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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691165080 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/02/2022 |
| Pages: | 496 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xix
Abbreviations xxi
Introduction: Roman Religion, from Intuitions to Institutions 1
0.1 Roman Cult and the Question of Belief 1
0.2 From Roman Intuitions to Roman Institutions 5
0.3 HADD and Social Cognition 9
0.4 Intentionality and Belief 17
Part I Theoretical Foundations
Chapter 1 Losing Belief 27
1.1 Introduction 27
1.2 A History of Belief-Denial and the Belief-Action Dichotomy 27
1.3 An Anatomy of Belief-Denial and the Belief-Action Dichotomy 44
1.3.1 Belief Is Christian 44
1.3.2 Belief Is a Concept 46
1.3.3 Belief Is a Linguistic Practice 49
1.3.4 Beliefs Are Unknowable 53
1.4 Conclusion: Historical Empathy and Other Minds 55
Chapter 2 Recovering Belief 59
2.1 Introduction 59
2.2 The Intentionality of Belief 60
2.2.1 Belief Requires a Subject in Order to Exist 63
2.2.2 Beliefs Are about Objects 64
2.2.3 Beliefs Have Content 65
2.2.4 Belief Is a Distinctive Psychological Mode 68
2.2.5 Belief Has a Mind-to-World Direction of Fit 69
2.2.6 Beliefs Define Their Own Conditions of Satisfaction 72
2.2.7 Summary Thus Far 75
2.3 Discursive Intentionality: Extending the Analysis to Language 75
2.4 Belief-in 77
2.5 Belief Intensity 79
2.6 Intuition and Inference Produce Nonreflective and Reflective Beliefs 82
2.6.1 The Two Systems and "Theological Incorrectness" 83
2.6.2 Intuition and Roman Religious Culture 87
2.6.3 Inference and Agency 91
2.7 Conclusion 95
Chapter 3 Belief and Emotion, Belief and Action 98
3.1 Introduction 98
3.2 Belief and Emotion 99
3.2.1 What Is Emotion? 101
3.2.2 Belief and Emotion in Apuleius and Livy 106
3.3 Belief and Action 109
3.3.1 A Simple Belief-Desire Model of Action 113
3.3.2 Deontology: Desire-Independent Reasons for Action 116
3.3.3 Pietas as a Deontology 126
3.3.4 An Enriched Model of Action 130
3.4 Action Theory and Folk Psychology 133
Chapter 4 Shared Belief, Shared Agency, Social Norms 136
4.1 Introduction 136
4.2 Roman Consensus 139
4.3 Shared Intentionality and Shared Agency 143
4.3.1 Shared Intentionality 144
4.3.2 Shared Agency and joint Action 145
4.3.3 Mutual Belief 147
4.3.4 Aggregate versus Collective versus Joint Intentionality 149
4.3.5 Jointly Sharing Beliefs and Agency in Sacrifice 153
4.4 Norms, Collective Intentionality, Communal Common Ground, and Large-Scale Cooperation 159
4.5 Conclusion 165
4.6 Coda: Durkheim among the Ruins 166
Chapter 5 Shared Belief, Social Ontology, Power 172
5.1 Introduction 172
5.2 Objective and Exterior or Subjective and Interior? 173
5.3 A Social Ontology 177
5.3.1 Imposition of Function 178
5.3.2 Constitutive Rules 180
5.3.3 Shared Intentionality and Social Ontology 192
5.3.4 Societas versus "Emergent Social Entity" 194
5.4 Concluding Caveats and Possible Objections 201
Part II Case Studies
Chapter 6 Belief and Cult: Lucretius's Roman Theory 209
6.1 Introduction 209
6.2 Why Lucretius? 210
6.3 Epicurean Action 213
6.4 A Lucretian Archaeology of Religious Belief 214
6.5 Excursus: Roman Epiphanies 220
6.6 False Beliefs 227
6.6.1 Philodemus on Religious Inference 231
6.7 A Lucretian Aetiology of Cult 233
6.8 A Cognitive Theory? 235
6.9 Action Theory and Cult in Lucretius 236
6.10 A Prescription for Cult Practice 239
6.11 Conclusion 242
Chapter 7 Ad incunabula: Children's Cult as Cognitive Apprenticeship 244
7.1 Introduction 244
7.2 Ontogeny of Social Cognition 248
7.3 Learning to Pray: Imitation and Individual Agency 251
7.4 Religious Participation: From Joint Attention to Cultural Cognition 264
7.4.1 Ritual Norms, Overimitation, and Orthopraxy 271
7.4.2 Joint Commitments 279
7.4.3 Shared Beliefs 281
7.5 Religious Instruction: Beyond Apprenticeship 282
7.6 Conclusion 290
Chapter 8 The "Folk Theology" of Roman Prayer: Content, Context, and Commitment 291
8.1 Introduction 291
8.2 Some Guiding Theoretical Principles 294
8.3 Roman Prayer 303
8.4 Prayer Form 307
8.5 The Force of Prayer 311
8.6 Counterintuitive Content 319
8.7 Context and Commitment 330
8.8 Conclusion 335
Chapter 9 Inauguratio: Belief, Ritual, and Religious Power 337
9.1 Introduction 337
9.2 Cognition and Ritual Form 339
9.3 Auspicia 344
9.4 Cognition-about-Practice: Antony's Flaminate 347
9.5 Cognition-in-Practice 361
9.6 Constitutive versus Nonconstitutive Beliefs 362
9.6.1 Constitutive Beliefs 362
9.6.2 Nonconstitutive Beliefs 367
9.7 Conclusion: Belief Religious Reality, and Power at Rome 369
Epilog: Comparison, Explanation, and Belief 371
10.1 Introduction 371
10.2 Prescendi's Model of Roman Sacrifice 372
10.3 Roman Sacrifice in Dionysius of Halicarnassus's Antiquitates Romanae 373
10.4 Roman Sacrifice in Arnobius of Sicca's Adversus Nationes 376
10.5 Human Sacrifice in Caesar's De bello Gallico 381
10.6 Comparison, Explanation, and Belief in Dionysius, Arnobius, and Caesar 385
10.7 Believing in Belief 392
Glossary 395
References 399
Index Locorum 447
General Index 459
What People are Saying About This
“Belief and Cult is the first book to comprehensively demonstrate the role of belief in Roman religion and indeed to show that Roman religion would not be possible without belief. Jacob Mackey breaks new ground by examining the role of mental states and intentionality in various cult contexts. This is an excellent and important book that will spark debate and discussion.”—Jennifer Larson, Kent State University“Belief and Cult has the potential to be a game changer—a seminal work and turning point in the study of Roman religion. Jacob Mackey’s wide-ranging and cogent book makes a constructive and highly valuable contribution to our understanding of Roman religion and Roman society more broadly. An impressive book.”—James B. Rives, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill