Imagine No Religion How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities Carlin A. Barton and Daniel Boyarin Fordham University Press New York 2016 contents A Note on Authorship ix Introduction: What You Can See When You Stop Looking for What Isn’t There 1 Religio Part I. Mapping the Word 1. Religio without “Religion” 15 2. The Ciceronian Turn 39 Part II. Case Study: Tertullian 3. Preface to Tertullian 4. Segregated by a Perfect Fear 5. 55 60 Segregated by a Perfect Fear. The Terrible War Band of the Anti-Emperor: The Coniuratio and the Sacramentum 74 6. Governed by a Perfect Fear 96 7. Precarious Integration. Managing the Fears of the Romans: Tertullian on Tenterhooks 105 Thrēskeia Part I. Mapping the Word 8. Imagine No Thrēskeia: The Task of the Untranslator 123 9. The Thrēskeia of the Judaeans: Josephus and the New Testament 135 viii Contents Part II. Case Study: Josephus 10. Josephus without Judaism: Nomos, Eusebeia, Thrēskeia 155 11. A Jewish Actor in the Audience: Josephan Doublespeak 178 12. A Glance at the Future: Thrēskeia and the Literature of Apologetic, First to Third Centuries c.e. 200 Conclusion: What You Find When You Stop Looking for What Isn’t There 211 Acknowledgments 215 Notes 217 Bibliography 291 Index of Ancient Texts 303 General Index 305 A Note on Authorship This book is written in one scholarly voice but two authorial voices. Hence, we have chosen to write in the first-person singular throughout. ix I want to understand you: I study your obscure language. —Alexander S. Pushkin Introduction: What You Can See When You Stop Looking for What Isn’t There When one encounters the word “religion” in a translation of an ancient text: First, cross out the word whenever it occurs. Next, find a copy of the text in question in its original language and see what word (if any) is being translated by “religion.” Third, come up with a dif ferent translation: It almost doesn’t matter what. Anything besides “religion.” — edwin judge1 We laughed when we came upon this wonderful apothegm of Judge’s while coming close to the end of writing this book and composing the introduction.2 Judge’s remarks reflected conclusions to which we had come early on when we discovered that we needed to “untranslate” religio and thrēskeia to return them to their original contexts, and to allow the contexts to convey the range of their meanings. This book, generated by semantic studies of Latin religio and Greek thrēskeia, has as its project to see what it was possible to see when we ceased to look for what was not there, when we ceased to rely on the anachronistic word “religion” and instead, attempted to study, in the most nuanced way that we were able, these conceptual networks and the cultures from which they came “on their own terms,” integrated back into the endless depths and complexities of mundane existence. Brent Nongbri writes that, “[I]f we follow Judge’s dictum and do not allow ourselves to invoke the concept of religion in our descriptive accounts, we will force ourselves to think outside our usual categories.”3 Aligning our aspirations to his, we hope that our study of religio and thrēskeia might encourage the production of books, not on “Athenian religion,” the “Jewish religion,” or “Roman religion,” but rather books that will link what was conjoined in ancient cultures, and will explore the question of why the categories and boundaries of other cultures were drawn differently from our own. We hope to encourage books “that will encapsulate and thoroughly rearrange those bits and pieces of what we once gathered together as ‘ancient religions.’ ” 4 1 2 Introduction Close Encounters of the Lexicographical Kind The meaning of a word is its use in the language. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 20 What we identify as dif ferent senses of a word are merely, C. P. Jones has observed, “. . . possible translations in light of the fact that English lacks a simple equivalent.”5 There are no simple English equivalents of religio or thrēskeia. The uses of these words, it transpired, could be understood metonymically rather than metaphorically, by association rather than by distillation, and we had no possibility in advance of predicting the chains of association. It was not possible to abstract a covering “soul of the word” from either term. Rather, meanings developed out of other meanings by a series of transformations (the intermediary steps often being occluded). And so we tried, as far as we were able, to disentangle and distinguish the various relationships of one usage to another, to map the semantic ranges of religio and thrēskeia, attending to the varieties and range of their specific and pragmatic functions, their denotations and connotations.6 In the end, to translate religio or thrēskeia in any context, we needed many English words—and even then, we have been able only to approximate, if that, the world of nuance and ambiguity conveyed by the Latin and Greek terms. These words functioned in the semantics of a dif ferent cultural world, a dif ferent “form of life,” one that we can only approximate by using lots and lots of words—hence, this book. We can listen to and imagine people living in an ancient culture more precisely and richly when we begin with the assumption that we don’t know what their key words mean, especially if they are “false friends” of our own words. In translating both religio and thrēskeia, “religion” has often been used as a shortcut— a “worm hole”—to carry the reader quickly and safely from an often very alien ancient world back into our own. But we have lingered on the rich history and complexity of religio and thrēskeia in the hope that time spent on and with these words would enable us to make these words into “true friends”—an aid to expanding our conceptual universe. We hoped to imagine more richly the ancient “forms of life” that they evinced. “The history of a word,” as Richard Reizenstein asserts, “when it deepens into the history of a concept, can always give us rich information about problems that we cannot approach by any other means.” 7 While there have been some researchers who have striven to bring the gorilla into our world and teach her sign language so that she might live with us and communicate with us in our terms, we aspire to be like those researchers who have been willing to submerge themselves in the lives and language of the gorillas in the hope of learning a very dif ferent way of understanding and negotiating the world. J. Z. Smith writes: Giving primacy to native terminology yields, at best, lexical defi nitions that historically and statistically, tell how a word is used. But lexical definitions are almost always useless for scholarly work. To remain content with how “they” understand “magic” may yield a proper description but little explanatory power. How “they” use a word cannot substitute What You Can See When You Stop Looking for What Isn’t There 3 for the stipulative procedures by which the academy contests and controls second-order specialized usage.8 Intellectuals and academics in the contemporary world are cosmopolites who are tossed together, from a variety of backgrounds, into a kaleidoscopic variety of situations. They are like the relativist and essentialist Xenophanes who boasted of travelling the “world” for 67 years. Scholars who study the ancient world, in particular, “travel” far in time (as well as in space). They are pressed hard to fi nd ways of ordering and reconciling the great diversities in human experience. We scholars, like all cosmopolites, like the ancient Ionian thinkers, cope with and harmonize our often discordant, interrupted, and discontinuous experience by creating covering abstractions. And like the “pre-Socratics,” we tend to see abstractions not only as necessary for establishing a “critical distance,” but we pride ourselves on them as characterizing and elevating the person who uses them. For Western scholars, it is above all the Greek philosophers with their covering abstractions, rather than the Romans (with their persistent attachment to the concrete), who seem to us to have found a useful language to embrace the intricacies of culture. Cultures with elaborate divisions of labor and with the developed hierarchical structures needed to coordinate and rationalize the activities of the participants in that culture often rely for unity on highly simplified covering ideas and symbols. It is exactly the abstraction that sacralizes these ideas, that sets them apart. Each word becomes, so to speak, the head of a hierarchy. Like the inhabitants of the vast Roman Empire, of any vast, artificial and imaginary unity, we feel the need for these condensed ideas and symbols to unite us (e.g., logos, theos, race, class, gender, religion, politics, economics). The more distilled and simplified the language, the greater power to “cover” a multitude of distinct individual cases. Like Plato’s “Truth,” “Beauty,” “Goodness,” and “God,” one can often draw an equal sign between all the abstractions, and they enable us to embrace almost anything. “Every thing is politics.” “Every thing is economics.” While all language relies on categories and abstractions, in complex cultures, particular prestige and faith is put not only in language over direct experience of the world, but particularly in the reification of deductively drawn abstractions even over generalizations derived from observation of particulars. While scholars (not excepting ourselves) have the irresistible tendency, as they read, to use the literary work to symbolize and fi nally, to replicate themselves,9 we have tried to the best of our ability not to let the scales of custom blind us to those aspects of the texts that are unfamiliar and difficult to comprehend. We both chose to work, in the second parts of each part of the book, on authors who were far from our “comfort zone,” convinced that an important project of the humanities is to describe and understand, as well as possible, the myriad ways that humans have chosen to live their humanity with the disciplines of anthropology, history, literary criticism, archaeology, and religious studies and so forth serving that grand endeavor by accessing very dif ferent kinds of evidence and deploying dif ferent strategies of analysis. Our resulting study is divided into two, with each half containing a close semantic study followed by an attempt to place the word in the broad context of a particularly 4 Introduction pertinent author’s language and life world. The book begins with an analysis of Latin republican and early imperial religio, followed by a reading of Tertullian, the (second- to third-century c.e.) African writer who did the most to mold Latin to the new Christian movement. The second half of the book treats of Greek thrēskeia in its earlier usages and in the Christian apologists, followed by a study of its functions in the world of Josephus, the (first-century c.e.) Judaean historian and writer who made the greatest and most complex use of this word. We have also made the acquaintance of many of the Latin and Greek words in the general semantic fields of religio and thrēskeia: pudor, conscientia, fi des, scrupulus, superstitio, therapeia, sebomai, eusebeia, deisidaimonia, pistis, timē, although we have not given them nearly the attention they deserve. what does “no religion” mean? When we make the claim that there is “no religion” as we know it in the cultures we are describing, we can hear readers objecting: But that culture has gods and temples, holy days and priestly rules, so how can we say they have “no religion”? The point is not, as Nongbri emphasizes, that there weren’t practices with re spect to “gods” (of whatever sort), but that these practices were not divided off into separate spheres from eating, sleeping, defecating, having sexual intercourse, making revolts and wars, cursing, blessing, exalting, degrading, judging, punishing, buying, selling, raiding and revolting, building bridges, collecting rents and taxes. We are not arguing that “religion” pervaded every thing in those cultures or that people in those times and climes were uniquely “religious,” but that, as Nongbri makes clear, “[A]ncient people simply did not carve up the world in that way.”10 Timothy Fitzgerald has made the point in another way: “When [an] author points out that ‘religion’ permeates the whole of life, the reader can wonder what is the difference between saying that and saying that the concept has no distinct meaning, because nothing is picked out by it.”11 It is in the disembedding of human activities from the par tic u lar contexts and aggregations found in many societies into one concept and named entity or even institution that we fi nd the genealogy of the modern western notion of “religion.” Just as people had intercourse of more or less the same va rieties as today (if the pictorial evidence from antiquity can be relied on) and made babies (or not) but did not orga nize these practices and experiences into a category of “sexuality,”12 so too people sacralized and desacralized/desecrated, feared and revered and loved,13 made bonds and oaths, performed rituals, and told stories about gods and people without organ izing these experiences and practices into a separate realm. “Imagining no religion” does not mean that we imagine that people did not make gods or build temples, praise and pray and sacrifice, that they did not ask metaphysical questions or try to understand the world in which they lived, conceive of invisible beings (gods, spirits, demons, ghosts), organize forms of worship and festival, invent cosmologies and mythologies, support beliefs, defend morals and ideals, or imagine other worlds. But, as Daniel Dubuisson points out: What You Can See When You Stop Looking for What Isn’t There 5 [I]t was the West that made from this collection of attitudes and ideas an autonomous, singular complex, profoundly dif ferent from every thing surrounding it. And it conferred on this distinct complex a kind of destiny or essential anthropological vocation: humans are held to be religious in the same way as they are omnivorous, that is, by nature, through the effects of a specific inborn disposition.14 Nongbri notes that, “What is modern about the ideas of ‘religions’ and ‘being religious’ is the isolation and naming of some things as ‘religious’ and others as ‘not religious.’”15 And Fitzgerald remarks: “The symbolic links between rituals directed toward ghosts, kami, ancestors, and bodhisattvas and those directed toward the Emperor, the boss, foreigners, animals such as monkeys, and special status people are as interesting as the differences formulated in terms of unseen beings. Relations with the vague term ‘superhuman’ do not a priori guarantee any distinct semantic field.”16 Many readers may feel that “religion” provides a perfectly comprehensible English translation of religio or thrēskeia even while not conveying the nuances of the ancient context. But the “perfectly comprehensible” English translation often occludes the interesting or pertinent differences between our concepts and the Latin or Greek. It is as if someone, wanting to understand Chinese culture, is given a Chinese cookbook. The ingredients might be obscure and unfamiliar to her. Every time she came to ingredients or a set of instructions that she was not familiar with, she could translate it by “food”: “Gather the food.” “Put the food in the bowl.” “Grind some food and mix it with the other food.” These perfectly good and comprehensible English sentences, if not deliberately censoring the text, would not teach her much about Chinese cuisine. Her impression might be, in the end, that there was little new to learn—and she might as well throw the cookbook out. We suggest that translating religio and thrēskeia as “religion” gives us about as much information about ancient Roman and Hellenistic cultures as “food” used to translate the ingredients in a Chinese cookbook gives us about Chinese cuisines. We have tried to show what we miss describing and misdescribe when we use the particular modern terminology of “religion” and how much there is to be gained in nuance and depth by treating the sources in a dif ferent way.17 J. Z. Smith is one of the scholars who have done the most to problematize the category of “religion.” Nonetheless he concludes his essay, “Religion, Religions, Religious” with the declaration: “Religion” is not a native term; it is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to defi ne. It is a second-order, generic concept that plays the same role in establishing a disciplinary horizon that a concept such as ‘language’ plays in linguistics or ‘culture’ plays in anthropology. There can be no disciplined study of religion without such a horizon. [our emphasis]18 Many readers may feel that “religion,” even if it is a modern construct, serves important disciplinary, theoretical, or explanatory roles (especially those enabling cultural comparisons). There can be no disciplined study of religion without such a horizon. Indeed, there cannot be. But is it self-evident that the “disciplined study of religion” is a salutary procedure for 6 Introduction understanding human beings if it results in consistent significant distortion in our descriptions/redescriptions of ourselves and others? Smith writes in another essay: [E]xplanation is, at heart, an act of translation, of redescription, a procedure where the unknown is reduced to the known by holding that a second-order conceptual language appropriate to one domain (the known, the familiar) may, with relative adequacy, translate the language appropriate to another domain (the unknown, the unfamiliar).19 We grant (emphatically) that the understanding of one human by another is dependent on the possibility of translation. But the question remains of how far one can “reduce the unknown to the known” before one loses the irreducible difference of “the unknown.”20 Smith suggests that: While the adequacy of any translation proposal may be debated, the only grounds for rejecting such a procedure tout court is to attack the possibility of translation itself, most often attempted through appeals to incommensurability. Such appeals, if accepted, must entail the conclusion that the enterprise of the human sciences is, strictly speaking, impossible.21 But much is systematically occluded when the categories of analysis that are mobilized are not produced inductively but simply deployed without being subject to constant revision in face of the words and categories of the cultures being studied. We are hoping, in this work, to do the “impossible” work of making an incommensurable thought world comprehensible without resorting to the pre-sorted categories produced in the scholar’s study. Fitzgerald formulates another question that will be raised by many of the readers of this book: “Surely . . . the study of other people’s religions brings the student face to face with alternative non-western forms of faith and worship?” Fitzgerald responds: [I]t (“religion”) imposes on non-western institutions and values the nuance and form of western ones, especially in such popular distinctions as those between religion and society, or between religion and the secular, or religion and politics, or religion and economics. In addition, and in pursuit of this constructed image of the other religions, it draws up typologies of Judaeo- Christian monotheistic categories such as worship, God, monasticism, salvation, and the meaning of history and tries to make the material fit those categories.22 Fitzgerald demonstrates in his book (with greater success in some cases than others23) what is missed when one imposes on a given culture (in particular, modern India and Japan) analytic categories drawn, even very knowingly so, from the outside. The abstract category “religion” most certainly allows the scholar to search for, arrange, and compare a preselected set of cultural characteristics, but it is in the way that the picture on the cover of a jigsaw puzzle facilitates the search for, comparison, and fitting together of a thousand separate pieces. But that picture also predetermines what one will look for and find in the pieces. The seeker often finds what he or she is looking for. (“In a field, a cow looks for grass, a dog for a hare, a stork for a lizard.”) But if the cover picture was not in place before the pieces were cut, if the pieces were arbitrarily put in the box and never What You Can See When You Stop Looking for What Isn’t There 7 corresponded to the picture on the cover—and if, moreover, most of the pieces are missing— the scholar might be better served by the (admittedly laborious) examination of each piece of the puzzle from every angle and trying by continual comparative experiments to fit the pieces together, even if they never form a beautifully clear and comprehensible picture. We assert that the necessity and potential for comparisons is increased, not decreased, by abandoning as many of the predetermined abstract categories of the scholar as possible. A concept of “culture”—in the broad sense of “the way we do things around here”—is, perhaps, sufficiently capacious to allow for multivariate comparison without the imposition of a category as culture-specific as “religion.” To comprehend another people in another time or place, it is important to be as selfconscious as we are able to be concerning our own categories and conceptions and not to give our categories and conceptions any more epistemological privilege than we simply cannot help doing, not to impose them any more than we cannot help ourselves from doing. This self-critical consciousness helps us not only to stretch our imagination but also to understand how our concepts and categories organize and configure our own world. We know how very hard this is to do. The work of the great sociologist of the last century, Emile Durkheim, illustrated how his use of categories often undermined his own project of getting away from them. In his classic work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim renders the following opinion: The really religious beliefs are always common to a determined group, which makes profession of adhering to them and of practicing the rites connected with them. They are not merely received individually by all the members of this group; they are something belonging to the group, and they make its unity. The individuals which compose it feel themselves united to each other by the simple fact that they have a common faith. A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas in common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not fi nd a single religion without a Church. Sometimes the Church is strictly national, sometimes it passes the frontiers; sometimes it embraces an entire people (Rome, Athens, the Hebrews), sometimes it embraces only a part of them (the Christian societies since the advent of Protestantism); sometimes it is directed by a corps of priests, sometimes it is almost completely devoid of any official directing body. But wherever we observe the religious life, we fi nd that it has a defi nite group as its foundation [emphases ours]. 24 Durkheim had carefully dismantled all previous (and most subsequent) defi nitions of “religion” as a universal by showing that these definitions depended on theism or the recognition of the supernatural, which restricted them to certain traditions and not others. He wished to construct a universal human category in order precisely to distance any definition of “religion” from a particularly Christianizing model. But in the defi nition just quoted, as can be seen, he effectively defines “religion” as Christianity.25 It is telling that he had to append the adjective “really” to “religious,” suggesting, as “really” always does, an important and frequently highly ideological intervention into the meaning of a word. We make this point not to disparage so fi ne and important a scholar of over a century ago 8 Introduction but to emphasize how bound up the very project of defining “religion” understood as a project of redescription is in Christian concepts and categories—and how difficult it is for a Western scholar to escape those concepts and categories. A counter-example may suffice. As Benson Saler points out,26 Louis Dumont, in his classic work, Homo Hierarchicus,27 attempted to understand India in terms of its “holism” and “hierarchy,” and noted that what westerners “intuitively call religion” could not usefully be distinguished from “social structure” (i.e., caste) in the Indian case. Dumont contrasted India with the West, “in terms of a distinction between Indian holism on the one hand, and Western individualism and differentiated domains on the other.” Dumont developed “comparative analytic categories which cross-cut our usual distinction between ‘religion’ and other domains,” analytic categories that help us to clarify and map the concomitants of Western categorical distinctions (for example, the ways that domain distinctions “religion, politics, economics,” are necessary for our individualism).28 Had Dumont been looking to compare entities of the genus “religions,” he would not have made his discoveries. Similarly for our own work: not looking for “religion” in Tertullian and Josephus has enabled comparisons of their multifaceted strategies for coping with life in the Roman Empire that would be missed were we worrying that one is a “Christian” and the other a “Jew.” Dumont tried to interrogate not only our particular categories and abstractions but our very propensity to make them. Our project in this book has been inspired by all of these scholars and critical discourses around the concept “religion.” Wittgenstein said that, “Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.”29 If, as he also remarked, “to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life,”30 our task now is to imagine the form of life that attended the language of the ancient Romans (including those called Christians) and Greeks and (Greco-Roman) Judaeans, to accept their languages with their own aggregations and disaggregations, paradoxes and obfuscations, and thus to “imagine no religion.” genealogy of the genealogy of “religion” In the academic field of religious studies, the claim that religion is a modern invention is not really news. Brent Nongbri In the scholarly literature as it stands today, there are two almost directly opposed stances to the category “religion” and especially of religion as a form of identity. On the one hand, we find still many—if not most—writers writing as if “religion” were something as essentially human as language, or walking, and the only relevant questions being what kind of religion any given human group or human individual “had” or adhered to, usually expressed in terms of his “beliefs” or “faith.”31 On the other hand, we find too a growing consensus that “religion” and especially the notion of “a religion” is a historical and thus “historicizable” category, a particular kind of institution, something like literature or science and, as such, not found before the Enlightenment32 (or in variations, not before the fourth century,33 or the nineteenth century,34 or What You Can See When You Stop Looking for What Isn’t There 9 the Peace of Westphalia,35 etc.). The two most outstanding exponents of the latter view (with major variations between them) are William Cantwell Smith and Talal Asad, both of whom demonstrated how much of an imposition this invention was on the various cultures which Christian Europe met with in modernity.36 Building on their work—but especially on that of Asad, Brent Nongbri contributed a work entitled Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept,37 in which he attempted to work out a more detailed genealogy of the modern concept of “religion,” locating it in particular historical conditions. He traces the “pre-history” of the term, including the words that donated their phonetic shape and some of their semantic substance to the words that in modern European languages signify “religion”—namely, Latin religio (in Romance and Germanic languages), and Greek thrēskeia (in modern Greek)— showing that in no case does the word in antiquity function like its modern reflexes. Our work expands considerably the sketchy (but not inaccurate) treatments by Nongbri, attempting to discover what work these words did and what we can learn from them about antique cultural forms. Nongbri has observed that despite decades of problematization of the notion of “religion,” “[I]t is still common to see even scholars using the word ‘religion’ as if it were a universal concept native to all human cultures. In . . . the study of the ancient Mediterranean world, every year sees a small library’s worth of books produced on such things as ‘ancient Greek religion.’ ”38 Indeed, the number of scholars who begin their books on “Roman Religion” by asserting that they know that the term doesn’t fit Roman culture, but they will continue using it anyway “for convenience” is remarkable.39 Nongbri goes on to suggest that the reason for such self-contradiction is the lack of a coherent narrative of the development of the concept of religion, a lack that his book proposes to fill.40 Fitzgerald forthrightly argues that, “[R]eligion cannot reasonably be taken to be a valid analytical category since it does not pick out any distinctive cultural aspect of human life,” as opposed, for instance, to ritual that does but that also crosses boundaries between that which we habitually call “religion” in our culture and that which we habitually call the “secular.” Yet religion is still widely if somewhat loosely used by historians and social scientists as if it were a genuine cross-cultural category. Typically such writers treat religion as one among a number of dif ferent kinds of sociocultural phenomena whose institutions can be studied historically and sociolog ically. This approach may seem to have some obvious validity in the context of societies (especially western Christian ones) where a cultural and juridical distinction is made between religion and nonreligion, between religion and the secular, between church and state. We shall argue, however, that in most crosscultural contexts, such a distinction, if it can be made at all, is at best unhelpful and at worst positively misleading because it imposes a superficial and distorting level of analysis on the data.41 notes introduction: what you can see when you stop looking for what isn’t there 1. Cited as a personal communication in Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013), 156. 2. The “we” in this introduction (when it is not all of us, writers and readers) comprises authors Barton and Boyarin. Later chapters are written in the first-person singular to reflect the writerly voice of the prime author of the chapter. All chapters manifest one combined scholarly voice. The introduction and conclusion are composed by two writerly voices so intertwined as to justify the “we.” 3. Nongbri, Before Religion, 158–59. 4. Nongbri, Before Religion, 159. 5. C. P. Jones, “Ἔθνος and γένος in Herodotus,” Classical Quarterly n.s. 46 (1996), 315–20, 316. Jones’ short article is an exemplary instance of how a lexical study ought to be conducted. 6. The usual approach to lexicographical semantics is to defi ne a word, to discover its “essence”—the overlying abstract concept that generates all the specific instances of its usage. This approach could be termed “metaphorical,” while ours traces the connections of one meaning to another without assuming a common check list of characteristics that will fit all instantiations of the word. We have relied to some degree on Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblances.” (“Family resemblance” referred simply to the fact that a human biological family may look like each other without any one feature being constitutive of that similarity, but person A may have red hair, hazel eyes, and a large nose; person B has brown hair, brown eyes, and a large nose; and person C has brown hair, brown eyes, and a small nose. C and A do not share any of the characteristics, but when put together, A, B, and C can be picked out as members of the family owing to the similarity of both A and C to B. The “clues” will usually be more subtle, distinctive, and manifold. For an excellent exposition of this theory and its descendent, prototype semantics, see Chana Kronfeld, On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics, Contraversions [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996], 27–28.) 7. “Die Wortgeschichte, wenn sie sich zu einer Geschichte der Begriffe vertieft, kann uns noch immer reichen Aufschluß über Probleme geben, denen wir auf keinem anderen Wege nahe kommen können.” Cited in Willem Cornelis van Unnik and Pieter Willem van der Horst, Das Selbstverständnis der jüdischen Diaspora in der hellenistisch- römischen Zeit, Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums 17 (Leiden; New York: Brill, 1993), 68. 8. Smith, “Trading Places,” Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 215–29, 221–22. Emphasis original. 9. Norman Holland, “Unity, identity, text, self,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 90 (1975), 813–22, 816. 10. Nongbri, Before Religion, 3. 11. Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 82. 217 218 Notes to pages 4–6 12. Much like the disaggregation/aggregation that has produced “sexuality,” this aggregation has a specific history— one that can be traced not to a unique moment of origin perhaps but to beginnings nonetheless. Note that Foucault’s history of sexuality is analogous conceptually to our “imagine no religion,” in that in both instances the scholar is being asked to pay attention to the fact that what has appeared to be a timeless universal is a specific construction of a par ticu lar society. The Foucauldian connections of this enterprise are signaled both in Talal Asad’s title, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Chris tianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) and Nongbri’s Before Religion. 13. We are eschewing here the usual “believed in,” as that concept is itself very culture-specific. 14. Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology, trans. William Sayers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 12. 15. Nongbri, Before Religion, 4. 16. Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies, 24. 17. In his own necessarily very brief accounts of the trouble caused by imposing translations drawn from an entirely dif ferent culture on the terms of ancient Greek and Latin, Nongbri provides, moreover, an elegant and compelling example: namely, the words that are frequently translated by “piety” in renderings of Greek and Latin. As he remarks, “[T]o be sure, ancient people had words to describe the proper reverence of the gods, but these terms were not what modern people would describe as strictly ‘religious.’ They formed part of the vocabulary of social relations more generally.” Nongbri rehearses in this instance the case of eusebeia [“good fear”], the normal Greek word for “piety,” and remarks that this term is not restricted in any way to relations between humans and divine objects but “to hierarchical social protocols of all sorts.” As he points out, Plato describes the rewards for those who practice eusebeia and consequent punishments for those who display asebeia “to gods and parents.” 18. “Religion, Religions, Religious,” Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269–84, 280 19. Smith, “The Topography of the Sacred,” Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 101–116, 106. 20. We are not claiming, not at all, that the “external” observer can never see things that are occluded from the member of the culture itself. Any given culture makes distinctions that are not articulated (that are tacit, that “go without saying”) and makes categories and distinctions that do not operate “on the ground.” (For instance, infor mants might tell an ethnographer that we do not marry first cousins but only second cousins— and then the ethnographer discovers many firstcousin marriages.) Such discrepancies are well known to ethnographers, but this hardly marks an opposition between subjective and objective or insiders’ and outsiders’ perspectives. One would have to demonstrate in either case on the basis of the same kind of evidence whether a distinction or category is operative within the culture. 21. Smith, “The Topography of the Sacred,” 106. 22. Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies, 9. 23. It is somewhat startling to fi nd Fitzgerald, in the second half of his book, marking ritual, politics, and soteriology, as his replacement terms for “religion.” Unless we have very much mistaken him, the latter two categories are precisely ones that he interrogates and problematizes in the first half. (See the explicit critique of “soteriology” at p. 16.) Furthermore, he tends to meld “Judaism” into Christian ity in the form of the Judaeo- Christian, which quite misses the point that Jewry is one of the non-western collectives upon which the idea of religion has been foisted—if fairly willingly (L. Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011]). Benson Saler repeats this gesture by insisting on substituting “Western” for Talal Asad’s “Christian” (Benson Saler, Conceptualizing Notes to pages 6–9 219 Religion: Immanent Anthropologists, Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories, Studies in the History of Religions 56 [Leiden; New York: Brill, 1993], 96). 24. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman, abridged with an introduction and notes by Mark S. Cladis, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 59. 25. As Nongbri remarks, “Because of the pervasive use of the word ‘religion’ in the cultures of the modern Western world . . . we already intuitively know what ‘religion’ is before we even try to defi ne it: religion is anything that sufficiently resembles modern Protestant Christian ity.” Durkheim defi nes “religion” in terms of “practices,” with the pride of place, however, given to “faith” or “beliefs”: “The individuals . . . feel themselves united to each other by the simple fact that they have a common faith.” Secondly, Durkhein translates his defi nition into a defi nition of a “Church” as a group of people united precisely by their ideas about the sacred and their practices. He seeks to incorporate a group called the “Hebrews” under this rubric by suggesting that sometimes a people constitutes a Church. Ironically enough for this scion of a great rabbinic family, every single one of these defi nitions is a product of Christian ity and Christian ity alone, and indeed Durkheim’s very defi nition of the religion of the so-called Hebrews as a Church is drawn from Christian renditions of Jewry. 26. Saler, Conceptualizing Religion, 82–83. 27. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: an Essay on the Caste System, trans. Mark Sainsbury, The Nature of Human Society Series (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970). 28. Oral communication of Stanley Kurz, quoted in Saler, Conceptualizing Religion, 82. 29. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 4. 30. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 8. 31. For a good and concise description of these views, see Nongbri, Before Religion, 1–3. 32. Asad, Genealogies. 33. “The first model to be discarded is that of ‘religion’ itself. The crippling ambiguities of the term have been demonstrated by Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Only the establishment of Christendom in the fourth century created the conditions which make the typical modern use of the word historically realistic,” E. A. Judge, Social Distinctives of the Christians in the First Century: Pivotal Essays, ed. David M. Scholer (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson Publishers, 2008), 130. We tend to agree grosso modo with this perspective adding only that some other factors, viz. Cicero’s use of religio (see Chapter 2) also rendered the modern developments possible. 34. Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies. 35. Nongbri, Before Religion, 6. 36. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind, foreword by John Hick (New York: Macmillan, 1962); T. Asad, Genealogies. 37. Nongbri, Before Religion. 38. Nongbri, Before Religion, 7. 39. Very many scholars writing and speaking of “religion” avoid the problem of defi nition (and thus the need to examine their own presuppositions) by simply using the category as axiomatic. Thus they avoid the quicksand into which anthropologists have driven that word by including all sacralizing and desecrating behav iors. When loosened from its Christian moorings, the interpretations given to the word “religion” have drifted toward every direction of the compass. However none of these additional defi nitions cover the same ground as Roman religio. We can refer to a few impor tant titles: Henri Bouillard, “La Formation du concept de religion en Occident,” Humanisme et foi chrétienne. Mélanges scientifi ques du centenaire de l’institut catholique de Paris, eds. Charles Kannengiesser and Yves Marchasson (Paris: Éditions Beauchesne, 1967), 451–61; Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion; Michel Despland, La Religion en occident: évolution 220 Notes to pages 9–17 des idées et du vécu (Montreal: Fides, 1977); Ernst Feil, Religio: die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffs vom Frühchristentum bis zur Reformation (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986); Benson Saler, “Religio and the Defi nition of Religion,” Cultural Anthropology 2 (1987) 395–99; id., Conceptualizing Religion; Asad, Genealogies; Smith, “Religion, Religions, Religious”; Nongbri, Before Religion. 40. Nongbri himself, however, engages in the same sort of self-contradiction when he assents to J. Z. Smith’s approach, approvingly citing Smith’s comment that, “It is the very distance and difference of religion as a second-order category that gives it cognitive power.” Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 208. 41. Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies, 4. 1. religio without “religion” 1. “Religion in the Roman Empire,” in Experiencing Rome: Culture, Identity and Power in the Roman Empire,” ed. Janet Huskinson (London: Routledge, 2000), 245–75, 246. 2. My work on Roman emotions, especially the emotions of “honor,” has served as the foundation for my study of the Roman religiones. It will be immediately apparent that I am indebted, as well, to anthropologists and historians who have been influenced by the study of the relationship of pre-state systems to state systems. There are too many to name, but I would give special mention to Karl Meuli, Ake Hultkrantz, Valerio Valeri, Godfrey Lienhardt, and Walter Burkert. 3. Pudor, the Roman “sense of shame,” was an acute and inhibiting sensitivity to the eyes and opinions of others. The word embraced both the inhibiting emotions that discouraged the transgressions of boundaries and the “shame” that acted as the punishment for transgressions. I have discussed Roman notions of pudor at length in Carlin Barton, Roman Honor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 4. Although the word religio will have metamorphosed and become greatly restricted over the centuries, Augustine can still lament in the early fifth century that the word, like pietas and cultus, was not sufficiently restricted to observances directed at the one god; not sufficiently god-centered and restricted. He states that it was not just the ignorant, but also the learned who were wont to say that religio ought to be observed in dealing with relationships, affi nities, and bonds of every sort: that religio is the observance of a variety of duties and obligations in human relations. ( . . . Latina loquendi consuetudine, non imperitorum, verum etiam doctissimorum, et cognationibus humanis atque adfinitatibus et quibusque necessitudinibus dicitur exhibenda religio . . . observantia propinquitatis humanae [Civitas dei 10.1].) 5. For the movement from honor to honestas, the movement from situational to codified and formalized responses, see Roman Honor , esp. pp. 270–28. Honor/honos—which was always potentially transgressive—became “honesty,” which was never transgressive. 6. For example, Mommsen: “Roman religion in its pure, unhampered, and thoroughly national character” (History of Rome, trans. William Dickson, vol. 1 [New York, 1886], 239). Cumont: “Subordonnée à la politique, elle [la religion des Romains] cherche avant tout par la stricte exécution de pratiques appropriées à assurer à l’État la protection des dieux ou à détourner les effets de leur malveillance” (Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, Paris, 1906, 36). “Roman religion, properly speaking, comprised the public cults or the city of Rome and its citizens. Budding out from this model, as it were, were the cultic practices of various notionally autonomous citizen groups. . . .” (Greg Woolf, “Divinity and Power in Ancient Rome,” in Religion and Power, ed. Nicole Brisch, Chicago [2008], 243–59, 249). 7. “L’Originalité du vocabulaire religieux Latin,” Rites, Cultes, Dieux de Rome, Paris, 1979, 30–53, 37 = Revue Belge de Philologie et d’histoire 49 (1971), 31–54.