How an Old Distinction between Religion and Superstition Speaks to Today

SUPERSTITION

I’ve been thinking lately about superstition. Not the funky 1972 Stevie Wonder hit, although it would make a great soundtrack for this piece:

Very superstitious/Writing’s on the wall
Very superstitious/Ladder’s ‘bout to fall

Got the beat in your head? Hum it as you read.

Nor is it about the distinction Michal Scott (played by Steve Carell) of The Office makes about degrees of superstition: “I’m not superstitious, but I’m—I am a little stitious.” Aren’t we all? (I owe the reference to Ryan Bykerk.)

It’s about the difference between religion (the good stuff) and superstition (the bad stuff), a distinction and conversation that goes back at least to Cicero, the 1^st century BCE Roman orator, writer, and philosopher. What constitutes the one, and what the other?

We might start closer to home in mid-conversation with the 16^th century reformer, John Calvin. Calvin liked to use the word “superstition” as a way of pillorying his opponents. There was a lot for him to dislike about the church of his day: the accumulation of ceremonies, images in churches, the way worship was celebrated in Latin with the priest’s back turned to the congregation, the theology that claimed that the sacramental bread became actual flesh, these and more. When he came upon a practice he disliked, the s-word was soon to follow.

He doesn’t define superstition, as far as I know. The closest he comes is near the beginning of the 1559 edition of The Institutes of the Christian Religion, in a discussion of idolatry. Citing Cicero, he says: 

Even though Cicero truly and learnedly derives the word “religion” from the word relegere [almost certainly wrong], the reason that he assigns is forced and farfetched: that upright worshipers often reread and diligently weighed what was true. Rather, I believe that this word is opposed to giddy license; for the greater part of the world thoughtlessly seizes upon whatever is at hand, nay, even flits hither and thither. But godliness, to stand on a firm footing, keeps itself within its proper limits. Likewise, it seems to me that superstition is so called because, not content with the prescribed manner and order, it heaps up a needless mass of inanities. (1.12.1; The Library of Christian Classics, p. 244)

You can see the problem here. One person’s “proper limits” is another’s “needless mass of inanities.” For Calvin—and for Calvin’s followers throughout the centuries—“superstition” often seems little more than a word he used to throw against his opponents. We have religion; they have superstitions. We have “godliness” and “proper limits”; they have “a needless mass of inanities.” Think of the worship wars of the late 20^th century in conservative Protestant churches when accusations of this kind were thrown back and forth. But still, for all the cheap ways Calvin uses the term “superstition,” I have long suspected that he is trying to get at something deeper, something that goes wrong in religion, that still goes wrong. And for that, I think, we have to step back to where the discussion begins, to the ancient pagan Cicero and his “On the Nature of the Gods” (de natura deorum).

“On the Nature of the Gods,” written just a few years before Cicero’s untimely death in 43 BCE, is a philosophical dialogue. Cicero puts on his literary stage characters who represent various schools of thought and places them together in a beautiful house, overlooking Rome. The dialogue itself is immensely erudite, brilliantly written, amusing, and, well, baggy. Parts are missing from the 3^rd and final book of the dialogue, and it’s apparent throughout that Cicero did not intend it to be his final version. It could stand a good edit, but still, it makes for delightful reading.

Cicero assembles a cast of worthies: Gaius Velleius, an Epicurean; Lucilius Balbus, a Stoic, and Gaius Cotta, from the Academy, the school begun by Plato. Cicero himself lurks silent in the shadows. The topic is the nature of the gods. If you squint a little, the discussion could be taking place today in some academic setting. Velleius, the Epicurean, proposes a materialist vision of the universe: it’s all atoms, all random motion. Plug in whatever contemporary you wish, say, Richard Dawkins. Balbus, the Stoic, proposes the opposite: it’s all mind. You could substitute any number of contemporary advocates for panpsychism, say, Bernardo Kastrup. We are still having this argument. (On this see, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine (2021), especially chapters 9-10.)

It’s in Balbus’s long argument against the Epicureans and in defense of Stoicism that Cicero slips in the distinction between religion and superstition. Religion, Balbus says, is a respectful reading and honoring of the ancient stories. Superstition, by way of contrast, is transactional, a way of getting from the gods what one wants or not getting what one fears. If religion is laden with a sense of awe, of diffidence about what one can know and what one cannot know, superstition is motivated primarly by fear. It’s about placating the gods. Religion is what you do to put yourself on the side of the gods; superstition is what you do to get the gods on your side.

It’s a difference of motivation, of approach. This difference remains important and relevant. You could object that Cicero is talking about ancient Roman religion. Our faith is quite different. His was a polytheism; ours a trinitarian monotheism. All of that is true, of course, but the difference is not so great as one might suspect. (The early church considered Cicero one of the righteous pagans.) In the discussion in Cicero’s dialogue, no one takes the stories of the gods literally. The Epicureans were accused of a functional atheism, the gods so marginalized that their existence became unimportant. The Stoics believed in a world soul, the individual gods absorbed into a cosmic consciousness. And the Academy, with its roots in Plato, represents still another theological approach, one that strongly influenced Christian theology. The discussion is at a high philosophical level. But that is not the point. The point is not what but how, how one approaches matters of belief and religious practice. Is our relationship to the eternal, to what matters ultimately, one of awe, of respect for what we cannot fully comprehend, or one of fear, and with that fear a desire to find ways to throw the odds in our favor? The first, by Cicero’s lights, is religion; the second is superstition.

Superstition is by its nature transactional. The idea of faith as a transaction is planted deep in the dominant theology of our time, evangelicalism. Take, for example, our president. Lately, he has been worrying about his eternal status. He thinks he might have a chance if he could bring the war in Ukraine to an end:

If I can save 7,000 people a week from being killed, I think that’s a pretty—I want to try and get to heaven if possible,” he said. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I hear I’m really at the bottom of the totem pole. If I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons. (The Daily Beast)

He has new reasons to worry, as he bombards Iran and this new war begins to spread into the entire Middle East. More people are dying. My point, though, is not about foreign policy but about theological assumptions. When Donald Trump thinks about religion, he thinks transactionally: will I make through the pearly gates into a mansion in the sky?

He’s not alone. If, like me, you attend (too many) funerals, you will encounter, even churches that profess to be Reformed, an obligatory moment of worry about the eternal destiny of the person who has died. Is he or she going to heaven? Or—this is never quite said out loud—is he or she on the fast train to eternal agony in hell?  At that point in the service, someone, often the pastor, will testify that they have had a recent conversation with the deceased, and we can be assured that she or he met all the requirements for heaven. Met the requirements. Completed the transaction.

Pay attention to the structure of this theology. It has to do with belonging. In a transactional universe, you must buy your way in. You are on the outside unless you find the right coinage to purchase the right to enter: the right words, the right religious practices, the right beliefs, some other right. In the president’s words I quoted above you can hear the plaintive appeal of someone who believes that he does not belong. The basic premise of evangelicalism is that belonging requires you to do something: to come forward, to say the right prayer, to believe the right things. 

And this is true not only for getting into heaven but for this life also. You are out until you are in. This creates a world of people who belong and people who don’t. It justifies thinking in terms of insiders and outsiders. Or, to put this in transactional terms, owners and non-owners. In the Trumpian universe, Christians, especially white Christians, are the owners. To them belong all the rights and privileges of citizenship; the others are intruders, stealing what legitimately belongs to the owners.

I’ll not take this farther. In Ciceronian terms this entire theology has the structure of superstition. When we think of superstition, we usually focus on the apparatus of superstitious practice, such things as crystals and spells and incantations. But these things are not the heart of it. The heart of superstition is the idea of a transactional universe, a universe in which one’s fate depends on paying off the gods or God or whomever you worship. Against this, in Cicero’s terms, is religion, which, instead of trying to get the gods on your side, approaches that which is beyond us with respect, awe, and a sense of discovery. There is a diffidence in religion.

I regard the Calvinism of my youth (and my old age) as standing in that tradition. Rightly understood, the Calvinist doctrine of election is an attempt to take transaction out of theology. In this way of thinking there is nothing anyone can do to get God on their side. God cannot be bargained with. We don’t change our eternal destiny by what we say or do or think. Instead, this faith begins with belonging and challenges us to live out of that belonging.

Unfortunately, transactionalism early on crept back into this faith. The problem from the beginning was that the idea of election was formulated in terms of being chosen or not chosen. The question became how to know whether you were in or not. And this was answered as early as the Westminster creeds by saying that if you had the right consciousness of faith, you could be “infallibly assured that [you were] in the state of grace”:

Such as truly believe in Christ, and endeavor to walk in all good conscience before him, may, without extraordinary revelation . . . be infallibly assured that they are in the estate of grace, and shall persevere therein unto salvation. (Westminister Larger Catechism, Q&A 80)

This brings in by the back door the idea that if I have the right beliefs and live the right kind of life, I will (be assured I) belong, which, once again, makes faith a kind of transaction. 

But suppose that one simply begins with belonging. Then the question is not whether one belongs but how to belong—how to live the life of the children of God. Faith becomes a matter of honoring your belonging. And if you begin with your belonging, then you must begin with everyone’s belonging, and the question is immediately broadened to include how we belong together. And, not just to how we belong to each other as humans, but to how we belong together with the other creatures of the world and with the world itself. 

And if we begin thus with belonging, then religion becomes a quest for the proper ways of belonging, for the wisdom of belonging. From a Christian point-of-view, this wisdom comes from following Christ, who, as Hebrews 12:2 says, is the pioneer of this way of life. And with that we find ourselves in the company of earlier generations of Christians, women and men, who have considered the faith as a way, an ascent. And we recognize with them that this ascent is unbounded:

Certainly whoever pursues true virtue participates in nothing other than God, because he is absolute virtue. Since, then, we who know what is good by nature desire participation in it, and since this good has not limit, the participant’s desire itself necessarily has no stopping place but stretches out with the limitless. (Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses. Translation, Introduction and Notes by Abraham Malherbe and Everett Ferguson. Paulist Press, 1978, p. 31)

Gregory adds: “The one limit of virtue is the absence of a limit.”

And this perspective on religion—religion as a quest for the meaning of belonging—resonates remarkably with Cicero’s own claim about religion as opposed to superstition:

But the best and also the purest, holiest and most pious way of worshipping the gods is ever to venerate them with purity, sincerity and innocence both of thought and of speech.

Superstition separates us into camps: those who have the right techniques for getting on our side and those who don’t. We daily see the consequences of that. Religion in Cicero’s definition does the opposite: it brings us together. We all belong. Our quest is to discover the ways of belonging. As Gregory has it, on that quest we have barely begun.

Clay