Religare, Relegere

In the final years of his life, Marcus Tullius Cicero had withdrawn from public life, broken by the death of Tullia, his daughter. He was watching the very Republic which he had defended dissolve into the dictatorship of Caesar. He turned to writing about the gods: composed in 45 BCE, De Natura Deorum contained what he believed could reasonably be said about divinity (Rackham xiii). In the second book, he pauses to place emphasis on a single word.

This word is religio. Cicero offers an etymology here: "Qui autem omnia quae ad cultum deorum pertinerent diligenter retractarent et tamquam relegerent, ii sunt dicti religiosi ex relegendo" (Cicero 2.28.72). This translates to: "Those... who carefully reviewed and so to speak retraced all the lore of ritual were called 'religious' from relegere (to retrace or re-read)" (trans. Rackham 193).

So, to Cicero, a religious person is someone who is in attendance: they return to the rites and texts, reading them once more to understand them. From this perspective, religion is a habit of careful refocusing and reflection. Its opposite would be superstitio, which Cicero treats as a failure of discipline (Cicero 2.28.72).

Three centuries later, in a Christianized empire that Cicero would obviously not live to see, someone else took a different stance. Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius refused his predecessor's reading. The Divinae Institutiones was written by Lactantius between 303 and 311 CE, during the last great period of Christian persecution known formally as the Diocletianic Persecution. He writes: "Hoc vinculo pietatis obstricti Deo et religati sumus; unde ipsa religio nomen accepit, non ut Cicero interpretatus est, a relegendo" (Lactantius 4.28.2). This translates to : "We are bound and tied to God by this chain of piety... from which religion itself received its name, not, as Cicero explained it, from carefully gathering" (trans. Fletcher 131).

Contrary to Cicero's interpretation, Lactantius derives religio from the word religare, which means to bind or fasten. The difference between religare and relegere is two letters, and yet the theological difference implied is vast. For Cicero, religion is tied to what a person does and how they practice. Alternatively, for Lactantius, religion is tied to one's obligation to a god.

This philological dispute still remains unsettled to this day, and it's likely that it will remain that way. Both perspectives were already in circulation prior to Lactantius in fact. Titus Lucretius Carus, better known as Lucretius, had used religio in the sense of bonds that constrain. He called them "the knots of religion" to be loosened by the philosopher (Lucretius 1.931). A generation later, Livy would describe early Romans as bound by religio in such a way that suggests obligation more than observance (Livy 5.23.10). The binding sense was not strictly tied to Christianity. But when Lactantius landed on his interpretation, he positioned his etymology opposite to that of Cicero. When a modern English speaker refers to "religion," the word carries Lactantius' interpretation more wholly. The Ciceronian perspective, in which religion is defined as a discipline of attention, has been lost for the most part.

So in making a small philological correction, Lactantius would shape how the modern West would come to understand religion. And while we argue about religion today, many of us are using a word whose dominant meaning was decided in an etymological dispute millennia ago.

Works Cited

Cicero. De Natura Deorum; Academica. Translated by H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 268, Harvard

University Press, 1933. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/cicero-in-28-volumes.-vol.-19-loeb-268.

Lactantius. The Divine Institutes. Translated by William Fletcher. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, Christian Literature Publishing, 1886, pp.

9–223. Christian Classics Ethereal Library, ccel.org/ccel/lactantius/institutes.

Livy. History of Rome, Volume III: Books 5–7. Translated by B. O. Foster, Loeb Classical Library 172, Harvard

University Press, 1924. Internet Archive,

archive.org/details/livy-history-of-rome-12-volumes-in-1-searchable-loeb.

Lucretius. On the Nature of Things. Translated by W. H. D. Rouse, revised by Martin F. Smith, Loeb Classical Library 181, Harvard University Press, 1924.