Philosophical Piety and Lived Religion in Greco-Roman Antiquity: Cosmos, Justice, Ancestral Wisdom

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Religious Studies

First Advisor

Inwood, Brad

Abstract

This dissertation examines philosophical piety and lived religion in the writings and local contexts of three figures in the Platonist tradition: Plato of Athens, Philo of Alexandria, and Plutarch of Chaeronea. It bridges the traditionally separate spheres of the discourses of philosophy - often imagined as focused on abstract ideas such as fate, the gods, and justice - and the concrete practices of religion and magic. In the ancient Mediterranean world, philosophers actively participated in a multifaceted discourse involving lived religion. Documentary and material remains of rituals not only provide insight into the aspirations, experiences, emotions, and daily lives of everyday people, but they also engage and resonate with theories and ideas discussed in philosophical literature, such as the nature and accessibility of the cosmos, divinity, and justice. The material remains of ritual embody ideas about nature, divinity, humanity, and ancestral wisdom, and thereby encode operationalizations of "theological scripts" - social norms or behaviors for the divine and humans in their relation to the divine. Approaching Plato, Philo, and Plutarch together - and across the usual but problematic domains of philosophy, religiosity, and magic - not only teaches us about the ancient Mediterranean world and texts defined as the purview of Classics or Religion. It also instantiates the need to traverse the fault-line between Classics and Religious Studies. This fault-line has depended upon often unstated and anachronistic distinctions between ethno-religious groups. These distinctions are themselves a vestige and heritage of early Christian rhetorical constructions of the differences between Jewish, Christian, and mainstream Greek and Roman pieties. This dissertation bridges Classics and Religious Studies and shows the limitations of our historical and philological study when the two remain focused on the traditional objects of their studies. The philosophical and theological discourses of Plato, Philo, and Plutarch - alongside the documentary and material remains of local and contemporaneous ritual practice - form a constellation of mutually illuminating ways of malleably theorizing and living as a human in a divinely inhabited universe. Philosophical piety and lived religion emerge not as absolute alternatives but variously overlapping and intimately related forms of religiosity and modes of theologizing - or, more simply, modes of living as a human in a universe infused with and structured by the divine.

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