Was There "Belief" in Greco-Roman Religion?

One of the assumptions frequently made about religion in antiquity is that Greco-Roman religions were about ritual, while Christianity was about belief. It is a standard line in Roman history and in Christian theology.

I know that assumption, I’ve often repeated it myself. However, while researching my Jesus among the gods, it became apparent to me that it is not entirely true.

Yes, religio in antiquity was mostly about duties to the gods, duties in the form of sacrifices, festivals, and prayers done in the correct manner. But polytheistic religions of Greek and Roman varieties were not ideationally vacuous. The ancients performed rituals because they believed something about the gods, they believed something about how those rituals affected the gods, and they believed that the gods in turn bestowed favor on their worshippers.

In fact, one need only read Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods and Plutarchs Isis and Osiris to learn that many were capable of deep philosophical reflection on the nature, attributes, and activities of deity. Further, Greeks and Romans had their notions of heresy, superstition, and apostasy to indicate bad religion or someone tinkering with their religious traditions in unhealthy ways. Remember, Socrates was sentenced to death for a religious crime, corrupting the youth of Athens with alien religious concepts.

Thus, there was such a thing as Greco-Roman theology or a pattern of belief about deities that undergirded religious rituals.

The chief difference between pagans and Christians was not that pagans had rituals and Christians had beliefs. No, Christians did have their own rituals - baptism and Lord’s Supper - and pagans did have beliefs - Zeus/Jupiter/Dios is father of the gods and the father of all people. So, the difference was that Christians, shall we say, “believed in belief” and consequently they were more concerned with defining their beliefs and with internally policing their beliefs than their pagan counterparts.

I’m glad to say that I’m not the only one plugging this idea about Greco-Roman theology and beliefs. At SBL I picked up Jacob L. Mackey’s book Belief and Cult: Rethinking Roman Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), which is an outstanding book!

Here’s the blurb for the book:

Belief and Cult argues that belief isn’t uniquely Christian but was central to ancient Roman religion. Drawing on cognitive theory, Jacob Mackey shows that despite having nothing to do with salvation or faith, belief underlay every aspect of Roman religious practices—emotions, individual and collective cult action, ritual norms, social reality, and social power. In doing so, he also offers a thorough argument for the importance of belief to other non-Christian religions.

At the individual level, the book argues, belief played an indispensable role in the genesis of cult action and religious emotion. However, belief also had a collective dimension. The cognitive theory of Shared Intentionality shows how beliefs may be shared among individuals, accounting for the existence of written, unwritten, or even unspoken ritual norms. Shared beliefs permitted the choreography of collective cult action and gave cult acts their social meanings. The book also elucidates the role of shared belief in creating and maintaining Roman social reality. Shared belief allowed the Romans to endow agents, actions, and artifacts with socio-religious status and power. In a deep sense, no man could count as an augur and no act of animal slaughter as a successful offering to the gods, unless Romans collectively shared appropriate beliefs about these things.

Closely examining augury, prayer, the religious enculturation of children, and the Romans’ own theories of cognition and cult, Belief and Cult promises to revolutionize the understanding of Roman religion by demonstrating that none of its features makes sense without Roman belief.

One passage from the book sums up MacKay’s thesis:

Mary Beard once wrote, in a passage redolent with Protestantizing bias:

“Howe can we possibly imagine sophisticated intellectuals like Cicero or sceptical poets like Ovid leaping through bonfires in a ritual concerned with the purification of flocks and herds?”

I am in a position to recommend that we imagine exactly that. I was raised in a tiny village in south India on an ashram at the feet of a guru who was deeply schooled in the traditions of both Vedanta and British education, who effortlessly quoted Plato, Shakespeare, Keats, but who also conducted daily rituals of ancestor worshiped in which he lit incense and burned camphor on a bed of carbonized cow dung at a shrine housing the cremated remains of his father, who had been his guru. We need to cultivate historical emphathy to imagine Romans like Cicero and Ovid in scenarios not unlike this one. And sometimes we just need to accept what they tell us about themselves, their activities, experiences, and yes, even their beliefs.

The main take-aways from this book are:

• Protestants have argued that “ritual” is the antithesis of “true religion,” consequently, part of their polemics against Catholicism, Judaism, and paganism has been to deride them as religions of external ritual, rather than heartfelt interior faith.

• Roman religious emotions, actions, rituals, norms, institutions, and socio-religious realities depended for their existence on Roman beliefs about gods and themselves.

• To enquire about Greco-Roman religious beliefs is not “Christianizing” of Roman religion, it is merely tracing the ideation implied by actions or mapping the intentions behind actions.

• The inapplicability of belief to Greco-Roman religion is an example of Christianizing bias in favour of Christian uniqueness.

Probably one of the best books about Greco-Roman religion I’ve read in a long time. A good example of how testing a resident assumption can make for a very good PhD thesis!