Religious Beliefs, Practices, and Representations as Humanly Enacted Realities: Lucian (circa 120-200) Addresses Sacrifices, Death, Divinity, and Fate

Robert Prus

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.11.4.01

Authors

Robert Prus University of Waterloo, Canada

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.11.4.01

Keywords:

Religion, Pragmatism, Symbolic Interactionism, Social Constructionism, Sociology of Religion, Lucian of Samosata, Fate and Agency, Greek Olympian Gods

Abstract

Lucian of Samosata (circa 120-200) may be primarily envisioned as a poet-philosopher from the classical Roman era. However, the material he develops on religion not only anticipates important aspects of contemporary pragmatist/constructionist approaches to the sociology of religion but also provides some particularly compelling insights into religion as a humanly engaged realm of reality.

Following an introduction to a pragmatist approach to the study of religion, this paper presents a synoptic overview of several of Lucian’s texts on religion. In addition to the significance of Lucian’s materials for comprehending an era of Roman and Greek civilization, as well as their more general sources of intellectual and aesthetic stimulation, these texts also provide an array of valuable transhistorical reference points and alert scholars in the field of religion to some ways in which the study of religion could be more authentically approached within the social sciences.

The paper concludes with a consideration of the affinities of Lucian’s depictions of religion with pragmatist, interactionist, and associated approaches as this pertains to the study of religion as a realm of human involvement.

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Author Biography

Robert Prus, University of Waterloo, Canada

Robert Prus is a sociologist (Professor Emeritus) at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. A symbolic interactionist, ethnographer, and social theorist, Robert Prus has been examining the conceptual and methodological connections of American pragmatist philosophy and its sociological offshoot, symbolic interactionism, with Classical Greek, Latin, and interim scholarship.

In addition to his work on the developmental flows of pragmatist social thought in poetics (fictional representations), he also has been studying the flows of Western social thought in the interrelated areas of rhetoric, philosophy, ethnohistory, religion, education and scholarship, love and friendship, politics and governing practices, and deviance and morality. As part of this larger venture, Robert Prus has been developing a series of papers on Emile Durkheim’s “pragmatist sociology and philosophy of knowing.” Working with some substantial, but much overlooked texts developed by Emile Durkheim, this statement addresses the more thorough going pragmatist features of Durkheim’s later works on morality, education, religion, and philosophy. It indicates the conceptual affinities of Durkheim’s work with Aristotle’s foundational emphasis on the nature of human knowing and acting, as well as Blumerian symbolic interactionism. Still, no less importantly, it also considers the contributions of Durkheim’s scholarship to the broader pragmatist emphasis on the study of community life as this takes place in interactively accomplished process terms.

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