{106}

c) In the first place I have considered a cosmogony. In the second place an ecclesiology. But there is also an eschatology. Eschatology —from éschaton, which means the ultimate— is, from the point of view of the occurrence of human life, the homologous of what has been the primordial beginning of time. There is an éschaton, which is the end of time for man, which covers not only his future more or less proximate —this already happens in the cult—, but the totality of human reality, what we call its destiny. All religions have estimated that this éschaton is the beyond, another world. Eschatology is primarily and fundamentally the idea of another world. Naturally this other world is a world, but it is also another one, regardless of its characteristics. {107} The fact that it may be a beyond constitutive of another world evidently supposes that man is going to survive into it, that he is going to be able to live in that other world. The idea of immortality is precisely a terminus of faith. There is no reason whatsoever —not even in Catholic thought— to suppose that the idea of immortality may be a truth of pure reason: I subscribe myself to the opinion of many theologians who consider that immortality is a truth of faith.

The frontier between this world and the other is precisely death. All religions have had to take a position before the problem of death. Because of this there has been talk of the “cult of the dead”. Terrible and equivocating expression. What is meant by “cult of the dead”? Not everything that is done with the dead has a religious and cultic characteristic. There are many things in the ancient religions which are simply magic, in addition to other practices more or less superstitious and aberrant which still perdure even in the bosom of our Christian civilizations. But even eliminating all these superstitious practices, the expression “cult of the dead” continues to be enormously equivocal.

The expression, on the one hand, may mean that the dead are treated in a certain way because we consider that from the other world, from the beyond, they have some connection, favorable or adverse, with those who are in this world here. However, this is not necessarily a cult of the dead. More than a cult of the dead it is a condition —so to speak— of the ecclesial solidarity extended to the other world and to the spirits in it. The expression “cult of the dead” may mean, on the other hand, that one venerates, in one form or another, the spirits of the dead. But in this case, in order for the expression to be exact and extensible to all religions, it is necessary that we add an important correction. One can venerate the {108} spirits of the dead, provided that veneration means that these spirits are included inside the cult; but not that they may be the terminus of a special cult, different from the one offered to God. That would be an aberrant form. Of course, no one has ever experienced the liveliness of that survival. But neither has anyone lived the non-survival. Faith qua faith, is just as much faith in one case as it is in the other, either positive or negative. It cannot be said that the conditio possidentis belongs to the one who does not believe in the survival. It is not a question of conditio possidentis, but of an option. The option to believe that one is not immortal is just as much an option as to believe one is immortal. The reasons are a different question, but since they are not so impelling as a mathematical theorem, it means that the margin of option is equally optative in one side as it is in the other. It is no less real faith the faith of the one who declares that with death everything ends, than the faith of the one who says the everything begins there.

This is, in broad strokes, the structure of the body of a religion. It has a cosmogony, it has an ecclesiology, and has an eschatology. And this body is a body into which everyone born in our city finds himself incorporated. It is the constituted body of the religion he has received.

d) To this statutory characteristic is what the term tradition corresponds. Someone may believe that tradition is simply the very old. There is no doubt that there is a reason why words have acquired the meaning they have today. Yet, if we wish to be more precise and rigorous about the meaning of tradition we find that what really corresponds to it is the concept of something which has been established for all time. And this tradition has moments.

aa) In the first place there is an initial moment. It must be admitted at the very least that there has been a moment in which {109} a certain religious structure has commenced. That is the moment for the fixation of the tradition, what we might call the constituting moment of the tradition or the constituting tradition. To this moment belong, for example, the few known founders of religions: Abraham or Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Zarathustra in the Avesta, Lao Tse or Confucius. There are only a few founders of religions whose names are known today, and therefore, there are only very few religions whose constitutive moment appears evident today. Nevertheless, every tradition has this initial or constituting moment.

bb) In the second place, tradition is always there, it comes to us from always. And in this sense tradition has a continuating dimension. The traditional is in this sense that which is continuating in the objective spirit. It is usually said, and it is true, that this continuating tradition may adopt diverse forms. For example, there is an oral tradition. The Vedas have been transmitted orally. Surely the hymns of joy of the Avesta have also been transmitted orally. That is why it is so difficult to translate them, as those of us who have been trying to translate them for years well know. Together with that great function of the oral tradition there are religions that have fixed their traditions in writing, not precisely at the moment of their being constituted, but in some continuating phase of its own. The Vedas were put into writing, the Avesta was put into writing, the Yahwist and Elohist traditions were put into writing, etc. It is precisely the case of those religions to whose tradition belongs the existence of a Sacred Book. These are the “religions of the Book”. Christianity has the Bible, the Mohammedans the Al-Koran, the Ginza for the Mandean, the Avesta for the Zoroastrian, many religious books in Egypt, the Pali canon of Buddhism, etc.

{110} It is usually thought that there are no other forms of tradition besides these. However, with all due respect for the truth, although both are important and truthful, they are actually the most superficial. Continuating tradition is something much more serious. It is precisely the inner and lived experience with which each one of the individuals of a particular historical moment continues to actually receive, in a vital and internal way, the religious fecundity of those who have formed him, while at the same time he continues to form those who come after him. This lived and direct experience is the radical form of the continuating tradition. On top of it the whole scaffolding of the oral and written traditions ride. In the written traditions, and in the case of the Bible, it would be wise not to forget this at the time of making literary criticisms. And this radical form of tradition, which is prior to being oral, and prior to being written, is precisely to live it, to be a living tradition.

cc) But tradition not only has a constituting moment, and a continuating moment. It also has a moment that looks clearly to the future. Let us call it progradient tradition. It is the tradition that looks to the future with what it has received, and with what it is taking from the present situation, for anything that may be useful in illuminating the steps it will be taking in the future. It is here where the possibility appears for something, which is essential in almost all religions, and is precisely the beginning of theology: to disentangle tradition. It is the beginning, for example, of the theology of Memphis and Thebes, of the theology of the “Brahmanas” and the “Upanishads”, of the Iranian Zoroastrianism, etc. It is the starting of a theology inasmuch as the received tradition is forming and prefiguring the course of the body of its own religion, the religious body¹.

{111} In its triple aspect as constitutive, continuative, and progradient, tradition expresses the statutory characteristic of the body of religion as theology and as mundology.


II. Personal religious life

Besides religion as an institution we have the religious life that each individual actualizes precisely in that religious body or institution. It is within that body where each one of those belonging to it lives his own religious life, and this is what precisely constitutes the essential and fundamental terminus of religion. Religion is essentially the spirit with which that body is lived.

The personal religious attitude of each one is not an attitude numerically added to other attitudes in life, and different from them. This would be a somewhat Platonic conception of religion, dominated by a chorismós, a separation. The religious attitude is not just one more attitude in life, rather it is the radical and fundamental attitude with which one can live all of the doings and eventualities of life. Only in this sense it can be said that every religation molds itself into religion. Religion consists in living all the activities of life within the dimension of the surrender to the divinity, in one faith.

Nevertheless, there are in this life a few acts that are not just attitude, and can be essential to religion: for example, rites of initiation to the body of faith, formulas for the profession of faith. The formula for the Moslems is well known: la ilah illa Allah wa Muhammad rasul Allah, “there is no other God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet”. The Israelites have a formula for the profession of faith in the synagogue: {112} shama’ Yisra’el Yahweh ‘elohim Yahweh ’echad, “listen Israel, Yahweh our God is one” (Dt 6:4). And there are also the supplications and the prayers. But the supplications and the prayers only have sense within a certain conception of the divinity. It is not primarily a question of elevated sentiments. Many religions, within a certain historical level, have the same list of high sentiments more or less. It would suffice to note that some Psalms inscribed in the canon of the Old Testament are literally copied from extra-Biblical texts. And conversely we should not forget that not every sentiment found in the Psalms is worth imitating. There are many texts worthy of admiration, but not precisely worth of imitation, and are not proposed for imitation. A supplication is not primarily and fundamentally composed by a series of sentiments, but by something much more radical: by the conception of the divinity which one addresses in the faith, by the meaning of that faith.

Certainly, man in his own life not only performs these acts, but precisely because he performs or may perform all the activities of his life with a religious attitude, finds himself located in front of his actions, and in front of things not only in the sense that he does what he should, but in the sense that, apparently at least, when he does what he should not, he commits a peccatum. I say apparently not because this may not be real, but because the peccatum is something much more than just doing something you should not do. Any moral conscience, regardless of the type it may be, has knowledge of what should be done, and what should not be done. And is also aware that what is done when one commits an infraction against what should be done is not yet a peccatum. The peccatum is that deficit in the moral action when it is formally referred to the divinity. Only then we have a peccatum. Anything else is purely and {113} simply a moral fault. The difference and the connection that exists between the fault and the peccatum is one of the subjects which are beyond the scope of our present endeavors.

Thus, religion, lived personally by each one of the members of a social body, has a theology and is essentially included in a mundology in its triple dimension of cosmogeny, ecclesiology, and eschatology. Certainly, in that social body, this religion lived in a particular way presents a curious characteristic: it is an inexorable and necessary molding of religation. Religion in this sense is a molding which by reason of its own characteristics is the terminus of religation. However, religion takes on many innumerable forms, and all of them with a historical characteristic.

In what does their diversity consist?
In what does their history consist?

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¹ Zubiri notes on the margin: “religious reformer”.