City of Demons: Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity
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City of Demons: Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520956841 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 10/13/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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City of Demons
Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity
By Dayna S. Kalleres
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95684-1
CHAPTER 1
A City of Religious Pluralism and Spiritual Ambiguity
A fever could be a frightening, life-threatening ordeal in late antiquity. Luckily, Antioch offered the sick an overwhelming array of cures. A person, particularly of means, would first visit any number of physicians (Gk. iatroi; L. medici) available in a city as large as Antioch. He or she might then seek the services of a divinatory expert (Gk. mantis) to inquire after his or her future recovery, or travel beyond the city gates to one of the holy men in the caves of Mount Silpius for a wondrous cure. A person might also pray at one of the many martyr shrines outside the city, or healing might be obtained from incubation near one of the caves called called Matrona found in association with many of the very ancient synagogues in Daphne. Rumors circulated that incantations were offered by rabbis within the synagogues also, or itinerant healers might sell a healing incantation for a price. There were also old drunken women selling their healing amulets. Nurses in homes all over the city were well versed in folk remedies; an old woman healer (Gk. graus; L. anus) might come into the home offering incantations with a powerful mixture of Christian and non-Christian divine names.
Antioch's citizens engaged in tightly entwined healing and ritual practices, drawing upon a wide variety of powers that gave them comfort. Whether they were Greek, Jewish, or Christian, religious identity was superfluous in most aspects of day-to-day existence. John Chrysostom, however, did not rest easily with the spiritual ambiguity and dangers such ritual pursuits invited into the larger Christian community. Should someone fall victim to a fever, he was quite clear: Christian prayer and ecclesiastical ritual were the only options. All other ritual cures were demonic deceptions. In this he was absolute. Even if the fever attacked a small child and certain amulets were known to offer a cure, it would be better that a mother allow her child's body to die than accept amulets touched by the devil. Using amulets would doom the child's soul to eternal damnation.
This chapter and the next two approach John Chrysostom's efforts to peel Christians away from their ritual lives outside the church — in order to have a hope of saving these souls. Chapter 1 offers a tour of Antioch and Daphne that attends closely to the enchanted worldview and the animistic environments as well as John Chrysostom's related ritual practice. Inhabitants practice a wide range of rituals, and he insists that participation in non-Christian practices produces dangerous spiritual entanglements; in some cases demonic possession may result. While John utilizes the demonization of non-Christian activity, he is far more dependent upon diabolization. In his sermons, and perhaps even more so through his regulation of sacramental practice, Chrysostom transforms the spiritual ambiguity or abundance of Antioch into an active and predatory anti-Nicene evil.
Chapter 2 then pieces together several different demonological narratives that exist in his corpus of sermons. John also puts together powerful Nicene images in balance against his depictions of demonic predation. In his baptismal sermons as well as elsewhere he also projects persuasive images of sacramental and ecclesiastical ritual. He promotes these practices as effective weapons of spiritual warfare against a growing diabolic power.
Chapter 3 finally introduces our demonic case study or demonic crisis in John Chrysostom's Antioch and Daphne. As discussed in the introduction, John's harsh views against Jews and Judaizers during the High Holidays and Pesach provide material for our consideration of his strategies and tactics of diabolization.
Before traveling straight on to Antioch, however, we must first pause to consider a few details regarding interpretive language and concepts. This kind of study calls for the development of individualized tools to facilitate our examination of the strategies of diabolization in the late antique city. This pertains to Antioch, of course, but also to Jerusalem and Milan.
A CULTURAL OF SUPRAHUMAN PRESENCE AND RITUAL IN THE LATE ANTIQUE CITY
Antioch's religiously and culturally complex urban environment creates a form of ritualized identity all but inscrutable to our modern, post-Reformation eyes. Isabella Sandwell has recently recaptured a vital sense of how integral ritual practice was to religious identity in Antioch at the time. Significantly, she denies the actuality — and, in fact, desirability — of discrete religious identity in Roman imperial society; instead, "practices were shared by people whatever their religious allegiances." Drawing from Bourdieu's notion of habitus and his concept of embodied ritual dispositions, Sandwell builds an argument for Greco-Roman society's fluid play between religious difference and religious allegiance; she claims that a finely tuned sense of ritual action allows Antiochenes to feel "right" in the conflicting microenvironments of their social world: "[Antiochenes] would have ingrained in them unspoken dispositions and habits relating to tactful and appropriate ways of dealing with this sensitive situation." She invokes the concept of instinctive ritual play to build her discussion of Antioch's religious pluralism. In this way, Antioch's religiously pluralistic society diffused tensions. Once we reach the fourth century, Christian leaders, Chrysostom included, begin developing and imposing ideological rules and clear-cut categories in the construction of religious identity. The priest attempts to enforce strict, rule-bound structures upon those accustomed to a fluid approach to religious allegiance/difference. He meets with conflict and inevitable failures, as Sandwell has observed.
Sandwell's use of Bourdieu is smart and insightful, and her argument is extremely persuasive. However, her predominant methodology, i.e., sociology, foreshortens our view into the late antique urban environment to a modern (disenchanted) understanding of Antioch in the 380s. Likewise, I propose that her primary evidence — i.e., Chrysostom's preaching, as she defines it, "an explicit, linguistic, ideological, rule-based medium" — eclipses our view into the full and possible range of the elements that inform religious identity in this period, and, moreover, into the construction of that identity in the midst of religious conflict, change, and violence. Sandwell focuses upon the discursive aspects of John's preaching relationship with his various audiences. This is perfectly in keeping with the standards of scholarly trends in late antique scholarship; when interpreting issues of religious violence, many have adopted a perspective that attends closely — perhaps exclusively — to the visible realm and the horizontal plane of social interaction.
This study relies wholeheartedly upon the sturdy foundations of Sandwell's Bourdieusian reading. Still, one cannot help but wonder when reading an interpretation that cleaves closely to the visible ground of social interaction, Is it possible that something imagined could be missed? Perhaps we should consider the vague, ostensibly empty, but hardly depopulated, late antique spaces between the abandoned temples and the itinerant ritual agents who invoke those temples' once-venerated deities. What kinds of suprahuman populations loiter in these charged locations after the cult has been minimized or dies out? If we do not consider the imagined suprahuman, supernatural forces that people's rituals invoke, bind, expel, and exorcise as they move in their environment, we are missing subtle expressions of anger that could easily escalate into violence. We also miss the cosmological shifts that the rituals produce — changes in the heavens that link to and participate in religious transformations on the ground.
It is important, then, to note the directions City of Demons will take. This chapter, and indeed the book as a whole, will ascend from the horizontal and move beyond the visible to pierce through to the enchanted and animistic world of late antiquity. Consequently, in this and the next chapters, ritual practice draws our focus more deliberately and directly than perhaps we see in the work of Sandwell and others who have studied these cities. We examine people's ritual encounters with locally perceived cosmological and spiritual powers. In this way, we consider the development of the people's animistic "dispositions and habits," their habitus, their embodied knowledge of how to act ritually in a wide variety of situations in Antioch and Daphne. We also attend to the generative quality of ritual. Beyond the ability to inculcate or engender a worldview, ritual practice creates and manufactures a vivid sense of the supernatural. Ritual sustains demonic and other animistic powers; such ritual action also conjures invisible orders that stretch up from the earthly and sublunar realms into the heavenly.
Sandwell's model lucidly accounts for the religious identity of the Greek, Jew, and Christian — a process of construction not beginning until the fourth century. City of Demons supplements her consideration by asking how Antioch's ritual practices complement or complicate the processes of religious identity construction. Demons engendered and sustained by ritual practice fill and overlap "the betwixt and between" of these religious identities. In other words, while the demons of ritual practice may clarify religious differences, they may just as easily cultivate an ambiguity blurring the lines delineating Greek, Jewish, and Christian difference.
Antioch has been portrayed as a city of enduring religious pluralism, ambiguity, and, finally, tolerance. Undoubtedly there is truth in all such characterizations. That said, in using a term such as "religious pluralism," scholars favor the sociological at the expense of the cosmological and the spiritual — not to mention the enchanted and animistic. Such an interpretive perspective only scratches the surface of the interplay of religious identities in Antioch, leaving untouched the animistic forces thought to direct the diverse collection of ritual practices. Of course this view ignores the animated forces fueling and fueled by these novel and incipient movements toward religious difference and identity. To understand how the enchanted environment and animistic forces inform religions and parse their differences in an urban environment, to grasp a sense of the rituals that draw the supernatural into one's experience of religious identity, we must adjust our view.
It is time that we venture past the Cartesian divide and temporarily leave aside the familiar disenchanted categories of modern western interpretation.
The city's late antique inhabitants arrange themselves according to socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity — as well as religious affiliation(s): despite these and other expressions of difference, however, the people as a whole participate in a loosely shared understanding of Antioch's supernatural powers. In seeking protection, wealth, power, healing, erotic love, and a host of other issues, inhabitants develop a sophisticated ritual agility. Instinctively they know how to leverage generations of ritual knowledge and demons connected to those rituals. For so many it is almost impossible to surrender the embodied ritual and animistic knowledge — even for a golden-mouthed priest.
Their ritual sense and animistic sensibility — drawing again here on Bourdieu's idea of disposition or habitus — is a materially embedded and thus embodied form of knowledge. In their very manner of ritually moving through the city day to day, inhabitants continue to feed Antioch's enduring religious pluralism. Building upon this chapter, chapter 2 will examine the dimensional depth of the clash and conflict between the inhabitants and John Chrysostom regarding the singular issue of religious identity.
In contrast to the inhabitants of Antioch's day-to-day life that this chapter reviews, we will uncover in chapter 2 a John Chrysostom who sets himself apart from others through asceticism. Through his earlier ascetic practice he constructs a differently ordered animistic environment and enchanted worldview around himself. Before his ordination, his antidemonic struggles in mind and body carve out a clear, dualistic understanding of the divine opposing the demonic. As a practicing monk within the city, he produces a sense of the demonic that is much more extreme than that of the congregants whom he will eventually lead. Upon becoming a priest, he attempts to inculcate his congregations in this spiritual warfare: diabolizing images in his sermons regulate a severely agonistic worldview. So too he involves his baptized in the heat of this battle. Through the preparation and initiation of ecclesiastical ritual practice and the sacraments, they transform into soldiers of Christ. For John the title is certainly not metaphorical.
David Brakke has shown quite clearly that Stoic theories of cognition and perception play a central role in the ascetic, antidemonic battles and spiritual-warfare worldview of Evagrian and Egyptian monasticism. The embodied character of the soul/mind in both Stoic models of knowing offers a philosophical and psychological (and especially physiological) foundation to delineate clearly how the demon's body and the monk's body touch and battle in spiritual warfare. Gregory A. Smith correctly argues that when our Christian sources describe the material nature of the demon's body, they do not intend a metaphorical or psychological meaning. Though demons may be invisible, and though they may possess subtle bodies, they do indeed possess bodies in the late antique worldview. Thus there exists a material continuity between the demonic body and the soul. I have discussed elsewhere the complexity of the spiritual-warfare ideology within the ascetic and ritual writings of Gregory of Nazianzus, for instance, once again involving Stoic theories of cognition and perception. There as here I argue that the material (pneumatic) quality of the connectivity between human and demon informs late antique theorizations of demonic possession and the efficacy of exorcism.
One of the goals of City of Demons is to demonstrate the degree to which John Chrysostom's demonology is very much of his time, corresponding, for example, to that of Antony, Origen, Evagrius, and Gregory of Nazianzus not only in complexity and philosophical sophistication, but also in conceptualization of materiality and embodiment. What has separated John's demonology from that of other church fathers so far has been the difference in context and genre. While Antony's letters and Evagrius's treatises are addressed to other monks, and therefore they present their demonology in a fairly straightforward manner, John's demonology comes to us through the thick and contorted lens of a preacher's rhetoric molded to an elite audience trained (and expecting) to hear an orator's speech.
Consequently, scholars have understandably focused on the pastoral relations between priest and audience, and many have argued that John spoke to audiences who were generally unlikely to follow his ethical and antidemonic admonishments pertaining to their non-Christian behavior in Antioch. More to the point, though, it is impossible to recover audience reaction. In our approach to Chrysostom, we take the somewhat contrasting view that one thing is clear in John's demonology: after several years spent in rigorous asceticism within an urban environment, John engages actively with the crowded, culturally rich city not only as its Nicene priest but crucially as one of its exorcists. When John therefore assumes ecclesiastical duties, he does not abandon the harsh, dualistic worldview he cultivated during those years alone wrapped in ascetic practice and spiritual warfare. Instead he brings it with him and to his congregants in his sermons, but most especially in ritual. In his sermons he projects his demonology through carefully constructed images. These images also convey a precise understanding of ritual efficacy — both demonic and divine ritual and power in Antioch.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from City of Demons by Dayna S. Kalleres. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction. The City in Late Antiquity: Where Have All the Demons Gone?
PART ONE. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM AND ANTIOCH
1. A City of Religious Pluralism and Spiritual Ambiguity
2. The Devil Is in the Ritual
3. The Spectacle of Exorcism
PART TWO. CYRIL AND JERUSALEM
4. Jerusalem to Aelia, Aelia to Jerusalem: Monumental Transformations
5. The Devil in the Word, the Demons in the Image
6. Apocalyptic Prophets and the Cross: Revealing Jerusalem’s Demons from the Crucifixion to the End of Days
PART THREE. AMBROSE AND MILAN
7. Ambrose and Nicene Demoniacs: Charismatic Christianity inside and outside Milan
Abbreviations
Notes
Ancient Language Editions by Series
Translations of Ancient Sources
Selected Bibliography
Index