Between Personal and Institutional Religion: Self, Doctrine, and Practice in Late Antique Eastern Christianity

358 Pages·2013·1.33 MB·English

by  Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony

Between Personal and
Institutional Religion
CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS IN
LATE ANTIQUITY AND THE MIDDLE AGES
General Editor
Yitzhak Hen, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Editorial Board
Angelo di Berardino, Augustinianum–Instituto Patristico, Rome
Nora Berend, University of Cambridge
Leslie Brubaker, University of Birmingham
Christoph Cluse, Universität Trier
Rob Meens, Universiteit Utrecht
James Montgomery, University of Cambridge
Alan V. Murray, University of Leeds
Thomas F. X. Noble, University of Notre Dame
Miri Rubin, University of London
Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.
Volume 15
Between Personal and
Institutional Religion
Self, Doctrine, and Practice
in Late Antique Eastern Christianity
Edited by
Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Lorenzo Perrone
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Between personal and institutional religion : self, doctrine, and practice in late antique
Eastern Christianity. -- (Cultural encounters in late antiquity and the Middle Ages ; 15)
1. Christian life--History--Early church, ca. 30-600.
2. Christian life--History--Early church, ca. 30-600--Sources.
3. Spiritual life--Christianity--History of doctrines--Early church, ca. 30-600.
4. Eastern churches--Doctrines--History.
5. Christianity--Byzantine Empire.
6. Experience (Religion)--History of doctrines--Early church, ca. 30-600.
I. Series
II. Bitton-Ashkelony, Bruria editor of compilation.
III. Perrone, Lorenzo editor of compilation.
281.5'09021-dc23

ISBN-13: 9782503541310

© 2013, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2013/0095/205
ISBN: 978-2-503-54131-0
e-ISBN: 978-2-503-54201-0
Printed on acid-free paper
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction
BROURIA BITTON-ASHkELONY and LORENzO PERRONE 1
‘Trembling at the Thought of Shipwreck’:
The Anxious Self in the Letters of Barsanuphius and John of Gaza
LORENzO PERRONE 9
Memory and Forgetting in Romanos the Melodist’s On the Newly Baptized
GEORGIA FRANk 37
The Great Kanon of Andrew of Crete, the Penitential Bible,
and the Liturgical Formation of the Self in the Byzantine Dark Age
DEREk kRUEGER 57
Personal Experience and Self-Exposure in Eastern Christianity:
From Pseudo-Macarius to Symeon the New Theologian
BROURIA BITTON-ASHkELONY 99
The Transmission of Early Christian Memories in Late Antiquity:
The Editorial Activity of Laymen and Philoponoi
ALBERTO CAMPLANI 129
vi Contents
The Cave of Treasures and the Formation of Syriac Christian Identity
in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Between Tradition and Innovation
SERGEY MINOV 155
The Treatment of Religion in Sixth-Century Byzantine Historians
and Some Questions of Religious Affiliation
ROGER SCOTT 195
‘Packed with Patristic Testimonies’: Severus of Antioch
and the Reinvention of the Church Fathers
YONATAN MOSS 227
Julianism after Julian of Halicarnassus
ARYEH kOFSkY 251
Uniformity and Diversity in the Early Church: The Date of Easter,
the Jews, and Imperial Symbolism in the Sixth Century and Beyond
ODED IRSHAI 295
At Cross Purposes: The Ritual Execution of Haman in Late Antiquity
HILLEL I. NEwMAN 311
Scriptural Index 337
General Index 339
Acknowledgements
This book is the outcome of a research group on Personal and Institutional
Religion: Christian Thought and Practice from the Fifth to the Eighth
Cent uries, which was in session at the Institute for Advanced Studies
of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from September 2009 to August 2010.
The group consisted of the following participants: Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony
(The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Oded Irshai (The Hebrew University
of Jerusalem), Aryeh kofsky (University of Haifa), Derek krueger (University
of North Carolina, Greensboro), Hillel Newman (University of Haifa), István
Perczel (Central European University, Budapest), Lorenzo Perrone (University
of Bologna), and Roger Scott (University of Melbourne). Throughout the
year the group hosted seminars, led both by fellows and guests, among them,
Hagith Amirav, Philippe Blaudeau, Emiliano Fiori, Bas Ter Haar Romeny, and
Michelle Salzmann.
As coordinators of the research group, we took great delight in sharing our
year of study and discussion with our fellows and guests at the Institute for
Advanced Studies. we thank our colleagues for sharing with us their wisdom and
dilemmas, and for their friendships, old and new. we are particularly grateful for
the contribution of Joëlle Beaucamp (Université d’Aix-Marseille), who actively
participated throughout the year as an adopted member of the group. The ques-
tions on which we reflected in the course of the research year were called forth in
the concluding conference of the group, held at the Institute (8–9 June 2010). we
benefited greatly from the discussions that took place during the conference, and
the participation of several colleagues from Israel and from abroad: Peter Brown,
Alberto Camplani, Georgia Frank, Sergey Minov, Yonatan Moss, Claudia Rapp,
and David Satran. The results of the conference are presented in this volume.
we owe much of the productivity of the year to the effective work and gener-
ous initiative of our scientific assistant, Yonatan Livneh. we would like to express
our warm gratitude to the Hebrew University and the Rothschild Foundation
for their generosity, and especially to the Director of the Institute for Advanced
Studies, Prof. Eliezer Rabinovici; the former Associate Director, Pnina Feldman;
and the present Associate Director, Lea Prawer; as well as to their dedicated staff,
who constantly did everything possible to facilitate our work and provide us with
friendly hospitality. Special thanks are due also to Evelyn katrak for her rigorous
editing of the English.
In memory of Pnina Feldman
Introduction
Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Lorenzo Perrone
As Robert Markus has described in his essay Between Marrou and Brown:
Transformations of Late Antique Christianity, historians in the last dec-
ades have continued to reinterpret the ‘delicate balance of continuities
and transformations that define a historical Christian self-identity’.1 Continuing
this effort, the group aimed to discern the dynamics of change and continuity in
late antique Eastern Christianity through the lens of the categories of ‘institu-
tional religion’ and ‘personal religion’. In adopting these categories as a heuristic
tool, we do not mean to imply opposition of ‘personal versus institutional reli-
gion’, nor do we wish to impose a dichotomy between the two. As kim Bowes has
reminded us in her insightful study Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious
Change in Late Antiquity, private devotion and public worship were not always
rigidly separate categories. Nor was the mutual penetration of personal and insti-
tutional religion exclusive to the realm of worship. This became increasingly
apparent when we approached, for example, the subjects of the self, identity for-
mation, and theological developments in the late antique Christian East.
Eschewing any attempt to define these tangled categories, we neverthe-
less recognized that ‘personal religion’, individual piety, became tremendously
important in the period under discussion. This development was due in particu-
lar to the blossoming of an ancient monastic culture and the impact of its ascetic
ideals on late antique society as a whole. within this spiritual setting a new sig-
nificance was imparted to the individual experience of religion, which expressed
itself in a variety of ascetic manifestations, the most vital of them being spiritual
direction involving monks and laymen, the new practice of individual prayer,
1 Markus, ‘Between Marrou and Brown’, p. 13.
Between Personal and Institutional Religion: Self, Doctrine, and Practice in Late Antique
Eastern Christianity, ed. by Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Lorenzo Perrone, CELAMA 15
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 1–8 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.CELAMA-EB.1.100738
2 Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Lorenzo Perrone
and a new awareness of its goals and effects. This perception provided the provi-
sional starting point for our research group, presupposing that, when compared
to the previous epoch, the picture presented, particularly from the fifth century
to the eighth, seemed to imply also a phase of ‘revision’ and ‘stagnation’ in reli-
gious thought, practice, and exegetic trends. At first glance, the transformations
in this regard seemed to emphasize most of all an element of ‘stagnation’, as
evidenced mainly by the lack of originality in exegetical activity and doctrines.
However, the final impression of our joint research points to a more balanced
verdict. without denying the aspects that betray a decline in theological crea-
tivity under the growing pressure of dogmatic constraints after the Council of
Chalcedon, it was possible to better appreciate the situation of theology in the
face of such unique outcomes as the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus and the rich flow
of polemical literature. Moreover, even dogmatic controversies had finally to
be regarded in a new light as phenomena capable of mobilizing not only the
intellectuals but also the common people, and providing them with a new sense
of identity. Refining our initial questions and abandoning the notion of ‘stag-
nation’, we recognized the creative aspects inherent in the process of ‘revision’,
whether of thought or practice. By approaching the period in terms of ‘revision’
we asked, then, from a new perspective, about the mechanism of transformation
in Eastern Christianity, discerning social and religious changes while continu-
ing to navigate between the dynamics of personal and institutional religion.
Though the group was dedicated essentially to developments within late
antique Eastern Christianity, we consistently dealt also, in parallel, with the
issues raised during the same period by the creative stage of rabbinic Judaism,
providing an instructive contrast for our discussions. we thus came to explore,
to a modest extent, several avenues of Jewish-Christian interaction in the insti-
tutional and public sphere.
* * *
Several topics and approaches around which this book is organized have
received great scholarly attention in the last decades and have now fully pen-
etrated the consciousness of the late antique discipline. The ‘cultural turn’ in
the discipline has been traced more than once; most recently, Dale B. Martin
has charted its major steps in his excellent introduction to The Cultural Turn in
Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography. Pursuing one of
the fundamental shifts in the discipline sketched in this study, ‘the move from
institutional and intellectual history to social history’,2 the essays in our volume
2 Martin and Miller, eds, The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies, p. 16.