City of Demons: Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity - Hardcover

Kalleres, Dayna S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520276477 ISBN 13: 9780520276475

Verlag: University of California Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Although it would appear in studies of late antique ecclesiastical authority and power that scholars have covered everything, an important aspect of the urban bishop has long been neglected: his role as demonologist and exorcist. When the emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the realm, bishops and priests everywhere struggled to “Christianize” the urban spaces still dominated by Greco-Roman monuments and festivals. During this period of upheaval, when congregants seemingly attended everything but their own “orthodox” church, many ecclesiastical leaders began simultaneously to promote aggressive and insidious depictions of the demonic. In City of Demons, Dayna S. Kalleres investigates this developing discourse and the church-sponsored rituals that went along with it, showing how shifting ecclesiastical demonologies and evolving practices of exorcism profoundly shaped Christian life in the fourth century.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dayna S. Kalleres is Assistant Professor of Early Christianity at the University of California, San Diego.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

“In City of Demons Dayna Kalleres jolts readers out of their secular modern world to experience the richly enchanted and animated cities of late antiquity. Through case studies of John Chrysostom in Antioch, Cyril in Jerusalem, and Ambrose in Milan, Kalleres repopulates the late antique landscape with its demons and highlights the significance of the rituals and rhetoric of spiritual warfare in post-Constantinian Christianity. This engaging and methodologically sophisticated cultural history of urban demonologies challenges scholars to take account of the ways in which perceptions of human/demon interactions shaped the late Roman world.”—Christine Shepardson, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee and author of Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy

“Dayna Kalleres has written a creative and original book that is sure to make a tremendous impact. In lucid and engaging prose, she asks readers to reimagine the post-classical city as an animated space, alive with unseen forces. To take this urbanscape of late antiquity seriously is to engage in entirely new ways with our ancient Christian sources and to revise our understanding of religious community, identity, and conflict.”—Andrew Jacobs, Mary W. and J. Stanley Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies at Scripps College

Aus dem Klappentext

“In City of Demons Dayna Kalleres jolts readers out of their secular modern world to experience the richly enchanted and animated cities of late antiquity. Through case studies of John Chrysostom in Antioch, Cyril in Jerusalem, and Ambrose in Milan, Kalleres repopulates the late antique landscape with its demons and highlights the significance of the rituals and rhetoric of spiritual warfare in post-Constantinian Christianity. This engaging and methodologically sophisticated cultural history of urban demonologies challenges scholars to take account of the ways in which perceptions of human/demon interactions shaped the late Roman world.”—Christine Shepardson, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee and author of Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy

“Dayna Kalleres has written a creative and original book that is sure to make a tremendous impact. In lucid and engaging prose, she asks readers to reimagine the post-classical city as an animated space, alive with unseen forces. To take this urbanscape of late antiquity seriously is to engage in entirely new ways with our ancient Christian sources and to revise our understanding of religious community, identity, and conflict.”—Andrew Jacobs, Mary W. and J. Stanley Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies at Scripps College

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

City of Demons

Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity

By Dayna S. Kalleres

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-27647-5

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction. The City in Late Antiquity: Where Have All the Demons Gone?, 
PART ONE. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM AND ANTIOCH, 
1. A City of Religious Pluralism and Spiritual Ambiguity, 
2. The Devil Is in the Ritual, 
3. The Spectacle of Exorcism, 
PART TWO. CYRIL AND JERUSALEM, 
4. Jerusalem to Aelia, Aelia to Jerusalem: Monumental Transformations, 
5. Cyril of Jerusalem: The Devil in the Word, the Demons in the Image, 
6. Apocalyptic Prophets and the Cross: Revealing Jerusalem's Demons from the Crucifixion to the End of Days, 
PART THREE. AMBROSE AND MILAN, 
7. Ambrose and Nicene Demoniacs: Charismatic Christianity Inside and Outside Milan, 
Abbreviations, 
Notes, 
Ancient Language Editions by Series, 
Translations of Ancient Sources, 
Selected Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

A City of Religious Pluralism and Spiritual Ambiguity

A fever could be a frightening, life-threatening ordeal in late antiquity. Luckily, Antioch offered the sick an overwhelming array of cures. A person, particularly of means, would first visit any number of physicians (Gk. iatroi; L. medici) available in a city as large as Antioch. He or she might then seek the services of a divinatory expert (Gk. mantis) to inquire after his or her future recovery, or travel beyond the city gates to one of the holy men in the caves of Mount Silpius for a wondrous cure. A person might also pray at one of the many martyr shrines outside the city, or healing might be obtained from incubation near one of the caves called called Matrona found in association with many of the very ancient synagogues in Daphne. Rumors circulated that incantations were offered by rabbis within the synagogues also, or itinerant healers might sell a healing incantation for a price. There were also old drunken women selling their healing amulets. Nurses in homes all over the city were well versed in folk remedies; an old woman healer (Gk. graus; L. anus) might come into the home offering incantations with a powerful mixture of Christian and non-Christian divine names.

Antioch's citizens engaged in tightly entwined healing and ritual practices, drawing upon a wide variety of powers that gave them comfort. Whether they were Greek, Jewish, or Christian, religious identity was superfluous in most aspects of day-to-day existence. John Chrysostom, however, did not rest easily with the spiritual ambiguity and dangers such ritual pursuits invited into the larger Christian community. Should someone fall victim to a fever, he was quite clear: Christian prayer and ecclesiastical ritual were the only options. All other ritual cures were demonic deceptions. In this he was absolute. Even if the fever attacked a small child and certain amulets were known to offer a cure, it would be better that a mother allow her child's body to die than accept amulets touched by the devil. Using amulets would doom the child's soul to eternal damnation.

This chapter and the next two approach John Chrysostom's efforts to peel Christians away from their ritual lives outside the church — in order to have a hope of saving these souls. Chapter 1 offers a tour of Antioch and Daphne that attends closely to the enchanted worldview and the animistic environments as well as John Chrysostom's related ritual practice. Inhabitants practice a wide range of rituals, and he insists that participation in non-Christian practices produces dangerous spiritual entanglements; in some cases demonic possession may result. While John utilizes the demonization of non-Christian activity, he is far more dependent upon diabolization. In his sermons, and perhaps even more so through his regulation of sacramental practice, Chrysostom transforms the spiritual ambiguity or abundance of Antioch into an active and predatory anti-Nicene evil.

Chapter 2 then pieces together several different demonological narratives that exist in his corpus of sermons. John also puts together powerful Nicene images in balance against his depictions of demonic predation. In his baptismal sermons as well as elsewhere he also projects persuasive images of sacramental and ecclesiastical ritual. He promotes these practices as effective weapons of spiritual warfare against a growing diabolic power.

Chapter 3 finally introduces our demonic case study or demonic crisis in John Chrysostom's Antioch and Daphne. As discussed in the introduction, John's harsh views against Jews and Judaizers during the High Holidays and Pesach provide material for our consideration of his strategies and tactics of diabolization.

Before traveling straight on to Antioch, however, we must first pause to consider a few details regarding interpretive language and concepts. This kind of study calls for the development of individualized tools to facilitate our examination of the strategies of diabolization in the late antique city. This pertains to Antioch, of course, but also to Jerusalem and Milan.

A CULTURAL OF SUPRAHUMAN PRESENCE AND RITUAL IN THE LATE ANTIQUE CITY

Antioch's religiously and culturally complex urban environment creates a form of ritualized identity all but inscrutable to our modern, post-Reformation eyes. Isabella Sandwell has recently recaptured a vital sense of how integral ritual practice was to religious identity in Antioch at the time. Significantly, she denies the actuality — and, in fact, desirability — of discrete religious identity in Roman imperial society; instead, "practices were shared by people whatever their religious allegiances." Drawing from Bourdieu's notion of habitus and his concept of embodied ritual dispositions, Sandwell builds an argument for Greco-Roman society's fluid play between religious difference and religious allegiance; she claims that a finely tuned sense of ritual action allows Antiochenes to feel "right" in the conflicting microenvironments of their social world: "[Antiochenes] would have ingrained in them unspoken dispositions and habits relating to tactful and appropriate ways of dealing with this sensitive situation." She invokes the concept of instinctive ritual play to build her discussion of Antioch's religious pluralism. In this way, Antioch's religiously pluralistic society diffused tensions. Once we reach the fourth century, Christian leaders, Chrysostom included, begin developing and imposing ideological rules and clear-cut categories in the construction of religious identity. The priest attempts to enforce strict, rule-bound structures upon those accustomed to a fluid approach to religious allegiance/difference. He meets with conflict and inevitable failures, as Sandwell has observed.

Sandwell's use of Bourdieu is smart and insightful, and her argument is extremely persuasive. However, her predominant methodology, i.e., sociology, foreshortens our view into the late antique urban environment to a modern (disenchanted) understanding of Antioch in the 380s. Likewise, I propose that her primary evidence — i.e., Chrysostom's preaching, as she defines it, "an explicit, linguistic, ideological, rule-based medium" — eclipses our view into the full and possible range of the elements that inform religious identity in this period, and, moreover, into the construction of that identity in the midst of religious...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520276477
• ISBN 13: 9780520276475
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 392
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande