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 contempt 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
Balbus’s version of the ontological argument (which he takes from the philosopher Zeno) goes basically like this: (1) The universe itself is necessarily greater and better than anything contained in it. (2) To have life and reason is better than to lack these attributes. (3) But men have life and reason. (4) Therefore, if the universe is greater and better than anything contained in it, then the universe must have life and reason as well; otherwise, the universe would be less than the men it contains—which would be absurd. On this basis, Balbus proceeds to the seemingly pantheistic conclusion that “the universe is god”29—though he does not expound or embrace pantheism in any overt or systematic way.
The argument from design is probably even more familiar: it reasons that the orderliness observable in the universe can be accounted for only by supposing some Mind or Intelligence that creates and maintains such order. A familiar modern instance is Voltaire’s clock maker argument: a clock is an intricate thing that could not come into existence through mere accident; therefore, if there is a clock, there must be a clock maker.30 For the same purpose, Balbus invokes the example not of a clock—there is nothing especially intricate about a sundial—but of “a large and beautiful house.”31 And he enthusiastically elaborates on “the uniform movement and undeviating rotation of the heavens, the individuality, usefulness, beauty, and order of the sun and moon and stars, the very sight of which is sufficient proof that they are not the outcome of chance.”32 Observing these facts, he asks: “What can be so obvious and clear, as we gaze up at the sky and observe the heavenly bodies, as that there is some divine power of surpassing intelligence by which they are ordered?”33 His position in this respect closely resembles the kind of view later associated with natural theologians like William Paley.34
If these arguments are persuasive, they might seem to demonstrate the existence of gods, or perhaps of a god, but how would these gods or this god square with the personified deities of Roman religion—with Jove, Venus, Minerva, and company? How does the philosophical approach allow Balbus to escape the dilemma that suggested that it was necessary either to affirm mythic and civic religion together (which Balbus could not honestly do) or to reject them both together (which he also was not inclined to do)?
Here Balbus displays the second part of his philosophical strategy. More specifically, he proposes an elaborate account, supported by ingenious etymologies, of how the Greek and Roman gods can be understood as symbolic representations of the divine reality, so that “behind these sacrilegious fables lies a scientific explanation which is quite sophisticated.”35 Consequently, “though we reject these stories with contempt, we shall be able to identify and grasp the nature of the divinity pervading each and every natural habitat, as Ceres on earth, as Neptune on the seas, and as other deities in other areas; and we shall acknowledge the significance of the names which custom has imposed on them. These are the deities which we are to revere and worship; our worship of the gods is best and most chaste, most holy and totally devout, when we revere them with pure, sincere and untainted hearts and tongues.”36
In short, the gods are real, after all—not in a popular and crudely literal sense, though, but in a deeper philosophical or spiritual or even “scientific” sense. In this respect, Balbus can be seen as practicing a kind of nonliteral hermeneutics similar to that later profusely employed by religious Neoplatonists,37 by early Christian thinkers like Origen and Augustine and their numerous followers, and even by modern “demythologizing” theologians like Rudolf Bultmann.38 In this way, Balbus reconciles (at least to his own satisfaction) rejection of the mythical gods, understood literally, with continuing support for the gods of the city, understood more philosophically and metaphorically.
The Consecration of Philosophy
But Balbus’s elaborate defense of the gods was not merely an arid philosophical exercise. His account served to support and amplify the function of pagan religion in beatifying and consecrating the Roman world, and the Roman city. We have noted the similarity of Balbus’s proffered proofs to what in the later Christian tradition are sometimes called the ontological argument and the argument from design. But this description fails to capture the full force of Balbus’s presentation, which is more poetic and beatifying than dryly philosophical.
Thus, over and over again Balbus emphasizes not merely the orderliness of nature but its “beauty,” its “harmony,” its capacity to inspire “wonder.”39 (Here he sounds not so different from Abraham Heschel, discussed in chapter 2.) “All things are subject to nature, and are most beautifully administered by her” (2.81, p. 75). Balbus waxes rhapsodic for pages on end about “the beauty of the things which we declare have been established by divine providence,” resorting to lengthy quotations of poetry as the only way of conveying his admiration (2.98–118, pp. 82–90).
This beautiful orderliness, evident in the sun and moon and stars, extends to and indeed achieves a kind of culminating perfection in human beings, providentially endowed with “mind, intelligence, reason, prudence, and wisdom” (2.147, p. 100).
Humans, in turn, use these providential endowments, “by the work of our hands . . . striv[ing] to create a sort of second nature within the world of nature” (2.152, p. 102). This “second nature” would outstandingly include the human city with its various arts and occupations. The city is thus a sort of image of the cosmic order, and vice versa. “The universe is, so to say, the shared dwelling of gods and men, or a city which houses both, for they alone enjoy the use of reason and live according to justice and law” (2.154, p. 103).
In Balbus’s position, we see a kind of philosophical paganism that was not identical to the mythic religion (which it scorned), but that nonetheless served to preserve the gods (understood in a more sophisticated, nonliteral sense), and thereby to support the consecrating religion of the city.
Civic Fideism
Balbus’s philosophical paganism, however, provokes contempt from Cotta, the Skeptic—a disdain that is intellectual but also patriotic, or civic. Cotta thinks Balbus’s arguments fail from a philosophical standpoint. But he also thinks the philosophical arguments threaten rather than sustain the civic religion that both Balbus and Cotta affirm, and on which the city depends.
On the intellectual level, Cotta not only rejects but also systematically deconstructs and ridicules Balbus’s arguments and etymologies. He sarcastically disparages Balbus’s experiential evidence. “As for the utterances of a Faun,” Cotta comments mockingly, “I myself have never heard one, but I am willing to believe you if you say that you have, even though I have no idea what a Faun is” (3.15, p. 113). He argues that the same logic deployed in Balbus’s ontological argument (the universe is greater than anything it contains; humans have life, which is good; therefore, the universe must have life as well) could as easily be used to prove that the universe is “adept at reading a book,” or that the universe is a “musician” (3.22, p. 115). The orderliness that Balbus observes in the cosmos should be attributed not to gods but to “nature” (3.26–28, p. 117). And with respect to Balbus’s effusive praise of the cosmos’s beauty and usefulness, Cotta retorts: “What benefit . . . can be observed in mice or cockroaches or snakes, all of them troublesome and destructive to the human race?” (3.65, p. 132). He goes on to press the familiar argument from evil:
Either God wishes to remove evils and cannot, or he can do so and is unwilling, or he has neither the will nor the power, or he has both the will and the power. If he has the will but not the power, he is a weakling, and this is not characteristic of God. If he has the power but not the will, he is grudging, and this is a trait equally foreign to God. If he has neither the will nor the power, he is both grudging and weak, and is therefore not divine. If he has both the will and the power (and this is the sole circumstance appropriate to God), what is the source of evils, or why does God not dispel them? (3.65, p. 133)
But Cotta protests as well, in a more apparently pious vein, that Balbus is actually undermining the civic religion. “By deploying all these arguments for the existence of gods, you succeed in casting doubt on what is in my view crystal-clear” (3.10, p. 111). And before beginning his aggressive debunking of Balbus, Cotta unapologetically affirms that he is a priest, and he insists that “I shall indeed defend [the gods], and I have always done so; no words from any person, whether learned or unlearned, will ever budge me from the views which I inherited from our ancestors concerning the worship of the immortal gods” (3.5, p. 109).
This fervent declaration of faith seems in tension with Cotta’s exercise in deconstruction, and it is hard to square with his own admission, earlier in the dialogue, that “many troubling considerations occur to me which sometimes lead me to think that [the gods] do not exist at all” (1.61, p. 24). So, how to reconcile Cotta’s vigorously expressed skepticism with his equally vehement professions of belief?
One obvious possibility is the one suggested by Gibbon (and one, incidentally, used by modern thinkers in the tradition of Leo Strauss in interpreting a whole variety of important philosophers).40 Cotta, the priest, is “conceal[ing] the sentiments of an Atheist under the sacerdotal robes.” He does not believe in the gods, but for personal or public purposes he pretends to believe. So he is willing to confess his skepticism in “a conversation conducted between friends,” as he says, but he agrees that the existence of the gods should never be questioned “in public” (1.61, p. 24). Cotta, of course, does not explicitly confess to holding this position; on the contrary, he protests that he does believe in the gods. He avows that “I have never regarded any of these constituents of our religion with contempt,” and he even affirms that “Rome could never have achieved such greatness without the supreme benevolence of the immortal gods” (3.6, p. 109). But Gibbon (and Leo Strauss) would respond, probably, that this is what Cotta, the prudently and patriotically dissembling priest, has to say: for civic and public purposes, he has to pretend to believe in the gods.
And yet the interpretation does not quite fit. After all, it is in the “conversation among friends,” not in public, that Cotta expresses both his doubts and his support for the gods.
Still, is there any other way to understand Cotta’s seemingly conflicting and conflicted utterances? Perhaps there is. Here is a possibility. Perhaps Cotta thinks that the world—and hence our knowledge of the world—is divided into different epistemic domains that have their own proper truths and rules of belief. There is the natural world, perhaps, and the philosophical world; and then there is the civic world. Operating under the epistemic criteria proper to the natural and philosophical worlds, Cotta finds Balbus’s arguments for the gods profoundly deficient. But in the civic world, different rules of truth and belief apply, and these lead to different conclusions. In that world—in the civic world—the gods are real. Speaking as citizen and as priest, Cotta can accordingly assert that truth in complete good faith and without hesitation.
Cotta affirms the existence of the gods in public, in other words, not because he needs to dissemble, but because in the world of the city, the gods are real. And he strenuously resists Balbus’s effort to import philosophical reasoning to bolster the civic religion, because the importation reflects—and effects—a corruption of categories that can only be harmful, both to philosophy and to the city (3.5–10, pp. 109–11).
On this interpretation, Cotta is proposing and practicing what might be called civic fideism: the gods should be affirmed in the civic realm based on epistemic criteria appropriate to that realm, and should not be supported or judged by the kind of reasoning appropriate to other domains. Whether this interpretation accurately captures Cotta’s meaning is uncertain, but everything he says seems consistent with it. Moreover, if this is how Cotta is negotiating the problem of civic religion, he would be employing a strategy that has been used repeatedly in other contexts.
In the Middle Ages, for example, a group of thinkers sometimes known as the Latin Averroists seem to have resisted suspicions of heterodoxy by proposing a “two truth” position under which what was true in one domain—philosophy—might be different from what was true in another—in particular, theology.41 More recently, drawing on a Wittgensteinian perspective that understands knowledge and truth in terms of “language games,” the philosopher Norman Malcolm has argued that religion is a distinctive kind of “language game” with its own rules that need not track the rules used in other epistemic contexts. Religion is “a form of life; it is language embedded in action.” In this view, religious discourse needs no justification outside itself. And God can exist in and for the language game of “religion” even if he does not exist in other such games—philosophy, for example, or science.42
In a similar vein, the scientist and popular writer Stephen Jay Gould famously proposed that science and religion should be viewed as “nonoverlapping magisteria”;43 each could be true in its own realm and according to its own proper criteria. Contemporary legal philosophers have likewise proposed very similar strategies for defending the legitimacy of constitutional discourse,44 or of legal discourse generally.45 And although ordinary lawyers might find these theories overly subtle, these same lawyers instinctively act on a similar premise when they argue in court; they understand that in the courtroom they must limit themselves to “legal” reasoning, and that such reasoning may lead to conclusions that are taken to be true—true in law—that would not be adopted and would not be true in other domains based on other kinds of reasoning.46
In a similar way, it seems, Cotta wants to treat civic religion as a distinctive and valuable practice with its own epistemic rules and answerable only to itself. True, the priests and the augurs might not be able to satisfy the philosopher, but then, who appointed the philosopher to be the boss of the priests and augurs in the first place? Civic religion is its own domain, and it is safe and beyond challenge so long as it remains within its proper sanctuary.
This at least seems a plausible interpretation of Cotta. Moreover, it is unlikely that Cotta was the only ancient practitioner of this mode of believing. In his searching examination of the “modalities of belief” by which ancient pagans maintained their myths, Paul Veyne invokes the notion of “mental balkanization,”47 and he attempts to identify and describe different “programs of truth”48 in which the nature of reality and the criteria of truthfulness differ. “A Greek put the gods ‘in heaven,’ ” Veyne observes, “but he would have been astounded to see them in the sky. He would have been no less astounded if someone, using time in its literal sense, told him that Hephaestus had just remarried or that Athena had aged a great deal lately. Then he would have realized that in his eyes mythic time had only a vague analogy with daily temporality.”49 It would be a mistake, though, to conclude that the accounts of the gods were merely lies, or even “fictions,” and thus unreal.
Veyne offers an intriguing illustration from his own experience: “For my part, I hold ghosts to be simple fictions but perceive their truth nonetheless. I am almost neurotically afraid of them, and the months I spent sorting through the papers of a dead friend were an extended nightmare. At the very moment I type these pages I feel the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Nothing would reassure me more than to learn that ghosts ‘really’ exist. Then they would be a phenomenon like any other, which could be studied with the right instruments, a camera or a Geiger counter.”50
So Cotta may have been not a dissembling skeptic after the manner of Gibbon but rather a civic fideist who in his mode of belief anticipated the Latin Averroists and the neo-Wittgensteinian “language game” theorists. And what about Cicero himself? Cicero begins the dialogue by identifying himself with Cotta’s philosophical school.51 And he gives Cotta the last word in the debate. But then he concludes the book by declaring that “Cotta’s argument seemed to Velleius [the Epicurean] to be more truthful, but in my eyes Balbus’ case seemed to come more closely to a semblance of the truth.”52 So Cicero professes to be a religious believer in the philosophical sense, not a civic fideist (or, if that interpretation seems unpersuasive, a Straussian skeptic) like Cotta.
What to make of this? Is Cicero being disingenuous? Perhaps. He was, after all, a politician, and knew not to say things that would make political trouble for himself. In other writings Cicero ties moral duties closely to the good of the state, or of the public, arguing that while it is never permissible to dissimulate for private advantage, prevarication may be permissible if it serves the public good.53 He also believes that worship of the gods is good for the state; thus, early on in the book about the gods, Cicero reports with seeming approval the view that “without devotion to the gods all sense of the holy and of religious obligation is also lost. Once these disappear, our lives become fraught with disturbance and great chaos. It is conceivable that, if reverence for the gods is removed trust and the social bond between men and the uniquely pre-eminent virtue of justice will disappear.”54
So perhaps Cicero fits Gibbon’s (and Augustine’s) interpretation; perhaps he is lying—or dutifully dissembling—out of timidity, or for the public good. And yet, as with Cotta, this interpretation does not quite fit, because in the dialogue itself Cicero both expresses uncertainty and indicates that he is drawn to a belief in the gods. If the dialogue was private enough to allow for sincerity, in other words, why would a skeptical Cicero have professed belief in the gods; if it was public enough to require such a (disingenuous) profession, why did he openly acknowledge his doubts?
It seems, as James O’Donnell observes, that Cicero “was believer and skeptic, both at once.”55
The Precarious Tenacity of Pagan Faith
Believer and skeptic, both at once. It was a precarious position—but not an uncommon one. Then or now.
Balbus’s philosophical paganism and Cotta’s pagan civic fideism might be seen as complementary in the sense that they both served, or at least sought, to sustain the civic religion that functioned to support and consecrate Roman life and the Roman city. Educated Romans who found it impossible to take the mythic religion at face value might choose one or the other of these alternatives. Some Romans surely did follow Balbus’s path: later Neoplatonists like Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus would be outstanding examples. We will notice them again, briefly, in a later chapter. Gibbon remarked in a disdainful tone on the efforts of “new Platonicians” and “fashionable philosophers” who “prosecuted the design of extracting allegorical wisdom from the fictions of the Greek poets” and who “recommended the worship of the ancient gods as the emblems or ministers of the Supreme Deity.”56
Other Romans likely followed Cotta’s example, deliberately or intuitively. (By the nature of the position, it would be difficult to identify such fideists with confidence; they would be estopped by their philosophy from telling us who they were.) This was a different way of sustaining the faith necessary to support the city.
But although philosophical paganism and civic fideism could complement each other, they could also contradict each other, imperiling both. The way in which Cotta might undermine Balbus is obvious on the face of the dialogue. As noted, Cotta disparages and systematically deconstructs Balbus’s philosophical arguments for the gods. If Cotta’s refutations persuade (and in Cicero’s presentation the refutations seem almost overwhelming, Cicero’s own closing disclaimer notwithstanding), then Romans who might have depended on such philosophical bulwarks would find themselves unable to affirm the presuppositions and implicit tenets of pagan religion.
Because Cicero gives Cotta the last word, we do not know just what Balbus might have said in rebuttal. But we can imagine. Cotta’s fideism, as we have seen, depended on the strategy of dividing truth and belief into discrete domains, so that the epistemic rules proper to one domain would have no jurisdiction in another domain. Thus, belief in the gods might be unjustified for philosophy but wholly warranted in the civic domain. Balbus might well object, though, that the approach is untenable. Truth is the accurate representation of what is real. If the gods exist, they exist; if not, not. The gods cannot be real in one epistemic domain but not in another. And if there is reason to believe the gods are real, that is what we should believe; if not, not.
Once it is conceded, in short, that the gods do not exist in general, or for philosophy, they are doomed to disappear altogether. To put the point differently, just as Augustine would later argue that the civic religion could not be severed from the mythic one, so Balbus would likely have contended that the civic religion could not be separated from the philosophical one.
This is a powerful objection. As we have seen, Cotta’s two-truth approach has been common enough as a historical matter. It can provide a convenient strategy, for a time, to protect some necessary body of beliefs against corrosive objections. But the approach has also had its powerful critics. Thomas Aquinas energetically attacked the “two truth” strategies of the Latin Averroists.57 And the philosopher John Hick argued persuasively that the neo-Wittgensteinian “different language games” approach employed by thinkers like Norman Malcom in fact “cuts the heart out of religious belief and practice.”58
On the level of common sense, the critics surely have the more appealing argument. To most people, truth means the accurate representation of the world. And the world is what it is, and is not what it is not. A statement or a belief cannot be true in one domain but false in another.
In sum, the implausibility of the mythic religion to more educated Romans—of the religion of stories about lustful, vengeful, whimsical gods—created a challenge to believing in the civic religion. But the civic religion was what sustained and consecrated the city—the city of “shining beauty and grace” that Romans revered, and that gave their lives meaning and purpose and sublimity. So thoughtful and sophisticated Romans rose to the challenge, devising “modalities of belief,” as Veyne puts it, that served for decades and centuries to provide the necessary support.
The resulting intellectual achievement was intricate and impressive. And yet the modalities of belief remained fragile. And they were in turn stoutly challenged not just by the kind of internal examination evident in Cicero’s treatise but also, later, by a radically different form of religiosity—Christianity. To which we turn in the next chapter.
1. Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 50.
2. Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 109.
3. Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), xi.
4. J. A. North, Roman Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 84.
5. Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 58. See also Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (London: Penguin, 1986), 31 (“[Romans] did pay detailed acts of cult, especially by offering animal victims to their gods, but they were not committed to revealed beliefs in the strong Christian sense of the term”). See also John Scheid, An Introduction to Roman Religion, trans. Janet Lloyd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 173 (“The religious system of the Romans was founded on ritual, not on dogma. Their religious tradition prescribed rituals, not what they should believe. So each individual remained free to understand and think of the gods and the world-system just as he or she pleased”).
6. See, e.g., Jeffrey Stout, “Truth, Natural Law, and Ethical Theory,” in Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays, ed. Robert P. George (New York: Clarendon, 1992), 71.
7. See Fox, Pagans and Christians, 31.
8. Cf. Fox, Pagans and Christians, 89 (“Naturally, a person had to believe that the gods existed”).
9. See above, 69
10. Of one friend and frequent correspondent, he wrote, “I much suspect that he never showed me the true colours of his secret skepticism,” and he surmised that “the more learned ecclesiastics will indeed have the secret satisfaction of reprobating in the closet what they read in the church.” Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, trans. Betty Radice (London: Penguin, 1984), 102, 183.
11. Gibbon, Memoirs, 90.
12. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, [1776] 1995), 1:56.
13. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:59.
14. See, e.g., James J. O’Donnell, Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 98; Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 79.
15. North continues: “[The hypothesis] also seems to rest on a profound mistake: the underlying idea has to be that, as Roman nobles became more educated and sophisticated, they easily turned away from belief in the gods and towards some form of scientific materialism, believing that the universe could be explained without recourse to the gods. But this assumption is an anachronistic one: easy scientific rationalism may be available in our time but it was not in theirs. There were some philosophical systems that disposed of the gods or marginalized them, and some of the Roman elite certainly understood or followed such systems; but to jump from that to the assumption that the elite were all scientific rationalists exploiting the ignorant masses is quite without any justification.” North, Roman Religion, 31.
16. MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism, 79.
17. Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, ed. Alexander Roberts et al. (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2015), 1.6, p. 21.
18. Varro’s books on this subject are not extant; his writings come to us through the report of Augustine. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. and ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4.27, p. 176; 6.5, p. 246.
19. Augustine, City of God 4.27, p. 176; 6.5, p. 247.
20. Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 8.
21. Augustine, City of God 6.6, pp. 249–54.
22. Augustine, City of God 6.10, pp. 261–64.
23. See North, Roman Religion, 82.
24. Augustine, City of God 4.31, pp. 182–84.
25. Augustine, City of God 6.10, p. 263.
26. Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1.1, p. 3. Hereafter, references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
27. For a critical review of the argument, see Peter van Inwagen, “Necessary Being: The Ontological Argument,” in Arguing about Religion, ed. Kevin Timpe (New York: Routledge, 2009), 101.
28. See Elliott Sober, “The Design Argument,” in Timpe, Arguing about Religion, 161.
29. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 2.20–22, pp. 54–55.
30. See Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010), 571.
31. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 2.17, p. 53 (“Supposing your eyes lit upon a large and beautiful house. Even if you could not descry its owner, no one could force you to believe that it was built by mice and weasels”).
32. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 2.15, p. 52.
33. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 2.70, p. 72; 2.4, p. 48.
34. See William Paley, “The Argument from Design,” excerpted and reprinted in Faith and Reason, ed. Paul Helm (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 189.
35. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 2.64, p. 69. See generally 2.60–71, pp. 68–72.
36. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 2.71, p. 72.
37. See R. T. Wallis, Neoplatonism, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 130–37, 147–51.
38. See Rudolf Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth (New York: Joanna Cotler Books, 2000).
39. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 2.15, p. 52 (“the individuality, usefulness, beauty, and order to the sun and moon and stars”); 2.17, p. 53 (“the highly adorned universe, with its huge variety and beauty of heavenly bodies”); 2.19, p. 54 (“harmony,” “harmonious activity”); 2.58, p. 67 (“above all, that its beauty is outstanding in its universal adornment”); 2.75, p. 74 (noting “the argument inspired by wonder at the things of heaven and earth”). Hereafter, references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
40. See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (London: University of Chicago Press, 1952). For a succinct summary of Strauss’s approach to interpretation, see Ian Ward, “Helping the Dead Speak: Leo Strauss, Quentin Skinner, and the Arts of Interpretation in Political Thought,” Polity 41 (2009): 239–41.
41. See Frederick Copleston, SJ, A History of Philosophy, vol. 2 (New York: Doubleday, [1962] 1993), 436–37.
42. Norman Malcolm, “The Groundlessness of Belief,” in Faith, ed. Terence Penelhum (London: Macmillan, 1989), 193, 203.
43. Steven Jay Gould, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106 (March 1997): 16, http://www.science.fau.edu/sharklab/courses/evolution/pdfs/non-overlapping%20magisteria.pdf.
44. See Philip Bobbitt, Constitutional Fate: Theory of the Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
45. See Dennis Patterson, Law and Truth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
46. See generally Steven D. Smith, Law’s Quandary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
47. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe?, 41. See also 90 (“Truth is Balkanized . . .”).
48. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe?, 21, 48, 128.
49. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe?, 18.
50. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe?, 87.
51. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 1.11, p. 6.
52. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 3.95, p. 146.
53. See Cicero, On Obligations, trans. P. G. Walsh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3.93–95, pp. 116–17.
54. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 1.4, p. 4.
55. O’Donnell, Pagans, 46.
56. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:561.
57. For a highly dramatic account of this confrontation, see G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox” (New York: Doubleday, [1933] 1974), 70–74.
58. Hick concedes that religious talk is a special kind of language, and that religionists often use terms in distinctive ways—“as pointers rather than as literal descriptions.” Even so, “the pointers are undoubtedly intended to point to realities transcending metaphors and myths; and to suppress this intention is to do violence to religious speech and to empty the religious ‘form of life’ of its central and motivating conviction.” John Hick, “Seeing-as and Religious Experience,” in Penelhum, Faith, 183, 184.