Are today’s monotheisms less tolerant than pagan divinities? Throwing the ancient stone into the modern pond, Maurizio Bettini’s essay leads us to question the different modes of belief, from Antiquity to the present day.
The ancient gods are in exile, said Heinrich Heine. Should we therefore call them back to us? At the beginning of this 21e century when monotheistic religions tend to form places of identity tension, does not Antiquity show us the path to a more conciliatory relationship with “our” God and the God of others? Could we not be more curious about all forms of religious life, even the strangest? These ambitious questions, almost provocations, Maurizio Bettini, as a seasoned specialist in the history of religions, addresses them without dogmatism in his In Praise of Polytheism.
Flexibility of the Ancients, exclusivity of the Moderns
This is not, of course, a refined decadent stance. Mr. Bettini, professor of classical philology at the University of Siena, advances his arguments as a scientist who looks current events in the face. This short essay in pocket format, which can be read in one go, has the great merit of making us think about the gaps that separate the different modes of belief, from “pagan” Antiquity to the present day. On this side of the Alps, Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet were once capable of such audacities: throwing the ancient paving stone into the modern pond. Since then, the narrow tribe of antiquists has been more hesitant to launch into “untimely considerations.”
Mr. Bettini progresses in a zigzag fashion, without any desire to impose his point of view at all costs, according to developments whose order could be modified (the first chapter is devoted to the affair of the nativity scenes which has troubled Italy in recent years; another deals with the “translation” of the gods; another with their civic character, etc.). The author attempts to measure the devastating effect of the exclusivity advocated by monotheisms, recalling the words of Exodus (31, 14): “The name of Yahweh is Jealous.”
To this principle of closure, Mr. Bettini opposes the flexibility of the Romans, who periodically adopted new gods in a logic of cult accumulation. To take only two examples, Aesculapius, who came from Greece, thus arrived in Rome in the 3e century BC, before he was joined by Cybele, an Anatolian goddess. It was a time when the gods complemented each other rather than clashed.
The acclimatization of these divine figures, through theinterpretationis based on a theological approach open to the unknown, which makes religious wars impossible. Paganism therefore appears, at first glance, more cheerful than the monotheisms that will succeed it.
The supermarket of the gods
But, carried away by his demonstration, this In Praise of Polytheism sometimes idealizes the ancient world. The author gives the impression that, in antiquity, everyone gave free rein to their religious inclinations by shopping at the supermarket of the gods. In truth, the authorities closely monitored the changes in cults and only the priestly colleges could allow the official enthronement of new divinities. In the history of Roman religion that he briefly sketches, Mr. Bettini does not mention all the shadows on the picture of ancient tolerance.
Cult reconfigurations only concern the gods of venerable nations
Laissez-faire and laissez-passer in religious matters have not always been the norm. Let us mention in particular the repression of the Bacchanalia of 186 BC and the destruction of the Isiac places of worship on the Capitol between 58 and 53 BC. Furthermore, the author forgets to say that the reconfigurations of worship only concern the gods of venerable nations: people readily draw from the pantheon of ancient enemies of magnitude (the Veians, the Greeks, the Carthaginians with Juno Caelestis), they do not think of borrowing their obscure divinities from the Gauls or the Africans. And if one goes to pay homage to some local god in his provincial sanctuary, it is by applying a Roman varnish to it.
Similarly, when the book discusses the freedom with which religious practices were laughed at, some nuances could be added. Maurizio Bettini mentions (p. 186) the satirical texts that mock the Dea Syria or Mater Magna, to show that ancient humor does not directly attack these goddesses, but their ridiculous devotees.
The author implies that foreign cults cannot be despised in themselves, by primary xenophobic reflex. This is to forget the absence of distinction, in Antiquity, between religion in essence and everyday religious gestures. No Roman proposed to amend the exotic processions of the Great Mother, with their flagellant priests, to make them more decent. The gods and the adherence they inspire are one and the same. Eastern religions, with some of their excesses, are to be taken or discarded.
Divine Eclecticisms
In this register of the comic, which Mr. Bettini has not chosen to exploit fully even though he has been a good connoisseur of it since his very first works and his translations of Plautus’s plays, there would still be much to say. And what if one of the main virtues of pagan antiquity was precisely its capacity to mock its own gods? Comedies and satires kindly attack the Immortals, in the bad tricks they play on humans. Blasphemy does not exist in Rome and irreverence does not mean disrespect: characters who consider themselves stronger than the gods themselves can make people laugh by their impudence, they will be – whatever happens – soon punished.
Similarly, this essay does not carry full conviction when it makes a diagnosis of contemporary Western societies, relying on the fact that in our time, intercultural opposition can only be played out between competing monotheists.
Sacrificing the crib out of respect for Muslim children, removing a minaret from the Tuscan hills in homage to our bell towers paradoxically emanate from the same mental framework : one which is based on the deep conviction, so internalized that it often becomes unconscious, that there can be only one God, one and only one. (p. 31)
If by chance the Indian community in Great Britain had claimed the right to the mass construction of Hindu temples, a British national reaction would certainly have been expressed. The conflict occurs on the physical terrain of public space (which the game of egoisms prefers to oneself rather than to others) and on the symbolic terrain of traditions, often fantasized. Whether this cultural skein is entangled on a monotheistic or polytheistic background, matters little.
Beyond these slight criticisms, there remains a stimulating text, one of the most valuable contributions of which is of a philological nature. Reflections abound on the career of the word paganusfrom the verb to tolerate or the term polytheiaused by Philo of Alexandria, which we see reappear later in the form of theexchanged polytheism by Samuel Purchas in 1614. This book is also worth reading for its anecdotes, taken from ancient sources, which have often gone unnoticed. Rereading theHistory Augustusthe author thus recalls that, at home, in his lararium, the emperor Alexander Severus (3e century AD) brought together effigies of emperors diuibut also of Apollonius of Tyana, of Christ, of Abraham and of Orpheus! An Antiquity that is not afraid of eclecticism and that seeks wisdom where it is: in the four winds.