Imperial Violence in and for Christian Constantinople

I have previously and recently spoken of some of the things I learned from the late Byzantine historian Robert Taft, not least at a conference together in 2011. At that gathering, I recall him very firmly underscoring the fact that when given the opportunity, each and every Christian group or church throughout history has abused its power to enforce its views on other Christians, from the imperial violence against so-called non-Chalcedonians in Egypt, Syria, or Armenia, to Henry VIII in England, to Catholics against Jews in Italy, and so on down the line. "Nobody has clean hands," Taft underscored very bluntly.

Along comes a new book to remind us of this, and its focus on Constantinople, when we are today seeing Christian temples there being turned into mosques again, makes Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos' Constantinople: Ritual, Violence, and Memory in the Making of a Christian Imperial Capital (University of California Press, 2020, 238pp.) very timely indeed. About this book the publisher tells us this:

As Christian spaces and agents assumed prominent positions in civic life, the end of the long span of the fourth century was marked by large-scale religious change. Churches had overtaken once-thriving pagan temples, old civic priesthoods were replaced by prominent bishops, and the rituals of the city were directed toward the Christian God. Such changes were particularly pronounced in the newly established city of Constantinople, where elites from various groups contended to control civic and imperial religion.

Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos argues that imperial Christianity was in fact a manifestation of traditional Roman religious structures. In particular, she explores how deeply established habits of ritual engagement in shared social spaces—ones that resonated with imperial ideology and appealed to the memories of previous generations—constructed meaning to create a new imperial religious identity. By examining three dynamics—ritual performance, rhetoric around violence, and the preservation and curation of civic memory—she distinguishes the role of Christian practice in transforming the civic and cultic landscapes of the late antique polis.

Imagining Religious Toleration

The question of tolerance, especially among so-called religious minorities, is one that gets regularly raised. Certain founding mythologies of the post-Reformation world are all bound up with fatuous claims about "wars of religion" requiring the supposed peace and tolerance of the nation-state to resolve (a notion William Cavanaugh handily dispensed with). Supposedly "religious" groups were not "tolerant" until the state was founded.

But when cameth this tolerance? Who conceived of it? What did it look like? These are questions taken up in a collection being published later this year: Imagining Religious Toleration: A Literary History of an Idea, 1600–1830, eds. Alison Conway and David Alvarez (University of Toronto Press, October 2019), 304pp.

About this collection the publisher tell us this:

Current debates regarding religious tolerations have come to a standstill. In investigating the eighteenth-century novel, Alison Conway, David Alvarez, and their contributors shed light on what literature can say about toleration, and how it can produce and manage feelings of tolerance and intolerance. Largely reserved for intellectual historians and political philosophers, discussions of religious toleration are relatively limited, with very few literary scholars exploring the subject.

Beginning with an overview of the historical debates surrounding the terms "toleration" and "tolerance," this book moves on to discuss the specific contribution that literature and literary modes have made to cultural history, studying the literary techniques philosophers, theologians, and political theorists used to frame the questions central to the idea and practice of religious toleration. By tracing the rhetoric employed by a wide range of authors, this book reveals the tropes and figures we associate with literary texts, delving into such topics as conversion as an instrument of power in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and the relationship between religious toleration and the rise of Enlightenment satire.