The origins of ancient religions and cults
Eighteenth-century scholars were increasingly interested in making sense of the startling variety of religions they encountered in historical writings and travel accounts. Books such as Jean Frederic Bernard's and Bernard Picart's Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723–43) provided descriptions of diverse theologies and offered illustrations of how people around the globe practiced their beliefs. Comparative analyses of religions allowed for the exploration of both the diversity and the structural similarity of past and present beliefs. Religion appeared as the central unifying factor of human culture, and it offered a key to understanding other times and places.
Although some of the first academicians, such as Jean Mabillon, were notable historians of the Church, much of the eighteenth-century research at the Académie des inscriptions focused on pagan religions. The Académie's studies of ancient cults and religions, which significantly outnumbered their research into the history of Christianity and Church history, offer insight into how eighteenth-century scholars, most of whom were still devout Christians, tried to make sense of alien systems of belief. In many cases, the academicians adopted what might be called proto-sociological explanations for what they saw as superstitious and erroneous beliefs of the ancients. Many tried to offer psychological accounts of superstition, citing, above all, a combination of fear and ignorance in the face of natural disasters and calamities. Nevertheless, the academicians often tried to see things from the perspective of their historical subjects. They sincerely attempted to describe what people in the past believed and to explain the possible reasons for those beliefs.
Although the vast majority of the academicians were not deists or atheists, their studies of past religions proved to be subversive to Christian dogma. They exposed difficulties about the age of the Earth and of humanity, which was problematic for Judeo-Christian chronology; they showed how religious leaders acted as impostors to fabricate miracles and manipulate popular superstitions; and they revealed uncanny similarities between Christianity and other mythological systems. The cumulative effect of the academy's erudite studies was thus inevitably corrosive to religious orthodoxy, and it is crucial to explaining the central paradox about the subversive nature of state-sponsored scholarship.
One of the more important questions touched on the origins of the various religions encountered in antiquity. The academicians and their counterparts debated whether human beings were initially monotheists or polytheists. Generally, the notion of a primitive monotheism that had been revealed to Adam was the more orthodox and theologically acceptable alternative. The abbé Nicolas-Hubert Mongault maintained, with many of his contemporaries, that the original belief in a single God became corrupted and turned into idolatry among the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Egyptians. Having forgotten the "true ideas of religion … their mind, instead of lifting itself up to the supreme being and the cause of all good things, stopped at inferior and sensible causes." Physical bodies such as the sun, he argued, "became the object of their cult that was regulated by their different" natural and social needs.
The academicians sought to explain the origin of cults and superstitions in ancient societies. They usually resorted to psychological or functionalist accounts. In his article on the cult of the god Bonus Eventus, Philibert-Bernard Moreau de Mautour attributed the origins of cults to "self-interest, self-love, and other passions and vices." He compared "the religious and healthy fear that, in a soul enlightened by the lights of faith, is the principle of wisdom" with a primal, unenlightened fear that "troubles human beings … and that was the main source of the superstition of the pagans." The academicians thus popularized the idea that religious cults were informed by the ignorance of nature's laws and motivated by basic psychological needs.
The notion that primal fear was the main motivating factor in the establishment of ancient systems of belief became a widely shared assumption among the academicians. In his article on the representations of the gods Fear and Pallor on Roman medals, Moreau de Mautour argued that the destructive powers of nature caused people to become idolatrous and "to seek protectors who would save them from perils that menaced them." They became accustomed "to fear a hidden and secret power" that caused fortunes and misfortunes in their lives, and over time they established formal cults.
Abbé Claude François Fraguier's article on curses that fathers placed on their children connected notions of paternal authority with the origins of cults. He argued that there was nothing more natural for those who felt oppressed and weak than to call upon the help of "a superior power" for protection or "vengeance for the evils that they had suffered at the hands of others." He suggested that in order to discover the origins of cults and religions, one had to look back to a time before the establishment of states and political institutions. In these early societies, the children's "duty to their fathers extended" quite far and became a "formal aspect of religion." Those who dared to violate this duty would incur the "anger and vengeance of the gods." Over time, Fraguier argued, inner feelings of remorse, shame, and guilt became externalized, transforming into divinities (the Furies) who would punish transgressors.
The idea that the pagan gods were fashioned through attempts to externalize guilt and shame had many supporters at the Académie des inscriptions. Étienne Lauréault de Foncemagne's essay on the goddess Laverna highlighted the anthropomorphic nature of the Greek and Roman gods, observing that people tried to justify their "most shameful weaknesses by recognizing as the object of [their] cult divinities as weak as them and susceptible to the same passions [as them]." Even theft, which was a crime "that most directly attacked civil society," was "consecrated in the person of Mercury," as "the son of Jupiter was chosen as the patron of thieves." In his dissertation on the Fates (parques), the abbé Antoine Banier similarly argued that the true origin of these divinities was to be found in human self-love and desire to shun blame and responsibility for improper actions. It was precisely to "avoid the remorse of a criminal conscience," he argued, that people "invented Gods that drove us to crimes by a fatal necessity." As a result, ancient tragedies always blamed the gods for the misfortunes that human beings seemingly brought upon themselves. Banier's essay on the Furies likewise insisted that paganism was originally conceived as a way to indulge human passions, thereby justifying the weakness of human nature. Consequently, the gods of the ancient pagans resembled human beings in their decadent behaviors, and religion provided a kind of excuse for unvirtuous acts.
At the same time, Banier agreed with his fellow academicians that pagan religions contained mechanisms for regulating behaviors. Well before the Christians, the ancients came up with notions of the afterlife in which crimes and transgressions would be punished, while virtues would be rewarded. Even in periods of great ignorance when "the depravity of the heart cast shadows over the mind," he noted, people could still understand that "virtue is not always recompensed in this world nor are crimes [always] punished." Consequently, they came up with the notion that there had to be a place "to punish the evil and reward the good," and that is how they came up with the idea of the Elysian Fields.
These accounts tried to demonstrate how corrupted understandings that lost sight of original monotheistic ideas tried to make sense of the world around them. Although primitive monotheism was widely supported, the academicians' accounts of ancient religions focused almost exclusively on paganism. They explained how the ancients worshipped their gods and shed light on the psychological origins of various superstitions. Such an approach signaled a subtle shift away from the humanist pursuit of prisca sapientia, of pristine theological and philosophical knowledge that supposedly had been available to the ancients. Rather than looking at how the purportedly original and true religion was perverted by pagan beliefs, the academicians attempted to examine ancient paganism on its own terms, treating antiquity as a foreign culture worthy of exploration for its own sake.
Not all embraced the theory of primitive monotheism, however. Charles de Brosses, who invented the term "fetishism," claimed that the ancient Egyptian religion was always based on the practice of animal worship. He rejected the notion that this practice contained any underlying figurative or mystical meanings, as earlier scholars like Athanasius Kircher had claimed. Comparing Egyptian ceremonies to religious practices in contemporary Guinea (about which he read in travel accounts), de Brosses insisted that all religions of early human societies involved similar structural elements of what he called "brute-worship." So-called primitive human beings reasoned in the manner of children and were missing the spark of true religion. De Brosses argued that they worshiped animals and objects because they were unable to formulate abstract notions of the divinity, suggesting, as David Hume had three years earlier, that the first societies were not monotheistic, but polytheistic and idolatrous. Such views challenged the orthodox Christian concept of an original Adamic religion, and they would be taken up by atheist thinkers, such as the baron d'Holbach and Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger.
Boulanger's work in particular revealed strong debts to the Académie's research. His L'antiquité dévoilée par ses usages (1766) cited the Mémoires of the Académie des inscriptions in numerous places, and his analysis of the psychological origins of pagan religions strongly resembled the reasoning of academicians such as Banier, de Brosses, Fraguier, and Moreau de Mautour. Like his earlier Recherches sur l'origine du despotisme oriental (1761), Boulanger's L'antiquité dévoilée traced the origins of ancient religions to how early societies responded to natural disasters, such as floods and fires. References to these events and to the universal Flood appeared in the histories of all ancient peoples, testifying to the high likelihood that the deluge was in fact universal. Following the Flood, Boulanger hypothesized, human nature became fundamentally transformed. Traumatized by such calamities and subject to the whims of nature, the earth's inhabitants lived in a state of constant fear. They reconstituted societies anew, inventing religious ceremonies and rituals that, according to their feeble understanding of the laws of nature, would pacify deities who they thought controlled natural phenomena. Thus, Boulanger attributed the origins of ancient religious and political institutions to the traumatic experiences of the universal deluge. Like his counterparts at the Académie des inscriptions, he saw myths and fables as important sources for uncovering the historical foundations of human societies.
Functionalist explanations of religious practices
In seeking to make sense of ancient religions and cults, the academicians often adopted functionalist explanations of the role that people's beliefs and practices played in the maintenance of the social order. Rather than highlighting the ignorance and superstition of those who believed in the pagan divinities, the scholars at the Académie examined how different religious rituals worked to promote human association. They also highlighted the ways in which these practices helped to establish laws and contribute to the functioning and progress of ancient societies.
While the academicians were frequently critical of ancient superstitions, they also perceived the social and political utility of pagan religions. For example, in explaining the origins of the cult of the god Terminus, Claude Gros de Boze, the perpetual secretary of the Académie from 1706 to 1742, examined how Roman king Numa Pompilius tried to curb popular passions. Seeking to curtail the human drive to expand one's domination over others, which inevitably led to violent wars, Numa established this cult of Terminus, the god of boundaries. According to Gros de Boze, Numa revived an ancient law but "added new penalties" and, to make it "more sacred and inviolable, he persuaded people that there was a particular god" who served as "the protector of borders and the avenger of usurpations." The Roman legislator thus found it necessary "to involve religion in politics" in order to "restrain by the fear of the Gods" those who were not controlled by established laws. Like Niccolò Machiavelli's examination of the practical effects of the Roman religion in the Discourses on Livy (1531), Gros de Boze's analysis drew on Livy but also relied on other historians, including Polybius, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus.