Martyrdom and Memory

Early Christian Culture Making

Elizabeth Castelli

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780231503440
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Martyrs are produced, Elizabeth Castelli suggests, not by the lived experience of particular historical individuals but by the stories that are later told about them. And the formulaic character of stories about past suffering paradoxically serves specific theological, cultural, or political ends in the present. Martyrdom and Memory explores the central role of persecution in the early development of Christian ideas, institutions, and cultural forms and shows how the legacy of Christian martyrdom plays out in today's world.

In the pre-Constantinian imperial period, the conflict between Roman imperial powers and the subject Christian population hinged on competing interpretations of power, submission, resistance, and victory. This book highlights how both Roman and Christian notions of law and piety deployed the same forms of censure and critique, each accusing the other of deviations from governing conventions of gender, reason, and religion. Using Maurice Halbwachs's theoretical framework of collective memory and a wide range of Christian sources—autobiographical writings, martyrologies and saints'lives, sermons, art objects, pilgrimage souvenirs, and polemics about spectacle—Castelli shows that the writings of early Christians aimed to create public and ideologically potent accounts of martyrdom. The martyr's story becomes a "usable past" and a "living tradition" for Christian communities and an especially effective vehicle for transmitting ideas about gender, power, and sanctity.

An unlikely legacy of early Christian martyrdom is the emergence of modern "martyr cults" in the wake of the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School. Focusing specifically on the martyr cult associated with one of the victims, Martyrdom and Memory argues that the Columbine story dramatically expresses the ongoing power of collective memory constructed around a process of rendering tragic suffering redemptive and meaningful. In the wake of Columbine and other contemporary legacies of martyrdom's ethical ambivalence, the global impact of Christian culture making in the early twenty-first century cannot be ignored. For as the last century's secularist hypothesis sits in the wings, "religion" returns to center stage with one of this drama's most contentious yet riveting stars: the martyr.

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COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND
THE MEANINGS OF THE PAST

The solution to the question …—how is the memory of groups conveyed and sustained?—involves bringing these two things (recollection and bodies) together.

—PAUL CONNERTON, How Societies Remember

Was der Raum für die Gedächtniskunst, ist die Zeit für die Erinnerungskultur.

—JAN ASSMANN, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis

WHAT DOES IT MEAN for a group to constitute its identity through the memory of past suffering? How is that memory constructed, refined, and maintained over time? What are the dynamics of authority and authenticity that govern this memory work? What is the relationship between the knowledge built upon collective memory and historical knowledge? What modes of interpretation and meaning construction are at work in these different ways of thinking about and reconstructing the past? Is it incidental that collective memory seems often to be particularly focused on the experience of violence, a meaning-shattering occurrence?¹ These are some of the questions that frame this book’s exploration of early Christian martyrdom and collective memory.

In the last twenty years, the theoretical language of collective memory has become increasingly important to interdisciplinary historical and sociological discussions of how groups and societies construct and understand the past.² This orientation to the study of how collectivities make sense of their own present through recourse to constructed narratives of their pasts offers important insights to students of early Christianity. In what follows, I will seek to provide a brief history of the idea of collective memory or social memory, paying special attention to the historiographical challenges that this way of thinking about the past raises.

MAURICE HALBWACHS’S THEORY OF SOCIAL MEMORY

A theory of collective memory was first articulated in the modern period by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945).³ A disciple, first, of philosopher Henri Bergson and later of sociologist Emile Durkheim, Halbwachs sought to create a systematic model for social memory. Positioning himself explicitly against Freudian psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the individual unconscious and on the psychic processes of repression and forgetfulness, Halbwachs was interested in how the past comes to be apprehended and rendered meaningful by individuals.⁴ Halbwachs argued that memory is a social construction, the product of the individual’s interaction with his or her group—be this family, social class, religious community, or some other collectivity with which the individual is affiliated. Halbwachs published his views on these matters in three major works over the course of a twenty-five-year period: Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, published in 1925,⁵ La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte, which appeared in 1941,⁶ and La mémoire collective, published posthumously in 1950.⁷

As its title suggests, The Social Frameworks of Memory argues that individual memory is necessarily produced within a social frame. Here, Halbwachs asserts that individuals remember things only in relation to the memories of others. Individuals obviously possess personal memories peculiar to their own psychologies and experiences, yet even these memories are filtered through the social field. Their meanings derive their intelligibility from context and collectively generated frameworks of significance. Given that individuals are embedded in different and multiple social groupings, even the most personal memory cannot help but derive its sense from the collective context. Moreover, in a precursor to later poststructuralist theorizing, Halbwachs observes that even the most private memories are preserved in language, which renders them social entities rather than the products of autonomous individual consciousness. Memories are processed through language, which provides the conventional and customary meanings that then refract back onto the memory. Through retelling—whether narrative, performative, representational, even liturgical—memory accrues meaning through discursive and embodied repetition.⁸

In situating personal consciousness of the past within a collective context, Halbwachs argues that “memory” in essence performs a socially conservative function—that is, memory (a particular, socially constructed version of the past) operates as an ideological ground for the present. This tendency toward conservation—or, perhaps better, preservation—emphasizes continuity between the past and the present, establishing an attachment or bond across time. In this way, collective memory does the work of “tradition,” providing the conceptual and cognitive constraints that render past experience meaningful in and for present contexts.⁹

Social memory offers one important way for groups to situate themselves temporally and topographically.¹⁰ Individuals, as members of groups (families, social classes, religious communities, political parties), generate their own sense of the past out of the different groups’ accountings of the past. Halbwachs is particularly interested in the structuring work that memory does socially, politically, and culturally. Therefore, individuals figure in his analysis only insofar as they are participants in groups, never as distinct and detached memory holders. He steers away from the physiological and philosophical questions that captivated his early teacher, Henri Bergson, about the dualistic relationship between matter and memory.¹¹ Instead, Halbwachs is very much a disciple of Durkheim, seeing the individual only in terms of the collectivities of which he or she is a part.

In this same early work, Halbwachs pays special attention to the conservative aspect of memory within religious communities in particular. In a chapter entitled “Religious Collective Memory,” he observes the dual character of ancient Greek and Roman religions, organized around the household, on the one hand, and around public, political institutions, on the other. Both forms of religion—domestic and civic—involve positioning the collective (the family or the city) in relationship to its own past. But Halbwachs expends the bulk of his energy devoted to analyzing religion on a lengthy discussion of the origins of Christianity. This discussion, although constrained by the limits of the scholarship on early Christianity of his day, nevertheless offers some intriguing points of departure for this discussion.

Religion as a generic category and as a dimension of human life is, not surprisingly given his allegiance to Durkheim, for Halbwachs a foundationally social enterprise. Moreover, in the spirit of his time, he is not afraid to make sweeping statements about all religions and their collective relationship(s) to the(ir) past(s). “Every religion … reproduces in more or less symbolic forms the history of migrations and fusions of races and tribes, of great events, wars, establishments, discoveries, and reforms that we can find at the origin of the societies that practice them,” he writes.¹² Religion, in Halbwachs’s account of it, is in essence a form of cultural memory work. What makes it different from the cultural memory work of other collectivities or modes of social life is the heightened importance attached to religion’s complex and potentially paradoxical relationship with the past. This is particularly amplified at moments of ideological and institutional stress or change. On the one hand, religious transformations involve a sort of displacement of a society’s or group’s historical center of gravity and a reconfiguration of its core assessments of the past. That is, when religious change occurs, narratives of origins may be problematized, historical legitimations for contemporary practices may be questioned, and lineages and genealogies may be challenged. On the other hand, religious innovation must always be couched in the past’s terms, Halbwachs argues, and so religious reforms will most often be described not as departures from but as reclamations of the past. “Even at the moment that it is evolving, society returns to its past,” he writes. “It enframes the new elements that it pushes to the forefront in a totality of remembrances, traditions, and familiar ideas.”¹³

For the religions of Mediterranean antiquity and late antiquity, this view seems to hold true—the Augustan restoration, for example, was an innovative movement whose author consciously cloaked it in the authorizing garments of the distant past.¹⁴ The emergence of rabbinic Judaism—a radical reimagining of the law in the light of the destruction of the temple—used the language of conservation rather than innovation, building up in the process a new collective memory of a remote past.¹⁵ Early Christianity, for all its talk of a “new covenant” and a “new creation,” nevertheless rooted itself in existing national narratives and epic pasts.¹⁶ Moreover, one of the important rhetorical strategies of early Christian apologists was to argue for their movement’s superior embodiment of the highest virtues from the classical world.¹⁷ Ultimately, Christianity generated its own myth of origin, which itself became the touchstone for all subsequent narratives of Christian collective memory. Claims to collective memory, here and elsewhere, operate in part to rationalize innovations in societies where ruptures with the past create cultural anxiety.

In exploring Christianity as an example of collective memory, Halbwachs observes this tradition’s peculiar relationship to time. Although all religions, in Halbwachs’s view, are wholly oriented toward the past, Christianity’s relationship to time is different because it claims to be simultaneously both historical at its root and outside of time, eternal. The liturgy of Christianity embodies this paradox. The Eucharist is a ritual restaging of a purported historical event; both event and ritual reenactment take place in history, in time. The cultic, commemorative repetition, however paradoxically, seeks to remember something that recedes ever more persistently into the past the more it is reenacted.¹⁸ Moreover, part of Christianity’s moral force resides precisely in its claim to exist outside history, beyond the confines of historical contingency. Halbwachs emphasizes the Christian negotiation with time by focusing on the power of repetition, not only in the ritual of the eucharist (“the successive sacrifices—celebrated at distinct moments and in distinct places—are one and the same sacrifice”¹⁹), but also in the idea of revelation’s simultaneous eternity and constant renewal. “Dogma, just as the cult, is ageless; within the duration of passage of time of the changing world, it imitates the eternity and the immutability of God.”²⁰

But perhaps most important for this study is how Christianity negotiates its relationship to time and history through its engagement with the idea of Christian origins. Halbwachs notices the critical role played by the collective memory of the early years of the church in subsequent social formations and theological commitments. Just as the religious innovation embodied in the founding of Christianity situates itself in relation to its precursors, so any subsequent innovation comes to be measured in terms of an imagined past. “Every time that the Church was called upon to judge new theses, new cults or new details of the cult, new modes of life and religious thought, it asked itself first of all whether these conformed with the body of usages and beliefs of this first period.… The Church repeats itself indefinitely, or at least it claims to repeat itself.”²¹ In the early centuries of Christianity, apologists and heresiologists alike would generate a portrait of the movement as one with an unbroken, monolithic tie to the past. Collective memory—at once deeply conservative and terrifically malleable—would serve this ideological project with great facility.

Some years after the publication of The Social Frameworks of Memory, Halbwachs continued his explorations of Christian collective memory in a work entitled La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte: Étude de mémoire collective (The legendary topography of the gospels in the Holy Land: A study of collective memory), published in 1941. In The Social Frameworks, Halbwachs had devoted a chapter to “The Localization of Memories.”²² In The Legendary Topography of the Gospels, he developed this idea of “localization” by analyzing the production of Christian origins through the memory work of Christian pilgrims, travelers, and crusaders. Mapping their notions of the Christian past onto the topography of the Holy Land, these travelers constructed a useable Christian past for their own Christian present. For the fourth-century pilgrims who initially mapped the Christian world of the Holy Land, this Christian past often was built directly on top of important Jewish sites. Like the allegorical and typological interpreters of scripture who found the Christian message embedded in the Hebrew Bible, these pilgrims produced a continuous Christian meaning out of Jewish precursors.

Halbwachs depends in his analysis of the gospels primarily on the work of Ernest Renan (1823–1892) whose influential Vie de Jesus (Life of Jesus) participated in the broader nineteenth-century destabilization of dogmatic accounts of the historical Jesus.²³ Despite the fact that this whole body of work from the original “quest of the historical Jesus” has been relegated largely to the realm of the artifactual,²⁴ Halbwachs’s use of it offers some insights that remain critical to the contemporary project. Halbwachs reads the history of gospel writing as an occasion of collective memory, noting that there is a broad “framework of resemblances” shared by the gospels with respect to locations and narrated events as well as to the meanings attributed to these places and happenings. The multiplicity of memories present in the gospel accounts need not be seen as a problem requiring a solution, Halbwachs argues. There is, instead, a brand of paradox embedded in the very claim...