Belief in the supernatural, the divine, a world of the spirit, the reality of a soul that could live on beyond the decay of the earthly body, magic, superstition and witchcraft created for the inhabitants of all but the most recent communities a sphere of experience that was always larger than the material world around them. Belief was used to explain the apparently inexplicable, to ward off evil, to promote well-being, induce harmony of being and to prepare the mortal body for the world or worlds to come. The link with a world beyond mere physical observation has proved remarkably enduring, even in the secular, liberal West. In southern Italy images of saints and the Madonna are still carried through villages to offer protection against floods or volcanic eruptions or to encourage rainfall. The concept of ‘the Limbo of the Infants’, introduced as a term by the Catholic Church around 1300 to describe a haven for the souls of babies who died before there was time for baptism, in which they enjoyed a natural happiness, but were denied access to heaven, was all but set aside in 2007 when the Church announced that unbaptized infants should be entrusted to the possible mercy of God. Protests from parents anxious that their dead children should have a sure destination forced the Church to admit that Limbo was still a possibility. All attempts to provide a secular alternative to traditional Islam have foundered on the continuing vitality of the values and practices of the faith which is bound to a world beyond this one. Suicide bombers are recruited on the promise that they will be welcomed at once by the souls of the faithful when they cross the threshold of death.
Religions of every kind have exerted an extraordinary psychological power. This has been served in a number of ways. For thousands of years the finest buildings and monuments have been dedicated to religious purposes; in tribal societies the sacred—totems, ancestral graveyards—have exerted powerful fears and provoked an instinctive reverence. The numerous cathedrals, mosques and temples built in Christian, Islamic and Buddhist communities from medieval times onwards as gateways to the divine are among the richest architecture in the world, constructed in societies where for the poor the monumental buildings were awe-inspiring expressions of the spiritual. Religions were also the source of sanctioned behaviour. The rules laid down for social practice, custom, family life, or sexual conduct, are almost all religious in origin. A great many religions have been vehicles for constructing a male-centred society in which women were compelled to accept an ascribed and restricted gender role or risk severe forms of punishment or social discrimination. Many moral codes or legal systems were constructed by lay authorities—for example, Justinian’s Codex, or the Code Napoleon—but they relied on a conception of acceptable behaviour that was derived from the core moral teaching of the Church. In traditional Islam there should ideally be no distinction between religious precept and state law. In early Chinese history the emperors were accorded divine status, making the law, but making it as gods. In Japanese society, where the emperors also enjoyed quasi-divine status, to die willingly for the emperor was a moral obligation that overrode all others.
Religious belief was always difficult to challenge because the threat that unbelief or heresy posed was a threat to an entire way of viewing the world. For a great many communities governed by animist or polytheistic systems of belief there were no reasons, and usually no means, for questioning the ground in which such belief was rooted. There was no question of earning salvation, but simply obeying the customary rites and endorsing the beliefs of a given system. Monotheistic religions, in which respect for the deity and reverence for doctrine earned the right to salvation, were altogether more problematic. Arguments about Christian doctrine brought regular schism, provoking the rift between Orthodox Christianity in Eastern Europe and Western Catholic Christianity in 1054, and further schism between Catholic and Protestant Christianity in the 16th century. Fear of heterodoxy, or of the diabolical, provoked Catholicism into regular heresy hunts and the extraction of confessions through torture. Protestant and Catholic were burnt at the stake for their faith in the struggle over the Reformation. Radical Protestantism was also fearful of idolatry or witchcraft and the last witches were famously burnt in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Islam was also schismatic. In 680 AD the faith divided between Sunni and Shiite sects over disagreements on doctrine (including the Shia insistence that Allah could take human form), and the two branches are still engaged in violent confrontation throughout the Middle East. Convinced of the rightness of their cause, monotheistic religions enjoy a strong imperative to convert; those outside the pale, regarded as pagans or infidels, are damned. Conversion was seen as an obligation, part of God’s purpose to ensure that among the many competing claims to a divine order only one could be the right one.
To claim no religious allegiance has been a recent and limited option, confined largely to the Western world. Atheism became publicly admissible in the 19th century without fear of punishment but the public denial of God still attracts outrage. Secularists over the past two centuries have been keen to separate Church and state, but have not necessarily been irreligious. The strident rejection of the supernatural was identified with 19th-century socialism whose world view was materialist. Atheism appealed to a progressive intelligentsia hostile to what they saw as stale Christian convention. When the German poet-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously announced in Thus Spake Zarathustra, published in 1888, that ‘God is dead!’, he challenged what he saw as the great lie, dating back 2,000 years, and found a limited intellectual audience more than willing to accept a godless reality. In the early 20th century atheism was formally adopted by the Soviet Union, and communist China after 1949, but in neither case was it possible to eradicate belief. Atheism is now widely regarded as a declining intellectual force in an age of religious revivalism. The wide popular hostility to Richard Dawkins’s recently published The God Delusion (2006) is testament to how necessary it is even for societies where church attendance is moribund that the material world is not just all there is.
For much of recorded history what was known or believed to be knowable was bound up with religion. Religious institutions and the priesthood were the depositories of knowledge passed down, like the famous Jewish Talmud, from generation to generation. The earliest work of ‘wisdom literature’ in ancient Egypt, perhaps in the world, was attributed to Imhotep, high priest of Heliopolis under Djoser, king between 2,654 and 2,635 BC. Religious buildings housed valuable manuscripts, not only sacred books but treatises on many subjects. During the early Christian era in Europe, in what use to be known as the ‘Dark Ages’, monasteries and churches kept alive traditions of teaching, writing and recording. The Venerable Bede, based at the monastery in Wearmouth-Jarrow in the north-east of England in the early 8th century, helped to collect together an estimated 300–500 volumes, one of the largest libraries of books in the then Western world. Western education was dominated by the Church until the 18th century. Knowledge of this kind was limited in several ways. First, it was confined to a very small elite who could read and write. A distinct literary or official language was developed which could be fully understood only by the favoured few. Although the earliest writing can be dated back to the Sumerian civilization in present-day Iraq around 5,000 years ago, and then appearing in Egypt and China, the overwhelming majority of all humans who lived between then and the last few centuries were illiterate. Knowledge for them was limited to what could be conveyed orally, or crudely illustrated. For most people information was passed on through rumour, superstition, ritual, songs, sagas and folk tales. Second, it was limited by the theological or philosophical priorities of those who held the key to knowledge, reinforcing existing views of the known world, or of man’s relation to the universe, or of social hierarchy. Knowledge was used instrumentally, rather than for its own sake, confirming the existing order rather than encouraging critical or subversive discourse.
Knowledge in this sense did not inhibit technique. From the earliest settled communities onwards rapid strides were made in the practical skills associated with metallurgy, construction, irrigation, sculpture, and the production of artefacts of often stunning originality and beauty. The contrast between the last 6,000 years and the previous tens