Religion
Religiō

In classic antiquity, religiō broadly meant conscientiousness, sense of right, moral obligation, or duty to anything. In the ancient and medieval world, the etymological Latin root religiō was understood as an individual virtue of worship in mundane contexts; never as doctrine, practice, or actual source of knowledge. In general, religiō referred to broad social obligations towards anything including family, neighbors, rulers, and even towards God. Religiō was most often used by the ancient Romans not in the context of a relation towards gods, but as a range of general emotions which arose from heightened attention in any mundane context such as hesitation, caution, anxiety, or fear, as well as feelings of being bound, restricted, or inhibited. The term was also closely related to other terms like scrupulus (which meant "very precisely"), and some Roman authors related the term superstitio (which meant too much fear or anxiety or shame) to religiō at times. When religiō came into English around the 1200s as religion, it took the meaning of "life bound by monastic vows" or monastic orders. The compartmentalized concept of religion, where religious and worldly things were separated, was not used before the 1500s. The concept of religion was first used in the 1500s to distinguish the domain of the church and the domain of civil authorities; the Peace of Augsburg marks such instance, which has been described by Christian Reus-Smit as "the first step on the road toward a European system of sovereign states."

Roman general Julius Caesar used religiō to mean "obligation of an oath" when discussing captured soldiers making an oath to their captors. Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder used the term religiō to describe the apparent respect given by elephants to the night sky. Cicero used religiō as being related to cultum deorum (worship of the gods).
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