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“Is a Cushite Made in the Image of God?”: Christian Visions of Race in Late Antiquity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 June 2022
Abstract
There has been an increasing interest in classical and late antique studies on the existence of something approximating the modern concept of race in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Scholars of early Christianity have also debated the presence of prejudice based on skin color. The following study seeks to broaden this conversation by including late antique contexts outside of the Roman Empire as well as marginal language communities within the Roman Empire. This paper will demonstrate that anti-Black prejudice—or racism—did indeed exist in the late antique Roman world and that such racism was more pronounced in Roman literature written in Greek and Latin.
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References
1 The Life of Apa Aphou, Bishop of Pemje (Oxyrhynchus), 638-57, in Christian Oxyrhynchus: Texts, Documents, and Sources, ed. Lincoln H. Blumell and Thomas A. Wayment (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015), at 646.
2 Byron, Gay L., Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (New York: Routledge, 2002), 5–6Google Scholar. Of note is how Byron describes ethnicity as “a relationship between two contrasting individuals or groups of people” (2), while race is described as an “external factor” (5). See McCoskey, Denise Eileen, Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 2Google Scholar.
3 See Isaac, Benjamin, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buell, Denise Kimber, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although Erich Gruen conflates “race” and “racism,” I define them separately; see Gruen, Erich S., Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 198Google Scholar.
4 Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature, 35.
5 Isaac, Benjamin, Empire and Ideology in the Graeco-Roman World: Selected Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 182CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Aristotle's views on peoplehood were largely influenced by his primary division of humanity into “civilized” people of the polis and “barbarians.” See Ward, Julie K., “Ethnos in the Politics: Aristotle and Race,” in Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays, ed. Ward, Julie K. and Lott, Tommy L. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 14–37, esp. 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, 84. See also, Rebecca Futo Kennedy, “Why I Teach About Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World,” Eidolon 2017, (https://eidolon.pub/why-i-teach-about-race-and-ethnicity-in-the-classical-world-ade379722170).
7 See Snowden, Frank M. Jr., Blacks in Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 176–77Google Scholar.
8 Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature, 32.
9 Ausonius, Parentalia, ed. Hugh G. Evelyn White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919), 56–95, esp. 66. See also, John H. Starks Jr., “Was Black Beautiful in Vandal Africa?” in African Athena: New Agendas, eds. Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra and Tessa Roynon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 239–57, esp. 255.
10 Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature, 17. Anna Solevåg argues that the depiction of the Black woman as a dancer, implying that she was a prostitute, was a conflation of many of the layers of social identity that would have been seen as debased in the Roman world; Solevåg, Anna Rebecca, Negotiating the Disabled Body: Representations of Disability in Early Christian Texts (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2018), 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, ed. W. A. Baehrens, vol. 8, Homilien zu Samuel I, zum Hohelied und zu den propheten kommentar zum Hohelied in Rufins und Hieronymus übersetzungen, Origenes Werke (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1925), 26–241, esp. 114; English translation: Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, trans. and annotated by R. P. Lawson (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1957). See Num 12:1-16. Byron describes Origen's theology of race “color-symbolic spiritualizing”; specifically, a “spiritualizing of blackness and whiteness”; Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature, 75. Indeed, allegorical interpretations of Scripture are common to Origen. It should be noted, however, that Jerome's Latin translation of Commentary is the only complete surviving copy of the text and may not fully represent Origen's views; see Lawson, Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, 5. Consideration of Commentary, however, is included as a sample of how some Roman Christians framed racial categories theologically.
12 Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, 116.
13 Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, 117.
14 Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, 122. See Zeph 3:10; Ps 51:17.
15 Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, 123. Indeed, Rodney Sadler points out that the book of Jeremiah “exalts” Cushites such as Ebed-Melech; Rodney S. Sadler Jr., Can a Cushite Change His Skin? An Examination of Race, Ethnicity, and Othering in the Hebrew Bible (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2005), 97.
16 Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, 125.
17 Gen 1:31. Origen does claim that the Shulamite's beauty is rooted in her being made in the image of God; Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, 128. Origen's concept of her beauty, however, is rooted in being “made white” through salvation. Coupled with his repeated association of Blackness with depravity, this statement cannot be interpreted as Origen stating that Black people are made in the image of God.
18 Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, 125. See Song 8:5.
19 Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, 125. Referring to Blackness as a “defect” demonstrates that Frank Snowden's positive assessment of early Roman Christian views of Blackness is untenable: “Color was inconsequential; in fact, we have seen that they regarded as black all men who had not been illumined by God's light and considered all men, regardless of the color of the skin, as potentially Christians. Ethiopians were by all means to be embraced, for the Church, in the words of Augustine, was to reach even the Ethiopians, the remotest and blackest of men. All who were Christians were the same kind of men”; Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity, 205. Byron's critique is demonstrated in the texts surveyed here and in her work: “With all due respect to Professor Frank Snowden and others who have been persuaded by his research on Blacks (or Ethiopians) in antiquity, it is clear from the taxonomy developed … that the ancients were well aware of ethnic and color differences and displayed their understandings (sometimes negative and sometimes positive) in various forms of symbolic representations of Egyptians/Egypt, Ethiopians/Ethiopia, and Blacks/blackness”; Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature, 151n149.
20 Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, 126. Again, Origen says her Blackness “will be banished completely,” 127.
21 Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs, 127. In like manner, Origen says: “We have shown that this occurs wherever a sinful foundation came first, and that a person is darkened or burned by the sun where the condition of sin exists,” 129.
22 Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature, 43. Snowden acknowledges that Blackness represented depravity for Jerome and other early Roman Christian authors, yet maintains that this attitude did not represent color prejudice; see Snowden, Blacks in Antiquity, 201. Again, Byron is correct in demonstrating how this language goes beyond a “metaphorical motif” and had real implications on racial and political dynamics in early Roman Christianity; see Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature, 57.
23 Wortley, John, ed., Apophthegmata Patrum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 117Google Scholar.
24 See Wortley, Apophthegmata Patrum, 271. David Brakke denies the existence of race in the ancient world and alleges that claims of racism in antiquity are “anachronistic”; see Brakke, David, Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 158CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Denise Buell rightly points out, however, that “we can only interpret the past from the vantage point of the present” and that there is not even any “single way that all people think or speak about race and ethnicity today”; Buell, Why This New Race, 5. Furthermore, the working definition of race in this study as a broader category of human groups based on physical characteristics is clearly present in this example and throughout the samples provided here.
25 Wortley, Apophthegmata Patrum, 451.
26 Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Faith, in Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Fide, CSCO 154, Scriptores Syri 73, ed. Edmund Beck (Louvain: Secrétariat du SCO, 1955), 254–55. Jeffrey Wickes notes that Ephrem's use of “darkness” language also appears in his anti-Semitic rhetoric; Wickes, Jeffrey T., St. Ephrem the Syrian: The Hymns on Faith (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2015), 385n7Google Scholar. Christina Shepardson highlights how Ephrem's “dark/light” contrast is one of several poetic images used to disparage Jews in contrast with Christians; Shepardson, Christina, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem's Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 53–54Google Scholar.
27 Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature, 117.
28 Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature, 117–18. Brakke minimizes the internalized racial trauma to which Moses, “a truly uncolonized person,” is subjected as “mockery” and “voluntary”; see Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, 179. Byron's analysis is more accurate: “The symbolizing of ‘virtue’ comes at the expense of the Ethiopian's ethnic and color difference”; Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature, 117.
29 Or, south of the First Cataract.
30 Britt Dahlman, Saint Daniel of Sketis: A Group of Hagiographic Texts with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, Studia Byzantina Upsaliensia 10 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2007), 154.
31 Wortley, Apophthegmata Patrum, 466.
32 Vivian, Tim, Witness to Holiness: Abba Daniel of Scetis (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2008), 238Google Scholar.
33 Ignazio Guidi, ed., Vie et récits de l'Abbé Daniel le Scété (VI Siècle), in Revue de l'Orient chrétien 5 (1900): 535–64, esp. 541.
34 Vivian, Witness to Holiness, 5. David Brakke also notes the varieties of racial imagery across various translations of literature regarding Daniel of Scetis; see Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, 167.
35 Such arguments were overstated by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholars such as Leipoldt, Johannes, Schenute von Atripe und die Entstehung des national ägyptischen Christentums (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1903), 26Google Scholar. Since the late twentieth century, scholars have rejected any sense of anti-Greek sentiment in early Egyptian Christian literature; Ewa Wipszycka, “Le nationalisme a-t-il existé en Égypte byzantine?,” in Études sur le Christianisme dans l’Égypte de l'Antiquité tardive 9-61 (Rome: Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, 1996), 18. Modern critiques are valid; there was no hard and fast division between Greek and Coptic speakers. However, modern scholarship has largely not accounted for the persistence of a degree of difference in how the two languages were received and shaped perceptions of the world. For example, Jacques van der Vliet, “Coptic as a Nubian Literary Language: Four Theses for Discussion,” in The Christian Epigraphy of Egypt and Nubia (New York: Routledge, 2018), 269–78, esp. 272.
36 Athanasius, Life of Antony, ed. G. J. M. Bartelink (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2011), 196. He makes similar distinctions between “Greeks” and Christians in Athanasius, On the Incarnation, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, PG 25 (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1857), 85–196, esp. 168.
37 Athanasius, Against the Greeks, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, PG 25, 1–94 (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1857) 45–48. Indeed, the differences and contradictions between the various “pagans” bolstered Athanasius’ argument of their fallibility. For the use of “Christian” as a racial/ethnic group, see Buell, Why This New Race, 8.
38 Cyril of Alexandria, Against Julian, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, PG 76 (Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1859), 490–1065, esp. 564. Here Cyril uses both the terms δεισιδαιμονίαν and θρησκείας with reference to religion—both Christian and Greek. What is of note is how Greek is an ethnic modifier for religion, highlighting the contrast between Christians and Greeks.
39 Stanley M. Burstein, Graeco-Africana: Studies in the History of Greek Relations with Egypt and Nubia (New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1995), 5. Burstein narrates the origins of Greek exoticization of Egypt as a cultural other whose degree of “civilization” was measured against a Hellenistic standard. See also Westerfield, Jennifer Taylor, Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Late Antique Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 5Google Scholar.
40 Athanasius, Life of Antony, 320–22. This common Christian rejection of Greek identity inverted the early Roman tendency to ascribe to Hellenistic identity; see Emma Dench, From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman, and Modern Perceptions of Peoples from the Central Apennines, Oxford Classical Monographs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 46.
41 Guidi, Vie et récits de l'Abbé Daniel le Scété (VI Siècle), 544.
42 Dahlman, Saint Daniel of Sketis, 162. This same statement appears in Wortley, Apophthegmata Patrum, 472.
43 Vivian, Witness to Holiness, 241, 251. The imperial capital and its dominant language disparaged cultural “others,” even when all sides included were Christian; see Bas ter Haar Romeny, “Ethnicity, Ethnogenesis and the Identity of the Syriac Orthodox Christians,” in Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World: The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300–1100, ed. Walter Pohl, Clemens Gantner, and Richard Payne (New York: Routledge, 2012), 183–204.
44 Pereira, F. M. Esteves, Vida do Abba Daniel do Mosteiro de Sceté (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1897), 14Google Scholar. See also Vivian, Witness to Holiness, 139.
45 The Life of Apa Aphou, 646. For background on the anthropomorphite controversy surrounding Aphou and Theophilus, see Patterson, Paul A., Visions of Christ: The Anthropomorphite Controversy of 399 CE (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012), 54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 The Blemmyes were a nomadic group that lived in the desert region between the Nile and the Red Sea. They traded and often came into conflict with the Nubians (or Nobatia) who lived in urbanized communities along the Nile.
47 Brakke, David and Crislip, Andrew, Selected Discourses of Shenoute the Great: Community, Theology, and Social Conflict in Late Antique Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 191CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on Shenoute's care for the Nubians and Blemmyes, see López, Ariel G., Shenoute of Atripe and the Uses of Poverty: Rural Patronage, Religious Conflict, and Monasticism in Late Antique Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 57–60Google Scholar.
48 The Roman province Mauretania (modern Morocco) is unlikely; see Mikhail, Maged S. A., From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity and Politics after the Arab Conquest (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 356n121CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Arabic History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria (AHPA) provides different locations for the two disputant nations: “In those days the patriarch addressed letters to the king of the Abyssinians and the king of the Nubians”; B. Evetts, ed., Arabic History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, Patrologia Orientalis 5 (1904): 2–215, esp. 24. Amélineau differs from the AHPA as he identifies the nation of “Mauritania” as the territory of the Blemmyes; see Émile Amélineau. Histoire du patriarche copte Isaac: Étude critique, texte et traduction (Paris, Leroux, 1890), xxxv. Rather than identifying “Makouria” with Ethiopia as in the AHPA, Amélineau indicates this region encompassing the bishoprics of Dongola, Korti, Ibrim, Bucaras, Saï, Termus, and Suenkur; see xxxiv. Porcher suggests, rather, that Mauritania is correct and that the scribe may have confused “Makouria” for Morocco; see E. Porcher, ed., Vie d'Isaac Patriarche d'Alexandrie, Patrologia Orientalis 11 (1915): 377n1. This is less likely and requires a greater deviance from the text. Bell follows the suggestion of Amélineau, stating that “Maurotania” is also referenced as the land of the Blemmyes in the Life of Shenoute; see Harold Idris Bell, Egypt from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest: A Study in the Diffusion and Decay of Hellenism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 94n132. The suggestion of Amélineau and Bell is more likely especially in light of the frequent conflict between the Blemmyes/Beja and Makouria; Adams, William Y., Nubia: Corridor to Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 451–52Google Scholar; Hatke, George, Aksum and Nubia: Warfare, Commerce, and Political Fictions in Ancient Northeast Africa (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 157Google Scholar.
49 Porcher, Vie d'Isaac Patriarche d'Alexandrie, 377–79.
50 Athanasius, Life of Antony, 146. Antony responded to the devil by saying that his “heart is black.” See also Johnson, Aaron P., “The Blackness of Ethiopians: Classical Ethnography and Eusebius's Commentary on the Psalms,” in Harvard Theological Review 99, no. 2 (2006): 165–86, esp. 169–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brakke, David, Athanasius and Asceticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press), 229Google Scholar.
51 John of Shmun, Panegyric on Antony, in Orientalia Christiana Periodica 9, ed. G. Garitte, (Rome: Pont. Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1943), 100–34, 330–65, esp. 338.
52 McCoskey, Race, 62.
53 Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, ed. F. C. Conybeare (London: William Heinemann, 1921), 6.
54 Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature, 40.
55 Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature, 40–41. On Greco-Roman “othering” of Egyptians and other marginal ethnic groups of the empire, see Greg Woolf, “Becoming Roman, Staying Greek: Culture, Identity and the Civilizing Process in the Roman East,” in Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 40 (1994): 116–43, esp. 119. Woolf gives examples from classical writers such as Cicero who presented humanitas—the status of a community being “civilized”—as a gift that the Romans learned from the Greeks and were now called to “give” to the rest of the “barbarians.”
56 Stephanie L. Black, “‘In the Power of God Christ’: Greek Inscriptional Evidence for the Anti-Arian Theology of Ethiopia's First Christian King,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 71 (2008): 93–110, esp. 101–02.
57 “Greek Triumphal Inscription of King Silko at Kalabsha,” in Fontes Historiae Nubiorum: Textual Sources for the History of the Middle Nile Region Between the Eighth Century BC and the Sixth Century AD, vol. 3, From the First to the Sixth Century AD, ed. Tormod Eide et al. (Bergen: University of Bergen Press, 1998), 1149. George Hatke understands “Ethiopians” here to mean Nubians; see Hatke, George, Aksum and Nubia: Warfare, Commerce, and Political Fictions in Ancient Northeast Africa (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 157Google Scholar. Nubians were, however, already mentioned in the inscription. The ambiguously broad way that “Ethiopian” is used across Greek literature implies a broader claim of rule that Silko is claiming among the world of Black people.
58 See Shinnie, P. L., Ancient Nubia (New York: Routledge, 1996), 118Google Scholar.
59 John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History, ed. Smith, Robert Payne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1860), 223–24Google Scholar.
60 Brakke and Crislip, Selected Discourses of Shenoute the Great, 11.
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