Machiavellian Rome

A version of this post was swallowed into cyberspace and fully digested earlier today. A roughly equivalent re-posting follows.

Modern concepts of civil religion arise, argues Guy Stroumsa ( A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason ) from two sources: The Querelle des Rites that pitted Jesuits against Dominicans on the legitimacy of Christians performing Confucian “honors” and the analysis of Roman religion adopted by Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy . According to Machiavelli, religion was one of the main reasons for Rome’s success, but it was a religion of a particular kind. In contrast to Christianity, which focused on “the salvation of the individual,” Roman religion was “civic” religion (152), religion subordinated to the purposes of the Roman state. Machiavelli was responsible for “the modern recognition of the place of religion in the ancient state.”

Machiavelli’s views on Roman religion made their way to the philosophes and shaped their understanding of Christianity and politics, and the proper role of religion in public life. Stroumsa illustrates with a discussion of Montesquieu’s Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence (1734).

For the Romans, religion’s purpose was to keep people obedience, cultivate civicly-beneficial virtues, and generally to keep the peace. It did this by avoiding questions of “truth,” and by subordinating all deities to the “only divinity” of Roman, “the genius of the republic” (155). Roman religion was structured to maintain its civic character, the priesthood being an office of state rather than a separate class, and the priests drawn from the Senatorial class so that they shared the interests of that class (155).

In this way, Roman religion proved itself more rational than Greek religion. Rome improved on Greek religion in other ways: “its gods were more respectable, its dogmas more reasonable, its merveilleux less fanatical, and its cult wiser.” Romans “rejected various gods, too weak or vicious for their taste, and deified concord, peace, salvation, and liberty” (156).

Because the real religion of Rome was honor to Rome, the Romans were highly tolerant. To avoid confusion and arrest the proliferation of gods, they assigned Latin names to foreign gods, but they permitted conquered peoples to worship freely, so long as they honored the Roman state. There was an exception: Egyptian religion was not tolerated, “and that stemmed from its own intolerant nature.” In time, Jews and then Christians also ran afoul of Roman religion, but “this was because the Romans thought the Jews were Egyptians, and the Christians Jews” (155). Montesquieu clearly considered the Roman way superior to the intolerances of Christendom.

Christianity was ill-suited to function as a civic religion. He agreed with Josephus’s claim that the Hebrew state was a theokratia , in which God was acknowledges as ultimate ruler and in which social norms and virtues were made internal to religion (rather than religious virtues internal to civic). Christianity made “truth and belief” into “ultimate values,” and this Rome could not tolerate. It implies a genius beyond the genius of the state, a truth beyond the truth of political necessity (154).

Stroumsa’s analysis is very revealing. First, it shows that the quest for civic religion, founded on classical models, was a part of a deliberate agenda of replacing the role of Christianity in the West. And it suggests, second, that it is inevitable that the modern state, insofar as it is founded on a Roman model of religion and public life, is on track to end where the Roman state ended – in a clash, perhaps of epochal proportions, between the state and “intolerant” “Egyptians.”