The Sacred, Religion, and Morality Romanus Cessario OP (bio) During the period that standard English-speaking authors refer to as that of modern continental philosophy, the trio of the "sacred," "religion," and "morality" became subjects of research in disciplines that developed out of or alongside classical theology and philosophy. The argument of the first half of this paper is that by and large this innovation has not been a fortuitous one for Catholic thought. For instance, it is generally agreed that August Comte (1798–1857) played a key role in the initial transformation of "religion" into what may be described as a Time-magazine sphere of society, that is, alongside the economy, politics, sports, theater, and so forth. His 1852 Catechism of Positivism supplied the founding charter for the discipline that has come to be known as the Sociology of Religion. This work, moreover, along with Comte's other writings influenced in a broad sense the development of modern sociology. Although born into a devout Catholic family, Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte's own views on religion reflect the intellectual uncertainties of his period. He subtitles his Catechism a "Summary Exposition of the Universal Religion, in Eleven Dialogues between a Woman and a Positivist Priest of Humanity."1 It [End Page 16] should be evident that August Comte does not escape the skepticism and confusion with respect to religion that infected certain French authors during the first half of the nineteenth century. Even Friedrich Nietzsche was moved to remark on the strained ambiguity that, in his caustic opinion, was characteristic of figures like Comte and Ernest Renan: "How strangely devout for our taste even these recent French sceptics are, to the extent they have some Celtic blood in their ancestry!"2 Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) played a crucial role in carrying Comte's views on religion to a next stage of reflection. Durkheim elucidated the nature of religion to be a celebration of a group's or a people's community or social solidarity.3 He postulated that common values form the cohesive bonds of society, particularly in primitive societies, although he also opined, as Mary Ann Glendon has observed, that in his own day communal religions had already lost most of their authority and effectiveness.4 Durkheim himself probably possessed a genuinely religious streak; his father had been the Chief Rabbi of the Vosges and Haute-Marne. Durkheim's own views on religion, however, are thoroughgoingly secular at best. Robert Nisbet, on the other hand, affords valuable insights into the analytical genius of Durkheim in his 1974 book, The Sociology of Emile Durkheim.5 I single out this author as a guide to discovering what may be profitable in Durkheim because Nisbet was a brilliant intellectual historian who saw European history in terms of the decline of morally bound groups. Durkheim's celebrated 1897 study on suicide anticipated this conclusion when the author signaled "moral poverty" and anomie as causal factors in the occurrences of suicide in nineteenth-century Europe.6 Max Weber (1864–1920) brought his peculiar style of idealist or antipositivist reflection to bear on the relationship between the sacred, religion, and morality. His promotion of the fact-value distinction led Leo Strauss to consider Weber the most profound exponent of values relativism in social science.7 The American political scientist Rogers Brubaker expounds on Weber's views and, [End Page 17] in general, the positivist basis of modern culture and society in The Limits of Rationality, An Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber.8 Although Durkheim and Weber each develops his own approach to the role that religion plays in secular society, these two thinkers are generally accepted as the forgers of the functional empiricism that governs the epistemological outlook of the modern social sciences. This outlook today affects profoundly the way that Christian believers, especially Catholics, think about God, religion, and, to be sure, morality.9 One way to evaluate the influence that modern sociology has exercised on Catholics in the United States is to observe the evolution from its founding in 1938 of the American Catholic Sociological Society (ACSS) into its present-day embodiment as the Association for...