For Durkheim himself – most of whose life fell between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, decades during which millions of Frenchmen dreamed of revenge and of recovering Alsace and Lorraine – the supreme sacred thing was France.įrance, for Durkheim and other French patriots, was very like God. The great French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) recognized this when he defined religion as a set of beliefs and practices pertaining to “sacred things.” These things may of course be gods, but they may be things other than gods. But if a thing walks like a religion, and talks like a religion, and makes moral demands like a religion makes, and gives the kinds of consolations that a religion gives, then it’s a religion. For it doesn’t necessarily involve a belief in God or gods after all, you can be an enthusiastic nationalist while at the same time being an atheist. You may quibble with this assertion, arguing that nationalism is not, strictly speaking, a religion. He said that nationalism, not Protestantism, is the most important and influential present-day heresy. But one day he happened to make an incidental observation regarding the history of religion that has stayed with me.
When I was in high school my Latin teacher didn’t succeed in teaching me much Latin beyond the first three words of The Aeneid (“ Arma virumque cano”).
