Faithful Narratives

Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity

Andrea Sterk, Nina Caputo, Andrea Sterk, Nina Caputo

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780801451829
• eBook ISBN: 9780801471049
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

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.Contributors: Peter Brown, Princeton University; Nina Caputo, University of Florida; Carlos Eire, Yale University; Susanna Elm, University of California, Berkeley; Anthony Grafton, Princeton University; Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College; Phyllis Mack, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; Kenneth Mills, University of Toronto; David Nirenberg, University of Chicago; Mark A. Noll, University of Notre Dame; David B. Ruderman, University of Pennsylvania; Lamin Sanneh, Yale University; Andrea Sterk, University of Florida; John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame.

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 by the gods. These ideas were preserved and subsequently published. No Roman emperor wrote more and no Roman emperor is therefore better known to modern historians than Julian.2

Surprisingly, however, few of the modern historians writing about the Emperor Julian are actually interested in much of what he wrote. In part, this may be explained by the content of these writings, treatises about gods such as the Great Mother of the Gods, also known as Cybele, or about Zeus, whom Julian equated with the Sun or Helios, phrased in the highly abstract language of Neoplatonism. Julian’s abstract philosophical treatises, for example on the relation between the transcendent One, or Zeus-Helios, and the sublunar sphere of the material world, are rarely of interest even to those historians who are concerned with his religious views, because Julian also expressed these views in the more concrete forms of imperial edicts and laws, the stuff true histories are made of. Moreover, Julian had been fairly straightforward about his political as well as religious decisions. The reason he had offered for his attacks against the ruling emperor, certain to result in civil war, was in fact that Constantius had murdered Julian’s entire family, and that he had done so as a Christian. Thus Julian hated Constantius and the Christianity he represented, converted back to the gods of the Greeks and Romans, and became known as the Apostate or deserter.

Modern historians of Julian are even less interested in another set of writings with religious overtones, those composed by Christians, better known as Fathers of the Church, who made the emperor into the infamous Apostate. Methodologically speaking, this is deplorable, because these Christian men belonged nearly without exception to the very elite whose opinion Julian sought to sway. Further, it was they who through their writings determined the emperor’s long future as the Apostate and Anti-Christ, a characterization he only escaped as a consequence of the Enlightenment and the works of Montesquieu and his successors. These Christian elite men included Basil of Caesarea, Ambrose of Milan, Jerome, Augustine of Hippo, and most prominently, Gregory of Nazianzus, the protagonist of the remainder of this paper. These men were fully aware of Julian’s proffered reasons for reverting to the gods of the Greeks and the Romans, as he called them, because of his murderous cousin, whom these authors often praised as a model Christian emperor. Not only were they aware of Julian’s philosophical treatises on the nature of the gods, which to them were not so abstract because they wrote in the same register, but they were also directly affected by the emperor’s laws regarding religion. Julian, his actions and his writings, thus elicited a phenomenal response on the part of the Christian members of the elite, terrified by the specter that this emperor could find an imperial imitator at any moment.3

Historiographical Impasse: Pagan versus Christian

The Emperor Julian and Gregory of Nazianzus, the most important of his Christian adversaries, are, in effect, representative for two different yet related matters. First, Gregory of Nazianzus’s entire literary oeuvre, which remains foundational for Christian orthodoxy to this day, is paradigmatic for the response of Julian’s Christian subjects. Second, the engagement of modern scholars with Emperor Julian and his Christian opponents is indicative of the ways in which modern scholars address religion, here Christianity, and what is commonly known as paganism. Scholars engaged with Julian, that is, historians, pay scant attention to Gregory of Nazianzus’s ample writings, in which he made Julian into the Apostate. Conversely, scholars who traditionally deal with men such as Gregory, Basil of Caesarea, and Augustine, that is, scholars of early Christianity, patristics, and theology, do not deal with the Emperor Julian. The reasons for such mutual disinterest are not difficult to parse. Julian the Emperor, the “Apostate,” and Gregory of Nazianzus, “the Theologian,” are emblematic for the relationship between Christianity and the later Roman Empire and its scholarly conceptualization. This relationship between Rome and Christianity continues to be cast in the familiar binary mode of the grand narrative. According to this narrative, the Roman Empire declined and fell soon after Christianity had triumphed and thus forced Romans to become pagans, destined to fade away, at the very latest when Christianized barbarians arrived at its gates. We are all familiar with the many variations of this theme. Such narratives assume, of course, that the Roman Empire and Christianity acted as distinct entities, oil and water, preserving their essential nature even when thrown together. Here the Roman Empire of the pagan gods and there Christianity, catapulted into the Greco-Roman world fully formed. Of course, recent scholarship has modified and nuanced such binary narratives to a considerable degree.

Yet old dichotomies are hard to shake, and the division of the late Roman world into pagans and Christians has proven particularly resilient. Because of the manner in which our modern scholarly disciplines are arranged, scholars of history still pay insufficient attention to phenomena that are, broadly speaking, religious, and scholars who specialize in theology—even though they may pursue “historical theology”—rarely acknowledge the historical context in which “their” authors wrote. “Historical theology” differs from systematic theology in that it deals with theological issues formulated in the past, for example, by these Fathers of the Church, but not as a set of intellectual responses to a defined historical context. There is very little history involved in historical theology. Conversely, historians of a period that arguably witnessed the rise of Christianity, including its theology, to the preeminent religion of the Roman Empire, often write as though this fact were of little consequence to the history of this period. If one wanted to be polemical, one could say that this is akin to studying the history of the French Revolution from the perspective of its leading men and on the basis of taxation, administration, and bridge building, but without paying any attention to topics such as liberty, equality, and brotherhood, since the latter topics fall under the purview of theologians, or cultural theorists. One can certainly write the history of the French Revolution quite profitably by focusing on the roads and bridges then built, but I hope to have made my point (and will make it again a bit more subtly below). In-depth study of the interactions of Julian and Gregory, two men supposedly on either side of the secular historian versus church historian and theologian (that is, the pagan-Christian) divide, shows how arbitrary these scholarly dividing lines really are, and how much they obscure rather than illuminate the history of the later Roman Empire.

Both Julian and Gregory belonged to the first generation of Romans born after Constantine had made Christianity legal and hence a real career option for elite men. These elite men were without exception deeply imprinted by their formation in paideia. Every Christian writer who mattered had undergone training on the basis of the writings of Homer, Hesiod, Thucydides, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle (or in the case of the Latins, Cicero, Varro, Livy, Sallust, Vergil, Ovid, Seneca, and so forth). These Christian writers were forensic rhetoricians, physicians, teachers, including teachers of the imperial family (regardless of its religious affiliation), high imperial administrators, including leaders, advisors, and administrators of their fellow Christians, as well as the emperor and his court. For them, in sum, as for all other members of the elite, classical learning was the status marker as well as the conditio sine qua non for any leadership position. Christian members of the elite were thus very similar to their non-Christian elite contemporaries.4

As far as Julian’s Christian contemporaries are concerned, men such as Gregory emphasized in their writings the deep gulf separating them from those “on the outside,” that is, their pagan relatives, friends, and neighbors. At the same time Julian’s hostility vis-à-vis his Christian cousin Constantius and all those similarly deluded fairly leaps off the pages of his writings. But what does this really mean? What lies behind these codes? Modern scholarly disciplines, as noted, are not conducive to bridging that gulf constructed (nota bene) by our sources.5 Scholars of ancient history usually end their studies with Constantine’s precursor Diocletian, often appending a short last chapter gesturing toward a Roman Empire ruled by a Christian and hence no longer part of their intellectual domain. Those who venture further into that Christian Roman realm tend to remain on the safe side of individual emperors and their rule, dealing with questions of imperial legislation, administration, and the army, with occasional forays into Christian councils, especially those where imperial involvement is palatable. Here the Emperor Julian provides welcome relief as a “pagan” emperor and thus “normal” material for real ancient historians. The strangeness of his paganism (potentially tainted by his Christian upbringing) can be further tempered by ceding his philosophical writings, such as his Hymn to the Mother of the Gods or that to King Helios, to the professional philosophers, better equipped to deal with such obtuse musings than ancient historians concerned with the realia of governance. Alas, most philosophers interested in classical philosophy are just that. Hence, for most of them Julian’s philosophical writings have little to offer, since Julian (as emperor) was no “professional” philosopher and his writings thus lack originality or system; he was undoubtedly no Iamblichus or Proclus.

As far as Julian’s impact on the writings of his most prominent Christian contemporaries is concerned, we enter the realm of social historians (who are very interested in the writings of these men, but not so much in their theology, that is, in the “philosophical” dimension of these men’s writings where Julian’s impact might be located), theologians, and church historians.6 The latter two groups in particular have their own concerns and scholarly traditions, which do not necessarily privilege dedicated searches for the pagan roots of the foundations of Christian thought and action, that is, orthodoxy. Julian, therefore, makes cameo appearances in man...

Table of contents

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Introduction The Challenge of Religion in History
• PART ONE Late Antique and Medieval Religious Debates and Their Modern Implications
• PART TWO Early Modern Perspectives on Spirituality, Culture, and Religious Boundaries
• PART THREE From the Premodern to the Modern World Sacred Texts, Individual Agency, and Religious Identity
• NOTES
• CONTRIBUTORS