Religious competence and individuality: three studies in the Roman Empire

Abstract

The theme of individuality and individualisation in religious contexts in the fairly remote past is perhaps best viewed as a heuristic device whose main value, at least in the context of Graeco-Roman history, is to question the excessive dominance of a model of religious action as essentially collective, which is perhaps proximately Durkheimian but in the Classical field goes back ultimately to early scholarship on ancient Judaism. Terminology is a basic problem in this context. Religious individuality can be defined as the construction of personal religious achievement or the practice of mastery defined by sui generis rules. In the case of the Roman Empire, five types of such achievement have been suggested: pragmatic; moral; competitive; representative; or exemplary/ reflexive. All these distinguishable types of individuality are linked, at least indirectly, to the complex and highly differentiated social, political, economic and moral structures of the Empire. Specifically religious individuation emerges only with the development of religion as a distinctive field of (social) action and thus the possibility of specifically religious distinction. If sustained over the long term, any such achievement is to be seen as individualisation under ancient conditions. This article briefly explores three types of religious distinction based on a conviction and lived practice of such individualised competence: the figure of the Weberian mystagogue in his Mediterranean forms; the figure of the practitioner skilled in Graeco-Egyptian ‘magic’; and the idealised figure of Pythagoras as projected by Iamblichus’ On the Pythagorean life (c.300 CE).     

Animal Mind: Science,Philosophy, and Ethics

Although 20^th-century empiricists were agnostic about animal mind and consciousness, this was not the case for their historical ancestors – John Locke, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and, of course, Charles Darwin and George John Romanes. Given the dominance of the Darwinian paradigm of evolutionary continuity, one would not expect belief in animal mind to disappear. That it did demonstrates that standard accounts of how scientific hypotheses are overturned – i.e., by empirical disconfirmation or by exposure of logical flaws – is inadequate. In fact, it can be demonstrated that belief in animal mind disappeared as a result of a change of values, a mechanism also apparent in the Scientific Revolution. The “valuational revolution” responsible for denying animal mind is examined in terms of the rise of Behaviorism and its flawed account of the historical inevitability of denying animal mentation. The effects of the denial of animal consciousness included profound moral implications for the major uses of animals in agriculture and scientific research. The latter is particularly notable for the denial of felt pain in animals. The rise of societal moral concern for animals, however, has driven the “reappropriation of common sense” about animal thought and feeling.