The Gods, the State, and the Individual. John Scheid
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.
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