Читать книгу The Gods, the State, and the Individual - John Scheid - Страница 12

Chapter 1

The Critique of Polis-Religion

An Inventory

Hegelian dialectic made a profound impression on historians of the nineteenth century, including, where Roman history is concerned, Theodor Mommsen and his successors.¹ This form of thought projected Western religious concepts into the past and on this basis explained the evolution of religion up to and including the Christian religions. It was relatively easy, since (by definition) no great rupture was expected. It sufficed for each generation of humanity to separate the wheat from the chaff before arriving at the enlightened Christianity of the modern age. Many historians took this route, including Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Theodor Mommsen, and from a certain point of view Georg Wissowa, Franz Cumont (who invented the celebrated concept of the oriental cults), and Jules Toutain, to name the most representative figures.² The phenomenology of religion was also inspired by this historical-theological dialectic.³

Against this comparatism or reduction of all religion to a precocious manifestation of some religiosity approaching Christianity, other approaches have emphasized the religious alterity of the ancients. This alterity is, of course, not total. The Romans employed in part the same vocabulary for religious matters as we, and their conduct resembled ours. But if one looks closely, one cannot fail to observe numerous small differences that are, in fact, essential. To begin with, their conception of divinity was fundamentally different. The Romans, too, believed that their gods lived eternally at the heights of heaven and that they intervened in the lives of mortals, but their religion was not concerned in any way with the metaphysical space proper to the gods; it concerned itself solely with relations between gods and humans on a terrestrial plane. The rest was not relevant, so to speak, to the competence of human imagination. The Romans thus appear on one side very near to us, and on another, they are very much unlike us. It is for this reason that I affirmed, in the conclusion of my inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, the necessity to work on details:⁴ not rejecting theories and models, but recommending that one practice one’s research while in continuous contact with the sources, remaining attentive at once to otherness and to that which is difficult for us to understand. It is precisely in the unintelligible that the proper originality of the ancients reveals itself. If we think purely through abstractions, working from syntheses or general studies far removed from the sources, or by means of theories not continually subjected to empirical verification, we inevitably impose ideas and concepts of today on the civilizations of the past. Strongly inspired by what was once called sociology, such as it was understood by Georges Dumézil and Louis Gernet, which has become social anthropology, this project adopts as a fundamental principle the obligation to take the otherness of the ancients as a point of departure—in other words, to refuse to assimilate them to us. Or, if we compare two types of religion, to proceed with great caution, knowing that in matters of religion we are all of us directly or indirectly formed by 1,600 years of Christian thought. We are thus concerned with a method whose relevance extends beyond religion and reaches all other aspects of ancient culture. It calls for caution and the deconstruction of all modern interpretations before returning to the ancient sources.

It has been possible to exaggerate this affirmation of otherness, and it is appropriate to criticize such excesses. At the end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth, a certain number of historians of religion were already affirming the alterity of the ancients, when explaining their religious behaviors in light of practices observed in Africa or Australia. Their approach was tied to a grand objective: as philosophers, sociologists, or historians, they aimed to explain the birth of religion. Such was the aim in philosophy, as in sociology or history. The sociologist Émile Durkheim, like the philosopher Hegel before him, or his contemporaries, the so-called Cambridge ritualists⁵ and the historian William W. Fowler,⁶ sought the origin of religion or, at least, of particular religions. The comparativism practiced by Durkheim and Fowler did not differ on this point from the explicit approach of the Romantic philosophers. Notwithstanding numerous useful observations, regarding, for example, collective behavior, their interpretations often resulted in theories of historical evolution necessarily oriented toward Christianity. The celebrated essay on sacrifice of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss is a case in point, as a comparative analysis of sacrificial rites in many types of religions issues in a Christian theory of the rite.⁷

All this is well known. Why, then, this return to an already old method of the history of religions, which was applied under the name of religious anthropology and taught in handbooks and monographs, and which appears to be a scientific achievement? It is of course entirely normal for a given mode of explanation to be criticized, not least one that is today more than fifty years old, if one refers to the works of Louis Gernet, Georges Dumézil, Marcel Detienne, or Jean-Pierre Vernant. Their works, and those they inspired, may contain errors and distortions, notably in their use of structuralism, which is often difficult to handle. The problem is rather that the objections now made to their work do not themselves seem relevant to the data at all and appear merely to recycle very old methods of explaining religious alterity in terms of our own religious categories, instead of seeking to understand it in its historical context.

The topic has not only general relevance. It applies also to a specific concept, that of the religion of the city, called polis-religion by those who criticize it. In the pages that follow, I will try to deconstruct this new theory, being unable to criticize ancient religions as the deconstructionists imagine it: one still awaits from them a convincing reconstruction of the religion of the ancients.

To speak frankly, opposition to the model of civic religion has gone on long enough and, at its basis, it consists always of the same arguments, dressed in new clothes. Already in 1912, in the introduction to the second edition of his handbook, Georg Wissowa responded to a critique that had been directed at him on the occasion of the first edition of his book, published in 1902.⁸ Although the author of this review—in all likelihood Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff⁹—recognized the value of the work, he found Wissowa’s presentation excessively juridical: it exteriorized religious concepts and forms in conformity with the point of view of pontifical law; and it betrayed an obvious lack of sensitivity toward religiosity.

In point of fact, Wissowa’s handbook was an important watershed in the historiography on Roman religion. It is not, however, in its historical perspective that Wissowa innovated, because the first part of his book, which his correspondence reveals to have been finished in about 1890, is relatively disappointing. Overall, that part makes only small advances beyond earlier manuals, apart from corrections to references. On one hand, Wissowa finds himself still under the influence of Hegel and his historical dialectic, and on the other, he is indebted to the Romantic notion of popular religion, of Volksreligion, as a pledge of authenticity. He therefore seeks to distinguish in the tradition between that which is originally Roman, which belongs organically to the religion of the Roman people, and that which comes from outside, from Greece. As it happens, Wissowa’s inquiry was less a frantic search for prototypically Roman elements than a reaction against the indistinct commingling of Greek and Roman elements in contemporary treatments of ancient sources, such as was then the rule: Jupiter was Zeus, and Minerva Athena. Basically, Wissowa did not want to speak about Roman religion while citing Greek myths, as one still did in his day. From this point of view, he recovered a more correct picture of Roman religion. Nevertheless, it is true that Wissowa exaggerated in his approach, to the extent that he admitted that there had already been a mixture of “typically” Roman and foreign elements in the reign of King Numa, shortly after the foundation of Rome. Here one sees clearly the influence of Romantic Volksreligion, the religion of the people, a concept dear to Herder, who was followed in this by Hegel.¹⁰ I will not dwell on the influence of these theories, to which I drew attention twenty-five years ago.¹¹ A second disappointing aspect of the first, historical part of Wissowa’s handbook rests in his acceptance of a dominant theory of his day, according to which Roman religion had entered a state of decadence by the dawn of the empire, at the start of our era. This understanding was shared in that era by all specialists and also recalls features of Hegelian dialectic, according to which ancient Rome was characterized by a very impoverished degree of religious thought and at the same time by a fervent religiosity, which was prepared to accept any religious novelty. At the time, religious renewal took the form first of the so-called oriental cults, which were thought to prepare the way for Christianity. Thanks to the opening of the Mediterranean world by the Romans and their deep but “empty” piety, Christianity realized at last a union between the sensual and ecstatic piety of the Orient and the naïve but cool piety of the Greek variety. Apart from technical details, this entire part of Wissowa’s handbook is therefore unsatisfactory, because the dialectical model that undergirds it has long since been abandoned, even if elements that supported that model have not themselves in turn been abandoned by all scholars, as we shall see.

However, Wissowa’s book also contained a second part, which seems to correspond to the term Kultus in the title [Religion und Kultus der Römer (Religion and Cult of the Romans)]. Just as he finished the historical portrait, around 1890, Wissowa had discovered that this way of studying Roman religion could no longer suffice. At the request of Mommsen, Wissowa was reading the proofs of the second edition of the first volume of the corpus of Latin inscriptions, the one that contained the Roman calendars.¹² In doing so he realized that one could not continue to write religious history by confining oneself to speculation about archaic rites whose names are written in big letters on the calendars, relying on the similarly speculative interpretations of poets and mythographers. He appears to have realized that there existed an entire other part of Roman religion that had theretofore escaped study, that of the festivals and rites of the supposedly cynical and decadent era, which were also recorded on the calendars.¹³ A second influence confirmed him in this discovery: his reading of the volumes of Mommsen’s Römisches Staatsrecht (Roman Public Law), which had appeared at regular intervals during the early part of Wissowa’s labors.¹⁴ It was at this time that Wissowa decided to devote more attention to rites, to all rites, and not just those of the archaic period, as well as to Roman sacred law. These studies, which took ten years to complete, effectively shape the second, most innovative part of his handbook, which has ever since constituted the foundation of all expert study on Roman public cults.

As it happens, it is precisely this part of the book that shocked, and not the historical one, which was extremely conventional, as I have emphasized. The common reproach was that he had reduced Roman religion to cult, and public cult at that. In so doing, ran the critique, Wissowa’s manual came to describe collections of priestly rules, of festivals conducted by magistrates and the elite, but presented nothing truly religious. One detects in this reproach the odor of secularist criticism against small-minded, small-town religion of the sort that Mommsen had identified with Rome in its decadence: a religion of a people devoted to (one might even say “lost in”) the counting of rites to be observed and benefits sought and received, but deprived of true religiosity. We will return to this point, because the attack is in itself revealing. Let it suffice for now to study Wissowa’s reply, which is in my view excellent: he responded that he claimed the right to pose the question whether the concept of “religiosity” was indeed “a concept wholly fixed and constant for all times and peoples.”¹⁵ For his part, he thought that the reproach directed at the book should in fact be directed at the object of study, which is to say, at Roman religion, as if to signify that it was itself responsible for this quality of his portrait. In so writing, he did not specify exactly what he thought in petto of Roman ritualism. According to the first part of his handbook, decline had already commenced by the dawn of the empire. Like his teacher Mommsen, he was compelled to render a rather negative judgment on the ritualistic and self-interested piety of the Romans, even if he also tendered them a little more indulgence. For Mommsen, who was agnostic, Roman religion strongly resembled the Catholicism that he encountered during his travels in Rome and Italy. Because of his education in the Lutheran tradition, he abhorred this type of religion. The Catholic Wissowa ought to have been less radical, although, at the base, he had to share Mommsen’s opinion. He nevertheless claimed the right to study Roman religion and piety in their historical context, even as he thought that all people had a right to their own beliefs. Perhaps his Catholic conscience had been affronted by the Lutheran bent of the critique. We will return to the confessional subtext, to Wissowa’s choice, and to the critiques leveled against his work, and to those that are still leveled today against his wish to emphasize the alterity of Roman religion and against those who defend the same position.

Beyond the possibility that “religiosity” did not have the same form everywhere and always (the quotation marks are Wissowa’s), and bracketing his desire to separate out the influences exerted on Roman religion and place them in historical sequence, the major contribution of Wissowa consists in his description of Roman religion under the republic, from the fifth to the first century BCE. He basically describes public religion, because it is about this above all that the ancient sources speak and which in any event deserves closer study. At times, when the sources permit, Wissowa remarks equally on private rites. Overall, he recuperates a description of the religion of the Roman people under the republic in the same terms as Roman historians, orators, and thinkers, by seeking to reconstitute the rules and behaviors that can still be reconstituted. The imperial era does not concern him except insofar as it still adheres to this normativity, at least in the first century of the empire. Moreover, it is important to observe that Wissowa did not align himself with the ethnographic comparativism developed by Wilhelm Mannhardt or James G. Frazer, who proposed an alterity of a different type.¹⁶ I cannot say whether Wissowa imagined a different form of comparativism, or if he rejected for whatever reason the way in which Anglo-French ethnology of that era analyzed ethnographic material, but the overall tone of his handbook appears to invite such an explanation.¹⁷

The Main Objections to the Theory of Polis-Religion

What are the modern criticisms of polis-religion? A first fact surprises. The term in question is always Greek polis, a surprising fact, and not the Latin term civitas. The explanation for the use of this terminology surely lies with the criticisms directed at an article written by Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, published in 1990 in a collective volume, that summarized the chief aspects of the religion of the Greek polis as it had been analyzed in Paris and Great Britain over the previous two decades.¹⁸ The strange neglect of the term (and concept) of civitas and also of the Romans is due to the fact that, according to conventional representation, the polis was dead by the third century BCE and the Roman civitas had already been left behind by the political, institutional, and demographic developments of the imperial republic. In any case, to apply the term polis-religion to a religious domain that was in fact much larger and which underwent an important evolution after the birth of the Greek polis is reductive and would seem to imply that historians of Roman religion who use this approach implicate themselves in an archaic model of limited chronological applicability.

A first criticism addressed to the works of such people concerns the social context of the rituals of public cult.¹⁹ Polis-religion is described as a “civic compromise” that sought to establish a close link between sacrifice, euergetism—a form of public charity, or private funding of public goods—and domination. This model of priesthood and cult was imposed by the elite on its inferiors. The rural population would not have known the sacrificial system of the elites, which is to say, the cultic acts and distributions of meat in which all members of the polis were supposed to participate. Such a view is extraordinarily reductive. It signally neglects a fact that, indeed, critics of the civic model of religion always pass over in silence, to wit, that the population—the entire population—understood perfectly this system of sacrifice, because they practiced it in their families, in villages as well as the rural territories of city-states, and in the grand rural sanctuaries.

A second criticism urges that the masses would not actually have accepted the religious model of the elite. The gods who manifested themselves to ordinary people would have been more disquieting, more dominating than those of public cult, who worked for the well-being of all. The rapid expansion of the cult of Asclepios/Aesculapius is taken as testimony in favor of this argument, as well as the appearance of healer-heroes, the proliferation of small oracles and private mysteries, and the miracle workers and magicians. This expansion of the religious marked the limits of acceptance on the part of the masses of the cultic model imposed by the elite.

Such views must be qualified. First of all, the religious opposition between masses and elites, which hints at the importation of much later, Romantic ideas of Herder and Schlegel on the hidden riches of popular belief and folklore, must be questioned, because many of the cults in question were in fact introduced at Rome by the elites themselves. It was the Roman Senate that caused Asclepios/Aesculapius to come to Rome, and it was through the creation of Roman colonies—a statal act par excellence—that his cult was spread in northern Italy and through the Danubian territories. This devotion rapidly became a standard part of the cultic life of the Roman city. Second, and most important, to interpret the appearance in the third and second century BCE of immediately “useful” divinities (which is to say, divinities honored in exchange for expected services, such as healing or prosperity) as an important change in the religious life of the ancient city appears an over-interpretation of a simple fact: what is merely a consequence of an overall trend toward better documentation is taken as evidence of a profound historical evolution. It is only starting in the last two centuries BCE that we have sources available of sufficient detail and volume to get to know general aspects of religious life a little better, which is to say, the religious life of city-states, and also the religious life of subgroups within those city-states. As a correlate, this does not mean that the mere appearance of written evidence marks the appearance of a new “religiosity.” Nothing precludes the possibility that similar cults—of Apollo, for example, or of Minerva—had existed already at an earlier period.

Moreover, in the eyes of Richard Gordon, the advent of new forms of religious behavior does not cast in doubt the model of civic religion, since in general they lay within its framework. They reveal, however, opposition to the dominant model, insofar as they demanded of their participants religious commitment and development.²⁰ It is at this juncture that the implicit and anachronistic opposition between civic and new religions is revealed as a theoretical postulate of critical scholarship. It is true, of course, that Greek and Roman authorities did not like secret cults, which imposed more or less stringent requirements on their followers, although it also needs to be emphasized that the “faithful” of these cults were not simply “the people,” but often well-integrated and well-off citizens. All that to one side, when one reads that these new practices represented “a revalued conception of piety,” questions are begged. A conception of piety is revalued in relation to what? In relation to a true “faith,” more ancient, original, in greater conformity with the Romantic model of “religiosity,” pure and true to its origins? Or in relation to what Minucius Felix called vera religio, “true religion,” which is to say, Christianity? We return to the criticism directed against Wissowa.

Other criticisms of polis-religion are more global.²¹ For example, polis-religion as described in the handbook of Louise Bruit and Pauline Schmitt-Pantel or the article of Sourvinou-Inwood granted a central place in the religion of city-states to cults shared among all the citizens.²² These cults were directed and controlled by priests drawn from the elite, which retained religious authority on this basis. From this point of view, Greek and Roman city-states were identical. The most perfect realizations of this model were located in the city-states of archaic and classical Greece and at Rome. Later, the notion of polis-religion being diffused together with that of the city-state, the history of ancient religion was implicated in the fall of the classical city. After the decline of the ancient city, religion would no longer be a form of conduct tied to the city-state but became one choice among many groups who offered their own doctrines, experiences, and discrepant myths.²³ Here, again, one needs to nuance these claims. For one thing, it seems to me overly fast to date the decline of the city-state from the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE. This theory, which dates from the nineteenth century, has been successfully contested and overcome, first through the work of Louis Robert and Philippe Gauthier²⁴ and by many other historians of the second half of the twentieth century, to the point where one could now qualify the Hellenistic Age as a golden age of the classical city. One might likewise point to a remark of John North, who in the course of his argument refers to the third century CE: one cannot be said to prove much about broad changes in the history of religion in preceding periods through interpretive claims about evidence of that late date.

Finally, the chief reproach voiced against advocates of the model of polis-religion is that they ascribe everything to politics and overstate the historical salience of Romanization as well as Roman resistance to foreign influences.

Alongside these supposed characteristics of Roman cults, further weaknesses and failures of the model of civic religion are enumerated as follows:

• It is difficult on the basis of such a model to account for the complexity of ancient religion. According to this critique, the model cannot explain why successive layers of deities and cults were not syncretized by the religious authorities, so as to realize a certain order and harmony within the pantheon. For the moment, let it suffice to emphasize that in a polytheist regime the collective has no need to rationalize its pantheon, because diversity is its raison d’être.

• The model does not leave space for other aspects of religion that were important for some, such as myth or popular cults like those of Silvanus or the so-called Mothers in Germania. The problem here is that, in the Greco-Roman world, myth was not part of religion. Moreover, there existed domestic and private cults (like that of Silvanus) or local cults (like that of the Mothers). There was no reason to introduce them into the civic pantheon of Rome. Once again, these cults were tied to their social context and to the very structure of polytheism.

• The model is not able to explain change. It responded to changes that took place within some Mediterranean koinê. Thus, if the changes arose principally in the private sphere, every perspective that marginalized non-public cults was perforce incapable of taking those changes into account. The difficulty here is that, even if a single one of such private cults turns out to have been the start of a religious revolution, the mode of analysis of the other private cults proposed by critics of civic religion offers no better means to understand the reasons for this revolution.

• Treating private cult as a secondary religious phenomenon does not allow one to explain why paganism remained popular even when public cult had been abolished. This fact is paradoxical only in appearance and can be easily explained: for a long time, private cult was not subject to the same prohibitions, and so it could endure after the promulgation of laws that in the first instance forbade only public cult.

• Greek myths antedated the city-state and were panhellenic; they were thus available to be used by the city-states that inscribed themselves within a framework greater than themselves. The great sanctuaries with which the city-states contended prove that cult sites were independent from their function within a specific city. Also, the oracles prove that there existed a religion superior to that of the polis. Finally, the temples of Asclepios at Epidauros and Pergamon, like the mysteries at Eleusis, were chiefly concerned with cult as celebrated by individuals. On these varied points, it is necessary to observe that the existence of federal cults or oracles external to the city is a banal given in the world of city-states. Nonetheless, one should also note that in the framework of panhellenism, it was not the Greeks who existed in federal union, but the Greek city-states, and moreover the cults and oracles functioned in a fashion closely homologous with the model of civic religion.

• Pilgrimage is also invoked, as well as human mobility, which would have led to the existence within city-states of numerous non-citizen inhabitants or metics. Because polis-religion is based on citizenship, it would have been less and less able to integrate the totality of religious actors, since these did not have citizenship. We will return to this question.

• There would have been a gap between public and private cults, and it is this gap that would have been the reason for change. It is through this gap that foreign cults would have inserted themselves. The very idea of such a gap or lacuna itself poses a problem. It seems to me to amount to the importation of an anachronistic “religiosity” rather than to the detection of a historically verifiable dissatisfaction experienced by participants in ancestral religions.

Overall, this series of claims is thought to demonstrate that, whatever its strength, polis-religion never in fact fulfilled its function, neither in the age of the archaic and classical Greek city, nor, certainly, in the age of the Hellenistic and Roman cities. It was a concern of elites, who tried thereby to impose their domination on the lower classes, without ever successfully colonizing their private lives. Not only would there always be cults outside and beyond the city, but individuals would have possessed religious activities more dynamic and enduring than those of the city. In sum, one has the impression that, below political and social institutions, existed Religion-with-a-capital-R: not the religion of Zeus, Jupiter, Minerva, and their companions, but the Religion of Cybele, Mithra, Isis, Aesculapius, and of the God of the Jews and Christians, or the gods of the Gauls, who were thought to address themselves to individuals. There was thus an opposition between religion and Religion, in such a way that the latter spoke to the individual and was not the product of some manipulation of the crowd nor a means of social and political control.

“Religiosity”

Clearly, behind all these separate criticisms lies the notion of religiosity, whose status as a universal was refuted by Georg Wissowa. It appeared in the Protestant context of early nineteenth-century Germany.²⁵ It refers to the subjective dimension of Christian religious experience, marked by its interiorization. This experience is opposed to objective, exteriorized religion, which (according to its theorists) finds expression in the institutions and dogmas of the Catholic Church.²⁶ This insistence on the feelings and emotions of the individual, on individual perception of the infinite, is memorably expressed in the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher on Christian faith, published at the start of the nineteenth century.²⁷ Effectively, he placed primary value on the private religious experience of the individual contemplating the universe. This contemplation triggers and shapes religious emotion, to the extent that by this means the individual recognizes and feels supreme order and his or her own absolute dependence in spiritual matters on the divine creator who animates everything. In other words, piety in itself is neither a knowing nor a doing, but a feeling and certainty of one’s dependence.²⁸ This foundational principle eliminated as much as possible any role in religion for religious institutions. The individual could thus take himself to an existing church or just as easily to one he himself created. Indeed, in Schleiermacher’s theology there is a sense in which even the biblical tradition lost its central importance, since only pious feeling counted. This is a paradox in Schleiermacher’s thought that theologians have debated extensively, but it is not what interests us here.

Schleiermacher’s approach has shaped the study of antiquity since Hegel and his successors. One example among many is Richard Reitzenstein, a professor of philology at the University of Strasbourg who tried to interpret the Judeo-Christian tradition commencing from pagan antiquity, which is to say, commencing under the empire, as a monotheist religion of a savior originating in the Orient.²⁹ Reitzenstein identified in Roman antiquity, in the Secular Games of Augustus, for example, the birth of a new form of religion, a “religiosity” that he imagined as an interiorization of religion. Observe right away that nothing connected to this celebration in the ancient sources authorizes this gratuitous claim, which is profoundly marked by a Christian ideology. It is therefore not without reason that Jerzy Linderski once criticized a colleague for transforming the Augustan historian Livy into a member of a Protestant church.³⁰

To be sure, it has been urged that, confronted with varied religious formalisms, the advocates of “religiosity” were often inspired less directly by Christian ideas than by Schleiermacher’s definition of religion.³¹ The essential point, however, is that “by introducing the subjective and existentialist component of ‘feeling,’ Schleiermacher reduced religion to a predominantly private spiritual experience of the divine.”³² Duly noted. But historiographic precision aside, what does this change? It is still a matter of a definition of religion provided by a Lutheran theologian and based in the tradition of western Christianity. It is not a neutral definition of religion, which can have many variants.

It is, moreover, insufficient merely to reject references to “religiosity” in order to free oneself from notions of faith and private “religiosity.” For this, one would do well to employ other comparisons. This is the criticism that was addressed to Wissowa, for it turns out that research conducted with different points of reference calls into question the universal character of Christian definitions of faith and religiosity.

Another argument: the hesitation of ancient historians to refer to this Schleiermachian category of faith would be all the more surprising if one were to consider that no one has questioned its utility as regards Christian beliefs of the Middle Ages.³³ It would therefore be uniquely true of the non-Christian civilizations of antiquity that their interiorized emotion and private belief cannot be the objects of modern study. Is it necessary to respond to this argument at length? One could easily imagine that this Romantic category might actually be relevant to medieval religious practices, which were essentially Christian, although the historian might still wonder if reference to this Lutheran or post-Tridentine conception of faith really enhances our understanding of the beliefs of persons of the Middle Ages. In any case, applied to non-Christian antiquity, the concept does not work. This is what produced a universal consensus in the nineteenth century, to the effect that Roman religion was not a religion at all, and thus motivated the search for the seeds of a vera religio, a true religion. Nor is it a matter of arguing that adversaries of this theology of history ultimately refer, whatever they might say, to a Christian notion of faith, because this would be false. In fact, they take into account other models of belief and religious practice, that of the Jews, for example, of whom one never hears a word in such studies, or those of the Indians, the Chinese, or the Japanese, or those observed by anthropologists during the second half of the twentieth century in America and Africa. Even the volume in which Andreas Bendlin published the study that elaborates the ideas I have cited here includes a chapter by an anthropologist sufficient to illustrate my point.³⁴

In consequence, the point of the disagreement does not concern the acceptance or rejection of the model put forward by Schleiermacher. It concerns, rather, the existence or nonexistence of a universal and timeless category of belief, as well as the possibility of reducing this universal category to the form given it by Schleiermacher. Adversaries of the model of civic religion essentially deny the existence of any other way of regarding religion and, as a related matter, insist upon situating religious practice in a different category than other forms of social conduct, just as a Christian science of religion does. Please note: this is not a reproach. I do not regard this position as erroneous. From a Christian point of view, it is entirely correct. From a neutral, scientific, and historical point of view, however, it is not the only possible one.

Finally, it is necessary to devote a few words to another criticism, which concerns how one understands ritual. In general, this issue has been wholly absent from critiques of the model of civic religion, although it is in fact central or, in any case, it has become such under the influence of contemporary anthropology. Critics sometimes allude to the issue, but only in order to contest that rites can be collective representations of communal identity. The criticism in brief runs as follows: such a status for ritual (as an expression of communal identity) is unworkable, since it would be impossible to create a common identity among practitioners who would have discrepant notions of what the ritual scene was playing at. Ritual would have been powerless to communicate meaning that could forge a community. This is a point to which I will return.

To set forth why I believe it is correct to see a powerful religious ideology behind the superficially deconstructive appearance of the theory attributed to Wissowa and his distant descendants, allow me to cite the recent thesis of a Protestant theologian produced at Tübingen.³⁵ The author there speaks bluntly about matters on which ancient historians are silent or speak only in half-truths. First, he makes an explicit choice between two possible modes of analysis, that associated with Gustav Mensching and Joachim Wach,³⁶ which understands religion as belonging to the individual as an autonomous being, on the one hand, and that of Durkheim, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, and advocates of polis-religion, on the other, which accepts as foundational the possible existence of other religious systems. Second, it is clear that the author attaches himself to a Christian and theological mode of religious history. In effect, his objective is to understand Christianity and the difficulties it encountered in the Roman empire. One apparently finds in the confrontation between Christianity and empire an instantiation of “an always already extent religious dynamic” “of tension between individual and collective religion.”³⁷ Why would this dynamic be always existent? In light of what historical necessity?

Finally, once again we encounter an argument that seeks to show that religions cannot have had as their sole object and effect the constitution of identity; rather, beyond this, ancient people would have sought and discovered in religion a deeper feeling, which responded to an inner need.³⁸

Returning to the impact of the ideas of Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Protestant religious ethics, these were very influential up until the First World War. Nor was it only ancient historians who sought to explain the advent of Christianity in a Hegelian perspective. This ambition found expression also in the works of the sociologists Georg Simmel and Max Weber.³⁹ At the center of their work one finds not institutionalized religion, but “religiosity” understood as a fundamental psychological and emotional disposition that characterizes the individual. Sociological discourse in this vein therefore sees in the attitude of the individual, who recognizes his or her absolute dependence in respect of God, a decisive factor in the birth of the religious.⁴⁰ So it is that Simmel derives the sense of the divine from the fear of death, from metaphysical enigma and from the need for consolation that these call forth. Religious feeling is therefore independent from organized religion: it is rather a feeling of piety and a need to believe that forms part of a disposition that is constituent of the human. In Simmel’s words, “If one looks very closely, all ostensible attempts to trace the origin of religiousness always tacitly assume its preexistence; it will thus be better to recognize it as a primary quality that cannot be derived from anything else.”⁴¹ In other words, it is a human universal. Two aspects of this approach seem essential, to the extent that they would permit the method to respond to problems of a general nature: on the one hand, the possibility it holds out to explain all social action on the basis of this famous individual psychological datum; and on the other, the capacity that this approach claims for itself, that of superseding particular cultural specificity-states in order to speak to some multidimensional or universal level. One can see how this approach contrasts with that of Georg Wissowa, who in the first instance studied institutionalized religion and assigned himself the task of understanding the otherness of Roman understandings of religion, such as they were. In particular, he insisted upon a dichotomy between personal “religiosity” and exteriorized religion. For the critics of the concept of civic religion, the goal of inquiry should be to surmount this traditional dichotomy of subject and object, or, one might say, to apprehend conjointly the domains of culture and of emotion, of institutionalized religion and the dimension of individual psychology.⁴²

This claim has the merit of being clear. In itself, it does not shock, because it is what we all try to do. Wissowa’s was the first attempt. Since then, there has been some progress, provided, however, that one does not assess every individual behavior against the model of modern Western individualism, nor every form of religious conduct in light of Christian “religiosity,” as it is conceived and promoted within certain milieus.

It should be noted in passing that this debate over civic religion occurs neither in comparative studies nor in social anthropology. It is easy to see why: those disciplines are opposed to universalist claims of the sort advanced on behalf of phenomenology or “religiosity” as it has been understood since Schleiermacher claimed universal status for it. This is how it offers historians a means to infallible interpretation. For the same reason, Wissowa presents a clear challenge to advocates of this interpretive scheme because of the rigor with which he interrogates the evidence. According to Andreas Bendlin, Wissowa was motivated to this rigor by a desire to defend his discipline, Latin, as a scientific domain in its own right and not, that is, by any concern for principles of interpretation in the history of religion.⁴³ Regardless of how one trivializes Wissowa’s way of interpreting and analyzing the available sources, it is methodological madness to reduce the understanding of patterns in the ancient sources in the historical study of Roman civilization to claims about Latinists defending their place in the world. Does this mean that when one practices the history of religions, it is better to oppose the documents supplied by one’s objects of study and rely instead on one’s own personal (supposedly universal) conception of the religious and religion? Does this mean that philologists alone are obliged to yield to their sources? To regard the matter thus is ultimately to deny history the status of method or science, in favor of some sort of philosophy or Christianizing theology.

We will rediscover and revisit these arguments throughout this essay, when we examine the difficulties supposedly encountered by the model of civic religion as it has been employed by some number of scholars in Paris and England.