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

Roman religion, when the Romans themselves did not regard the individual as a primary unit of social analysis, freely making religious commitments that might emancipate or sunder oneself from other forms of social commitment? In addition, Scheid outlines and emphasizes the consequences of our accepting as historically primary features of Roman religion prominent in the sources (its emphasis on ritual action; its profound concern for the here-and-now), instead of seeking at Rome those features of Christian religious life that we would like to find, whose very lack then becomes at once an explanandum and the principal evidence for Roman religion’s deficiency as religion.

      Scheid describes the emergence of what he alternatively terms a sociological or secular perspective on Greek and Roman religions as a hard-won struggle on the part of researchers to set aside a priori commitments, derived above all from Protestant Christianity, about what religion is and how individuals and communities relate to religions. In his view, nineteenth-and early twentieth-century historians of religion derived from Protestant theology and Romantic philosophy an understanding of religion as, in essence, an interiorized sense of individual dependence and awe before some unseen and transcendent divine. In that historiographic tradition, such feelings on the part of individuals have historically found collective expression in institutions and shared practices. For a multitude of reasons, individuals and cultures have often lost their way and become estranged from their own feelings and thus from the divine; religious institutions and practices are then hijacked by elites, who put themselves forward as experts—as priests—and exploit popular devotion to ritual and their own control over particular spaces, materials, and institutions of knowledge production to interpose themselves between individuals and the divine. Scheid’s work in this regard is part of a widespread and international tradition of self-critical reflection in the study of religion, and he is surely correct in the fundamentals of his diagnosis. An exemplary essay in the American branch of this tradition is Jonathan Z. Smith’s “On the Origin of Origins,” the first chapter in Drudgery Divine.¹ Focusing ultimately on Protestant historians of religion of the nineteenth century and their influence in the United States, Smith shows, among other things, how Protestant efforts at self-differentiation vis-à-vis Catholic ritualism led to the misrecognition and denigration of any religious tradition in which collective ritual action was a preeminent form of religious expression. Many similar and also excellent works of historiography, from a wide variety of perspectives, might be cited.²

      Although the way was paved by a number of earlier, excellent books—including, as Scheid and many others in the field emphasize, the extraordinary work of Georg Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer³—the emergence of a new consensus was the result of convergent work in France and England in the 1970s and Germany perhaps a decade later.⁴ This new consensus had three features of importance here. First, contributors to it explicitly reflected on the need to identify and bracket assumptions about religion derived from the Abrahamic religions:⁵ those regarding the centrality of “faith” as an epistemic category (that religions are founded on belief) and a bundle of propositions (that religions have doctrines); the assumptions that religions are revealed to humans by gods who communicate with them in human language, and some, at least, of the content of those communications remains available in books, with all that entails about etiology, historical self-awareness, capacities for fundamentalism, and the need for interpretation; the assumption that adherents to particular religions properly display their zeal by persuading others to share that zeal;⁶ and so forth.

      That said, Romans wrote books on religious themes and reflected both discursively and in figurative art on their own religious practices, and they performed rituals, even if they almost never attributed the content of those rituals to some originary moment of divine revelation. The second feature of the new consensus relevant to this sketch is thus substantive in orientation. Across a variety of domains, scholars have sought to craft frameworks within which to understand the role of religious literatures and other forms of aestheticized cultural production at Rome, including avowedly literary forms like myth as well as philosophical theology and figurative art: were they merely personal reflections on the meaning of ritual performance, which was somehow primary? Or can they serve as indices to interpretive or ideological agendas at their moment of production? How, in sum, should they contribute to the writing of histories of Roman religion?⁷

      As a related matter, the nature of Roman ritualism has also been subjected to searching inquiry. If religion consists in nothing more than a set of gestures, is it devoid of theological or even ideological content? What does it mean to say that the Romans esteemed correct performance—that their religion was an orthopraxy, as doctrinal religions might esteem orthodoxy—when the evidence clearly suggests that performances might vary, one from another? How should we, and how did the Romans, understand religious change? Greeks and Christians rehearsed etiological myths; the Romans spoke in vaguer terms about the customs of their ancestors (whom they tellingly termed maiores—literally, their “betters”). How did these distinctive ideological positions find expression in patterns of fundamentalism and historicism in religious thought and practice?⁸ On another plane, how should one conceive the relationship of religious sentiment and affiliation on the part of individuals in such ritual systems? What did it mean to “participate” or “belong” to a civic religion?⁹

      The final feature of this work on religion concerns the broader theorizing that it provoked. Scheid and many others use the terms “polis-religion,” “the civic model,” or, to refer specifically to the work of Richard Gordon, “the civic compromise” to describe the relevant theories. In abstract terms, these were attempts to describe Greek and Roman religions as symbolic systems within particular social, material, political, and economic contexts. At the level of method, this ambition encouraged a scrupulous historicism in regard to the actual practices of ancient worship and its imminent theorizations by participants, even as it worked to disallow any un-self-conscious or unreflective imposition of anachronistic or etic categories. Researchers thus came to trace and study the homology one might observe within elite cultural production between the ordering principles and structures of authority of Greek and Roman cults and the political communities in which they found life. What is more, work in this vein regularly stressed—quite rightly—the extent to which the performance of cult penetrated the structures of everyday life: there was no sphere of one’s civic or familial existence outside religion, nor did religion offer space or forms of authority or systems of knowledge from which to launch an immanent critique.¹⁰

      John Scheid has played a major role in all these developments over the past thirty years. In part this results from his extraordinary technical expertise across the full range of subdisciplines within classical studies, and his use of those skills in the study of the cult site and inscribed records of the Arval Brethren, a priestly college active in imperial Rome. In consequence of Scheid’s mastery of this material, his monograph on the cult of Dea Dia, the goddess venerated by the Brethren, and the social, political, and material contexts of the institutionalization of the Arvals, is perhaps the most fully elaborated study now in existence of an ancient cult as it was conceived, developed, practiced, and sustained. What is more, his careful theorizing about the rules and meaning of Roman ritualism, developed out of enormously detailed engagements with the data, must stand as paradigmatic for what can be achieved by this method.¹¹

      For all the rigor of its method and proper regard for historicism at its core, the theory of polis-religion and civic cult has never actually been hegemonic in the field.¹² Although dissent and revision now proceed along a number of lines, no one has done more to provoke concern about the explanatory reach of the theory than John North. Commencing in 1979, North urged that the varieties of religious activity visible in the evidence already in the second century BCE could not be captured and explained by the theory. Focusing on the suppression by Rome of Bacchic worship, North urged that the action taken by state authorities could not be explained other than by postulating an awareness on their part of forms and spaces for religious activity that escaped not simply the actuality of their control but the form of their power. Never denying the prominence or importance of state cults, North has urged that we witness over time the development of a marketplace of religious choices, to which individuals repaired, sometimes in addition to their (at least nominal) participation in state cult, and sometimes instead.¹³