ABSTRACT
Religion as a description of a particular system of thought and practice, separable from the secular sphere, is a relatively recent phenomenon in the Western world. Prior to the modern period, religion was simply what everyone did, i.e. it was how they lived. To think there was a sphere of life that was simply outside the religious sphere was inconceivable. Dividing the world into the religious and the secular was therefore alien to traditional thinking. Something like the distinction first made its appearance in the Middle Ages, when they sought to distinguish those clergy who lived under a monastic rule, the regular clergy, from those who lived in the wider world, the secular clergy. It was a distinction which effectively contrasted those who were supposedly solely living in and for the eternal versus those who were living in the present age (saeculum).
