Abstract

Questions of nature's role in politics -- what constitutes a people, justice, necessity -- thread together into a singular significant problem: what is religious? This essay begins with the aim of defining religiosity -- to say what it is. Thucydides serves as an invaluable educator. With Thucydides' History we can analyse human nature writ large: we see the rise of a people, observe their division, note the dissolution of their 'ancestral' and finally question the cancer of self-doubt that sets in as to the justness of their Justice -- that is to say: their crisis of faith. But how to question Thucydides? The questions Nietzsche raised in his `On the Use and Abuse of History for Life' are most relevant and revealing to the topic at hand. What is Religious? examines the nascent emergence and mature decline of a people, it strives to grasp the modus operandi behind it, it seeks a forward philosophy