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4.2 History of Religions in the Making Franz Cumont (1868-1947) and the ‘Oriental Religions’ Eline Scheerlinck1 As is the case for many of his colleagues within the humanities, it is hard to pin one label on Franz Cumont (1868-1947). His work moves at the crossroads of his- tory of religions, classical philology, ancient history, archeology and Orientalism. However, Cumont employed this multidisciplinarity in such a way as to make him a pioneer within the developing field of history of religions at the turn of the nineteenth century. In what follows I will focus mainly on Cumont as a historian of religion and on the renewing role which he played in the development of the history of religions as an independent academic discipline. Cumont created a new methodological model for the study of ancient religions. Moreover, Cumont’s fo- cus on the Oriental influence on Greek and Roman religion was a symptom of his original yet nuanced ideas on the role of the ancient Near East within the history of Western culture, in particular Western religions and (pseudo)sciences such as astrology and magic. A new method for Mithras At the end of the nineteenth century some students of ancient religion had grown to be dissatisfied with the methodology which had dominated the field until then. In the previous decades, the study of religion had been approached from a purely philological perspective. One of the founding fathers of the compara- tive study of religions, Oxford professor Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900), was a comparative philologist, who traced the evolution from a primordial monothe- ism to polytheism by studying the names of the gods in the so-called Semitic and Indo-European languages.2 According to Max Müller, divinities came into existence through epitheta which were originally given to the one god. It is clear that, to the comparative mythologist, ‘the history of religions was a history of lan- g u a g e’. 3 However, Max Müller was also responsible for the edition and translation 220 Eline Scheerlinck to English of different ancient Eastern religious texts, from, e.g., Zoroastrianism and Confucianism. These ‘Sacred Books of the East’, were published by Oxford University Press in fifty volumes from 1879 until 1910, a few decades later than Max Müller’s earlier theoretical work.4 This collecting and editing of texts fits in well with the methodological climate of history of religions at that time. The pop- ularity of the approach of comparative mythology had started to teem toward the last decade of the nineteenth century, as scholars criticized its generalizing claims which were not satisfyingly based on documents. A more positivist methodology for the history of religions asserted itself: the methods of the academic discipline of history were to be applied to the history of religions: to collect the data, classify and analyze them were the historian of religions’ priorities. Synthesizing and gen- eralizing ideas were to be formulated in a later stage.5 This was the viewpoint of, e.g., Jules Toutain (1865-1961) (cf. infra) and Maurice Vernes (1845-1923). Vernes was the founder of the Revue de l’histoire des religions in 1880 and director of the ‘V section: Sciences religieuses’, established in 1885, at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris.6 These are two important examples which show how, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a history of religions independent from theology, was institutionalized.7 What was the role or place of Franz Cumont within this development? Al- though Cumont studied comparative grammar with Charles Michel (1853-1929) in Ghent and comparative mythology with Hermann Usener (1834-1905, cf. infra) in Bonn, as a historian of religion he was not a comparatist.8 He did not pay much attention to the subjects to which students of comparative mythology or religion were generally drawn, such as the origin of religion or parallels between religions which had never been in contact. However, Hermann Usener’s ideas would have a lasting influence on the Belgian scholar,9 as he was most probably responsible for Cumont’s open mind when it came to other cultures of the Mediterranean (cf. infra).10 However, Cumont’s approach would certainly not be entirely his teacher Usener’s, who in 1893 published Götternamen, a major work in the tradi- tion of comparative mythology.11 That Franz Cumont provided the history of religions with a model for the study of ancient religions was affirmed by his contemporaries (cf. infra) as well as it is the consensus within the academic community today.12 He famously did this with his work on Mithras. ‘L’Homme de Mithra’13 developed his interest in the Persian god during his study period in Germany and Austria (1887-1890), when he wrote essays on the topic and went on a first journey of exploration in Hungary and Romania, in search of inscriptions and other ancient remnants that would attest the presence of the cult of Mithras.14 In the following years, Cu- mont collected, assisted by his international network of correspondents, Mithraic monuments from all over Europe,15 after which he published the two monumental History of Religions in the Making 221 volumes of Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra (TMMM) in 1896 and 1899.16 Instead of focusing on language, names, texts and myths, Cu- mont thus examined this one specific ancient religion in the Greco-Roman world from the viewpoint of the entire Altertumswissenschaft. In TMMM, which estab- lished him as a world authority in the study of ancient religions, Cumont took account of all literary texts in Greek, Latin and Oriental languages, particularly Armenian. Moreover, he included all inscriptions and all figurative archeological monuments, such as statues or the typically subterranean and cavelike Mithraic temples.17 In 1910 Jules Toutain wrote an article in the Revue de synthèse historique on the progress of the discipline of history of religions in the previous decades.18 Applauding Cumont’s TMMM as a perfect example, as a model even, of the his- torical method, he compared it in a positive way to the new comparative approach within the study of religions, connected with anthropology, which we find in the work of influential scholars such as James Frazer (1854-1941) and William Rob- ertson Smith (1846-1894).19 Toutain contrasts Cumont’s inductive method with the deductive, ‘arbitrary’ approach of the comparative school: Souci constant de ne recourir, pour expliquer le caractère et le succès des mystères mithriaques, qu’à des idées ou des faits recueillis soit dans la civilisation iranienne soit dans la civilisation gréco-romaine des premiers siècles de l’empire; usage de la méthode inductive, à l’exclusion de toute comparaison arbitraire, de toute déduction purement logique; clarté de la pensée, maîtrise de l’expression toujours adéquate, par sa précision même, à l’idée de l’auteur toutes ces qualités donnent au grand ouvrage de M. Cumont une valeur hors pair.20 Between Hellenomania and Panbabylonism Cumont’s preference for a Near Eastern god for his first important study of ancient religion is another aspect of the classicist’s pioneering role. After this groundbreaking work on Mithras, the scholar broadened his outlook to other mystery cults who found their origin in the Near East. In his most important work, Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, he described mystery cults from Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria and Persia, and the pseudosciences astrology and magic, in terms of their impact on the Roman West.21 In this work, Cumont ar- gued that these cults, as a group, completely destroyed the Roman state religion. Moreover, in his evolutionist take on the religious history of late antiquity, the ‘Oriental’ religions constitute an intermediary step, paving the way for Christian- ity. 22 Thus, again rather exceptionally, Cumont assigned to the Near East an ac- tive and positive role in the moral and religious evolution of the Roman Empire.23 By emphasizing the role of these ‘Oriental’ religions within the Roman religious 222 Eline Scheerlinck landscape, Cumont presented an interpretation of late antique religious evolution that was new in the field of history of religions, which tended to focus on Judaism as the precursor of Christianity.24 While Cumont acknowledges the similarities between the mystery cults and Christianity, he does not aim to explain them.25 These issues were also tackled by contemporary scholars. In Germany, Rich- ard Reitzenstein (1861-1931) discussed the ‘Hellenistischen Mysterien-religionen’ and their influence on Christianity.26 Reitzenstein was an exponent of the Reli- gionsgeschichtliche Schule, a group of scholars from the University of Göttingen, for example, Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932), Otto Gruppe (1851-1921) and Adolf Deiss mann (1866-1937), who challenged the originality of Christianity by study- ing it in its historical, Oriental context.27 For example, Deissmann compared the Greek of early Christian literature with popular Greek language in the papyri from Egypt, where, e.g., the Oxyrynchus cache was found in 1897.28 This signifi- cant development in the history of the study of Christianity and ancient religions was connected with the heightened political interest of Europe in the East during the second half of the nineteenth century, which brought with it an intensification of archeological excavations and scientific missions in the Orient. Scholars could make use of a profusion of new documents, the knowledge of ancient languages and writing systems increased enormously, remnants of ancient civilizations were unearthed. This meant also that some subjects, such as the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome and the history of Christianity, could be studied in a broader context. These subjects, both crucial for the formation of European identity, were until then studied as fairly isolated phenomena and the new approach challenged their supposed originality and/or superiority.

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