Belief and Cult

Rethinking Roman Religion

Jacob L. Mackey

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691233147
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

A groundbreaking reinterpretation that draws on cognitive theory to show that belief wasn't absent from—but rather was at the heart of—Roman religion Belief and Cult argues that belief isn't uniquely Christian but was central to ancient Roman religion. Drawing on cognitive theory, Jacob Mackey shows that despite having nothing to do with salvation or faith, belief underlay every aspect of Roman religious practices—emotions, individual and collective cult action, ritual norms, social reality, and social power. In doing so, he also offers a thorough argument for the importance of belief to other non-Christian religions.At the individual level, the book argues, belief played an indispensable role in the genesis of cult action and religious emotion. However, belief also had a collective dimension. The cognitive theory of Shared Intentionality shows how beliefs may be shared among individuals, accounting for the existence of written, unwritten, or even unspoken ritual norms. Shared beliefs permitted the choreography of collective cult action and gave cult acts their social meanings. The book also elucidates the role of shared belief in creating and maintaining Roman social reality. Shared belief allowed the Romans to endow agents, actions, and artifacts with socio-religious status and power. In a deep sense, no man could count as an augur and no act of animal slaughter as a successful offering to the gods, unless Romans collectively shared appropriate beliefs about these things.Closely examining augury, prayer, the religious enculturation of children, and the Romans' own theories of cognition and cult, Belief and Cult promises to revolutionize the understanding of Roman religion by demonstrating that none of its features makes sense without Roman belief.

PART I

Theoretical Foundations

1

Losing Belief

1.1. Introduction

This chapter has critical aims. It clears ground for the constructive chapters that follow. In the first section, I sketch a history of the loss of belief in scholarship on Roman religion. I show how a dichotomy between belief and action accompanied by a denial of belief had sprung up by the early twentieth century and had come to prevail by the century’s end. The origins of the dichotomy lie in early Christian antipagan polemic, while belief-denial was encouraged by developments in late twentieth-century anthropology. In the second, final section, I expose some of the flaws of the central premises and arguments offered in support of the belief-action dichotomy and belief-denial.

This chapter and the next four attempt to show that belief is not nearly as fraught as has often been assumed. As we shall see, some scholars have taken “belief” to name a distinctively Christian attitude, not available to traditional Romans. Instead, I will be arguing, “belief” is just the English word for a very basic sort of cognitive state, which is characteristic of all neurotypical human beings, whose job is to represent the way things stand in the world. It will turn out that belief, under this deflationary description, plays a central role in our cognitive and practical lives. It underlies emotion, individual and collective action, and even socioreligious reality. Before we deal with these contentions, however, we must address in the present chapter the question of how belief came to be divorced from action and then denied altogether in scholarship on Roman religion.

1.2. A History of Belief-Denial and the Belief-Action Dichotomy

An important survey of Roman religion by John North closes by recapitulating its aim “to summarize and report on some fundamental changes in our way of looking at the religious life of Roman pagans.” North notes that “the understanding of” Roman religion had been “blocked in the past by expectations inappropriate to the Romans’ time and place.” One of these inappropriate expectations consisted of attributing too much importance to “any question of the participants’ belief or disbelief in the efficacy of ritual actions.” In contrast, scholars had concluded in recent decades that they had “good reason to suspect that the whole problem [sc. of belief] derives from later not pagan preoccupations.” Belief was now to be seen as largely anachronistic to Roman religion and reference to it usually a solecism. Evaluation of the new approach was welcomed “by the progress that may be made, or not made, in the future” under its auspices.¹

Now, there can be no doubt that the past several decades, and especially the years since the publication of North’s survey, have witnessed unprecedented growth in novel, productive, theoretically sophisticated, and self-reflexive approaches to Roman religion. And yet I would plead that a tendency in evidence throughout this period, the tendency to assert that belief is not a category of much relevance to the Romans, has impeded our appreciation of the cognitive aspects of Roman cult. Despite some notable recent attempts to challenge this attitude, antibelief convictions persist among some classicists. In certain respects, such convictions are quite traditional, rooted in early Christian polemics against pagans that were appropriated into Protestant disparagement of Catholic ritualism. In other respects, antibelief sentiments are new, stemming from late twentieth-century anthropological theorizing. So let us begin by briefly reviewing the fate of belief in scholarship on Roman religion. For we must see whence we have come in order to grasp where we are and to decide where we wish to go.

Once upon a time, researching Roman religion meant, in part, reconstructing its “original” state from the evidence of necessarily later sources. This pursuit occupied scholars such as Johann Adam Hartung, who helped found the field with his Die Religion der Römer in 1836. In the striking image of his “Vorrede,” Hartung describes authentic Roman religion as “an ancient temple” (ein alter Tempel) on which a later structure (Überbau), assembled of Greek and other alien materials, had been imposed. Both of these structures collapsed, leaving to the scholar the task of excavating the remains (die Trümmer) of the first structure from under the rubble of the later one.² Hartung’s image of architectural supersession and collapse proved canonical: Preller, Aust, and Wissowa, among others, cited it approvingly.³ Guided by Hartung’s conceit, with its tragic motif of “das Erlöschen des alten Glaubens”⁴ (the dying out of the old belief), scholars could not but disparage the religion of the historical republic as contaminated or degenerate.⁵

This thesis sat well with Theodor Mommsen, for whom “the old national religion was visibly on the decline” in the age of Cato and Ennius, undermined by Hellenism and other eastern influences.⁶ However, for Mommsen, Roman religion qua religion had always fallen short.⁷ At its best, it had served as a system of ritual marked by a practical legalism,⁸ but by the late republic it was merely a tool with which the elite cynically exploited “the principles of the popular belief, which were recognized as irrational [als irrationell erkannten Sätze des Volksglaubens], for reasons of outward convenience.”⁹ Mommsen’s view of republican religion as a means of manipulation or social control has ancient authority, for example, that of Polybius (6.56), whom he cites.¹⁰ More importantly, it is surely no coincidence that this scholar, with his particular interests and expertise, should have identified a legalistic paradigm at the heart of Roman religion.

Mommsen’s legalistic paradigm proved influential; Georg Wissowa absorbed its lessons. He dedicated the first edition of his still fundamental Religion und Kultus der Römer to the elder scholar, asserting that without Mommsen’s Lebenswerk—especially Römisches Staatsrecht (1871–88) and his contributions on the Fasti to CIL I, pars prior (1893²)—his own work would not exist.¹¹ In the “Vorwort” to his book’s second edition, Wissowa responded to the charge that his account lacked “Religiosität.”¹² Defending his “juristische” perspective, that is, the “Gesichtspunkt des ius pontificium” (point of view of the priestly law) he explicitly aligned himself with Mommsen and his paradigm.¹³ It was for another scholar, Franz Cumont, to discover a source of the “religiosity” that Wissowa had neglected: the “Oriental religions.”¹⁴ Cumont adduced dry Roman legalism to explain the appeal of these foreign cults. Roman religion was “froide” (cold) and “prosaïque” (prosaic), its priests comparable to jurists,¹⁵ its observances comparable to legal practice.¹⁶

Cumont’s cold legalism stopped one step short of empty formalism. Arthur Darby Nock, an otherwise extraordinarily sensitive scholar, took that step. In his essay for the tenth volume of The Cambridge Ancient History (1934), Nock asserted that Roman religion was “in its essence a matter of cult acts” (465). It was a “religion made up of traditional practice”; “it was not a matter of belief” (469); it was, in a word, “jejune” (467). In Nock’s appraisal, we see quite clearly the dichotomy between belief and practice that came to inform even the most rigorous scholarship: Roman religion was strictly “a matter of cult acts”; “it was not a matter of belief.” Where Hartung had traced a “dying out” of belief, and where Mommsen had derided “irrational” belief, Nock saw no real role for belief at all, only empty cult.¹⁷ This is not to say that Nock had taken the step that later scholars would take and denied that Romans could believe. It was merely that Roman belief was not a relevant component of Roman cult. A dichotomy b...