Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman World

297 Pages·2007·2.016 MB·English

by  Catherine M. Chin

Grammar and Christianity
in the
Late Roman World
DIVINATIONS:
REREADING LATE ANCIENT RELIGION
Series Editors
Daniel Boyarin
Virginia Burrus
Derek Krueger
Acomplete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.
Grammar and Christianity
in the
Late Roman World
Catherine M. Chin
university of pennsylvania press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2008University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly
citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written
permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chin, Catherine M.
Grammar and Christianity in the late Roman world / Catherine M. Chin.
p. cm.—(Divinations)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4035-1(hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8122-4035-9(hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Grammar, Comparative and general—History. 2. Christianity and culture—History.
3. Rome—History—Empire, 284–476. I. Title.
P63.C492007
415.0937—dc22 2007023273
For my parents
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Contents
1. introduction: toward tyranny 1
2. imagining classics 11
3. from grammar to piety 39
4. displacement and excess:
christianizing grammar 72
5. fear, boredom, and amusement:
emotion and grammar 110
6. grammar and utopia 139
epilogue:
christianization and narration 170
notes 175
works cited 245
index 261
acknowledgments 271
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1
Introduction
Toward Tyranny
his book is avery long answer
T to a very short question: How did
W
literate Romans of the fourth and fth centuries come to the idea that there
was such a thing as Christianity? On its face the question seems naïve.
There was, in this period, a dramatic growth in the numbers of people,
buildings, books, and public events that were called, at least in some con-
texts, Christian; historians now conventionally refer to this period as one
in which the Roman Empire was Christianized. The question that this book
attempts to answer, however, is not whether people or places called Chris-
tian existed in the later Roman Empire. Instead, the book addresses the
question of how some later Roman readers and writers went about trans-
forming those people, places, texts, and events into a generality, and how
they summoned that generality into conceptual existence. My basic argu-
ment is that a movement from the description of various people or things
as Christian to the concept of a free-standing religious and cultural entity
that could be named Christianity did take place in this period, but took
place in a series of quite tenuous intellectual movements, under very spe-
W
ci c educational conditions, and with no immediate guarantee that the
notion of Christianity would become an enduring component of the West-
ern cultural imagination. Christianitasis a decidedly uncommon formula-
tion in the early centuries of Christian history; its conceptual fragility is
worth examining.
Because this is a book about the conceptual consequences of names
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and naming, it is about language as much as it is about religion. Speci cally
it is about how the teaching of language in late antiquity shaped the ability
of late ancient readers and writers to have concepts that we call religious.
This language teaching was primarily in the hands of grammarians, and so
texts surrounding the discipline of grammar, in both Christian and tradi-
tional contexts, form the evidentiary core of this study. The modest premise