Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T01:30:45.992Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Church and State, Religion and Power in Late Antique and Byzantine Scholarship of the Last Five Decades

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Claudia Rapp*
Affiliation:
Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, University of Vienna

Extract

Tackling issues of church and state is a tall order under any circumstances. Taking the metahistorical view and summarizing the scholarship on church and state makes it positively daunting, especially when the half-century under consideration spans the entire lifetime of the author. This task is made even more challenging when the societies and cultures under investigation are late antiquity and medieval Byzantium, the former (c.300–c.800, encompassing the entire Mediterranean) a paradigmatic period of religious change, the latter (330–1453, focusing on the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman empire and its subsequent history) emblematic of ‘otherness’ when compared to the Christian tradition in the West that has shaped our worldview to the present day.

Type
Part III: Church and State in History
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD, 1987).Google Scholar

2 Spiegel, Gabrielle M., The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, MD, 1997)Google Scholar; Clark, Elizabeth A., ed., History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA, 2004)Google Scholar; Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

3 Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge, 1977; first publ. Paris, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Althoff, Gerd, Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter: Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt, 1997).Google Scholar

4 See, e.g., Bennett, Judith, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia, PA, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and in this volume, Judith M. Lieu, ‘What did Women do for the Early Church? The Recent History of a Question’, 261–81. The study of sexuality in Byzantium has not yet grown much beyond its infancy, compared to scholarship on the western Middle Ages; see, e.g., Burger, Glenn and Kruger, Steven F., eds, Queering the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN, 2001).Google Scholar

5 See, e.g., Young, Robert J. C., Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, 2001).Google Scholar

6 Weitzmann, Kurt, ed., Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Evans, Helen C. and Wixom, William D., eds, Glory of Byzantium: Arts and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843–1261 (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Evans, Helen C., ed., Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557) (New Haven, CT, 2004).Google Scholar

7 Nelson, Robert S. and Collins, Kristen M., eds, Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai (Los Angeles, CA, 2006).Google Scholar

8 Althaus, Frank and Sutcliffe, Mark, eds, The Road to Byzantium: Luxury Arts of Antiquity (London, 2006).Google Scholar

9 Cormack, Robin and Vassilaki, Maria, eds, Byzantium 330–1453 (London, 2008).Google Scholar

10 e.g. Morris, Rosemary, ed., Church and People in Byzantium (Birmingham, 1990).Google Scholar

11 A good example is the series of conferences and edited volumes under the title ‘Transformation of the Roman World’ between 1992 and 1998, with funding from the European Science Foundation.

12 Hartley, Elizabeth, Hawkes, Jane and Henig, Martin, eds, Constantine the Great: York’s Roman Emperor (Aldershot, 2006)Google Scholar; Demandt, Alexander and Engemann, Josef, eds, Konstantin der Crosse (Mainz, 2007).Google Scholar

13 van Dam, Raymond, The Roman Revolution of Constantine (Cambridge, 2007), 13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, 1996).Google Scholar

15 Fowden, Garth, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Princeton, NJ, 1993).Google Scholar

16 Momigliano, Arnaldo, ed., The Conflict between Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth Century: Essays (Oxford, 1963).Google Scholar

17 Dodds, Eric Robertson, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine (Cambridge, 1965).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Fox, Robin Lane, Pagans and Christians (New York, 1987).Google Scholar

19 Chuvin, Bernard, Chronicle of the Last Pagans (Cambridge, MA, 1990; first publ. as Chronique des derniers païens, Paris, 1990).Google Scholar

20 Cameron, Alan, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford, 2011).Google Scholar

21 Hopkins, Keith, ‘Christian Number and Its Implications’, Journal of Early Christianity 6 (1998), 185226 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, responding to Stark, Rodney, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, NJ, 1996).Google Scholar

22 Trombley, Frank, Hellenic Religion and Christianization, c.370–529, 2 vols, Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 115 (Leiden, 1993–4).Google Scholar

23 Raymond van Dam, Kingdom of Snow: Roman Rule and Creek Culture in Cappadocia (Philadelphia, PA, 2002); idem, Becoming Christian: The Conversion of Roman Cappadocia (Philadelphia, PA, 2003).Google Scholar

24 Mitchell, Stephen, Anatolia: Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor, 2 vols (Oxford, 1993).Google Scholar

25 Salzman, Michele, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy: Social and Religious Change in the Western Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2002)Google Scholar, Cooper, Kate, ‘Insinuations of Womanly Influence: An Aspect of the Christianization of the Roman Aristocracy’, JRS 82 (1992), 15064.Google Scholar

26 A good introduction is Hahn, Johannes, Emmel, Stephen and Gotter, Ulrich, eds, From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity (Leiden, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Hahn, Johannes, Cewalt und religiöser Konflikt. Studien zu den Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Christen, Heiden und fuden im Osten des Römischen Reiches (von Konstantin bis Theodosius II) (Berlin, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Bowes, Kim, Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2008).Google Scholar

28 MacMullen, Ramsay, The Second Church: Popular Christianity, A.D. 200–400 (Atlanta, GA, 2009).Google Scholar

29 The seminal work is Nock, Arthur Darby, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (London, 1933, repr. Lanham, MD, 1988)Google Scholar; for a recent counterpoint, see Mills, Kenneth and Grafton, Anthony, eds, Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Rochester, NY, 2003).Google Scholar

30 Rousseau, Philip, Ascetics, Authority and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian (Oxford, 1978; 2nd edn, Notre Dame, IN, 2010)Google Scholar; Sterk, Andrea, Renouncing the World yet Leading the Church: The Monk-Bishop in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA, 2004).Google Scholar

31 Rapp, Claudia, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley, CA, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32 Boyarin, Daniel, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia, PA, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Becker, Adam H. and Reed, Annette Yoshiko, eds, The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN, 2007)Google Scholar; Schott, Jeremy M., Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia, PA, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Dvornik, Francis, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy: Origins and Background (Washington, DC, 1966).Google Scholar

34 MacCormack, Sabine G., Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA, 1981)Google Scholar; McCormick, Michael, Eternal Victory: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the Early Medieval West (Cambridge, 1986).Google Scholar

35 Mathews, Thomas F., The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton, NJ, 1993; rev. edn 1999).Google Scholar

36 On the history of the word paganus and the new political correctness in avoiding it, see now Cameron, Last Pagans of Rome, 14–32.

37 Cancik, Hubert and Rüpke, Jörg, eds, Die Religionen des Imperium Romanian: Koine una Konfrontationen (Tübingen, 2009)Google Scholar. For a different, equally innovative attempt to undo the ‘Christianizing assumptions’ of earlier scholarship, see Ando, Clifford, The Matter of the Cods: Religion and the Roman Empire (Berkeley, CA, 2008).Google Scholar

38 Drake, Harold A., Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore, MD, 2000).Google Scholar

39 Eusebius, , Life of Constantine, intra., transl. and commentary by Cameron, Averil and Hall, Stuart G., Clarendon Ancient History Series (Oxford, 1999).Google Scholar

40 Winkelmann, Friedhelm, Die Textbezeugung der Vita Constantini des Eusebius von Caesarea (Berlin, 1962).Google Scholar

41 Fögen, Marie Theres, ‘Das politische Denken der Byzantiner’, in Fetscher, Iring and Münkler, Herfried, eds, Pipers Handbuch der Politischen Ideen, 2 (Munich, 1993), 4185, at 59.Google Scholar

42 Haldon, John F., The State and the Tributary Mode of Production (London, 1993), 1.Google Scholar

43 Beck, Hans-Georg, Kirche una theologische Literatur im byzantinischen Reich (Munich, 1959; repr. 1977), 62.Google Scholar

44 Rapp, Claudia, ‘Imperial Ideology in the Making: Eusebius of Caesarea on Constantine as “Bishop”’, Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 49 (1998), 68595.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45 Tinnefeld, Franz, ‘Kirche und Staat im byzantinischen Reich’, Ostkirchliche Studien 54 (2005), 5678, at 67.Google Scholar

46 Dagron, Gilbert, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium (Cambridge, 2003; first publ. as Empereur et prêtre: Étude sur le ‘césaropapisme’ byzantin, Paris, 1995), 15866.Google Scholar

47 Beck, , Kirche und theologische Literatur, 36.Google Scholar

48 Dagron, , Emperor and Priest, 283.Google Scholar