Download PDF | Christians Shaping Identity From The Roman Empire To Byzantium Studies Inspired By Pauline Allen Brill Academic Publishers 2015.
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Acknowledgements
It is with gratitude that we acknowledge the editorial board of Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae and their readers for their advice to authors and their work on the manuscript. We also thank all those who reviewed the articles in their first draft, in response to which a number of the authors made substantive changes. Without both levels of review the volume would be much impoverished. The assistance of the editorial staff at Brill, especially Mattie Kuiper and Louise Schouten, is deeply appreciated and we thank them for expediting the volume.
Geoffrey Dunn and Wendy Mayer are both former doctoral students of Pauline Allen. Her inspiration, drive, and exemplum as a researcher have greatly enriched and in many ways enabled their own careers. This book is a small token of the incalculable ways in which both as a remarkable person and as an outstanding researcher she has fostered the careers of countless other scholars and in which she has for so many years served to further early Christian studies as a field.
Introduction
Wendy Mayer and Geoffrey D. Dunn
In recent decades the issue of identity has emerged as a significant focus in scholarship concerning the world of the Roman and subsequently Byzantine empire.! This is linked to the postmodern turn in historiography, with its appropriation of theories from anthropology, sociology and social psychology, to the maturation of the discipline of late antique studies, with its sociocultural emphasis and expansive chronological boundaries,” and to the fact that the period from the first to eighth centuries witnessed, in addition to the fall of Rome in the West and Arab conquest in the East, the appearance of two influential new religious movements, Christianity and Islam.
Changes of these kinds impact group and individual identity at multiple levels. A critical component in the formation of a new religious movement, as is increasingly being recognised, is the demarcation of boundaries and the promotion of ingroup/out-group bias.? As a result, texts produced by an in-group that were once read at face value are now increasingly being approached with a critical eye.
This is the case not just with religious movements, but applies also to groups that self-identify on political, linguistic, and ethnic grounds. So we find studies that seek to understand the production of Roman,® Byzantine, or barbarian identity,’ in addition to those that explore how Christianity as a religion or individual groups within it sought to construct a clear identity over and against society,® Judaism,° Islam, or an internal ‘other’! just as Jews, Muslims, and the spectrum of groups that constituted them were seeking to do the same. An emergent interest in the realm of the subjective self and indi-vidual self-identity is a natural extension of this almost overwhelming focus by scholars of the ancient, late-ancient, early mediaeval, and Byzantine worlds on the construction and maintenance of group identity.
While some of the essays in this volume engage with social, cultural, personal, religious, and other categories of identity in this explicit way, the volume takes a more expansive approach to the concept. In some ways, it could be argued that all texts, as well as material objects, are, at a number of levels, shaped by and expressive of the identity of the group and/or individual who created them. Similarly, as is increasingly being recognised, the identity of individuals and groups who appear in texts or on material objects has been carefully crafted to align with or serve the construction of the identity of the author/s or artisan/s. The choice of texts that one reads or artefacts that one purchases, too, are expressive of identity, just as lack of choice can be indicative of an imposed identity. For the most part it is in these respects, rather than in a direct theoretical engagement with the issue of identity, that the essays in this volume approach the topic.
The theme—Christians shaping identity—is engaged with and operates at an additional level. The essays and their authors are themselves illustrative of a variety of shaped identities. They pay quiet tribute to the work of a scholar who has, over the decades of her career to date, directly and indirectly done much to shape the intersecting fields of classics, patristics, New Testament, early Christian, late antique, and Byzantine studies.
The accolades by mentors, colleagues, former students, and friends usually found in such a volume are absent, although richly deserved. In their place, the topics treated and the authors themselves stand as witness to a remarkable career.
This approach was chosen out of respect for this scholar’s modus operandi, which is to lead from the middle (often of a team). It also reflects how she views her own legacy, which for her resides, even more than in her own numerous publications and achievements, in the Australian and international academic bodies, institutions, and scholars whose formation she has guided and helped to shape over the years. The theme of this volume is thus a natural one that falls out of a combination of the varied research topics in which this scholar has engaged, the avenues of research she has helped to pioneer, and the new ways of viewing and working in the above fields she has introduced to date. It also anticipates her continuing influence in these domains for years to come.
A few select examples of her vision for the future and the new directions in which she has taken scholarship in recent times will help the reader read beyond the content of the essays presented here—useful and enjoyable as the subject matter of each is—to the meta-text that they constitute in regard to shaped identity. The Centre for Early Christian Studies at Australian Catholic University, recognised internationally as one of the largest concentrations of such scholarship, is the product of her vision to collapse the boundaries between the previously discrete, but naturally aligned disciplines of New Testament studies and patristics.
Its emphasis on philological and socialhistorical research rather than theology has likewise helped to foster the merging of the two formerly separate disciplines of patristics and church history," as well as to strengthen the natural intersection between early Christian studies, early to middle Byzantine studies, and the field of late antiquity. This contribution to the reshaping of the identities of scholarly disciplines has been further nuanced by her initiative to bring together scholars formerly geographically isolated as a result of the historical centralisation of scholarly associations and networks in the United Kingdom, Western Europe, and North America.
A joint initiative with colleagues in Japan witnessed the founding in 2003 of the Western Pacific Rim Patristics Association, now the Asia Pacific Early Christian Studies Society (APECSs), which brings together annually scholars from a range of disciplines with an interest in Christianity and its context in the period extending from the first to eighth centuries.
The range of countries engaged in this network has since expanded to include Korea, China, Russia, the Philippines, and now Latin America. These are not the only countries with which Australian scholars, under her leadership, have forged ties. Centre members have long participated in the annual meetings of the Canadian Society for Patristic Studies and exchanged ideas with Canadian colleagues. A longstanding relationship with South Africa, formed when a few individuals from that country began to attend the Oxford Patristics Conferences, has in recent years been expanded and formalised, bringing scholars of the Centre into collaboration and interaction with South African researchers across the fields of classical, ancient, and New Testament studies. The impact of these crosscultural connections and influences on the way in which we now approach the first eight centuries CE is progressively coming into view.
A brief glance at her publications will show not just the breadth of her scholarship, but the multitude of ways in which it has led the field. Her work on the preacher and audience and on the value of homilies as a source for social history helped to cement the place of homilies, previously dismissed as “popular” and trivial, as a literary genre worthy of detailed study. As a result of her work on Maximus the Confessor, John Chrysostom, and Severus of Antioch, these figures and their works are now viewed in a different light. Her extensive work on the letter-writing of bishops has again demonstrated the wealth of data that can be mined from a previously neglected genre. Our view of the christological disputes of the sixth and seventh centuries has similarly benefited greatly from the documents she has edited, translated, and analysed over the course of her career. These are just a few examples. Perhaps the most significant way in which she has shaped scholarship for future generations, however, is in her embrace of an approach to research and publication rare in the humanities—collaboration.
As a reflection of her multi-faceted contributions, and inspired by them, the majority of the essays presented here address the shaping of Christian identity from within and without in the context of the broader social and cultural world of the first to eighth centuries. Some shift the focus from the internal formation of group identity to how in the course of those centuries Christianity as a social and religious movement impacted contemporary society. The final group of essays explore how various Christian groups in the present have been shaped by their reading of the past, in some cases with particular focus on how the self-identity of those groups itself filters that reading.
Of the essays that look at issues of Christian identity in the time before Constantine, David Sim examines the very origins of Christian identity as the presence of non-converted Gentiles within the Christian communities made the first followers of Jesus question how important a Jewish identity was for themselves. The focus here is with the community represented within Matthew’s Gospel and the conflict that arose between those members who believed that their Jewish heritage was essential, along with their faith in the messiahship of Jesus, and those who did not believe that being a follower of Jesus necessitated being Jewish as well. The argument here is that the Matthean community held the first view in that they upheld the enduring importance of the Torah and that Gentile followers of Jesus needed to become Jews.
Michael Lattke shifts the focus from arguments about identity that occurred within emergent Christianity to how Christianity defined itself in relation to the Roman empire. Here building blocks for a commentary on the writings of the second-century apologist, Aristides of Athens, are offered. These constitute an example of how Christians of this period, when not focused specifically on the question of their Jewish origins, appealed to ethnicity as a basis for identity. Theo de Bruyn considers exorcism, as recorded in early Christian spells and amulets, as a barometer of the symbolic world of Egyptian Christians. His essay considers the role habitus plays in the persistence of cultural norms, the tension between actual practice and the claims of Christian apologists, and the variability in the use of formulae in response to local factors. He concludes that the apologists were in part correct, but that the shape of the identity thus expressed could be somewhat variable.
From the pre-Constantinian world, in which Christianity was a minority religion, attention turns to the period after Christianity had gained imperial support, beginning with the East. In the first of four essays in this section Andrew Louth argues that the narrative of monasticism promoted by the texts of this period, for a long time adopted by scholars, has led to the history of the development of monasticism being read through a very particular (i-e., nostalgic Egyptian) lens. This view is at odds with the evidence, which indicates that Egyptian monasticism was not the pre-eminent form of early Christian asceticism. Rather, it is Basil of Caesarea who, on the one hand, preserves evidence of the greater range of ascetic possibilities that existed, and, on the other, is concerned himself with both ordering the church and shaping monasticism. Shigeki Tsuchihashi offers us insight into how Gregory of Nyssa transformed the Platonic notion of the perfection of human nature as becoming like God found in the cave allegory.
This is a piece grounded in a thorough appreciation of the Greek philosophical tradition and its impact upon early Christian thinking, that gave it a distinct identity. Miyako Demura looks at the controversy that developed in the centuries following the death of Origen and how the charges brought against him by Epiphanius profoundly shaped the view of him. This contrasts with the recent appreciation of Origen as an Alexandrian biblical scholar and contributor to the development of Christian theology. Wendy Mayer shows how the dominance of theology in the twentieth-century discipline of patrology/patristics has misshaped the identity of John Chrysostom, a trend which has even longer roots going back to the fifth century.
She builds upon a recent turn in scholarship that views him rather from within the context of the Greek paideia that informed his approach to human psychology. When observed from this angle he emerges as a pyschagogue, concerned with teaching others about how to achieve a healthy soul. In this respect this essay is about retrieving John’s own self-identity as opposed to the range of identities that a theological lens has imposed.
From the Greek-speaking East, attention turns to the Latin-speaking West in the fourth and fifth centuries. At the heart of identity construction is often the promulgation of an ideal set of behaviours, usually at variance with actual practice. In the first of six essays, Mary Sheather leads us into the world of Ambrose’s involvement in politics and his own theorising about that in De officiis. Here there rise to the fore questions of the ideal emperor, the relationship between church and state, and Ambrose’s own self-identity as a Christian Cicero. Sheather sees a close correlation between the theory Ambrose espoused as applied both to political and ecclesiastical leaders and the ways he operated in practice with regard to the Altar of Victory, the basilica conflict, and the burning of the synagogue at Callinicum. Philip Rousseau ruminates on Jerome as a man of the church and relevant for the world in which he lived in all his non-conformity.
Jerome is presented in this essay as a priest critical of much of the priesthood he saw around him, yet needing to be within the heart of the church not only administratively but intellectually in order to be an effective critic and reformer of it. The essay is both illustrative of the still fluid Christian identity of the time and ultimately concerned with reshaping the view of Jerome traditionally held in order to more closely approach his own self-identity. Koos Kritzinger also turns to Jerome, but specifically to Jerome's Vita Malchi, to see what he thought of the identity of the desert monk. This small work shows Jerome well aware of the need to pattern life on a wide variety of biblical as well as classical models, but shaping the story of Malchus and his wife in a subtle way that shows them surpassing what those models offered.
Malchus’ superior identity is very much founded on his chastity. Naoki Kamimura takes up consideration of Augustine of Hippo’s neglected commentary De sermone Domini in monte. In looking at Augustine's reading of the Sermon on the Mount, Kamimura explores both the context within which Augustine’s ideas developed and how this early work attempted to shape in a particular way the process of Christian perfection. Kazuhiko Demura offers another chapter on Augustine, this time on his insights into human nature when it came to how Augustine could motivate people on the need to care for the poor. Here, as in the essays of Kamimura and Tsuchihashi, for Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and other Christian bishops of this period at the heart of shaping the ideal ‘Christian. —and thus an identifiably Christian community— lay human anthropology. By viewing people as fellow travellers Augustine was able to unite love of self with love of others and love of God.
In the final essay in this section, Geoffrey Dunn brings together much of his recent work on Innocent I to consider how the labelling of others as heretics and schismatics—an example of out-group bias—promoted Christian identity. What this chapter argues is that in the early fifth century this Roman bishop sought to maintain clear Christian identity by excluding those who violated increasingly demarcated boundaries, but in a lenient way that promoted reconciliation.
The next five essays turn to an exploration of Christianity in the Byzantine world after the collapse of the Roman empire in the West. Brian Croke presents the career of Ariadne, an underrated Byzantine empress of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, whose position as daughter, wife, and mother of emperors and as a woman of independent authority held together the empire, shaped its Christian allegiances and, by shaping an identity for imperial females, paved the way for later empresses like Euphemia, Theodora, and Sophia. Bronwen Neil brings us into the world of dreams, the realm of personal identity. Focusing on the Dialogues of Gregory the Great and the Oneirocriticon attributed to Daniel, she looks at the variable attitude towards dreams and their interpretation between East and West.
Youhanna Nessim Youssef turns to Egypt and the role of the retrospective construction of a group’s history in the shaping of its identity. Appealing to later liturgical and conciliar texts, he argues that the introduction of the Armenian cult of the forty martyrs of Sebaste was important in shaping the identity of non-Chalcedonian Christianity in Egypt in the seventh and eighth centuries. The ascription of introduction of the cult to Severus of Antioch, a hero of the non-Chalcedonian movement who was exiled in Egypt, draws an intentional link between Antioch and Coptic self-identity. Roger Scott, who examines the place of the first seven ecumenical councils in Byzantine universal chronicles, takes us into the realm of how Christianity was exploited in the shaping of secular Byzantine identity.
What this essay brings out is how this genre illustrates changing attitudes to the past and how such constructions of the past were utilised. Averil Cameron deals more delicately with the issue of identity via the topic of fictionality. Here in a number of ways we come full circle in our exploration of the theme in that, at a period in the early Byzantine empire when Persian and Arab invasions threatened its hegemony, in this society in which Christianity was now dominant Jews once again became an important tool for Christians to think with.
From consideration of the shaping of identity in the past, the final four essays turn to reflection on how the form imposed on the Christian past has served and continues to serve to shape Christian identity in the present. Inspired by the career and interests of the scholar this volume honours, they pay particular attention to the Roman Catholic and eastern Christian traditions. Michael Slusser considers the influence of Alois Grillmeier, who in the middle of the twentieth century changed perceptions about early Christian christological debate by rejecting the notion of an Alexandrian (allegorical) and an Antiochene (literal) school of exegesis, replacing it with a ‘Word-flesh’ and ‘Word-man’ classification.
Christology, with its focus on how one structures the identity of a key figure in Christian religion, Christ, has itself played akey role from the fourth century onwards in shaping the identity of Christian communities; it has also done much, from the nineteenth century to the present, to shape the historical discipline of patristics. Theresia Hainthaler, in looking at the documents produced by modern ecumenical dialogue between various Christian denominations and Oriental churches, brings the insights of Slusser’s essay to the fore. The Oriental churches to the present day hold to the mia physis christological formula and reject the definition of the Council of Chalcedon (451). Hainthaler’s observations on these texts, as evidence of diplomatic dialogue between groups that construct their identity differently, illustrate how a variety of the mechanisms that played a role in the first eight centuries CcE—both positive and negative—continue to play a role today in the negotiation of Christian group identity.
These mechanisms include the early church itself (as remembered in a particular way), which is employed to promote both group cohesion and alterity. Elizabeth Clark’s essay further emphasises the key role played by the ways in which a community constructs its past. Here it is made explicit in her exploration of the impact of George Tyrrell’s embrace at the turn of the nineteenth century of Catholic Modernism, with its approach to the early history of the church as a period in which the religion ‘developed’ from its beginnings rather than as one that saw the reception of a set of truths that remained static. A window is also opened onto how a group polices and reinforces boundaries perceived as under threat, employing strategies that go back to the very beginnings of Christianity.
In the final essay, Kari Elisabeth Borresen raises the topic of how gender is employed in the construction of individual and group identity. Tracing the strategies via which the perceived deficiency of being female was reinforced or overcome in early (male) and medieval (female) Christian thought, and their subsequent trajectories, she highlights how this history and its perception continue to inform Catholic approaches to the present day. In a way, her essay brings together the insights of the other three essays in this section, with its exploration of how gendering melds with the shaping of Christ’s identity, memory-construction, and boundary policing in the contestation of cultic leadership.
One of the most significant contributions of the scholar this volume honours has been her work on the multiple Christian identities that were contested in the centuries following the Council of Chalcedon. Her influence and inspiration in this respect emerges where concerns of heresy and orthodoxy, of group cohesion and loyalty, of how identities are contested and managed, weave in and out of every essay.
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