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.

Hearing Voices or Hearing God?

Historically of course when psychology, psychiatry, or psychoanalysis has turned to something called "religion" (a definition of which is not at all an agreed-upon thing), it is very often done so in reductionist and simplistic ways at best; at worst it has pathologized "religion" as the province of neurotic people.

More recently, however, some clinicians and others have attempted to move beyond such an approach, trying to understand "religious" practices and beliefs on their own terms, and even realizing that some of them are practiced by perfectly healthy people. I have shown some examples of this on this blog and elsewhere.

Now we have a new book that will add to and enrich this discussion. I'm looking forward to reading Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind: What Mental Abnormalities Can Teach Us About Religions by Robert N. McCauley and George Graham (Oxford University Press, 2020), 280pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

A man with schizophrenia believes that God is instructing him through the public address system in a bus station. A nun falls into a decades-long depression because she believes that God refuses to answer her prayers. A neighborhood parishioner is bedeviled with anxiety because he believes that a certain religious ritual must be repeated, repeated, and repeated lest God punish him. To what extent are such manifestations of religious thinking analogous to mental disorder? Does mental dysfunction bring an individual closer to religious experience or thought? Hearing Voices and Other Unusual Experiences explores these questions using the tools of the cognitive science of religion and the philosophy of psychopathology.

Robert McCauley and George Graham emphasize underlying cognitive continuities between familiar features of religiosity, of mental disorders, and of everyday thinking and action. They contend that much religious thought and behavior can be explained as the cultural activation of our natural cognitive systems, which address matters that are essential to human survival: hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, and theory of mind. Those systems produce responses to cultural stimuli that may mimic features of cognition and conduct associated with mental disorders, but which are sometimes coded as "religious" depending on the context.

The authors examine hallucinations of the voice of God and of other supernatural agents, spiritual depression often described as a "dark night of the soul," religious scrupulosity and compulsiveness, and challenges to theistic cognition that Autistic Spectrum Disorder poses. Their approach promises to shed light on both mental abnormalities and religiosity.

Orthodox Material Culture

Like most things, the study of Eastern Orthodox aesthetics, anthropology, and material culture lags behind similar treatments given to Western communities. But an important new study looks to fill the gap to some degree: Orthodox Christian Material Culture: Of People and Things in the Making of Heaven by Timothy Carroll (Routledge, 2018), 201 pp,

About this book we are told the following by the publisher:

Although much has been written on the making of art objects as a means of engaging in creative productions of the self (most famously Alfred Gell’s work), there has been very little written on Orthodox Christianity and its use of material within religious self-formation. Eastern Orthodox Christianity is renowned for its artistry and the aesthetics of its worship being an integral part of devout practice. Yet this is an area with little ethnographic exploration available and even scarcer ethnographic attention given to the material culture of Eastern Christianity outside the traditional ‘homelands’ of the greater Levant and Eastern Europe.

Drawing from and building upon Gell’s work, Carroll explores the uses and purposes of material culture in Eastern Orthodox Christian worship. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in a small Antiochian Orthodox parish in London, Carroll focuses on a study of ecclesiastical fabric but places this within the wider context of Orthodox material ecology in Britain. This ethnographic exploration leads to discussion on the role of materials in the construction of religious identity, material understandings of religion, and pathways of pilgrimatic engagement and religious movement across Europe.

In a religious tradition characterised by repetition and continuity, but also as sensuously tactile, this book argues that material objects are necessary for the continual production of Orthodox Christians as art-like subjects. It is an important contribution to the corpus of literature on the anthropology of material culture and art and the anthropology of religion.

Icons vs. Statues

Why, in general (though by no means exclusively), has Western religious art often tended towards 3-d statuary while the East has usually (but again not exclusively) preferred 2-d iconography? A new book may shed some light on this question: Beate Fricke, Fallen Idols, Risen Saints: Sainte Foy of Conques and the Revival of Monumental Sculpture in Medieval Art (Brepols, 2013), 300pp. + 5 colour + 80b/w ills.

About this book we are told:

This book presents an analysis and contextualization of the revival of monumental sculpture in medieval art, and outlines the history of image culture, visuality and fiction. This book investigates the origins and transformations of medieval image culture and its reflections in theology, hagiography, historiography and art. It deals with a remarkable phenomenon: the fact that, after a period of 500 years of absence, the tenth century sees a revival of monumental sculpture in the Latin West. Since the end of Antiquity and the "pagan" use of free-standing, life-size sculptures in public and private ritual, Christians were obedient to the Second Commandment forbidding the making and use of graven images. Contrary to the West, in Byzantium, such a revival never occurred: only relief sculpture – mostly integrated within an architectural context – was used. However, Eastern theologians are the authors of highly fascinating and outstanding original theoretical reflections about the nature and efficacy of images. How can this difference be explained? Why do we find the most fascinating theoretical concepts of images in a culture that sticks to two-dimensional icons often venerated as cult-images that are copied and repeated, but only randomly varied? And why does a groundbreaking change in the culture of images – the "revival" of monumental sculpture – happen in a context that provides more restrained theoretical reflections upon images in their immediate theological, liturgical and artistic contexts? These are some of the questions that this book seeks to answer.The analysis and contextualization of the revival of monumental sculpture includes reflections on liturgy, architecture, materiality of minor arts and reliquaries, medieval theories of perception, and gift exchange and its impact upon practices of image veneration, aesthetics and political participation. Drawing on the historical investigation of specific objects and texts between the ninth and the eleventh century, the book outlines an occidental history of image culture, visuality and fiction, claiming that only images possess modes of visualizing what in the discourse of medieval theology can never be addressed and revealed.

New Books from Brepols

After a sojourn in New England, I returned to a number of catalogues announcing forthcoming fall publications, including several from Brepols: Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Lorenzo Perrone, eds., Between Personal and Institutional Religion: Self, Doctrine, and Practice in Late Antique Eastern Christianity (Brepols, 2013), 400pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The shift from Late Antiquity to Early Byzantium seen in the light of the mutual relations between personal and institutional religion. This book addresses change and continuity in late antique Eastern Christianity, as perceived through the lens of the categories of institutional religion and personal religion. The interaction between personal devotion and public identity reveals the creative aspects of a vibrant religious culture that altered the experience of Christians on both a spiritual and an institutional level. A close look at the interrelations between the personal and the institutional expressions of religion in this period attests to an ongoing revision of both the patristic literature and the monastic tradition. By approaching the period in terms of ‘revision’, the contributors discuss the mechanism of transformation in Eastern Christianity from a new perspective, discerning social and religious changes while navigating between the dynamics of personal and institutional religion.

Recognizing the creative aspects inherent to the process of ‘revision’, this volume re-examines several aspects of personal and institutional religion, revealing dogmatic, ascetic, liturgical, and historiographical transformations. Attention is paid to the expression of the self, the role of history and memory in the construction of identity, and the modification of the theological discourse in late antique culture. The book also explores several avenues of Jewish-Christian interaction in the institutional and public sphere.

Students of Maximus the Confessor will be interested in Joshua Loller, "To See Into the Life of Things" the Contemplation of Nature in Maximus the Confessor's "Ambigua to John" (Brepols, 2013), 357pp.

About this book we are told:

This work provides a synthetic treatment of Maximus the Confessor’s Ambigua to John, a collection of texts uniquely expressive of the speculative contours of his thought.

Maximus the Confessor (580-662) is one of the great minds of the Christian tradition and his Ambigua to John are a collection of texts uniquely expressive of the speculative contours of his thought. They have not, however, received a synthetic treatment until now. This work provides such a synthetic treatment and argues that Maximus’ central concern in the Ambigua to John is to articulate the nature of philosophy and, more precisely, the scope of the contemplation of nature (θεωρία φυσική) within the philosophical life, where "philosophy," the love of wisdom, is nothing less than the love of the Divine. Part I of this study provides a thorough background in Greek philosophical and patristic philosophies of nature, showing how Maximus’ predecessors understood knowledge of the world in relation to philosophical life, discourse, and praxis. Part II studies the contemplation of nature in the Ambigua and analyzes Maximus’ account of human affectivity in the world, his account of the coherence of philosophical life (praxis and contemplation) as a response to this affectivity, his understanding of the relation between God and the world, and his reconciliation of these various aspects of philosophy in the Christian economy of salvation, which he understands as the renewal of nature and its contemplation.

Finally,  students of the Church of the East, and the complex religious route known as the Silk Road, will be interested in Sam Lieu et al., Medieval Christian and Manichaean Remains from Quanzhou (Zayton) (Brepols, 2012), x+282pp.+ 127b&w ills.

About this book we are told:

Better known to western medieval travelers as Zayton, Quanzhou in Fujian was China’s main port and also the terminus of the Maritime Silk Road. The city was home to a cosmopolitan population especially when China was under Mongol rule (ca. 1280-1368 CE). Italian visitors to and inhabitants of the city included Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone and Andrew of Perugia. The city had a significant Christian population, both Catholic and Church of the East (Nestorian), and the nearby town of Jinjiang has to this day in its neighbourhood a Manichaean shrine housing a unique statue of Mani as the Buddha of Light. These religious communities left a wealth of art on stone which first came to light in Mid-Twentieth Century but is still very little known and studied outside China. This volume containing over 200 illustrations (many in full colour) is the work of a team of scholars from Australian universities in collaboration with the major museums in Quanzhou and Jinjiang and is the first major work on this unique material in a western language. The book will be of great interest not only to scholars of Manichaeism and of the Church of the East but also to scholars of East-West contacts under the Mongols.