A History of Mediterranean Religion

1. What Is Meant by a History of Mediterranean Religion?

It is the intention of this book to tell the story of an upheaval epochal in its impact. This is the story of how a world well beyond the understanding of most of us was transformed into a world very like our own, at least in one particular. To put it succinctly: we will describe how from a world in which one practiced rituals, there emerged a world of religions, to which one could belong. This is no straightforward story. The changes I shall relate were not inevitable; no one could have foreseen them. Nor were they irreversible: quite the contrary.

To speak of religions — in the plural — seems to us today quite normal. We may in fact define ourselves in terms of a religion. A religion may open doors for us — access to officialdom, to the mass media, to tax offices when it is a question of tax exemptions — or in some cases the doors of a prison. But, although we as individuals may belong to one religion, we can no longer "unthink" the plural form of the term as a concept for describing both present-day and historical societies. And yet, with ever-greater frequency, trends arise that defy such categorization. "New Age" has been one such concept. "Spirituality" increasingly appears to be another, and "mysticism" has a long history as a phenomenon of this kind. Countless Christians, Muslims, andHindus talk quite straightforwardly of themselves as belonging to one (only rarely several) of many religions, but there are good grounds for wondering whether, in many cases, we should not speak of culture and cultural differences rather than of membership of different religions.

When a concept has many different meanings, windows of comparison are opened across space and time, and in many cases it is only then that a meaningful conversation becomes possible. A history, moreover, can be communicated successfully only when the number of concepts in play is limited, when recognizability is vouchsafed to all participants, despite small differences; otherwise, we are faced with a multitude of disparate, sometimes conflicting histories, with results that may be entertaining (think only of the "Thousand and One Nights"), and thoroughly informative and revealing (a thousand every-day stories adding up to a "microhistory"), but with no end, no "moral." This is all the more true of a long history such as the one being attempted here, where the actors change repeatedly, or at least often more frequently than the parameters of religious practices and concepts.

Conceptual harmonization can, of course, add to the difficulty when an effort to achieve such harmony superimposes an appearance on continuity that masks on-going changes and transformations. It then becomes critical to refine our concepts, to notice differences. We begin to see that the world we are describing comprises many geographical spaces, where many different kinds of development are underway: a change that we note in one location may also have taken place elsewhere, but there is no guarantee that it had the same consequences in both settings. Thus, although a history of Mediterranean religion is not a universal history of religion, it must nevertheless always take into account other geographical spaces, must ask what happened there, and must notice instances where ideas, objects, and people broke through those walls erected in our imagination by the metaphor of separated spaces.

My Mediterranean narrative recognizes that comparable transformations with similar outcomes (in religions, in assemblages of practices, in concepts, and in symbols) took place in other epochs and in other realms, where they were perceived by the peoples they affected as being distinctive. I think particularly of western, southern, and eastern Asia. And yet, in the past half-millennium, religion in many of these regions was very different. I maintain that the institutionalization of religion characteristic of the Modern Period in many parts of Europe and the Americas, and the conflict-ridden rigidity of the "religions" or "confessions" of which one may be a member — but only one at a time — rests on the particular configurations of...