The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

“Now when primitive religious beliefs are systematically analyzed, the principal categories [of understanding] are naturally found. They are born in religion and of religion; they are a product of religious thought.”

Durkheim suggests that religion enabled human thought to reach the level of conceptualizing abstractions like time, space, number, class, and division—all considered fundamental categories of understanding in classical philosophy. Religion accomplished this by reflecting human social structures back onto human experience in a way that enables people to observe and classify everything around them, and thus to consider new categories of thought inherent in those classifications.

“This division of the world into two domains, the one containing all that is sacred, the other all that is profane, is the distinctive trait of religious thought; the beliefs, myths, dogmas and legends are either representations or systems of representations which express the nature of sacred things, the virtues and powers which are attributed to them, or their relations with each other and with profane things.”

In Durkheim’s brief survey of all human religions, the only common factor is a belief in the sacred and the associated idea of the sacred’s separation from the profane. In Durkheim’s view, all other beliefs in religion, even in the most complicated theologies, derive from this basic sense of the sacred. The fundamental form of religion, then, would be one in which the basic division of sacred and profane stands at the forefront of its system of beliefs and rituals.

“Thus we arrive at the following definition: A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”

Durkheim’s definition of religion includes two main qualifications that cultural systems must meet in order to be accorded a religious identity: a system of classification that identifies sacred things, and a communal social context. Durkheim calls that context a “Church,” which he describes as a united body of believers.

“To-day we are beginning to realize that law, morals and even scientific thought itself were born of religion, were for a long time confounded with it, and have remained penetrated with its spirit. How could a vain fantasy have been able to fashion the human consciousness so strongly and so durably?”

In this quote, Durkheim expresses a positive view of religious effects on society, believing religion to have been the source of the kind of conceptual thinking that ultimately made many other areas of human social engagement possible. His question at the end expects a negative response—“It couldn’t”—by which Durkheim intends to say that religion is not a “vain fantasy” if it can encourage such monumental heights of human achievement.

“[T]he totem is not merely a name and an emblem. It is in the course of the religious ceremonies that they are employed; they are a part of the liturgy; so while the totem is a collective label, it also has a religious character. In fact, it is in connection with it, that things are classified as sacred or profane. It is the very type of sacred thing.”

This is part of Durkheim’s initial exposition of totemism as a cultural system. Other scholars previously argued that totemism was not a religion, but a symbolic system for marking individual and group identity. Durkheim disagrees, noting that in addition to a totem’s role in establishing identity, it is also a religious symbol. Things are classified either with the totem’s identification or outside of that identification, and then treated with the religious attitudes that match those toward the sacred and profane, which meets the definition of a religion Durkheim established in Book 1.

“We have a religion as soon as the sacred is distinguished from the profane, and we have seen that totemism is a vast system of sacred things.”

As in the quote above, here Durkheim contends that totemism clears the bar of his definition of a religion. Although totemism does not necessarily include beliefs about spirits or divinities common to other religions, it does appear to establish a system of the sacred and the profane, and thus it would qualify as a religion.

“In other words, totemism is the religion, not of such and such animals or men or images, but of an anonymous and impersonal force, found in each of these beings but not to be confounded with any of them. No one possesses it entirely and all participate in it. […] Taking the words in a large sense, we may say that it is the god adored by each totemic cult. Yet it is an impersonal god, without name or history, immanent in the world and diffused in an innumerable multitude of things.”

By the middle of Book 2, Durkheim is laying out the broad outlines of his thesis: Religion has a social origin, and the “god” that is religion’s object is nothing other than the all-pervasive force of society exerted upon the individual. In this quote, Durkheim is preparing the reader for that conclusion by pointing out totemism’s apparent vagueness and ambiguity regarding the center of its worship: an impersonal, immanent force that seemingly correlates with the effects of society itself.

“The real totemic cult is addressed neither to certain determined animals nor to certain vegetables nor even to an animal or vegetable species, but to a vague power spread through these things. […] This is original matter out of which have been constructed those beings of every sort which the religions of all times have consecrated and adored.”

Here Durkheim again emphasizes the vagueness of the social force central to totemic religion. In his view, this vagueness makes totemism a likely candidate as a fundamental form of religious belief, as it is easier to imagine other religions articulating further developments upon that original vague foundation than it is to imagine that a highly specific set of beliefs could engender such an unfocused and ambiguous sense of divinity at a later stage.

“Religion ceases to be an inexplicable hallucination and takes a foothold in reality. In fact, we can say that the believer is not deceived when he believes in the existence of a moral power upon which he depends and from which he receives all that is best in himself: this power exists, it is society.”

Durkheim directly identifies society as the “god” of the original form of human religion. Nevertheless, despite arguing for a social origin for religion rather than the traditional idea of a supernatural origin, Durkheim emphasizes a positive view of religion once again, insisting that it is not a hallucination or deception but a response to an experience grounded in reality.

“The great service that religions have rendered to thought is that they have constructed a first representation of what these relations of kinship between things may be. […] for from the moment when men have an idea that there are internal connections between things, science and philosophy become possible. Religion opened up the way for them.”

Another view of Durkheim’s positive view of religion is offered here. In contrast to some of his academic colleagues, who saw religion as a passing phase invalidated and transcended by the development of science and philosophy, Durkheim contends that the latter disciplines owe their whole existence to the former.

“In a word, just as society exists only in and through individuals, the totemic principle exists only in and through the individual consciousnesses whose association forms the clan. If they did not feel it in them it would not exist; it is they who put it into things. So it must of necessity be divided and distributed among them. Each of these fragments is a soul.”

Most totemic religions, while not necessarily focused on spiritual aspects, still have a concept of the human soul, which is likewise ubiquitous across human cultures. In explaining where the idea of a soul came from, Durkheim posits that it represents part of the collective consciousness that is the basis and object of religious devotion. As necessary components of the social forces at the heart of the religion, individuals must be the incarnations of some part of those forces, and this incarnation of social force is what Durkheim sees as the soul.

“It remains true that our nature is double; there really is a particle of divinity in us because there is within us a particle of these great ideas which are the soul of the group.”

Durkheim again affirms a point of belief in traditional religion, which many of his colleagues were inclined to reject instead: the idea of a bipartite constitution to the human being, body and soul. In Durkheim’s view, however, unlike in traditional religious conceptions, the soul is not a metaphysical reality in its own right, but rather a psychological conception that exercises social influence on the individual’s inner life.

“Our moral consciousness is like a nucleus about which the idea of the soul forms itself; yet when it speaks to us, it gives the effect of an outside power, superior to us, which gives us our law and judges us, but which also aids and sustains us. When we have it on our side, we feel ourselves to be stronger against the trials of life.”

In this quote, Durkheim describes how the feeling of social forces as they exert influence within us can lead to the impression that we have a soul inside of us. Here he describes the experience of conscience, which appears to the human to be both within oneself and yet above or opposed to oneself, much as the soul carries a dual notion of both identification with us and differentiation from us.

“It follows that asceticism is not a rare, exceptional and nearly abnormal fruit of the religious life, as some have supposed it to be; on the contrary, it is one of its essential elements.”

In much of the writing about religion in Durkheim’s day, asceticism (practices like fasting, vigils, and physical mortification) was held up as proof that religion habitually degraded into harmful forms, resulting in an impoverishment and warping of human values. In Durkheim’s analysis, however, asceticism is a natural and proper feature of religion, maintaining religion’s essential distinction between the sacred and the profane.

“The real reason for the existence of the cults, even of those which are the most materialistic in appearance, is not to be sought in the acts which they prescribe, but in the internal and moral regeneration which these acts aid in bringing about.”

Because Durkheim sees the influence of all-pervasive social forces as the ultimate object of human religious systems, he regards systems of rituals as existing largely to offer and maintain the continued experience of those forces. By insisting on his own interpretation, however, he unfortunately disregards the meanings that Aboriginal Australians give to their own rites, a common reaction in the anthropological writings of his day.

“The physical efficaciousness assigned to [religious rites] by the believer is the product of an interpretation which conceals the essential reason for their existence: it is because they serve to remake individuals and groups morally that they are believed to have a power over things.”

Durkheim again dismisses the surface meanings of the rituals as interpreted by the religion’s own practitioners, and instead looks for a deeper, essential reason for their practice. Durkheim sees the power of rituals largely in terms of refreshing and reinvigorating worshipers in their experience of the transcendent social forces that lie at the heart of religious experience.

“After we have acquitted ourselves of our ritual duties, we enter into the profane life with increased courage and ardor, not only because we come into relations with a superior source of energy, but also because our forces have been reinvigorated by living, for a few moments, in a life that is less strained, and freer and easier. Hence religion acquires a charm which is not among the slightest of its attractions.”

In this quote, Durkheim describes in experiential terms the benefits gained by participation in religious rituals. Religion serves not only to achieve a purpose aligned with theological or dogmatic ends, but to refresh the worshiper for reentering the world of the profane in a reinvigorated way. This quote, like many above, displays the essentially positive view that Durkheim takes of religion.

“So everything leads us back to this same idea: before all, rites are means by which the social group reaffirms itself periodically.”

This quote provides a useful summary statement on Durkheim’s view of religious rituals. Since religion is based upon the society itself, communal rituals serve to recreate the social states by which the psychological and emotional effects of society can be felt, and those effects are at their most profound in gatherings that highlight aspects of one’s group identity.

“If among certain peoples the ideas of sacredness, the soul and God are to be explained sociologically, it should be presumed scientifically that, in principle, the same explanation is valid for all the peoples among whom these same ideas are found with the same essential characteristics.”

Durkheim’s goal throughout the book has been to find the underlying principles of all human religion, not just of totemism or Aboriginal Australian religion. Here he states his belief that the conclusions he has arrived at, in view of those specific cases, can properly be extended to make accurate observations about human religion in general, as well as applied to any particular religious tradition.

“Thus religion, far from ignoring the real society and making abstraction of it, is in its image; it reflects all its aspects, even the most vulgar and the most repulsive. All is to be found there, and if in the majority of cases we see the good victorious over evil, life over death, the powers of light over the powers of darkness, it is because reality is not otherwise.”

One of Durkheim’s recurring points is that religion is based on reality, that it concerns itself with the real phenomena of human experience. In this quote, that idea is stated again, pointing out that religion’s reflection of society is so accurate that it replicates not only the positive features but the negative features too, and it maintains a sensibility about those features that matches our lived experience of the real world.

“A day will come when our societies will know again those hours of creative effervescence, in the course of which new ideas arise and new formulae are found which serve for a while as guide to humanity; and when these hours shall have been passed through once, men will spontaneously feel the need of reliving them from time to time in thought, that is to say, of keeping alive their memory by means of celebrations which regularly reproduce their fruit.”

It was popular among many academics in Durkheim’s day, following on social and philosophical trends begun in the Enlightenment, to envision a future in which humanity’s dependence on religion would gradually fade away in the face of science and naturalistic philosophy. Durkheim takes the opposite view in this quote, predicting that future human societies would come back to religion as an essential feature of its existence, and that this will serve to produce continued positive social effects.

“It is precisely this principle which is at the basis of the method which we follow in the study of religious phenomena: we take it as an axiom that religious beliefs, howsoever strange their appearance may be at times, contain a truth which must be discovered.”

In this quote from the book’s Conclusion, Durkheim is working toward establishing the place of religious studies within the field of sociology. He contends that religious beliefs are worthy of study. If diligently examined, they will reveal “a truth which must be discovered”—namely, essential insights into the society and its representative religion.

“In summing up, then, we must say that society is not at all the illogical or a-logical, incoherent and fantastic being which it has too often been considered. Quite on the contrary, the collective consciousness is the highest form of the psychic life, since it is the consciousness of the consciousnesses.”

As with religion, Durkheim holds a positive view of the overarching effects of society, or at least a recognition of their transformative power. Society, as the main object of sociological study, is here treated in the same terms with which Durkheim treats religion throughout the book: as a positive and fruitful system of beliefs, structures, and practices that demands careful observation because of its status as an essential feature of human experience.