First of all, to understand the relationship between literature and religion, we must understand what literature is and what religion is. We need to find out where they started. Develop what? Explain what?
The origin of literature
Literature refers to the art of using language to vividly reflect the objective reality, including drama, poetry, novels, essays and so on. It is an important manifestation of culture, which expresses inner feelings in different forms (called genres) and reproduces social life in a certain period and region.
The development of literature
Literature originated from human thinking activities. The earliest literature is oral literature, which is usually combined with music to form lyric poems that can be sung. The earliest written documents are China's The Book of Songs, Indian Ramayana and ancient Greek Ilion Ji. The classification of European traditional literature theory divides literature into three categories: poetry, prose and drama. China's works written in words in the pre-Qin period were collectively referred to as literature, and literary works were listed separately only after Wei and Jin Dynasties. Modern literature is usually divided into four categories: poetry, novel, prose and drama.
Literature shows the wisdom of human writing. For people, animals, mountains and rivers, as well as understanding, discovering, recording and mastering nature. Reflects people's inner pursuit. A desire.
Religious origin
Religion is a cultural phenomenon that appears when human society develops to a certain historical stage and belongs to social ideology. The main feature is to believe that there are supernatural mysterious forces or entities outside the real world, which dominate everything and have absolute authority, dominate natural evolution and determine the fate of the world, thus making people awe and worship this mystery, and thus extending their belief cognition and ritual activities.
The development of religion
The objects and ways of religious belief and worship are all formed around people's survival and production in society. Closely related to the survival and life of social groups, the first is the relationship between man and nature, and the second is the relationship between people. The former is represented by natural forces while the latter is represented by social forces. Because these two alien forces that dominated primitive people were deified in their fantasy reflections, they became two basic objects of worship: the worship of natural forces and the worship of clan ancestors. At all stages of social development, although the number of worshippers is increasing and the ways of worship are becoming more and more complicated, they are all evolved from nature worship and ancestor worship.
The objects people worship are closely related to the life and production of social groups. Therefore, with the development of productive forces and the improvement of survival ability, the contents and worship forms of religious concepts reflecting the above two objects of worship will inevitably change accordingly, thus forming a historical development of social religion that is roughly synchronized with the development of all social strata.
Religion shows that human society is becoming more and more developed. Compared with the same period last year, human IQ is getting higher and higher, the scope of activities is getting wider and wider, and there are more and more unknown fields. People have no resistance, and pray for comfort in their hearts, hoping that the gods can save the day and safeguard their own interests.
The above points can explain,
Literature and religion are both * * *, both of which embody people's thoughts. It is spread by spirit, writing and faith. It is a subject that expresses social life and psychological activities in words and characters. It belongs to the artistic category of social ideology. They are all the arts of language and writing (literature is composed of language and writing, which opens up the field of silence) and is an important manifestation of social culture.
The biggest difference between the two is that. Religion binds people's hearts and is a tranquilizer to relieve inner panic. Literature opens people's minds and spirits.