Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities 1st Edition by Carlin A. Barton (PDF)

Description

“Shed[s] new light on the fascinating transformations of these words [religio, threskeia] in the shadow of Roman imperial power.” —Brent Nongbri, award-winning author of God’s LibraryWhat do we fail to see when we force other, earlier cultures into the Procrustean bed of concepts that organize our contemporary world? In Imagine No Religion, Carlin A. Barton and Daniel Boyarin map the myriad meanings of the Latin and Greek words religio and threskeia, frequently and reductively mistranslated as “religion,” in order to explore the manifold nuances of their uses within ancient Roman and Greek societies. In doing so, they reveal how we can conceptualize anew and speak of these cultures without invoking the anachronistic concept of religion. From Plautus to Tertullian, Herodotus to Josephus, Imagine No Religion illuminates cultural complexities otherwise obscured by our modern-day categories.“An excellent attempt to approach translational issues with fresh eyes . . . this book presents a fresh methodological challenge to students of the ancient world and especially to scholars interested in the ‘religion’ of the ancient Mediterranean.” —Reading Religion“A timely contribution to a growing and important conversation about the inadequacy of our common category ‘religion’ for the understanding of many practices, attitudes, emotions, and beliefs?especially of peoples in other times and contexts.” —Wayne A. Meeks, author of In Search of the Early Christians

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The ancient world was very different than our modern world in terms of concepts, beliefs, practices, and behaviors. This book extensively analyzes how the Latins and Greeks related to each other with respect to what we would call “religion” today. It turns out that such a thing really never existed anywhere in the ancient world. Though, modern people like to imagine that people in the past had similar concepts and worldviews, they simply are not there in the actual manuscripts, sources, and inscriptions from the Greek and Roman worlds. The book observes that it is commonly accepted in religious studies that “religion” is a modern invention that very much resembles Christianity as the prototype. The text also clearly shows that the Roman and Greek worlds did not have a division of “religion” or “religious things” from other aspects of life and certainly did not speak in the way of “religious groups” or “religions”.The book studies the way the Latin word ‘religio’ (which is the etymological root of the word “religion”) and the Greek word θρησκεία (threskeia) were used in numerous contexts. Most of the time they were both used in secular and mundane contexts. That is, they were usually used without referencing or having anything to do with gods. They were used in many contexts: cultural, military, social norms, royalty, etc. In general ‘religio’ and ‘threskeia’ meant a wide variety of things including emotional things. Broadly speaking, for both terms (they were not exactly equivalent to each other and no English word exists than can adequately translate to either one) they could mean fear, binding, obligation, inhibition, high precision, very detailed or meticulous, restraint, relating to an oath or taboo, etc. Certainly these terms are not something reducible to modern abstractions and reifications like “religion”.Furthermore, the book does a great job in analyzing other Latin and Greek terms that are within the same realm of ‘religio’ and ‘threskeia’, such as ‘fides’ (faith), ‘superstitio’ (superstition), ‘sebomai’ (respect or fear), ‘eusebeia’ (good fear), ‘deisidaimonia’ (excessive fear), etc. These terms also had nothing to do with the gods and were used in mundane contexts. In particular it is interesting that the word ‘superstitio’ generally meant an excessive amount of fear, not irrational “supernatural” beliefs like some people assume it means today. Since ‘religio’ was understood as fear of some sort and ‘superstitio’ could mean excessive fear, then it changes how we perceive statements by Romans like Lucretius, who is often touted as criticizing religion. In the original context, when Lucretius speaks of the evils of superstition, his not talking about gods and supernatural beliefs, he is talking about fears. Perhaps paranoia.Detailed case studies are provided of texts that used ‘religio’ like those of Cicero and Tertullian. Case studies are also provided of texts that used ‘threskeia’ like those of Josephus, Herodotus, the New Testament, Philo, and 4 Maccabees. Many Roman and Greek selections are found throughout to drive the points.One important observation noted in the book is that when modern historians speak of “religion” of ancient cultures (Rome, China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc); they normally disclose that such a concept or system not really there in the modern sense at all. The authors make the following observation: “It is still common to see even scholars using the word ‘religion’ as if it were a universal concept native to all human cultures. In … the study of the ancient Mediterranean world, every year sees a small library’s worth of books produced on such things as ‘ancient Greek religion’.” Indeed, the number of scholars who begin their books on “Roman Religion” by asserting that they know that the term doesn’t fit Roman culture, but they will continue using it anyway “for convenience” is remarkable.”Other good books on the emergence of the concept “religion” are:

⭐

⭐

⭐(excellent detailed example on how the Japanese had no concept of “religion” in their own language or culture)

⭐.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.” (9)‘Religio’Part I. Mapping the Word1. ‘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 TurnDuring 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 godsPart II. Case Study: Tertullian3. Preface to TertullianGeneral 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 sorts4. Segregated by a Perfect FearTertullian 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)- Remaining Chapters (5 through 12 and Conclusion) reviewed in comments section below

Keywords

Free Download Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities 1st Edition in PDF format
Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities 1st Edition PDF Free Download
Download Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities 1st Edition 2016 PDF Free
Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities 1st Edition 2016 PDF Free Download
Download Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities 1st Edition PDF
Free Download Ebook Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities 1st Edition