A Companion to Religion in Late Antiquity

Josef Lössl, Nicholas J. Baker-Brian, Josef Lössl, Nicholas J. Baker-Brian

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781118968123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

A comprehensive review of the development, geographic spread, and cultural influence of religion in Late Antiquity

A Companion to Religion in Late Antiquity offers an authoritative and comprehensive survey of religion in Late Antiquity. This historical era spanned from the second century to the eighth century of the Common Era. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, the Companion explores the evolution and development of religion and the role various religions played in the cultural, political, and social transformations of the late antique period.

The authors examine the theories and methods used in the study of religion during this period, consider the most notable historical developments, and reveal how religions spread geographically. The authors also review the major religious traditions that emerged in Late Antiquity and include reflections on the interaction of these religions within their particular societies and cultures. This important Companion:

• Brings together in one volume the work of a notable team of international scholars
• Explores the principal geographical divisions of the late antique world
• Offers a deep examination of the predominant religions of Late Antiquity
• Examines established views in the scholarly assessment of the religions of Late Antiquity
• Includes information on the current trends in late-antique scholarship on religion

Written for scholars and students of religion, A Companion to Religion in Late Antiquity offers a comprehensive survey of religion and the influence religion played in the culture, politics, and social change during the late antique period.

CHAPTER ONE
Religion in Late Antiquity—Late Antiquity in Religion

Thomas E. Hunt

Introduction

Religion, wrote Daniel Dubuisson, is a construct of the West and provided the “nucleus around which the West has constructed its own universe of values and representations” (Dubuisson 2003: 39). During the military and political upheavals of the Reformation and in the wake of encounters with non‐European societies, people living in Europe constructed an object called “religion” and then began to study it (Kwok 2012: 288–290). The category of “religion” was critical to the articulation of European modernity and it therefore denotes a cluster of concepts that are not easily transferred into pre‐modern societies. Dubuisson himself, however, locates the roots of “religion” in the writings of the Church Fathers (Engler and Miller 2006: 167). Late Antiquity and religion are bound together.

“Late Antiquity” was born of a revolution in methods. The term “Late Antiquity” was first systematically applied by the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl (Riegl 1889: XV; 1901). He deployed the term Spätantike to mean a specific period defined by particular artistic sensibilities, heavily influenced by the classical tradition and yet distinct from it (Marcone 2008: 11–12). Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, he insisted that Art History could be counted as a true Wissenschaft because it adhered to the same cycles of discovery and research that marked, for example, Philology (Olin 1994: 107). His work was shaped by two themes. First, he showed that artistic critique could be applied to objects traditionally overlooked by historians of art (Rampley 2009: 446). Second, he argued that the work of art was generated through Kunstwollen. This technical term has a long and complicated reception, but it was used by Riegl to express how the artist was shaped by the formal conventions of her time (Elsner 2002: 359–360). By examining the artifact, he argued, it would be possible to infer conclusions about the wider culture that produced it (Cordileone 2014: 286). At the beginning of his Die Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, he argued that the traditional model of late Roman decline into barbarism could be reimagined through a close examination of the everyday items produced in the later empire (Riegl 1901: 7). Through applying a new conceptual vocabulary to overlooked sources, he was able to show how “barbarians” renewed late Roman art. After this methodological innovation, the Spätantike could be identified as a discrete period of creative innovation and its distinctive forms could be studied (Elsner 2002: 362–363).

At the opening of Die Spätrömische Kunstindustrie Riegl declared that he was venturing forward into a “dark continent on the map of art‐historical studies” (Riegl 1901: 2). The language is telling. He was an imperial adventurer, hoping to open up historical and cultural territories previously unknown to the Viennese of the cosmopolitan imperial center. The goal of Riegl’s Wissenschaft was to bring to that center a better notion of the history of the world and the place of Austria–Hungary in that history. Anxieties around civilizational decline, imperial power and cultural reproduction shaped Riegl’s Late Antiquity, marking it out as “rhetoric of modernity” (Giardina 1999: 157–159). Like all “modernities,” it has an underside of empire and coloniality (Mignolo 2007: 465). It is from these antipodes that it is possible to frame the deeper connections between, on the one hand, the study of religion and, on the other hand, the study of Late Antiquity.

The Study of Religion

The small town of Loudun sits in western France roughly equidistant between Tours and Poitiers. In 1632 a group of nuns cloistered in this town began to act strangely. Judging this behavior to be symptoms of demon possession, the townsfolk and the Church hierarchy began a series of exorcisms, trials, and interrogations. In his analysis of these events Michel de Certeau showed how they were the product of numerous tensions already present in the cords of prestige and power that bound together the society of seventeenth‐century France (de Certeau 2000). He noted that the involvement of clergy, physicians, and lawyers in this process was motivated not by compassion for the nuns, but by concerns to maintain their own cultural authority through the application of their specialized knowledge. Similarly, he points out, the modern historian deploys their own knowledge to explain the odd behavior of the nuns. Loudun should make the historian cautious, for conversation about “other times and other places … has critical effects. It reflects back on the historian’s presuppositions, relativizing them and our investments in some version of the present order of things” (Seed 2014: 12). De Certeau’s analysis highlights the ways in which historians deploy terms to explain human behavior that their subjects would never use. Instead, these concepts are created by scholars through comparison and analysis. “Religion” is such a concept, created through an “act of second order, reflective imagination” through which the familiar and unfamiliar can be explained (Smith 1982: xi).

For de Certeau, the Loudun possessions reveal tensions within French society and the way those tensions manifested themselves in people’s encounter with the world. Confronted by the writhing bodies of the nuns, the residents of Loudun sought to explain their behavior by situating them against other examples of demon possession. In so doing, they were able to integrate this unusual, unsettling behavior into a much larger conceptual universe, drawing on abstract notions of good and evil, cosmology, and the material presence of the demonic in everyday life (de Certeau 2000). Similarly, “religion” is not an objective concept, but is a particular category that has been developed in order to compare and analyze human behavior. As such, “there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study” (Smith 1982: xi), a concept created to give meaning to the material products and behaviors of the humans being studied. To approach religion from such a constructionist position is not to deny that something called “religion” exists. It certainly does and its effects can be seen in the world around us (not least on the shelves of libraries and in books like this one) (Engler 2004). Contemporary explanations of the events at Loudun reveal unspoken but powerful forces in French society of the seventeenth century. In a similar way, the naming of some human behavior as “religious” reveals wider cultural assumptions about human beings that can be mapped and studied (Broucek 2015: 115–116). Seventeenth century explanations for the nuns’ behavior were influenced by the power, prestige and ambition that shaped French society at the time. Similarly, twenty‐first century historians’ accounts of the past are shaped by contemporary structural and social pressures. Recognizing that “religion” ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE: Religion in Late Antiquity—Late Antiquity in Religion
• PART I: HISTORICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES
• PART II: TRADITIONS AND IDENTITIES
• PART III: THEMES AND DISCUSSIONS
• Index
• End User License Agreement