that people have conceived the gods in human terms, as projections of
themselves: ‘‘mortals think that the gods are born, and that they have clothes and
speech and bodies like their own’’ (fr. 14 D-K). Xenophanes here segregates religion,
treats it as a distinct object of speculation. He insists on the fundamental difference
between the divine and the human, and criticizes the obtuseness of those who cannot
see the distinction. In an even more famous fragment he remarks that ‘‘Homer and
Hesiod have attributed to the gods everything that is a shame and reproach among
men, stealing and committing adultery and deceiving each other’’ (fr. 11). From the
moment that religion is isolated as an object of investigation, its connection with
morality and its importance as an educative example is also recognized. The morality
attributed to the gods can and should be a model for people, and representation of
divine immorality has the potential to corrupt believers. The relationship of religion
and morality will occupy philosophers down to the end of antiquity.
A generation or more after Xenophanes authors continue to write as though
religion and the world of the human are thoroughly integrated. In Herodotus’
histories, for instance, religion plays a frequent and decisive role in human actions
(for a brief example see his account of the fate of Polycrates, 3.40–3). With the
Sophistic movement at the end of the fifth century BC, however, the opposition
between the human and the divine is firmly established. Some are now comfortable
discussing human affairs entirely without reference to the divine. The great example is
the austere Athenian historian Thucydides, an extreme rationalist by the standards of
any period of antiquity. When he does treat religion, it is often with irony (see the
backhanded deprecation of oracles at 5.26, or the great debate about morality and
religion in the ‘‘Melian dialogue,’’ notably at 5.103–5). The exemplary account of
the Sophistic opposition of reason and religion is provided in Plato’sDefense of
Socrates, delivered against the charge that ‘‘Socrates does wrong because he does
not believe in the gods that the city believes in, but introduces other spirits; he also
does wrong in corrupting the youth.’’ The relationship of the gods to justice remains
central in much of Plato’s writing (see for instance the beginning of theRepublic).
For Greeks the alternative to religion was not society but politics. The modern
English word ‘‘politics’’ derives from the Greek,ta politika, which means, literally,
‘‘things pertaining to the polis,’’ the characteristic Greek community-formation.
When Greeks speak of ‘‘politics’’ they allude to group life, as manifested in a
specifically Greek organization. The Greek ‘‘political’’ takes in not only the classic
modern idea of the political – i.e., the institutional forms and activities used by the
state to make decisions about day-to-day life – but also those spheres of behavior that
we today characterize as social and economic: they did not think of the social as
something apart from the political.
The Greek idea of the political emerges in tandem with the idea of religion; the
segregation of the one creates space for the other. For example, isolation of religion
makes it possible to imagine an area in which people can ‘‘make their world,’’
286 Charles W. Hedrick Jr.