The Sphere of Culture-2

The idea of religious feeling as a personal, cosmological view of the world, reflecting a profound spiritual need to know oneself, came out of the ancient civilizations, when the binding function of religious rites could no longer be maintained intact given the presence of competing religious systems and ideas within the new super-tribal cities.

Hence, individuals started to experiment with religious feelings independently of tribal practices, developing a broader and more personal view of spirituality separate from, albeit originally derived from, the tribal version.
Religions with a strong theistic system of belief arose in the ancient civilizations, which provided the social conditions for people to develop a marked sense of demarcation between subjective consciousness and the natural world. This led to a view of the universe as having a pattern to it that humans did not invent, but that they discovered by reasoning about it. The more people appreciated the complexity of the pattern, the more they tended to formulate a conception of a Supreme Intelligence (monotheism) or Intelligences (polytheism), immeasurably greater than a mere mortal, who must know it in its entirety.

The religious sphere continues to be a part even of modern-day secular societies, where religious rituals and symbols continue to form the fabric of modern cultures, even if people are no longer aware of their religious derivations. As the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (1912-1991) argued, in his book The Great Code (1981), religious symbols remain as residues in the artistic practices and in the everyday discourse patterns of even those societies that define themselves as largely secular. I;rye showed how the Bible, for example, is the implicit code sustaining and informing Western literature, art, and social institutions. Anyone who has not had access to this code, Frye suggested, will simply not understand the Western world. The stories of Adam and Eve, of the Tower of Babel, of Paradise lost and regained, of the Flood and Noah's Ark have supplied not only the themes for the great art and literary works of Western civilization, but also the symbols shaping the daily thought and discourse patterns of Western peoples, even if most have never read the Bible. The signifying order is built from this code, diffusing its meanings throughout the entire social system. In the English language, for instance, life is commonly referred to as a journey through the waters (the Ark story), human beings as fallen creatures (the Adam and Eve story), and so on. So, too, cultures with different religious traditions have their own codes that must be accessed through their signifying orders in order to interpret the deeper strata of meanings that are expressed in their arts, literatures, and languages.

The Political Sphere

The need for stability and social cohesiveness in the emerging super-tribal systems of the ancient world led to a rise in the prominence and influence of secondary cultural spheres. Awareness of the growing role of the political sphere in human affairs, for instance, can already be seen in Plato (c. 428-347 BC), who attempted to reconcile the religious and political spheres by proposing a model of a community that would be governed by an aristocracy of "philosopher-kings." But it was Aristotle (384-322 BC) who recognized the ever-increasing power of the political, legal, and economic spheres in city-state cultures. In his Politics, he suggested that these were often in conflict with the religious sphere because of the tension created by their overlapping moral jurisdictions.

This tension extended well into the Middle Ages, an era in Western history characterized by a protracted struggle for supremacy between the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. This conflict was reflected in the scholarly writing of the era. The philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), for instance, defended the traditional role of the Church in his Summa Tlieologica (1265-1273), while the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) argued, in his De Monorchia (c. 1313), for a united Christendom under one emperor and pope, each supreme in his appropriate sphere. By the time of the Renaissance, intellectuals like Niccolo Machiavelli (1459-1527) transcended the traditional church-state debate by evaluating the problems and possibilities of governments seeking to maintain power in non-religious, non-moralistic ways. Some years later, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) argued that the power of the political sphere in regulating the affairs of a culture should be unlimited, since he believed culture to be primarily a "social contract" which individuals livtain groups of people continue to prefer the strictly religious form of education. Private or separate schools, as they are commonly called, exist typically for this reason. Thus, the age-old tug between the religious and secular spheres for control of the minds of children continues to characterize education in societies throughout the world.

Source: Analyzing cultures: an introduction and handbook / Marcel Danesi and Paul Perron. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c1999.