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.
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.
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
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
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