The Gods, the State, and the Individual. John Scheid
the civic model has developed a rich literature, some of which has been empirical, canvassing forms of religious activity that one can interpret as unaccounted for by the civic model. Greg Woolf’s “Polis-Religion and Its Alternatives” is a touchstone of this genre.14 Others have attempted theoretical engagements with the model and its expositors. The earliest and most trenchant articles in this vein were produced by Andreas Bendlin, and others have now taken up his misgivings about the notion of “embedded” religion.15 A number of scholars have advanced sociologically oriented accounts, of now startling variety. Some have taken up the metaphor of the marketplace and sought to explain large, long-term changes as aggregates of individual choices, susceptible to comparison with other similar historical developments. Here, a massive failing of the field overall has been its assumption that the one great historical change experienced by antiquity in the domain of religion was its Christianization, and a systematic flaw of a subset of the sociological literature is its employment of comparanda consisting in the spread of Christianity among other non-Christian populations.16 I have myself suggested that the phenomenon truly demanding explanation is not the conversion of the ancient world to Christianity, but its conversion to an understanding of self and religion in which “conversion” was meaningful; and I have attempted to provide a historical sketch of the dynamics that made this possible.17 Finally, still others are trying to reorient inquiry away from public authorities to households, and most notably to the individual as irreducible historical agent.18
This is the context in which Scheid seeks to intervene. Indeed, The Gods, the State, and the Individual should be understood as motivated by this turn in contemporary scholarship. It represents, at least in part, an intensive response to contemporary anglophone scholarship, and it deserves to meet that audience head-on. What is more, the debate now raging has all along existed in something of an echo chamber, because as influential as Scheid has been among experts, his work remains largely untranslated. That said, Scheid does more than attempt to diagnose some limitations of theory and method among critics of the civic model. He also offers a powerful and elegant restatement of major components of an orthodoxy that Scheid himself helped to bring into being. This translation thus provides a sustained account in English of an important position in historical research by its most prominent advocate.19
Regarding this translation, let me say a word about language and another about passages quoted by Scheid. The Latin term civitas and the French term cité are essential terms of art in Scheid’s text. The primary meaning of civitas is “citizenship,” it being an abstraction from civis, “citizen.” By metonymies standard in the classical period, it could also designate the collective that shared citizenship and was united by it—namely, “the people” of a given polity. It could also refer to the urban center that housed the political, legislative, and juridical institutions through which that people governed itself: civitas as “city.” And it could refer to the territory in which that people resided: civitas as “territory” or, perhaps, “state.”20
French cité occupies a correspondingly important role in Scheid’s text. The primary meaning of cité is, of course, “city,” but its metonymic and associative reach is quite different from English “city” and much closer to Latin civitas. For example, cité is the term commonly employed to translate English “city-state,” meaning that it can render civitas in those contexts when civitas refers not simply to an urban center but to the totality of territory on which a given political collectivity resides. Likewise, droit de cité (literally, “right of the city”) is a term of art in French and particularly Swiss citizenship law designating not simply one’s status as a legal resident of a given city; in many contexts it forcefully implies the possession of citizenship that follows upon legal residence within a constituent polity of the national state. Hence, although their patterns of association have different centers of gravity, Latin and French concepts in these lexical complexes map each other much more closely than any set of English terms can map either of those languages. In correspondence, Scheid has suggested that one render cité as city-state wherever possible, and I have followed that suggestion.
Scheid quotes texts from Greek, Latin, and German, nearly always in French translation. In every case—including, of course, texts whose original language is French—I have provided translations into English. Where possible, I have made use of published translations, but often enough I have had to prepare my own. In a single case—namely, the discussion of Foucault in chapter four—I have provided references to, and quoted from, works of Foucault and Paul Veyne beyond those cited in the French edition of this book, in an effort to clarify both what was at stake for Foucault in the remarks quoted by Scheid, and likewise the import to be assigned to Veyne’s reading of Foucault in the work cited by Scheid.
In closing, let me thank John Scheid for his cooperation in reading the English text and discussing several problems of translation. I am grateful also to the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, where I read the copyedited text.
Preface
In a world disturbed by conflicts that sometimes pit religions against states, it is not easy to define the respective weights one ought to assign to one or the other in public decisions or private choices. The major religions have a tendency to claim an absolute position, regarded as conferring upon them an influence over social and political life that borders on exclusive. There are cases in which religious authorities exercise public power directly, and others in which they reserve the right to control the state, even to challenge the foundations of its sovereignty from within.
This raises a number of questions. Should a religion necessarily penetrate all levels of society and the state, as is envisaged by the monotheist religions? Is it legitimate that its doctrines and obligations be imposed on all individuals? These are problems for all faiths, albeit not always in the same terms. Can one compare the situation that obtains in Christian countries with those known to peoples who adhere to Islam? And what of those regions that do not know the revealed monotheisms, such as China and India? How do they manage diverse religions? How do they treat minorities?
These are central issues in contemporary politics, and not only in states struggling with religious antagonism and absolutism. Is the situation in our democracies totally clear? In some of them, religions are in principle separate from the state, public actions and individual conscience being alike freed from any religious obligation. In others, by contrast, there exist concordats. And what should one say about the special relationships that American democracy maintains with a number of its principal religions?
Confronted with the multiplicity and complexity of situations, is secularity (so often praised!) the most appropriate solution and the best guarantee of freedom of conscience? Is there not a risk that this will be seen as interfering in the life of individuals in an intolerable manner and likely to provoke dissent from certain sectors of society? Moreover, is otherness in religious matters an obstacle to civil peace, as it is understood in liberal democracies? Is diversity by its very nature going to create obstacles to good relations within the citizen body of any given nation? Finally, are secular democratic societies truly devoid of religious influences? Answers to these questions necessarily vary in the very different contexts of the many states and regions of the world.
Hence the need to take a step back in order to reflect on, among other problems, the questions now being posed regarding the principle of secularism that constitutes, in its diverse forms, one of the foundations of our democracies.
Undoubtedly, the study of texts and inscriptions in Latin does not provide the ancient historian with any particular legitimacy to intervene in this most contemporary debate. But when he or she takes the trouble to step outside this specialization in order to question the methodological principles that guide research, it may in consequence be possible for such a person to enrich that debate. For the past half-century, in fact, numerous scholars have toiled to bring to light and to explore the otherness that characterizes the religious conduct and behaviors of our ancestors. In ancient Rome, at least up until the fourth and fifth centuries CE, when Christianity became the