Via Michael Gilleland’s Laudator Temporis Acti post, a quote from Robert Parker, Athenian Religion: A History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996):
As everyone knows, Greek religion was not a ‘religion of the book’. No doubt it acquired its distinctive stamp before writing was thought of. But it persisted as a religion ‘not of the book’ through something like a millennium of literacy. (And it had passed through an earlier literate phase in the Mycenaean period.) In this area, it seems, social factors prevented the ‘technology of communication’ from exercising a really decisive influence.
The city used writing to record publicly its commitment, financial and so moral, to the cult of particular gods. What mattered about this declaration was that it could be seen to have been made, even if not all Athenians had the skill, and fewer still the interest, to read the dry and difficult inscriptions. Writing was not, by contrast, used to build up a complicated specialized corpus of ritual knowledge. We stressed earlier the crucial importance of the fact that ‘sacred laws’ (not a Greek term) are a subsection of the whole law-code of a community, not an independent category resting on a different authority. They are so, of course, because of the indissoluble unity of ‘church and state’ in Greece, powers that could never be at odds because they could never be clearly distinguished. A crucial aspect of this integration of religion in Greece is the ordinariness of the priests; they were ordinary in many ways, but above all in lacking all pretension to distinctive learning. Elaborate ritual texts are the hallmark of a more specialized priesthood and a more autonomous religious order than those of Greece.
The amateur status of the Greek priesthood was not affected in any way by the advent of the art of writing. One does not picture the priestess of an Athenian public cult with a book in her hand. The famous sixth-century marble sculptures of ‘seated scribes’ from the acropolis are generally held to represent not priests but, significantly, ‘treasurers’ or similar officials, bound to give account of the sacred monies in their care. When the religious book begins to appear, it is rather the mark of marginal figures, the wandering initiators and purifiers and prophets, who in the phrase of the Derveni papyrus ‘make a craft out of rites’. Lacking a position in the civic religious structure, they naturally need to display credentials of other kinds. The association between bookishness and irregularity is at its clearest in Orphism. Both in social and religious terms Orphism is profoundly unorthodox; and it displays several characteristics of a ‘religion of the book’, being indeed transmitted through a ‘hubbub of books’. The only books of public cult, by contrast, are the calendars inscribed for all to view (though few to read) on wood or stone.
See the linked post for footnotes.
I’d go further: the idea that religions have to have doctrines (written or unwritten) is a relatively recent novelty which has yet to catch on in some parts of the world.
Kusaasi traditional religion doesn’t have priests, though it does have individuals who are held to be the only appropriate people to perform particular rites, because they are supposed to be the descendants of the original first settlers, which makes them the “landowners” for religious purposes, regardless of the actual current ownership of the land. Their title teŋdaan “tindana” is usually translated “earth-priest”, but that is just a mistransposition into our own religious categories.
The nearest thing to professional religious persons are the ba’ab, who cast lots to obtain guidance for clients, for example over which ancestor should be commemorated in the name given to a newborn child, invoking that ancestor as spiritual protector. But “diviner”, not “priest”, is the right name for them. Similarly with sɔn’ɔpʋtib “witchfinders”: they have that particular expertise, again largely based on casting lots, but they are in no meaningful sense “priests.”
Sɔnpʋtib /sɔ̃pʊtɪb/ “witchfinders”, sorry. I would not like to be responsible for exposing Hatters to potential ridicule from Kusaal-speakers by leading them to mispronounce this piece of core vocabulary.
There are also cultures with a specialised priestly caste with sacred texts and rules that aren’t written – compare the reports about Celtic druids, or Hinduism originally. The latter still preserves a tradition of passing on sacred texts by reciting and memorizing; AFAIK, writing them down in scrolls and books was a relatively late development.
individuals who are held to be the only appropriate people to perform particular rites, because they are supposed to be the descendants of the original first settlers, which makes them the “landowners” for religious purposes, regardless of the actual current ownership of the land. Their title teŋdaan “tindana”…
Thanks very much for this–this is very interesting. I was just working on a comparative mythology paper involving the institution of certain Greek cults, and it was stimulating to contemplate the word tindana, “(sacral) land owners”.
In Harry Turtledove’s alternate-history novella “The Pugnacious Peacemaker” (a sequel to L. Sprague de Camp’s “Wheels of If”) ex-Bishop Ib Scoglund of the Bretwaldate of Vinland, now a member of the International Court of Justice, has the job of trying to make a permanent peace between Tawantinsuyu (the Incan Empire, still intact) and its neighbor to the east, the Emirate of the Dar al-Harb (roughly Brazil). They are locked into a cycle of terrorism and counter-terrorism that turns into outright war about once a generation. Their problem is partly religious in nature: the Tawantinsuyans are not People of the Book: they do have sacred works, but they are passed solely by oral tradition, and by the 20C the entire population learns them verbatim in childhood.
Scoglund pretends to be interested in possibly converting to Sun-worship, and asks one of the Son of the Sun’s officials to write down the sacred works, since as an adult convert he probably won’t be able to memorize them. The official agrees that this is permissible, and writes everything down and gives Scoglund a copy. He then uses this to persuade the Muslim hierarchy that the Sun-worshippers are in fact, or at least may be, People of the Book. Finally Scoglund convinces the Emir (modeled, I think, on Nasser) that he will be financially better off this way: instead of persecuting the Tawantinsuyans in his country, he can make them pay jizya instead, and the qadis’ ruling will tamp down the fanatics on both sides. Scoglund puts the final touch on it by moving the current (purely military) border to the Orinoco, which will tend to make terrorism more difficult. The Son of the Sun agrees, even though it means losing a chunk of territory (nobody argues with a theocrat).
(Scoglund is really a lawyer from the U.S. on something very like our timeline.)
I’m puzzled by the presence of prophets or soothsayers like Calchas in the Iliad. How did one become a prophet? Was it a hereditary vocation? Was some kind of accreditation necessary?
I think I understand things like the Delphic Oracle. There was a kind of apprenticeship program to bring in new staff.
I don’t really remember hearing much about free-lance soothsayers in classical Greece, but it’s not something I’ve set out to look for either.
Is this a historical development where the small-time entrepreneurial soothsayers of Mycenaean times were forced out of of business by Big Oracle? I realize there’s a lot we don’t know about those days.
I was recently reading about Roman religious practices. They also did not really have anything like doctrine. But they were fanatics about getting their rites very exact, and almost always did the invocations reading from a written text. If a ceremony did not have the expected result, they would frequently blame it on someone pronouncing a word wrong or making some other slip of the tongue. And the priesthood was very much tied up with the old aristocratic families.
@maidhc: See here and here for some comments I made about Roman religion in another thread last year.
Another aspect of Roman religion that may seem unusual was that many of the priesthoods were short-term civic offices, rather than careers. Among the leading patrician families, it was commonplace for the men, as they ascended along the cursus honorum, to serve term one or more years as priests, sometimes simultaneously with other elected positions or military commands. Most likely, the priestly colleges were actually filled with a mixture of ambitious short-timers, respected elders, and career functionaries. The last would probably have been largely aristocratic scions who may have showed less promise or inclination for a political career, who provided day-to-day staffing and institutionally continuity to the temples. However, we do not know that many details about them (like whether they actually had to be reelected every year or not), likely because they were among the members of the aristocracy that were most peripheral to the centers of power.
The obvious exception to this characterization of the long-serving priests is the Vestal Virgins, since being a Vestal was the highest civic office that a patrician woman could hold. So we know rather more about the Vestals than about the other long-serving priesthoods—although not actually that much about their religious rites, many of which were never observed by male chroniclers. For example, we know that the Vestals were elected for life—until death, resignation, or (very rarely) impeachment—and even those that did eventually resign frequently served for decades.
But they were fanatics about getting their rites very exact, and almost always did the invocations reading from a written text. If a ceremony did not have the expected result, they would frequently blame it on someone pronouncing a word wrong or making some other slip of the tongue.
That is similar to what I read about Vedic religion, only without the reading from written text. Instead priests underwent a lengthy schooling, learning to chant the invocations in exactly the same manner as their predecessors.
To me it’s not clear whether this insistence on correctly pronouncing invocations and performing rituals is an old (IE) feature or just the endpoint of a parallel development in line with typical human pathways. In any case, the use of written texts would make it easier to have the kind of career-stage priesthood the Romans had as compared to lifelong priests learning rites and sacred texts by heart since their youth like in India.
@Hans: The Romans even preserved the archaic Latin pronunciation of some hymns and prayers, to the point that by imperial times they were sometimes completely incomprehensible. One example I remember was an early hymn to Mars that described a very energetic dance. The archaic text of the hymn was retained enough to be written down phonetically by priests who did not know that it was supposed to be accompanied by a dance or even what deity it was honoring. (They thought it was dedicated to Ceres.)
The Salii—the leaping priests of Mars—continued to practice similar rituals, but Ovid expressed his dislike of their rites, which he considered ugly and incomprehensible. Most of the priesthoods and their rituals were traditionally held to have been established by the mythological King Numa Pompilius (who was dated to the seventh century B. C. E.) and his wife, the nymph Egeria. (Numa’s wife was probably originally held to have been a nature priestess and later upgraded to an actual minor goddess.) However, the Romans’ respect was probably less for for Numa’s original institutions than a vaguer notion of tradition. For example, multiple Roman historians tell that when the original law books interred in Numa’s grave on the Ianiculum were supposedly accidentally uncovered around 180 B. C. E., the Senate ordered them ritually burned, on the vague testimony that the information that was found within was dangerous. (The reported date for this event is late enough that there is a good chance that the stories are based on an actual event, but what the documents actually were and what actually happened to them will probably never now be known.)
This kind of staid attitude toward ritual, preserving ceremonies even after they had become meaningless, was parodied by Mervyn Peake in Titus Groan and Gormenghast. However, I am not sure whether Peake was thinking specifically of the Romans as he was writing; the milieu of the books, particularly Gormenghast, often seems more characteristic of post-Renaissance Europe, and Britain in particular.
the idea that religions have to have doctrines (written or unwritten) is a relatively recent novelty
A classic observation on the differences between the Abrahamic religions and maybe most (but not all) others, and probably one that would warrant calling the two types by different names even.
I’d half-seriously suggest “mythology” for the latter, but it seems pretty clear this will not catch on.
From ages 5 to 11, Mervyn Peake lived in an enclosed compound in Tianjin, China. Some have suggested that this experience influenced his later writing.
One example I remember was an early hymn to Mars that described a very energetic dance. The archaic text of the hymn was retained
Yes, the carmen arvale. I remember going through that and the carmen saliare in a course on early Latin and Italic during my studies with the late Prof. Neu…
A classic observation on the differences between the Abrahamic religions and maybe most (but not all) others
While this is certainly true in many ways of present-day Judaism and Christianity, I’m not sure how fundamental a difference is truly involved.
At least as far as the Tanach goes, I’m not sure that doctrine (as opposed to practice) is very much in evidence. The doctrines are the work of epigoni, trying to make sense of the texts, which quite often do not readily oblige (the Pentateuch especially abounds in characters who refuse to play along by being just Good or Bad; personally, I’ve always had a soft spot for that perfectly genuine prophet Balaam, later unequivocally tagged as a wrong ‘un; the text, as so often, makes no comment on the matter at all.)
In the New Testament, even Paul is clearly just beginning to try to codify his and his companions’ experiences into doctrines (and generations of Christians have probably secretly felt that he didn’t do a particularly good job of it …) Making it into a coherent body of doctrine required generations of ingenious scholars and a powerful ability to explain away edge cases. And imperial authority …
West African Muslims I’ve talked to about such matters generally seem much more interested in right praxis than in right doctrine: the doctrines are there, but apart from those that feed into Sharia (which matters a great deal), they don’t seem to matter much once you get beyond the Shahada minimum (which is itself really more of a statement of allegiance than a statement of faith.) They’re a matter for specialists.
My experience among Christians, come to that, is that interest in doctrine as such is not at all common; in fact, to be interested in such things basically marks you out as either some sort of religious professional or as a doctrine nerd (a type of individual particularly often encountered in Calvinist circles, which perhaps attract persons prone to believe that they can explain the intrinsically inexplicable.)
@Hans: Thanks. I couldn’t remember the name of the hymn, and not speaking Latin, I wasn’t able to locate it online. I figured that there was a good chance somebody else would know what I was talking about though.
@maidhc: What he saw in China as a boy is often cited as a potentially important influence on Peake’s work, and it just occurred to me that The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (who also spent time growing up in late Qing Dynasty China) depicts the poor, including Wang Lung’s family, living in rude huts that back up against the outer wall of a rich noble’s estate. Thinking about it now, there are definite similarities to the dwellings of the Bright Carvers’ dwellings huddled beneath the walls of Gormenghast.
West African Muslims I’ve talked to about such matters generally seem much more interested in right praxis than in right doctrine
As are Russian Orthodox.
To the degree that it is often scorned as обрядославие (praxidoxy). In truth, though, there is a lot more to a religion besides doctrine and ritual. There is moral teaching, enthusiasm, art, and various social aspects as well.
“Russian Orthodox” includes most of Russians today. In 1987 most of those were still taught or teaching in schools that religion is a sort of medieval superstitions still found in some distant corners maybe. Then they turned out to be believers overnight. I do not think it is possible to compare thier view to that of those who grew up in a community that practices it. It is a bit like sex (another element of life removed from public view and even many private discussions).
Yes, praxis is more accessible.
@drasvi
Saints and martyrs can help to provide believers with a focus. Unfortunately the Russian Orthodox Church is canonising people like the Romanovs, who were not venerated in their lifetime and did not acquit themselves well when confronting believers in 1905. I believe
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgy_Gapon
would have been a better choice, and he was also killed by leftists.
“Russian Orthodox” includes most of Russians today. In 1987 most of those were still taught or teaching in schools that religion is a sort of medieval superstitions still found in some distant corners maybe. Then they turned out to be believers overnight. I do not think it is possible to compare thier view to that of those who grew up in a community that practices it.
I’m not sure what you mean, but if you’re implying that the focus on praxis is a post-Soviet thing, that’s incorrect — the emphasis on behavior (praying to icons, fasting, etc.) and indifference to doctrine is an ancient feature of Holy Rus.
No, I meant the opposite:
That most of modern Russian Orthodox people are something different from Muslims of Nigeria (and also from some communities where Orthodox Christian “praxis” has been practiced without any interruption). I understood your “[a]s are Russian Orthodox” as referring to modern believers too.
Oh! No, I’m afraid I don’t know much about modern believers, so I appreciate all updated information. (I confess I have little tolerance for the idea that those wretched Romanovs were saints.)
Speaking about Christians and Muslims, Journey beyond the Three Seas is quite peculiar.
It is a short account by a Russian merchant in 15th century of a rather unsuccessful expedition to India, written in a mixture of lnagauges. Mostly Russian by… “sex, religion and politics” can be in something else. There are a few political notes in Turkic and there are some details like prices for prostitutes’ services (a slave-girl is cheaper) and he is completely lost: he finds himself praying in mosques together with Muslims, as there are no churches around (one of ruiles he meets even comments on how lost he is) and tormented by the fact.
He concludes – apparently on his death bed – with God’s name in 4 langauges.
UPD: no, God in 4 languages was in the middle: Олло, худо, богъ, данъиры. He concludes with Arabic names of God. Al-malik, al-quddus etc.
As discussed here in 2014!
ruiles
rulers.
Admittedly I’m enough of a heathen to draw little distinction between doctrine and any praxis that is actually prescribed rather than simply transmitted. (If you will, “it is important to perform rituals correctly” seems often like a piece of doctrine — not necessarily the most philosophically elaborate doctrine, but doctrine nevertheless.)
You don’t see much of a distinction between someone who says “If you don’t accept the prescribed definition of the Trinity, I’ll have you burned at the stake” and someone who doesn’t care whether or not you understand the Trinity so long as you show up at services, fast at the appropriate times, and show respect to icons?
If you don’t accept the prescribed definition of the Trinity,
That’s a deathly trap. 🙂
I remember reading on some Anglican cleric’s blog that even most parsons don’t understand their church’s teaching on the trinity, and unwittingly commit acts of heresy when trying to explain the trinity and especially the holy spirit to their congregations. I don’t think that the situation is much better in other confessions.
Exactly, which is why it’s the ideal example of a doctrine. As with Marxism-Leninism, you can always find heretics if you need some to persecute.
Perhaps consistent with Hans’ take, I remember once hearing an Anglican cleric opine that probably more heresy was preached from pulpits on Trinity Sunday* (when clergy tended to feel obligated to get into the technicalities for the supposed edification of their flocks) than on any other day of the year. But you can certainly accept the Church’s authoritative teaching on the subject without actually knowing exactly what that teaching is in all of its fine details. Only an impertinent modernist/rationalist would think otherwise.
*NB that Trinity Sunday is itself a medieval Western innovation, from the age of Scholasticism when many clerics perhaps overrated the capacity of their own rational faculties to comprehend and explicate such matters.
@Hans, J.W. Brewer: Crossing over with another thread: Walter M. Miller, Jr.—presumably unintentionally—placed a similar heresy in the mouth of Abbot Zerchi in A Canticle for Leibowitz: *
Roman Catholic dogma actually holds that both the body and soul are fundamental parts of the human being—hence the assumption of Mary into heaven “body and soul.”
(My own opinions—as a nonbeliever, admittedly—on whether terminological questions about the nature of the Trinity are actually meaningful are a matter of public record.)
* That’s three nested colons, if you’re counting.
Roman Catholic dogma actually holds that both the body and soul are fundamental parts of the human being
Mainstream Christian (and Muslim) doctrine in general, in fact. It’s subchristian Western folk religion that imagines that human beings spend eternity as disembodied spirits (typically as “angels in heaven.”)
There is a heretical concept of the “sleep of the soul”, which asserts that the soul is (as it were) in storage (or something) until the resurrection of the body, driven by the very natural point that it is (to say the least) difficult to imagine what being a soul without a body could even be like, and doubts whether this is even conceivable as a mode of human experience; it’s not possible to square this (reasonable though it be) with any straightforward reading of the relevant Bible passages, though, which is why it’s not mainstream.
It doesn’t seem to be mainstream in Islam, either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barzakh
The Trinity and the two natures of Christ are sufficient in themselves to produce an infinite amount of theology and infinite schisms. Almost as good as “a =~a”.
a few too many words on the doxy/praxy question:
i’m sure i’ve cited it on here before, but one of the best and subtlest things i’ve read on that can of worms is still haym soloveitchik’s 1994 essay Rupture and Reconstruction, which describes the late-20thC shift in the function of text in traditionally observant jewish communities from tools for the (ex post facto) justification of embodied community practice (מינהג / minig / minhag) to sources of correct practice.
soloveitchik doesn’t go on to draw the – to my eye obvious – conclusion that this is an absorbtion of a specifically christian (and more specifically, biblical-literalist protestant) approach to the relationship of texts and embodied practice, and of (ortho)doxy to (ortho)praxy. i’d go a step further, even, following daniel boyarin (with carlin barton and on his own), and say that it’s the most recent step in the assimilation of jewish ritual practice into the category of “religion” that christianity invented in its own image.
i’m skeptical about the idea that there’s any necessary tension between “elaborate ritual texts” and the predominance of non-professionalized ritual practitioners (“the ordinariness of the priests… lacking all pretension to distinctive learning”). traditional jewish practice – until recent shifts overlapping with the ones that soloveitchik analyzed – with all of its elaborate uses and cycles of ritual text (blessings over activities; formal daily and weekly prayer services; readings from the tanakh; tkhines, zmires, and other less formal sung and recited texts; holiday ritual texts; etc) has had very little to do with the professionalized rabbinate*. the vast majority of all this textual activity takes place takes place outside the synagogue, with professionalized prayer leaders at daily services the exception rather than the rule.
the fantasy that this elaborate use of text has relied on widespread, extensive “distinctive learning” is given the lie by any description of traditional kheyder education written by someone who survived it – and by scholarly work like judit frigyesi’s fascinating Writing on Water: The Sound of Jewish Prayer. perhaps more importantly, though, a very large amount of this “elaborate ritual text” was and is used by women and girls, who generally have been (and are) specifically excluded from access to any “distinctive learning”, and by poor and working-class men, who (until very recently) functionally lacked any meaningful access to the “distinctive learning” that defined wealthy men’s self-understanding as Good Jews (traditionally understood as contrasting with the עם-הארצים (“jewishly ignorant people” – literally “men of the land”, i.e. men who work with their hands).
* rabbis’ traditional roles have varied from community to community, but broadly have had much less to do with the ongoing enactment of ritual than with the oversight, explication, and adjudication of its more esoteric corners (mainly through the justification of community practice in textual terms: the responsa literature).
perhaps more importantly, though, a very large amount of this “elaborate ritual text” was and is used by women and girls, who generally have been (and are) specifically excluded from access to any “distinctive learning”, and by poor and working-class men, who (until very recently) functionally lacked any meaningful access to the “distinctive learning” that defined wealthy men’s self-understanding as Good Jews (traditionally understood as contrasting with the עם-הארצים (“jewishly ignorant people” – literally “men of the land”, i.e. men who work with their hands).
A great point that hadn’t occurred to me.