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THE ANTI-INDIVIDUALISTIC
IDEOLOGY OF
HELLENISTIC CULTURE'
LUTHER H. MARTIN
[N]o individual is capable of creating a fully
originallygesture, belonging to nobody else... nor
can it even be regarded as that persons's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us
as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations.
Milan Kundera2
Summary
character for
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culture came to value.8 The "individual", as one recent commentator has concluded is a very "slippery figure".9
One reason the individual has remained so lubricious is that
historical scholarship too often confounds a social acknowledgement of individuals-even
a concern with their well-being-with
the social valuing of individuals above the collective of which they
are members. Consequently, we may note Louis Dumont's useful
differentiation between the "empirical" individual, as he terms
those samples of mankind found in all societies as the "subject of
speech, thought, and will",?1 and an "ideological" individualism,
a valuing of "the independent, autonomous, and thus essentially
nonsocial moral being, who carries...[the] permanent values" of
culture." It is, in other words, not the particularity of unitary
existence but its approbation that provides the condition for taking
special notice of the individual in the first place.
The English speaking world seemed unconcerned with
ideological "individualism" until after 1840 when Henry Reeve
first coined the term in his translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's
famous observations on Democracyin America.12 In this work, first
published in 1835, the intrepid French investigator of nineteenthcentury American culture observed that "individualism is a novel
expression, to which a novel idea [democracy] has given birth."'3
Reeve felt constrained to append an apologetic note to his introduction of this English neologism: "However strange it may seem to
the English ear", he wrote, "I know of no English word exactly
equivalent to" the French word individualisme-itself a term of
4
nineteenth-century coinage.
At about the same time that the Tocqueville was extolling the
value of individualism for the American experiment, the German
historian, J.G. Droysen, was "inventing" the Hellenistic age.
Unacknowledged from antiquity through the Enlightenment,
Droysen's new periodization, itself a species of historical
generalization, reflected the historicistic values of its nineteenthcentury definition.'5 The criteria for historiography during this
century had been influenced by the emergence of nationalism and
the subsequent founding of national archives, which supplied the
recently established profession of history with a trove of newly consolidated, if politically oriented, sources. Human history became
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.64
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my mother, and who are my brothers?' And stretching out his hand
his disciples, he said, 'Here are my mother and brothers. For
does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and
(Mt. 12:46-50//Mk. 3:31-35; Lk. 8:19-21).
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concern for the self. For these Christians, to "take care", like the
ancient injunction to self-knowledge, referred "to the drawing of...
social boundaries".67
No one in the New Testament is portrayed as successfully suing
for membership in any of the Jesus movements apart from importunate invitation. Yet, in his study of the influence of Greek ideas
on Christianity, the influential biblical scholar, Edwin Hatch, summarized Christian origins in terms of the conventional view of
Hellenistic religions: "There is", he concluded "no adequate
evidence that, in the first age of Christianity, association was other
than voluntary. It was profoundly individual. It assumed for the
first time in history the infinite worth of the individual soul."68
Hatch's view of the "original" Christians, decidedly more Protestant than historical as Jonathan Z. Smith has recently argued,69
informs the work of many modern scholars who are still concerned
with the question of "how the charismatic [that is, individualistic]
fellowship of the apostolic Church", that "original" Christianity
"rediscovered" by the Protestant reformers, "gave rise to the [corporate] bureaucracy of Roman Catholicism."70
Although Hellenistic internationalism did challenge the classical
view of a collective identity conferred by one's city of origin-the
view still represented by Aristotle-it did not challenge the social
basis of identity by producing any ideology of individualism.
Rather, it produced alternative strategies of social inclusion,
strategies defined not by place of birth but by inclusion in a newly
defined international plurality of social groupings in which
membership was conferred by invitation and instruction.71 As with
his conclusions concerning Hellenistic culture generally, Green,
risking self-contradiction, concludes that religion during this period
represented the "urge to retreat from self-determination, to seek
authority outside the self",72 and Griffiths must subsume his view
of heightened individual concerns during the Hellenistic period to
what he concedes is the "essentially communal" nature of religion
in antiquity.73 Salvation, in other words, in whatever Hellenistic
discourse it may be articulated, is, at base, a social status confirmed
by membership in a group deemed to have the power or the
authority to confer this status.
The subcultural religious groups adapted to the claims of
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LUTHER H. MARTIN
USA
1 This
paper has been presented, in various versions, as a lecture at several
universities. I should like to thank numerous colleagues who have responded to
it and offered a number of constructive comments. In particular, I should like to
thank ProfessorJaimee Uhlenbrock who invited me to participatein a symposium
on "The Individual and the Cosmos in the Hellenistic World" at the State
University of New York, New Paltz that was the genesis of this paper, Professor
Greg Alles who invited me to lecture at Western Maryland College, and Professor
Per Bilde who invited me to participate in a seminar on Hellenistic religions at the
University of Aarhus and who also made possible the presentation of this material
at the Universities
3 Graham
Chapman et al., Monty Python's The Life of Brian (of Nazareth) (New
York: Fred Jordan Books/Grosset and Dunlap, 1979), 46.
4
-or
with the anticipation of the intellectual formulations of Socrates by the
healing practices of Aesclepius, introduced into Attica in 420 B.C. (Robert
Garland, IntroducingNew Gods [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992], 134).
5
Christopher Pelling (ed.), Characterizationand Individuality in Greek Literature
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), V. For the argument for the origins of
individualism in the Middle Ages, Pelling cites Colin Morris, The Discovery of the
Individual 1050-1200 (New York: Harper, 1972); during the Renaissance: J.
Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860; trans. S.G.C.
Middleton, New York: Harper & Row, 1975); in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries: Lional Trilling, SincerityandAuthenticity(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
135
sity Press, 1972); to which we might add Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity (New York: Atheneum, 1970); in the eighteenth century: Leonard Woolf,
After the Deluge: A Study in CommunalPsychology(London: Hogarth Press, 1931) and
K. Marx, The Marx-Engles Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 222-223; for "6th century" Greek lyric poetry, though not cited by
name: Bruno Snell, The Discoveryof the Mind, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer (1953; New
York: Dover, 1982).
6 Eli
Sagan, At the Dawn of Tyranny. The Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression, and the State (New York: Knopf, 1985), 301; following, on this point, E.
Durkheim, On the Division of Labor in Society (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 195.
7 Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, trans. D.M.G.
Stalker (Edinburgh
and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), 1:226, n 85; 443, n 7; see 391-401. But
Jacob Neusner argues that in Judaism, "the individual's life always is lived with
the people"; in "The Virtues of the Inner Life in Formative Judaism", Tikkun
1 (1986): 72-83.
8 Louis Dumont, for
example, "A Modified View of Our Origins: The Christian Beginnings of Modern Individualism", Religion 12 (1982): 1-27, or Elaine
Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988), 96; for
recent bibliography but somewhat ambivalent argument, see Gedaliahu G.
Stroumsa, "Caro salutis cardo: Shaping the Person in Early Christian Thought",
History of Religions 30 (1990): 25-50.
9 Pelling, V.
10 For a discussion of individualistic
expression in Stoic thought, for example,
see Troels Engberg-Pedersen, "Stoic Philosophy and the Concept of the Person",
in: Christopher Gill (ed.), The Person and the Human Mind (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990): 109-135. I am indebted to Professor Engberg-Pedersen for calling
my attention to his most interesting article.
'1 Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1986), 25. Dumont's distinction between "individual" and the "ideology of
individualism" is based in the French tradition of sociology beginning with Emile
Durkheim (his 1898 article on "L'individualisme et les intellectuels", for example, reprinted in English translation in W.S.F. Pickering [ed.], Durkheim on
Religion. A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies [London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1975], 59-73), and specially, the work of Durkheim's nephew, Marcel
Mauss (Dumont, 1, see also 1-8, 183-201). Although not specifically referred to
by Dumont, Mauss' 1938 article, "Une categorie de l'esprit humain: La notion
de personne, celle de 'moi' " (now reprinted in English translation in M. Carrinthers - S. Collins - S. Lukes [eds], The Categoryof the Person. Anthropology,Philosophy, History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 1-25) is fundamental. Here Mauss first distinguished between "individual" as the empirical object
of observation and "person" as the construct of cultural and historical context.
It is the "system of ideas and values current in a given social milieu" that Dumont
refers to as an "ideology" (Dumont, 9). The "ideology of individualism", then,
refers to those social constructs which value the individual (or the person) above
the collective. In addition to the discussions, both theoretical and historical, by
Dumont and by Carrinthers-Collins-Lukes based on the distinction between the
empirical individual and its individualistic construction, see also Lukes,
Individualism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), and H.G. Kippenberg - Y.B.
Kuiper - A.F. Sanders (eds.), Conceptsof Person in Religion and Thought (Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, 1990).
136
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Luther H. Martin
137
Callisthenes, now in new translation by Ken Dowden in: B.P. Reardon (ed.), CollectedAncient GreekNovels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) 650-735.
30
Trans., Aubrey de Selincourt, Arrian. The Campaignsof Alexander(New York:
Viking Penguin, 1971), 349, 213.
31
Eliza Gregory Wilkins, "Know Thyself" in Greekand Latin Literature(1917;
Chicago: Ares, 1980), 18, 41.
32
J.R. Hamilton, "Notes" to Arrian, The CampaignsofAlexander, trans. Aubrey
de Selincourt (New York: Viking Penguin, 1971), 350 n. 4.
33 Wilkins, 18.
34 Frederick M.
Schroeder, "The Self in Ancient Religious Experience" in
Classical MediterraneanSpirituality, ed. A.H. Armstrong (New York: Crossroad,
1989), 337-359: 347.
35
Schroeder, 347.
36
Wilkins, 66.
Wilkins, 66.
For the influence of the Alcibiades on Plotinus, see Gerard J.P. O'Daly,
Plotinus' Philosophy of the Self (New York: Barnes and Nobel, 1973), 10-11.
39
Jean-Pierre Vernant, "The Individual within the City-State", in: Vernant,
Mortals and Immortals. Collected Essays, ed. F.I. Zeitlin (Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 1991), 330.
40 Louis
Gernet, The Anthropologyof Ancient Greece, trans. J. Hamilton and B.
Nagy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 12.
41
Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self", in: Luther H. Martin, et al.,
Technologies of the Self A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1988), 26, 31.
37
38
42
Schroeder, 337.
44
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139
Atherton, 332.
58
Rist, 147.
61
Paul Veyne, "The Roman Empire", in A History of Private Life, Vol. 1, ed.
Paul Veyne, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1987), 231.
62 William M. Brashear, A Mithraic Catechism
from Egypt (p. Berol. 21196), Tyche
Supplementband (Wien: Verlag Adolf Holzhausens Nfg, 1992), 15.
63
Brashear, 20.
64
68
Edwin Hatch, The Influence of GreekIdeas and Usages upon the Christian Church,
ed., A.M. Fairbain, 2nd ed. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1891), 334.
69 Jonathan Z. Smith,
DrudgeryDivine. On the Comparisonof Early Christianitiesand
the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 59-62;
see also Veyne, 231-2.
70
Benjamin Nelson, "Weber, Troeltsch, Jellinek as Comparative Historical
Sociologists", SociologicalAnalysis 36 (1975), 232n.
71
Jonas, 5-6.
72
Green, 586.
Griffiths, 238.
See G.W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor: The University
of Michigan Press, 1990), esp. ch. 1.
75
Luther H. Martin, Hellenistic Religions. An Introduction(New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987), 76.
76 Luther
H. Martin, "Reflections on the Mithraic Tauroctony as Cult
Image". Studies in Mithraism, ed. J.R Hinells (Rome: "L'erma" di Bretschneider,
forthcoming).
77 Luther H. Martin, "Greek Goddesses and Grain: the Sicilian Connection",
Helios 17 (1990), 251-261.
78
See G.F. Snyder, Ante Pacem. ArchaeologicalEvidence of ChurchLife Before Constantine (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985).
73
74
LutherH. Martin
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79
I have suggested a social interpretation of the Mithraic tauroctony in
"Reflections on the Mithraic Tauroctony as Cult Scene".
80 C. Bradford
Wells, Alexanderand the Hellenistic World (Toronto: A.M. Hakkert, 1970), 210; Jaimee P. Uhlenbrock, "The Coroplast and his Craft", in The
Coroplast'sArt. Greek Terracottasof the Hellenistic World, ed., Jaimee P. Uhlenbrock
(New Rochelle, NY: Caratzas, 1990), 15-31: 16.
81
Uhlenbrock, ed., passim.
82
83
Wells, 210.