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Introduction

The model of civic religion, which was born in part from the recognition that religious practice is always exercised in a specific social context, has been called into question by a number of researchers in England and Germany. The challenge that they pose to the model of polis-religion is that, according to them, it does not take account of the religion of the individual, of religiosity viewed as a universal phenomenon, everywhere and always identical and present. In their view, religion exists fundamentally in the relationship—emotional, individual, and direct—that exists between God and human, without any need whatsoever for social institutions. In Germany, this model is bound to the history of Protestant theology and was diffused inter alia by Romantic philosophy, and it remains very powerful. It has always prevented other currents, based on modern Anglo-French social anthropology, from spreading, even if the so-called Frankfurt School, of which the historian of Roman religion Georg Wissowa was a precursor, was relatively close to an anthropological approach.¹ But this school was practically extinct after the Great War, and this left the field to those methods strongly inspired by Christianizing phenomenology.

The attack on polis-religion is therefore not surprising. Interpretations of ancient religions in their historical and social contexts have always provoked the same attack in their traditional milieu, whether that milieu is Christian and merely one that adopts its ideas from the Christian tradition. More surprising is the critique advanced by English colleagues, graduates of Cambridge and Oxford, universities where the polis model has been defined in opposition to a Eurocentric one. This development may have something to do with a generational reaction, or perhaps with the influence of British liberal thought, which tends to reduce all events to the free choice of individuals while denying any deterministic role to the social or institutional frameworks within which those choices are made.² Above all, however, one has the impression that in England, at any rate, the critique is an avatar of deconstructionism, which allows one to appear progressive and brilliant at very little cost. One deconstructs modes of analysis or the models of a science for the beauty of the gesture itself, and on this basis critiques this or that argument for its supposed ties to this or that ideology. Attention is often drawn to the problems posed by an ancient evidentiary regime, which is of course easy for an ancient historian to do, and then the site is left in ruins. It’s a fun game, but it is altogether as free as it is dangerous, especially for the humanities. If we ourselves insist that our studies are nothing more than bourgeois or petty-bourgeois amusements, hampered by their certitudes and discourse, perhaps our colleagues will one day persuade the taxpayers who finance these amusements to direct their tax dollars to more serious pursuits.

To defend the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, to justify the utility of history, and also to check whether a collection of researchers has indeed been working for twenty or thirty years under the influence of a collective illusion, it suffices to take up the same armaments: one must deconstruct the deconstructionists. This is not a difficult task: scholars of the ancient world are long habituated to investigate the history of their subject and to evaluate the contribution of their predecessors. For example, for a series of seminars in 1987 organized by Francis Schmidt, François Héran, Catherine Weinberger-Thomas, Jean Kellens, and Clarisse Herrenschmidt, I myself analyzed the influence of Romantic and Hegelian thought on the arguments of Theodor Mommsen and Georg Wissowa.³

We will therefore examine the arguments deployed against the model of civic religion, pointing out errors and misunderstandings, and we will try to show that the deconstruction of polis-religion has actually consisted in reintroducing to the history of religions extremely traditional points of view—indeed, exactly those points of view that the model of polis-religion was devised to combat and overcome.

The arguments formulated against the model of civic religion seem to me above all to misrecognize—to ignore, even—essential data that all those who study the Greco-Roman world ought to understand well: what was the city-state and its society, what was the individual in his epoch, and what was his involvement in the city-state? One must, in the end, understand the religion of the ancients without reducing it to some simple function of self-fashioning or identity creation.

I will try to show that deconstructionist theories typically pass to one side of the problem and neglect the sources. In opposition to the critiques formulated against civic religion, I will also try to reconstruct some important features of this type of religiosity, which seems to us so strange. In particular, I will draw attention to the fact that, in the Roman world, the entire community functions and expresses itself in a collective mode. This was not true simply of city-states or political communities. I will emphasize, moreover, that one should not reduce Roman religions to some communal anchorage for the expressing of piety. This was only the framework of religious practice, which was in itself essentially ritualistic and rested upon ancestral custom, devoid of revelation, of dogma, and of centralized authority. It is strange that the detractors of public religions never discuss this aspect of it.

Do not misrecognize the purpose of this book. I do not seek to deny that forms of expression or religious conduct other than those of the Greeks and Romans are possible. A Christian interpretation of historical facts is perfectly possible. But it will be viable solely for those who accept that the Christian point of view is the only one possible. For my part, I wish simply to observe that in the Roman epoch, as today among many religions, religious emotion had another dimension for the majority of practitioners. I will not deny that historians today are formed by ideological and other a priori commitments. Naturally, I accept this about myself, too. But unlike the deconstructionists, I admit and speak openly about my thoughts on matters of religion. Although I was raised Catholic, I have for a long time been agnostic, even if I am aware that I was formed, like every Westerner, in the Christian tradition and Christian culture. And so, I claim the right to analyze a religion independently from contemporary religious views and opinions. I want to be able to regard relations between the ancients and their gods as possibly more rational than Christian-Romantic theory can imagine, and thus I want also to be free to assign emotion to another place in polytheist ritualism than the one it occupies in religions of revelation. Finally, I do not believe that Roman religious history has today as its sole function to explain the transition from pagan religions to Christianity, and I refuse to reverse the argument but retain the problem by thinking that, before the Christianization of the world, everything was already the same and that, fundamentally, there is a single true religiosity, the “true religion” of the Christian Minucius Felix, which transcended the decadent institutions of polis-religion.⁴ The reader will judge the objectivity of my position. And if I have failed in this regard, at least the failure will have been a knowing one.

That said, I see essentially three major problems, as the title of this book suggests. The first seems to me to be a neglect of what the Greek and Roman city was; the second is a poor comprehension of what one might call the individual in the ancient world; finally, the third is a limited and distorted understanding of the religions of this world of city-states. But before entering into the thick of my topic, it is appropriate to make an inventory of the critiques advanced against the model of civic religion.