Memories of Utopia

The Revision of Histories and Landscapes in Late Antiquity

Bronwen Neil, Kosta Simic, Bronwen Neil, Kosta Simic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032337685
• eBook ISBN: 9780429827891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

These essays examine how various communities remembered and commemorated their shared past through the lens of utopia and its corollary, dystopia, providing a framework for the reinterpretation of rapidly changing religious, cultural, and political realities of the turbulent period from 300 to 750 CE.

The common theme of the chapters is the utopian ideals of religious groups, whether these are inscribed on the body, on the landscape, in texts, or on other cultural objects. The volume is the first to apply this conceptual framework to Late Antiquity, when historically significant conflicts arose between the adherents of four major religious identities: Greaco-Roman 'pagans', newly dominant Christians; diaspora Jews, who were more or less persecuted, depending on the current regime; and the emerging religion and power of Islam. Late Antiquity was thus a period when dystopian realities competed with memories of a mythical Golden Age, variously conceived according to the religious identity of the group. The contributors come from a range of disciplines, including cultural studies, religious studies, ancient history, and art history, and employ both theoretical and empirical approaches. This volume is unique in the range of evidence it draws upon, both visual and textual, to support the basic argument that utopia in Late Antiquity, whether conceived spiritually, artistically, or politically, was a place of the past but also of the future, even of the afterlife.

Memories of Utopia will be of interest to historians, archaeologists, and art historians of the later Roman Empire, and those working on religion in Late Antiquity and Byzantium.

Part I
Writing and rewriting the history of conflicts

1
Curating the past

The retrieval of historical memories and utopian ideals

Bronwen Neil

When we think of how historical memories are transmitted through generations and centuries, we may think of a wide range of artefacts, from written texts to inscriptions, art, and architecture.¹ We might also think of the little things that carry memories for individuals: an ancestor’s book, a watch, or a treasured piece of jewellery. Some cultural productions may seem incidental and even trivial compared with the ideas behind commemorative community practices, such as raising monuments at sacred sites, processing with holy books, or liturgically commemorating past heroes and villains. It is clear from memory studies that objects imbued with memory (souvenirs), acts of commemoration, and the associated cognitive processes all played an important role in keeping utopian ideals alive in Late Antiquity, as they do today.

By studying the history of cultural artefacts and practices from the early Christian centuries to 750 CE, we can show the operation in the past of two powerful ideas, with which we are more or less familiar in the current post-truth millennium. The first is that the destruction of common memories destroys cultural unity. The second is that such memories can be reframed by changing the cultural record, by altering the physical environment or erasing or altering the public discourses by which significant events are remembered, whether with celebration or mourning.

Why study memory and utopian ideals together?

The contributors to this volume reveal how various religious groups in Late Antiquity created new memories of the past and forged a new vision of the collective future by manipulating religious texts and by destroying and/or repurposing material objects. To this end, we have drawn upon and adduced a unique range of evidence, both visual and textual, to support the basic argument that utopia in Late Antiquity, whether conceived spiritually, artistically, or politically, was an imagined place or state of the past but also of the future, even extending to the next life. Our collective assumption is that the ways in which past and future utopian communities were envisaged and commemorated in literature and the visual arts reveal what was most important to that group’s identity, whatever their religious affiliation. We apply this conceptual framework to Late Antiquity, a period when historically significant conflicts arose between the adherents of four major religious identities: Christian, Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Muslim. By exploring the many ways in which the past was remembered and rewritten in Late Antiquity, we seek to discover whether the same commemorative practices can be found across time, across space, and across religions during the establishment of a new, Christian identity.

The studies within this volume span the period from the initial contact of Graeco-Roman communities with Christians of various stripes up to the Arab-Byzantine wars of the mid-seventh and eighth centuries. We have used various terms to describe this period, depending on the context: the early Christian centuries (first to fourth); the Later Roman Empire, which ended with the departure of the last Western emperor from Italy in 476; or Late Antiquity, a vaguely defined period that spans from the third century to the seventh or eighth century. Our common task is to show how various religious groups in Late Antiquity manipulated religious and historical texts, and destroyed or repurposed material objects, to create new idealised memories of the past and to forge a new vision of the collective future.

My task here is to highlight and explore some of the key ideas of the chapters within, and to show how the application of theory to the data provides us with new evidence and opens up new avenues for exploration. Let us start with the important question of definitions before we review some recent significant studies in the fields of memory retrieval and the construction of utopian communities, and the links between the two.

Defining our terms

In English, the term utopia has inescapable associations with Sir Thomas More’s Latin work of the same name, subtitled in the English translation: ‘A fruitful and pleasant work of the best State and of the public Weal, and of the new isle called Utopia’ (More 1516; Robinson 1551). Since More’s coinage, the term has been used in a variety of contexts, including political (especially in regard to Marxism), architectural, and science fiction discourses. Variously derived from Greek eu-topia (‘well place’) or ou-topia (‘no place’), a utopia is often defined in terms of its opposite, dystopia.

For members of subcultures in conflict with the mainstream, utopia is a landscape of the imagination. It often has religious overtones, as we will see in the conflicts described within, between pagans and Christians, between Christian subgroups, and between Christians and other monotheists. We have consciously used the dated term pagan to identify practitioners of traditional Graeco-Roman religion and the adherents of mystery cults. The term, while unsatisfactory in that it has pejorative overtones and seems to assume a ‘non-pagan’ perspective, has been redeployed in recent scholarship on Late Antiquity (Rives 2009). We hope our readers will accept it in lieu of a more satisfactory term.

Utopia is an imaginary landscape of the past or future, one which is based on an ideological pursuit of purity and happiness. The idea of utopia and its opposite, dystopia, is a multi-valent topos, which has been the key to so much art and literature in the past that it is easy to assume we know what it means in any given context without really thinking about it.

It is often easier to articulate what is not an ideal living community than to encapsulate the ideal in precise terms. Classical utopias (in Latin, locus amoenus) were places where the weather was never inclement; where there was no shortage of food, water, or shelter; where entertainment was free; and where work was not required. A state of physical bliss is also the foundation of the Zoroastrian concept of Paradise, imagined as a garden with continuous running water, flowers in constant bloom, and trees bearing fruit all year round. This idea found a counterpart in the Christian heaven, with hell, its dystopian counterpart, being envisaged as the exact opposite: a place of fire and brimstone, where physical tortures went on forever.

In his monumental work Ideology and Utopia, German sociologist Karl Mannheim (Mannheim 1936), introduced the concept of collective utopian thinking to his sociology of knowledge. Utopia for Mannheim was a concept that predominated among oppressed groups, rather than the ruling class. Utopian thinking occurred when a group was intellectually invested in the destruction and transformation of a current feature of society to such an extent that the sole focus of its members was directed towards those aspects of the current social order that needed changing.² Mannheim contrasted utopian thinking with ideological thinking: while utopian thinking seeks to change the current social order, ideological thinking seeks to preserve it. Both ways of thinking share the fault of being unable to diagnose society as it actually is; the reality to be comprehended is distorted and concealed by the blinders of either utopianism or ideology. This distortion is complicated by the fact that the reality we fail to comprehend may be a dynamic one (Mannheim 1997: 87). ‘A state of mind is utopian when it is incongruous with the state of reality in which it occurs,’ Mannheim asserted (1997: 173). It may be able to be realised in a future social order, however (1997: 177).

In respect to heavenly hopes, or what we have termed eschatological utopia, Mannheim believed that as long as medieval society could locate Paradise outside society, in a sphere which transcended history and dulled its revolutionary edge, it did not require utopian thinking to believe that such a place or state existed. Late Antiquity is an interesting time to view the change from non-utopian thinking to ideological thinking. The idea of Paradise was fully integrated into medieval society (Mannheim 1997: 174), but in the Gothic West and the early Byzantine East of the fifth to seventh centuries, the concepts of heaven and hell, with their eternal implications, were still gradually being introduced. While medievals expected that a utopian state could only be realised in a future time, after death, late-antique writers were more genuinely hopeful, even revolutionary, in their thinking about social change in the present day. Mannheim’s distinction between utopian and ideological thinking thus does not apply to the earlier period. Many late-antique writers, builders, and artists were not concerned to maintain the status quo but rather to challenge existing social orders.

The focus in utopian studies has mostly been directed towards groups rather than individuals. Clint Jones and Cameron Ellis (2016) have attempted to retrieve the individual in their multidisciplinary studies of collective utopias. Their volume moves away from the dominant, macro-level theorising on identity and its relationship to globalising trends, focusing instead on the individual’s relationship with utopia. Theirs is a theoretical study, which does not deal with practical attempts to build a utopia in urban or rural settings.

Early memory studies have followed a similar trajectory from a focus on group memories to those of individuals. The contested term cultural memory (Das kulturelle Gedächtnis) was first adopted in ancient world studies by Egyptolo-gist Jan Assmann (2000: 11–44; 2007) and is linked with the identity of a finite community that transmits a fixed culture. As an increasing body of scholarship on memory history (Gedächtnisgeschichte) has demonstrated, however, both remembering and forgetting are more dynamic than Assmann’s theory allowed. They are social, cultural, or cognitive processes that are rarely neutral (Conner-ton 1989; Baxter 1999), and may be fictitious. The creation of fictive memories could also be an unconscious or accidental act. Rather than speaking of cultural memory, many historians now prefer to use the alternatives coined by Maurice Halbwachs: collective memory (Halbwachs 1950) or social memory (Halbwachs 1952). However, even these terms have been subject to compelling critiques with the boom of memory studies in the 1990s. Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam warned that the concept of collective memory occupies a sort of no-man’s-land, becoming ‘the predominant notion which replaces real (factual) history, on the one hand, and real (personal) memory, on the other hand’ (Gedi and Elam 1996: 40).

The so-called memory boom of the 1990s, which affected various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology, history, sociology, cultural studies, and cognitive studies, has exposed the ways in which memories of the past can be manipulated to suit present political agendas or serve prevailing ideologies (Klein 2000; Berliner 2005; Thiessen 2008). In a ground-breaking study of Germany’s rituals and traditions of remembering the Holocaust in memorials and counter-memorials, James Young spoke of collected memories and of their collective meaning in society (Young 1993). According to this view, our traditions and cultural forms continuously assign common meaning to our disparate memories (Young 1993: xii). Individuals cannot share another’s memory any more than they can share another’s cortex, even when groups share ‘socially constructed assumptions and values that organise memory into roughly similar patterns’ (Young 1993: xi). This position is still widely cited as authoritative, for example by Corning and Schuman (2015: 12). However, Susan Crane persuasively argued for the need to retrieve the individual from collective memory in historical studies (Crane 1997).

The applicability of social-memory theories to antiquity continues to be debated, as shown in the recent exchange between T. P. Wiseman and Karl Joachim Hölkeskamp in Memoria Romana (Galinsky 2014), where Wiseman argued that collective memory cannot be carried in monuments and literature (Wiseman 2014: 40). He favoured the term popular memory, which he found in competing, especially non-elite, forms of remembering. This is most significant, he argued, in oral and performative cultures, in particular the classical Roman games. Against Wiseman, Hölkeskamp (2016) defended the power of material and literary culture to emote memory. The memories invested in material objects were particularly important to those in power, until such a time as people failed to connect with the memories evoked, at which point physical symbols became objects of resistance (Alderman and Dwyer 2009).

When studying ancient societies, we need to heed Martin Bommas’s warning that, when pushed too far, the concept of social memory comes to represent ‘a theoretical and idealising picture of the past in the past’ (Bommas 2011: viii). To avoid this idealising tendency, we need to take into account the influences of conflict and the use and abuse of power invested in one group over others. In the process, we will uncover a hidden record of religious conflicts and supremacist discourses that operated across the various religious groups of the Roman Empire from 300 to 750...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Map of the Byzantine Mediterranean 500–700 CE
• PART I Writing and rewriting the history of conflicts
• PART II Forging a new utopia: holy bodies and holy places
• PART III Rewriting landscapes: creating new memories of the past
• PART IV Memory and materiality
• Scripture index
• Index