Religious Dimensions of the Self in the Second Century CE

312 Pages·2013·3.585 MB·English

by  Jörg Rüpke (editor), Gregory D. Woolf (editor)

Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum
Studies and Texts in Antiquity and Christianity
Herausgeber/Editors
Christoph Markschies (Berlin) · Martin Wallraff (Basel)
Christian Wildberg (Princeton)
Beirat/Advisory Board
Peter Brown (Princeton) · Susanna Elm (Berkeley)
Johannes Hahn (Münster) · Emanuela Prinzivalli (Rom)
Jörg Rüpke (Erfurt)
76

Religious Dimensions of the Self
in the Second Century CE
Edited by
Jörg Rüpke and Greg Woolf
Mohr Siebeck
Jörg Rüpke, born 1962; Director of the International Research group “Religious Individualiza-
tion in Historical Perspective” at the Max Weber Centre of the University of Erfurt.
Greg Woolf, born 1961; Chair of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews.
e-ISBN PDF 978-3-16-152351-9
ISBN 978-3-16-152243-7
ISSN 1436-3003 (Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum)
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2013 Mohr Siebeck Tübingen. www.mohr.de
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by
copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproduc-
tions, translations, microfilms and storage and processing in electronic systems.
The book was typeset by Martin Fischer in Tübingen, printed by Laupp & Göbel in Nehren on
non-aging paper and bound by Buchbinderei Nädele in Nehren.
Printed in Germany.
Table of Contents
Jörg Rüpke and Greg Woolf
Introduction ..................................................... VII
Rethinking Philosophical Tradition
Eran Almagor
Dualism and the Self in Plutarch’s Thought ........................... 3
Jula Wildberger
Delimiting a Self by God in Epictetus ................................ 23
Religious Concepts of the Self
Jörg Rüpke
Two cities and one self:
Transformations of Jerusalem and reflexive individuality
in the Shepherd of Hermas ......................................... 49
Harry O. Maier
Dressing for Church: Tailoring the Christian Self
through Clement of Alexandria’s Clothing Ideals ...................... 66
Christoph Markschies
Das „Selbst“ in der valentinianischen Gnosis ......................... 90
Anders Klostergaard Petersen
Justin Martyr in Search of the Self ................................... 104
Anna Van den Kerchove
Self-affirmation and Self-negation in the Hermetic revelation treatises .... 130
VI Table of Contents
Richard Gordon
Individuality, Selfhood and Power in the Second Century:
The Mystagogue as a Mediator of Religious Options ................... 146
Second Sophistic Perspectives
Wolfgang Spickermann
Philosophical Standards and Individual Life Style:
Lucian’s Peregrinus/Proteus – Charlatan and Hero .................... 175
Dorothee Elm von der Osten
Habitus Corporis: Age Topoi in Lucian’s Alexander or the False Prophet
and The Apology of Apuleius ........................................ 192
Practices of the Self
Zsuzsanna Várhelyi
Self-Care and Health-Care: Selfhood and Religion
in the Roman Imperial Elite ........................................ 221
Elena Muñiz Grijalvo
Votive Offerings and the Self in Roman Athens ....................... 243
Peter Gemeinhardt
Wege und Umwege zum Selbst: Bildung und Religion
im frühen Christentum ............................................ 259
General Index .................................................... 279
Index of Sources .................................................. 291
Introduction
Jörg Rüpke and Greg Woolf
Did new senses of the self emerge in the High Roman Empire, and if so what were
the religious corollaries? Le souci de soi, the third volume of Michel Foucault’s
Histoire de la Sexualité appeared in 1984 and was enthusiastically welcomed as
offering a seductive and subtle account of the emergence of a new sense of the
individual between the Hellenistic period and Late Antiquity. Peter Brown and
Paul Veyne are just the most distinguished of those who took up these ideas.
The approach they pioneered has stimulated conferences, university courses,
doctorates and monograph series, and provided the basis for major works of
scholarship, notably Brown’s own Body and Society and the essays gathered
in the first volume of the Histoire de la Vie Privée over which Veyne presided.
Hellenistic philosophy, medical texts and the literature of the so-called Second
Sophistic have all been recruited to this debate. A concern with the growing
place of the individual has been seen as central to much Hellenistic philosophy,
a phenomenon discussed for example in Martha Nussbaum’s Therapies of
Desire. A more critical response to these ideas, spanning philosophy and litera-
ture, is provided by Christopher Gill’s The Structured Self in Hellenistic and
Roman Thought. The same concerns are central to the critical works of Averil
Cameron, Tamsyn Barton, Catharine Edwards, Eric Gunderson and
Jim Porter among others. Art historians like Barbara Borg and Jaś Elsner
have found ways of connecting discussions of Selbstdarstellung to this different
approach to the self. Both philologists and art historians have incorporated new
sensibilities into their accounts of the intellectual culture of the second Sophistic.
Religious studies have not always been central to this debate. But at times this
new sense of the self has been represented as a prefigurement of Christian sensi-
bilities, especially in so far as a special concern with the body and with personal
experience is concerned. Some of the arguments deployed also evoke earlier
debates about the uniqueness of the so-called oriental cults. The focus on the dif-
ferentiation of the individual can also be connected to A. D. Nock’s arguments in
Conversion and Jonathan Z. Smith’s in Drudgery Divine in their very different
essays in mapping religious change over Hellenistic and Roman antiquity.
This volume sets out to examine these issues, by bringing together key pro-
tagonists in these debates within the separate spheres of philosophical, literary
VIII Jörg Rüpke / Greg Woolf
and religious studies. The contributions are based on papers presented at a
workshop held in the Augustinerkloster of Erfurt in June 2010. It was conducted
within the framework of the research programme Religious Individualization in
Historical Perspective, a multi-disciplinary and multi-period investigation based
at the Max Weber Center of the University of Erfurt, and funded by the German
Research Foundation (DFG).
The volume is opened by chapters dealing with the rethinking of philosophical
tradition in what might be called “the long second century”, the period which
lies at the heart of our inquiry. Eran Almagor deals with some treatises of the
philosopher Plutarch and with his interpretations of Plato. He points out how
knowing oneself is for Plutarch also a matter of grasping a divine element within
the world. However, this access is of a type, which at the same time implies a
sense of an infinite hiatus between the self and the divine. Humans need to
develop a sense of humility as a characteristic dimension of their care for their
selves. Jula Wildberger analyses a religious concept of the self presented in the
works of Epictetus. Her inquiry reveals a complex notion of the self, one which is
at the same time intimately related to, and also clearly separated from, god. Each
time the self prays in adversity to God to lead it to whatever place he has assigned
for it, it performs a volitional gesture, prohairetic of God’s won volition: what
was previously outside, and ‘God’s business’, thereby becomes the self’s own. By
making God a part of itself, the self at the same time acknowledges that it is a
part of God and belongs to him. Self and God have become blended, not despite
their separation, but because of the existence of a separate self.
A second group of contributions deal with religious concepts of the self. Jörg
Rüpke’s chapter explores textual strategies of shaping the self within the new
religious framework offered to Roman Jews by the ekklesia of god and his mighty
angel Christ. The multi-layered text known as the “Shepherd of Hermas” offers
many metaphors and thought experiments for the individual hearer and reader
to reflect on his or her own conduct and priorities, and to position his or her self
accordingly. Central to the text are metaphors of the city. Rüpke claims that the
prominence of these metaphors reflects the attraction exercised by the urban
and social fabric of the city of Rome, against the backdrop of the destruction of
Jerusalem in the age of the Bar Kochba insurrection.
Harry O. Maier’s analysis of the work of Clement of Alexandria focuses on
another medium of shaping the self, namely dress. Again, it is the urban context
of the metropolis of Alexandria, which shapes the precepts but in a negative
way, remaining tacit about the civic context. Making use of a long tradition of
philosophical thinking about the relationship between one’s dress and one’s
self, Clement develops ideals for a specifically religious dress code. As Maier
points out, the gender bias of these dress codes, recommending male ideals
for women gaining in strength, characterize Greco-Roman civic as Christian
religious norms.
Introduction IX
The interaction of philosophical thought and the concern for a contemporary,
specifically religious self is also at the centre of Christoph Markschies’ contri-
bution. For his analysis of texts from the pupils of the Roman teacher Ptolemaeus
(who presented themselves as pupils of the orthodox teacher Valentinus, but
were classified as Gnostic heretics by Irenaeus of Lyon), Markschies concen-
trates on the terms physis and psyche. It is part of their Platonic inheritance to
conceptualize a tripartite human nature, in which the soul binds body and spirit
together. Conversely, the idea that the demiourgos has a soul belonging to the
realm of the shadowy corporeal world, falls short of philosophical standards of
rigour. The effort to make this comprehensible to interested religious individuals
seems to take precedence over a correct interpretation of Plato’s Timaios. Anna
van den Kerchove explores the religious dimensions of the self that can be
disentangled from the Hermetic corpus. Here too the influence of Platonic mod-
els is clear, but discovery of the self is presented as part of a broader theological
enquiry and education. Anders Klostergaard Petersen inquires whether or
not Justin Martyr can plausibly be seen as a precursor of modern individualism.
The chapter demonstrates the difference between the historical Justin and the
narrative character presented in the Dialogue. In the Dialogue we find a deliber-
ate thematization of the differences between the world-views of philosophy and
that of religion proper. His search is a good example of what might be called a
reflective individuality, and he offers himself as a model for others. Richard
Gordon addresses in the final chapter of this section religious specialists, mys-
tagogues or “magicians” in the terminology of Max Weber. Such religious roles
offered channels within which a religious individuality might be developed in
relation to the power-structure of Graeco-Roman society. The religious services
these specialists offered were accommodated within these structures, but they
also permitted (and perhaps demanded) constant innovations. Those innova-
tions did not challenge social structures, but they did offer space for individua-
tion and so maintained the viability of the religious system as a whole.
Religious thinking in the second century cannot be dealt with without pay-
ing attention to the larger intellectual context known as the “Second Sophistic”.
Wolfgang Spickermann analyses an essay written by one of the key figures of
the period, Lucian of Samosata. He argues that the image of the demi-god Hera-
cles, as developed in Lucian’s writings, provided a model for the figure of Per-
egrinus, who himself served as a literary model for Lucian. Individual life-styles
did not preclude attempts to live according to philosophical models. Dorothee
Elm von der Osten also deals with Lucian, and broadens the analysis by taking
Apuleius of Madauros into account as well. Her analysis takes up a topic already
developed by Harry Maier in relation to Clement, that of outward appearance.
But in this chapter the stress is laid not upon dress, but on the bodily habitus,
on the manner in which these figures presented their age, gender, education
and social status. Lucian seeks to explore the discrepancies between the persona