The Power of Religion in Late Antiquity

Andrew Cain, Noel Lenski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754667254
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317019534
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Late Antiquity witnessed a dramatic recalibration in the economy of power, and nowhere was this more pronounced than in the realm of religion. The transformations that occurred in this pivotal era moved the ancient world into the Middle Ages and forever changed the way that religion was practiced. The twenty eight studies in this volume explore this shift using evidence ranging from Latin poetic texts, to Syriac letter collections, to the iconography of Roman churches and Merowingian mortuary goods. They range in chronology from the late third through the early seventh centuries AD and apply varied theories and approaches. All converge around the notion that religion is fundamentally a discourse of power and that power in Late Antiquity was especially charged with the force of religion. The articles are divided into eight sections which examine the power of religion in literature, theurgical power over the divine, emperors and the deployment of religious power, limitations on the power of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the use of the cross as a symbol of power, Rome and its transformation as a center of power, the power of religion in the barbarian west, and religious power in the communities of the east. This kaleidoscope of perspectives creates a richly illuminating volume that add a new social and political dimension to current debates about religion in Late Antiquity.

PART I

Religion and the Power of the Word

Chapter 1

Disarming Aeneas: Fulgentius on Arms and the Man

Emily Albu

University of California, Davis

Just two weeks before the 2007 shifting frontiers VII conference in Boulder, the action epic 300 opened in theaters. screenwriter and director Zack snyder had ample heroic material with which to work in the three hundred spartans who fought to the death against a throng of invading Persians at Thermopylae. But snyder had no interest in allowing the ancient sources to retell their story. Rather, he faithfully animated the images in frank Miller’s graphic novel 300, itself inspired by the 1962 film, The 300 Spartans.¹ As one reviewer of Snyder’s film wrote, the result is “an over-the-top take on ancient Greek history.”² Another critic summarized the movie more concisely: “The Chippendales wage war.”³ some admirers of the film thought it a spectacular reworking of the heroic genre for the computer-gaming generation. Other viewers considered its intentions less benign and noted that the film displays beautiful Greeks fighting bravely for western freedom and democracy against evil hordes of grotesque slaves, and oddly orientalized Africans. The fearless Spartans do not die in vain, and their sacrifice inspires all Greeks to mobilize against the Persians bent on annihilating Athenian democracy. Judging this to be thinly veiled propaganda in favor of an American assault on his country, a spokesman for the Iranian government condemned 300 for glorifying “hostile behaviour which is the result of cultural and psychological warfare” and for offering “an insult to Iran.”⁴

The new millennium has seen a resurgence of films set in antiquity, featuring ancient heroes recast for our own age and often harboring a latent political agenda. Gladiator began this revival with a hero remarkably attuned to the George W. Bush campaign rhetoric of the 2000 election.⁵ Maximus is a strong and simple man, a devoted husband, father, and patriot, and an outsider determined to restore decency and honor to a corrupt and cynical empire. The Achilles of the film Troy reveals how the national mood had shifted by 2004, as he scorns the bellicose yet cowardly Agamemnon in words widely interpreted as a critique of Bush.⁶

Much like today’s film-makers, Christian mythographers in Late Antiquity appropriated ancient heroes for their own purposes.⁷ But they worked with a greater sense of urgency. Their mission was to discredit the core meaning of the stories that had long defined their own civilization and the place of human beings in the cosmos. Variously using philosophical arguments or flights of mystical imagination, they deployed creative etymologies, allegory, or other rhetorical devices in order to dismantle the received notions of these pagan texts and to replace them with radically different Christian ways of thinking.

Fulgentius the Mythoclast

A late antique master of this art was Fulgentius the mythographer.⁸ Modern scholars have been highly critical of his works. Thus, for example, this well-known assessment by Laistner: “Among the remnants of an effete and expiring classicism none are more pretentious, yet essentially trivial, than the three treatises which bear the name of fabius Planciades fulgentius.”⁹ Yet fulgentius mesmerized medieval writers and readers and transformed the reading of ancient myths for more than a thousand years.

We do not know precisely who he was or when he lived. He has often been identified as the anti-Arian bishop Fulgentius of Ruspe (468–533). Hays, however, has recently demonstrated that they were almost certainly not one and the same person.¹⁰ although both Fulgentii lived in North africa, the mythographer seems to have written his Mitologiae after the bishop’s death, most likely in the 540s or 550s but perhaps near the very end of the sixth century. Clues to the mythographer’s identity are extracted mainly from his own texts: Mitologiae (The Mythologies) in three books, Expositio Virgilianae continentiae (An Explanation of Vergilian Continence / Contents), Expositio sermonum antiquorum (The Explanation of Obsolete Words), and De aetatibus mundi et hominis (On the Ages of the World and of Man). The first two of these, the Mitologiae and Continentia, conspire to demolish the network of tales and beliefs that supported Greco-Roman paganism.

Both the Mitologiae and Continentia expose their author as a late antique deconstructionist who fired an assault on the conventional ways of understanding the ancient myths. They also present a rigid moralist who aimed literary criticism as his weapon of choice against pagan lust in protection of Christian values, combining the eclectic pedantry of a late antique schoolman with the prudish sensibilities of the new moral majority toward the ancient heroic ideals. He proved unusually adept at this and singularly persuasive, seducing readers with his distinctive blend of erudition, wit, sarcasm, and rhetorical razzle-dazzle. His attack was relentless. The Mitologiae reduced gods and heroes, one after another, to etymological or allegorized constructs, in the process repeatedly ridiculing the lies and depravities contained in the ancient tales.

Modern critics have sometimes tried to defend allegory as an honest attempt at reconciling the irreconcilable. Here, for instance, is what Comparetti says about Fulgentius and allegory:

[Allegory] is the instructive and honest resource of men, whose minds are dominated at one and the same time by two contradictory influences of equal power, from neither of which are they able to free themselves. Allegory is a species of dialectical hallucination, which owes its origin to those earnest convictions which are natural to a vigorous and impulsive temperament.¹¹

Fulgentius’ motives for his own hallucinations may have been more calculated. He seems obsessed with exposing the sexual decadence of pagan culture and with revealing the old gods as lechers and perverts and the old literature as pornography. so his prologue to the Mitologiae (10.19–11.18) disabuses the muse Calliope of her expectation that this is a standard work on Greco-Roman myth:

The title of my little work has misled you, Your Noble Garrulousness. I do not sing about the horned adulterer being smitten, or the maiden deceived by a false shower, as the god (in that first instance) by his own judgment preferred a beast to himself and (in the second) seduced with gold the woman he could not get with his political clout [potestate]. I do not write about the thigh of a young lover fed to a swine’s jaw, nor in my little work has juvenile licentiousness dangled beneath a falsely assumed wing. I do not explore the adulterer slinking around in swan’s plumage, foisting his chick-bearing eggs on maidens instead of pouring child-bearing seed into their innards … What I wish to do is to expose those altered vanities …; and so I look for the faithful performance of reality, so that once the fictional invention of lying Greece has been destroyed, we may grasp what allegorical understanding one ought to discern in these stories.¹²

In other words, Fulgentius would both demolish the obscene pagan tales and rescue from them some edifying meaning, to which people were finally receptive, now that their world was Christian.

In this process he showed considerable prurient interest in highlighting the obscenity that he found lurking within the story, as in the Danaë interpretation above (and repeated at 1.19), where the golden shower is simply a metaphor for Jupiter’s sex-for-gold scandal. Time and again Fulgentius zeroed in on the aetiological/allegorical core of pagan myth, which he repeatedly explained as lust-driven. So the pagans depicted Venus “floating in the sea, because all lust suffers shipwreck” (2.1);¹³ Hercules’ love for Omphale symbolized the battle against lust (2.2); and “Antaeus stands for lust, so also in Greek we say antion, contrary; and likewise he was born from the earth because lust alone is conceived from the flesh” (2.4).¹⁴ In the same vein, when he interpreted Scylla to mean “disorder” (confusio; 2.9), he asked, “And what is confusio if not lust (libido)?”¹⁵

Fulgentius thus ripped the ancestral gods and heroes from their venerable positions as cultural icons. Some he ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Power and Religion on the Frontier of Late Antiquity
• Part I Religion and the Power of the Word
• Part II Power Over the Divine: Porphyry, Iamblichus, and the Struggles for the Philosophical Tradition
• Part III Emperors and the Deployment of Religious Power
• Part IV Ecclesiastical Hierarchies and the Limits of Religious Power
• Part V Constantine and the Power of the Cross
• Part VI Rome: The Center of Power
• Part VII The Power of Religion in the Barbarian West
• Part VIII The Power of Religion in the Communities of the East
• Bibliography
• Index