The Crucible of Religion in Late Antiquity

As the second of Guy G. Stroumsa’s two contributions to the Studies and Texts in Antiquity and Christianity series from Mohr Siebeck, the duly-named collection of independently-written articles and essays, The Crucible of Religion in Late Antiquity: Selected Essays, has as its central aim the adumbration of “some of the major themes linking [the problems of late antique religious history] together” (vii). Indeed, the unity of this variegated collection—in its underlying search for the “new religious ethos” of the late antique religious environment—strains, at times, under the relative specificity of each chapter’s contents, but it nevertheless provides to the student of late antique religion and history a considerable and stimulating array of material with which to map their understanding of the period.

The book receives a somewhat tenuous division into two parts, a condition that is understandable given the book's constitution as a compilation of essays and articles written over the course of Stroumsa’s career. The first part, “Christ’s Laughter: Visions, Docetism, Martyrdom,” deals with what the author terms the “mental aspects of religion;” these chapters contain, inter alia, treatments of the myth of Prometheus and its late antique reception history, the evolution of Christian understandings of the visio beatifica (beatific vision), the emergence of Orphism and its influence on Jewish, Christian, and Gnostic communities and texts, and the oft-overlooked relationship between early Christian martyrdom and the notion of propitiatory sacrifice. And while a careful perusal of these chapters rewards the reader of more general interests with a path from particular instantiations of the late antique religious ethos to its broader cartography (Stroumsa is always careful to draw this connection), there exists in these chapters, too, plenty of grist for the specialist’s mill.

Chapter 7 (“Christ’s Laughter: Docetic Origins Reconsidered”) and 8 (“The Greek and Jewish Origins of Docetism”) illustrate the aforementioned dynamic well. In the latter, Stroumsa and his chapter co-author Goldstein trace the development of 2^nd-century docetic portrayals of Christ’s crucifixion. They argue, contra the either/or tendency in studies on the origins of Docetism and Gnosticism alike, that distinct elements from both (non-Platonic) Greek and Hebrew sources lay behind the laughing Christ who escapes death on the cross. This Christ is one we encounter, for instance, in the Nag Hammadi Corpus’ Treatise of the Great Seth and the Apocalypse of Peter. Stroumsa and Goldstein observe that the Greek eidolon (image) tradition, which begins in Homer with Apollo’s fashioning of Aeneas’s “image” (eidōlon; Iliad V) and Ulysses’ perception of Herakles’ eidōlon in Hades (Odyssey XI), and which continues into the lyric poets (Stesichorus and Pindar) through to the Athenian tragedians (Euripides), functions as a “technical literary device” used for the purpose of revising theologically problematic myths (113).

This tradition, along with its basic function, is suggested to have merged with 1^st century CE Jewish traditions about the “binding of Isaac” (Akedah; Gen. 22) and the Lord’s derisive laughter against the “kings” and “rulers” of Psalm 2 (LXX). As a result “the problem of the suffering Jesus was solved by referring to the vain plot against the Messiah in Psalm 2 and of the sacrifice of a substitute, as in the binding of Isaac and in the Greek stories about the eidōlon” (124). The discussion that Stroumsa provides in these chapters is at once informative to the philologically-oriented scholar whose research centers on Gnostic texts and communities, and to the historian whose interest lies primarily in the period’s broader ideological currents and trajectories.

The book’s second part brings to the fore questions of “religious communication across cultures and communication across cultures and communities” (2) in the Roman Empire. In these chapters, and in particular “The End of Sacrifice Revisited,” “Axial Religion in the Late Antique Scriptural Galaxy”, and “On the Roots of Christian Intolerance” (chapters 11, 15 and 16 respectively), one observes a firm commitment to “la longue durée (long duration) and les vastes espaces (vast spaces) a methodology which, Stroumsa suggests, is especially suited to the task of charting late antiquity’s religious ethos (1).

The first and second of the aforementioned chapters (11 and 15) each explore two of the four major late antique religious transformations that Stroumsa enumerates in his The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity (University of Chicago Press, 2005)—those being the termination of blood sacrifices and the rise of “book religions,” respectively. The third, as an examination of the roots and causes of Christian intolerance beginning in the 4^th century, purposes to render intelligible Christianity’s dramatic progression from the persecuted religio illicita to empire-wide persecutor, all in the span of three centuries.

Stroumsa’s claim, which is sure to be of interest even to scholars of modern religion and culture, is that “the growth of intolerance in the conflict between religions in late antiquity has to do more with the deep transformation of the concept of religion” (243) than with the ascendancy of monotheism. By this he means that from its inception, Christianity reconceptualized vera religio (“true religion”) as a “matter of truth” and “personal conviction,” in contradistinction to the late antique Pagan idea of a “civil religion” founded upon ancestral tradition. With its eventual politicization in the 4^th century, the universally oriented proselytic impulse of Christianity, innervated by a dual understanding of itself as vera religio and the religiously other as falsa religio (a distinction eventually made explicit by Augustine), gave birth, as a matter of course, to a species of intolerance that was both bitter and absolute (238-242).

The Crucible of Religion in Late Antiquity may be likened to a wonderfully overgrown pathway through a dense wood: though the attractive roadside “flora'' often compete for the reader’s attention, and indeed do often justify (and reward) his peculiar interest, the “path” of late antique religious transformation and evolution remains ever visible, even within and amongst the florid shrubbery of richly footnoted detail.

Jerome Falk is a graduate student in religion at the University of Manitoba.

Jerome Falk

Date Of Review:

April 11, 2024