BMCR 2009.01.03, Jeremy M. Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making

Jeremy M. Schott, Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in
Late Antiquity. Divinations.  Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2008.  Pp. 254.  ISBN 9780812240924.  $59.95.

Reviewed by Heidi Marx-Wolf, University of California at Santa Barbara
([email protected])
Word count:  3292 words
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In Christianity, Empire and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity,
Jeremy M. Schott makes an important contribution to the ongoing
discussion of the construction of Christian identity in the late third
and early fourth centuries, a discussion that focuses, in large part,
on the role that the polemical, apologetic, and historical writings of
key Christian intellectuals played in the formation of this identity.
Schott's stated aim is to focus on a specific moment in time, namely
the Great Persecution and the reign of Constantine, because, he argues,
this was a period of intense polemical exchange between Christians and
"pagans," a conflict that "proved instrumental in the production of
Christian identity and, in turn, the construction of a specifically
Christian imperial ideology" (5).  Schott eschews from the outset any
static or essentializing understandings of the terms Christian,
"pagan," monotheism and polytheism.  (I myself put the term "pagan"
between quotation marks because of its pejorative connotations and the
fact that the individuals who are denoted as such by Schott would not
have used this name for themselves.)  Instead of using the foregoing
terms in any fixed way, he aims to investigate processes of identity
formation which, according to the post-colonial literature that informs
his approach, is a process of constant negotiation and renegotiation.
This theoretical approach proves helpful as Schott traces the process
by which Christians moved from a subjugated minority within a "pagan"
empire to, if not oppressors under Constantine, at least imperialists
of a certain stripe, colonizing as they did the centers and instruments
of power and knowledge.  The strength of this book is that it clearly
plots the ways in which Christian imperial ideology grew out of earlier
imperial discourses, in particular those of a number of late Roman
philosophers.  In this respect, Schott's book depicts Christian
intellectuals using the instruments and discourses of empire first to
challenge and subvert the prevailing political order and its
ideological producers and adherents, and subsequently to co-opt empire
for Christianity post-Milvian bridge.  Indeed, as Schott masterfully
demonstrates, "on both sides of the Constantinian divide. . .the need
to conquer, restrain, and supervise ta ethne, 'peoples,' remained the
central ideological basis for imperial rule of the Mediterranean" (13).
For the most part, Schott is successful in what he sets out to do, and
I have few substantive criticisms to offer.

In Chapter One, Schott moves earlier in time to explore what he sees as
the roots of the kind of universalizing discourses that are at the
center of the book.  By investigating the works of such early imperial
intellectuals as Posidonius, Cornutus, Plutarch and Numenius, Schott
demonstrates that many thinkers in the second century worked
comparatively across the disciplines of ethnography, universal history,
and figurative interpretation in order to read the sacred texts,
iconographies, and ritual practices of ethnic others.  Ultimately,
these endeavors constituted an attempt to recover a lost wisdom.  The
corollary of this perspective was that the more ancient a source, the
closer it was to the truth.  This led to the construction of
ethnogenetic accounts that located groups of people chronologically in
relation to each other, a chronology that translated into varying
degrees of proximity to an Ur-philosophy.  The main goal of these
thinkers, then, was to "distill a universal philosophy that transcended
ethnic and cultural specificity" (11).  Schott goes further to
demonstrate that this sort of project was an intellectual correlate to
the way Roman imperial administration conquered peoples and territory.
Indeed, he very convincingly argues that imperial expansion, the fact
of empire, was a necessary condition for the flowering of such
discourses.  And in spite of the ability of empire to create a new
polity for its inhabitants, one that supposedly subsumed local identity
to a more universal one, the intellectual syncretism that flowered
under Roman imperial administration did not necessarily lead to or even
intend the erasure of difference.  In the case of the universalizing
discourses of these Stoics and Platonists, despite their attempts to
highlight points of comparison, their final portrayals of various
ethnic groups within the empire were not isometric.  Rather, in all
cases, as Schott demonstrates through careful textual analysis, a Greek
center was always revealed and difference reiterated.  Schott then
traces the methods, philosophical techniques, and impulses
characteristic of these thinkers into early apologetic writings of
Christians such as Justin Martyr and Tatian.  Some of these techniques
can be traced through Jewish participants in the Hellenistic "war of
books" such as Philo, and they include euhemerism (demythologizing
other groups' deities), and chronographical arguments for the greater
antiquity of key Hebrew holy men such as Moses.  By demonstrating that
these early apologists adopted discursive modes that were both made
possible by the fact of empire and served to affirm the political
reality of imperial conquest and rule, Schott lays the groundwork for
his later chapters that trace the trajectory of this philosophical
mimicry into the founding discourses of Christian imperialism.  Chapter
One ends with a discussion of Celsus' On the True Doctrine in which
Schott argues that Celsus was involved in debunking the meta-narrative
of the early apologists in which they claimed that Christianity was the
Ur-theology, the ecumenical "ancient doctrine."

In Chapter Two, Schott turns to Porphyry, the third-century Platonist
and biographer of Plotinus, who was also engaged in anti-Christian
polemic, particularly in the period immediately prior to the inception
of Diocletian's persecution.  Although it is not vital to Schott's
argument that Porphyry was the anonymous Hellene in Lactantius's
account who attended Diocletian's Nicomedian court with Hierocles to
offer speeches that in the end helped to provide the rationale for
persecution, he does seem to be convinced that Porphyry was in fact the
Hellene in question.  Schott's appendix clearly lays out the evidence
for this position marshaled by a number of scholars to date such as
Elizabeth Digeser and Richard Goulet.  Using Porphyrian fragments from
Augustine's City of God in which the Bishop of Hippo purported that
Porphyry sought a via universalis but failed to ever find one, Schott
very cleverly places this fragment within the lineage of universal
discourses he is tracing.  He writes, "By admitting that the universal
way of salvation is not found in any one particular group. . .Porphyry
implies that the via universalis is only discernible when one's pursuit
of philosophy is sufficiently ecumenical" (57).  This fragment has
bedeviled scholars for some time, and Schott's explanation goes a long
way to making sense of Porphyry's philosophical project despite
Augustine's obvious aim to muddy the waters.  Schott also constellates
Porphyry's On Abstinence from Animals as part of the philosopher's
cross-cultural project.  Indeed, he demonstrates quite clearly that
this project is one perspective from which scholars can investigate
most of Porphyry's non-polemical writings.  But he also claims that,
like Plutarch and other second-century Greek intellectuals before him,
Porphyry's treatment is not isometric, and his engagement with
"barbarian wisdom" is thoroughly Greek-centered.  Schott follows up on
this point by discussing the way in which participation in Greek
paideia was the way for Porphyry to make the journey from province (in
this case Tyre) to metropolis (i.e. Rome).  His vantage point as a
universalizing philosopher allowed Porphyry to engage in an
anti-Christian polemic which, Schott rightly points out, was received
by its targets as one of the most dangerous and venomous.  Where Schott
makes his contribution to the ongoing multi-nodal debate over Against
the Christians is by tracing out Porphyry's ecumenical logic even in
this polemic.  The main bone of contention for Porphyry, as Schott sees
it, was Christian attempts to pass off a culturally-specific tradition
as an ecumenical and universal wisdom, an Ur-theology.  "Christians,
who by their own admission claimed to possess a universal philosophy,
based on a set of barbarian texts from the edges of the Greco-Roman
world, were disrupting Porphyry's carefully constructed hierarchical
world" (71).  Schott is very good at depicting the kinds of issues and
concerns that would have led a philosopher like Porphyry to enter the
fray of late third-century anti-Christian polemicizing and perhaps even
to marshal reasons to proceed with oppressive measures.  Whether or not
he actually participated in the deliberations at Nicomedia, we may
never be able to definitively prove.

Chapter Three reads Lactantius's Divine Institutes as a response to
Porphyry's polemics.  In this chapter, Schott does three things.
First, he shows how Lactantius imitated Porphyry's hermeneutical
approach to sacred texts, in particular oracles, in order to establish
Christianity as a universal philosophy.  Then Schott demonstrates that
Lactantius was also engaged in crafting a history of religions.  This
history posited an aboriginal true religion, an Ur-monotheism, that had
declined and devolved into a multiplicity of false religions.  And he
excavates this true religion out of his "pagan" sources.  Schott also
demonstrates the way in which Lactantius tied this discourse to the
language of imperial geography.  In the end, Lactantius argues that all
traditional religions are really forms of ancestor worship and asserts
a set of theological principals that are authentic because they
transcend these cultural differences.  Finally, Schott discusses the
changes Lactantius made to the Divine Institutes after the rise of
Constantine to power, changes which lent a "new, imperial timbre to his
historical geography" (12).

In Chapter Four, Schott argues that the Lactantian ideology of empire
and traditional apologetic topoi were taken up by Constantine in his
speeches and letters and expressed in political actions that served to
establish the difference between "pagan" and "Christian."  Schott's
reading of both Constantine's rhetoric and specific actions, such as
Christian monumental building and measures that have been interpreted
by some scholars as anti-"pagan", is compelling and innovative.  For
instance, he sees Constantine's clearing of traditional cult sites for
Christian colonization as a "metonymic performance" of his
universalizing mission.  The difference between "Christian" and "pagan"
produced by Constantinian ideology and rule was, according to Schott,
one that both could and needed to be reiterated by subsequent emperors.
In general, Schott's argument in this chapter is interesting and
represents a new take on some of the Constantinian sources.  In the
end, however, it may not sufficiently countenance the very thing it is
trying to establish, namely that Christian identity is in the process
of being formed.  Schott's explanation may not leave sufficient
flexibility in Constantine's understanding of his religious affiliation
to account for many of the emperor's actions such as the toleration of
imperial cult, the construction of Constantinople and the gathering of
"pagan" cultic icons in that city.  Furthermore, while we are on the
topic of Constantinople, Schott neglects to tell us what he means by
"Rome" in the time of Constantine although he asserts that the
emperor's reign "did not erase the classic distinctions between Rome
and her provinces upon which Roman imperialism had been based for
centuries" (133).  My concern here anticipates a larger criticism I
have of the book which I will raise later in the review.  I believe
that what Schott means is that Constantine, like Lactantius, associates
the "provincial" with the "barbarian," culturally-specific practices of
"pagan" cult.  However, the geographic and political de-centering of
the empire in this period should somehow be accounted for in Schott's
analysis.

In the case of his discussion of both Lactantius and Constantine,
Schott departs from the conclusions of scholars such as Elizabeth
Digeser and Harold Drake who have argued that these two figures were
attempting to establish common cause between Christians and other
monotheistically-inclined individuals.  For Schott, this apparently
conciliatory stance actually reveals a developing rhetoric of Christian
empire built upon the same philosophical lines of reasoning and the
same imperial motivations, namely the need to conquer, restrain, and
supervise ta ethne.  The consensus theory of Lactantius is one more
instantiation of a discourse that, despite appearances, establishes an
asymmetrical relationship between center and periphery.  By challenging
the picture of both Lactantius and Constantine as consensus builders
around monotheism, Schott highlights the way in which this theological
position, namely ecumenism, ties into imperial ideologies with concrete
political consequences.

Schott's final chapter concerns Eusebius's massive diptych, the
Preparation for the Gospel and the Demonstration of the Gospel.  Schott
aptly shows just how thoroughly this work is a polemical response to
and counterattack on Porphyry.  Schott reveals that Eusebius's "complex
intertext," which indeed it is, "dismantles and manipulates Porphyrian
exegesis to resituate Greek philosophical practice as merely another
native barbarism" (137).  Here Schott is particularly strong as he adds
a new and challenging perspective to an ongoing discussion about the
way Eusebius constructs Christian identity in these two works.  Schott
disagrees with Aaron Johnson who recently argued that Eusebius was
involved in constructing Christianity as a new ethnos.  Instead, Schott
argues that for Eusebius, Christianity's superiority lay in its
transcendence of historically and geographically bound peoples.  Schott
also addresses Eusebius's efforts to wed the inception of Christianity
with the beginning of imperial rule and demonstrates the way in which
Eusebius's characterization of this association changed over time from
the view that the empire was propitious for the spread of Christianity
to the view that "empire and church proceed in lockstep" such that
imperial conquest and conversion were two prongs of the same "offensive
against native error and barbarism" (157).

In an elegant epilogue, Schott draws important parallels between the
rhetorical and apologetic discourses under investigation in his book
and theories about the history of religion that inform modern
theoretical approaches.  He also focuses on the way in which
Lactantian, Constantinian, and Eusebian ways of thinking about religion
were re-deployed when Europeans began to encounter new ethne in their
colonization of the Americas, bringing home very poignantly the
rhetorical potential of these discourses for the imperial projects of
the early modern period.

As I mentioned earlier, I have but few criticisms of Schott's project.
My main concern is that Schott never clearly defines a set of terms
which he regularly uses in the course of his post-colonial reading of
his sources.  These terms include "Rome," "her provinces," "Roman,"
"barbarian," "center," and "periphery."  Schott appears to take a
somewhat static view of these terms both culturally and politically.
By this I mean that Schott's "Rome" appears to be the Rome of the early
empire, but he neglects to take into account the changing political
realities in the third century that made the empire a very different
animal than it was during its first two centuries.  A few examples
suffice to make my point.  First, Caracalla's decree of 212 CE granting
universal citizenship surely changed what it meant to be Roman, an
inhabitant of the empire, and the meaning of citizenship itself.
Second, by the late third century, emperors had not come from the city
of Rome for quite some time, and the city itself and its history and
traditions no longer stood for the empire in the ways it had in earlier
epochs.  This de-centering necessarily had profound consequences for
the questions and trends Schott is focused on.  This oversight creates
a couple of problems for Schott.  For instance, in Chapter One,
although Schott recognizes the fact that the philosophers he uses as
examples are not themselves from the center and seeks to finesse this
issue by attributing the ease with which such provincial elites gained
access to the metropolis to the tendency of Roman imperialism to annex
and assimilate these elites, he does not explain why Greeks (or
Greek-speaking Syrians in the case of Numenius) might be producing
discourses that, as Schott argues, reinforce the superiority of
Greek-ness over other forms of "barbarity" while at the same time
elucidating sameness.  In other words, Schott has not really spoken to
the question of the place of non-Roman intellectuals in relation to
Rome.  And there is a sense in which one cannot clearly identify
Greek-ness with Roman-ness in the discourses of the philosophers he
uses as examples.  In fact, there very well may be something subversive
about the maneuvers of these intellectuals.  Indeed, if we place them
next to the anti-Greek polemic of a Roman such as Juvenal, they may
also turn out to be apologetic in some way.  Schott is certainly on
point when he asserts that empire is the condition for such
Hellenocentric discourses, but more care needs to be taken about both
the historical realities of Roman imperialism and Roman identity over
time.  This criticism in no way calls into question the importance of
Schott's basic argument and key insights.  However, his book would have
been made all the more compelling for taking account of which Rome he
had in mind as well as changing political realities on the ground for
the period he is investigating.

The other main difficulty I have with the way Schott structures his
overall argument is that, although he traces the roots of the
universalizing discourses at the heart of his study to the second
century, he neglects to consider third-century intellectual, cultural
and political trends.  The decision to ignore much of the third century
has a number of important consequences.  First, it leads him, in a
number of places, to use the label "barbarian" to stand for Christian.
Although I recognize that he is primarily following his sources here,
there is no reciprocal recognition of the way in which many
third-century Christian intellectuals would have also thought of
themselves as Hellenes and heirs to the Greek philosophical patrimony.
In other words, there are moments when one is not sure that "barbarian"
versus Greek is not being taken by Schott as a reified sort of
distinction.  Furthermore, part of the reason why Schott's portrayal
dwells on the conflict and polemical exchanges between Christians and
non-Christians is, I believe, because he does not consider the nature
of intellectual activity among and between philosophical schools and
associations in the third century.  Schott claims that third-century
writers such as Clement and Origen continued to "offer challenges to
the privilege of Greek philosophy throughout the third century" (51).
But we might as easily say that these thinkers made contributions to
Greek philosophy itself.  This is likely the way Origen was seen by
many of his contemporaries given the fact that his lessons were often
attended by both Christians and non-Christians, and that he was called
to Syria by the mother of Alexander Severus, Julia Mammea, to instruct
her in philosophy.  Recent scholarship has shown that the third century
was actually a period of intense exchange across rather permeable and
ill-defined religious boundaries between Christians and non-Christians.
And in many cases, religious affiliation may not have been the primary
identity category that determined the positions intellectuals took on
specific issues.  Pier Franco Beatrice, an author whose work Schott
references often, has even argued that Porphyry studied with Origen
because Porphyry saw him as a part of the Ammonian lineage, frequenting
Origen's lectures in Palestine even before visiting Longinus in Athens
and Plotinus in Rome. And although Schott acknowledges this flexibility
in identity between Jews and Christians, relying for this point on the
work of Daniel Boyarin, the lines between Christian and "pagan" seem to
be far more clearly delineated and calcified for Schott.  In other
words, Schott's singular focus on conflict and hostile polemic may, in
the end, over-determine what he finds in his sources at certain
junctures.  These criticisms in no way downplay the significance of
"pagan" polemic for Christians during and after Diocletian's
persecution, but they do suggest a more nuanced approach than the
conflict model that seems to inform much of Schott's study.

Overall, Schott's book is a well-reasoned, careful work that sheds new
light on a number of areas in late antique studies: the formation of
Christian and "pagan" identity, the nature of apologetic and its
relation to traditional philosophical discourses, the changing rhetoric
of empire, to name but a few.  He offers close, innovative readings of
texts, readings which yield interesting and important insights on some
very vexed and difficult questions in the history of religion.