Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times

One of the best books deconstructing modernity has to be Paul Tyson. “Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times”, in it Tyson calls for a return to premodern ways of thought, he lays out four specific aspects of a more ancient, Platonic Christianity :

“Firstly, Christian Platonism is an entirely integrative outlook, yet it is not a reductive or closed (conceptually complete) outlook. That is, this stance assumes that there is one overarching ever-active Cause of reason and existence in the cosmos (God), and hence all true meanings are coherent with each other and there are no discrete zones of different types of truths/meanings that have no connection. Even so, while God knows and sustains the whole, we only ever know parts and know partially.”

…..our knowledge of truth—of any sort and to any degree—is a function of the grace of divine revelation and is always “located” within an ontological and epistemic relation to God. Thus knowledge is inherently religious and we can gain a more integrative and truer perspective on reality through a deeper repose in the ever-revealing Word of God. Thus receptive prayer, quiet attention, and right worship are keys to truth and success in the active pursuit of meaningful knowledge.”

“Secondly, Christian Platonism does not think the modern idea of “pure nature” makes any sense at all. In an Augustinian fashion, all creation is understood as perpetually upheld by the Creator such that the very intelligibility and existence of any being is a manifestation of divinely gifted form made actual in embodiment.

“Thirdly, Christian Platonism maintains that moral, aesthetic, and spiritual qualitative meanings are real, and are more primary than material quantitative facts. This does not make the material and the quantitative unreal, but what is apparent to the senses is not understood as intelligible or actual in anything other than a derived relationship to the spiritual realities on which all material manifestations are dependent. Further, the reality of transcendent meaning is not fully comprehensible to us, but as we ourselves (and all creation) are dependent on spiritual meanings and realities for our very being we have an innate participatory knowledge of truth to the partial extent that we are both capable of and open to such knowledge.”

“Ontological participation is the idea that concrete particular beings, such as the book in your hand or Socrates, are not self-contained entities, but rather participate in qualitative powers of being that transcend their spatiotemporal specificity. Indeed the Platonist understanding of the nature of temporal beings maintains that no immediate and tangible physical appearance can be equated with that which really (that is, eternally) is. Here a clear distinction between appearance and Reality is in play, and this distinction operates on a couple of levels. To Plato, the intelligible essence of any being is real, and the spatiotemporal expression of that being in physical actuality is partial and derivative. Such incomplete derivation is what constitutes the very fabric of the order of reality revealed to us by our senses. Because of this derivative relationship, there is always more to any being than what meets the eye.

“Reality are appearance not independent of each other, but appearance is dependent on Reality for its intelligibility and for the mystery of its spatiotemporally expressed actuality, and that Reality cannot itself be accounted for by any appearance.

In Christian Platonist thinking, God in his hiddenness is always present as the eternal and intelligible grounds of his temporal creation. God is the ontological Source out of which all beings gain their intelligible essence (their form) and their particular existence (for beings like us, matter in space and time is the medium of our existence). Thus the Real is not immediately visible and is always more ontologically primary than the apparent. 

That is, Christian faith historically saw the priority of the spiritual over the material as a relation between that which is primary and that which is derivative. So an ontological perspective (and Western metaphysics used to be entirely defined by this perspective, which is why Western metaphysics itself has been so determinedly dissolved and re-defined in recent centuries) holds that what you can’t simply see is more real than what you can.

“Christian belief explicitly holds that God totally transcends his created order of beings, and also gifts beings with a degree of real autonomy from himself—but it does mean that all of reality is fundamentally dependent on God for its ongoing existence and its essential and intelligible nature.

So ontological participation means that at the level of what I most fundamentally really am, I do not define and self generate the most basic reality of my being myself; I, as God’s creature called into being by him, ontologically participate in God. So, as Augustine put it, God is closer to me than I am to myself.”

Excerpt From: Paul Tyson. “Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times”

Nietzsche - against reality, against reason

"Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times” by Paul Tyson is one of the best books I’ve ever read, clear, simple, and a devastating critique of modernity. Here he shows how Nietzsche hypocritically falls prey to the very critiques of Christianity he asserts :

“Nietzsche’sexplains the internal dynamic of Christianity as a function of what Nietzsche called “the will to power.” In exchange for the people being given access to the larger rituals and institutions admitting them to belief in a (false) promise of idealized perfection, the church gets power over the masses. In important regards the critique of Christianity put forward by Feuerbach and Marx prefigures the Nietzschean fascination with the immediate and tangible power-dynamic of the practices of embodied life as the only “sincere” reality revealed in any structure of belief. So to Nietzsche the nature of Christianity is thus explained as the generation of a delusional popularist mythos of ideal perfection for the real purpose of the expansion and protection of very tangible (economic and violent) expressions of ecclesial power.”

In important regards the critique of Christianity put forward by Feuerbach and Marx prefigures the Nietzschean fascination with the immediate and tangible power-dynamic of the practices of embodied life as the only “sincere” reality revealed in any structure of belief. So to Nietzsche the nature of Christianity is thus explained as the generation of a delusional popularist mythos of ideal perfection for the real purpose of the expansion and protection of very tangible (economic and violent) expressions of ecclesial power.”

“Unsurprisingly, this perspective plays a significant role in nineteenth- and twentieth-century modern theology in general and Protestant liberal theology in particular. This is not surprising because, in Scotist and Ockhamean fashion, modernity’s movement away from metaphysics to epistemology, its move away from divine Being to human knowing must reverse the polarities of our cultural outlook on reality. Now, in modernity and postmodernity, “the real” is the apparent; then, the transcendent was the ground of the apparent and only the reality of that ground could give substantiality to the apparent. But even within its own terms, Nietzsche’s “explanation” of Christianity is not convincing.”

“If Nietzsche is genuinely persuaded that all meaning is exclusively apparent, entirely contingent, and nothing other than imaginatively generated mythos, then this must also apply to his own account of the essence of Christianity, and that account is then clearly seen as but a screen for his own will to power. If we are to consider reasoning as a valuable truth-seeking tool (something Nietzsche cannot do) then there are two consequences to this stance.

Firstly, there can be no “objective” way of deciding that the beliefs of Christianity are any more delusional than Nietzsche’s preferred poetic alternative. Conversely, how could the belief in “ideals” be false if no belief can be true? Suspicion is a worm that eats itself. In other words, one must abandon the truth-revealing capacity of reason if one accepts Nietzsche’s reasoning, but then one would not be accepting his reasoning on the grounds that it was reasonable, but simply because one liked his willful imaginative assertion. Then, of course, if you ditch reason, there is no reason why belief in transcendence is false, it is merely that you do not like that belief and would rather imagine a different reality. But this is to abandon reasoning as such and to revert—in the final analysis—to arbitrary will and violent power.

“The point I am making in these two sentences is that “false” is a notion tied to a bivalent conception of “truth.” False makes no sense if there is no true. If one abandons bivalent truth itself—as Nietzsche seems to be attempting—then all “knowledge” and “meaning” claims becomes poetic assertions, and then the idea that any claim could be false is meaningless. But then the poetic assertion that there is no bivalent truth is itself an act of unreasoned will such that there can be no Nietzschean reason why Platonist ideals are false (or true). Here we touch a virulent voluntaristic irrationalism.”

“Secondly, the vitriolic stance against Christian religion that this outlook supports cannot escape the charge of resentment.The Nietzschean nihilist resents the cultural and political power that the Christian imagination exerts over Western culture and simply wills to replace it with a nihilistic culture of power that is more amenable to its own imaginative desires. ”

“Simone Weil well saw that the dynamic of resentment in Nietzsche is an inversion of his stated claims. To Weil, that Christianity is a religion of slaves is undoubtedly true, but it is the powerful who resent the weak on whom their power must depend, and all too often it is not the weak who resent their powerful oppressors. For the great ones are only great in relation to the not great whom they stand out from and on whom they stand. No great one is genuinely great out of their own splendor. They must have viewers and a stage apart from themselves in order to be great. And as they would never worship any other than themselves, they despise those who worship them, yet they need their worship as a function of their own greatness. ”

“Christianity—where creation is an originary harmony, a gracious act of divine joy, love, and goodness—espouses the radical inversion of the agonistic religio-mythic power structures that emerged with the rise of the great ancient agrarian civilizations.118 The prophetic imagination is the eschatological imagination of the weak and the oppressed, not for power over their oppressors, but for life without oppression for all.119 This is a profoundly subversive understanding of power”

“Of course, the church, like any human institution, readily succumbs to the false “realism” of a Babylonian understanding of power and religion, but this is something recognized as a failure by its own doctrines and sacred texts.

Where “Platonism” means belief in transcendent Reality that relativizes the transience, contingency, injustice, moral relativism, violence, and mortality of human existence understood in exclusively immanent terms, then yes, Christianity is a type of Platonism.

Even so Christianity (and also Plato) does not despise the immediate nature of immanent human existence; indeed, the incarnation gives human immediacy its great dignity within Christian faith. But the immediate is never understood as merely immediate for either the Christian or the Platonist. And this does indeed distinguish it from Nietzsche and from any who believe in the early modern idea of “pure nature,” where the immediate and immanent is real in its own terms, and is really the only reality we can meaningfully talk about.

But Nietzsche can offer no reason why there is only immanence without appealing to something beyond mere contingency (reason). So the manner in which thoughtful argument must shatter in the hands of those who use it in the name of a realism of unmitigated immediacy—of embracing the reality of mere appearance—divides reason from immanence and upholds a profound irrationalism of mere will and merely willful imagination.”

Excerpt From: Paul Tyson. “Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times (KALOS Book 2).” iBooks.

Nietzsche - philosopher of bourgeois capitalism

Was Nietzsche's real God Henry Ford ? 

David Bentley Hart think so, in The Beauty of the Infinite he writes, 

One wonders, really, whether this is not the narrative that the Nietzschean element in the postmodern most truly subserves. The market is not so much a vertical as a horizontal totality, a plane upon which everything can be arranged in a hierarchy of abstract equivalence, aleatory instances of desire or apathy; it is a totality that contains everything in a state of barren and indifferent plurality. It invites and preserves a vertical hierarchy of wealth and poverty, of course, but without reference to a stable ontological or "analogical" syntax: the realm of the real is at the level of horizontal transactions, from which social and economic positionings arise and into which they can just as easily sink again. It is the totality, in short, not of Apollo but of Dionysus (Apollo's other face). It may well be that in some sense what Nietzsche foresaw, what he pre- pared for (why God "died" for him), was modernity's postindustrial market.

The myth of affirmation without negation, or of no negation except as part of a  prior affirmation, the insistence upon evaluation and transvaluation (upon value) and upon the primordiality of the will, and so many other aspects of the Nietzschean narrative stand in curious compatibility with the mythos of the market.

For all his solicitude for noble values, Nietzsche may prove, in retrospect, to have been the greatest of bourgeois philosophers:

the active and creative force of will he praised may be really a mythic aggrandizement of entrepreneurial ingenuity and initiative; talk of the will to power, however abstracted and universalized, may reflect only a metaphysical inflation of that concept of voluntaristic punctiliarity that defines the "subject" to which the market is hospitable; the notion of a contentless and spontaneous activity that must create values describes, in a somewhat impressionistic vein, the monadic consumer of the free market and the venture capitalist; to speak of the innocence of all becoming, the absence of good and evil from being, and a general preference for the distinction between good and bad as a purely evaluative judgment is perhaps to speak of the guiltless desire of the consumer, the relativity of want, and that perpetual transvaluation that is so elegantly and poignantly expressed on every price tag, every declaration of a commodity's abstract value; a force that goes always to the limit of what it can do is perhaps at one with modern capitalism's myth of limitless growth and unbounded trade.

Nietzsche, however much he detested bourgeois values, perhaps knew not which god he served (as a Marxist might say, his ideology was the product of material forces he did not recognize). 

Seen in this light, it is clear why the figure of Christ presents such an intractiible problem in The Anti-Christ: he is unmarketable, he produces nothing that can be brought into history's true arena (the strife of the market), his practices do not obey market functions; he is, simply enough, a bad consumer and entrepreneur, concerned with feeding the poor and comforting the sickly, living like a mendicant, advocating the unconditional forgiveness of debts, treating money like Caesar's uncontested property (with an irresponsible air of indifference), and promiscuously producing and distributing good things like bread, fishes, and new wine outside the cycle of commodification and exchange. 

TheAnti-Christ may well be the text that best marks the line of division between church and market as a line of enmity (another reason theology may be beholden to Nietzsche). None of the rhetorical ornaments of Christ's life - none of its shadow and light, pathos and joy - can be fitted to the pagan aes- thetic of endlessly expansive power and Dionysus's heedless dance.

Nietzsche's avowed god, Dionysus, is of course an endlessly protean and deceptive deity and a wearer of many masks. When he makes his unannounced appearance at the end of Beyond Good and Evil, as its secret protagonist, whose divine irony has occultly enlivened its pages, he exercises his uniquely divine gift, the numinous privilege of veiling and unveiling, concealment and manifestation; he is the patron deity, appropriately, of the philosophical project of genealogy. 

But perhaps another veil remains to be lifted, and the god may be invited to step forth again, in his still more essential identity: Henry Ford. After all, Ford's most concise and oracular pronouncement - "History is bunk!" - might be read as an exquisite condensation of the theme of the second of the Unzeitgemiifte Betrachtungen...

And there could scarcely be a more vibrant image of univocity's perpetual beat of repetition - of eternal recurrence, the eternal return of the same - than the assembly line: difference here is certainly not analogical, but merely univocal, and the affirmation of one instance is an affirmation of the whole. It is, moreover, well documented that Ford was a devotee of square dancing, which is clearly akin to (perhaps descended from) the dithyrambic choreia of the bacchantes; Ford was a god who danced. 

Radical hermeneutics, certainly, has all the marks of a necessary, "superstructural" hygiene of the market, a final speculative transition from the concrete figures - the particular optics - of certain premodern traditions, inexplicably lingering on in the public space, to the open, Heracleitean spectacle of the market's endless fluidity. 

And this is why it serves especially well (though at a removed and ideological level) to help clear the ground for the market: it obeys the logic of an age and a regime in which the agora has been disseminated throughout the polis, giving shape to all real public identity. 

...talk of the "flux" and the "abyss" is itself a metaphysics, surely: to name the flux is also to profess an understanding of the "logic" (the logos) of the aleatory, to name chaos as the metaphysical substance - the truth - that, once grasped by thought, excludes other and opposed truths, and exposes them as fictions. 

And one should call this metaphysics by its proper name: Dionysian metaphysics, metaphysics in its primordial constitution - which is to say, market metaphysics. 

The market, after all, which is the ground of the real in modernity, the ungrounded foundation where social reality occurs, makes room only for values that can be transvalued, that can be translated into the abstract valuations of univocal exchange. 

A desire that expands to the limits of which it is capable: not an analogical desire for God or the other, but a desire for nothing as such, producing in order to desire more. Here one sees the necessary, if not always immediately apparent, synonymy of consumerism and nihilism: in our "society of the spectacle" (to use Guy Debord's phrase), the open field where arbitrary choices may be made among indifferently desirable objects must be cleared and then secured against the disruptions of the Good; this society must presume, and subtly advocate, the nonexistence of any higher "value" than choice, any truth that might order desire toward a higher end; desire may posit, seize, want, not want - but it must not obey. 

Thus endless transvaluation is the law of the market, and its secret faith is in the impossibility of anything beyond this law; and as this law and this faith mark the triumph of the nothing, their "moral" logic is simply that of the absolute liberty of the will.

More to the point, while it [this type of hermeneutics] can provide no critique that cannot be absorbed by the market (which is undeconstructible, in that it simply is the world it describes, it is the values it promotes, it creates the reality it proclaims), a radical hermeneutics can and does serve the ideological ends of the market, precisely because it aids in breaking down the inassimilable extravagances of precapitalist and presocialist traditions, and resists and ironizes the claims they make regarding truth or the good. 

To put the matter more simply, "radical" hermeneutics looks suspiciously like a species of liminal semeiosis, which aids in bearing persons over (in various states of privation) into the diversified identitylessness of the market; it wears the aspect of a passive soupc;:on perhaps, but even so plays its part in the violence of this necessary transformation, this invention of the abstract self, the unnarrated consumer. This hermeneutics, this great narrative of the death of metaphysics that is by extension an elegy pronounced over every story of truth, merely serves the market, as the latter forces back the pressures of other tradi- tions to the margins of reality, causing identities to evaporate, to be burned off in a newly fashioned space of private meaning.

Religion - an invention of modernity

Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities by Carlin A. Barton is a superb book.

The following is a review by Clandestine Library For Further Reading :

The ancient world was very different than our modern world in terms of concepts, beliefs, practices, and behaviors. This book extensively analyzes how the Latins and Greeks related to each other with respect to what we would call “religion” today. It turns out that such a thing really never existed anywhere in the ancient world. Though, modern people like to imagine that people in the past had similar concepts and worldviews, they simply are not there in the actual manuscripts, sources, and inscriptions from the Greek and Roman worlds. The book observes that it is commonly accepted in religious studies that “religion” is a modern invention that very much resembles Christianity as the prototype. The text also clearly shows that the Roman and Greek worlds did not have a division of “religion” or “religious things” from other aspects of life and certainly did not speak in the way of “religious groups” or “religions”.

The book studies the way the Latin word ‘religio’ (which is the etymological root of the word “religion”) and the Greek word θρησκεία (threskeia) were used in numerous contexts. Most of the time they were both used in secular and mundane contexts. That is, they were usually used without referencing or having anything to do with gods. They were used in many contexts: cultural, military, social norms, royalty, etc. 

In general ‘religio’ and ‘threskeia’ meant a wide variety of things including emotional things. Broadly speaking, for both terms (they were not exactly equivalent to each other and no English word exists than can adequately translate to either one) they could mean fear, binding, obligation, inhibition, high precision, very detailed or meticulous, restraint, relating to an oath or taboo, etc. Certainly these terms are not something reducible to modern abstractions and reifications like “religion”.

Furthermore, the book does a great job in analyzing other Latin and Greek terms that are within the same realm of ‘religio’ and ‘threskeia’, such as ‘fides’ (faith), ‘superstitio’ (superstition), ‘sebomai’ (respect or fear), ‘eusebeia’ (good fear), ‘deisidaimonia’ (excessive fear), etc. These terms also had nothing to do with the gods and were used in mundane contexts. 

In particular it is interesting that the word ‘superstitio’ generally meant an excessive amount of fear, not irrational “supernatural” beliefs like some people assume it means today. Since ‘religio’ was understood as fear of some sort and ‘superstitio’ could mean excessive fear, then it changes how we perceive statements by Romans like Lucretius, who is often touted as criticizing religion. In the original context, when Lucretius speaks of the evils of superstition, his not talking about gods and supernatural beliefs, he is talking about fears. Perhaps paranoia.

Detailed case studies are provided of texts that used ‘religio’ like those of Cicero and Tertullian. Case studies are also provided of texts that used ‘threskeia’ like those of Josephus, Herodotus, the New Testament, Philo, and 4 Maccabees. Many Roman and Greek selections are found throughout to drive the points.

One important observation noted in the book is that when modern historians speak of “religion” of ancient cultures (Rome, China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc); they normally disclose that such a concept or system not really there in the modern sense at all. The authors make the following observation: “It 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’.” 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.”

Other good books on the emergence of the concept “religion” are:

Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept

‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment

The Territories of Science and Religion.

Here are chapter by chapter samples from the book:

Introduction: What You Can See When You Stop Looking for What Isn’t There

“There are no simple English equivalents of ‘religio’ or ‘threskeia’. 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” (2); “In the end, to translate ‘religio’ or ‘threskeia’ 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 different cultural world, a different “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 ‘threskeia’, “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 ‘threskeia’ 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.” (2); “We have also made the acquaintance of many of the Latin and Greek words in the general semantic fields of ‘religio’ and ‘threskeia’: ‘pudor’, ‘conscientia’, ‘fides’, ‘scrupulus’, ‘superstitio’, ‘therapeia’, ‘sebomai’, ‘eusebeia’, ‘deisidaimonia’, ‘pistis’, ‘time’, although we have not given them nearly the attention they deserve. 

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 respect 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 everything 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.”...It is in the disembedding of human activities from the particular contexts and aggregations found in many societies into one concept and named entity or even institution that we find the genealogy of the modem western notion of “religion.” 

Just as people had intercourse of more or less the same varieties as today (if the pictorial evidence from antiquity can be relied on) and made babies (or not) but did not organize these practices and experiences into a category of “sexuality,” so too people sacralized and desacralized/desecrated, feared and revered and loved, made bonds and oaths, performed rituals, and told stories about gods and people without organizing 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.” (4); the modern construct of religion is pretty much based on Christianity (7-8); “In the academic field of religious studies, the claim that religion is a modern invention is not really news” (8); “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.” 

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. 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. 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 different kinds of sociocultural phenomena whose institutions can be studied historically and sociologically. 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 cross-cultural 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.”
‘Religio’

Part I. Mapping the Word

1. ‘Religio’ without “Religion”

“The ancient Roman ‘religiones’ involved motives and movements evoked by and servicing the array of bonds and obligations embedded in every aspect of everyday life. The emotions and behaviors of ‘religio’ guided and directed attention, but they did not demarcate nor were they limited to a particular sphere of experience. They were not generated or regulated by, nor did they necessarily concern, gods or priests, magistrates or kings. I will argue in the first of the following chapters that if the English word “religion” can be set aside (if only momentarily), Latin ‘religio’ can reveal an economy of ideas and emotions otherwise obscured: a homeostatic system of reciprocities moving back and forth across a boundary or bond—an emotional economy closely related to and reflecting the self-regulating “government of shame” of cultures without powerful centralized institutions and means to enforce their claims to authority and legitimacy. 

In this chapter, I want to bring to light the pattern and logic of the sometimes bewildering and contradictory range of meanings of ‘religio’ in the literature of the Republic and early Empire. I will argue that the ancient Roman ‘religiones’ were part of a system of equilibrations; of weighing and balancing. Like ‘pudor’, the Roman “sense of shame” (which it often closely resembles), ‘religio’ operated as a homeostatic system of psychological and emotional restraints and adjustments on every level and in every situation of Roman life. ‘Religio’ did concern the “sacred” in so far as the “sacred” embraced the words, things, people, persons, places, and times set apart, removed, bounded—but ‘religio’ did not require and was not evidence for a transcendent reality: A Roman had ‘religiones’ that had nothing to do with gods.

I will argue that it is exactly the flexible, undefined, and less formalized powers and play of emotions exercised in Latin ‘religio’ that will be suppressed in an increasingly defined, disciplined, regimented system of government legitimated by reference to a notion of an ultimate authorizing power. I will argue that it took a very long time for our notions of religion to congeal.” (15-16); Cicero used ‘religio’ in different contexts, not just in relation to the divine and some selections do give the impression that there was a universal, distinct, authoritative, power structure of obedience like modern religion, but this is not completely correct; “ ‘Religio’ was most often (and still long after Cicero) used by the Romans to describe not an institution or set of institutions but rather a range of emotions arising from heightened attention: hesitation, caution, anxiety, fear—feelings of being bound, restricted, inhibited, stopped short. 

The emotional aspects of Roman ‘religio’ have been frequently observed by scholars.” (19); “The feelings central to ‘religio’ were not those of love but of being bound. Even Cicero, who links ‘religio’ etymologically with ‘relegere’ (retrace, pick out again, reread) (De natura deorum 2.72), continually used ‘religio’ with verbs of binding such as ‘alligare’, ‘adstringere’, ‘continere’, ‘impedire’, ‘ligare’, ‘obligare’, ‘obstringere’, ‘solvere’, ‘exsolvere’. And the bind, as I will stress repeatedly, is not generally or necessarily to the gods. Indeed, gods need not be anywhere in the picture. In its earliest preserved appearances, Latin ‘religio’ was the feeling that “gave one pause,” “made one stop in one’s tracks,” or caused one to reverse one’s course.” (20-21); Plautus from around 184 BC used ‘religio’ as something that gave pause; “ ‘Religio’, throughout the Republic and well into the Empire, was experienced as a hindrance (Plautus, ‘Mercator’ 881), an impediment (Cicero, ‘Pro Flacco’ 10), an obligation (Cicero, ‘De legibus’ 2.58), or a restraint (Livy 27.23.1).” (21); “ ‘Religio’ was especially evoked by highly charged boundaries and limitations and the fear of transgressing “taboos,” such as those surrounding the oath, the treaty, the ‘domus’ or ‘fanum’. 

The Romans approached such boundaries as we might approach an electrified fence. But it is important to notice that the gods were not the inhibiting or disciplining forces in any of these instances of ‘religio’. Rather, the inhibitions of Roman ‘religio’, like those of Roman ‘pudor’ are generated internally and psychologically by the particularities of each situation.” (22); “ ‘Religio’ was often closely associated with or equated to the ‘scrupulus’ – a small sharp or pointed stone, the smallest weight that could move the pan of a scale. The ‘scrupulus’ could also be thought of as the little irritant, the stone on which on stabbed one’s toe or the pea under the princess’ mattress. The ‘homo scrupulosus’, the ‘homo religiosus’, was someone who, like the peasant farmer (or the pilot of a ship), was alert, cautious, circumspect.” (22-23); “Note that Aulus Gellius can, in the second century of the Empire, still use ‘religiose’ to mean “extremely precisely” “scrupulously” (11.18.19). Interestingly, this is the most ancient usage of ‘religio’ still in wide circulation in English: We still say, “She flosses her teeth religiously.” “He does his homework religiously.” 

The substantive ‘scrupulus’ could, like ‘religio’, describe both the inhibited and focused attention and also the impediment, hindrance, obstruction that elicited that attention.” (23-24); “The changes in the meanings of the word ‘religio’ after Cicero entailed the loss of many of its ancient meanings. As a result, modern scholars have had to borrow the word ‘taboo’ to fill the catachresis, the hole—and, paradoxically, to describe ‘religio’. Many of the ideas that we associate with the Polynesian word ‘taboo’ were essential elements of ancient ‘religio’.” (25-26); religio was also used to describe anything (e.g. person, temple, city, god) as experiencing shame, guilt, a crime or a curse (29,30); 2 modern examples that illustrate the complex uses of ‘religio’ in a 21st century fashion to help see how it was used in the ancient world (32-33); ‘superstitio’ often meant excess ‘religio’ (the propensity to be too cautious, to anxious, too fearful, to shameful, etc) (35)

2. The Ciceronian Turn

During the time of the Roman civil wars and after, ‘religio’ became more associated with fear than with inhibition or hesitation (39); Lucretius, who is often mistaken as anti religious, actually wanted to break people free from the bondage of ‘religio’ (fear); Julius Caesar describes the fears of soldiers (religio) in his book “Civil Wars” and his generals Petreius and Afranius (42); “I cannot sufficiently emphasize that Cicero, even while modifying the meaning of ‘religio’ in several passages, continued to use the word in the entire array of its ancient and customary usages (inhibition, scruple, fear, and the object that evoked these emotions: ‘taboo’, bond, obligation, oath, treaty, transgression, guilt of transgression, curse, etc.). 

Nevertheless, from his earliest surviving works, there is a consistent attempt to respond to the disarray and excessively heightened – or excessively lowered – anxiety he associated with these ‘religiones’ and to formulate certain cures. Like most conversions, Cicero’s was a long time coming.” (43); Cicero began to think of fear of the gods as ‘religio’ since they kept structure and order in a society; Cicero’s philosophical works lead later authors into creating words that would evolve into religion as we know it today (46); ‘superstitio’ was a frenzy, mania, excess fear etc; Cicero’s ‘religiones’ were mainly a means of preserving society through order and fears (reverence) towards order or authority than actually following a cult or gods

Part II. Case Study: Tertullian

3. Preface to Tertullian

General intro to Tertullian’s thought; “The notion of ‘religio’ as a separate sphere or dimension of life compatible with and capable of surviving under the umbrella of the Roman imperial government made its appearance in Tertullian’s negotiatory writings; it was in this context that ‘religio’ was pressed into use to translate Greek ‘threskeia’, linking it to closely to god-centered cultic behaviors. The Ciceronian/Platonic notion of ‘religio’ as comprehensive and hierarchical government headed by a god-king, structured by fixed laws and reinforced by heaven and hell will play an important role in Tertullian’s separatist, segregationalist mode. 

Neither of these trajectories have completed their arch in Tertullian. The meanings of ‘religio’ in Tertullian are still very unsettled. Among the ancient meanings and connotations of Latin ‘religio’ retained by Tertullian are: (1) those relating to the array of emotions of fear and inhibition, respect and veneration; and (2) those relating to the notion of scrupulous attention, restraint, hesitation, and continence evoked by the emotions of fear and inhibition.” (58); Tertullian’s thinking involved a dichotomous vision of the world of a slave serving a master – he was an apocalyptic utopian of sorts

4. Segregated by a Perfect Fear

Tertullian and Lucretius were both very interested in fear and proposed different solutions for it: “Lucretius wanted to assuage the fear, while Tertullian wanted to concentrate and intensify it.” (61)

5. Segregated by a Perfect Fear. The Terrible War Band of the Anti-Emperor: The ‘Coniuratio’ and the ‘Sacramentum’

‘Coniuratio’ meant a group “swearing together”; “An oath was a ‘religio’ in one of its ancient Latin sense: a bond – indeed, the most powerful bond that the Romans knew.” (75); “A “swearing together” – a ‘coniuratio’ – could be for any purpose. (Note that the word ‘coniuratio’ can be used for good things, for ‘coniuratio’ is a ‘neutral’ word…) The purpose of a ‘coniuratio’ was to heighten the energies and create a powerful ‘religio’ that would cause the professors to fear deserting the group – and to make their enemies fear such a powerful augmented and sacralized common will.” (75); “Jachen Bleicken suggested that a ‘coniuratio’ was the only possible way of uniting in purpose people who did not possess any common coercive or centralized institutions. 

The oath could be used – as it was in the Roman army - to forge bonds between people who did not necessarily share ‘communitas’ or ‘societas’. The institution of an oath administered by the magistrates of the state to its soldiers made it an important tool for arousing in the soldiers a sense of solidarity and loyalty to their general. It made their obedience and total commitment to him a point of honor.” (75); some emperors feared protests and rebellions which used ‘coniuratio’; ‘sacramentum’ generally meant a fierce oath like Roman soldiers did to show strong loyalty (80-81,85)

‘Threskeia’

Part I. Mapping the Word

8. Imagine No ‘Threskeia’: The Task of the Untranslator

“If ‘religio’ is traditionally given as the Latin word for “religion,” ‘threskeia’ is cited as the ancient Greek one (and indeed, in Modern Greek, that is its meaning). In this regard, the Greek word is as much a false friend as the word ‘religio’ is itself. In other ways, however, the two aren’t quite compatible in that the Latin word is attested much more widely and richly than the Greek. Moreover, as has been shown in earlier chapters, studying ‘religio’ in the earlier periods gives access to an entire cultural system that has been named here the “balancing system.” 

‘Threskeia’ is a different kettle of fish. Only very, very sparsely attested at all in classical Greek, it appears primarily and increasingly widely from the later Hellenistic period onward. Its usages, moreover, suggest only a partial semantic overlap with ‘religio’ until quite late in late antiquity when it is adopted as the translation equivalent of a reconfigured ‘religio’, or (alternatively put) when ‘religio’ acquires new values partly by being used as a translation equivalent of ‘threskeia’. Nonetheless, the analogy of ‘religio’ will provide some heuristic value in the study of this word as well. 

A contextual study of the usages of ‘threskeia’ in antiquity demonstrates a world of nuance that simply does not map onto the abstraction “religion” as used in modern folk (and to a lesser extent, scholarly) language. This is much easier to carry out than the parallel study of ‘religio’, owing simply enough to the relative paucity of ancient usages. I have conducted here a fresh and fairly exhaustive collection of literary contexts in which the term is used, starting with Herodotus and ending in the Hellenistic period, including Jewish authors such as Philo. 

To this a partial study of epigraphic evidence has been added as well. I have found ambiguity and even ambivalence in these uses—or better put, while each individual context can be fairly well specified (at least I hope so and have tried to demonstrate so), the aggregate does not permit one or even a set of clear definitions. Rather, it is important to realize that the word always has the potential for communicating overtones of meaning that cannot be captured in a definition, and certainly not—it should be unnecessary to say by now—by using the term “religion” in any form while glossing and discussing these usages. I have found, indeed, that the contexts in which ‘threskeia’ functions within the textual corpus just specified involve a range of usages that one might be inclined to see as opposites. ‘

Threskeia’ is used, on the one hand, by writers to indicate excessive, extravagant, and even harmfully distracting practices of others; but, on the other hand, can be used by participants to indicate their own cultic practices, thus presumably with a positive valence and not the negative charge associated with the first set of usages. It is as if a single word in Greek incorporates both our modern English “religion” and “superstition,” usually taken as opposites. Although, to be sure, many in our culture regard religion negatively, but even they, nonetheless, distinguish lexically between the denotation of “superstition” and “religion.” 

Thus, even a sentence, which we might imagine in the mouth of a Richard Dawkins—”All religion is mere superstition”—nonetheless, makes the semantic distinction that ‘threskeia’ does not, as I shall show here. In fact, the preceding sentence could not be expressed in ancient Greek. Carlin Barton has pointed out that “[T]he Latin noun ‘pax’, like the Latin nouns ‘fides’, ‘pudor’, ‘religio’, ‘purgamen’, ‘piaculum’, ‘lustrum’, ‘flagitium’, and like the Latin verbs ‘sancire’, ‘sacrare’, ‘mactare’, had two complementary valences, poised, as it were, on the two opposite poles of a balance beam.” 

This kind of nuance, in which a word functions in such seemingly divergent ways, which ultimately reveals an entirely other semantic, cultural world is completely obscured when one uses a covering abstraction as a shortcut for translation.” (123-124); passage by Plutarch on ideal wifely behaviors - “This is a particularly rich passage given that it explicitly draws a contrast between proper ‘sebas’ (‘sebomai’ = to show awe, fear, revere, with respect to gods, persons, and objects) and improper ‘threskeia’ and ‘deisidaimonia’, both of which are associated explicitly with negative adjectives; ‘threskeia’ is with ‘periergos’ (taking needless trouble; useless) and ‘deisidaimonia’ with ‘xenos’ (alien, strange, unusual), an opposition that I will discuss again herein. 

This is a common enough pattern to show that Greek culture had a certain similarity to the Roman culture explored thus far in this book in the form of a balancing system in which the mid-point between extremes is seen as the ideal, one in which too much fear of the god was as negative a moment as too little. Moving along, one will frequently find the word ‘eusebeia’—literally “good fear”: that is, that which is appropriate and within measure, not over the top or otherwise useless—in contrast to ‘deisidaimonia’ and ‘threskeia’. 

‘Threskeia’ frequently functions in Greek much like ‘superstitio’ in Latin. ‘Deisidaimonia’ and ‘threskeia’ in this text are the disdained extremes of proper ‘sebas’ of good fear, or appropriate piety/reverence. For another clear indication of the close semantic affiliation of ‘deisidaimonia’ and ‘threskeia’, one need look no further than Soranus, the gynecologist of late–first and early–second centuries Alexandria and Rome. In Soranus’ gynecological writings, we find the following among the qualifications for a midwife: “She will be free from ‘deisidaimonia’ so as not to overlook salutary measures on account of a dream or omen or some customary mystery or vulgar ‘threskeia’.” … (Book 1, chapter 1, section 4). 

The good midwife has to be free of vain and popular beliefs and practices—LSJ even gives “superstition” here—because if she is not, she might be so busy with them that she ignores salutary ones. Here, even more explicitly than in the texts already cited, both the correlation of ‘threskeia’ with ‘deisidaimonia’ and the negative marking of both as excessive and distracting from what must be done are as clear as a bell.” (124-125); “It is clear, at least from the preceding context, that ‘deisidaimonia’ had a range of meanings that properly overlapped with ‘superstitio’ in its Latin sense; thus excessive zeal for the gods > scrupulously > ‘superstitio’ and partly with something like “superstition” in its modern sense as well. The aforementioned established nexus between ‘deisidaimonia’ and ‘threskeia’ indicates that the latter may carry a similar range of acceptations.” (125-126); early uses of ‘threskeia’ referenced the practices of others like Herodotus did with other cultures; “It is remarkable that after making an appearance on the stage in the fifth century B.C.E., the word ‘threskeia’ disappears from the Greek lexicon entirely until well into the Hellenistic period.

It seems never to have been used in Attic Greek (an important point for the elaboration of which, see upcoming discussion.). It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine why suddenly the word reappeared when it did, becoming eventually a fairly common word within the literary and inscriptional lexicon. It is impossible, of course, even probable, therefore, that ‘threskeia’ had been functioning in non-Attic dialects all along. … After ‘threskeia’ does reappear, in literature – for example, in Strabo, the first-century (B.C.E. and C.E.) geographer – it retains the overtones of “otherness” in one sense or another found in Herodotus.” (129-130); “In this sense, ‘threskeia’ overlaps some of the territory of Latin ‘superstitio’ as well, including especially such readings of that word that incorporates ‘superstitio’ as excessive ‘religio’ and ‘superstitio’ as spirit possession and finally ‘superstitio’ as referring to foreign cults and interdictions.” (131); passage from a Hellenistic source on a queen – “Here, threskeia clearly is an emotion of reverence, fearful honoring, once again reminiscent of ancient Latin ‘religio’. 

In any case, as shall be seen over and over (especially in Josephus), the emotions of ‘threskeia’ always issue in particular acts and disciplines. The foreignness here is marked explicitly. It is very important, moreover, that here the emotion of ‘threskeia’ is directed toward a “royal title” instead of a god. The correct generalization seems not to be, as found in the literature, that these barbarians deified their queen but rather that the practice of ‘threskeia’ did not know of this distinction at all. 

As noted earlier, ‘threskeia’ in pre-Christian writers very often means emotional inhibitions, prohibitions, “taboos,” similar (albeit not identical) to Latin ‘religio’. Although Latin ‘religiosus’, the adjective, can refer to one who shows too much ‘religio’, Latin has no noun from this root that refers to that state and uses for that ‘superstitio’. In Greek, on the other hand, the sense of too much ‘threskeia’ being referred to as ‘threskeia’ also, as well as ‘deisidaimonia’, is present in the texts, leaving examples of, therefore, foreign, strange, and especially excessive, unnecessary ritual practice in the contexts of this word. 

In both of these languages, the sense is that balance is good: Too much of a good thing leads to a bad thing. When ‘threskeia’ is used negatively, in sum, it is of the sacralizing behaviors of others, including others within, which the observer sees as dangerous, subversive, or foreign, motivated by nervous or excessive fear (‘deisidaimonia’) with or without altered states (‘goeteia’). What is fascinating is to observe that at least some of those “others” seem to use ‘threskeia’ to refer without pejorative tone as the name of “our” cult and practices. Such usages are limited largely, but not completely, to epigraphic evidence and to non-Attic Greek use. It is important to note that epigraphically, the word appears only in inscriptions from Asia Minor, Thrace, and adjoining (and ethnically closely related) Bythinia—nearly never from Attica, the Peloponnese, or Thessaly.” (132)

9. The ‘Threskeia’ of the Judaeans: Josephus and the New Testament

In Josephus’ writings ‘threskeia’ does not mark a sphere of the religious as opposed to the secular (138); ‘threskeia’ in the New Testament is generally unclear but certainly not “religion” in the modern sense; ‘threskeia’ in Philo; ‘threskeia’ in 4 Maccabees; ‘Ioudaismos’ is used in 4 Maccabees – “To be sure, ‘Ioudaismos’ appears in the text 4:26, but it has long been established that it is mistaken to translate there “Judaism,” as if the name of a “religion” since the term coined on the model of Greek ‘Hellenismos’ (loyalty to the Greek culture and language), ‘Medismos’ (acting like a Persian – and thus disloyal to the Greek culture and language) must mean loyalty to the Judaean cause and culture. But this has nothing to do with ‘threskeia’, which appears in another context and at another place in the text.” (148); Josephus is the writer who used the word ‘threskeia’ most frequently than any writer before the 4th century AD

Part II. Case Study: Josephus

10. Josephus without Judaism: Xomos, Eusebeia, Threskeia

“In Chapters 8 and 9, I have shown the complexity of the semantic range of the Greek word ‘threskeia’. It is especially important to recapitulate the point that this word refers to “cult” in both very negative and positive valuations, and these nuances are fairly neatly divided in the archive between two corpora—literary and epigraphic—with the literary material tending strongly toward the pole of associating ‘threskeia’ with ‘deisidaimonia’ and therefore the excessive, useless, and untrammeled in cultic behavior as opposed to ‘eusebeia’. 

The inscriptional material (from Thrace and its eastern neighbor, Bithynia) treats it more neutrally as “our own cultic behavior,” separating it from ‘deisidaimonia’ and associating it semantically with ‘eusebeia’. On the other hand, in the previous chapters, I introduce literary writers who use ‘threskeia’ in the aforesaid “positive” sense: notably, the first-century Judaean historian, Josephus. In this chapter, I continue to explore this writer who used this word ‘threskeia’ more than any other writer of antiquity. I propose to show how it is possible and distinctly advantageous to describe Josephus’ world entirely without using the concept of “religion” at all. 

Josephus, the son of Mattias, was one of the generals of the revolt of the Jews of Palestine against Rome in the first century. At a certain point in the war, he changed his mind and his colors, and attempting to convince his fellows of the hopelessness of the war and the likelihood of total destruction, he became a client of Vespasian the Roman general (later to be emperor) and of his son Titus (also a future emperor), spending the rest of his days (20 years) in Rome in a palace provided by the former and writing all his books there. He not only changed his mind but also his name: the new nomen, Flavius, honoring his new patrons. Josephus is always in a cultural situation of negotiation or mediation between loyalties, writing apologetically, as it were, to both his Judaean and Roman audiences at one and the same time. 

I argue that abandoning the very notion that there is such a thing as “religion” within Josephus’ cultural or imaginative world opens up possibilities for reading him complexly and understanding him richly that are foreclosed when we anachronistically separate different spheres. When Josephus speaks of the ideas, thoughts, ideologies of the Torah, he does not call them ‘Ioudaismos’ or the Judaean ‘threskeia’: Rather, he calls them “the philosophy of the sacred books.” When he refers to the enjoined and proscribed practices encoded in those books as well as in Judaean custom, he calls them “ancestral laws/customs,” and as I show, he calls the whole complex Nomos/nomoi. As does ancient Greek, Josephus, however, does have words that mean “cult,” “reverence,” “prohibitions,” especially—but not exclusively—with respect to God. One of these is ‘threskeia’. In the previous chapters, I show that no English word can possibly be used to translate Greek ‘threskeia’. 

There, I map the semantic range or occasions of usage of this word within a corpus of Greek texts stretching from Herodotus through the writings of such authors as Strabo and Plutarch to the writings of Hellenistic Jews, such as Philo, and Josephus, as well as observing its usage in a somewhat different sense in epigraphical materials from Thrace and Bithynia. I note in those chapters, moreover, a well-known gap in the attestation of this word from Herodotus until the first century B.C.E., and even then it is first attested in Strabo, from Pontus, and not in peninsular Greek. In this chapter, I would like to show that the word ‘threskeia’ enters into complex semantic relations in Josephus’ corpus with other words within its semantic field. The reason why it would seem—with one important exception—that such a study has not been undertaken until now is that on the assumption that ‘threskeia’ means “religion,” and that we know what “religion” is (even if “we” somehow can’t agree on a definition), what remains to investigate? Being released from the apprehension that there is a concept/word, “religion” in all (or even most, or even many) cultures, and having begun to see how complex a word ‘threskeia’ is semantically, the opportunity but also the ‘desideratum’ of an expansive study in the Josephan corpus becomes apparent. As Josephus scholar, Steve Mason, has written, “Although the word θρησκεία [threskeia] hardly occurs outside of Judaean or Christian Greek before Josephus, Josephus has it a remarkable 91 times.” 

This provides an incredible opportunity, of course, to study the semantics of this crucial word in one author, but also raises a riveting question: Why Josephus? Why so much there? The potential to learn a great deal about Josephus and his world from such an inquiry is palpable, if once again, one doesn’t paper it over with an anachronistic abstraction or beg the question. Josephus’ writings provide one of the best places to observe the multiple and shifting semantics of the word. One must consider, moreover, the possibility that a Greek word with a somewhat different or varying set of associations and connotations has been adapted as well as adopted to speak of a different culture’s (Israelite) conceptual world. Why, then, does Josephus suddenly use such a rare word in Greek literature with such frequency and range of nuance? 

Mason has offered an explanation: “Josephus also favours a noun that integrates ‘divine worship, ritual, cult, and piety’ (threskeia) and its cognate verb ‘to worship’. Though rarely used by non-Judaean writers the word group had some currency among other Judaean authors before Josephus picked it up. He found it singularly convenient for his claims about the Judaean disposition toward piety and worship.” Mason is careful not to confuse that integration with the production of a concept anything like modern “religion.” 

I shall show here, building on Mason and adding to his conclusions, that the word ‘threskeia’, even in Josephus, signifies a much more interesting complex of ideas that would be obscured by that covering abstraction, “religion.” Agreeing with Mason by and large in his interpretations of ‘threskeia’ in Josephus, I would like to essay a somewhat different explanation for its deployment by him: namely, that the word was not just employed by the historian to make claims about “the Judaean disposition toward piety and worship,” but to do work for him that was even more freighted than that. The heuristic question of this chapter will be why Josephus, among all the users of Hellenistic Greek up to and around his time, used the word ‘threskeia’ so frequently. 

The question is sharpened by connecting it with the results of the previous chapters in which it has been shown that ‘threskeia’ itself quite frequently carries negative connotations (or even denotations). The answer to this question—a question that reveals itself only when one “imagines no religion”—will, I reckon, reveal much about Josephus and his world that we would not have perceived otherwise.” (155-157); to criticize Josephus for not speaking like we do on religion is as incorrect as criticizing the Romans for the same thing; ‘nomos’ is often translated as “law” but it is broader than that to even mean “way of life” (158); ‘nomos’ could mean what we modern people call “political”, “religious”, “legal” without any distinction between these 3 modern thing in the works of Josephus (it is more muddled) (162); ‘threskeia’ can be used to express emotional dimensions and practice components

Conclusion: What You Find When You Stop Looking for What Isn’t There

The Consolations of Greek Tragedy VS the Terrors of Easter

The Tragic Hero always reinstates those in power, never builds a new World

David Bentley Hart writes on the difference between the Tragic and the Christian view of things :

....whereas the resurrection of Christ in a sense breaks the bonds of the social order that crucifies, so as to inaugurate a new history, a new city, whose story is told along the infinite axis of divine peace, the religious dynamism of Attic tragedy has the form of a closed circle; it reinforces the civic order it puts into question, by placing that order within a context of cosmic violence that demonstrates not only the limits but the necessity ofthe city's regime.

These irresoluble contradictions within moral order belong often to a civic order of injustice, which tragedy dissimulates by displacing the responsibility for civic violence to a metaphysical horizon of cosmic violence; the sacrificial structure of the polis is presented as the sacrificial order of the world.

Perhaps, however, it is just this mythos - this pagan metanarrative of ontological violence - that the Christian narrative has from its beginning rejected, and against which it must pose itself as an alternative wisdom. Greek tragedy, as a gnosis, a vision of truth, is a particularly alluring feature of a particular linguistic economy, a narrative of being according to which the cosmos is primordially a conflict of irreconcilable forces, embraced within the overarching violence of fate; and the wisdom it imparts is one of accommodation, resignation before the unsynthesizable abyss of being, a willingness on the part of the spectator to turn back toward the polis as a refuge from the turmoils of a hostile universe, reconciled to its regime and its prudential violences, its martial logic.

This is the opiate of tragic consciousness, its place in a sacrificial economy-its power to stabilize civic order through a brief but enchanting dalliance with the powers that both sustain and threaten that order. Tragedy is never a revolutionary art form: its peculiar artistry lies in making it appear as if the polis has been momentarily invaded by the world's circumambient chaos (which it has repelled), even though everything that occurs in the course of the drama is contained within the rigid lineaments of Apollonian order. Its dramatic effect, that is, arises from the cataclysm it seems to portend; and its special enchantment lies in making its very orderly metaphysics of violence seem disordered and mysterious; but it is purest speculative stability. All is Apollo, to invert Schelling's and Nietzsche's formula; Dionysus is the bright and pitiless glare of reason and prudence.

Tragedy might well represent the most pronounced instance in Greek religion of that mystification of violence that sustains the sacred order of pagan society, the consecration of social violence as a restraint of cosmic violence, natural and divine. This is why it cannot preserve moral thought against the lure of ideology, but can only preserve a particular ideology against critique: its salubrious disenchantment is meant to mesmerize us with necessity's dark majesty.

...the Christian narrative proves resistant to a tragic reading: theology must insist upon "historicizing" evil, treating it as the superscribed text of a palimpsest, obscuring the aboriginal goodness of creation; Christian thought, which conceives of difference within being as primordially an ordination of peace, capable of being sustained within unforeclosable complications of harmony, radically resituates all things (even, ultimately, pain, alienation, and death) within its greater story of creation and redemption, and so can never reconcile itself to any wisdom whose premise is the ontological necessity of violence. 

In the plays of Euripides someone often dies on behalf of the polis, heroically (which is also to say sacrificially); and it is just this gesture of exclusion, reappropriated by the polis under the form of a heroic decision that affirms the order of society, that is the very core of the tragic.

But from the vantage of Christian thought, the motion of exclusion, when demystified, is shown to subserve a sacrificial regime whose mechanisms are justified only by way of just this heroic mythology: in the light of Easter, which is the Father's verdict in favor of the crucified and his condemnation of the powers that crucify, Christ can finally be seen only as dying against the pagan polis, as. the one the city kills and the Father raises up in defiance of civilization's most essential economic gesture. Nor is Christ excluded like Oedipus, as the one who purifies society by venturing forth into the abyss, in the interests of society; he dies as a criminal, forcibly excluded, and his resurrection forever associates the divine with the realm of the excluded, the "impure;' the waste.




The resurrection unsettles (indeed, irreparably disrupts) the analogy between cosmic and civic violence; it shows Christ's self-donation to be an infinite motion, indifferent to the boundary between polis and chaos; it "untells" the tale by which power sustains and justifies itself, breaks open the closed circle of exchange and sublation, overcomes totality through the sheer exceedingness of an infinite that is beauty.

Tragedy universalizes the form of the splendid hero: and even so, he is excluded, pushed to the margins; his suffering cannot inaugurate a new civitas, but only restores the balance of the old order; he ventures into the void, and so affirms once again that beyond the city walls there is only void.

But Christ, who suffers outside the gate, makes of his death an act of inclusion that begins the world anew; his resurrection erases the boundary between city and waste, life and death, pure and impure, exclusion and inclusion, by simply passing these distinctions by in his infinite motion toward the Father.

...the Gospels prove at the last irreconcilably subversive of this aesthetic; Peter's grief over his denial of Christ marks an irrevocable departure from the staid representations of antique order, and announces from the beginning Christianity's tendency to "spill" the tragic out, to overturn the lovely vessel that appeared so splendid standing upright on the dionysia, at the unmoving center of the polis.

If any suffering is worthy of attention, if divine solace is intended for such as these (to recall Nietzsche's declarations of repugnance), then tragedy as such is evacuated of its sacred func- tion: it is no longer a ritual mediation between city and cosmos, nor can it be taken uncritically in its depictions of a special greatness enmeshed in the toils of "fate;' its tales of a unique Mea that makes glamorous the violences that afflict it. Tragedy is not, in its origins, an art of disenchantment; it does not disabuse the spectators of their mythic expectations or universalizing inclinations by bringing vision back from the horizon of the absolute to the particularity of suffering; as Nietzsche understood, only the god suffers.

...metaphysical solace is precisely what the tragic is. It turns attention not toward the one who suffers, but to the sublime backdrop against which the drama is played out; it assures the spectator that this is how things are, this is the constitution of the universe, and that justice is strife; tragic wisdom is the wisdom of resignation and consent, a wisdom that is too prudent to rebel against what is fixed in the very fabric of being, and that refuses to suffer inordinately, enraged by death or resentful of civic order. Tragedy legitimates a particular regime of law, violence, and war: it teaches that μoipa places and displaces us, and so leads us to a serene and chastened acceptance of where we are placed and how we are displaced; tragedy resists every motion outward, beyond the sentineled frontier, and reinforces the stable foundation of the totality.

Christianity, however, feeds upon a different wisdom, a defiant, Jewish wisdom that insists upon an act of affirmation far removed from the resigned serenity of tragic consciousness: insanely, perhaps, it enjoins a love of creation that will not be reconciled to the loss of what is created but enacts a double motion, an affirmation of the goodness of what is and an expectation of action by God to rescue this wholly good creation from the violences that enslave it.

A recognition of the true universality of suffering, of its endless particularity and the infinite gravity of its every instance (no matter how base the sufferer), is a Jewish, not an Attic, accomplishment, and it leads inevitably to a prophetic outcry, a call for a reconciliation that is also redemption, a demand for divine justice; Israel is always - and always ever more - in rebellion against the wisdom of totality.

The wisdom of Israel - expressed in the added ending to the book of Job, or in Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones - lies in its growing awareness that God is the God of justice and election, and that his goodness and the goodness of creation can be affirmed only through faith in a future that overcomes all endings; this is the wisdom of an outcry, which begins as a low and plaintive threnody, arrives at its first aston- ished dramatic peak in the aqedah, and then acquires confidence, even audacity, until it can say that God is God only if he confirms his glory in resurrection.

...far from failing to glimpse behind evil a transcendent horizon, a chthonian depth, Christian thought has simply always denied that such a horizon or such a depth belongs to being in any but a contingent fashion. The cross dispelled the seduc- tions of the tragic by revealing an infinite gulf between the God of creation and the power of death (a gulf, that is, that is not spanned by sacrifice), by emptying the tragic of its heroic pathos and false beauty, and - most importantly- by opening out into a resurrection that reveals love as the source and end of creation.

It is from Israel that Christianity learns the grammar of charity, its passionate commitment to creation and its revulsion before injustice, rather than resignation before the magnitude of evil. Christian love erupts from the empty tomb, and so must always be in rebellion against all tragic "profundities:'

Christ's resurrection transgresses the orderly metaphysics that makes negation a tragic or dialectical moment; for theology, then, the Otaμa of the crucifixion is never translated into contemplative repose (self, "meaningfulness:' eleos and phobos, Geist), because the serenity of every tragic representation has been dis- rupted by a sudden, unanticipated, inassimilable declaration of divine glory.

Christian thought is obliged to remain bound to Israel's cry for eschatological justice; the Jewish "unhappy consciousness;' knowing the contingency of finite existence but refusing to submerge the beauty of the beloved in the indeterminate flux of "nature's" chaos, continues to have the mad audacity to desire back what is lost, not as inward consolation, but in the concrete exteriority of the gift. After the violence of crucifixion (which is the last drama totality can enact, its final word, its boundary), the resurrection is aesthetically (which is to say, historically) an- other thing; he who was dead is - literally- not dead now; this is an act of rebellion. It is not the beauty of the cross, but of the one crucified, that is rescued at Easter; God's judgment vindicates Christ, his obedience unto death, but not the crucifIXion.

If tragedy seeks to recuperate what is lost in death by making the particular instance of death an occasion for the disclosure of the god, then the Chris- tian story stands starkly opposed to tragedy precisely because it views the death of the beloved with far greater gravity and cannot rest content with tragedy's economic optimism, its certainty regarding the credit stored up in the absolute.

Christ is God as a particular man, who only in returning exceeds the limit set by death; he exceeds also the economy of death, though, by failing to become an abstract security reserved within an abstract infinite, and reveals the infinite to be instead endlessly determinate, boundlessly beautiful, serving no economy at all, but embracing all things.

Dionysus may reassemble his torn limbs, but only because he is one in being divided, he is violence, he lives in the death of the particular; Christ, however, is a rabbi, is indeed God as a rabbi, and so is obliter- ated - becomes no one -'-- unless the Father who speaks him speaks him anew as the illimitable rhetoric and form and appeal of the gift.

The resurrection, then, shows the way to no truth within us (existential, tragic, Dionysian, or what have you), but declares anew, with the newest inflection, the glory of God in the beauty of his creatures, and in such a way as to leave us no self-knowledge at all; our story has been interrupted, our tragic narrative of self-recovery overturned.

Theology forbidden to extract any metaphysical comfort from the cross because the violence of crucifixion has been demystified; the crucifixion must not be subjected to the sacrificial logic of speculation, as it is, say, in any "death of God" theology (which recuperates the meaning of this death as the abolition of divine transcendence), or in any theology that makes of the cross a necessary moment for God, a taking into himself of suffering and death (which attributes to suffering and death a primordial autonomy, with which God is obliged to come to terms), because Easter unsettles every hermeneutics of death, every attempt to make death a place of meaning.

Rather than seeing the resurrection as a speculative (that is, dialectical) tension that eternalizes the cross, theology must recognize it as a reversal of the narrative of violence that makes crucifixion seem meaningful. In the self-oblation of Christ (which is the entire motion of his life) God indeed comprehends suffering and death, but only as a finite darkness exceeded- and conquered- by an infinite light; God's infinity embraces death by passing it by as though it is nothing at all and by making it henceforth a place of broken limits.

The only way to avoid the violence of making Christ the object of a speculative sacrifice, in the interest of meta- physical solace, is by affirming that the resurrection occurs apart from the crucifixion, after the crucifixion, in time, and that it therefore vindicates not the cross but the Jew who died there.

In the light of Easter, all the sacrifices totality makes are seen to be meaningless, an offense before God, disclosing no deeper truths about being; the system of sacrifice is a tautology, a practice that justifies itself through further practice; but what the totality is willing to sacrifice on behalf of metaphysical solace is what God raises up. Because of the resurrection, it is impossible to be reconciled to coercive or natural violence, to ascribe its origins to fate or cosmic order, to employ it prudentially; as difficult as it may be to accept, all violence, all death, stands under judgment as that which God has and will overcome.

Only in the light of this impossible desire for the one who is lost, this insane expectation of a restoration of the gift, and this faith in what is revealed at Easter is it morally possible for Christian thought to regard the interval between oneself and the lost beloved as potentially an inflection of divine rejoicing, a distance of peace: not by way of some sublation of the beloved, nor according to the serene proportions of tragic wisdom, but by way of the Holy Spirit's ingenuity in resurrection, his ability to sustain the theme of God's love (the gift given) over the most dissonant passages, now under the form of hope."

- From Beauty of the Infinite