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.
Chapter 2
Polis and Republic
The Price of Misunderstanding
One precondition for the study of a problem like the nature of religion in the Greco-Roman world is to know well the historical context of the object of study. This is not a matter solely of contextualizing one’s analysis by situating it within some field of academic debate, but also, with equal rigor, of contextualizing the ancient sources that one cites. No one would be so ridiculous as to explain the findings of archaeologists in their samplings by reference to contemporary material culture, but this is what happens in certain studies of ancient religion. The resulting misinterpretations are numerous, and I will consider some examples of this kind. They concern not only matters of detail, of the kind about which this or that specialist or group of specialists might disagree, or disagreements about method. They concern, rather, fundamental and general disagreements.
These errors are frequently attributable to the separation between different fields of scholarship. The Greeks of the philosophers are not those of the historians; the Romans read by patristic scholars and theologians generally have little to do with those of the historians and archaeologists. During the 1960s, Jean-Pierre Vernant had such an impact because, in order to treat a question, he drew upon the different sciences of the study of antiquity: philosophy, history, philology, the history of art, economics, social history, and anthropology. Nor was his research on religion detached from more recent scientific developments. He encouraged comparative study, by inviting all scholars who worked on antiquity to participate in a given research project. This methodological advance has not found an opening in certain areas of study: in philosophy, literature, or theology, and in the German university system, for example, it is largely unknown and always provokes surprise and perhaps even suspicion. The results of Vernant’s research of this kind are today judged by one or another discipline, such as philology or epigraphy or theology, and often the specialists do not find anything to interest them, quietly regarding the social conduct of the Greeks as brought to light by Vernant and his collaborators as of little interest to their own projects or little relevance to the history of Greece in general. This is because they do not understand what Vernant was talking about.
What Is a Roman City?
It is the same with the problems that I am seeking to explore. The main contributors to the debate have only a very vague idea of what an ancient city-state was and, hence, of the way in which individuals integrated themselves in society. It is not a particularly innovative methodological move to suppose at the outset that this is not a historical problem, or to say that this question is not one that needs to be posed, because the form of the civic community has no particular relationship to actual society. If we deconstruct the arguments used to defend this position, we find once again the old theory of the decadence of the ancient city after Chaeronea, after the fall of Athens under the blows of Macedon and the advent of the Hellenistic age. Thereafter, the city as civic community would have dissolved into larger structures. It is significant that all authors admit that the system of polis-religion was in fact able to function in the framework of the archaic Greek city-states and in Rome of earliest times. Later, in each case, the world and society would have changed to such an extent that city and citizen would no longer have been the principal units of social interaction, but the individual confronted with a distant power.
Often, historians establish a direct link between
