Christianizing Egypt

Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity

David Frankfurter

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400888009
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Kirchengeschichte

How does a culture become Christian, especially one that is heir to such ancient traditions and spectacular monuments as Egypt? This book offers a new model for envisioning the process of Christianization by looking at the construction of Christianity in the various social and creative worlds active in Egyptian culture during late antiquity.As David Frankfurter shows, members of these different social and creative worlds came to create different forms of Christianity according to their specific interests, their traditional idioms, and their sense of what the religion could offer. Reintroducing the term "syncretism" for the inevitable and continuous process by which a religion is acculturated, the book addresses the various formations of Egyptian Christianity that developed in the domestic sphere, the worlds of holy men and saints' shrines, the work of craftsmen and artisans, the culture of monastic scribes, and the reimagination of the landscape itself, through processions, architecture, and the potent remains of the past.Drawing on sermons and magical texts, saints' lives and figurines, letters and amulets, and comparisons with Christianization elsewhere in the Roman empire and beyond, Christianizing Egypt reconceives religious change—from the "conversion" of hearts and minds to the selective incorporation and application of strategies for protection, authority, and efficacy, and for imagining the environment.

CHAPTER 1

Remodeling the Christianization of Egypt

I. OVERTURE

Sometime in about the seventh century CE, an Egyptian monk recorded two healing charms on either side of a piece of papyrus. At this point the temples of Egypt were in ruins, silent enclosures for the occasional Christian chapel or private devotions, and for impressive architecture one looked to the great saints’ shrines, the churches with their colorful wall paintings, or the great estates outside the towns. Christianity and its images and leaders fairly permeated the culture of Egypt. The stories and songs that people shared revolved around the saints and the Holy Family. And so the first spell the monk took down, introducing it with a series of holy titles to evoke church liturgy, told a story of Jesus’s and the apostles’ encounter with a doe in labor, how the doe appealed to Jesus to help her through childbirth, and how Jesus sent the Archangel Michael to ease the pain. But in the second charm the monk shifted to another set of figures, whose story he continued onto the other side of the papyrus:

Jesus Horus [ⲓ̅ⲥ̄ ⳉⲱⲣ] [the son of Is]is went upon a mountain in order to rest. He [performed his] music, [set] his nets, and captured a falcon, … a wild pelican. [He] cut it without a knife, cooked it without fire, and [ate it] without salt [on it].

He had pain, and the area around his navel [hurt him], and he wept with loud weeping, saying, “Today I am bringing my [mother] Isis to me. I want a messenger-spirit [ⲇⲏⲙⲟⲛ] so that I may send him to my mother Isis.

…

[The spirit] went upon the mountain of Heliopolis and found his mother Isis wearing an iron crown and stoking a copper oven.

…

[Isis] said to him, Even if you did not find me and did not find my name, the true name that the sun bears to the west and the moon bears to the east and that is borne by the six propitiatory stars under the sun, you would summon the three hundred vessels that are around the navel:

Let every sickness and every difficulty and every pain that is in the belly of N, child of N, stop at this moment! I am the one who calls; the lord Jesus is the one who grants healing!¹

Sandwiched between invocations of Jesus as healer emerges an extensive narrative about the ancient Egyptian gods Horus and Isis—at a time when no temples and no priesthoods were still functioning to sustain their myths and no one could still read the Egyptian texts in which such traditional stories had been recorded. And yet this charm for abdominal pain, and the four others like it (for sleep, for childbirth, and for erotic success), replicate many of the basic features of charms from many centuries earlier. As in those ancient Isis/Horus spells for healing, we note here the drama of Horus’s suffering far from his mother Isis, the repetitive, almost singsong structure, and—as in the preceding legend of Jesus and the doe—its application to some specific real-world crisis.²

What is this text doing in Christian Egypt? What does it tell us about Christianization, about abandoned rites and traditions, about the folklore that might stretch between these two religious periods? Is it “pagan” or “Christian” to record or recite such spells? And what of the scribe, whose investment in the authority and magic of Christian ritual speech is apparent from the very beginning of the document? How did he understand these ancient names? And how many others copied similar spells—in monastic cells, at shrines, or in villages?

It is such cases that this book examines, those in which seemingly archaic religious elements appear in Christian form, not as survivals of a bygone “paganism,” but as building blocks in the process of Christianization. And while I will focus on the Christianization of Egypt over the fourth through seventh centuries, the arguments I make and the models I propose about the conglomerate nature of Christianization should apply to other parts of the Mediterranean and European worlds as well.

In fact, it is rare that we find such overt examples of the recollection of archaic religious traditions in ongoing folklore and practice as appear in this magical text with Isis and Horus. More often we find, in the vague and hostile testimony of Christian bishops and abbots, references to local practices that may strike us, in their independence from church teaching and their suggestion of another sacred landscape entirely, as reflecting a more archaic religious order:

… it is said that some of them ablute their children in polluted water and water from the arena, from the theater, and moreover they pour all over themselves water with incantations (spoken over it), and they break their clay pots claiming it repels the evil eye. Some tie amulets on their children, hand-crafted by men—those (men) who provide a place for the dwelling of demons—while others anoint themselves with oil that is evil and incantations and such things that they tie on their heads and necks.³

The author does not accuse his subjects of visiting temples, making sacrifices, or praying to ancient gods (although similar testimonies from Gaul and Iberia often did make these accusations).⁴ But what is this realm of practice, with its pollution and demons, that the author is describing? Is it Christianity? “Paganism”? Is it “popular religion,” and if it is, from what “proper religion” might it be distinct?

It is in these kinds of testimonies, and their echoes in the archaeological record, that we begin to find religion as it was lived, Christianity in its local constructions, and the syncretism that characterizes any religion as it is negotiated in time and space. Christianity in Egypt of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries amounted to a framework within which mothers and scribes, artisans and holy men, priests and herdsmen experimented with diverse kinds of religious materials and traditions, both to make sense of the institution and its teachings and to conceptualize efficacy—the magic without which life couldn’t proceed.

II. HISTORICAL SETTING

My 1998 book Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance was intended to explore and model how Egyptian religion was able to continue in various ways, despite economic, legal, and social pressures (and albeit in diminished forms), into the fourth, fifth, and even sixth centuries in particular regions, then particular villages, then particular households. The underlying thesis, that religions don’t just disappear over a few centuries but transform and shift in orientation, required a different concept of “Egyptian religion” than that held by many Roman historians raised to think of a monolithic “paganism” or a romantic era of great temples. Part of the work of the historian of religions is to think critically about what terms and models most productively cover the evidence one has.

While I also delved into types of continuity and preservation of Egyptian traditions in Christian guise (like the ticket oracle, to be addressed in more detail in chapters 4 and 6), it was not my goal then to address Christianization per se except in a series of preliminary observations at the end of the book proposing the religion’s integration in Egypt as idiom, as ideology, and as license for iconoclasm. But since 1997 I have had the opportunity to rethink these observations in terms of new archaeological evidence and new discussions of Coptic literature as data for continuing traditions.⁵ This book thus turns to the problem of Christianization indicated by Religion in Roman Egypt: Was this a “conversion” or a synthesis of religious traditions? How, and in what contexts, should we answer this question—through documents of ecclesiastical order, monastic or imperial administration, or even “degrees” of Hellenism? That is, what are the proper data for Christianization: The amount of churches or monasteries built?⁶ The amount of people showing up at these places?⁷ Their assimilation of “Christian” names?⁸ A growing diversity of material objects that imply some association with the religion? Or, conversely, the functional end of all traditional religious infrastructure, perhaps implying people’s concomitant absorption of Christianity?⁹ Is there a point at which we can say that a “Christianity” has come to exist or that people “are Christian” or even hold a Christian “identity” in any sense?¹⁰ Does the mere existence of Christian clergy—owning property, sending letters—signify the Christianization of culture or simply the growth of an autonomous institution?¹¹ These are all signs, to be sure, of an institution (or the decline of something in the culture), but do these types of documentation reflect cultural transformation, and if so, how?

My preference has always been for documents that illustrate “popular,” “lived,” or local religion: the cultures of pilgrimage and shrine, ritual expertise and magic, and domestic ritual concerns. These dimensions of the process of Christianization do not exclude or stand apart from the “institution,” broadly defined. People of these cultures—the laity, members of the lower clerical ranks—can pay close attention to sermons and ecclesiastical instructions, but that still leaves us far from knowing the influence of those sermons and instructions.¹² At the same time, the various worlds of lived or local religion also exert their own innovations and self-determination—their own agency, as I will explain. And so the documents of lived or local religion do not tend to show a Christianity familiar to the modern historian (even if they do so to the anthropologist). They show a Christianity in gradual, creative assemblage, whose principal or most immediate agents may have been local scribes, mothers protecting children, or artisans, not priests or monks.

But where do such materials leave us in gauging degrees or depths of Christianness or even the means of Christianization? In fact, as with most of the late Roman world, we have no data to explain how Christianity spread in Egypt. It certainly did not happen simply by virtue of churches built and priests in residence. Hagiographical legends of saints motivating allegiance through the destruction of idols are so idealized as to be useless as documentation, and there is little actual evidence beyond the mere texts of sermons how public preaching occurred and to what effect. Most scholars have argued that Christianity spread by village rather than individual. Ramsay MacMullen suggested that the process must have involved miracles in some way, since hagiographies assume this, but it is unclear how these performances would have taken place.¹³ Peter Brown’s scenario, based generally on hagiography, in which holy men represented the face, charisma, and ideologies of Christianity by virtue of their social functions in the culture, seems quite likely (and is developed further in chapter 3),¹⁴ although we have little notion of what teachings these figures would have taught as Christian or what ideas communities might have assimilated: One God or the powers of angels? One Bible or their own prophetic powers? The saving power of Jesus’s crucifixion or the material efficacy of the cross symbol? The material signs of Christianization from the fourth century on—from personal names to decorated tombs, from monastic complexes to scripture fragments—do not tell us what ideas this religion involved for its diverse local adherents. We cannot, that is, infer a system of one Bible, one God, the power of the Eucharist, the authority of the church, and the rejection of idols, except in the most abstract sense, when the little data we have for lived religion show the power of martyrs and angels, the apotropaic nature of scripture, the use of oil as a vehicle of church authority, and an utterly fluid concept of idolatry. We must conclude that Christianity arose and developed as a local phenomenon.

Of course, by the sixth century, Egypt was probably at least as Christian as any premodern culture could be. Except for a few lingering shrines and isolated expressions of private or local devotion to the old gods, the traditional temple religion of Egypt had largely disintegrated, the result of internal economic decline, Christian imperial pressure, and many other factors. At the same time, the evidence gleaned from papyri, inscriptions, and archaeology shows the increasing influence of the Christian institution in many parts of life. In the domestic sphere we see a rise in Christian names (whether biblical or saints’), suggesting families’ inclinations to endow their children with the blessings of the new heroes and holy beings.¹⁵ In the urban sphere we see a shift in the topography of monumental centers, from temples to churches and saints’ shrines, with those institutions’ liturgical calendars and processions now distinguishing public culture.¹⁶ Christian offices seem to have provided civic reward for the local elite, and the schooling of those elite came to include Christian texts as well as classical.¹⁷ Monks and monasteries also became central players in the social and economic lives of many regions of late antique Egypt, both as producers and as unofficial administrators. And the literary output in these monasteries was in full spate by the fifth century, offering a veritable library of documents describing the fantasies, ideals, pious models, scriptural exegeses, and often-conflicting ideologies embraced by Egyptian monks in late antiquity.¹⁸

In all these respects Egyptian culture—public, administrative, monastic—showed the influence of Christianity: Christianity as a context for prestige, as an extension of learning, as a framework for blessing...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1: Remodeling the Christianization of Egypt
• 2: Domestic Devotion and Religious Change: Traditions of the Domestic Sphere
• 3: Controller of Demons, Dispenser of Blessings: Traditions of the Holy Man as Craftsman of Local Christianity
• 4: A Site of Blessings, Dreams, and Wonders: Traditions of the Saint’s Shrine
• 5: The Magic of Craft: Traditions of the Workshop and the Construction of Efficacy
• 6: Scribality and Syncretism: Traditions of Writing and the Book
• 7: Whispering Spirits, Holy Processions: Traditions of the Egyptian Landscape
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Illustration Credits
• Index