RELIGIOUS AGENCY, SACRALISATION AND TRADITION IN THE ANCIENT CITY

Jörg Rüpke

doi:10.19090/i.2018.29.22-38

Abstract

Starting from a discussion against the notions of a unified ‘public religion’ my focus during the past decade has been on ‘religious individualization’ and the fluidity of religion captured by the concepts of ‘lived ancient religion’ and ‘religion in the making’. These concepts focus on the inherent dynamic qualities of those cultural products that I identify as religion in the course of historical analyses. And yet, the undeniable presence of traditions and even canones can be conceptualized beyond a world of individually fragmented religious practices and beliefs and incipient, ever-changing and also dissolving institutions that would be clustered together only in the form of narrative shorthand terms by historians. The paper offers a theoretical reflection on a concept of religion useful for the question of tradition and canonization, building on earlier proposals and developing those further by developing the notion of sacralisation. This will be framed by an historical assumption, namely that the processes of interest here are pushed in urban contexts. Here, my focus will be on the ancient Mediterranean.

Highlights

Starting from the discussion against the notions of unified ‘public religion’ as entertained by ancient historians, one research focus during the past decade has been very much on ‘religious individualization’ and the fluidity of religion
Starting from a discussion against the notions of a unified ‘public religion’ my focus during the past decade has been on ‘religious individualization’ and the fluidity of religion captured by the concepts of ‘lived ancient religion’ and ‘religion in the making’
These concepts focus on the inherent dynamic qualities of those cultural products that I identify as religion in the course of historical analyses

Summary

Introduction

Starting from the discussion against the notions of unified ‘public religion’ as entertained by ancient historians, one research focus during the past decade has been very much on ‘religious individualization’ and the fluidity of religion. What I am going to offer in this paper is above all a theoretical reflection on a concept of religion that is able to capture both the fluidity of ‘religion in the making’ visible when focusing on religious agency and the notion of persistence, of trans-individual continuity, emphasized by the use of ‘tradition’. For this I am building on earlier proposals and developing these further. Synonym for merely ‘furthered’ or ‘accelerated’ or amounts to ‘originated in’ needs to be discussed in the end on the basis of specific historical evidence

Religious agency and sacralisation

Selectivity and canonicity as intensification of sacralization

Reflecting on the urban

Urbanism and the formation of religious groups