Download PDF | Stanley Stowers - History and the Study of Religion_ The Ancient Mediterranean as a Test Case-Oxford University Press (2024).
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History and the Study of Religion
How does one understand religion? Can one explain religion? How does one understand the craf and discipline of the historian? How can one best bring together the study of religion with the craf and discipline of the historian? I am a historian who works in the study of religion and believe that the present intellectual moment ofers enormous, in some ways unprecedented, opportunities in the study of both religion and historiography. But at the same time, difculties and dangers loom together with the opportunities. My specialty and prime set of examples lie in the study of ancient Mediterranean religion, if indeed there is something that can rightly be called “Mediterranean religion” or even called “religion.” Many specialists in the study of religion and also many of those who study ancient cultures doubt, or even reject outright, religion as a cross-historical category, on the one hand, and on the other, anything common about religion across the ancient Mediterranean.1 And some cognitive scientists who against religion specialists have argued for the centrality of gods to religion, then agree with the skeptics that religion is not a coherent social object, a social kind.
I will argue that long discredited forms of antirealism and untenable anthropocentrism haunt both groups. Among other areas, I work in Christianity and Judaism. Do they belong to Mediterranean religion? One can easily see how coming to an understanding of what religion is and what Mediterranean religion is forms key questions. I will argue that religion is a robust realistic entity, a social kind, and that ancient Mediterranean religion even with all of its great diversity operated with some key common principles. It is no secret that Christianity and Judaism have presented themselves as unique and essentially untouched by an inferior and degenerate religiosity that characterized everyone else in the Mediterranean. History looks diferent when one dispenses with such normatively heavy freight and situates the two within rather than outside of Mediterranean religion.
One source for the opportunities comes from striking developments in the biological and cognitive sciences that present new ways of understanding human beings and human cultures. Among other seemingly solid fndings, cognitive psychology has shown that our traditional folk and academic ways of understanding how reasoning and the mind work is from moderately to wildly misleading. Tese fndings in key regards based on experimental research should also be ways of bringing discipline to history and the study of religion. Te fndings should suggest important constraints on historical work. Te “should” here impels me to go to areas of philosophy that have seen intensive investigation of how inquiry in the accepted areas of modern knowledge does and should take place and how the areas in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities do and should relate or not relate to each other. In Chapter 1 I argue that only realist approaches to the study of religion can succeed and I show the dead end of antirealist scholarship about religion.
Chapter 3 outlines the epistemic theory of social kinds that springs from such realism, and in Chapter 4 I lay out my theory of religion as a social kind. Te historian who fnds social kinds useful needs cogent and fruitful social theory more broadly. Recent work in philosophy regarding social ontology has made major breakthroughs that hold the promise of breaching the impasses in social theory that have long bedeviled the social sciences, including history. I will also argue that the cognitive science of religion needs social theory based on advances in social ontology instead of relying on the folk intuition that the cognitivists otherwise disparage. Chapters 5 and 6 treat social theory about religion and the contribution of the new ontological thought that allows not just an epistemic but also a constitutive account of religion as a social kind. My daunting limitations force me to think about the opportunities and dangers mostly from the historiography of the ancient Mediterranean. Here the last forty years or so seem to have opened up truly critical approaches that break out of highly established and almost unquestionable molds.
Tis generalization, I believe, applies to the best work in the study of ancient Judaism, ancient Christianity, and wider Mediterranean religion. Te work on the Lares and the proposals of Jörg Rüpke that I discuss below illustrate these critical approaches for Roman religion and religion in the Roman Empire. Most of this new work fts well with my theory of ancient Mediterranean religion. Just when such idols of Western historical thinking as monotheism, ethical monotheism, world religions, the evolution of morality, the axial age, and many more seem to have been decisively discredited by patient and detailed historical work, many of those well described as evolution-of-culture scholars have taken up the old ideas with little critical historical sense or with what seem to be outright normative and ideological motives. To be clear, I am not and do not want to claim that all of those who take the new approaches inspired by the mind sciences and Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory have made these mistakes. As claimed above, some of this work gives historians invaluable resources and compelling fndings about religion. Indeed, I will argue that good historical scholarship must take a Neo-Darwinian view that accepts the critiques of the traditional and intuitive ideas of mind and culture that historians instinctively use.
It comes down to this: On one side, the historians need the experimentally confrmed fndings of the biological and mind sciences, and on the other side, the cognitive and evolutionary experts who want to apply that work to history need the best and most critical work of the historians and not ideological history from above. Each needs the “corrections” of the other. To be sure, both the cognitive sciences/evolutionary theory and truly critical historical work on religion are areas of rather recent work-in-progress. From many who professionally study religion (mostly in humanities faculties), one constantly hears that religion is only an arbitrary social construction of the modern West. As some of these writers like to say, “religion is not out there.” Religion has no reality beyond a category and some patterns of rhetoric that intellectuals and folk in the west have used to cover a miscellany of supposed characteristics and practices arbitrarily thrown together for ideological purposes. Such antirealism about the social has for good reasons died out in most areas in the academy, but lingers in religious studies, language departments, and some shrinking corners of cultural anthropology. I will argue that no robust program of research about religion can take place with such antirealist assumptions.
Indeed, such antirealism if appropriated in method and theory by the wider academy would bring explanatory research to a grinding halt. Te antirealist philosophy underlying the “religion-is-notout-there” approaches needs to be brought into the open and critiqued, as I attempt in Chapter 3. And regarding critique, I fnd much to like in David Deutsch’s defnition of bad philosophy: It is “philosophy that is not only false, but actively prevents the growth of other knowledge.”2 Deutsch was thinking particularly of the instrumentalism (a form of antirealism) in physics following from Niels Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics that long hobbled the feld, but I think that Deutsch’s maxim applies also to the study of religion. Today’s proponents of antirealism about religion typically come out of a tradition of so-called poststructuralism that has formed mostly in the English-speaking academy as an appropriation of mid-twentieth-century French writers, but writers radically decontextualized from the philosophical and academic histories that give sense to their work. Strangely, many in departments of religious studies not only claim that religion does not exist as any more than an idea but also want to have nothing to do with gods and similar beings in their research, if for varied reasons. On these views, religion, even if considered real, and the notion “religion” have nothing essentially to do with God or gods. Religion is about something else such as power, the organization of meaning as a whole, ultimate concern, transcendence, the moral instinct, moral rationality, the absolute of reason, the intuitive essence of human feeling, “what is most important for humans,” the organization of value in culture, social functions, the symbolization of “the social,” and on and on. Ironically, it is those who have studied religion from the cognitive sciences with experimental and other evidence about how religious thought works who have robustly defended the idea that religion and religions are centrally about gods and similarly imagined beings.
Te following chapters seek to show why and how religion ought to be understood realistically as a social kind by those who study it and applies the approach to the study of ancient Mediterranean religion and especially early Christianity. Developing the theory to ft Mediterranean religion, however, requires resisting certain barriers to historical understanding and explanation. Tese barriers as building blocks for traditional Christian and western European history consist primarily of some ruling concepts and some methods of constructing “history” and tradition that yield myths of Western origins. Concepts that obstruct include monotheism, worship, community, paganism, the big bang theory of Christian origins, the age of martyrdom, and the triumph of morally superior religion and society (the hierarchy of cultures). Te topics are far too big to adequately treat here, but I hope to chart directions in research that might prove helpful in treating them.
Te obstructing methods, though instantiated in ways particular to the topics just noted, can be understood as closely related to problems long aficting modern attempts at critical historiography, sometimes called “history from above” or “from the elites.” Tese amount to particular ways of privileging a canon of literarily transmitted sources that represent the thought, norms, fantasies, and paradigmatic stories created by a proverbial 2 percent of the population. Tis thought might or might not be to a greater or lesser extent distributed through the larger societies in public and mental representations with varying degrees of acceptance and resistance. Te methods usually obscure the varying degrees of acceptance and the resistance, and sometimes attribute the resistance to shadowy groups described as morally and religiously evil. I will illustrate this problem in some detail with concrete cases. Approaches inspired by the model of epidemiology informed by cognitive psychology present the only way I know to deeply and critically counter the myths and methods.3 Mere conceptual analysis and supposedly critical or subversive forms of historiography fail.
As the metaphor of epidemiology indicates, the approach seeks to discover the distribution of cultural items through societies and the mechanisms that shape patterns of distribution. We lack the evidence from antiquity to robustly carry out epidemiological approaches, but theory informed by the approach and the evidence that does exist can guide the historian. Stress must fall on one point: Tese stories of Western origins are even today normative and unquestionable for many millions of people. One narrative features a Judaism that appeared in the alien world of West Asian and Mediterranean polytheism but was then perfected by Christianity. Both “religions” were empowered by a unique monotheistic religiosity. At the irresistible beating heart of those historical innovations were vastly superior forms of religion, morality, and social formation that easily humiliated and destroyed polytheistic Mediterranean religion. With frst intimations in Judaism’s supposed ofer of monotheism and morally good lives to millions, Christianity suddenly appeared so as to perfect the message with a power that swept the world like a raging wildfre. Polytheists with their crassly materialistic religion and incessant moral depravity were unable to resist the vast superiority of the new religion, although most Jews stubbornly hung onto their old inferior and problematic version of monotheism. Or alternatively on a minority account, Christianity corrupted the pure monotheism to which Judaism remained faithful.
Tis deeply entrenched mythology provides some clues as to why so much scholarship on religion does not take seriously the centrality of gods in religion. Kant, the great philosopher, and Emil Durkheim and Max Weber, founders of dominant approaches to the study of religion and of sociology, did not think that gods were central or essential to religion. All three took for granted the idea of historical progression to “ethical monotheism.” Te later notion supposedly involved the shedding of local irrational conceptions of gods and mythical ideas to be replaced by a rational conception of one transcendent god that opened the way for modernity and science. Religion had to be about something more serious than the many palpable and approachable gods of “primitive cultures” that had become inconceivable in advanced civilization. But many other factors also have favored the lack of interest in all but the big and ofcial gods or of “utter transcendence,” whatever that is, and neglect of everyday religiosity. One of these historical factors concerns not so much the prejudices of scholars, although those prejudices and the historical factor ofen conspire together, but stems from the kinds of historical evidence for types of religion. Could it be that kinds of religiosity practiced by millions was also of little or no interest to the writers of most ancient literary sources and even held in contempt by many?
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