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 sole religion, religious practice was conceived as a form of social conduct, without any claim to dominate the conscience. As Fontenelle said, “Do as the others do, and believe what you want.”1 In contrast to Fontenelle’s dismissive tone, and indeed, to that of many modern historians, ritualism without dogma is neither as ridiculous nor as decadent as is often claimed.2 That said, the progressive bringing to light of its specific qualities could not have occurred absent the operation of a principle of secularism: every researcher endeavoring to overcome his or her own convictions and personal practices, in order to confront behaviors and beliefs that are definitively other. It is this very approach, together with the results that it has produced, that is today being contested, even denied, by certain recent approaches that struggle to accept the results of this well-known principle of secularism, which is to say, of religiously disinterested research.
In fact, this overall debate encompasses a wider range of questions than that provoked by the image one might provide of civic religion, the religion of the citizens that the ancients called “public religion” (sacra publica). Rather, it concerns more generally every religion, whether ancient or modern, to which one cannot apply the principles of Christianity. Indeed, it is a question that reaches beyond the domain of the specialists and is taken up in texts directed to the public at large. Thus, a great public journal recently devoted an issue to a theme dear to the cognitive sciences, “Brain and Spirituality.” In that issue, an editorial proclaimed, “spiritual experiences in all their diverse forms—prayer, shamanic trance, meditation—have a bodily inscription in the brain.” It marveled to discover that this spirituality, which “is first of all, and above all, a lived experience that affects the mind as well as the body,” always has “as its common aim to provoke a shock to a state of being, an enlargement of consciousness and, often enough, of the heart.” In other words, the editorial asserts, seemingly without self-consciousness or irony, that inscribed at the center of the human brain one finds the very principles of Christian piety. To be sure, in the course of history there have been disbelievers. Sometimes, too, it happens that the sense of the sacred is lost and religion is reduced to a social or cultural dimension. Ritual gestures are delegated to priests and “religion thenceforth takes on an essentially social and political function.” In reaction to “this overly exterior and collective” (observe in passing the “overly”—why “overly exterior and collective?”) “spiritual currents” transformed these religions, by renewing their ties to “the most archaic forms of the sacred.” In this perspective, Pythagoreanism and the mystery cults that arose in ancient Greece are to be considered as essentially reactionary forms, which came into being in opposition to the soulless polytheism of official religion.3
In this historical reconstruction of the emergence of “true” religiosity, the reader familiar with German philosophers and theologians of the Romantic era will recognize without difficulty the influence of Schleiermacher, Hegel, and others. There is nothing new here: what is extraordinary is the return (yet again) to an ancient thesis in the history of religions, based now on evidence supposedly furnished by psychology. The scanner becomes the means to arbitrate in the human sciences, between older theories heavily marked by Christianity, on the one hand, and the history of religions as it has developed over the past century, on the other. The editorial places in perspective the endless alternation between some movement of the “truly sacred” toward the institutionalization of religion and its opposite, as it is reproduced in our own day, to wit, in “the need for experience and transformation being felt by numerous individuals.” Religion, community, individual. These are the terms of this historical dialectic, which seeks without end to attain the “truly sacred” essence of Christianity. In the eyes of the editorial, the role of the individual in this process is that of an engine, driving the rediscovery of some originary revelation.
This kind of theory, deriving from theology, finds articulation not only in magazines and general remarks. One finds similar ideas in specialized works of history, even in sociological treatises from the nineteenth century to our own day. We are in fact under continuous threat of denying the right of otherness to those who, in the past and even in the present, do not possess the same ideas about religion as those who live in monotheistic cultures. So, certain contemporary works aim to show that religions based on ritual and closely tied to particular collectivities are but marginal phenomena in the history of Religion (with a capital R), which according to them is properly inscribed in the heart of the individual. The result is to classify these as non-religions, in contrast with a single religiosity deemed worthy of the name. How many contemporary religions correspond to the type of Roman religion? Ought one refuse to name them “religions”? As regards religion existing in our own states, including the monotheistic religions, ought one exclude any behavior that does not correspond to the paradigm of Christian “religiosity”?
My essay is devoted to those theories that attack, under the names “civic religion” and “polis-religion,” historical and anthropological approaches to the religions of classical antiquity, and, in addition, to the practice of a research method attentive to a priori ideological and confessional commitments. It is not the aim of this essay to demonstrate that such theories are false, but merely to assign them their proper place, to wit, within a Christian theology of history, and to show that the data are susceptible to very different evaluation within a history of religions that tries to be secular. For the rest, I will try to show that certain critiques of the traditional religions of the Romans actually transgress the facts and are sometimes simply wrong. By means of these corrections, this book can at the same time give more precise description to certain important features of the religions of Rome. We will not linger at some very general level of the history of humanity; rather, we will focus on the Romans, referring to the people of Rome itself and of the Roman world. The Romans are a good object of study because, since the nineteenth century, their religion has been regarded as the most characteristic of those non-religions that populated the world after the loss of “true” piety and before the necessary synthesis in Christianity. Beyond the particular case, however, the reader will readily recognize arguments that are employed equally today, in contemporary conversations about religion and secularism—and will learn that the data of the past do nothing, in any way, to support those arguments. On the contrary, the Roman case may be able to provide new perspectives on our way of thinking about others and, to the extent that the Roman Empire had to solve problems that are not so far removed from the European situation today, also on possible forms of relation between the two levels of community.
Introduction
