宗教学导论第一次作业
What Do the Mythological Theology, Civic Theology, and Natural Theology of Ancient Greece and Rome Mean, and What Is Their Relationship?
The Roman scholar Varro (Terentiu Varro) distinguished these three kinds of theology—that is, three different ways of explaining the gods: the mysterious (mythicon) (that is, the mythic (fabula)), the civic (civile), and the natural (physicon).
Myth is directed toward the theater; it is the stories of the gods told in poetry. Civic theology is directed toward the city; it is the worship of the gods and the activities of festivals and celebrations. Natural theology, by contrast, is directed toward the world; it comes from philosophers’ rational reflections on and inquiries into nature.
From one point of view, these three theologies seem to have a progressive relation, from small to large or from shallow to deep. The city is within the world, and the theater is within the city; the core of civic religious rites includes performances of stories about the gods, and thus mythological theology is related to civic theology.
However, from another point of view, these three theologies in fact encompass three dimensions of religion, and at the same time of civilization: the cultural-historical dimension, the social-political dimension, and the rational-philosophical dimension.
Myth was the main subject of ancient Greek and Roman literature and art, and also a way of narrating history. Here “history” is not meant as an objective and faithful record of what happened in the past; the significance of history lies in telling people where they themselves come from (whether by bloodline or by culture). The myths of ancient Greece and Rome were never fixed dogma, but an open body of stories that continually received additions and revisions. The revision of myth corresponds to developments in history and culture. The “confluence” of the early Greek gods was in fact the merging of different regional cultures—for example, “Rhea seems to come from Cretan culture, Athena from Mycenaean culture, Hermes and Hera from Aegean civilization or the culture of the Greek Bronze Age. Apollo seems to have come from Ionia, Aphrodite from Cyprus or Cythera, Dionysus and Ares from Thrace. The gods seem to have converged upon Mount Olympus from all points of the compass.”[①]
When northern peoples poured into the Greek peninsula and brought with them a unified language, the names and functions of various local gods were also gradually reconfigured and integrated. Homer’s epics and Hesiod’s genealogy of the gods then sought to unify the system of myth further; in particular, Hesiod tried to introduce the gods into a unified, ordered system by raising the question of their origins. But these poems and literary works did not have much effect on the actual religious practices of the city-states. Their greatest influence lay in the fact that—as “indispensable content for the education of Greek youth, these epics helped produce a sense of cultural and religious unity among the Greeks. That is to say, these epics created among the Greeks an awareness that culturally and religiously all Greeks were a whole.”[②]
Therefore, whether these mythic stories were actually believed by people, or whether what they proclaimed was in harmony with civic politics, was not the crucial issue. What mattered was that myth provided a sense of unity in culture and history. In different city-states, people may have worshiped different patron gods, but in all theaters the same stories were performed, and all youths recited the same poems. It was precisely the distinctive, systematized, and artistic mythological theology of ancient Greece that made it possible, even though the customs and rites of the city-states were not identical, to form a unified religious, cultural, and ethnic identity. So much so that anyone who wished to be integrated into Greek culture first had to find a place within the genealogy of the gods. This is somewhat similar to the Chinese schema of the “descendants of Yan and Huang”; the fundamental significance of painstakingly constructing these “genealogies” lies not in religion or history, but in cultural and ethnic integration.
Compared with mythological theology, which constructs and sustains cultural and historical unity through literature and art, civic theology constructs and sustains social and political unity through ritual and institutions. In the name of religion, civic theology prescribes rites such as worship, sacrifice, and festivals, or endows existing institutions or affairs with sacred meaning. On the one hand, the rites and institutions of a society are also part of culture; they originate in tradition and custom. But at the same time, rites and institutions can be artificially transformed or given new interpretations. Whether in ancient Greece or in modern society, this kind of “civic theology”—or, translated differently, “civil theology” or “political theology”—exists. That is to say, certain ways of life, rites, and social institutions are “sacralized,” endowed with sacred meaning.
Human beings always try to understand their life-world as meaningful. Meaning is not merely something personal and subjective; it also has a collective and objective side. People always live in society, and the meaning of individual life often needs to be established from within the social order. “Order” is precisely “the result of objectifying meaning; it is not only supported by institutional reality, but often itself possesses institutional characteristics, or is itself a kind of institution.”[③] For the construction of a group’s system of meaning, sacralization or religious interpretation is the most effective. “A group’s system of meaning makes its social order—its present, existing, and future, ideal social arrangements, such as the forms of its authority and power, its system of stratification and assignment of roles, the distribution of its resources and rewards, and so forth—meaningful; these features make the system of meaning a powerful legitimization of the group’s social order.”[④]
Simply put, civic theology (or civil theology, or political theology) sacralizes civic life, thereby, on the one hand, allowing individuals to find a sense of belonging and a place to anchor meaning within social order, and on the other hand, providing powerful legitimation for social order and political institutions. For example, in ancient Greece, the jurors of the Athenian courts had to swear an oath to Zeus, Poseidon, and Demeter before proceedings began, while military commanders also always had to regard themselves as emulating the gods or heroes[⑤]. Even today, judges still have to solemnly swear before the national emblem (or something similarly sacred), and war must at least be fought in the name of something sacred like “freedom,” never in the name of something secular like “oil.”
Natural theology, as seen by philosophers, looks very different from the previous two theologies; from the outset it is critical and reflective. But it is also a quest for and construction of “order”—mythological theology seeks and constructs order in culture and history, civic theology seeks and constructs order in politics and life, while natural theology seeks and constructs order in reason and knowledge.
In ancient Greece, what is called natural theology was basically natural philosophy, or rather, the core part of natural philosophy. Whatever view one held concerning the arche of the world, the pre-Socratic philosophers all agreed that “it is something creative or divine.”[⑥] Xenophanes treated “reason” as “god,” and Pythagoras treated “number” as “god.” Aristotle defined God as the “unmoved mover” and called theology the “first philosophy.” For philosophers, “god” remained indispensable because often only by appealing to such an infinite, eternal, and supreme thing could one provide a solid and reliable foundation for the order of the entire system of knowledge and value.
From natural philosophy to natural science—even in modern natural science, which has drawn a clear line between itself and religion—the element of “natural theology” still exists in some form. One easily thinks of Einstein’s famous saying: “It is hard to find among the deeper scientific minds one who is entirely without a religious feeling.”[⑦] Here “religion” does not mean that scientists must accept some religious culture or ritual, but rather the feeling of faith in and reverence for that ultimate order of the world. The modern physicist Max Planck believed: “When one asks about the existence and nature of a supreme power that governs the world, religion and natural science come together. The answers they each give are at least comparable to some extent; as we can see, they are not only not contradictory, but are harmonious and consistent. First, there is the rational order of the world; second, both sides acknowledge that the essence of this order can never be directly known, but only indirectly known, or, in other words, only conjectured. For this reason, religion needs to use unique symbols, while exact natural science uses sense-based measurement. So nothing can prevent us from equating these two omnipresent and mysterious powers: the world order of natural science and the God of religion.”[⑧]
In short, mythological theology, civic theology, and natural theology correspond respectively to the three dimensions of human civilization: cultural-historical, social-political, and rational-philosophical. They all try to seek or construct a (sacred) order in different places. These three “theologies” are characteristic of ancient Greece and Rome, but they also exist in different forms in every era of human civilization. For example, the place of mythological theology may be the theater, but it may also be the textbook, or mass media; its subject matter may be myth, or history, or merely some “symbol” or “sign.” What was civic theology in ancient Greece could be called civil theology in ancient Rome, and political theology in Schmitt; the object it worships may be local gods, or God, or even—such as in American sociologist of religion Bellah’s “civil religion”[⑨]—simply the worship of “the republic itself,” and so on. These three “theologies” are not a progressive, mutually replacing relation, nor are they a parallel, either-or relation; rather, they are more like three dimensions that coexist side by side but point in very different directions. It is also like the various different modes of life of one and the same person—literary and recreational life, social and political life, intellectual and academic life, and so on. They seem to have little direct interference with one another, and it is hard to say which is more important or more elevated. But in a healthy person or a healthy civilization, they should ultimately exist in some kind of harmonious coexistence; and ancient Greece was precisely the model of the harmonious coexistence of these three dimensions. The alluring “Greek spirit” was manifested not only in its philosophy and science, but also in its civic institutions, religious rites (such as the Olympic Games), sculpture and drama, myth, and epic poetry. To use a simplistic mentality of “discard the dross, retain the essence,” and to elevate one aspect while belittling another according to modern tastes, is often shallow and one-sided.
October 29, 2006
[①][US] John B. North and David S. North, *The Religion of Humankind* (7th ed.), trans. Jiang Xitai et al., Sichuan People’s Publishing House, 2005, p. 56 (p. 41)
[②]Ibid., p. 65 (p. 47)
[③] Sun Shangyang, *Sociology of Religion*, revised ed., Peking University Press, 2003, p. 91
[④]Ibid., p. 93
[⑤]See [US] Paul Cartledge, ed., *The Cambridge Illustrated History of Ancient Greece*, trans. Guo Xiaoling et al., Shandong Pictorial Publishing House, 2005, p. 304
[⑥][US] John B. North and David S. North, *The Religion of Humankind* (7th ed.), trans. Jiang Xitai et al., Sichuan People’s Publishing House, 2005, p. 74 (p. 52)
[⑦] Einstein, “The Religious Spirit of Science,” in *Collected Works of Einstein*, vol. 1, The Commercial Press, 1976, p. 67
[⑧] M. Planck, *Religion and Naturwissensechift*, 1958, pp. 26–27, cited in Qian Shiti, *Science and Religion—Their Relationship and Historical Evolution*, People’s Publishing House, 2002, pp. 157–158
[⑨] See Sun Shangyang, *Sociology of Religion*, revised ed., Peking University Press, 2003, p. 100 ff.
Latest Comments
- Gu
2006-10-29 22:48:25
This assignment is definitely far removed from the instructor’s line of thought… and I also don’t have the reading materials such as *Euthyphro*, *On the Divine*, and *The City of God* to draw on. I’ve written it, yes, but should I drop the course after all…
- Pan Qiqi
2007-12-30 16:20:29 Anonymous 210.21.224.235
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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