Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli gives a paper on '“I Have Nothing Else To Live By”: Religious Individualization as Comfort-Zone Religiosity (Tertullian vs. Idol-Makers; On Idolatry 3-8)'

This essay is interested in testing the epistemic reliability and the critical reach of the individualization focus of the “Live Ancient Religion” project. In my opinion, such a check-up demands (a) to draw attention to the diverse constraints and conditioning biases with which the individual agency is woven together; (b) to highlight the accommodationist scope of some individual appropriations of religious systems as comfort-zone religiosities. I elected Tertullian’s On Idolatry 3-8 as a case study. These few pages correspond to the literary framing and rhetorical embellishment of the author’s occasional confrontations with the arguments of some Carthaginian Christian “idol-makers”, who, when asked, advocated in different ways the religious-moral legitimacy of their job. Developing a multi-layered approach to the individualization processes, my analytic strategy is twofold: while attempting to theoretically discomfort religious individualization by pointing at its multiple obstacles, I describe also Tertullian’s efforts to concretely interfere with too comfortable and socially adequate appropriations of Christian beliefs and practices. In this sense, this paper aims to indirectly criticize the “feel-good spirituality” that underlies any palatable and marketoriented survey on ‘personal religions’, and thus to distance itself from such questionable enterprises.
The essay is part of a larger project on 't Forbidden Jobs: Making a Living as a Jesus Follower in the Roman Empire':
This project is a thematic expansion and a methodological refinement of the research conducted, in the last three years, at the crossroads of early and late ancient Christian studies. The aim of the enquire was to sketch the fading profile of the Jesus follower engaged in public-political affairs before Constantine and the “Christianisation” of the Roman state, thereby attempting to answer to the following question: how and how far a Greco-Roman officeholder could appropriate, embody, adapt and innovate (at least) a part of the Christian set of experiences, beliefs and practices, without being forced to quit his honours and public duties? This line of research, which tries to capitalize on Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory of action, while integrating it with more self-centred perspectives at the intersection of dispositions and strategies, could be profitably extended to other empirical domains. Politics, i.e., ruling and administrating political communities, is definitely not the only sphere of socio-symbolic production where an objective tension between different forms of commitment and interest may be felt by believers in Jesus and influence their private and public behaviours. Other occupations, activities and trades are equally involved in the interplay between Christian normative definitions of an appropriated religious conduct, related expectations from both religious authorities and “significant others”, and material interests in accomplishing social duties, doing businesses and holding tasks provided by the current socio-economic system. Within this perspective, a “forbidden job” is no more an indisputable ban coming from an overwhelming authority. What is a forbidden job in the eye of the Christian (prescribing and writing) beholders might turn into a matter of religious appropriation and innovation from the point of view of the Christian professional and worker: a spot where “practical individuality” is at stake. In this sense, to advocate an analysis at the level of the individual should not lead to underrate the question of how historically deep-rooted and structured relations of power create dispositions to act. Why, how, to what extent, under which material conditions and social conditioning do Christian people obey to normative discourses about “how much religious they are when they make a living in everyday life”? A suitable answer should probably bypass both interactionist and hard structuralist lines of theorizing. Rather, it presupposes a sociological theory of embodied powers which, while taking institutions and agencies of power seriously, is also acquainted with the idea of a subject storing a plurality of dispositions ready to be strategically activated in a plurality of situations. Succeeding in these socially conditioned performances may be the magic formula of a religious appropriation.