Bishops and People: Looking for Local Religious Life in Late Antiquity (original) (raw)
Related papers
Pagan Temples, Christians, and Demons in the Late Antique East and West, SE 54 (2015)
In Late Antiquity Christian attitudes toward pagan shrines in diverse parts of the Mediterranean differed. In the East several temples were destroyed or transformed into churches, whereas in the West they were just abandoned at the end of the fourth century and remained closed during the next two hundred years. These contrasting attitudes have been explained by scholars on political, economic, and civic grounds. This article aims at demonstrating that religious motifs mattered as well, and the practical attitudes toward pagan shrines were influenced by the fact that in the East several temples were considered to be real dwellings of demons. This view on temples derived from an old tradition, absent from the West, of representing shrines as places of actual encounters with gods, from the spectacular way in which some temples functioned in Late Antiquity, and from some specific traits of eastern monasticism.
2012
The story of The Miracle of St Michael of Chonai was remarkably popular in the Byzantine world, spawning at least three versions of the story and numerous iconographic retellings that extend from Moscow to Mt Sinai. The ubiquity of representation reflects how important the city of Chonai (ancient Colossae) had become in the early medieval period, not merely as one of the major healing springs inviting pilgrimage but as an acclaimed locus of the success of Christianity against external competitors and internal fratricides. An array of these forces finds a narrative presence in the story, especially in its vernacular (anonymous) form, the oldest of the versions of the story. The battles with Greek idolatry, inter-city rivalry with Laodiceia and more nebulous pagan protagonists are related with increasing aggrandizement of the figure of St Michael, the archangel, the archistrategos. Whilst the narrative sequence suggests a stratigraphy of the story’s textual development, the literary features applied in the descriptions of Michael’s appearance complicate the notion of the triumph of Christianity through its leading, angelic defender. The cultures that are conquered in the story yet manage to leave their strong imprint upon the key character of the story and his actions. The suspicion that the healing waters granted and protected by St Michael were nothing other than a pre-Christian healing shrine taken over by Christian expansionism is strengthened by the language and imagery supplied to Michael. Various direct attributions are explored — Apollo, the Phrygian god Mên, Helios, Zeus — which leads to the realisation that the apparent Christian victory is more like a negotiated settlement, where sufficient lines of cultural continuity are exchanged that satisfied local devotees that the site could still be patronized, even with the adoption of a development in religious expression. The cost of the settlement is the near-annihilation of the feminine elements in religious expression, in effect deemed within the story to be the substance and face of paganism.
2020
The Lived Ancient Religion project has radically changed perspectives on ancient religions and their supposedly personal or public character. This volume applies and further develops these methodological tools, new perspectives and new questions. The religious transformations of the Roman Imperial period appear in new light and more nuances by comparative confrontation and the integration of many disciplines. The contributions are written by specialists from a variety of disciplinary contexts (Jewish Studies, Theology, Classics, Early Christian Studies) dealing with the history of religion of the Mediterranean, West-Asian, and European area from the (late) Hellenistic period to the (early) Middle Ages and shaped by their intensive exchange. From the point of view of their respective fields of research, the contributors engage with discourses on agency, embodiment, appropriation and experience. They present innovative research in four fields also of theoretical debate, which are “Experiencing the Religious”, “Switching the Code”, „A Thing Called Body“ and “Commemorating the Moment”.
Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World
2020
This paper discusses the first emergence of epitaphs and images indicative of Christian and Jewish affiliation and identity in Rome and its surroundings. It starts from the observation that unambiguous markers of Christianity only begin to emerge in the early 3rd century, and become more widespread towards the end of that century and in the 4th century. It further argues that, with very few exceptions, the same is most likely true also for indications of Jewish identity, and concludes that this lateness cannot be explained by fear of hostility in either case. Instead, it is suggested, this phenomenon must be seen in the wider context of a new desire emerging around the same time to form groups based on ethnic identities that engage in communal activities such as burial or dedications, and of those groups to make their ethnicity known. If this chronological coincidence could be confirmed by future research, it would not only support the view that religious identity grows out of ident...
Review of European Paganism: The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages by Ken Dowden
Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, 2007
List of illustrations x Acknowledgements xii Foreword xiii How to use this book xvii Authors and events: a time-chart xx 1 Approaching paganism 1 Pagans, so primitive 1 Christian ending 4 Roman government 4 Germanic invaders 8 Beyond the Roman pale Beyond the Byzantine pale Evidence Latin and other languages Greek and Roman windows on barbarian culture 2 Dividing the landscape 25 Location Focus and area Physical features (absolute position) Relative position Ownership: public and private Power The god in the stone? Strength in numbers: tree, stone, spring 3 Focus I: spring, lake, river 39 Spring and well What a spring is Prevalence CONTENTS vi Purity and health What happens at springs and wells Saints, the conversion of the aniconic, and heads Other water Lake River Water worship 4 Focus II: stone and tree 58 Stone What a stone is Feelings about stones Personalising stones Stones and permanence Stone as the object of cult What happens at stones Tree What trees are like Personalising trees Notable trees What happens at trees Pagan tree and Christian objectors 5 Area I: land 78 Hill and mountain What mountains are like Worship on mountains: lightning and fire Shore and island Sea: shore and promontory Islands Cave 6 Area II: growth 89 Meadow Grove What a grove is like Grove and temple-culture The feel of natural groves Grove and garden Groves and barbarians 101 Groves and placenames 104 CONTENTS vii The power of groves Ancient groves Inviolability On the Dusii demons… Divine ownership Inside the grove 7 Technology: statues, shrines and temples Statues The place of statues Impressive statues and Christian destruction Temple, fanum, ecclesia What a temple is The shape of temples Contents and decoration Shrines, vocabulary and placenames Temples in less developed cultures Continuity Instances What are Christians to do with temples or fana? Destroy the fana! Build churches! 8 Christian paganism 149 Christian knowledge Textuality: coming down from Sinai Specificity What pagans do Eating and drinking Dance Particular customs New Year's Day Thursday The moon Laurel Catechism: renouncing what?
2011 - A Companion to Roman Religion
2007
Rome matters. Roman religion is, basically, the religion of one of the hundreds of Mediterranean city states. Many features of this type of territorially bound religion, centred around a politically independent community, characterise Roman religion down to the end of antiquity. However, Roman cults, gods, iconography, rituals, texts, were exported to many places throughout the Roman Empire. A change of the point of view produces similarly ambivalent results. Many of the religious traditions or concepts that attracted people in Rome originated outside of Rome and were shared by many non-Romans. At the same time, even the major religious traditions of antiquity gained distinct features at Rome and these Roman varieties informed developments outside Rome. After all, Rome was a capital, politically for the Imperium Romanum, religiously not only for the cult of the Capitoline triad, but for Isis or Christianity as well. It is one of the many attractions of the theme of “Roman religion” that in dealing with the traditions of a metropolis (and its growing “hinterland”) we are able to look into transformations reaching far beyond. At the same time we are reminded of one of the truths of modern globalisation: place and local culture matters. Religion matters. Ancient religion is not longer the object of – at best – antiquarian research, interested in “Altertümer” and pre-rational behaviour, i. e. the European exotic. With the cultural and the following “turns,” religious institutions, signs and practices, religious mentalities and language, have come to the centre of mainstream historical and literary studies. Thus, analysis of religion itself can no longer be handled as an isolated sector of culture but has to be contextualized within its cultural, social, and economic setting and has to be analysed for its political function and its use in legitimating power or resistance. Aims The volume aims to help its readers - put the manifold religious symbols, discourses, practices, which they encounter in literally every field of ancient studies, into a larger framework; - offer a broad range of methodological approaches to seemingly intransigent phenomena; the presuppositions and limits of these approaches will be made explicit; - offer basic information about the most important religious symbols and institutions; and - attempt at coherent narratives, yet not to formulate new orthodoxies, but rather to suggest that narrative is an important form of historical explanation and a didactically useful tool.
Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World, 2020
The Lived Ancient Religion project has radically changed perspectives on ancient religions and their supposedly personal or public character. This volume applies and further develops these methodological tools, new perspectives and new questions. The religious transformations of the Roman Imperial period appear in new light and more nuances by comparative confrontation and the integration of many disciplines. The contributions are written by specialists from a variety of disciplinary contexts (Jewish Studies, Theology, Classics, Early Christian Studies) dealing with the history of religion of the Mediterranean, West-Asian, and European area from the (late) Hellenistic period to the (early) Middle Ages and shaped by their intensive exchange. From the point of view of their respective fields of research, the contributors engage with discourses on agency, embodiment, appropriation and experience. They present innovative research in four fields also of theoretical debate, which are “Experiencing the Religious”, “Switching the Code”, „A Thing Called Body“ and “Commemorating the Moment”.
DOI 10.1628/219944615X14234960199632. This article presents the concept of “lived ancient religion” as the methodological perspective underlying the contributions to this issue. For antiquity, the term is employed in order to denote an approach that focuses on the individual appropriation of traditions and embodiment, religious experiences and communication on religion in different social spaces, and the interaction of different levels facilitated by religious specialists. This approach is intended to replace the dated (and, with regard to Mediterranean antiquity, anachronistic) model of ‘state religion’ and ‘religions’/‘cults’ in its variants.
Religion in the making: the Lived Ancient Religion approach
Abstract: For the past five years (2012–2017), the Max Weber Center of Erfurt University has hosted a project on ‘Lived Ancient Religion: Questioning “cults” and “polis religion”’, financed by the European Research Council and embedded in the research group on ‘Religious individualisation in historical perspective’ (see Fuchs and Rüpke. [2015. “Religious Individualisation in Historical Perspective.” Religion 45 (3): 323–329. doi:10.1080/0048721X.2015.1041795]). It was designed to supplement existing accounts of the religious history of the Mediterranean area at the time of the long Roman Empire, accounts traditionally centred upon public or civic institutions. The new model focuses on the interaction of individuals with a variety of religious specialists and traditions, taking the form of material culture, spaces and text. It emphasises religious experience, embodiment and ‘culture in interaction’. On the basis of research into the history of religion of the Roman Empire, this co-authored article sets out to offer new tools for research into religion by formulating three major perspectives, namely religious agency, instantiated religion and narrated religion. We have tried to illustrate their potential value by means of 13 short case studies deriving from different geographical areas of the central and eastern Mediterranean area, and almost all relating to the period 150 BCE to 300 CE. These short descriptions are summarising research pursued by the members of the team of authors, published or to be published in extended form elsewhere, as indicated by the references.