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