Battle Royal
In 1972, Italian-Hungarian historian of religions Angelo Brelich published “Ad Philologos”, a brilliantly scathing review of a book on Dionysus in archaic Greek poetry (Privitera 1970) in which he decried the general ignorance of method and theory in the study of religion(s) shown by classicists. In his introduction Brelich, who nevertheless agreed on the conclusions offered in that book, wrote:
“First of all, it seems to me – and I want to make this absolutely clear once and for all, putting aside for a moment any specific reference to the volume in question – that when philologists often accuse us of lacking philological rigor in our use of documents, they themselves might at times be right or wrong. However, it frequently happens that, while they may be rigorous in certain philological matters, they also display an incredible carelessness in their assessments of historical-religious matters, a coarseness of concepts, a complete absence of method, as well as sheer ignorance of the very problems at stake. As jealous custodians of their own field, they believe they can invade and even annex someone else’s territory with impunity. In fact, while at the very least we recognise the necessity of philological foundations – though in practice ours may prove insufficient because we are not philologists – they do not even seem to entertain the slightest doubt that there are questions for which they could be incompetent” (my translation; emphasis in the original text; Brelich 1972: 621).
By that time, Brelich, who succeeded History of Religions pioneer and first president of the International Association for the History of Religions (1950-1959) Raffaele Pettazzoni at the University of Rome, had already spent much of his career to decry – mostly in vain – the rise of confessional trends and spiritual advocacy within the academic study of religion(s), and the History of Religions (also known as Comparative Religion and/or Religionswissenschaft) in particular. Predating by several decades other more famous scholars’ pleas and calls for a non-confessional, epistemologically-warranted, and most “rigorous critical practice” within the field (to recall the words of Bruce Lincoln in his seminal Theses on Methods; Lincoln 1996), an exasperated Brelich asked his peers in the wake of the (in)famous 10th IAHR International Congress in Marburg (1960):
“do we want to keep on studying the history of religions or are we interested in promoting a new religious direction for humankind through meetings between representatives of the various living religions? The most important thing now is to distinguish radically these two goals and get rid of this misunderstanding” (my translation; Brelich 2021 [1960]: 221).
Nickolas Roubekas’ The Study of Greek and Roman Religions: Insularity and Assimilation, originally published in 2022 and available as a paperback since 2024, clearly shows that, more than half a century later and despite decades of interdisciplinary grandstanding, not much has changed: with very few exceptions, the toolboxes and the results of the academic disciplines that study religion(s) continue by and large to be ignored by classicists, while the modern disciplines that have inherited the scholarly responsibilities of the old Victorian Science of Religion failed to differentiate between the two options outlined by Brelich and mostly opted to tolerate, if not support, a fideistic and (crypto-)theology-friendly status quo.
Roubekas, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Aristotle University (Thessaloniki, Greece), Adjunct Professor (Privatdozent) at the University of Vienna's Department of Religious Studies, and co-Editor of Numen, the official journal of the IAHR, points out that the front is threefold: Theology vs Classics, Classics vs the manifold discipline collectively gathered under the “study of religion” umbrella, and Theology vs the study of religion (Roubekas 2024: 67). As if creating a Venn diagram, in the middle of this scholarly battlefield – a forgotten wasteland of scorched ruins and fragmentary remains – one can find the disputed territory of the study of Greek and Roman religion(s). Mapping this rough and contested territory can be a daunting – and dangerous – task, but Roubekas is stout-hearted and not easily dissuaded. Indeed, it takes guts to begin a book on the study of Greek and Roman religion(s) by showing how misguided “one of the most renowned classicists working in the French world” was in her anonymous peer review of the book in question, in which she concluded that “religionists’” skills are basically worthless if compared to the classicists’ allegedly full-fledged “interdisciplinary” abilities (Roubekas 2024: xii). While this case perfectly encapsulates the disciplinary Dunning-Kruger Effect originally highlighted by Brelich, scholars involved in the study of ancient Mediterranean religions are usually caught in the crossfire between different academic domains and more often than not subjected to gaslighting on academic steroids; meanwhile, the fragile historical remains of the subject matter in question are tugged by different scholars with different agendas (and sometimes suboptimal skills) until they are torn to shreds and made unreadable. Roubekas’ book takes all of them to task with less acrimony and more gusto than Brelich, while always maintaining an admirably diplomatic aplomb.
An overview of the volume
The first chapter introduces all the main topics of the book. Roubekas starts by offering a rebuttal of Greta Hawes’ review of Roubekas’ previous book (Roubekas 2016) and endorses a vigorous Popperian falsificationism in historiographical matters that invites open discussions and epistemological debates to dismantle the “tacit protectionism” in vogue within Classics and Ancient History:
“any classification (or anything) is liable to scrutiny if the one who renders it invalid formulates an alternative. For example, the debate on defining religion has been central and yet unresolved in the field for more than a hundred and fifty years, whereas is has remained largely (if not entirely) mute among classicists and historians. Moreover, as Mary Douglas […] taught us many years ago […], classifications are not fixed but culture-specific and […] discipline-specific as well” (Roubekas 2024: 4-5).
This preamble paves the way for a nuanced rebuttal of the use of “religion” as a descriptor for Antiquity by scholars in the critical study of religions (dealt with in Chapter Three). Given the awareness of the very concept of “anachronism” in Antiquity and the polysemic meanings of each religious term within its ancient lexical context (like δεισιδαιμονία and θρησκεία; Roubekas 2024: 12-13), the rejection of “religion” as anachronistic for Antiquity is doubted as an epistemologically unwarranted strategy that perplexingly revives the old, acritical, and fideistic Christian or Abrahamic exceptionalism – almost as if it were purposefully designed to act as a demarcation between fields rather than being “an adoptable of even a useful tool for those studying the religions of the Greeks and the Romans” (Roubekas 2024: 11). Moreover, in Roubekas’ own words, “given the lack of agreement regarding the idea expressed by and the exact meaning of ‘religion’ among scholars, it seems somehow paradoxical to argue that, say, the Greeks and the Romans had no religion” (Roubekas 2024: 14) [1].
Inspired by Peter Thonemann’s 2019 gender analysis of female underrepresentation in two hundred contemporary companion volumes, the second chapter presents an eye-opening analysis of a selection of key entries related to “religion” published within five prestigious companions and handbooks (i.e., Daniel Ogden’s A Companion to Greek Religion, Blackwell 2007; Jörg Rüpke’s A Companion to Roman Religion, Blackwell 2007; Rubina Raja and Rüpke’s A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient World, Blackwell 2015, Esther Eidinow and Julia Kindt’s The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion, Oxford University Press 2015; Barbette Stanley Spaeth’s The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Mediterranean Religions, Cambridge University Press, 2013). While each volume has its highlights, Roubekas illustrates the strong affinity for disciplinary exceptionalism and the general lack of interdisciplinary insights from classicists, archaeologists, and ancient historians in these works, compounded by an equally troubling scarcity of theoretical reflections concerning definitions (replaced by apodictic statements) and often inadequate bibliographies about “religion” in Antiquity. The comparative method – “the very foundation of the field of the study of religion” (Roubekas 2024: 28) – is often glossed over or completely forgotten. Each volume has its individual highlights, but they are few and far between, and therefore utterly unable to support interdisciplinarity, which Roubekas considers “essential in further examining and advancing the study of Greek and Roman religion(s)” (Roubekas 2024: 21). Despite these limitations, Spaeth’s Cambridge Companion shines as the most interdisciplinary diverse in terms of academic representation, and comprehensive insofar as bibliographical references are concerned, with Spaeth’s own introduction even citing “the works of theoreticians such as Talal Asad, Timothy Fitzgerald, John R. Hinnells, Bruce Lincoln, and Russell T. McCutheon” (Roubekas 2024: 31). Notwithstanding the vigorous and welcome debate within Classics concerning race, gender, and representation (a reflection of the larger crisis currently affecting method and theory in the Humanities), Roubekas ends his critical examination by pointing out the enduring penchant for classicists to manufacture a provincial justification for their discipline to phagocytize all the adjacent fields, including philosophy, art, geography, archaeology, philosophy, and history, based on the desiderata of the founding father of modern classical philology, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (1844-1931) (Roubekas 2024: 34-36). Nonetheless, Wilamowitz’s aristocratic “Altertumwissenschaft with its Totalitätsideal” rejected any independent, scientific, and comparative study of religious matters as he disdained the groundbreaking approaches of scholars such as Ellen Harrison and James G. Frazer (Roubekas 2024: 34-35).
Chapter Three offers a more in-depth look at the questionable deletion of the concept of “religion” from the scholars’ theoretical toolbox insofar as Antiquity is concerned. Roubekas traces the roots of this endeavour in Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s influential The Meaning and End of Religion (Smith 1962), in which Smith – an “ordained Presbyterian minister” – favoured “faith” over “religion” and suggested an oftentimes sympathetic and acritical study of [the religious life of] adherents and insiders” in which only emic statements and feelings are to be acknowledged by the researcher (Roubekas 2024: 37-38). Once combined with Jonathan Z. Smith’s “popular aphorism” about “‘religion’ as a ‘category’” (the famous “there is no data for religion”; Roubekas 2024: 7, 38), this approach led scholars to deconstruct and dissolve “religion” tout court. Roubekas singles out Brent Nongbri’s Before Religion (2013) and Carlin A. Barton and Daniel Boyarin’s Imagine No Religion (2016) as key examples of this scholarly trend, and proceeds to question their assumptions: the explanations and the suggested replacements for “religion” to avoid anachronism, like family-resemblances approaches, result nonetheless in a series of epistemological cul de sacs and methodological non sequiturs mostly because of the researchers’ own restricted disciplinary view, their unawareness of the polysemy of the ancients’ lexicon, and an insufficient acquaintance with historiographical documents. Interestingly, Roubekas links the Religious Studies reluctance to use the concept of “religion” to a sort of overdrive immune reaction as the term would be irremediably “theologically charged” and “Eliadean” (that is, pertaining to the essentialising, crypto-theological, racially charged, spiritualistic, and hermeneutic approach typical of Mircea Eliade, the most important historian of religions of the 20th century); however, “the content a term has acquired due to its specific and temporal context does not automatically signify its ineffectiveness as a conceptual tool” (all quotes from Roubekas 2024: 50) [2].
Chapter Four opens with a surprising list of world-renowned classicists and ancient historians’ definitions according to whom “belief” as a category, a concept, and a cognitive state or act was completely absent from the ancients’ mindset (Roubekas 2024: 54). In addition, Greek and Roman religion scholars are “particularists” (Roubekas 2024: 55) and, consequently, they are almost completely uninterested in their objects of study as expressions of the wider category of “religion”, while being also prone to do away with gods, goddesses, and other superhuman agents altogether. This baffling attitude runs in the face of the ancient documents themselves, as a “a general theory of religion is not something alien to the Greek and Roman cultures” (Roubekas 2024: 61) [3]. Whenever scholars in this field had to approach such documents, they mostly favoured ancient particularists over comparative generalists, a defensive if misguided strategy to preserve the uniqueness that Roubekas ties to the dangerous presence of phagocytising Christian scholarship, while classicists, on the other side, have historically tended to absorb, and thus neutralise, all discourses and definitions related to ancient non-Christian religions (Roubekas 2024: 63-67). The chapter ends with the suggestion that Classics as a discipline has inherited, and failed to confront as a whole, the same methodological tensions once fostered by Theology against the nascent academic, critical, and scientific study of religion(s) (Roubekas 2024: 67).
Chapter Five presents a striking excerpt from Arnobius of Sicca’s Christian argumentation against pagans’ beliefs as a forerunner of the linguistic turn and juxtaposes it with Willi Braun’s paradoxical insight according to which “religion” as a category and subject matter approached by “a non-theological discipline (Religious Studies) is defined by its theological contents” (71; from Braun 2020: 17). This unresolved tension, with Religious Studies uncomfortably belittled or patronised by Theology, is nowhere more evident than in the UK, as highlighted by the (in)famous 2019 British Academy report “Theology and Religious Studies Provision in UK Universities” (Roubekas 2024: 70-71) [4]. While Religious Studies scholars opted to resolve this tension by adopting the linguistic turn and deconstruct “religion” as both category and concept, Roubekas suggests that a better strategy would involve redirecting their attacks against their actual “foe”: not religion per se but “scholars who attach to such a category something more (sacredness, holiness, transcendence, and the like)” (Roubekas 2024: 73). The importance of having a working definition for “religion” leads the author to build on the works of other scholars (including Einar Thomassen, Albert Henrichs, and Philippe Borgeaud) to advance the following minimum set of features of Greek and Roman god-talk:
anthropomorphism;
communication;
power;
immortality.
Additionally, Roubekas rejects the disciplinary status quo according to which Greek and Roman religions were deprived of orthodoxy and were just “praxis first”-oriented (Roubekas 2024: 83) and brings superhuman agents (or, according to Marshall Sahlins, “metapersons”) to the fore once again – which means to bring theologia back as ancient “god-talk” without being afraid of committing any alleged anachronism (Roubekas 2024: 80, 120).
Finally, Chapter Six proposes a road map and a series of constructive questions to strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration between classicists and religionists while rejecting “postmodern theorization” (Roubekas 2024: 90) when unsupported by a sufficient knowledge of ancient documents (literary, material, or archaeological) within their original cultural contexts. With this aim in mind, based on both Jason Ā. Josephson Storm’s bold metamodernist manifesto (Josephson Storm 2021) and Jennifer Larson’s innovative cognitive reading of ancient Greek religion (Larson 2016), Roubekas makes a reasoned plea for a cross-disciplinary effort to adopt, and adapt, the key results from the Cognitive Science of Religion to reinstate the study of ancient beliefs as one of the central foci of academic research in the field.
Conclusions: “Of course I know that many people will be angry with my [book]”
Throughout all the chapters, as well as in two of the three final appendices, readers are treated to a thought-provoking series of chronologically inverted rebuttals by past religionists to present-day theorists’ claims to show how scarcely innovative or even questionable some contemporary assumptions might be: see, for instance, Plutarch, Homer, and two Greek epigraphs vs Nongbri and Barton and Boyarin (Roubekas 2024: 43); Matt Sheedy vs Cato the Elder (Roubekas 2024: 57); the Sisyphus fragment (from Sextus Empiricus’ Adversus Mathematicos) vs Ara Norenzayan and Dominic Johnson; Hesiod vs Naomi Goldenberg (Roubekas 2024: 111). This takes us full circle, as Roubekas’ recommendation is to go back to the sources to avoid over-theorisation unsupported by the source materials (Roubekas 2024: 16-17). However, sources en tant que telles might be unable to provide all the answers a scholar of religion may need. As Brelich hinted at in his J’accuse against philologists working on religious matters, ancient documents are affected by various socio-cognitive and taphonomic biases, and philological interpretations might differ wildly: concerning certain literary matters, “the historian of religions cannot rely on what the philologists tell them, because they are notoriously in disagreement with each other on every minor issue” (Brelich 1972: 625). This does not detract in the least from Roubekas’ plea for interdisciplinary collaboration; on the contrary, such issues highlight the need for a renewed cooperation with even more urgency. Brelich lamented that philologists “did not have the monopoly on scientific rigour” and wished that classicists and historians of religions, “instead of despising each other or harbouring preconceived mistrust toward one another, [could] understand that they cannot replace each other and that they need one another to resolve certain issues for which they cannot find the way out alone” (Brelich 1972: 625-626). Today, Roubekas adds that Religious Studies scholars and ancient historians do not have a monopoly on epistemology, and suggests that only after acknowledging each other’s failings, prejudices, and blind spots, scholars can start to work together to overcome them (Roubekas 2024: 67).
Despite its short length (173 pages), Roubekas’ book is replete with provocative and fresh ideas (which, unfortunately, I couldn’t report here in their entirety) and seems to pack an epistemological punch well above its weight. The author is well aware that his take on the topic might prove unpopular among scholars (to put it mildly), so much so that at the end of the first chapter he cites Friedrich Max Müller’s (one of the founding fathers of the academic and critical study of religion) letter to Arthur Penrhyn Stanley dated 7 December 1878: “of course I know that many people will be angry with my Lectures. If it were not so, I should not have written them” (Roubekas 2024: 17). However, right at the same time when Roubekas’ book was being published, other high-profile volumes were starting to challenge the status quo in the study of Greek and Roman religions from within, chiefly among them Jacob L. Mackey’s Belief and Cult: Rethinking Roman Religion (Princeton University Press) and Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience, edited by Esther Eidinow, Armin W. Geertz, and John North (Cambridge University Press), both published in 2022. Since most of their proposals overlaps with Roubekas’, his worst fears might prove unfounded. Could it finally be that a truly “interdisciplinary study of Greek and Roman religion(s) has finally arrived”? (Roubekas 2024: 107).
Notes
This post is the unabridged and updated version of the review published one year ago in BASR Bulletin 145 (November 2024): 25-28. The rest of the notes below are intended to provide (a) a bit of bibiographical context and, hopefully, some useful references for readers to expand the topics treated in the main text, and (b) some shameless self-promotion (!). It’s my personal blog, after all.
[1] Cf. Ambasciano (2023).
[2] See also Ambasciano (2018) and Ambasciano (2019) for an in-depth historiographical analysis.
[3] Again, see Ambasciano (2023) for a cognitive and epistemological take on the topic.
[4] A longer analysis is also available in Ambasciano (2020).
Refs.
Ambasciano, Leonardo (2018). “Politics of Nostalgia, Logical Fallacies, and Cognitive Biases: The Importance of Epistemology in the Age of Cognitive Historiography.” In Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: A New Synthesis, edited by A. K. Petersen, G. I. Sælid, L. H. Martin, J. S. Jensen, and J. Sørensen, 280-296. Leiden and Boston: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004385375_019
Ambasciano, Leonardo (2019). An Unnatural History of Religions: Academia, Post-truth and the Quest for Scientific Knowledge. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Ambasciano, Leonardo (2020). “Memoirs of an Academic Rōnin: Religious Studies and Mentorship in the Age of Post-Truth.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 33(1): 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341495
Ambasciano, Leonardo (2023). “Zombies Roaming Around the Pantheon: Reconsidering Ancient Roman Belief.” Implicit Religion 25(1-2): 33-75. https://doi.org/10.1558/imre.24338
Ambasciano, Leonardo (2024). “Absolutely Disruptive: An Introduction to Josephson Storm’s Metamodernism Book Review Symposium.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 37(1): 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-bja10134
Barton, Carlin A. and Daniel Boyarin (2016). Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities. New York: Fordham University Press.
Braun, Willi (2020). Jesus and Addiction to Origin: Towards an Anthropocentric Study of Religion. Edited by Russell T. McCutcheon. Sheffield: Equinox.
Brelich, Angelo (1972). “Ad Philologos.” Religioni e Civiltà (1): 621-629. http://cisadu2.let.uniroma1.it/smsr/issues/1970/pages/index.html#page/620/mode/2up
Brelich, Angelo (2021 [1960]) “Some Notes Concerning a Congress of the History of Religions.” In Donald Wiebe, An Argument in Defence of a Strictly Scientific Study of Religion: The Controversy at Delphi, 215-224. Toronto, ON: Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion. https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/124861. Originally published in 1960 as “Ai margini del 10° Congresso Internazionale di Storia delle Religioni (Marburgo, 11 e 17-9-1960).” Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 31 (1960): 121-128. Republished as “A proposito di un Congresso di Storia delle religioni” in Brelich, A. (1979). Storia delle religioni, perché?, edited by Vittorio Lanternari, 130-136. Naples: Liguori.
Eidinow, Esther, Armin W. Geertz, and John North (eds) (2022). Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Josephson Storm, Jason Ā. (2021). Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Larson, Jennifer (2016). Understanding Greek Religion. London and New York: Routledge.
Lincoln, Bruce (1996). “Theses on Method.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8(3): 225-227. https://doi.org/10.1163/157006896X00323
Mackey, Jacob L. (2022). Belief and Cult: Rethinking Roman Religion. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Nongbri, Brent (2013). Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Privitera, G. Aurelio (1970). Dioniso in Omero e nella poesia arcaica. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo.
Roubekas, Nickolas P. (2016). An Ancient Theory of Religion: Euhemerism from Antiquity to the Present. London and New York: Routledge.
Roubekas, Nickolas P. (2024). The Study of Greek and Roman Religions: Insularity and Assimilation. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell (1962). The Meaning and End of Religion. New York: MacMillan.