Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity

By Andrea Sterk and Nina Caputo

Historians of religion face complex interpretive issues when examining religious texts, practices, and experiences. Faithful Narratives presents the work of twelve eminent scholars whose research has exemplified compelling strategies for negotiating the difficulties inherent in this increasingly important area of historical inquiry. The chapters range chronologically from Late Antiquity to modern America and thematically from the spirituality of near eastern monks to women's agency in religion, considering familiar religious communities alongside those on the margins and bringing a range of spiritual and religious practices into historical focus.

Focusing on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the essays address matters central to the study of religion in history, in particular texts and traditions of authority, interreligious discourse, and religious practice and experience. Some examine mainstream communities and traditions, others explore individuals who crossed religious or confessional boundaries, and still others study the peripheries of what is considered orthodox religious tradition. Encompassing a wide geographical as well as chronological scope, Faithful Narratives illustrates the persistence of central themes and common analytical challenges for historians working in all periods.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jan 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9780801471049

Book preview

FAITHFUL

NARRATIVES

HISTORIANS, RELIGION, AND

THE CHALLENGE OF OBJECTIVITY

EDITED BY ANDREA STERK

AND NINA CAPUTO

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Challenge of

Religion in History

A

NDREA

S

TERK AND

N

INA

C

APUTO

PART ONE:  LATE ANTIQUE AND MEDIEVAL

RELIGIOUS DEBATES AND

THEIR MODERN IMPLICATIONS

1. Pagan Challenge, Christian Response:

Emperor Julian and Gregory of Nazianzus

as Paradigms of Interreligious Discourse

S

USANNA

E

LM

2. Between Syria and Egypt: Alms,

Work, and the Holy Poor

P

ETER

B

ROWN

3. Medieval Monks on Labor and Leisure

J

OHN

V

AN

E

NGEN

4. Sibling Rivalries, Scriptural Communities:

What Medieval History Can and Cannot

Teach Us about Relations between Judaism,

Christianity, and Islam

D

AVID

N

IRENBERG

PART TWO: EARLY MODERN PERSPECTIVES ON

SPIRITUALITY, CULTURE, AND

RELIGIOUS BOUNDARIES

5. The People and the Book: Print and

the Transformation of Jewish Culture

in Early Modern Europe

D

AVID

B. R

UDERMAN

6. The Jewish Book in Christian

Europe: Material Texts and Religious

Encounters

A

NTHONY

G

RAFTON

7. Mission and Narrative in the Early

Modern Spanish World: Diego de

Ocaña’s Desert in Passing

K

ENNETH

M

ILLS

8. Incombustible Weber: How the

Protestant Reformation Really

Disenchanted the World

C

ARLOS

E

IRE

PART THREE: FROM THE PREMODERN TO THE MODERN

WORLD: SACRED TEXTS, INDIVIDUAL

AGENCY, AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITY

9. Religion and Gender in Enlightenment

England: The Problem of Agency

P

HYLLIS

M

ACK

10. Constructions of Jewish Identity

through Reflections on Islam

S

USANNAH

H

ESCHEL

11. Bible, Translation, and Culture:

From the KJV to the Christian

Resurgence in Africa

L

AMIN

S

ANNEH

12. Reflections on the Bible and American

Political Life

M

ARK

A. N

OLL

Notes

Contributors

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The present volume is the result of a three-semester series at the University of Florida in 2008–9, followed by a session on the same topic cosponsored by the American Historical Society and the American Society of Church History in Boston in 2011. The idea to organize this series on religion in history was spurred partly by the personal interest of the organizers and our students, partly by the professional challenges that we face on a daily basis in our teaching and research. Our goal was to foster a sustained cross-disciplinary discussion that would include undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and members of the general community. Toward this end, each of the twelve visiting scholars addressed the broader community in a public lecture and led a seminar for graduate students and faculty that engaged pedagogical challenges as well as research. We were pleased that this multilayered series fostered an ongoing conversation that finds its most concrete expression in this book.

Because this project has developed over the course of several years, we are indebted to a large number of institutions and individuals to whom we would like to express our gratitude. The initial funding for this project was provided by the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Grants from both these institutions helped subsidize expenses associated with the graduate seminar that ran in tandem with the lecture series.

While we could not have put together this series without these external sources of funding, the series and resulting volume would have also been impossible without the cooperation and support of numerous departments and centers at the University of Florida. At a time in which the humanities are under siege—both financially and intellectually—it was particularly gratifying that the lecture series received significant support from more than a dozen units on campus: the Department of History, the Bob Graham Center for Public Service, the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Center for Jewish Studies, the UF Office for Research, the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish Studies, the Rothman Distinguished Lecture in Classics, the Richard J. Milbauer Chair in History, the Department of Classics, the Department of Religion, the Center for African Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, and the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. The Christian Study Center of Gainesville also provided financial as well as institutional support for the project as a whole.

Alongside institutional sponsors we would be remiss to omit a few specific individuals who contributed to the success of the series and its legacy in this volume: Jack Kugelmass, Richard Horner, Bonnie Effros, and Joseph Spillane, and our graduate assistants Anna Lankina and Valentina Istrate. Anna has been involved in the project from beginning to end, and we are especially grateful for her work on the index. We would also like to thank Peter Potter, our editor at Cornell University Press, and the anonymous readers who reviewed the manuscript. We are perhaps most grateful to Mitch Hart and Howard Louthan, who endured the planning and execution of this project, from the first day to the very last, with excellent humor. (We would also like to thank them for taking Anthony Grafton to a local nature reserve to see the alligators, and even more, for bringing him back in one piece.)

Finally, we are deeply indebted and grateful to the contributors themselves. All of them were intellectually generous and gracious during their campus visits—even as they endured the difficulties of interminable airport layovers and breakneck schedules once they arrived. They were also encouraging and supportive of our students, patient with the editors as the volume made its way through the long publication process, and unflaggingly enthusiastic about the project as a whole. We hope that this book will be as engaging for the reader as it has been for the editors and contributors.

Introduction

The Challenge of Religion in History

ANDREA STERK AND NINA CAPUTO

Contemporary Western society presents a baffling array of religious options, opinions, and extremes, from militant secularism to radical fundamentalism. The success of antireligious writers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens suggests that atheism is not simply on the rise but an increasingly potent force to be contended with in public discourse. Churchgoing may be on the decline in Europe, but there is no shortage of devotion in other parts of the world, especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where religious fervor has kept pace with processes of secular democratic reform.¹ On the local level, within our own town of Gainesville, Florida, site of a major public research university, diverse religious groups are thriving on campus. And in the town itself, the inflammatory anti-Islamic rhetoric of fundamentalist pastor Terry Jones has garnered national and international media attention. His threatened Qur’an burnings in fall 2010, his trial of the Qur’an and its subsequent execution by fire in spring 2011 and again in spring 2012, inevitably bring to mind the practices of the medieval Inquisition.² Most recently his promotion of a provocative anti-Islamic video helped spark fatal protests in the Middle East.³ Vigorously denounced by almost all the churches and synagogues in Gainesville and around the world, such incidents expose the intensity of religious feeling that still motivates large segments of our population both in and beyond the West.

While by no means new to the twenty-first century, these conflicting religious impulses pose an ongoing challenge to scholars, who must grapple with the role of religion and the interpretation of religious developments in history. Some historians exclude religious phenomena entirely, leaving only economy, society, and politics as valid subjects of historical inquiry.⁴ On the other end of the spectrum is the notion that particular moments in history are themselves sacred, for example, the parting of the Red Sea and conquest of the promised land, the Virgin birth, Muhammad’s Hajj, or even the signing of the U.S. Constitution.⁵ Such critical or defining events are deemed by the faithful to be beyond the purview of secular history or best left beyond the probe of skeptical historians. To be sure, few scholars today would argue that only religious insiders can adequately understand a tradition’s practices and ideals, and on the other side, few would exclude religious phenomena from the study of history altogether or relegate it to the domain of seminaries and divinity schools. Yet recent scholarly trends and approaches have raised fresh dilemmas. Teleological or triumphalist narratives of religious history, which marked the scholarship of an earlier age, have given way to a reductionism that may equally distort the meaning of religion for the communities being studied. And increased attention to methodological issues as well as postmodern concerns have posed new challenges for historians: the complex role of memory, the ambiguity of evidence and its interpretation, the function of narrative, and the tension between text and representation, to name only a few.

It is fair to say that many of today’s historians of religion find the task of writing as well as teaching religious history an increasingly precarious endeavor.⁶ On the one side, seeking to be sensitive to religious experience and conviction while, on the other, maintaining intellectual and scholarly integrity, historians of religion require almost supernatural navigational skill. The religiously committed historian may have to negotiate particularly tricky currents.⁷ An emphasis on the personal combined with the call for methodological transparency has encouraged openness about one’s own religious convictions or orientation. Some offer such admissions as an expression of intellectual transparency or honesty, recognizing the elusive nature of objectivity; others meanwhile advocate outright partisanship on the grounds that all knowledge is radically subjective, that objectivity is not merely elusive but illusory.⁸ Moreover, in an age when public figures are expected to wear their religious beliefs and commitments on their sleeves, and the failure to do so is viewed with increasing suspicion and hostility, historians who are agnostic or nonbelievers, even those who treat religious belief sympathetically, may face distinctive pressures of their own. The task of teaching religious history in a critical, analytical vein—whether in public, nondenominational, or religiously affiliated institutions—can be fraught with tension when students bristle at any challenge to a traditional religious narrative that many have come to accept as beyond dispute. And all historians of religion—those who work on their own tradition as well as those who cross confessional boundaries—are subject to false assumptions about their identity or suspicions about their motives for pursuing such research.

Yet despite such tensions, it has become increasingly important to address the subject of religion in our own day. Whatever the impact of secularism and postmodernism, religious concepts and language lie at the foundation of political, scientific, and cultural life, as well as many of the conflicts that plague the modern world. In recent years world events have brought religion into the center of history in ways unanticipated even a generation ago. A variety of fundamentalisms have pushed religious faith from the private to the public sphere, provoking fundamentalist-like agnostic or atheistic reactions against religion.⁹ Amid renewed concern about the role of religion in society and global politics, historians of religion have faced new questions and occasionally assumed new roles in attempts to understand or explain the complexities of world events. While religion has come to occupy a central place in the public arena, many historians in the past fifty years have shifted their focus to the personal, the private, and the role of non-elites in history, examining different kinds of sources and emphasizing bottom-up rather than top-down processes in religious history.¹⁰ Attention to the private sphere of religious practice and experience has also raised new questions for historians regarding the nature and forms of religious evidence, the interpretation of religious phenomena, and the meaning of religion itself for particular communities in specific eras and social contexts. And recent developments remind us that we must take religious ideas and practices as seriously as political, economic, or social ones—forces with which they are often intertwined—in the making of human history and therefore in our analyses and accounts of the human past.

Motivated in part by the widespread public ignorance of religious traditions and communities that so influence contemporary realities and discourse, the contributors to this volume address perennial scholarly debates as well as newer methodological questions. The book presents the work of twelve scholars whose research and teaching have exemplified compelling strategies for negotiating the difficulties inherent in this increasingly important subfield of historical study. In essays ranging chronologically from Late Antiquity to the twenty-first century, historians engage with particular religious issues and a range of methodological questions in a theoretically critical yet sensitive manner. The title Faithful Narratives functions on at least two levels. First, encompassing widely varied case studies and approaches, it nonetheless captures the unifying focus on faith as a historical force that had consequences in the lives of individuals and the development of communities. Second, the essays themselves are narratives that attempt to be faithful to the demands of critical analysis and sensitive to the beliefs, ideals, and struggles of their religious subjects. As suggested by the subtitle, then, these studies address the challenges of integrating a responsible scholarly engagement with religious texts, practices, people, and power into historical analysis and narrative.

We do not intend for this volume to be comprehensive in scope. Most of the essays grapple with issues generated in a specifically Western Christian context and are refracted through a double Christian lens. The treatment of Judaism and Islam, for example, is shaped by the dominant Christian culture of the period and region under investigation. Moreover, the essays inevitably reflect the scholarly discourse of a largely secular Protestant North American intellectual environment in which the authors teach and pursue their research. Despite these limitations, we have attempted to strike a balance in our focus on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that mirrors particular religious landscapes in their historical contexts.

The essays are organized chronologically around central themes for the study of religion in history: textual traditions and authority, interreligious discourse, practices of piety, and notions of community and identity. Part I probes the ways in which religious texts and ideas have shaped premodern cultures and subcultures and how they continue to reverberate in the modern world. Authors in this section examine disputed sites of textual authority (Elm and Nirenberg) or notions of poverty and labor (Brown and Van Engen), reflecting on the enduring influence of these premodern debates in contemporary scholarly discourse or in modern perspectives on religion, economy, and society. Part II focuses on the reading, writing, redaction, and proliferation of religious texts in the early modern period. Although distinctive interpretations contributed to the construction of confessional boundaries (Eire), the use and assimilation of textual traditions across religious boundaries also come to the fore (Ruderman, Grafton, Mills). The essays in this section explore not only the construction and crossing of religious boundaries but also the permeability of those boundaries and the interpenetration of religious values and ideas in what have most often been regarded as distinct traditions. Revealing the subtle shift from the premodern to the modern era, part III continues the emphasis on sacred texts, specifically examining their role in promoting individual agency, communal identity, or public piety (Mack, Heschel, Sanneh, Noll). Particularly evident in this section is both the legacy and the resonance of premodern religion in diverse contexts of the modern world, a thread that runs through the volume as a whole.

Despite the diversity of topics covered, several significant points of convergence link the individual chapters. All of the studies included in this volume deal with either sacred texts and their interpretation or religious practice and experience. Authors in each section examine how texts gained authoritative or canonical status within particular communities, conflicts over interpretation, or the role of texts in interreligious discourse. Others, meanwhile, investigate the rituals, practices, and spiritual experiences that marked the religious life of particular communities from antiquity to modernity. Moreover, some of the groups or individuals considered—holy wanderers, apocalyptic figures, female prophets—were located on the peripheries of what is considered mainstream if not orthodox religious traditions and hence bring the spirituality and experiences of those on the margins into historical focus. Such thematic overlap between sections illustrates the recurrence or persistence of central themes and common analytical challenges for historians working in all eras and geographical regions.

Indeed, despite our decision to organize the essays along chronological lines, the actual content of many of these essays challenges typical divisions between the premodern and the modern and even the very notion of modernization as it relates to the study of religion. Whether we consider sources of moral, intellectual, or political authority; notions of work and leisure; conceptions of the rich and the poor and obligations of the one toward the other; questions of ethnic and national identity; beliefs about gender, agency, and the self; or the meaning of magic, superstition, or miracles, we find deep religious layers still at work in modern assumptions about the nature of reality and the nature of human involvement in society. Historians dare not ignore these formative religious attitudes, practices, and teachings, which remain deeply ingrained in the contemporary world. Indeed, as David Nirenberg has noted, historians of religion in recent years have recognized that pressing questions about the interrelationship of the three Abrahamic religions have created distinctive opportunities for the study of the past to intervene in the present.¹¹

Closely connected to the premodern/modern divide that this volume attempts to mitigate is the barrier between the religious and the secular. Indeed, the vast majority of intellectuals equate modernity with secularization, de facto removing serious engagement with religion or religious ideas as such from the realm of modern historical study and absolving themselves of the obligation to interrogate the contours and parameters of secularism as a practice and ideology—in other words, to historicize secularism. Similarly, the secular-religious dichotomy has affected the very shape of the historical discipline. For example, as Susanna Elm shows with regard to the study of late antiquity, we find secular historians studying the life and writings of the pagan Roman emperor Julian while confessional or church historians focus on the leading Christian theologians of the same period, rarely bringing such figures into dialogue even though they were direct contemporaries who knew and interacted with each other.¹² Further difficulties arise when scholars adopt either a religious history frame, which expands evidence of religion or religious communities in shaping social and cultural norms to undue proportions, or a secular frame, which assigns religion a separate, secondary, and often insignificant role. This artificial barrier, then, has tended to distort or limit our understanding of historical developments in all periods.¹³ Closely connected with an overly simple divide between the secular and the religious is the fact that we have promoted a master narrative of secularization that no longer seems tenable.¹⁴ The story is familiar: thanks to the philosophical interventions of Enlightenment thinkers and the political consequences of the French and American revolutions, church and state were disaggregated. As a result, the church was stripped of its powers of coercion, and expression of religious faith was relegated to the private sphere.

To be sure, some historians have resisted the urge to perpetuate this narrative, endeavoring instead to uncover the deeply religious convictions and practices underlying many of the notions we consider secular.¹⁵ Most recently Brad Gregory’s revisionist study of the Reformation and its legacy has undercut long dominant notions about the roots of secularism and pluralism in the contemporary Western world. He not only exposes the religious roots of these developments but also shows that secularism has been no more successful in living up to the ideals commonly associated with it than were the medieval church or the Protestant Reformation.¹⁶ In a similar vein, several studies in this volume challenge reigning notions of secularization and its history. Analyzing medieval representations of labor and modern scholars’ efforts to understand the meaning of work in the Middle Ages, John Van Engen finds notions of the worldly or the secular within medieval as much as modern culture and medieval religious ideals underlying modern secular attitudes toward labor. Tracking changing boundaries between the natural and supernatural worlds, Carlos Eire explores the very definition of religion, examining the evidence and significance of shifting conceptual structures we label secularization. Incorporating perspectives from the global south, Lamin Sanneh shows how religious developments in Africa have forced a reappraisal of the received wisdom about secularization. Phyllis Mack analyzes the spiritual authority and ideals of two female religious leaders in late eighteenth-century England. Their religious consciousness alongside their challenge to contemporary gender roles, she argues, reflects the complex processes that scholars have too easily equated with secularization and modernization. All of these studies approach religion and religious expression as integral to the very framework of social organization from late antiquity to the modern period.

While these essays challenge still largely dominant notions of modernity and secularization, they also build on significant developments in historical scholarship on religion. The crumbling of traditional binaries—center/periphery, on the one hand, and orthodoxy/heresy, on the other, comes to the fore in essays examining those on the margins of their respective religious communities. We learn, for example, of certain Jewish scholars’ fascination with Islam, radically different notions of the holy among eastern ascetics, and the religious agency and moral authority of Quaker and Methodist women. Traditional geographic as much as theological markers are also reassessed. As Ken Mills and Lamin Sanneh remind us, Christian expansion in early modern Latin America and late modern Africa can no longer be considered peripheral to the history of a dominant European Christianity; indeed recent developments in non-Western Christianity suggests a hemispheric shift in the religion’s center of gravity.¹⁷ And while religious institutions and elites receive their due, these essays also bring into focus religious practices and ideas we associate with popular piety. Local context, developments from below, and beliefs of those on the presumed fringes of society must be taken seriously in any historical study of religion that aims at a responsible representation of its role in a given cultural, intellectual, or political climate.

Assumptions about clear-cut boundaries, like traditional binaries, have shaped and occasionally distorted modern views of particular religions or interreligious relations; yet in different ways scholars have begun to challenge those imagined boundaries demonstrating that they were more often negotiated than fixed. In keeping with these new perspectives, authors in this volume examine the interaction between Jewish-Christian, Christian-pagan, Muslim-Christian, and Jewish-Muslim communities and individuals. For example, Susannah Heschel shows that Jewish scholars who immersed themselves in the study of Islam—some to the point of conversion—tested the boundaries between religious, political, and cultural modes of public expression. She argues that this engagement with Muslim literature and culture, which persisted until the Second World War, enabled some Jewish scholars to fashion themselves as intermediaries between eastern and Western aesthetics and theology. By forging a middle ground, they helped to relieve the social and political pressures Jews experienced in late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe.

Several authors employ another common methodological strategy: reading the sacred text as a site of contact, conflict, or disputed authority between established religious communities and their outsiders or among members of the same religious community. David Nirenberg examines contested readings of the Bible and the Qur’an both between and within religious traditions. He ultimately affirms the potential of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptural hermeneutics to be self-critical without requiring relativism or negating revelation. Reassessing perceived boundaries between Christian and pagan culture in late antiquity, Susanna Elm traces a protracted struggle by members of a relatively homogeneous elite—consisting of theologians and Greco-Roman philosophers—for control over normative and canonical texts. In a similar register, Anthony Grafton and David Ruderman address Christian scholars’ pursuit of the skills and resources necessary to produce and study Jewish books with the birth of the printing press, which played a significant role in relocating the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity. Jewish scholars had to negotiate carefully in sharing skills and knowledge that had been strictly guarded by Jewish elites who were protective of theological and political autonomy and who used their specialized knowledge as a means of exerting some control over the version of Judaism that emerged from European publishing houses and universities. Turning to the identity-forming role of the Bible, Lamin Sanneh shows how vernacular translation of the sacred text shaped the nations of modern Africa, challenging widely accepted postcolonial assumptions about the colonial project. In a similar vein, Mark Noll explores the construction of a powerful common discourse based on biblical language and motifs, both Jewish and Christian, that undergird American public and political culture.

Approaching religious texts and traditions in a way that is neither totalizing nor reductionist, the essays collected here reflect the seemingly obvious yet no less challenging objective that John Van Engen stated a generation ago: Any study of religious culture must take religion seriously.¹⁸ A reflection on interpretations of the Christian Middle Ages, often distorted by the failure to do justice to faith or belief as a dynamic motivating force, Van Engen’s thoughtful reminder could well be applied to the study of religious developments in any historical period. In this volume, then, authors devote significant attention to the ways in which psychological, political, sociological, and economic factors interact with and shape religious ideals and religious communities in diverse settings and periods. Yet at the same time, historians express concern about the limitations of social scientific tools and models in the study of religion. Phyllis Mack, for example, describes the inadequacy of psychology, specifically current theories of agency, to adequately account for the reality of religious women’s behavior, experiences, and choices.¹⁹ Common conceptual formulations or theoretical frameworks used to analyze religious beliefs or practices may have explanatory force today that would have been completely lost on the individuals and communities we study and may significantly misrepresent the meaning of religious rituals or convictions for those believers. And despite the tendency of many historians to interpret religious beliefs primarily as symptoms of a particular sociopolitical or cultural climate or to view religion as a component of another more tangible matrix of power or identity, religion can be a cause as much as an effect of social, economic, or political change. For example, Peter Brown’s analysis of a religious struggle over the meaning of work and the definition of the poor in late antiquity shows how theological principles and their institutional application affected the economy and society of entire regions for centuries. Moreover, the victory in this struggle of one religious ideal over the other has shaped even modern models of an economically divided society and our modern conscience concerning the duties of the rich toward the poor. Similarly, challenges to traditional beliefs about death and purgatory in the Protestant Reformation had significant material consequences, engendering what Carlos Eire has described as no less than an economic revolution. In short, these essays treat religion as an entity sui generis, a causative force in history rather than merely a symptom of social or political change.

Indeed, the study of religious beliefs and practices in particular historical settings not only reveals their socioeconomic implications but also illumines ongoing debates on the human condition, the dignity of humanity, or the very notion of humanness. Perhaps nowhere is the issue of the human more explicit in this volume than in Ken Mills’s treatment of an early modern missionary’s chronicle of his outward and inward journey across the desert of Pariacaca in Peru. Drawing from a rich apostolic narrative tradition, the friar’s chronicle, sensitively and empathetically analyzed by Mills, not only reveals the lessons he has learned about little known peoples and new corners of the exterior world but also draws readers into his own interior spiritual journey of suffering and deliverance, an intentionally emulative narrative that exposes both the frailty of human existence and the meaning of human experience. As they explore the value and meaning of work, miraculous phenomena, notions of the sacred, questions of agency and authority, or emotions and the religious self, other studies grapple with fundamental human issues that have long posed points of tension for believers and their communities. What often comes to light are the ways in which connections with other religious traditions shaped individual or communal identity. Exchanges of religious texts and ideas involved complex human interactions that might reveal the transcendence of human relationships as much as the fragility of human understanding. The fundamental connection between religion and notions of the human that permeates this volume helps to explain the dilemma and yet the importance of the personal that often arises in academic discussions of religion. Though historians rarely reflect directly on this dimension of their work, it is implicit in the questions they raise, the approaches they take, and the meanings they ascribe to the evidence they study. However open to critique, correction, and argument a given historian may be, any interpretation of religious events or experiences inevitably passes through the prism of the personal.

Finally, although these essays focus on historiographical and methodological issues in historical scholarship on religion, the challenges scholars face in research often carry over into the classroom setting. A recent treatment of pedagogy in the journal of the American Historical Association described the temptation to avoid discomfiting questions or conflicts by presenting religion in functional terms: Whatever it might mean to the believer, religion is ‘really’ a form of community building, or an ideology that supports the status quo, or the pre-reflective source of normative impulses. Reduced to its function in society in this way, religion is better thought of as being ‘about something else’ rather than in terms that attempt, at least, to plumb its perhaps ineffable meaning for adherents.²⁰ Thus words like sacrifice, redemption, conversion, repentance, or ecstasy are not understood in terms of their stated meaning or their meaning for historical actors, but as pointers to other, allegedly more profound meanings: poverty, social marginality, sexual desire, political ambition. Just as in historical research and writing on religion, the tendency in the classroom has been to reduce religion to its lowest common denominator or to attribute religious sentiments or experience to something else. In religiously affiliated as well as secular colleges and universities, historians have tended to avoid or talk around religious beliefs rather than attempt to understand or explain them. That these concerns are paramount is reflected in our commitment to make pedagogy alongside scholarship an important consideration in this volume. Scholars need to take stock of religion in the history classroom as well as the historical monograph. Whether explicitly or implicitly, several essays address the pedagogical challenges posed by the critical study of religion and religious themes in history.²¹

Indeed this volume is intended to help pave the way forward in the study, analysis, and teaching of religion in history. It is our hope that these essays will serve scholars and students as models of serious engagement with the social, intellectual, and experiential dimensions of religion in the lives of individuals and communities. We also hope that the approaches taken and the questions raised will stimulate further research and conversation that contributes to our understanding of both the challenge of religion in history and the challenge of history to religion. To the extent that we succeed in these modest aims we will have not only provided models for historical scholarship but will help prepare students and future citizens for sensitive reflection on and meaningful engagement with our pluralistic, postmodern, yet no less deeply religious world.

PART ONE

Late Antique and

Medieval Religious

Debates and Their

Modern Implications

CHAPTER 1

Pagan Challenge, Christian Response

Emperor Julian and Gregory of Nazianzus

as Paradigms of Interreligious Discourse

SUSANNA ELM

On December 11, 361, a man called Julian arrived in Constantinople, a city at the time also known as the New Rome.¹ Julian entered this city as the sole ruler of the Roman Empire and as the legitimate successor of his recently deceased cousin Constantius. Later, the Emperor Julian became famous, known as the Apostate, because he had reverted from his Christian religion back to the religion of the gods of the Greeks and the Romans. As such, he has been a subject of plays, romance novels, poems, and literary works by authors such as Henrik Ibsen, Vladimir Majakovskij, Gore Vidal, and Constantine Cavafy. In addition, hardly a year goes by without the publication of a scholarly monograph on the emperor.

Scholars who write about Julian are, as a rule, historians of the Roman Empire, secular historians who look at the later Roman Empire from the perspective of social, imperial, and political history. Here the Emperor Julian stands out among his peers, that is, other Roman emperors, because together with Marcus Aurelius, he is the only Roman emperor whose personal writings we possess. Indeed, Julian wrote a great deal, far more than Marcus Aurelius, whom he considered a model, because he wished to explain himself and his actions to persons that mattered to him: members of the Greek-speaking elite of the Roman Empire, also known as the oikoumeēe. Julian’s reasons for writing were, on the face of it, straightforward. As Caesar, the second most important person in the empire, Julian had challenged the supremacy of the reigning Augustus, his cousin Constantius. Julian had, in fact, been a usurper, and he was the first to acknowledge this. While marching to engage the ruling emperor in battle, he also engaged in a veritable letter writing campaign. He composed letters to the Senate in Constantinople and to cities in the Western part of the empire he already controlled—Rome, Corinth, Sparta, Athens, in sum, cities with a great degree of cultural cachet—to persuade his audience of the legitimacy, indeed divinely preordained inevitability, of his actions.

Writing about the divine in relation to his imperial mandate was to become one of Julian’s central preoccupations. Thus, immediately after his arrival in Constantinople, he invited a wide circle of persons to his court and engaged them (and through them all his subjects) in philosophical debates, in which he proclaimed his own perspectives and positions regarding the correct way to rule the empire as a person chosen to rule