4125198

The Past and Present Society
Sacred and Profane: Idolatry, Antiquarianism and the Polemics of Distinction in the
Seventeenth Century
Author(s): Jonathan Sheehan
Source: Past & Present, No. 192 (Aug., 2006), pp. 35-66
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
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SACRED AND PROFANE:
IDOLATRY,
ANTIQUARIANISM
AND THE
POLEMICS OF DISTINCTION IN THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY*
Everyday
life is not a
place
for the sacred.
Instead,
the sacred
stands
apart
from
ordinary, profane
affairs: it finds its home in
churches, mosques
and
synagogues, spaces
sanctified
by
their
connection to the world of the transcendent and dedicated to its
honour. If this seems a rather
pedestrian
distinction,
it is not.
At the
very least,
it has been a distinction vital to the
anthropo-
logical description
of the world. 'In
every primitive
commu-
nity
..
.',
the social
anthropologist
Bronislaw Malinowski
argued
in
1925,
'there have been found two
clearly distinguishable
domains,
the Sacred and the Profane'.'
Despite
their
magic-
ally
infused
lives,
the Trobriand islanders that he so
famously
studied never lost
sight
of these two domains. Ask
any
of these
Melanesian farmers whether
magic
alone
grew
his
crops
and
'he would
simply
smile on
your simplicity':
if fields are
parched,
if fences
break,
'he will have recourse not to
magic,
but to
work,
guided by knowledge
and reason'.2 This distinction between the
ordinary
world of work and the
sphere
of the sacred is thus
pri-
mal to human existence: in
anthropological terms,
Malinowski
insisted,
all
communities,
all
peoples,
at all
times,
have used it
to establish what the
religious sociologist
Mircea Eliade later called
a 'fixed
point'
to
guide action, organize
internal life and establish
societies.3
The French
pioneer
of
sociology
and
anthropology
Emile Durkheim was
emphatic.
'In all the
history
of human
*
Many
thanks to the Center for the
Study
of
Religion,
at Princeton
University,
for
supporting
research and
writing
on this
topic.
I am also
grateful
to Constance
Furey, Anthony Grafton, Jonathan Israel,
Carina
Johnson,
Martin
Mulsow,
Kate
Seidl,
Dror
Wahrman,
and audiences in
Chicago
and Los
Angeles
for their
help
in
thinking through
these materials.
1
Bronislaw
Malinowski, 'Magic, Science,
and
Religion',
in his
Magic, Science,
and
Religion
and Other
Essays,
ed. Robert Redfield
(Boston, 1948),
1.
2lbid.,
11-12.
3 Mircea
Eliade,
The Sacred and the
Profane:
The Nature
of Religion,
trans. Willard
R. Trask
(New York, 1959),
21.
Past and
Present,
no. 192
(Aug. 2006)
C The Past and Present
Society, Oxford,
2006
doi: 10.
1093/pastj/gtl005
36 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 192
thought',
he
declared,
'there exists no other
example
of two cate-
gories
of
things
so
profoundly
differentiated' as that of the sacred
and the
profane.4
And the distinction has not
gone away,
either in
ordinary speech
or in
contemporary anthropology.
Even for such a
prominent
modem writer as Clifford
Geertz,
it is still active,
if
expressed
in
epistemological
rather than natural terms. The
sacred,
he
insists in a now famous
essay,
'is what lies
beyond
a
relatively
fixed frontier of accredited
knowledge
that . . . sets
ordinary
human
experience
in a
permanent
context of
metaphysical
con-
cern'. Without this
frontier,
without the distinction that the
frontier
metaphorically represents,
'the
empirical
differentia of
religious activity
or
religious experience
would not exist'. Without
this
frontier,
in other
words, religion
would not be an
object
of
knowledge.
On one side of the frontier are 'transcendent truths'.
On the other side there are the
'common-sensical,
the
scientific,
and the aesthetic':
precisely
those
aspects
of human existence that
enable the researcher to
differentiate,
isolate and describe 'the
religious perspective'.5
The
profane operates
here as an unstated
ideal, making
the sacred
legible
to the
anthropological eye.
But seen in the
long term,
these modem
descriptions
of the
sacred and
profane
are rather
peculiar.
In
patristic
or medieval
times,
for
example,
the
profane
did not
generally
connote a
space
of human behaviour neutral as to
religion,
or outside it.
Instead,
it
was a
theological concept
that described what was set
against
or in
opposition
to
(pro)
the
temple (fanum). Translating
the Greek
bebilos
(impure, unhallowed),
it could be
variously
rendered as
'irreligious', 'contrary
to the
sacred',
and so on.6 This was
espe-
cially
true of the verb 'to
profane',
which in
English
and Latin alike
conveyed (and
still
conveys)
a sense of desecration or violation of
the sacred. At
times,
the
'profane' merely
denoted what was 'for
men' or 'human' as
opposed
to 'for the
gods'
or 'divine'
-
think
of the term 'sacred and
profane
letters'. But even
then,
in the
4
mile
Durkheim,
The
Elementary
Forms
of
the
Religious Life,
trans.
Joseph
Ward
Swain
(New York, 1915),
53.
5Clifford
Geertz, 'Religion
as a Cultural
System',
in his
The
Interpretation of
Cultures: Selected
Essays (New York, 1973), 102, 98, 111,
110. For a sustained and
provocative critique
of this
essay,
see Talal
Asad,
'The Construction of
Religion
as
an
Anthropological Category',
in his
Genealogies of Religion: Discipline
and Reasons
of
Power in
Christianity
and Islam
(Baltimore, 1993).
6 For
the
complicated etymologies,
see Thesaurus
linguae
latinae
(Leipzig,
1900-
),
s.v. 'profanus'.
SACRED AND PROFANE 37
Christian
world,
the
profane
carried as much of the
stigma
of
corruption
as man himself did.
'Pagan'
or
'gentile'
letters
always
stood in distinction to the word of God and
were, by impli-
cation, caught
in the same
pollutions
of
paganism. Historically,
in other
words,
the
profane
was
largely
a force
against religion,
not
impartial
to it.7
Early
Latin
renderings
of Psalm 89 con-
demned those who
'profane [d] [God's] laws',
for
example;
while
Eusebius denounced
gentiles
who 'offered execrable sacrifices
on
profane
and
impure altars',
and
Cyprian
described
apostates
from Christ's Church as
'foreign
...
profane
. . .
enemies'.8
If the
profane originally
marked a
theological
distinction
between true
religion
and its
pollution,
where did what I would
call the
anthropological profane
come from? When and
why
did
it become
possible
to
imagine
there were some areas of human
life that have
nothing
to do with
religion? Or,
to ask much the
same
question,
when and
why
did it become
possible
to ima-
gine something
called
'religion'
that
applied generically
to all
people?
The intention of this
essay
is to
provide
a
single geneal-
ogy,
or at least a
prehistory,
of this distinction. This
story
will
not offer an
etymological
excavation of either the 'sacred' or the
'profane'.
Rather the
story
is a historical
one, grounded
in the
seventeenth
century, and,
more
specifically,
in the
largely
Calvinist world of
seventeenth-century
biblical
scholarship.
This
scholarship's
obsessive zeal to define the nature and boundaries
of true
religion through systematic investigation
of
false religion,
what scholars called
'idolatry',
will be the centre of the tale. In
a
typically baroque
and
polymathic way,
Calvinists
-
and I use
the word
broadly
to refer to the Reformed
(versus
the
Lutheran)
tradition of
Protestantism,
and thus to the
English
Church as
well
-
produced
scores of
antiquarian
treatises on ancient
deviations from the true God. Most
intriguing
of all was the
spectre
of
Jewish idolatry:
the
Jews' deviance,
and
especially
their
aberrant love for the Golden
Calf,
haunted these treatises. In
7 And here
religion
is
understood,
as it was for
many centuries,
as a
rough equiv-
alent of either 'true
religion'
or 'Christian
religion';
for the full
etymology
and
'conceptual history'
of
religio,
see Ernst
Feil, Religio:
die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen
Grundbegriffs
vom Frahchristentum bis zur
Reformation,
3 vols.
(Gottingen, 1986).
8
Augustine,
Ennarationes in Psalmos. In Psalmo LXXXVIII Ennaratio. Sermo
II,
in
Patrologia
cursus
completus:
Series
latina,
221 vols.
(Paris, 1844-64), xxxvii,
col.
1131; Eusebius,
De vita
Constantini, ibid., viii,
col.
0056d; Cyprian,
Liber de unitate
ecclesiae, ibid., iv,
col. 0503a. The
King James
Bible
(1611)
uses
'profane'
almost
exclusively
in this sense:
see,
for
example,
Lev.
18-22; Ezek.
21-3.
them,
the Israelites functioned as the Trobriand islanders later
did for
Malinowski,
as
parables
and
metaphors
for
exploring
the nature of
religion.
And this nature would shift
sharply
over
the course of the seventeenth
century,
as scholars made
profane
idolatry
into a
species
of the sacred. As
antiquarians
assimilated
idolatry
into the heart of
religion,
I
argue,
the traditional
opposi-
tion between
religious
truth and error broke down. The theo-
logical profane
was absorbed into the heart of the
sacred, paving
the
way
to a new
anthropological
distinction between the sacred
and the
profane.
This distinction was
forged
in Christian
antiquarianism,
and
yet,
it is a
major
aim of this
essay
to
show,
these
scholarly
obsessions with ancient
idolatry
were never
antiquarian
in our
modem sense.
That is, they
were never
just
moved
by
the in-
fatuation with obscure
details,
but instead were driven
by
the
engines
of
theological polemics.
If
orthodoxy, 'right belief',
was
the obsession of the Lutheran seventeenth
century,
Calvinists
added
orthopraxis, 'right practice',
to their list. This was cer-
tainly
true for
Calvin,
and for
subsequent
Calvinists it was
especially,
indeed
overwhelmingly,
true in
England,
where the
politics
of
worship
were ever
present
in scholars' minds and
marked both the
subjects
and the results of their work.
There,
scholars worked with uncommon
assiduity
to
develop
new
understandings
of
idolatry just
as their entire
political
and re-
ligious
life was
being
torn to
pieces by
the
politics
of
worship.
The creation of an
anthropological profane
-
that
part
of hu-
man affairs untouched
by religion
-
and an
anthropological
sacred
-
religious
behaviour
ecumenically
understood
-
was a
product
of this
theological milieu,
where societies and
kings
stood and fell over the
challenge
of
giving
God his due.
I
STRANGE GODS: THE GOLDEN CALF AND THE IDOLATRY
OF THE
JEWS
Three months after the
Jews escaped
from their
Egyptian
bond-
age,
the book of Exodus tells
us, they
crossed into the wilder-
ness of Sinai. There God called Moses
up
to the
thundering
mountain,
where he remained for
forty days, learning
the com-
mandments and
hearing
the laws that God
expected
his
people
to
obey.
In the absence of their leader and fearful of their new
condition of
freedom,
the
people
of Israel
grew
worried and
'gathered
themselves
together
unto
Aaron',
the
high priest,
and
said to him:
'Up,
make us
gods,
which shall
go
before us'.
Aaron
obeyed them, forging
a 'molten calf' and
offering
it to
the anxious
Jews
as
'thy gods, O
Israel,
which
brought
thee
up
out of the land of
Egypt'.
Then Aaron
'built
an altar before
it',
and the
people
celebrated and offered sacrifices.
Soon,
how-
ever,
Moses returned from the
mountain,
and when he saw his
people's deviance,
he flew into a
rage,
first at Aaron and later at
the rest of the Israelites. In an
explosion
of
anger,
Moses
smashed the
tablets,
burnt the calf and
then, calling
Aaron and
the Levites to his
side, slaughtered
the
impious
-
'every
man
his
brother,
and
every
man his
companion,
and
every
man his
neighbour' (Exod. 32:1-27).
The
story
of the
great betrayal
-
not
only
of Moses but also
of God
-
powerfully shaped
the
Jewish tradition,
not least
because it established the ancient line of
Jewish priests
and
gave
them a
complex
ceremonial law to oversee. But
though
it was
certainly
a well-known
story
to
early
Christian
writers,
these
tended
(for
obvious
reasons)
to be far more anxious about the
pressing
fact of
gentile idolatry
than about its remote
Jewish
incarnations.
Tertullian,
for
example,
was
profoundly antagon-
istic to idol
worship, calling
it 'the chief crime of
mankind,
the
supreme guilt
of the
world',
but had little to
say
about
Jews
in
his De
idololatria.9
Lactantius,
whose Divine Institutes had an
amazing
afterlife in the
early
modern
period,
railed
against gen-
tile
idolatry
as
'madness',
but was
mostly
silent on the Hebrew
failures.1'
Even the
Reformation,
with its notorious obsession
with
idolatry,
focused little on the
Jewish proclivity
for false
worship.
In the
period
when Protestants
essentially
reinvented the
second commandment
(abandoning
the Latin
Vulgate
command-
ments
and,
like the Eastern Orthodox
Church, changing
the
prohibition against images
from a
gloss
on
'you
shall have no other
gods
before me' into a commandment in its own
right),
ancient
heathen
practices,
more than
Jewish idolatry, preoccupied
9
Tertullian,
De
idololatria,
ed. and trans.
J.
H. Waszink and
J.
C. M. van Winden
(Leiden, 1987),
23.
10 Lactantius,
Divine
Institutes,
in The Ante-Nicene
Fathers,
ed. and trans. Alexander
Roberts and
James Donaldson,
10 vols.
(New York, 1890-9), vii,
41.
critics
eager
to condemn
'pagano-papism'."
And so the Swiss
divine
Heinrich
Bullinger,
in his 1529
Origin of Errors,
used the
pagan 'religion
of
images'
and the
pagan tendency
to
'worship
these
images
with no less reverence than
they
do the
gods
themselves',
as a stick to beat the Catholics for their idolatrous
'temples'.12
When
Bullinger's
sentiments were
transposed
into
the 1563 Elizabethan
homily
book
- in the
longest
of these sets
of standard sermons
-
a similar stress on
gentile idolatry emerged:
'images
came in
amongst
Christian men
by
suche as were
Gentiles' and Catholic rites were 'all one with the rites whiche the
Gentiles idolaters used in
honouryng theyr
idolles'.13 Catholics in
turn
pointed
to
pagan
rituals as confirmation of the
dissimilarity
between their
religion
and idol
worship. 'Scripture',
as the tire-
less Tridentine cardinal Robert Bellarmine
wrote,
'never
gives
the name of idols to true
images,
but
only
to the simulacra of
the
Gentiles,
which refer to false Gods'.'4 For much of the six-
teenth
century, idolatry
was a
gentile,
not a
Jewish
disease.
But
by
the
1600s, things changed,
as
Jewish idolatry began
magnetically
to attract scholars
eager
to understand human
deviations from the laws of God. The 1607
Papal
Index
neatly
marked the new concern with
Jewish
affairs: the first volume on
its list was
by
the erstwhile
Catholic,
Francois
Monceaux,
en-
titled Aaron
purgatus: or,
On the Golden
Calf.15
From all
appear-
ances,
this book had a laudable
goal, namely
to 'clear Aaron of
shame and
guilt'
and to ensure his
dignity
as the
high priest
of
Israel and brother of Moses.'6 'Since an
offence,
however
small,
"11Margaret Aston, England's Iconoclasts, i,
Laws
against Images (Oxford, 1988),
372. Calvin himself tended towards a more ecumenical condemnation of
'Jews
as
well as
Gentiles';
see his Institutes
of
the Christian
Religion,
trans.
John Allen,
2 vols.
(Philadelphia, 1843), i,
ch. 11. On idols and iconoclasm
generally,
see Carlos M. N.
Eire,
War
against
the Idols: The
Reformation of Worship from
Erasmus to Calvin
(Cambridge,
1986);
Lee Palmer
Wandel,
Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm
in
Reforma-
tion
Zurich, Strasbourg,
and Basel
(Cambridge, 1995); Phyllis
Mack
Crew,
Calvinist
Preaching
and Iconoclasm in the
Netherlands,
1544-1569
(Cambridge, 1978).
12
Heinrich
Bullinger,
De
origine erroris,
in divorum ac simulachrorum cultu
(Basel,
1529),
Gr.
3 [John Jewel],
The Second Tome
of
Homilies
(London, 1574,
STC
513:3), 58,
103. On the
homily book,
see
Aston, England's Iconoclasts, i,
322
ff.
14 Robert Bellarmine, Septima
controversia
generalis
de ecclesia
triumphante
tribus
libris
explicata,
in
Opera omnia,
ed.
Justin F'vre,
12 vols.
(Paris, 1870-4), iii,
213.
15J.
M. De
Bujanda,
Index librorum
prohibitorum,
1600-1966
(Montreal, 2002),
627;
Francois
Monceaux,
Aaron
purgatus: sive,
De vitulo aureo libri
duo, repr.
in Critici
sacri: sive,
Doctissimorum vivorum in SS. Biblia
annotationes,
9 vols.
(London, 1660).
'6
Monceaux, Aaron
purgatus, ix,
4407-8.
against God,
or a chance error in a
priest,
is a mortal
one',
Monceaux declared in his dedication to
Pope
Paul
V,
Aaron
needed
particular
exoneration if the Levitical order of
priests
were to remain free of
original offence.17
The
question
at
hand,
then,
was whether or not Aaron
'knowingly,
as the common
opinion
has
it,
made the
idol'.'8 Monceaux declared him inno-
cent: Aaron was neither the machinator & architectus of
Jewish
idolatry,
nor was he interested in
reviving
ancient
Egyptian
cults.
Instead,
he
insisted,
Aaron
sought
to create 'a true like-
ness,
or
better,
a
symbol
. . . of the
glorious
God of Israel'.19
Moses' brother did not sin 'so much as
he, through
error and
indiscretion,
offered an occasion for another's sin'.20
If Monceaux's book marked the
beginning
of a seventeenth-
century
obsession with
Jewish idolatry,
those scholars most
interested in it
-
namely
Calvinist researchers of all national
stripes
-
refused to
acquit
either Aaron or the
Jews
and instead
indicted both for their
relapse
into the idolatrous
practices
of their
Near Eastern
neighbours.21
Thus the Dutch
jurist
and scholar
Hugo Grotius,
in his Annotations on the Old
Testament,
made the
connection en
passant, declaring
his belief that the
Jews 'hoped
that the
spirit
of the God
they worshipped
would come into the
image' just
as the
Egyptians (gentes aliae)
felt about the
'spirit
of
the stars'.22 The
Huguenot
divine Andre Rivet insisted in his
commentary
on Exodus that when the
Jews
'saw that Moses
had not returned after some
days
. ..
they
wanted to establish
some divine
worship
in the outward manner to which
they
were
accustomed in
Egypt'.23
Rivet's
countryman,
the scholar Samuel
17
Ibid.,
4411-12.
18
Ibid.
19 Ibid.,
4427.
20
Ibid.,
4530.
21 For a general survey of the
antiquarian
literature on
idolatry,
see
Guy
Stroumsa, 'John Spencer
and the Roots of
Idolatry', History of Religions, xli (2001).
Some erudite
Catholics,
like Athanasius
Kircher,
were also
intrigued by
these links
-
see his discussion of
Apis
and
Serapis
in his
Oedipus Aegyptiacus:
hoc est Universalis
hieroglyphicae
veterum doctrinae
temporum
iniuria abolitae
instauratio,
3 vols.
(Rome,
1652-4), i, 201,
where he derides the
'superstitious
Hebrew
people'
and their fasci-
nation with 'the cult of this idiotic
god'.
22
Hugo Grotius, Opera
omnia
theologica
in tres tomos
divisa:
ante
quidem per partes,
nunc autem
conjunctim
& accuratius
edita,
3 vols.
(London, 1679), i,
57. In seventeenth-
century
sacred
history,
the
Egyptians
were
nearly always given pride
of
place
as the
first
worshippers
of the stars.
23
Andr6
Rivet,
Commentarius in
Exodum,
in
Opera theologica,
3 vols.
(Rotterdam,
1651-60), i,
1176.
Bochart,
dedicated the
longest
article in his Hierozoicon:
or,
The
Animals
of
Sacred
Scripture (1663)
to the
cow,
and
though
he
was not sure
why, given
'the mutual hatred between
Jews
and
Egyptians',
the
Jews
had turned to calf
worship,
still he conceded
that the
'origin
of the
superstition'
came from
Egypt,
'where calves
and cows were in
many ceremonies'.24
The
English
were no less inclined to see the shades of
Egyptian
deviance in
Jewish
rites.
Thus,
in a book that went
through
fifteen editions in the seventeenth
century,
the
scholarly popu-
larizer Thomas Godwin decried the
Jews
for their
'corruptions
learned
among
the
AEgyptians,
who
worshipped
their Idoll
Apis,
otherwise called
Serapis,
in a
living
Oxe'.25 The moderate
royalist
Thomas Fuller
simply replaced
the Golden Calf with
an
image
of
Apis
in his 1650 A
Pisgah-Sight of
Palestine
(see
Plate).26
The
Jews,
declared the divine
Henry Hammond,
'doted
on the
specious Idol,
and were
transported
with their sensual
way
of
worshipping it,
that God was
quickly
almost
lost,
their
heart
going
back to
Aegypt'.27 And,
while the
English jurist
and
antiquarian John
Selden offered a
stranger
set of
genealogies,
they
still
grounded Jewish worship
in the
religions
of the Near
East. The Golden
Calf,
he
thought, might
be an incarnation of
Apis
-
yet
'we do not know
altogether
whether he ... was
rep-
resented
by golden
statues'
-
or
Osiris,
whose 'divine
image'
was
certainly
rendered in
gold.
More
likely, though,
the calf's
ultimate
origins
were rooted not in
Egypt
but in
Syria
and its
host of such unfamiliar
gods
as
Nergal, Dagon, Ur,
Adad and
Mithras,
since 'neither
[its]
rites nor
[its]
name was honoured
anywhere
earlier' than there.28
24
Samuel Bochart, Hierozoicon:
sive, Bipertitum opus
de animalibus sacrae
scriptu-
rae,
2 vols.
(London, 1663), i, 345,
338.
25Thomas Godwin, Moses and Aaron: Civil and Ecclesiastical
Rites,
Used
by
the
Ancient
Hebrewes,
2nd edn
(London, 1625,
STC
1068:1),
191.
26Thomas Fuller, A
Pisgah-Sight of
Palestine and the
Confines Thereof:
With the
History of
the Old and New Testament Acted Thereon
(London, 1650).
27
Henry Hammond, Of Idolatry (1646),
in The Works
of
the Reverend and Learned
Henry Hammond,
2 vols.
(London, 1684), i,
259.
28
John Selden, De diis Syris syntagmata: aduersaria
nempe
de numinibus commen-
titiis
in vetere
instrumento
memoratis
(London, 1617,
STC
1116:8), 50, 56;
Martin
Mulsow, 'John
Seldens De Diis
Syris:
Idolatriekritik und
vergleichende Religions-
geschichte
im 17.
Jahrhundert',
Archiv
fiir Religionsgeschichte,
iii
(2001), 10;
see also
Peter N.
Miller, 'Taking Paganism Seriously: Anthropology
and
Antiquarianism
in
Early Seventeenth-Century
Histories of
Religion',
ibid.
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But the Calf exerted more than
just
historical
pressure
on
Calvinist scholars. Instead it
symbolically
condensed
antiquarian,
political
and
theological
concerns. It did
so,
at the
very least,
as
a
story
about
idolatry, probably
one of the most
politically
charged topics
in an
age
saturated
by
the
politics
of
religion.
When
it was
placed
on the 1607
Index,
for
example,
Monceaux's
Aaron
purgatus
was
treading
hard on the heels of the enormous
waves of iconoclasm that had
recently swept
across
Germany
and the
Netherlands,
and would have been fresh in all readers'
minds - and
especially
those in the Roman Church. These were
only
the latest in a series of
idol-breaking episodes
that
raged
intermittently
from the 1520s to the
English
Revolution. These
political
events were
intimately
connected to the new Protestant
theologies:
as Carlos Eire has
noted,
one of the 'foundations of
the Protestant attack on medieval
piety'
was its
'sharp
distinction
between...
"true" and "false"
worship'
and this
distinction,
in
turn,
was
intimately
tied to the use of
images.29
For their
part,
Catholics had
long distinguished
between
dulia
(veneration)
and
latria
(worship):
the
good Christian,
in
their
mind,
venerated
images (saints, crucifixes,
and so
on)
but
did not
worship
them. 'Great
profit
is derived from all
holy
images',
the Council of Trent
unequivocally declared,
because
through them, people
are moved to 'adore Christ and venerate
the saints whose likeness
they
bear'.30 Trent thus
distinguished
between idols
(Bellarmine's
'simulacra of the
Gentiles')
and
holy
images
-
those
objects
of veneration that evoke the
presence
of
God in the mind of
pious worshippers.
But
sixteenth-century
Protestants scoffed at these subtleties.
Calvin,
for
example,
dis-
missed the
dulia-latria
distinction as a
'subterfuge',
a mere
wordplay
in the face of the
very
real
'profanation
of the Divine
honour' that
images inevitably
introduce.31 And for
Calvin,
and
Calvinists
generally,
this was no idle
question. Rather,
in matters
of
worship,
Calvin
proclaimed,
the 'whole substance
of
the Christian
religion
is
brought
into
question'.32
God
prefers
'Practice to
Knowledge,
and honest Gentiles to wicked Israelites' was one
extreme formulation of a Protestant
position
that affirmed the
29
Eire, War
against
the
Idols,
54.
30
Canons and Decrees of the Council
of Trent,
trans. H.
J.
Schroeder
(St
Louis and
London, 1941),
216.
31
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian
Religion,
trans.
Allen, i,
114.
32
Calvin, quoted in
Eire,
War
against
the
Idols,
199
(Eire's italics).
centrality
of
worship.33
It was not the
case, then,
that in the
Reformation 'correct belief' was 'more
highly
valued than correct
practice'.34
For Reformation
thinkers, instead, worship
was es-
sential to
Christianity:
the
fights
about the so-called
'adiaphora'
that rocked Lutheranism in the wake of its founder's death
testified to the
significance
of
worship;35
so
did the
struggles
about
idolatry
and the role of
images
in the Church
-
struggles
that
shaped
the entire
sixteenth-century political
and
religious
landscape.
When Calvinists
expounded
on
Jewish idolatry, therefore,
they
did so in the service of these
ongoing struggles.
But the
new
religious landscape
of the seventeenth
century
made the
Golden Calf a
potent polemical
device in the wars over
politics
and
religion.
This was
particularly
true of the second biblical
story
of the
Calf,
which
symbolically
condensed a host of
religio-political problems
that
plagued
the
period.
This second
appearance
was in the ancient cities of Dan and
Bethel,
where
the
Jewish king Jeroboam
and the ten northern tribes of Israel
'made two calves of
gold
... and
appointed priests
from
among
all the
people' (1 Kgs. 12:28-31).
This
rebellion
against
the
House of David set the
stage
for the
disintegration
of the
Jewish
empire
c.900
BCE and the
subsequent
loss of the ten northern
tribes.36 It also introduced an idolatrous deviation into the
heart of northern
Judaism.
'Behold
your gods, O
Israel,
who
brought you up
out of the land of
Egypt', Jeroboam
declared to
initiate his new
worship,
and his calves were the cultic centre
for the schismatic ten tribes.
Ironically, Jeroboam's
rebellion
was itself
precipitated by idolatry-inspired
revulsion.
Jeroboam
took his lead from the
prophet Ahijah,
who accused Solomon
of
worshipping
'Ashtoreth the
goddess
of the
Sidonians,
Chemos
33
Alexander
Ross, Pansebeia: or,
A View
of
All
Religions
in the World
(London,
1653),
534.
34
Talal
Asad,
'Toward a
Genealogy
of the
Concept
of
Religion',
in his
Genealogies
of Religion,
58. On
ceremonies,
see
Aston, England's Iconoclasts, i, 11;
also
Bryan
D.
Spinks, Sacraments, Ceremonies,
and the Stuart Divines: Sacramental
Theology
and
Liturgy
in
England
and
Scotland,
1603-1662
(Burlington
and
Aldershot, 2002).
35
For the literature on the
adiaphora controversy (hinging
on whether
'things
that are neither commanded nor forbidden
by God, may
still be
regarded
as
adiaphora
without
compromising Scripture'),
see Sources and Contexts
of
the Book
of Concord,
ed. Robert Kolb and
James
A.
Nestingen (Minneapolis, 2001),
184.
36
On
the
history,
see
John Bright,
A
History of Israel,
4th edn
(Louisville, 2000),
230-8.
the
god
of
Moab,
and Milcom the
god
of the Ammonites'
(1 Kgs.
11:33).
In the name of
Jehovah, then, Jeroboam
broke with
Jerusalem
and instituted his own
(idolatrous) worship.
If Aaron's errors testified to the
poisonous
effects of
idolatry
on the mind of the
credulous, Jeroboam's
fall testified to its
poisonous
effects on the
political
life of the nation. This was
particularly appropriate
in the seventeenth
century.
Where the
sixteenth
century
had
operated largely
within the rhetoric of
heresy
and schism
(implying
that Christian
unity might return,
whether
by
violence or
by reconciliation), by
1600 the
diversity
of Christian churches was a stubborn feature of the
political
and
religious landscape.
Like Israel and
Judah long before,
the
tribes of
Europe
were
permanently
divided. The seventeenth-
century
obsession with
Jewish idolatry
thus had a
compelling
logic
in the
light
of the new
immobility
of
Europe's religious
division:
Jeroboam's
deviance resonated with a
period when,
perplexingly,
the love of God was shared
by all,
but the
ways
to
show this love had become
fiendishly
divisive. And
so,
Calvinists
repeatedly
noted that
Jeroboam's
love of God did
nothing
to
exonerate his idolatrous behaviour. The
anonymous
author of
the
Originall of Popish
Idolatrie described how
Jeroboam
'insti-
tuted
strange Priests, corrupted
the Law of God' and
began
an
'Idolatrie and
corruption
of sacrifices' that continued for 'more
then
[sic]
foure hundred
yeers'.37
Grotius offered a
typically
laconic comment
-
that
'princes
are accustomed to
twisting
sacred matters to their ends'
-
but declared it God's will that
Jeroboam,
like the
Pharaoh, 'might
be hardened more and
more in his
idolatry'.38
And Hammond insisted that 'the
guilt
of
Idolatry'
should be
charged
to
Jeroboam
and 'that the divine
censure,
and character of
Jeroboams
sin
(that
stuck so close to
his
posterity) importeth
also'.39
As an
allegory, then,
the
story
of
Jeroboam's
crimes showed
clearly
that
recognition
of God
guaranteed
neither the cohesion
of a
political community
nor the
right practice
of a
religious
community. Indeed,
the
Jeroboam story,
and
Jewish idolatry
37 Anon.,
The
Originall of Popish
Idolatrie: or,
The Birth
of
Heresies
...
Being
a True and
Exacte
Descniption
of
Such Sacred
Signes, Sacrifices
and
Sacraments
as Have Bene Instituted
and Ordained
of
God since
Adam,
2nd edn
([Amsterdam], 1630,
STC
1130:8),
12.
38Grotius, Opera
omnia
theologica, i,
150-1
(commentary
on 1
Kgs. 12:28,
13:24).
39
Hammond, Of Idolatry,
in
Works, i, 259.
more
generally,
offered Protestants a
powerful argument
that
love of the true God did
nothing
to
prevent
false
worship. Jeroboam
loved
Jehovah enough
to demolish the
impious
Solomonic state
and Aaron carried this love
throughout
his
priestly
life. None-
theless,
both Aaron and
Jeroboam
were
indisputably
and
finally
guilty
of idol
worship.
The
monotheistic, yet backsliding, Jews
thus
repeatedly
showed that belief in God in no
way
ensured
orthopraxis.
What looked like an
expression
of
antiquarian
interests,
in other
words,
was also the
expression
of
highly
con-
fessional ones. If
pious
intentions could have idolatrous
results,
then the Catholic
separation
of veneration
(dulia)
and
worship
(latria) collapsed.40
Here as
elsewhere, scholarship
was
working
in the service of
theological polemics:
the
idolatry
of the
Jews
offered
ostensibly
definitive
proof
that
only through
the
rigor-
ous exclusion of
images,
could
worship pay
its due to God.
II
A PERPETUAL MANUFACTORY OF IDOLS: IDOLATRY
AND THE END OF WORSHIP
Yet the Calvinist fascination with the Golden Calf also
grew
from
a more uncomfortable set of
concerns,
ones that
began
to unravel
any easy
distinction between the chosen
people
and its enemies.
Since the middle of the sixteenth
century,
after
all,
Calvinists
had identified their Church with that of the Israelites. In
partic-
ular,
the
emergence
of the
Jews
from
captivity,
their defeat of
the
Pharaoh,
and their later battles
against
the Canaanites and
the Amorites all functioned as elaborate
prefigurations
of the
history
of the Calvinist Churches as
they fought
their
way
across
Europe
over the later sixteenth
century.
These
were,
as
Christopher
Hill and others have
noted, extremely
mobile sto-
ries: different
prophets,
different incidents and different morals
40 For this reason, Matthew Poole commented that 'it does not
please
the
Romans' to think that
Jeroboam
'retained the Mosaic Law': see his
Synopsis
criticorum
aliorumque
S.
Scripturae interpretum,
5 vols.
(London, 1669-76), ii,
517. Monceaux's
Catholic
exculpation
of Aaron and
Jeroboam might
be understood as a
desperate
effort to
police
this distinction. His
argument
that the calf was
actually
modelled on
the cherubim from the tabernacle
(Aaron purgatus, ix, 4486, 4529) would, presum-
ably,
have made it an
object
of
pious veneration,
rather than of idolatrous
worship.
The fact that his work was censured
by
the Church
may
be an indication of its own
discomfort with
applying
this distinction to the
impiety
of the
murmuring Jews.
were
employed
in this set of identifications.4'
If
any
biblical book
was
indispensable
to the Calvinist
project,
however,
it was
Exodus. And
yet
this
'paradigm
of
revolutionary politics',
in
Michael Walzer's
terms,
was crucial not
only
for its
hopeful
ending,
but also for its internal and self-directed violence. For
Calvin,
Walzer
perceptively argues,
'it was more
important
that
the Levites had killed brethren than that
they
had killed idola-
ters'.42 The
story
of the Calf was more than
just
an anti-Catholic
parable.
It was also a tool for a
disconcertingly
strict
self-scrutiny,
a
pressing
need in the seventeenth
century,
when Calvinism itself
began
to
fragment
into a
variety
of
mutually
exclusive tribes.
The failures of the ancient
Jews were,
in other
words,
used as
mirrors to scrutinize the
very people
who most identified with
their successes. This was all the more true because the
charge
of
idolatry
was so
fantastically easy
to make. The 'threat to the
faith that came from
visualizing
God'
was,
after
all,
an intan-
gible
and
subjective
threat.43 And
sixteenth-century
Reformers
cast their nets
widely:
for
them, idolatry
stemmed not from the
genuflection
of the
worshipper,
but rather from his internal dis-
position. Any image, then,
offered an occasion for sin: 'as
long
as the
images
are
present
before man . . .
they
will sit
deep
in
his
heart'.44
If,
as Calvin
argued,
the 'mind of man is
...
a
per-
petual manufactory
of idols' then
idolatry
lurked in the shadows
of
every corporeal
transaction with the
divine.45
Criticism and
self-criticism were never closer.
Nowhere did the dialectics of reflexive censure
play
out with
more
urgency
than in the
English
seventeenth
century:
in the
battles of ceremonies and sacramentals that divided the Church
under
Archbishop Laud,
in the schismatic tendencies of the
Revolution,
and in the contentious consolidations of 1660 and
1688.
During
this
period,
as
Bishop
Samuel Parker later com-
mented, idolatry
and transubstantiation were
41
Christopher Hill,
The
English
Bible and the
Seventeenth-Century
Revolution
(London, 1993);
Charles H.
Parker,
'French Calvinists as the Children of Israel:
An Old Testament Self-Consciousness in
Jean Crespin's
Histoire des
Martyrs
before
the Wars of
Religion',
Sixteenth
Century Jl,
xxiv
(1993).
See
also,
more
generally,
Sacvan
Bercovitch,
The American
Jeremiad (Madison, 1978).
42
Michael Walzer,
Exodus and Revolution
(New York, 1985), 7,
64.
43
Aston, England's Iconoclasts, i,
452.
44
Eire,
War
against
the
Idols,
60.
45
Calvin,
Institutes
of
the Christian
Religion,
trans.
Allen, i,
104.
the Two
great
Kettle-drums to the Protestant Guards.
They
were con-
tinually beating upon
them with all their
Force,
and whenever
they
found themselves at
any Disadvantage
with an
Enemy
...
by making
a
Noise
upon
these Two loud
Engines, they
could at
pleasure
drown the
Dispute.46
While transubstantiation defined
orthodoxy, idolatry
was used
as a
'Stabbing
and Cut-throat Word' to define and enforce
orthopraxis.47
The 'Lord of Hosts' is 'tender and
jealous
... of
every point
of his instituted
Worship',
insisted the Puritan Samuel
Lee in
1650,
and so
every aspect
of
worship
had to be scruti-
nized for the
lingering
scent of
idols.4s
And
yet,
as Andre Rivet
had
argued,
the
only way truly
to
identify
an idol was to know
what 'the
worshippers
attach to them in their
imagination'.49
Seventeenth-century
Calvinists were not
merely
anxious about
the effects of church
images
or stained
glass,
but about the
very
structures of human
cognition
and its
ability
to
worship
God.
This was a
key
reason that the
Jews
became
objects
of so much
interest: here were a
people
covenanted to
Jehovah yet
constitu-
tionally
unable to avoid
idolatry.
The
Jews
were
given
the rules
for what
George
Lawson in 1659 called the 'outward reveren-
tiall acts' but their
inability
to live
up
to these rules confirmed
that
only
'the inward
recognition
of the Soul'
guaranteed genu-
ine
worship.50
If the sole criterion for an idolater was that he
'dethroneth God in his
imagination,
and setteth
up
some other
object
in his
place',
then
virtually anyone
was a
suspect.51
Sin as a
product
of secret desires
-
an internal state divorced
from outward behaviour
-
was a central
theological point
of
the
Reformation,
so it is no
surprise
that it
appeared
here.52
But the
rigorous application
of this
logic
to
idolatry
was
prob-
lematic,
as
Thomas Hobbes made clear. His effort to out-Calvin
the Calvinists
began
in the 1651
Leviathan,
with his excoriation
46
Samuel Parker, Reasons for Abrogating
the Test:
Imposed upon
All Members
of
Parliament Anno 1678 Octob. 30
(London, 1688),
65-6.
47
Ibid., 81.
48
[Samuel Lee],
Orbis miraculum:
or,
The
Temple of Solomon,
2nd edn
(London,
1659),
95.
49
Andr6
Rivet, Explicatio
decal.gi,
in
Opera theologica, i,
1249.
50 George Lawson, Theo-Poltica: or,
A
Body of Divinity Containing
the Rules
of
the
Special
Government
of
God
(London, 1659),
160.
51 Thomas
Tenison, Of Idolatry:
A Discourse in which Is Endeavoured a Declaration
of
its
Distinctionfrom Superstition (London, 1678),
14.
52
See,
for
example, Jean Delumeau,
Sin and
Fear:
The
Emergence of
a Western
Guilt
Culture,
13th-18th
Centuries,
trans. Eric Nicholson
(New York, 1990).
of the
imagination
as a 'dream' that
prodded
men into the
'religion
of the Gentiles':
it was the
generall Religion
of the
Gentiles,
to
worship
for
Gods,
those
Apparences
that remain in the Brain from the
impression
of externall
Bodies
upon
the
organs
of their
Senses,
which are
commonly
called
Ideas, Idols, Phantasmes,
Conceits . . . And the
worship
of these with
Divine Honour is that which in the
Scripture
is called
Idolatry.53
Afflicted
by
the
faculty
of the
imagination
and thus
subject
to
the
'Phantasticall
Inhabitants of the
Brain',
human
beings
in
ancient times set
up
their ideas as
gods.54
And
yet
modem man
is no less
plagued by
these
fantasies,
no less
subject
to
everyday
idolatry produced by
the
workings
of the human brain.
Idolatry
is
solely dependent
on
internally regulated worship, granted;
but then the demons of
paganism
hover around all acts of devo-
tion,
no matter how sanitized of
images.
Hobbes's
critique
of
idolatry
was
troubling,
but
only
because
he
pushed
the Calvinist line to its
logical
limit and moved mono-
theism and
idolatry
into the same
conceptual
frame.
By
his
insistence on the
ubiquitous
threat of
idolatry,
Calvin had
already
eroded the distinction between
religion
and idol
worship.
But where the
proximity
of
categories only enhanced,
for
Calvin,
the
glory
and faith of the
sanctified,
Hobbes made no
exception
at all for the saints. If 'there is no
Idea,
or
conception
of
any
thing
we call
Infinite'
and if God is infinite
himself,
than
any
idea or
conception
about God
is, by definition, idolatry.55
Correct
worship
-
in Hobbes's
story
-
became an
illusion,
unattainable
because of our own human nature.
And,
for
Hobbes,
the disin-
tegration
of the
orthopraxis
ideal had
happy consequences.
After
all,
he
argued, worship
is
nothing
more than 'the
sign of
inward honour' and a
sign
is
only
made honourable
'by
the con-
sent of
men',
that
is, by
the 'lawful
sovereign'.
'If it were com-
manded to
worship
God in an
image,
before those who account
that
honourable',
Hobbes
insisted, 'truly
it is to be done'.56
In
more dramatic
terms,
53Thomas
Hobbes,
Leviathan:
or,
The
Matter, Forme,
and Power
of
a Common-
wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil
(London, 1651), 5, 7,
356.
4 Ibid.,
359.
15
Ibid.,
11.
56Thomas
Hobbes, Philosophicall Ruciments Concerning
Government and
Society
(London, 1651), 255, 259, 257.
if a
King compell
a man to
[false worship] by
the terrour of
Death,
or
other
great corporall punishment,
it is not
Idolatry:
For the
Worship
which the
Soveraign
commandeth to bee done unto himself
by
the ter-
rour of his
Laws,
is not a
sign
that he that
obeyeth him,
does
inwardly
honour him as a
God,
but that he is desirous to save himselfe from
death,
or from a miserable
life;
and that which is not a
sign
of internall
honour,
is no
Worship;
and therefore no
Idolatry.57
Hobbes must have been
pleased
to wield what was an extreme
puritanical position against
those
purveyors
of dissent who would
split
Church and State over matters of
worship.
It
was,
after
all,
formally
stated in 1643
by
Parliament that 'all Monuments of
Superstition
or
Idolatry
should be removed and
demolished'.58
To do
so,
in Hobbes's
argument,
would be tantamount to
genocide,
since the 'monuments' of
idolatry
lurked not inside
churches,
but inside human minds.
Was
there, then, any place
for external
worship
in the Church?
This was
exactly
the
question
faced
by theological
controversial-
ists. Thus the
Anglican apologist
Edward
Stillingfleet explicitly
argued that,
as a matter of
principle, worship (religion)
must be
meaningful regardless
of the
perils
of human
cognition (idola-
try).
More than the 'bare internal acts of the
mind', worship
demands that acts are
'expressed
in such a manner as to
give
honour to that which we so
esteem'.59
In Thomas Tenison's
terms,
'meer outward shews of Adoration' not
only testified
to
idolatrous inward
states,
but
actually produced
them.60
Just
as
the Laudians
had,
before the
Revolution,
insisted that the
Prayer
Book and other formal
aspects
of
worship
could
'safeguard
against
the natural weakness of human
devotion',
the Arminian
Church that
developed
in
England
after the Revolution stressed
the need to ritualize external
performance
as a
way
of
securing
orthodox internal states.61
57
Hobbes, Leviathan,
360.
58An Ordinance
of
the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament
for
the Utter
Demolishing, Removing,
and
Taking Away of
All Monuments
of Superstition
or
Idolatry
([London], 1643),
a2'.
59
Edward
Stillingfleet,
A Discourse
Concerning
the
Idolatry
Practised in the Church
of
Rome and the
Danger of
Salvation in the Communion
of
It
(London, 1671), 55,
56.
60
Tenison, Of Idolatry,
22.
61
Ramie Targoff,
Common
Prayer:
The
Language of Public
Devotion in
Early
Modern
England (Chicago
and
London, 2001),
5. On Arminianism and the elaboration of
Anglican ritual,
see
John Spurr,
The Restoration Church
of England,
1646-1689
(New Haven, 1991);
Nicholas
Tyacke,
Anti-Calvinists: The Rise
of English
Arminian-
ism,
c. 1590-1640
(Oxford, 1987).
Antiquarians
attacked this issue
differently, partly
because
they
realized that Hobbes's tirade had the dramatic effect of
setting
religion
and
idolatry
onto the same
plane.
If both
idolatry
and
religion began
with
humanity's 'Opinion
of
Ghosts, Ignorance
of second
causes,
Devotion towards what men
fear,
and
Taking
of
Things
Casuall for
Prognostiques',
then the semen
religionis
was the
very
source of idolatrous
worship.62
'Here is a founda-
tion laid for
Atheisme',
William
Lucy exclaimed,
'It is
impossi-
ble that so
goodly
a
tree,
as
Religion,
should
grow
out of such
rotten and
contemptible
seeds as these': how can error be 'a
seed of
Truth',
since 'the
greater growth
it
hath,
the
greater
is
the
Errour,
but it never
grows
into
Truth'.63
But if
idolatry
was
so hard to
distinguish
from
right worship
as Calvinism
implied,
then
perhaps
the historical
relationship
between truth and error
was more
complicated
than
Lucy's simple
contrast. As
theology
and radical criticism
together
made the ideal of correct
worship
vanish into an idealistic
cognitive horizon, antiquarian
scholars
responded by inquiring
even more
carefully
into the historical
origins
of
religion
and its
relationship
to ancient
sacrilege.
In
doing so, they began
to make
idolatry
and
religion
into mem-
bers of the same
species, shifting
the
relationship
between truth
and
error,
and
helping
to create new
categorical
distinctions
between the sacred and the
profane.
III
DISTINCTIONS:
TRUTH,
ERROR AND THE ORIGINS OF IDOLATRY
The fourth
chapter
of Samuel Purchas's 1613
Pilgrimage
con-
cerned 'the word
Religion'.
Where the
impious might,
with the
Roman
jurist
Masurius
Sabinus, identify religion
as 'that which
is removed and withdrawn from us'
(relinquere);
where the
Ciceronian would characterize it as the
scrupulous study
of 'all
the ritual involved in divine
worship' (relegere);
where the
early
Augustine might
connect it to the idea of
'chusing again' (religere):
Purchas himself offered a
peculiar combinatory
definition.
This is the effect of sinne and
irreligion,
that the name and
practice
of
Religion is thus diversified, else had there bin, as one God, so one religion,
62
Hobbes, Leviathan,
54.
63William Lucy, Observations, Censures,
and
Confutations of
Notorious Errours in
Mr.
Hobbes,
his
Leviathan,
and other his Bookes
(London, 1663),
85.
and one
language
... For till men did
relinquere, relinquish
their first
innocencie . . .
they
needed not
religere,
to make a second
choice,
or
seek
reconciliation,
nor thus
relegere,
with such
paines
and vexation of
spirit
to
enquire
and
practice
those
things
which
religare,
binde them
surer and faster unto God.64
Purchas's
etymological
ramble was both
typical
and
telling: typical
for its
baroque inability
to settle on a
single
ancient
authority,
but
telling
for its rational restlessness.
Religion,
in Purchas's
terms, simply
could not be defined
categorically,
because sin
had divided the
original religion
into
parts, dissolving
the 'one
god,
one truth' that stood as Purchas's
epigraph.
'If we div-
ide the known
regions
of the world into 30
equall parts',
wrote
the astronomer and
antiquarian
Edward Brerewood in
1614,
the 'Christians
part
is as
five,
the
Mahumetans,
as
sixe,
and the
Idolaters as nineteene'.65 In a world divided
by
'sinne and irre-
ligion',
the definition of true
religion
demanded serious
thought
precisely
about those 'nineteene'
parts
of erroneous
practices.
The
seventeenth
century's
most monumental effort to do
this,
to define
religion by
contrast with
error,
can be found in the
Dutch
polymath
Gerhard Vossius's 1641
Origin
and
Progress of
Idolatry,
which rambled
through
vast
gardens
of
learning
on
everything
from sun
worship
to the deities of ancient
Gaul,
Rome, Greece,
Chaldea and
Babylonia.
On the one
hand,
Vossius
insisted,
to understand
idolatry,
we must understand
'religion'
-
which consists both 'in the
knowledge
of God' and 'in the wor-
ship
of him'
-
in the most abstract of senses. On the
other,
real
knowledge
of this
religion demanded,
for
Vossius,
an immense
elaboration of
'impiety'
in which 'God is
ignored'
and
'supersti-
tion',
in which 'the
right worship
of God is
elsewhere'.66 Put
more
succinctly,
to understand
'religion'
we must understand
64Aulus Gellius, Noctes atticae, Iv.
9.
8-9; Cicero,
De natura
deorum,
Ii.
72;
Augustine,
De civitate
dei,
x.
3;
Samuel
Purchas, Purchas
his
Pilgrimage: or,
Relations
of
the World
(London, 1613,
STC
1184:1),
15-16. On the
inability
of ancient writ-
ers to settle on a
single
definition of
religion
-
largely
because it did not
play
a
central role in the
theological
architecture of
early Christianity
-
see
Feil, Religio,
i.
65
Edward Brerewood, Enquiries Touching
the
Diversity of Languages,
and
Religions
through
the
Cheife
Parts
of
the World
(London, 1614,
STC
1021:3),
118. The
place
of Islam in
seventeenth-century antiquarianism
is
interesting
and
complex
-
for
introductions,
see G.
J. Toomer,
Eastern Wisedome and
Learning:
The
Study of
Arabic
in
Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1996);
P. M.
Holt,
Studies in the
History of
the Near East
(London, 1973); and,
for
background,
Norman
Daniel,
Islam and the
West: The
Making of
an
Image,
revised edn
(Oxford, 1993).
66 Gerhard
Vossius,
De
theologia gentili
et
physiologia
christiana:
sive,
De
origine
ac
progressu
idololatriae
(Amsterdam, 1641),
16.
idolatry:
it was
only by showing
what
religion
was
not,
that reli-
gion
could be defined. Vossius's
1,500-page
treatise on the
'not',
on all the deviations from
religion
known to
early
modem schol-
arship,
tried to
crystallize
the distinction between
pious religion
and
impious
error. In his
terms, then,
'false
religion'
was a
meaningless
idea. Either
religion
is
true,
or it is not
religion.
And
yet,
as
prodigious
as Vossius's
scholarship was,
this
period
was
largely
unable to embrace this
sharp
distinction between
truth and error. The
agitated
and
repetitive inquiries
into the
origins
of false
religion testify
as much.
Although
Adam stood
as the fount of
religion among men,
within a few short
generations
mankind's
impiety
called down God's homicidal rains. How
was God so
easily forgotten?
In a
period sceptical
of the
powers
of the
devil,
scholars found the error in
humanity
itself. Thus in
1677,
the
jurist
Matthew Hale declared - as had Cicero -
that
religion
was 'as connatural to Humane Nature as
Reason,
and . . . as ancient as
Humanity
it self'.67 If
so,
what was the
first
religion?
For
Hale,
the
question
was
easy:
as much as Truth is
certainly
more ancient than
Errour,
we have reason
to think that even before the ancientest Form of Idolatrous
Worship
in
the
World,
even that of the
Heavenly
and Elemental
Bodies,
there was a
True
Worship
of the True GOD.68
In a Platonic
fashion,
error and
idolatry
came into the world
by
virtue of
forgetfulness,
what Hale called 'the
gradual decay
of
that true and ancient Tradition of the true
Worship
of the true
God'.69
Other scholars in the
period
had different
ways
of
expressing
the same sentiment: Thomas
Fuller,
for
example,
declared that 'if truth be once
casually
lost . .. numberless are
the
by-paths
of
falsehood',
and Edward
Stillingfleet,
more
poet-
ically, argued
that the 'destructive
principles'
of the
gentiles grew
out of a substratum of
'necessary
and
important
truths'
just
as the
'most
pernicious
Weeds are bred in the
fattest soyles'.70
But even
these weeds were
valuable,
as
Stillingfleet
admitted. His 1662
Origines
sacrae used 'the same method which Thales took in tak-
ing
the
height
of the
Pyramids'. Just
as Thales calculated the
67
Matthew Hale, The Primitive
Origination of Mankind,
Considered and Examined
According
to the
Light of
Nature
(London, 1677),
166.
68
Ibid.,
168.
69
Ibid.,
169.
70Fuller, Pisgah-Sight of Palestine, 123;
Edward
Stillingfleet, Origines
sacrae:
or,
A
RationalAccount
of
the Grounds
of
Christian Faith (London, 1662),
8.
height
of the
pyramids 'by measuring
the
length
of their
shadow',
Stillingfleet
determined the
'height
and
antiquity
of truth from
the extent of the
fabulous corruptions
of
it'.71
Sacred
origins
were
inscrutable without the shadows of their
corruption.
Precisely
because it offered a
reciprocal
handle on true reli-
gion,
this
corruption
and its
impact
on human
history
obsessed
seventeenth-century
scholars.
Particularly pressing,
in this
light,
was an exact
chronology
of
corruption's appearance.
In the case
of
idolatry,
two venerable traditions
competed.
The
first,
offered
by
that
darling
of
seventeenth-century
Christian
Hebraism,
the
medieval
Jewish philosopher Maimonides,
dated
idolatry's
appearance
to 'the
days
of
Enosh'.72
Rooted in
Genesis,
Maimonides'
genealogy put
the
origins
of
idolatry nearly
at the
very beginning
of mankind
-
Enosh was the
grandson
of
Adam,
born
only
235
years
after his
expulsion
from Paradise
(Gen. 4:26, 5:3-6).
The
second,
from the also
popular
Divine
Institutes of
Lactantius, delayed idolatry's origins
until after the
Flood,
when the 'first nation ...
ignorant
of
God', namely
the
sons of
Ham, grandsons
of
Noah,
'went into
exile,
and settled
in a
part
of that land which is now called Arabia . . .
[and]
established for themselves at their own discretion new customs
and
inventions'.73
Of the
two,
Lactantius was
clearly
more
appealing
to
antiquarians.
After
all,
if
idolatry
was a
pre-diluvial
phenomenon,
then it had
always
shadowed true
religion:
out-
side of
Eden,
truth had been free of error for a mere two centuries.
If
idolatry
was a
post-diluvial phenomenon,
however,
scholars
could embrace the time before the Flood as a
period
of un-
broken
religious devotion,
a
Christianity
avant la lettre or what
Eusebius called the 'most ancient
organization
for
holiness'.74
Thus,
writers like Thomas Tenison and William
Lucy
denied
the Maimonidian
genealogy, seemingly
aware
that, by putting
idolatry
so close to the
source,
there was a chance that
religion
71
Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae,
14.
72
Maimonides, Mishneh Torah: The Book
of Knowledge,
ed. and trans. Moses
Hyamson,
2 vols.
(Jerusalem
and New
York, 1981), i,
66a. The treatise on
idolatry
was translated in 1642
by
Gerhard Vossius's
son, Dionysius.
On Maimonides more
generally,
see Aaron L.
Katchen,
Christian Hebraists and Dutch Rabbis: Seventeenth
Century Apologetics
and the
Study of
Maimonides' Mishneh Torah
(Cambridge, Mass.,
1984).
73 Lactantius,
Divine
Institutes, vii,
63.
74
Eusebius, The
Proof of
the
Gospel,
ed. and trans. W.
J. Ferrar,
2 vols.
(Grand
Rapids, 1981), i,
9.
might
be
corrupted by
its evil twin." Matthew
Hale,
for
one,
was
explicitly
aware of
just
such an
unsettling possibility. Idolatry,
he
declared,
'was not the first
Religion
in the
World,
neither
did this
Religion
tread
upon
the Heels of the
Origination
of
Mankind
. . . this
Religion
cannot
pretend
to be coeval with
Mankind,
nor
give
us
any
sufficient Indication of the Recentness
of Mankind'.7" But here the
very
tenor of his denial indicated
the
potency
that this
argument
held in the
period.
What
if, indeed,
idolatry
was the first
religion?
What
if, indeed,
it was 'coeval'
with human
origins?
At this
point idolatry
ceased to be a
corrup-
tion
of
religion,
but rather
(in
a Hobbesian
sense)
its
very
double.
These traces of erosion in the wall between
religion
and idol-
atry
became holes when more iconoclastic writers turned their
attention to the same
questions.
The Dutch
Jew,
later Catholic
convert,
Isaac La
Peyrere,
for
instance,
rewrote the entire reli-
gious history
of
mankind,
and eliminated the distinction alto-
gether.
His ostensible discoveries that
long
before the
expulsion
from the
Garden,
the earth had been inhabited
by
the so-called
'pre-Adamites';
that
only Jews
were born of Adam and
Eve;
that 'Gentiles are not
sprung
from the
Linage [sic]
and Kindred
of the
Jews';
that 'the Gentiles in their Creation and Nature are
indeed ancienter than the
Jews';
and that
they
are 'different in
relation and kindred from the
Jews,
as those divers
species
of
creatures in unknown Countries are from those which we know' -
all these discoveries recast the relations between
religious
truth
and error.77
They
did so
by recasting
the order of Christian
anthropology.
The four traditional
periods
-
the
pre-Mosaic
times
(nature),
the
period
after the
Decalogue (law),
after the
coming
of Christ
(grace),
and after
judgement
and
redemption (glory)
-
were
kept,
but now the law
began
not with
Moses,
but with
Adam,
the father of the
Jews.
The
Jews
had
never,
in other
words,
lived
in a state of nature.
Rather, only
the
gentiles
had ever lived in a
75 See
Tenison, Of Idolatry, 40; Lucy, Observations, Censures,
and
Confutations of
Notorious
Errours,
125.
76
Hale, Primitive
Origination of Mankind,
167.
77Isaac La
Peyrere,
Men
before
Adam
(London, 1656), 55, 89,
124. On La
Peyrere,
see Richard H.
Popkin,
Isaac La
Peyrdre (1596-1676):
His
Life, Work,
and
Influence (Leiden, 1987).
On
poly-
and
monogenism,
La
Peyrere
and
Grotius,
see
Joan-Pau Rubies, 'Hugo
Grotius's Dissertation on the
Origin
of the American
Peoples
and the Use of
Comparative Methods', JI History of Ideas,
lii
(1991),
238
ff.
pre-juridical
state. Once
upon
a
time, then,
there had existed an
age
and a
people utterly
without God's
law, utterly
without reli-
gion,
and this
age
was documented
only by
the
'prophane
records
...
of the
Caldeans, Egyptians, [and] Scythians'.78
But here the
profane
did not mean
'sacrilegious'
or
'defiling'. Rather,
it meant
something very
like our modem
anthropological category.
The
gentiles
were not
against God,
but
rather,
as 'the men of the first
Creation, Atheists,
or without a
God', they
'were blind in the
knowledge
of the true God'.
Only through
the Adamic law did
religion
enter this
profane
world.79 If the Council of Trent had
declared that 'those who live
only according
to the law of nature'
are 'dominated
by
the
devil',
La
Peyr"re
offered a
completely
dif-
ferent version of
non-religious
man.80
The
pre-Adamites
were not
living
in
a state of
error;
indeed
they
'were not
guilty
of
any
tres-
pass against
God' because His law was still unknown.81 Sin was
not a
divine
offence in this
period
but the
product
of
'Nature',
the
consequence
of man's
living
'in a state of Nature' without reli-
gion.82 Early
man was
not, then,
closest to God.
Instead,
in La
Peyrere's hands,
he was
utterly profane,
either without
religion
at
all or in an
aboriginal
state of
idolatry.
And this
profane
was not
antagonistic
to
religion,
but instead
prior
and
parallel
to it.
La
Peyrere
was an eccentric and
largely rejected by
the Prot-
estant mainstream. And
yet
his
peculiar
ideas
responded
to a
set of
problems
-
about truth and
error, religion
and the ori-
gins
of
idolatry
-
that fascinated the late
seventeenth-century
scholarly
tradition.
Only
in the
writings
of the
Anglican
Hebraist,
antiquarian
and
clergyman John Spencer
were these
questions
finally given
a
lasting
set of
methodologically
and
conceptually
innovative
answers,
ones that
brought
out the radical
implica-
tions of the wider
antiquarian project
without
lapsing
into the
full
impiety
of someone like La
Peyrere
or Hobbes.83 Like his
78
La
Peyrere, Men
before Adam,
22.
79
Ibid., 89,
175.
80
Giuliano Gliozzi, 'The Apostles in the New World: Monotheism and
Idolatry
between Revelation and
Fetishism', History
and
Anthropology,
iii
(1987),
125.
81 La
Peyrere,
Men
before Adam,
30.
82
Ibid., 32,
41.
83
On Spencer,
see
Jan Assmann,
Moses the
Egyptian:
The Memory of Egypt
in
Western Monotheism
(Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 55-79;
Francis
Schmidt,
'Des
inepties
tolerables:
la raison des rites de
John Spencer (1685)
a W. Robertson
Smith
(1889)',
Archive de sciences sociales des
religions,
lxxxv (1994); Stroumsa, 'John
Spencer
and the Roots of
Idolatry'.
antiquarian predecessors, Spencer
was drawn like a moth to the
flame of
Jewish idolatry,
and his 1685 On the Ritual Law
of
the
Hebrews was an extended effort to understand its
history
and
aetiology.
In
'Egypt
and after
they
left
Egypt', Spencer
insisted,
the Israelites 'were a
people
most dedicated to
idols'.84
Before
captivity,
the
Jews
had held 'the
lamp
of divine
wisdom';
after-
wards
they
became an
'Aegypticizing'
people."5
Seeing
this
transformation in his
people,
God
gave
the
Jews
the central
objects
of their ritual
worship
and instituted the ceremonial and
moral laws that would control
Jewish religious practice
until the
present day.
These
laws, Spencer argued,
were neither inher-
ently good (the Jewish view)
nor evil
(the
Christian
view).
Instead, they
were
useful
as tools to end
idolatry among
the
Jews. They
worked both as sticks to threaten
Jews
who fell into
idolatry
and as carrots to entice
Israel,
now addicted to
Egyptian
ways,
to follow the
ways
of God. This double function
gener-
ated the
many parallels
between
Jewish
and
Egyptian
ritual
practice:
the institution of the
paschal lamb,
for
example,
resus-
citated a
symbol
familiar to the enslaved Hebrews
-
namely
the ram of Ammon
-
but
by sacrificing it,
the
Jews 'reenact[ed]
and
reenforce[d]
the
separation
from
Egypt
and from
idolatry'.86
Because,
in the words of
Maimonides,
man is
incapable
of
'abandoning suddenly
all to which he was
accustomed',
God
had used a
'gracious
ruse' and
permitted Egyptian worship
to
continue 'but transferred
[it]
from created or
imaginary
and
unreal
things
to His own name'.87
Spencer
is often credited with
inventing
the
discipline
of com-
parative religions,
not because of the
accuracy
of his
antiquarian
researches but because his
analysis
offered a
powerful functional
approach
to the
study
of
religion
that later
anthropology
and
religious
studies would claim for its own. The sacrifices and fes-
tivals of the
gentiles
were aimed at
'temporal
benefits' and the
appeasement
of
gods.88
'God
gave
a Law
containing
carnal
rites,
and
promising
carnal
goods',
declared
Spencer,
'in order
84John Spencer,
De
legibus
Hebraeorum
ritualibus et earum
rationibus,
libri tres
(Cambridge, 1685),
21.
85 Ibid., 22,
24.
86
Assmann,
Moses the
Egyptian,
65.
87
Maimonides, The Guide of the
Perplexed,
trans.
Shlomo
Pines
(Chicago, 1963),
526.
88
Spencer, De
legibus Hebraeorum,
34.
that he
might
accommodate his
teachings
to the custom and use
of the
people
and their
age'."9
And the chief function of these
rites was the creation of distinctions.
Nearly
all of
Spencer's
book thus focuses
exactly
on rites of distinction and the rheto-
ric of distinction suffuses his text: circumcision intends to 'dis-
criminate the sacred
people
of God from the
idolaters';
the
sabbath severs 'the common cares and affairs of life from God
and
religion';
God
provided dietary
laws 'to
separate' Jews
and
gentiles,
and so on.90 Distinctions in
time, place,
between and
among peoples: religion
serves to mark the difference between
all. But this tool of distinction was not
unique
to the
Jews.
For
Jew
and
gentile alike,
the ritual law was
appropriate
to the
'pri-
meval duties of man'.91
Jews
were not alone in
performing
cir-
cumcision: so did the
'Phoenicians,
the
Egyptians,
the
Colchi,
the
Ethiopians, [and]
the
Idumaeans', among
others.92
Although
performed
in the service of different
gods, Jewish
and
Egyptian
rituals were
functionally congruent.
Only
this
congruence
made accommodation
possible:
the
Hebrews were
willing
to
accept
the Mosaic Law
precisely
because
it introduced no dissonance on the level of formal
practice.
Distinction on the level of content
(which
animals are
prohib-
ited,
which Gods are
worshipped)
was crucial for believers:
surely
the Hebrews
thought
their own rituals were sacred and
those of the
Egyptians profane.
But for the
analyst
of
religion,
for what I would call the
anthropologist
of
religion,
these distinc-
tions are irrelevant.
Instead, looking
from
outside, religion
must be
analysed
not in terms of
truth,
but in terms of its social
function as a tool for
making
distinctions. And this shift of ana-
lytic perspective
then
helps
to
explain
the
extraordinary lability
of the term
'profane'
in
Spencer's
text. From within the
Jewish
tradition,
the
profane
marks the
pollutions
of
gentilism
-
its
rites
separate
'divine and
profane worship'.93
But from
without,
the
profane
marks a neutral
space.
In
analytical terms,
as when
Spencer argues
that the
Egyptians
too
'distinguish[ed]
between
their sacred and
profane animals',
it can
simply designate
that area
89
Ibid.
90Ibid., 40, 81,
107.
91
Ibid.,
36.
92
Ibid.,
54.
93
Ibid.,
40.
that
religion designates
as its own outside.94
Or,
in
descriptive
terms,
it can serve as a
synonym
for the
'vulgar',
the
'secular',
or,
more
generally,
the 'common cares and affairs of
life'.95
At
the same
moment, then,
the
profane
is shorn of its
primally
negative meaning,
and that
very
'antithesis of
religion', idolatry,
is transformed into a
species
of
religion.96
Spencer's
readers saw this
immediately.
The Calvinist
John
Edwards was
particularly incensed,
and his 1699
Compleat
His-
tory: or, Survey of
All the
Dispensations
and Methods
of Religion
railed
against Spencer's impiety
on
precisely
this
point. Spencer,
declared
Edwards,
'makes the True God most
diligently
and
precisely
tread in the
steps
of the false Gods and
Idols'.97 Or,
in
a more thunderous tone:
He labours to shew. .. that the most
Holy
and Tremendous
things
in
our
Religion
are taken from the most
prophane
and
impure practices
of
the worst of
Heathens
... God raked
up
all the
Vain, Ludicrous, Super-
stitious, Impure, Obscene, Irreligious, Impious, Prophane,
Idolatrous,
Execrable, Magical,
Devillish Customs which had been first
invented,
and afterwards
constantly
used
by
the most Barbarous
Gentiles,
the
Scum of the
World,
the
Dregs
of
Mankind,
and out of all these
patch'd
up
a
great part
of the
Religion
which he
appointed
his own
People.98
Edwards's
repetitive
distinction between
'religion'
and the
'pro-
fane',
the
'holy'
and the
'obscene',
and the 'true God' and the
'execrable',
was a
symptom
of his
deep suspicion
that
Spencer's
analysis had,
in
fact,
eroded these familiar
oppositions.
And
indeed,
it had done so. Even the devilish customs of the
Egyptians
were
sacred,
in
Spencer's terms,
not for
any prisca theologia,
but
because
they
contained a functional structure for
transacting
with the divine. True for
Jews,
true for
gentiles and,
most alarm-
ingly,
true even for
Christians."99
In
Spencer's hands, religion
became
something
more than
just
a
synonym
for
Christianity.
Instead,
it became an
anthropological category
tout
court,
a
94Ibid.,
106.
95Ibid., 149, 153, 82,
81.
96
Eire, War
against
the
Idols,
200.
97
John Edwards,
A
Compleat History: or, Survey of
All the
Dispensations
and Methods
of Religion (London, 1699),
249.
98
Ibid.,
251.
99Thus Edwards reacts
viciously against
the
suggestion
that 'one of the most
Solemn Offices of
Christianity'
is a
'pure
Imitation of a
Pagan Usage'
when
Spencer
argued
that 'Christ in
Celebrating
the
Holy
Sacrament of his
Supper,
refer'd to the
Custom of the Barbarous
Scythians
and other
Savage Nations,
who used to drink
Blood at their
making
of Covenants and
Bargains':
ibid.
category
that
encompassed Jehovah,
Isis and
Jupiter and,
more
importantly,
all
rituals, prohibitions
and rules that
governed
human interactions with them.
IV
SACRED AND PROFANE: HUMAN SCIENCE CATEGORIES
In
conceptual terms,
this was a
profound innovation,
and one
that resonated in a Protestantism exhausted
by
centuries of reli-
gious
conflict and intolerance.
Certainly
this was the broader
background against
which this new
analytic language emerged,
a time when the
language
of tolerance
began
its
journey
towards
respectability.
If
nothing else,
tolerance was a notion that even
religious
error should be viewed
impartially. John
Locke's insist-
ence that 'some
[religious] opinions
and actions ... are
wholly
separate
from the concernment of the state'
implied,
after
all,
that some
opinions
and actions were
wholly separate
from the
'concernment' of
religion
as well.100
Though
actual
legal
tol-
eration was more
myth
than
reality,
the
conceptual space
for
toleration demanded a universalist
understanding
of
religion
in
which
-
especially among
Christian sects
-
diverse
practices
of
worship
would not be seen as
defiling
'true'
religion.
Peter
Harrison attributes this 'new framework for
classifying' religious
behaviour to the deist literature of the late seventeenth and
early
eighteenth
centuries.101 And authors like
John
Toland
certainly
played
an
important
role in
popularizing
this view.
By insisting,
for
example,
that the 'most antient
Egyptians, Persians,
and
Romans,
the first Patriarchs of the Hebrews ... had no sacred
Images
or
Statues,
no
peculiar
Places or
costly
Fashions of
Worship',
Toland was not
only strikingly
Calvinist in his attitude
towards
religious
ritual but also
strikingly
relaxed in his
parallel
of
Egypt,
Persia and Israel.102 Deists like Charles Blount were
revolted
by ritual,
comparing
the
'Religion,
that is to
say, Sacrifices,
Rites,
Ceremonies' invented
by
heathens and
Jews unfavourably
100John Locke,
'An
Essay
on
Toleration',
in his Political
Essays,
ed. Mark Goldie
(Cambridge, 1997),
150.
10oPeter Harrison, 'Religion'
and the
Religions
in the
English Enlightenment
(Cambridge, 1990),
1. See also Francis
Schmidt, 'Polytheism: Degeneration
or
Progress?', History
and
Anthropology,
iii
(1987).
102John Toland, Letters to Serena
(London, 1704),
71.
with the 'rational' and
simple worship
of God.103
Blount,
Toland
and
many
others
equated,
and
condemned,
all
religious
ritual -
Hebrew,
Christian and
gentile
-
as identical and
improper
rela-
tions to the
divinity.
But deism was not the
only (perhaps
not even the most
important)
source of this
argument.
On the
whole,
deist claims
were often
recycled
from
antiquarian scholarship:
when Blount
argued
that idols were 'at first
worshipp'd only
in commemora-
tion of some
Hero,
or
gallant person
as his
Effigies',
but then
the idol
'grew
in time to be
...
revered as a
God',
he was
merely
repeating
a common
trope
from Lactantius which had circu-
lated
among
all
antiquarians
of the
century.104
Nor would
any
seventeenth-century antiquarian
have
disagreed
with Toland's
judgement
that the ancient world was inhabited
by
'an endless
rabble of Gods
presiding
over the foulest of Distembers
[sic],
and even over Actions
very
barbarous and
obscene'.105
David
Hume's
suggestion
in the Natural
History of Religion
that
'many
vulgar Jews
seem still to have conceived the
supreme Being
as a
mere
topical deity
or national
protector',
was
hardly shocking
in the context of a
seventeenth-century scholarship
that had so
systematically
uncovered and
displayed
the errors of the ancient
Hebrews.'06
Even Hume's
perverse
insistence that
'polytheism
or
idolatry was,
and
necessarily
must have
been,
the first and
most antient
religion
of mankind' was
only
an
explicit
affirma-
tion of what was
already implicit (if feared)
in Matthew Hale.107
Indeed,
this inversion of the relations between truth and error
had been
virtually
advertised in the
many
treatises whose aims
were to
prove
such a sentiment
wrong.
And
by
the time anti-
quarian scholarship
on biblical
idolatry
reached
Spencer,
this
argument
for the
primacy
of
polytheism
was
given
serious con-
sideration. If
idolatry
was not
first,
in
Spencer's view,
it was at
least
contemporaneous with,
and
functionally indistinguishable
from,
the
practice
of true
religion. Antiquarian scholarship
on
103
[Charles Blount], Great Is Diana
of
the
Ephesians: or,
The
Original of Idolatry,
together
with the Politick
Institution of
the
Gentiles
Sacrifices
(London, 1680),
3
(my italics).
104
Ibid., 8;
Lactantius,
Divine
Institutes, vii,
41.
105Toland, Letters to
Serena,
91.
106
David Hume, A Natural
History of Religion,
in Four Dissertations
(1757; Bristol,
1995),
48.
107
Ibid.,
3.
idolatry,
in other
words,
offered an
analytical language
and set
of
conceptual
tools
ripe
for
exploitation by
more radical critics.'08
The
emergence
of this new
sacred-profane
distinction thus
owed its existence less to deism
per
se than to the
polemics
about
worship
that so
strangled seventeenth-century
Calvinism
and
English
Calvinism in
particular.
The enormous interest in
idolatry,
in the boundaries of true
religion
and the definition of
its
opposite, certainly
came from this milieu. It was
telling,
then,
that even such a
vituperatively
orthodox
theologian
as
Stillingfleet
saw
religious
error as a fundamental
guide
to the
discovery
of
religious
truth. For a
conforming Anglican
like
Spencer,
the
argument
for the
unavoidability
of ritual harmon-
ized
nicely
with what
John Spurr
has called the 'elaboration of a
true
"Anglicanism"'
after
1650,
and what Nicholas
Tyacke
has
argued
was an 'Arminian revolution'
begun
in the 1620s and
1630s but
only completed
after the Restoration.109 This revolu-
tion saw the battles over
worship
as a
particularly
fruitless
enterprise. Spencer's analysis
thus offered an
antiquarian
anti-
dote to these battles. When the
bishop
of
Oxford,
Samuel
Parker, praised Spencer
for at last
bringing 'Wit, Sense, Reason,
and
Ingenuity
into the
Synagogue',
it was not his
scholarship
alone that was
cherished.110 Rather,
Parker embraced what he
saw as the real
implications
of the
argument, namely
that 'God
permitted [the Jews]
to retain several of their former Rites and
Ceremonies in his new
Worship'
and that these ceremonies
were so common to all
peoples
that
'they
are call'd the Elements
of the World'.'" In Parker's attack
against
both the 1678 Test Act
and radical Calvinism more
generally, then, Spencer's arguments
rationalized
customary ceremony:
it was
justifiable
because it was
ubiquitous.
This
functional
notion of
religion
was the
flip
side of that other
much-touted invention of the late seventeenth
century,
the 'intel-
lectualist' definition of true
religion
-
usually meaning
Christi-
anity
-
in terms of
interiority,
belief and faith. In a
sense,
this
108
For a more detailed discussion of the decline of the older
antiquarian
treatise
in the face of its
appropriation by
more radical
elements,
see Kristine
Haugen,
'Transformation in the
Trinity
Doctrine in
English Scholarship:
From the
History
of Beliefs to the
History
of
Texts',
Archiv
fir Religionsgeschichte,
iii
(2001),
49.
109
Spurr,
Restoration Church
of England, 112-13; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists,
8.
110
Parker,
Reasons
for Abrogating
the
Test,
102.
111 Ibid.,
123-4.
criterion of
interiority
was summoned forth
by anthropological
analysis.
Once the formal and ritual dimensions of
Christianity
were assimilated to those of the
pagans,
the interior life of faith
served to
distinguish Christianity
from its
spiritual competitors.
Thus a Protestant
theologian
like Friedrich
Schleiermacher,
much
later,
was to
decry
all forms of
ritual,
even those
pre-
scribed
by
the Bible: 'it is not the
person
who believes in a
holy
writing
who has
religion,
but
only
the one who needs none and
probably
could make one for himself'. 'Become conscious of
the call of
your
innermost
nature',
he
declared,
for
only
then do
you approach religion.112
But even
the deists
accepted,
in
large
part,
this distinction between
religion (seen
as the structure of
rituals common to
all)
and true
religion (religion
shorn of
custom).
This was
exactly
Blount's
point
when he contrasted
'Religion,
that is to
say, Sacrifices, Rites,
Ceremonies' and the
'worship
of
God
...
in a rational
way'.113
The interior definition of
genuine
religion was,
I
think,
a
compensatory
reaction to the realization
that
religion qua religion
was common to
all,
from the basest
idolaters to the loftiest
sages.
The fact that
contemporary
scholars
of
Christianity
are so committed to it
only
confirms the
power
of this new
conceptual landscape.'14
Even if a new
space
for
Christianity
was
generated,
still the
map
of the sacred was
profoundly changed.
In the first
instance,
by embedding idolatry
within the matrix of human nature and
by making religion
a matter of
practice,
the theoreticians and
scholars of
idolatry
established the
categories
for the anthro-
pological investigation
of human
religion.
No
longer
did
religion
112Friedrich
Schleiermacher, On
Religion: Speeches
to its Cultured
Despisers
(Cambridge, 1988),
135.
113
[Blount], Great Is Diana
of
the
Ephesians,
3.
114It is important, for
example, that
just
when
religious anthropology
became
disciplinarily dominant,
we find
people
like Rudolf Otto
insisting
that real
religion
was a
'numinous
consciousness' of the
mysterium
tremendum: see his The Idea
of
the
Holy:
An
Inquiry
into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea
of
the Divine and its Relation
to the
Rational,
2nd
edn,
trans.
John
W.
Harvey (Oxford, 1950),
25
(originally pub-
lished in German in
1917).
For a classic insistence on the
'interiority' thesis,
see
Wilfred Cantwell
Smith,
The
Meaning
and End
of Religion:
A New
Approach
to the
Religious
Traditions
of
Mankind
(New York, 1962),
42 ff.
And,
more
recently, Ernst
Feil's melancholic conclusion to his three-volume
Religio:
die Geschichte eines
neuzeitlichen
Grundbegriffs
-
that his
analysis
showed 'that in the course of the
seventeenth
century
a modem
understanding
of
"religion"
does not allow itself to
be
proven'
-
is
predicated exactly
on his
disappointment
that this
'interiority'
did
not become the sole criterion of
'religion',
as he had
hoped
to show
(iii, 473).
This
is
exactly my point.
have to be defined with reference to truth and error.
Instead,
it
was
possible
to
investigate religion entirely
free of this distinction
and even to embrace error as a valuable
aspect
of the human
condition. What David W. Bates has called the
Enlightenment's
'epistemology
of
error',
in which error
'provides
the
potential
con-
ditions for a future
truth',
was
already
at work in the seventeenth-
century analysis
of false
religion.115
In these
analyses
and
after,
religion began
to become a relative
term,
a
description
of a cer-
tain constellation of human
practices referring
to an abstract
'god'
or
'gods'.
At the same
time, however, by removing
the 'truth'
from
religion,
the
stage
was set for a new
problem (one
that
pre-
occupied
all the
great anthropologists
and
sociologists
of
religion
-
Edward
Tylor, James Frazer,
Emile
Durkheim,
Bronislaw
Malinowski and
Mary Douglas,
to name
just
a
few),
that
is,
the
problem
of
determining
the horizon within which 'sacred' or
'religious'
life can be differentiated from
'profane'
or 'scientific'
or
'everyday'
life. Now that
idolatry
-
that
quintessential spectre
of the
profane
-
had itself moved into the
sphere
of
religion,
now that researchers had
begun
to
imagine
a time when
religion
itself was
absent, religion began
to be understood less in
opposi-
tion to 'error' and more in
opposition
to a
space
of social behav-
iour outside
religious ritual,
that
space
that modem
anthropology
would call
'profane'. Just
as a
sphere
for
political
life
gained,
in
sociologist
Niklas Luhmann's
terms,
'relative
autonomy'
in the
eighteenth century,
so too did both the sacred and the
profane
begin
the
process
of
differentiating
into
relatively
autonomous
spaces
of
social,
cultural and intellectual
production.'16
When
nineteenth-century anthropologists began
their inves-
tigations
of
primitive cultures, then, they brought along
an entire
intellectual armature inherited from the
early
modem battles
over the nature of
religion. 'Sociology
is the heir of
theology',
in
Philippe
Buc's terms.117 When
Durkheim
insisted that 'all known
religious
beliefs'
classify
'all the
things,
real and
ideal,
of which
men
think,
into
...
[the] profane
and sacred' and that these are
115
David W. Bates, Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France
(Ithaca, 2002), pp. x,
33.
"6Niklas Luhmann,
The
Differentiation of Society,
trans.
Stephen
Holmes and
Charles Larmore
(New York, 1982),
142.
117 Philippe Buc, The
Dangers of
Ritual: Between
Early
Medieval Texts and Social
Scientific Theory (Princeton, 2001),
194.
'two worlds between which there is
nothing
in
common',
he
was thus
elaborating
a set of distinctions
put
into
play
in the
waning years
of
Europe's religious conflagrations."18
But this
theological
inheritance does
not,
in
my mind,
debunk the dis-
tinctions. Unlike
Buc,
whose
Dangers of
Ritual
(2001) fiercely
attacks the use of social-scientific
categories
in medieval
history,
or Talal
Asad,
whose
Genealogies of Religion (1993)
insists that
the
'specific
Christian
history'
of
anthropological categories
dis-
qualifies
them as
culturally portable analytical tools,
I am not
performing
a hermeneutics of
suspicion
here.'19 On the con-
trary,
the reductionism of such
categories
as
'sacred', 'profane'
and 'ritual' offers
analytic
distinctions useful in
precisely
the
ways
that all reductions
are, namely by
the restrictions
they
impose
on the vast undifferentiated fields of human existence.
In Luhmann's
idiosyncratic though
correct
terms,
it is
through
reductions that 'more
complexity
becomes visible than is acces-
sible to the observed
system'.120 Precisely
because the
'analytical
function and the
objects
it
operates
on do not
belong
to the
same
logical order',
we
historians, anthropologists
and sociolo-
gists
are not
obliged solely
to 'master a culture's
grammar';
we
can also describe its
grammar
in theoretical terms unavailable
to that
culture,
in other words in reductionist terms.121
Indeed,
it
was
just
this shift of
analytical perspective
that allowed the
seventeenth-century analysis
of
religion
to move outside of the
confessional
self-descriptions
of
polemical
Christian
theology,
and to describe a set of
complexities
in
religion
invisible to its
adherents. The reductions of social science
provided,
in this
case,
the
very
tools to cut
scholarship
free from its
religious
commit-
ments. In the
end,
for better and
worse,
the new
anthropology
of
religion would,
in Asad's
words,
'define
religion
. . . as a
transhistorical and transcultural
function',
at the same time as
it would circumscribe the boundaries inside which this function
could
play.122
All the world's
peoples got religion,
but it was a
religion
divorced from the
ordinary parts
of
daily life,
bounded
1i8 Durkheim, Elementary
Forms
of
the
Religious Life, 52,
54.
119
Asad,
'Construction of
Religion
as an
42.
120Niklas Luhmann, Social
Systems,
trans.
John Bednarz, Jr,
with Dirk Baecker
(Stanford, 1995),
56.
121
Buc, Dangers of Ritual, 226,
227.
122
Asad, 'Construction of
Religion as an
28.
in its own
regime,
distinct from the
quotidian.
It is
hardly
sur-
prising
that the crucible of the seventeenth
century,
when
Europe's
peoples
tore themselves
apart trying
to reconcile
religion
and
everyday life,
first made this distinction
compelling
to the schol-
arly imagination.
University of Michigan Jonathan
Sheehan

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