authority of god and a divinely ordained human order, what room is left for political
self-determination and individual freedom?
I concentrate here on the relationship between religion and society in classical
Athens. Greek society and religion are attested in most detail from Athens; it is not
possible to approach the problem except in a very abstract way with regard to any
other Greek state. Athens is in many respects an exceptional case: for much of the
classical period it is the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful of the Greek city-states.
But then, it is not clear that any other Greek state would be more ‘‘representative’’
than Athens. Which Greek polis is ‘‘typical’’? Doubtless the Greek city-states shared
many cultural traits, but is there such a thing as a general ‘‘Greek society’’? Or were
there as many different societies as political entities?
It might reasonably be objected that the examples I have cited so far have been taken
from the modern world of vast multi-ethnic nation-states in which monotheistic
religion is the rule. The ancient Greek city-states were more intimate and socially
homogeneous, and a relatively tolerant, assimilative polytheism was the rule. It is
a truism that ancient religion is civic religion, a more or less overt extension of the
social and political order. In this context the basic dichotomies that we find in
the modern world, including even the opposition of religion and society, were
not recognized. There is certainly some truth in this position; critical evaluation of
it requires consideration of an ancient case. As a preliminary, however, it is also
necessary to consider the history of the concepts of religion and society and their
relationship.
History of the Problem
Discussion of the relationship between religion and society is hampered from the
outset by the absence of agreed definitions for either term. The problem is due in part
to a fetishistic obsession with the reality of ‘‘society’’ and ‘‘religion’’ – as if such
abstractions could ever really ‘‘be.’’ Such words do not describe existing things, but
reflect ways of thinking about the world. They may describe historically contingent
social attitudes; they may be useful contemporary analytic categories, but in neither
case do they describe the concrete or tangible. It will be convenient here to adopt
definitions consistent with Durkheim’s argument. By ‘‘society’’ I mean the categories
of the person (statuses) and the systematic relationships between these categories
(group relations). By ‘‘religion’’ I mean beliefs, manifested in word and deed (or
myth and ritual), in the transcendental, the deathless, unchanging, true or natural:
what is other than the world of contingent, practical experience, and thus can serve as
a model for it. The relationship as I imagine it is roughly analogous to that between
the specific and the general, practice and theory.
Definitions should be qualified by a consideration of the history of the terms and
their opposition. In the earliest Greek authors such as Hesiod, human experience is
regarded as a unified whole. Certainly Hesiod understood the distinction between
the divine and the human, the sacred and the profane. Religion, however, was
not understood as an autonomous region of human life, any more than were
other essential categories of modern analysis, such as ‘‘the political’’ or ‘‘social’’ or
‘‘economic’’: these the ancients regarded as integrated, or (in modern academic
Religion and Society in Classical Greece 285