Pagans and Christians in the City
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154. G. K. Chesterton, “What I Saw in America: The Resurrection of Rome Sidelights,” in G. K. Chesterton Collected Works, vol. 21 (San Francisco: Ignatius, [1922] 1990), 45.
CHAPTER 4
Believing in Paganism
The previous chapter described how religion pervaded Roman society and served to consecrate the city, not only sustaining its material prosperity and military dominance, but also endowing the city with a “shining beauty and grace.”1 Roman religion was, as we saw, populated by gods beyond counting. The worship of this vast and teeming pantheon occurred in and through a myriad of temples, shrines, public sacrifices and processions, theatrical performances, and regular solemn consultations with the auguries and oracles. The gods manifested themselves as well, and were honored, through sexuality—sexual ecstasy being understood as “the mysterious, indwelling presence of the gods.”2
In our survey of Roman religion, however, we mostly passed by in silence a question that modern students might think crucial. Did Romans actually believe in all these gods and goddesses? Did they think that the gods were real, and that the stories about them were, well, for lack of a better word . . . true? We passed over this question, but we cannot simply ignore it, because the question is important for our purposes; in attempting to answer it, we will be pointed toward a deeper understanding of what pagan religiosity consisted of. And that understanding will in turn be vital to our larger objective, which is to grasp what it might mean, today, to confront the choice T. S. Eliot described—the choice between a “Christian society” and “modern paganism.”
So in this chapter we will ask: (How) did pagans believe? We will see that the answer to the question cannot be a simple yes or no, or even a slightly less simple “some did and some didn’t.” The answer will need to take into account not only the differences in belief and disbelief from one class and one person to another, but also what French historian Paul Veyne calls “the modalities of belief.”3
Despite these differences, we will see that many and perhaps most pagans did manage to maintain, in one form or another, a belief in the gods that served to consecrate their shining city. Sometimes their believing took a simple and straightforward shape; sometimes it adopted more sophisticated or subtle or perhaps contorted forms. These various approaches strengthened Roman religion by providing subjects with different strategies or “modalities” for maintaining it. But the approaches also conflicted with, and thus undermined, each other, thereby rendering the city’s religion vulnerable. Vulnerable to the decay of belief, and hence to competing bodies of belief—like Christianity.
Pagan believing, in short, was at once a necessary, a robust, but also a variegated and precarious enterprise.
Was Believing Necessary?
First, though, we should notice a preliminary objection. The objection suggests that the question we have raised in this chapter—whether Romans actually believed in the pagan gods—is misconceived. Thus, some historians assert that for the Romans, the issues of truth and of belief somehow did not present themselves in any serious way. “It is a mistake to overemphasize any question of the participants’ belief or disbelief in the efficacy of ritual actions,” J. A. North argues. “These rituals are not saying things, but doing things.”4 In a similar vein, Robert Wilken observes that “in the cities of the ancient world . . . one did not speak of ‘believing in the gods’ but of ‘having gods.’ ”5
Maybe. The Romans were famous for performing ingenious feats of engineering. The celebrated Pantheon—the temple to all the gods—continues to exhibit the largest internally unsupported dome in the world. Did the Romans also manage to perform the ingenious intellectual feat of maintaining religious practices devoted to the pantheon of gods that were internally unsupported by actual belief?
Later thinkers have sometimes aspired to such a condition. Questions of belief and truth polarize, and sometimes paralyze; better, if we could manage it, just to, well, live—leaving questions of belief and truth to philosophers or scientists or whomever.6 And yet in modern society, matters of belief seem always to be obtruding. The philosophizing of someone like John Rawls, as we will see in a later chapter, seeks to overcome this obstacle and to achieve a kind of civic harmony by distancing civic life from questions of truth, or of Truth—by making truth a less pressing imperative. If the Romans managed to avoid or deflect such questions, we might well envy them.
But did they? Could they?
It is surely true, as we will see in the next chapter, that Roman religion was not concerned with matters of truth in a precise propositional sense in the way Christianity later was. Pagans did not exhaust themselves in formulating creeds and ferreting out heresies.7 It may also be that, then as now, most people manage to go about the duties and rituals and performances that life thrusts upon them—upon us—by complacently or carefully assuming, without worrying overmuch, that whatever needs to be true for our lives to make sense is true. The performances have to be done in any case, so what good could it do to worry about whether the premises that inform those performances are true or not? Perhaps in this spirit, Livy relates the ancient episodes of divine guidance and intervention with an air of nonjudgmental detachment; he occasionally notices the question of factuality—did this divine intervention really happen?—but seemingly sees no need to adopt any definite conclusion one way or the other.
And yet it is difficult just to banish the question of truth altogether. The question is always there, lurking in the corners, waiting to come out and confront us. Our practices and performances work on implicit presuppositions. Those presuppositions can be brought into the open and subjected to scrutiny. And circumstances can occur that provoke such scrutiny—perhaps the appearance of an accosting Socrates who thinks “the unexamined life is not worth living,” but more likely just the mundane frustrations or failures of life that will sometimes force us to ask, “What am I doing? Why? Does this make any sense?”
In the case of Roman religion more specifically, didn’t “having gods” presuppose a belief that the gods . . . existed?8 And didn’t the enormous investment of time and resources in ritual obeisance to the gods presuppose that the gods were real, and responsive? How could the Romans entrust crucial political and military decisions to the auspices without believing that the auspices were efficacious as a means of discerning the divine agenda? And if the decisions or battles went wrong, as they sometimes did, how could Romans suppress the occasional question or doubt?
So it is hard to imagine that Romans could entirely preserve a cozy obliviousness to such presuppositions and their factuality, or lack thereof. And indeed, we have already noticed the unhappy king Tarquin, who questioned the efficacy of the auguries, and the ill-fated general Publius Claudius, who doubted the reliability of the sacred chickens.9 We will shortly see how Romans of a philosophical temperament could subject polytheistic religion to searching examinations.
In short, the issues of truth and belief surely did arise—not every day, not for everyone, but to some people, sometimes. Much in the way that such issues arise today. So it seems that we may proceed with our question. Did Romans actually believe in the gods? In what sense?
Ignorant Believers, Cultured Despisers?
One recurring answer to that question is that the uneducated and gullible masses of Romans believed in the gods (and on that basis acquiesced in rule of the governing authorities who claimed the support of those gods), while more educated Romans were skeptics who found it best to leave the masses in their credulous ignorance. Enlightened thinkers of the eighteenth century like David Hume and Edward Gibbon often approached their own world in that way. Gibbon attributed a prudently concealed skepticism to contemporaries whom he respected, even against their own contrary professions10—they may have said they believed, but surely they couldn’t really believe—and he contemplated the project of “writing a dialogue of the dead in which Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire should mutually acknowledge the danger of exposing an old superstition to the cont
empt of the blind and fanatic multitude.”11 So it would be natural for Gibbon to project a similar attitude back onto the Romans—and he did. Gibbon commented acidly that “the various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.”12
True, even the more philosophical class of citizens might actively and publicly participate in the religious rituals and pageantry. But such participation did not signify actual belief, Gibbon thought; rather, these more enlightened celebrants “concealed the sentiments of an Atheist under the sacerdotal robes.”13
Gibbon’s interpretation would have deflationary implications for Eliot’s thesis, and hence for our overall inquiry. That interpretation basically equates paganism with the mythical stories about the gods, and perhaps with some of the public rituals dedicated to those gods—the sacrificing of bulls to Jove, for example. Even in ancient times, only the ignorant could believe in such stories and sacrifices, and by now no one believes them. Eliot’s “modern paganism” would thus become a virtual impossibility.
We will come across candidates for whom Gibbon’s interpretation may seem to fit. Other historians, however, have found the sort of dismissive interpretation favored by Gibbon facile, and implausible.14 J. A. North observes that “the idea that the whole college of pontifices and the whole Roman senate were engaged in a religious charade carried out for the benefit of the superstitious masses seems as unlikely as any hypothesis can be.”15 And just as it would be absurd to say flatly that educated people today believe such and such in matters of religion—in fact, educated people believe and disbelieve all manner of different and contradictory things—it is implausible to attribute any uniform belief to Romans of the classical world. Ramsay MacMullen observes that “as anyone would expect, the spectrum of attested beliefs is very wide even among the educated classes.”16
This diversity should hardly come as a surprise. Asked what Americans today believe in matters of religion, we would have to say that both the forms of religion and the modes of belief vary drastically. “Religion” (assuming the term is meaningful, as some doubt) is not uniform or all of a piece; it is a vastly diverse phenomenon, ranging from the highly structured theology and offices and liturgies of traditional Catholicism to the more freewheeling and free-form spiritualities of New Age crystal-gazers. And people believe and disbelieve in different forms of religion in different ways; some believe in a fairly literal sense, some in a more abstract or metaphorical or sophisticated (or perhaps sophistical) sense, some not at all. In a similar way, Roman religion took diverse forms and operated on different cultural and intellectual levels; the modes of believing or disbelieving in these different forms of religion surely differed as well. As we will see.
The Central Dilemma
So then, can we make any useful generalizations at all about Roman religious beliefs? Acknowledging the diversity but recognizing the simplification necessary for any summary presentation, we might helpfully adopt a distinction proposed in the first century BC by the encyclopedic scholar Marcus Varro (later described by Lactantius as one “than whom no man of greater learning ever lived, even among the Greeks, much less among the Latins”).17 Varro distinguished among three forms or levels of Roman religion: the mythical, the civic, and the natural or philosophical.18 Varro himself was dismissive of the popular myths portraying the gods as lascivious, violent, jealous, and whimsical; these, he thought, were “ignoble tales” and “lying fables.”19 But he treated the civic and the philosophical forms of religion with respect.
Varro’s opinions were probably common among educated Romans. Literalistic belief was for the “crude untaught raw yokels”20 (MacMullen’s description of the condescending opinion of the masses held by educated Romans). But even elite Romans typically revered or at least publicly supported the sacrifices and the auguries. And they affirmed that Roman successes had depended on and would continue to depend upon the favor of the gods. We will see specific examples of this combination of skepticism and affirmation as we proceed.
So the myths were false, at least if taken literally, but the religion of the sacrifices and auguries was . . . what? True? Necessary? Insulated against open public denial? In attempting to reject the mythical religion while preserving the civic religion on which the city depended, educated Romans faced a kind of dilemma. After all, the gods of the myths were the same deities to whom temples and sacrifices were dedicated. So then, how could the gods of the stories be fictional but the gods of the sacrifices be real? And real in what sense, if not in the sense conveyed in the ancient stories?
Augustine would later argue that “mythical” and “civic” religion were not severable. The gods of the myths—Jupiter, Apollo, Venus, and company—were the same gods who were propitiated in the sacrifices and consulted in the oracles. If they were unreal in one place, they were unreal in the other place as well. So if mythical religion was false and pernicious, civic religion was equally false and pernicious.21 Augustine maintained that the Stoic philosopher Seneca had understood and declared the point22 (though others have doubted Augustine’s interpretation of Seneca);23 the bishop contended that Varro had also understood this point perfectly well, and had dissembled in pretending to respect the civic religion.24 In this respect, Augustine’s interpretation was not unlike Gibbon’s.
Maybe Gibbon and Augustine were right. Varro and like-minded Romans didn’t admit as much, but then of course they couldn’t or wouldn’t confess their true views: that was Gibbon’s and Augustine’s point. Maybe Romans like Varro simply lacked the courage to profess what they really believed—or rather disbelieved; Augustine suggested as much.25 Or maybe it wasn’t a lack of courage that stopped Varro and his class from asserting the falsity of the civic religion, but rather prudence, and a concern for the public good. If Rome was the source of order and stability in the world, and if Roman governance depended on a general popular belief in the gods, wouldn’t a prudent, public-spirited citizen avoid subverting such belief? That was Gibbon’s suggestion, actually; his interpretation reflects a curious mixture of cynicism and charity.
This charitable-cynical interpretation might be right. But it overlooks other, more sophisticated or subtle alternatives—alternatives that might offer a way out of the dilemma, and that at least some educated Romans seem to have embraced. We might describe two such leading alternatives as philosophical religion—this was the third category of Roman religion recognized by Varro—and civic fideism. These alternatives emerge in a treatise by Cicero called On the Nature of the Gods (a book addressed, incidentally, to the Brutus of et tu Brute fame in slightly happier days than the ones Shakespeare would narrate in Julius Caesar).26
The Philosophy of (Roman) Religion
In the treatise, Cicero mostly presents himself as a youthful recorder of a dialogue about religion that had occurred years earlier among three older men. But the treatise begins with a sort of prologue in which Cicero explains that “on this question, the pronouncements of highly learned men are so varied and so much at odds with each other that inevitably they strongly suggest . . . that the Academics [i.e., Skeptics] have been wise to withhold assent on matters of such uncertainty.”
Most philosophers have stated that gods exist, the most likely view to which almost all of us are led by nature’s guidance. But Protagoras expressed his doubts about it, and Diagoras of Melos and Theodorus of Cyrene believed that gods do not exist at all. As for those who have claimed that they do exist, their views are so varied and at loggerheads with each other that to list their opinions would be an endless task. Many views are presented about the forms that gods take, where they are to be found and reside, and their manner of life; and there is total disagreement and conflict among philosophers concerning them. (1.1, p. 3)
Despite this description-defying diversity, the ensuing dialogue conveys what Cicero evidently regarded as two of the most eligible alternatives, expounded in the
exchange by a Stoic, Quintus Lucilius Balbus, and by an Academic or Skeptic, Gauis Aurelius Cotta, who was also a priest (and who was later elected consul). A third position, that of Gaius Velleius, an Epicurean, is dispatched so decisively, and with Velleius’s apparent acquiescence, that it seems not to be a serious candidate.
Balbus, the Stoic, peremptorily rejects the various stories about boisterous and lascivious gods and goddesses as “idiotic,” as “superstition” and “sacrilegious fables” (2.63, p. 69). In this respect, he follows Varro. He follows Varro as well, however, in supporting the civic religion. Thus, Balbus insists on the necessity and virtue of divination, deploring what he perceives as recent backsliding in the practice (2.8, 10, pp. 50–52; 2.163, p. 106).
In denouncing mythic religion while praising civic religion, Balbus thereby squarely encounters the challenge just noted: How can skepticism about the mythic gods be reconciled with respect for the gods—seemingly the same gods—inherent in civic piety?
Balbus’s response combines two strategies: he offers a philosophical defense of the existence of the gods together with a philosophical reinterpretation of the character or mode of their existence.
In his philosophical defense, Balbus presents a series of ostensible proofs that the gods are real. Cumulatively, he thinks, the proofs are irresistible: “the existence of the gods is so crystal clear that I regard anyone who denies it as out of his mind” (2.44, p. 62).
Some of Balbus’s proofs appeal to religious experience. “Voices of Fauns have often been overheard,” he contends, “and apparitions of gods have often been seen; these have compelled each and everyone who is not dull-witted or sacrilegious to admit that gods were at hand” (2.6, p. 49). Other proffered proofs are more logical in character; some of these resemble familiar proofs later developed by Christian thinkers and sometimes called the ontological argument27 and the argument from design.28