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,
