Unfinished Christians: Ritual Objects and Silent Subjects in Late Antiquity

By Georgia Frank

What can we know about the everyday experiences of Christians during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries? How did non-elite men and women, enslaved, freed, and free persons, who did not renounce sex or choose voluntary poverty become Christian? They neither led a religious community nor did they live in entirely Christian settings. In this period, an age marked by “extraordinary” Christians—wonderworking saints, household ascetics, hermits, monks, nuns, pious aristocrats, pilgrims, and bishops—ordinary Christians went about their daily lives, in various occupations, raising families, sharing households, kitchens, and baths in religiously diverse cities. Occasionally they attended church liturgies, sought out local healers, and visited martyrs’ shrines. Barely and rarely mentioned in ancient texts, common Christians remain nameless and undifferentiated.

Unfinished Christians explores the sensory and affective dimensions of ordinary Christians who assembled for rituals. With precious few first-person accounts by common Christians, it relies on written sources not typically associated with lived religion: sermons, liturgical instruction books, and festal hymns. All three genres of writing are composed by clergy for use in ritual settings. Yet they may also provide glimpses of everyday Christians’ lives and experiences. This book investigates the habits, objects, behaviors, and movements of ordinary Christians by mining festal preaching by John Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nyssa, and Romanos the Melodist, among others. It also mines liturgical instructions to explore the psalms and other songs performed on various feast days. “Unfinished,” then, connotes the creativity and agency of unremarkable Christians who engaged in making religious experiences: the “Christian-in-progress” who learns to work with material and bring something into being; the artisans who attended sermons; and, more widely, the bearers of embodied knowing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781512823967

Georgia Frank

Georgia Frank is Charles A. Dana Professor of Religion at Colgate University.

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Cover Page for Unfinished Christians

Unfinished Christians

Unfinished Christians

Ritual Objects and Silent Subjects in Late Antiquity

Georgia Frank

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

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Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2395-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2396-7

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For Jeffrey, Maddy, Halley, and Theo

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Chapter 1. A Commencement of Reality: Lived Religion and Ordinary Christians

Chapter 2. Crafting the Unfinished Christian: Baptisteries as Workshops

Chapter 3. Processions and Portabilia

Chapter 4. Liturgical Emotions and Layered Temporalities

Chapter 5. Singing and Sensing the Night

Conclusion. Silent Subjects, Ritual Objects

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

ACW – Ancient Christian Writers

BHG – Bibliotheca hagiographica graeca, 3rd ed., ed. F. Halkin, Subsidia Hagiographica 47 (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1957; repr. 1969).

Cat. – Catechesis / prebaptismal instruction

CPG – Clavis patrum graecorum, ed. M. Geerard and F. Glorie (Turnhout, 1974–87).

FOTC – Fathers of the Church

GNO – Gregorii Nysseni Opera, 10 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1952– )

Hom. – Homily

LCL – Loeb Classical Library

LSJ – H. G. Liddell, R. Scott, H. S. Jones et al., A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968).

MECL – James McKinnon, ed. Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

NPNF – P. Schaff and H. Wace, eds., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1. = first series, 14 vols. (1886–89); 2. = second series, 14 vols. (1890–1900).

Or. – Oration

PG – Patrologiae cursus completus, Series graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1857–66).

PGL – G. W. H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961).

Ps. – Psalm, Septuagint numbering, followed by Masoretic numbering in parentheses.

Romanos, Hymnes – Romanos le Mélode: Hymnes, ed. José Grosdidier de Matons, SC 99, 110, 114, 128, 283 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1964–81)

SC – Sources chrétiennes (Paris: Éditions du Cerf)

TLG – Thesaurus Linguae Graecae

Chapter 1

A Commencement of Reality

Lived Religion and Ordinary Christians

One Sunday in the 380s, John Chrysostom opened his homily with a pop quiz: Do you know, he asked the congregation, at what point our last homily began, or where it stopped? Perhaps an awkward silence ensued. So he continued, Or . . . [how] the previous homily began or ended?¹ He had scanned the blank stares long enough to admit, I think you have forgotten where our speech stopped. Did he shake his head in disbelief? Raise his voice? Whether he was annoyed, disappointed, or frustrated, we will never know. Still, he was in the presence of many people from many walks of life. He addressed fathers, merchants, soldiers, artisans, and tradesmen: "Each of you has a wife and supports children and takes care of all matters around the house. Some of you are also busy on military campaigns (strateiais) and others are craftsmen; and each of you is busy with different jobs. Whatever their memory lapses (or prior truancy), they did, after all, show up. You cannot be blamed in this matter, but rather be praised, Chrysostom reassured them, because you have not abandoned us on Sunday. No matter what, you come to church. Who is this you" who showed up, whose forgetting would be forgiven, if only because they showed up?

That church attendees led busy and complex lives was a fact preachers only rarely conceded. When Basil of Caesarea preached a series of nine sermons about the six days of the Creation, he understood that attending five consecutive days of homilies was taxing for many. It has not escaped my notice, Basil remarked early on the second day, that many workers of handicrafts, who with difficulty provide a livelihood for themselves from their daily toil, are gathered around us.² For their sakes, he tried to keep his homily brief. In addition to craftspeople, mothers and fathers, enslaved household workers, tradespeople, and merchants all had multiple demands on their time. As his brother Gregory of Nyssa would later recall, He spoke to such a large number of people together in a crowded assembly . . . [including] uncultivated men, artisans engaged in menial occupations, womenfolk untrained in such learning, a group of children, older people past their prime.³ Homiletic group portraits such as these provide some glimpses into the types of people who attended church, who burst into applause or shouted acclamations, who sat in the gallery or dozed off during the sermon. What can we know about their lives?

The lives of ordinary Christians—nonordained, nonmonastic, and nonaristocratic men and women—have been the focus of many studies in recent years.⁴ Textiles, inscriptions, amulets, household objects, letters, and saints’ lives provide fleeting glimpses of these often nameless lives.⁵ The size and layout of churches, their acoustic properties, the distance between the pulpit and the people, even the climate and weather shaped the experiences of audiences.⁶ Still, many records from Christian antiquity often overlook ordinary people. It is rare that a preacher describes the audience—the mothers and fathers, slave owners, artisans, foreigners, enslaved persons, freed persons, free persons, and non-Greek-speakers.⁷ And sermons have often been interpreted as reducing laypeople to a wayward bunch, a bloc of simplified foils preachers used to advance their pastoral agenda. The chasm is so obvious that one historian calls this a rhetoric of dichotomy and denigration.⁸ Yet, as the historians of Christianity Virginia Burrus and Rebecca Lyman remind other scholars, it is important to develop an eye and ear for differences that are not always oppositions.⁹

What can we know about ordinary Christians’ experiences when they gathered in ritual settings? By ordinary, I mean men and women, and enslaved, freed, and free persons who did not renounce sex or choose voluntary poverty. They neither led a religious community nor did they live in entirely Christian settings. In an age marked by extraordinary Christians—wonderworking saints, household ascetics, hermits, monks, nuns, pious aristocrats, pilgrims, and bishops—ordinary Christians went about their daily lives, in various occupations, raising children, and sharing households, kitchens, and baths in religiously diverse cities. If they experienced hunger, homelessness, or sleepless nights, such circumstances were by necessity, not by choice.¹⁰ Occasionally, they attended church liturgies, sought out local healers, and visited martyrs’ shrines. Barely and rarely mentioned in ancient texts, most ordinary Christians remain nameless and undifferentiated. We catch a glimpse of them from homilies delivered in urban churches. Not completely erased from the literary and material record, they often fell under the radar of elites who had more resources, influence, and education.

Accessing ordinary people’s lives and experiences may feel like a quest for impossible stories. Their interior experiences are all but lost or distorted by the records of the powerful. As Black feminist writers such as Marisa Fuentes and Saidiya Hartman point out in a different but still relevant context, modern historical records were created by and for elites engaged in slave-trading and slave-owning systems. Yet some historians have devised valuable correctives for capturing fragments of those who were dispossessed, dehumanized, or ignored in the eyes of white recordkeepers.¹¹ Inspired by these innovative, empathetic, and rehumanizing methods, this book investigates the habits, behaviors, and movements of ordinary Christians. It rereads literary records that originated in spaces where ordinary Christians gathered—such as baptisteries, streets, shrines, and churches—to understand their lived religious experience. Although these ordinary voices and lives have been all but lost, distorted, or ignored in many homilies or sermons, some parts of their shared presence may still be accessed by paying careful attention to instances when these physical, imaginative, sensory, and ritual bodies gather.

Studying the lives of ordinary people—that is to say, non-elites and sub-elites—begins with the body.¹² The particularity of bodies, and the knowledges such bodies produce, is at the heart of this book. The senses of smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing; the sensations of movement and being in a crowd; and the moods and feelings of such assemblies—all embody these gatherings. As the American religious historian Robert Orsi has put it, lived religion explores the corporeality of the people who participate in religious practices, what their tongues, skin, and ears ‘know.’¹³ These bodies may even have to stand in for the names of ordinary people.

In addition to their bodies, the traces of ordinary people’s material existence need careful attention. Archaeological, visual, and other material things may reveal dimensions of ordinary lives, including religion. Like ordinary people, ordinary objects are simultaneously overlooked and indispensable for understanding daily life.¹⁴ In slave economies, in which some people are treated as objects to be sold, bartered, separated, loaned out, borrowed, abused, or discarded, the need for later generations of historians to restore their humanity is even more urgent. How might historians of religion rehumanize marginalized people? Exploring the lived religion of ordinary Christians presumes the humanity of all children, women, men, enslaved people, freed persons, and foreigners, even as some in their society sought to dehumanize them. That is to say, it presupposes their awareness, agency, emotions, senses, labor, and interiority and mines surviving sources for traces of that presence. The study of ordinary Christians’ lived religion also considers how nonhuman objects bear witness to that humanity: a slave collar, an amulet, a handprint on a healing token, a skeleton, or a household lamp. These items all serve as reminders of the human being who never appeared in a text, yet wore, crafted, created, or clutched a given object.¹⁵ It calls attention to embodied existence by asking how sensations shaped their experiences and how feelings circulated in different settings and on different occasions.¹⁶

Lived Religion

Closely related to the study of ordinary religion is the work of scholars who study lived religion. Lived religion, in the words of the historian Robert Orsi, is how particular people, in particular places and times, live in, with, through, and against the religious idioms available to them in culture.¹⁷ Lived religion concerns itself less with moral norms and beliefs promoted by religious institutions, so as to focus more on creative, embodied, material, affective, and interpersonal dynamics of people who engage in these religious practices. Rather than focus on affiliation, belief, and formal membership, scholars of lived religion consider how clothing, objects, images, food, home shrines, storytelling, and music may enact one’s religious activity, or praxis. In lived religion, practitioners’ embodied experience is relational, as its practitioners sustain relationships with unseen beings, such as ancestors, spirits, and gods as well as with one another.

Some of the methods used by contemporary sociologists of religion may seem anachronistic for studying ancient lived religion. Without first-person testimonies or the ability to interview, some classicists and Mediterranean archaeologists have devised alternative methods to access ancient religion. A team of European scholars created the Lived Ancient Religion project to hold conferences and publish a journal, monographs, and essay collections devoted to studying the ways individual religious actors’ practices and beliefs diverged from official and traditional "polis religion" and cults.¹⁸ The project tends to focus on instances of religious change and religion in the making, with attention to sources that capture how individuals appropriate, change, and innovate existing religious habits and customs. Of course, the subjects of lived religion here are no longer living, hence the somewhat oxymoronic notion of lived ancient religion. As one of its lead investigators has put it, Rather than analyzing expert theologies, dogma, or the institutional setting and history of organized religion, the focus of lived religion is on what people actually do: the everyday experience, practices, expressions, and interactions that are related to and constitute religion.¹⁹ They look less to associations, public sanctuaries and literary communication in order to pay closer attention to objects and rituals in domestic settings. Seeking to understand religion from the ground up, the Lived Ancient Religion project highlights the diversity of ancient religious practice, a valuable context for early Christianity.

In one important regard, however, the Lived Ancient Religion project is less well suited to studying late antique Christian practices. The focus on individual agents who innovate, appropriate, and transform existing rites makes it a poor fit for the study of groups.²⁰ While acknowledging group-styles of family, neighborhoods, and associations, the preference is squarely on the individual’s capacity to create religion. Conversely, collectives merely repeat and reify religion, yet never transform or create it. In other words, ceaseless construction through individual action does not leave room for considering how groups are also makers.²¹ The emphasis on individual appropriation and modification of (mainly public) norms presumes only individuals have the agency necessary to appropriate and alter religious acts.²² This valuation of and starting from the individual guides the work of the Lived Ancient Religion project.²³ Even as individual communication is intersubjective, the individual is clearly the maker: Where are the religious agents in a framework fixated upon ‘festival’ and ‘collective practice’? one researcher asks rhetorically.²⁴ By contrast, this book presumes that groups exercise agency.

Ordinary Christians shared practices that created belonging in antiquity. From the house-church, to cohorts preparing for baptism, to chosen families, and even the immersive experiences of performing and reenacting sacred stories, early Christians found a sense of belonging together in rituals such as baptism and Eucharistic meals. As part of their new legal status, Christians explored new ways of feeling at home in the material world. Egyptian hermits and pillar saints remade the world in deserted spaces. Hospitals and philanthropy reknit civic culture. Liturgical choirs, new hymns, processions between churches, relic veneration, pilgrimage to holy places, and sacred biography are but a few examples of newly fashioned devotions in the fourth and fifth centuries. But individual elites often left a more durable mark on such innovation.²⁵ Even so, the greater presence of pilgrims’ hostels, the burgeoning trade in souvenirs, and the expansion of baptistery spaces all point to growing numbers of ordinary Christians participating in these devotions.

More Christian spaces also led to new relationships to sacred time during the fourth and fifth centuries. The evolution of various festal and liturgical calendars in diverse regions allowed groups to anticipate, repeat, revisit, reenter, and remember sacred stories in new ways. When the homilist Leontios delivered a Palm Sunday sermon in Constantinople near the turn of the sixth century, he addressed the congregation as you friends of Lazarus, a reference to the previous day’s feast day. As his phrase suggests, the bonds of friendship reached from the audience’s present back into Jesus’s days. You friends of Lazarus also presumes that the mood of the previous day’s feast carried forward the next feast day as Jesus’s friends accompanied him to Jerusalem.²⁶ Sacred stories about groups—whether disciples, soldiers, martyrs, or even the damned—generated group protagonists by which audiences might also become the protagonist of an event that has an impact on feelings and existence.²⁷ Doing and feeling were not strictly individual experiences.

Collective religious agency and creativity are central to recent scholarship on current lived religion in America. As the sociologist of American religion Nancy Tatom Ammerman observes, there has been a tendency to assume that religion is best measured in terms of the power of the official religious organizations and their leaders over the population in which they are located.²⁸ Religion, she contends, is not just about beliefs, membership (identity), institutional structures, and leadership. Rather than exclude these familiar elements, Ammerman advises simply decentering them.²⁹ She proposes a more capacious understanding of lived religion. It is material and corporeal, insofar as bodies and minds adopt and adapt religious idioms in the course of their lives, through birth, death, sexuality, relationships, and nature. As a site of multiple belongings, lived religion happens within and beyond religious structures. It extends to spaces people inhabit, economic activities, and other social configurations to encompass physical and creative activities people do together. Significantly, stories and rituals figure prominently in the study of lived religion. Unlike Ammerman’s subjects, ordinary Christians in antiquity left almost no autobiographical stories. Yet the performance of sacred stories—to which they sang along and gestured, and repeated during rituals like night vigils—suggests public ways they engaged in the personal stories of others.

Perhaps most valuable in Ammerman’s research method is her careful attention to historically conditioned blinders that narrow or distort our understandings of lived religion. One is the tendency to reduce religion to belief systems and institutions, a holdover from Protestant academic frameworks in the history of religion. Instead, closer attention to material facets of lived religion may correct for that bias. Behaviors, clothing, stories, and many other human activities may intersect with belief systems, but they need not be expressions of interior states. Ammerman also warns against the assumption that the more insular a group is—avoiding other religious or nonreligious groups or even coreligionists with different norms—the more pure or authentic their religious identity.³⁰ As the historian of ancient religion Nicola Denzey Lewis points out, classifications like public and private or religious and secular overlook the religious creativity of ordinary people who do not fit tidily into these boxes. When a couple affixes an object with a biblical name or part of a biblical verse onto their bedpost, do the words, names, practice, or setting make this habit popular, pagan, magic, Jewish, Christian, or superstition?³¹ Although some literate elites coined and even weaponized such terms, these notions rarely map tidily onto the realities of ordinary people’s daily lives.

Lived religion, then, gives voice to nonleaders who may draw sustenance from a religious community or a tradition, while engaging with other communities with ease. It is less concerned with conversion or competition, asking instead how ordinary Christians crafted their own rites, relationships, and bonds. Whether they participated in church festivals, observed the sabbath, attended theaters and games, or used amulets to ward off evil powers, their religious lives were embodied, material, affective, and collective.

Lived religion overlaps with lived theology, particularly in late antiquity. As the historian of late antiquity Averil Cameron warns, when cultural history separates lived religion from theology, it misses crucial dimensions of late antique Christianity.³² Like lived religion, lived theology does not limit itself to official scriptures, leadership, institutions, hierarchies, and doctrines. Instead, it attends to the particularities of human life. As the theologian Charles Marsh explains, Lived religion examines practices, beliefs, and objects, to understand more clearly the human phenomenon of religion, while lived theology examines practices, objects, and beliefs in order to understand God’s presence in human experience.³³ In premodern times, lived religion and lived theology may have been even closer, insofar as lived ancient religion encompasses not just humans but relationships with divine beings, such as gods, demons, or ancestors.³⁴ In lived theology, as in lived religion, sensual, sensory, affective, and physical experiences intersect, whether in a highly patterned Orthodox liturgy or a Black Pentecostal gathering.³⁵ Attentive to the particularities of experience, lived theology highlights how relationships and entanglements between God (or gods), spirit(s), and humans render ordinary people the crafters of stories through their bodies, voices, artifacts, and sensations.³⁶ They are makers whose actions and words make God real and kindle a feeling of absorption into the story.³⁷

Laity and Agency

It is important to consider whether the concept of laity is useful in studying ordinary Christians.³⁸ The word laity derives from the Greek word laos (people) and its cognate is laikos/Latin laicus (of the people).³⁹ In Greek mythology, laos was associated with the stones (laas) that the postdiluvial survivors Deucalion and Pyrrha threw behind them as a way to repopulate the earth.⁴⁰ As inert matter, the thingness of the laity was not confined to myth. In archaic Greek poetry, laos stood for a crowd or population undifferentiated by ethnicity, language, religion, custom, or culture.⁴¹ In the Septuagint, laos denotes a particular society or union as a way to differentiate people from their rulers or the upper classes.⁴² Its use in the phrase laos theou, God’s people, signifies Israel’s special relation to God. In the New Testament gospels, the term connotes crowd, population, or people, whether as an unthinking mob (Matt. 27:25; Mark 11:32) or as a new Israel.⁴³ Early Christians soon expanded the term to denote the congregation assembled for worship.⁴⁴ Yet laity still denoted passive recipients of clerical ministrations.

For Christians in the Byzantine East, church interiors and liturgical implements reflected and deepened the growing chasm between active clergy and passive laity. In early Byzantine churches, a low (roughly waist-high) partition separated laity from the chancel, where clergy consecrated bread and wine as part of the Eucharist. When the chancel barrier, or templon, was low, the laity could still observe the consecration of the communion bread and wine. In subsequent centuries, that partition became taller and opaque, typically covered with images and pierced by doors, behind which the priest prepared communion.⁴⁵ Eventually, priests further avoided contact with the laity by administering the Eucharist not directly in the hand but with long-handled communion spoons.⁴⁶

Similarly in the West, the laity remained in the shadow of the clergy, as canon law and liturgical practices divided them along vocational, linguistic, class, gender, and educational lines. Despite flourishing lay spiritual movements during the Latin Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation’s expansion of the laity’s ministries, negative stereotypes depicted the laity as passive, disengaged, illiterate, and vulgar.⁴⁷ The Second Vatican Council in the 1960s sought to reverse the infantilization of the laity by assigning a more active role and opening more—but certainly not all—ministries to baptized Christians.⁴⁸ Yet, over a generation after these papal efforts, one overview of the laity opens with this grim admission: A theology of the laity is a well-intentioned mistake, adding that laicism in all its forms is always a response to clericalism, one mistake spawning another.⁴⁹ Moreover, the prospects of an extraordinary ordinary modern Christian being canonized remains an open question among historians of Catholicism.⁵⁰ As one commentator put it, a paradigmatic clericalism has for too long shaped a negative definition of the lay state.⁵¹

Beyond Christian studies, the term laity has been similarly shackled to binaries.⁵² According to both editions of the Encyclopedia of Religion (1986, 2004), the term laity illuminates the internal diversity for some religious traditions, particularly those with two modes of pursuing spiritual fulfillment.⁵³ Thus, laity is apt for Christian traditions such as Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and some forms of Protestantism, as well as Theravada Buddhism and Jainism, which define a symbiotic relation between the higher path of religious virtuosi and the laity that supports and seeks out these renunciants.⁵⁴ It is less illuminating for religious traditions without ordained clergy.

Ritual studies and gender studies have illumined lay agency in a variety of activities. In many traditions, women and other laypeople practice a prominent role as agents through singing, dancing, sacred storytelling, receiving religious instruction, writing/copying/translating sacred writings, food preparation, divination, life-cycle ceremonies, fasts, listening and responding in the liturgy, funerary rites, or joining in pilgrimage and festivals.⁵⁵ For instance, images and continuous inscriptions carved on the exterior of a cathedral or an Indian temple can provide important evidence of how laypeople move around and experience religious buildings and their environs.⁵⁶ Even marking or setting apart special objects suggests lay agency.⁵⁷

Despite the greater attention given to lay religious practices, is the term laity still doomed to remain a parasite or a by-product of clericalism? Is laity locked into a dyad, there simply for the sake of creating and setting apart an elite, in the words of one historian?⁵⁸ Some proposed alternatives have included new or revived vocabularies. Popular has been, well, popular. In a lucid and systematic genealogy of the term popular culture from the eighteenth through the twentieth century, as one historian has noted, the concept popular has had pejorative overtones of unruly mobs or a counterculture, resulting in hierarchies such as religio vs. superstitio or other top-down, two-tiered models that pit so-called high versus low culture, or elite versus folk, thus reinscribing false or misleading dichotomies within a shared culture.⁵⁹

Even so, there are promising efforts to redescribe and resuscitate the category of laity.⁶⁰ According to the People’s History of Christianity, an ambitious multivolume collection, the church must be redefined to include the laity, the ordinary faithful, the people, a deliberate move away from church as a hierarchical-institutional-bureaucratic corporation.⁶¹ In fact, space is an important element in any redescription of the Christian laity. The two volumes in the series with essays on ancient Christianity consider a host of spaces, including baptistery, basilica, catacomb, house, chapel, shrine, synagogue, temple, cemetery, grave, and martyrium. Such spaces also prompt reflection on how objects mediate those experiences of the laity. For instance, how do curse-tablets, amulets, votives, and oracle tickets illuminate lay practices?⁶² When Christian leaders denounced Christians who engaged in these practices, they cast the objects as naive superstition and bad pagan habits. The reality of these objects in daily life clashed with a rhetoric of dichotomy and denigration.⁶³

Can hagiography provide a more nuanced picture of the laity? After all, crowded religious festivals and shrines were settings for telling tales of the saints. Are realia that reliable?⁶⁴ In many saints’ lives—patterned on narratives of ascetic progress in perfection—the laity