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Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making
Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making
Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making
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Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making

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-- Elizabeth Clark, John Carlisle Kilgo Professor, Duke University

LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 6, 2004
ISBN9780231503440
Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making

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    Martyrdom and Memory - Elizabeth Castelli

    INTRODUCTION

    WHO’S YOUR SAINT? we asked each other as we settled into our desks—more expectantly and conspiratorially, "What happened to her?"

    The scene was a catechism class in Corpus Christi, Texas, in the early 1970s. I was twelve years old. The exchange took place within a circle of anxious girls preparing to be initiated into spiritual adulthood in the Roman Catholic Church through the sacrament of confirmation. As a part of this process, we had collectively studied a compendium of the church’s teachings, and we had each passed an examination to demonstrate our mastery of this catechetical material. In the culminating moment of the initiation, when the sacrament would be dispensed, each of us, kneeling on the altar at the feet of the bishop, would express our free and willing acceptance of these teachings and their implications for our adult lives.

    This was heady and serious business. Yet, for most, if not all of the girls in my class, the most compelling part of the preparation process involved choosing our confirmation names, the names we would utter when the bishop posed the ritual question: What is your name? The name each of us would offer in response to this question would be the name of a saint whose life we had researched in the church school’s library. Writing out our reports in our still-emerging adolescent longhand and laying claim to the story of a life that we reinscribed on blue-lined notebook paper, we expected through the ritual of confirmation to enter into a special relationship with the saints whose names we would bear.

    As with all ritual processes, there were complex dynamics involved in our preparatory efforts and their sacramental culmination. Insofar as we were each choosing our own names, we became imbued with some form of spiritual agency. The names we chose were secret names, not names to be used when filling out bureaucratic forms or presenting ourselves to the world in ordinary ways. Our confirmation names would be those by which God would know us and through which God would communicate with us. In taking up these names, we were entering into a realm that struck many of us as tantalizingly mysterious. At the same time, we were engaged in a remarkable process of self-positioning in relation to the Catholic tradition as a whole because the names we chose would establish connections between ourselves and various saintly lineages. The choosing of our confirmation names wrote us into a communal history, organizing our spiritual identities in continuity with a geographically and temporally distant past. We were taking part in a ritualized practice of collective memory.

    We were, of course, more than likely largely unaware of these dynamics. But we were thoroughly conscious of the potential adventure involved in choosing a name, and many of us undertook the task very seriously. The questions we asked each other suggested our interests and investments: "Who is your saint? What happened to her? These questions pointed to the broad frameworks within which we assigned value: the realms of aesthetics, piety, and narrative. We wanted names that went with our other, given names. But we also wanted names that reflected our heightened adolescent certainty (or ambivalence) concerning our religious identities. (As I have already mentioned, the girls took this task rather seriously. The boys, generally speaking, seemed confoundingly unmoved by the drama of the moment. They took predictable and easily researched names—Anthony, Thomas, Peter, or Paul—and wrote their perfunctory reports on their saints, angling to be excused at the earliest justifiable moment to go to the gym to play basketball.) For many of the girls, the search for my saint" became a search for a secret connection, a hidden narrative, an obscure but therefore especially true story.

    The gendered differences that characterized the responses of the boys and girls in our class were, at the time, both strikingly obvious and predictably clichéd. The only comment they inspired involved the girls’ complaining and/or worried incomprehension at the boys’ apparent lack of investment and the teacher’s knowing indulgence of it. From my current vantage point, well on the far and long-crested side of feminism’s second wave, these differences are more interesting, evocative, and suggestive. Quite apart from the psychosocial dimensions of our creation as gendered subjects by means of our family systems, our schooling, and our daily lives in mid-twentieth-century U.S. society, the process of religious and spiritual formation in which we were engaged was also leaving the indelible imprint of gender.

    What was most striking about the saint-selecting process, in retrospect, was the sort of narrative that most attracted us. For, as it happened, the stories most of the girls sought to make their own were stories of torture bravely endured and death heroically met. If there were gory illustrations accompanying these violent hagiographies, so much the better. As I have considered this attraction from a safe and distant vantage point (surrounded by scholarly books in my study, writing a generation after the fact), I do not think that our relationship to these stories was primarily or solely one of identification. I think that something more complex concerning historical difference and traditional continuity was being worked out in this process. After all, the selection of one’s saint was not a matter of locating someone whose story was decidedly similar to one’s own. The saints’ lives were not our lives; indeed, their differences were precisely the point. The chance to choose one’s own name was rather an opportunity to embrace a new story, one that appeared in higher contrast and brighter intensity in the illustrations of the books where hagiographies were found. Their lives were not ours, but we could bask in their reflected glory by taking their names and copying out their stories into our notebooks. Our fledgling research was an attempt to reach across time, to acknowledge the yawning abyss between their then and our now and to find a way, however provisionally, to bridge the gap.¹ Of course, there is no question that our labors in the church library were naïve and risibly partial approximations of research. Moreover, if any of us actually had a fledgling critical historiographical method, it certainly never got in the way of our telling our compelling stories. And even if we had had such a method, the idiosyncratic collection of sources at our disposal would certainly have remained stubbornly resistant to its magic. Our research obviously was not historiography in any recognizable sense of the professional practice of writing the past. But it was, I would argue, an important form of collective memory work. And it was a form of memory work that linked in our imaginations undeserved suffering, heroism, violence, religious conviction, gender, and identity.

    This entire liturgical process of laying claim to the past of another through self-naming was, I now argue, a contemporary example of earlier processes in Christian practice whereby spectacular lives and the extremes of torture and death became emblems of Christian identity. Moreover, the retellings that were required of us were just a contemporary manifestation of earlier practices of liturgical renarration.² Our report writing involved virtually no critical engagement beyond the exercise of our own intuitions and tastes (which we could, nevertheless, articulate with considerable fervor when struggling with each other over who was going to have St. Lucy or St. Agatha as her saint). In this emphasis on aesthetics and piety and narrative, our writing replicated the processes of reinscription that had been taking place in the preservation of martyrs’ stories from the start. That the stories often bore remarkable structural similarities to one another, the varied details of a particular torture or death notwithstanding, raised no historiographical suspicions. The fact that these repetitions bordered on the formulaic was indeed telling, but only in the sense that it confirmed what we were already sure we knew: that the story bore within itself a deep-seated truth. What made the story compelling was its mythic scope and impact: although the powerful and evil seem everywhere and always to triumph through their exercise of brute strength, in a broader interpretive framework one could see that the suffering their brutality inaugurated was in fact a necessary sacrifice that promised the ultimate vindication of the weak and innocent. Understanding the true dynamics of the martyr’s tale situated us in a long, nearly unbroken line of interpretation. Reinscribing those dynamics within the context of the sacramental cycle in the religious narratives of our lives, we reconstituted our individual identities and our stories about the present in relation to this socially constituted memory of the distant past.

    The aim of this current project is to look in a more systematic way at the workings of such practices of collective memory in relation to early Christian martyrdom. My thesis is that the memory work done by early Christians on the historical experience of persecution and martyrdom was a form of culture making, whereby Christian identity was indelibly marked by the collective memory of the religious suffering of others. This book is not a history of early Christian martyrdom but an exploration of the culture-making aspects of its representations. The category of collective memory helps to illuminate why martyrdom was—and continues to be—such a critical building block of Christian culture.

    Collective memory provides the central interpretive framework for this project, but it is not the only theoretically relevant category for understanding the rhetorical and ideological power of the martyrological. As the personal reflection recounted above suggests, gender plays a central role both in the generation of the idea of martyrdom and in its ongoing reception and commemoration. The centrality of gender in configuring martyrdom and its memory is, I argue, neither incidental nor capricious.³ Rather, gender plays a significant role precisely because martyrdom has to do foundationally with competing ideas about the character and legitimacy of different systems of power. As Joan Scott has argued persuasively, gender is not only a mode of expressing the cultural meanings attributed to perceived sexual difference but also a primary way of signifying relationships of power.⁴ As a critical aperture onto questions of identity and power, the category gender reminds us to ask: Who remembers? Who is remembered? How? How are identities constituted and reconstituted in suffering and its remembrance? How are the contours of memory—both its content and its cultural forms—shaped by notions of difference and practices of power? Moreover, the conflict between the dominant imperial culture and the Christian counterculture that one finds reflected in the ancient sources concerning martyrdom is frequently staged as a conflict over the character of the proper and reasonable civil subject. These debates over subjectivity were almost always coded by gender, just as the polemics on both sides of the conflict used gender deviance as one of the standard forms of vituperation against their opponents. Gender pulses through the remnants of these debates and provides an analytical lens for reading them.

    Martyrdom and Memory explores the generative quality of a social memory of suffering in the early Christian context. In the first chapter of the book, I explore the theoretical framework of collective memory, a category that has been increasingly influential in cultural history in recent years. I begin with a discussion of the foundational work of Maurice Halbwachs, one of Durkheim’s many students and a theorist whose work on religious collective memory is especially illuminating for a study such as mine. (Indeed, Halbwachs used early Christianity as a case study in one of his most important works, La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte: Étude de mémoire collective [1941].) Although Halbwachs’s model has been critiqued and refined by subsequent scholars and although it poses but does not resolve some still-difficult theoretical problems, I argue that the idea of collective (or social) memory remains especially compatible with early Christian (and other ancient) forms of history writing and conceptualization of the past. Most important for making sense of the ancient sources that tell the story of early Christian martyrdom, the notion of collective memory allows one to move past often unresolveable questions of what really happened to questions of how particular ways of construing the past enable later communities to constitute and sustain themselves.

    Chapter 2 seeks to provide a historical framework for understanding the conflict between the Roman imperial powers and the subject Christian population from the second through the fourth centuries. In addition to providing a historical summary of the conflicts, I focus in particular on the competing Roman and Christian interpretations of power, submission, resistance, and victory. I argue that several critical elements of the historical conflict were appropriated and ideologically transformed by Christians. The historical conflict had primarily to do with contestations over notions of law and piety. The political, legal, and religious systems of Roman imperial society were understood to be organized in a precise analogical relationship, and these systems were highly articulated and relentlessly hierarchical. The social order required that these different systems be in close and rational alignment. When they were not, when challenges to the coherence of these systems were brought into play, the hegemony of imperial power seemed to be called into question. The resulting threat of chaos was repeatedly figured as analogous to and essentially interchangeable with forms of deviance: gender deviance, deviance from systems of rationality (that is, accusations of madness), and religious deviance (that is, accusations of superstition and magic). Christians, meanwhile, made use of precisely the same forms of vituperation and critique, claiming for themselves the superior manifestations of gender identity, rationality, and religious piety. Moreover, this chapter emphasizes the discursive character of martyrdom from its earliest manifestations within Christian collective memory: martyrdom is the product of commemorative interpretation, and it provides a comprehensive frame for interpreting a wide array of historical encounters between Christians and the dominant imperial culture.

    Chapter 3 focuses in on the production of the figure of the martyr through the practice of autobiographical writing and the inscription of memory. The chapter is framed by a critical engagement with Foucault’s later work on technologies of the self, especially his essays on self-writing. In this work, Foucault focused on a literary history of personal ethical writing in late antiquity. This tradition, he argued, began with the personal reading notebooks (hypomnēmata) and correspondence of philosophers during the Roman period and ended with the emergence of self-conscious (and increasingly interiorized) self-writing of fourth-century Christian ascetics and monastics. According to Foucault, the trajectory of this tradition moves increasingly and inexorably from the public realm toward the private. In this chapter, I offer readings of three early Christian texts in which literary first-person accounts of the preparation for martyrdom complicate Foucault’s historical narrative. The three Christian writers are Ignatius of Antioch, a bishop who wrote letters to various Christian churches while on his way to martyrdom in Rome; Perpetua of Carthage, a young wife and mother who records her increasingly complex visionary life in a prison diary; and Pionius of Smyrna, a presbyter whose rhetoric of resistance is preserved in lengthy speeches recorded as he prepared for execution. Central to the self-portraiture of the martyr-in-the-making is the privilege accorded masculinity and public performance. This chapter supplements, problematizes, and ultimately challenges Foucault’s suggestion that the self-writing of this period moves straightforwardly from public (exteriorized) to private (interiorized) forms of writing. My reading suggests instead that the self-writing in which these Christian martyrs engaged was undertaken explicitly in the service of leaving a written remainder, an inscribed trace that would serve as a public memory text for those left behind.

    Chapter 4 attends to the question of the public in a different way. It is devoted to questions of performance and spectacle as they serve as flash points in the debate over the politics of culture between Christians and non-Christians. Spectacle is a crucial dimension of martyrology—martyrs, after all, need an audience—and the Christian critique of spectacle is here read with and against the Christian tendency to appropriate and deploy the discourse and practice of spectacle when remembering the martyrs. Here, several different concepts and problematics overlap: in critiquing spectacle, Christian apologists and polemicists drew attention to the religious or idolatrous origins and associations of theater and the games; they asserted sexual and gender deviance on the parts of performers and spectators and, by implication and contrast, reaffirmed Christian normalcy; and they theorized the dangers of the gaze and worried over the blurred boundaries between fiction and reality. At the same time, the broader problematic of representation emerged in the memory works concerning martyrs. An apologist-historian like Eusebius would distinguish his commemorative work as distinctively Christian by characterizing it as word rather than as image. Meanwhile, Augustine the preacher would exhort Christians to divert their friends from attending the spectacles on the basis of the competition with pagan culture that Christian martyr stories could provide as a source of pleasure and entertainment. Christian culture found itself in direct competition with a wide range of forms of entertainment—the games, the circus, the theatre, the races. The arena became an especially charged venue where this competition came to be staged, since it was also the place where the executions of Christians could take place. As a consequence, the contest over the meanings of spectacle in this context was especially amplified. In a different venue, Christian debates over visual representations and the moral impact of graphic portraits of martyrs’ sufferings emerged in this framework but continued well into the period of iconoclasm. These debates provide a complex historical record of the anxiety and paradox embedded in the practices of memorializing and the ethically charged—and often ethically ambivalent—power of the visual.

    Chapter 5 draws upon visual representations as it explores the shifting and malleable character of collective memory in relation to one particular and important early Christian example: the female protomartyr, Thecla. Thecla is an especially appropriate figure for exploring the dynamics of collective memory because the evidence for her commemoration and her cult is sufficient in scope and range for analysis and comparison. There are strong literary traditions, both in the earlier Acts of Paul and Thecla and in the later Life and Miracles of Saint Thecla, alongside diffused artistic traditions involving cult objects from sites around the Mediterranean where Thecla was venerated. Because these texts and artifacts can be dated with some degree of certainty, it is possible to make a historical argument about the emergence of trajectories of collective memory. That Thecla is called a martyr at all opens the discussion as a problem, since the earliest source concerning her, the apocryphal Acts of Thecla, represents a more ambivalent tradition. It is a tradition in which Thecla suffers for her religious commitments but in which she also miraculously escapes persecution and takes up a life of ascetic renunciation (including the dramatic renunciation of the conventional markers of gender) and a life of public teaching. By the time she is venerated as a martyr-healer in Asia Minor, Egypt, and elsewhere, some centuries later, her representation emphasizes both her martyr status and her unambiguously feminine status. Paired with Paul in the literary tradition, she emerges in the artistic tradition paired most often with Saint Menas and with the biblical Daniel. The malleability and associative character of the commemorative traditions associated with Thecla open up a broader discussion of the workings of collective memory as a process of generating a useable past.

    Chapter 6 makes what will likely seem to some readers to be an unexpected move, connecting early Christian culture making in relation to martyrdom with contemporary Christian commemorative practices organized around the figure of the martyr. In Colorado in 1999, the early Christian martyrological tradition emerged dramatically in contemporary American culture as an as yet untapped resource for some evangelical Protestants to imagine their own experience in continuity with the Christian past. Almost immediately in the wake of the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton that spring, martyr cults emerged around two of the young women who were killed in the incident. But with the rise of the martyr cults also came controversy over the veracity of the backstory. Focusing on the figure of Cassie Bernall, one of the two girls whose deaths at Columbine came to be interpreted as a Christian martyrdom, I explore the processes by which narrative and interpretation proliferate in the generation of a martyr cult. I also seek to place this phenomenon in historical and political context, arguing that the emergence of the Columbine martyrs as martyrs was a logical outgrowth of the historical situation of evangelical Protestantism in the United States in the 1990s. During that decade, the political activism of some evangelicals who organized themselves around the globalized idea of the persecuted church prepared the ideological ground in which the narrative seed of the martyrs of Columbine could germinate and flourish.

    In reading the contemporary U.S. example in tandem with the early Christian situation, I do not argue that there is a simple, continuous historical line connecting the fourth century with the twentieth. Rather, I argue that the Columbine story demonstrates in a contemporary situation many of the dynamics of collective memory as they emerged in a distant cultural and historical setting. Moreover, the early Christian tradition itself was used in the Columbine aftermath as an ambivalent resource for interpreting contemporary circumstances—no longer evidence for the emergence of collective memory historically but rather a source for a new instance of the generation of collective memory. I read the emergent hagiographic literature and analyze some of the diverse material and cultural remnants that were produced in the wake of the tragedy alongside the public media debate over the authenticity of the stories that emerged from Columbine. This reading opens up an exploration of the ongoing power of collective memory constructed around a process of rendering tragic and meaningless suffering redemptive and meaningful. It also raises the question of the ethical ambivalence that resides at the heart of martyrdom, where privileged meanings emerge only out of death.

    The epilogue of this book reflects further on the contemporary legacies of martyrdom’s ethical ambivalence, raising questions about the meanings of this theological and ideological inheritance whose global impact in the early twenty-first century is incontestable. For, as the twentieth century’s secularism hypothesis sits irrelevantly in the wings, religion returns to center stage. The martyr, meanwhile, is one of this drama’s most contentious yet riveting stars, the one who packs the house for every performance. The epilogue raises a series of questions that will have to be answered in another context, questions about the deep and contradictory intersections between religion, suffering, and violence.

    This book seeks to contribute to a range of different discussions: the burgeoning scholarly discussion about martyrdom in late antiquity,⁵ the growing body of theoretically inflected work on early Christian culture, and, more broadly, the emergent field of religion and cultural studies.⁶ This book is not exhaustive in its treatment of all possible sources for evidence concerning martyrdom in the early Christian setting nor does it seek to generate a comprehensive narrative of early Christian martyrdom. There already exist ample scholarly attempts at such reconstructions from the last two centuries. Instead, this book focuses on exemplary figures, moments, and debates in order to chart a broader theoretical course through the rich body of evidence that survives into our own time. Moreover, it seeks to illustrate the fruitfulness of the interpretive category of collective memory for understanding the work that the past does in the present, work that is necessarily ambivalent, contingent, and contested. This study of collective memory and early Christian martyrdom ends in a setting—twentieth-century America—geographically and temporally remote from the Roman Empire. This move intends to draw attention to the remarkable capacity of collective memory to collapse time and simultaneously to amplify and critique (whether implicitly or explicitly) the great divides of historical difference. The contemporary American example also helps to render visible the ongoing and powerful influence of shared memories of past suffering even in our own social world.

    1

    COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND

    THE MEANINGS OF THE PAST

    The solution to the question …—how is the memory of groups conveyed and sustained?—involves bringing these two things (recollection and bodies) together.

    —PAUL CONNERTON, How Societies Remember

    Was der Raum für die Gedächtniskunst, ist die Zeit für die Erinnerungskultur.

    —JAN ASSMANN, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis

    WHAT DOES IT MEAN for a group to constitute its identity through the memory of past suffering? How is that memory constructed, refined, and maintained over time? What are the dynamics of authority and authenticity that govern this memory work? What is the relationship between the knowledge built upon collective memory and historical knowledge? What modes of interpretation and meaning construction are at work in these different ways of thinking about and reconstructing the past? Is it incidental that collective memory seems often to be particularly focused on the experience of violence, a meaning-shattering occurrence?¹ These are some of the questions that frame this book’s exploration of early Christian martyrdom and collective memory.

    In the last twenty years, the theoretical language of collective memory has become increasingly important to interdisciplinary historical and sociological discussions of how groups and societies construct and understand the past.² This orientation to the study of how collectivities make sense of their own present through recourse to constructed narratives of their pasts offers important insights to students of early Christianity. In what follows, I will seek to provide a brief history of the idea of collective memory or social memory, paying special attention to the historiographical challenges that this way of thinking about the past raises.

    MAURICE HALBWACHS’S THEORY OF SOCIAL MEMORY

    A theory of collective memory was first articulated in the modern period by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945).³ A disciple, first, of philosopher Henri Bergson and later of sociologist Emile Durkheim, Halbwachs sought to create a systematic model for social memory. Positioning himself explicitly against Freudian psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the individual unconscious and on the psychic processes of repression and forgetfulness, Halbwachs was interested in how the past comes to be apprehended and rendered meaningful by individuals.⁴ Halbwachs argued that memory is a social construction, the product of the individual’s interaction with his or her group—be this family, social class, religious community, or some other collectivity with which the individual is affiliated. Halbwachs published his views on these matters in three major works over the course of a twenty-five-year period: Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, published in 1925,⁵ La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte, which appeared in 1941,⁶ and La mémoire collective, published posthumously in 1950.⁷

    As its title suggests, The Social Frameworks of Memory argues that individual memory is necessarily produced within a social frame. Here, Halbwachs asserts that individuals remember things only in relation to the memories of others. Individuals obviously possess personal memories peculiar to their own psychologies and experiences, yet even these memories are filtered through the social field. Their meanings derive their intelligibility from context and collectively generated frameworks of significance. Given that individuals are embedded in different and multiple social groupings, even the most personal memory cannot help but derive its sense from the collective context. Moreover, in a precursor to later poststructuralist theorizing, Halbwachs observes that even the most private memories are preserved in language, which renders them social entities rather than the products of autonomous individual consciousness. Memories are processed through language, which provides the conventional and customary meanings that then refract back onto the memory. Through retelling—whether narrative, performative, representational, even liturgical—memory accrues meaning through discursive and embodied repetition.

    In situating personal consciousness of the past within a collective context, Halbwachs argues that memory in essence performs a socially conservative function—that is, memory (a particular, socially constructed version of the past) operates as an ideological ground for the present. This tendency toward conservation—or, perhaps better, preservation—emphasizes continuity between the past and the present, establishing an attachment or bond across time. In this way, collective memory does the work of tradition, providing the conceptual and cognitive constraints that render past experience meaningful in and for present contexts.

    Social memory offers one important way for groups to situate themselves temporally and topographically.¹⁰ Individuals, as members of groups (families, social classes, religious communities, political parties), generate their own sense of the past out of the different groups’ accountings of the past. Halbwachs is particularly interested in the structuring work that memory does socially, politically, and culturally. Therefore, individuals figure in his analysis only insofar as they are participants in groups, never as distinct and detached memory holders. He steers away from the physiological and philosophical questions that captivated his early teacher, Henri Bergson, about the dualistic relationship between matter and memory.¹¹ Instead, Halbwachs is very much a disciple of Durkheim, seeing the individual only in terms of the collectivities of which he or she is a part.

    In this same early work, Halbwachs pays special attention to the conservative aspect of memory within religious communities in particular. In a chapter entitled Religious Collective Memory, he observes the dual character of ancient Greek and Roman religions, organized around the household, on the one hand, and around public, political institutions, on the other. Both forms of religion—domestic and civic—involve positioning the collective (the family or the city) in relationship to its own past. But Halbwachs expends the bulk of his energy devoted to analyzing religion on a lengthy discussion of the origins of Christianity. This discussion, although constrained by the limits of the scholarship on early Christianity of his day, nevertheless offers some intriguing points of departure for this discussion.

    Religion as a generic category and as a dimension of human life is, not surprisingly given his allegiance to Durkheim, for Halbwachs a foundationally social enterprise. Moreover, in the spirit of his time, he is not afraid to make sweeping statements about all religions and their collective relationship(s) to the(ir) past(s). Every religion … reproduces in more or less symbolic forms the history of migrations and fusions of races and tribes, of great events, wars, establishments, discoveries, and reforms that we can find at the origin of the societies that practice them, he writes.¹² Religion, in Halbwachs’s account of it, is in essence a form of cultural memory work. What makes it different from the cultural memory work of other collectivities or modes of social life is the heightened importance attached to religion’s complex and potentially paradoxical relationship with the past. This is particularly amplified at moments of ideological and institutional stress or change. On the one hand, religious transformations involve a sort of displacement of a society’s or group’s historical center of gravity and a reconfiguration of its core assessments of the past. That is, when religious change occurs, narratives of origins may be problematized, historical legitimations for contemporary practices may be questioned, and lineages and genealogies may be challenged. On the other hand, religious innovation must always be couched in the past’s terms, Halbwachs argues, and so religious reforms will most often be described not as departures from but as reclamations of the past. Even at the moment that it is evolving, society returns to its past, he writes. It enframes the new elements that it pushes to the forefront in a totality of remembrances, traditions, and familiar ideas.¹³

    For the religions of Mediterranean antiquity and late antiquity, this view seems to hold true—the Augustan restoration, for example, was an innovative movement whose author consciously cloaked it in the authorizing garments of the distant past.¹⁴ The emergence of rabbinic Judaism—a radical reimagining of the law in the light of the destruction of the temple—used the language of conservation rather than innovation, building up in the process a new collective memory of a remote past.¹⁵ Early Christianity, for all its talk of a new covenant and a new creation, nevertheless rooted itself in existing national narratives and epic pasts.¹⁶ Moreover, one of the important rhetorical strategies of early Christian apologists was to argue for their movement’s superior embodiment of the highest virtues from the classical world.¹⁷ Ultimately, Christianity generated its own myth of origin, which itself became the touchstone for all subsequent narratives of Christian collective memory. Claims to collective memory, here and elsewhere, operate in part to rationalize innovations in societies where ruptures with the past create cultural anxiety.

    In exploring Christianity as an example of collective memory, Halbwachs observes this tradition’s peculiar relationship to time. Although all religions, in Halbwachs’s view, are wholly oriented toward the past, Christianity’s relationship to time is different because it claims to be simultaneously both historical at its root and outside of time, eternal. The liturgy of Christianity embodies this paradox. The Eucharist is a ritual restaging of a purported historical event; both event and ritual reenactment take place in history, in time. The cultic, commemorative repetition, however paradoxically, seeks to remember something that recedes ever more persistently into the past the more it is reenacted.¹⁸ Moreover, part of Christianity’s moral force resides precisely in its claim to exist outside history, beyond the confines of historical contingency. Halbwachs emphasizes the Christian negotiation with time by focusing on the power of repetition, not only in the ritual of the eucharist (the successive sacrifices—celebrated at distinct moments and in distinct places—are one and the same sacrifice¹⁹), but also in the idea of revelation’s simultaneous eternity and constant renewal. Dogma, just as the cult, is ageless; within the duration of passage of time of the changing world, it imitates the eternity and the immutability of God.²⁰

    But perhaps most important for this study is how Christianity negotiates its relationship to time and history through its engagement with the idea of Christian origins. Halbwachs notices the critical role played by the collective memory of the early years of the church in subsequent social formations and theological commitments. Just as the religious innovation embodied in the founding of Christianity situates itself in relation to its precursors, so any subsequent innovation comes to be measured in terms of an imagined past. "Every time that the Church was called upon to judge new theses, new cults or new details of the cult, new modes of life and religious thought, it asked itself first of all whether these conformed with the body of usages and beliefs of this first period.… The Church repeats itself indefinitely, or at least it claims to repeat itself."²¹ In the early centuries of Christianity, apologists and heresiologists alike would generate a portrait of the movement as one with an unbroken, monolithic tie to the past. Collective memory—at once deeply conservative and terrifically malleable—would serve this ideological project with great facility.

    Some years after the publication of The Social Frameworks of Memory, Halbwachs continued his explorations of Christian collective memory in a work entitled La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte: Étude de mémoire collective (The legendary topography of the gospels in the Holy Land: A study of collective memory), published in 1941. In The Social Frameworks, Halbwachs had devoted a chapter to The Localization of Memories.²² In The Legendary Topography of the Gospels, he developed this idea of localization by analyzing the production of Christian origins through the memory work of Christian pilgrims, travelers, and crusaders. Mapping their notions of the Christian past onto the topography of the Holy Land, these travelers constructed a useable Christian past for their own Christian present. For the fourth-century pilgrims who initially mapped the Christian world of the Holy Land, this Christian past often was built directly on top of important Jewish sites. Like the allegorical and typological interpreters of scripture who found the Christian message embedded in the Hebrew Bible, these pilgrims produced a continuous Christian meaning out of Jewish precursors.

    Halbwachs depends in his analysis of the gospels primarily on the work of Ernest Renan (1823–1892) whose influential Vie de Jesus (Life of Jesus) participated in the broader nineteenth-century destabilization of dogmatic accounts of the historical Jesus.²³ Despite the fact that this whole body of work from the original quest of the historical Jesus has been relegated largely to the realm of the artifactual,²⁴ Halbwachs’s use of it offers some insights that remain critical to the contemporary project. Halbwachs reads the history of gospel writing as an occasion of collective memory, noting that there is a broad framework of resemblances shared by the gospels with respect to locations and narrated events as well as to the meanings attributed to these places and happenings. The multiplicity of memories present in the gospel accounts need not be seen as a problem requiring a solution, Halbwachs argues. There is, instead, a brand of paradox embedded in the very claims to historicity in the texts. As Halbwachs understands it, It is precisely the presence of direct witnesses which increases the chances that some of [an event’s] features will be changed so that it becomes quite difficult to determine its characteristics. This is especially the case when the event is of a nature that arouses deep emotions in groups of people, giving rise to passionate discussions.²⁵

    The multiplicity of collective memories is not the only feature of the gospel accounts and their later rendering in space by travelers, pilgrims, and crusaders. The gospels as examples of collective memory are also partial, in both senses of this term: they preserve only a selection of what the first followers of Jesus might have remembered about him, and they are filtered through religious and ideological interests. They are partial rather than complete or comprehensive, and they are partial rather than disinterested or objective. This rather straightforward observation can be seen as the interpretive and historiographic motor driving much of twentieth-century gospels research.

    When localized through the activities of later visitors to the Holy Land, these memories link stories about the past with emergent theological and dogmatic claims. Because he understands collective memory as a social construction, Halbwachs has no problem questioning or indeed fully dismissing the historicity of important elements of the gospel narratives. The setting of the infancy narratives at Bethlehem, he notes, is completely dependent upon the prior importance accorded this town in Jewish tradition: There is nothing indicating that Jesus was born at Bethlehem, that Joseph and Mary ever passed through or stayed there, or that they were ever in Egypt. The authors of the Gospels seem entirely to have invented this poetic history.²⁶ Moreover, the only places that are noteworthy in the Jerusalem of the gospels are those affiliated specifically with supernatural occurrences in the narrative. Hence, the collective memory tied to these places is the memory of Christ rather than Jesus.²⁷ When later Christians travel to these locations, they are caught up in the time warp that Christian collective memory activates. Halbwachs reports on the many visitors to the Holy Land who record their impressions in a time-collapsing fashion as though, by travelling great distances, they have also engaged in a journey through time into the distant past.²⁸ Moreover, Halbwachs points out that the Jerusalem of these pilgrims is not the Jerusalem of Jesus’ first century but a much more archaic Jerusalem tied to more ancient biblical narratives and distanced from the Judaism of the first century itself. Let me add that the Jerusalem detested by the Christians was the Jerusalem of the Sadducees and the Pharisees.… Christianity had to try to evoke—in the places it now occupied and to which it now wished to give a new sacred aura—the great figures of the early days, the symbols and rites that had been neglected by contemporary Jews.²⁹

    Many of the observations made by Halbwachs about the gospels as texts of religious conviction rather than historical narration may seem self-evident from our vantage point on the other side of historical criticism’s century-and-a-half-long engagement with the gospel traditions. Yet his remarkable contribution as a sociologist who takes Christian origins seriously as an object of study should not be minimized. In this gesture, he moves far beyond his teacher and mentor, Durkheim, who limited himself to a study of elementary forms of religious life, albeit as a template for theorizing and understanding the social function of religion as a whole. Halbwachs rendered Christianity an object of critical social analysis, a move that remains provocative and controversial even into our own time. The emergence of Christianity, despite its own claims, could be historicized and mapped according to discernible social patterns. There is no question that Halbwachs’s argument implies a potentially troubling logical slippage between Christianity as a particular, historical, culturally specific manifestation of a religion and the category of religion in general, a slippage that might well (indeed should) inspire a wave of suspicion or at least caution. Nevertheless, I would suggest that Halbwachs’s insights into the collective memory of Christianity are sufficiently compelling to justify bracketing these broader theoretical problems, at least temporarily.

    In his treatment of the gospel traditions and their ongoing reception and recapitulation through bodily practices (e.g., ritual, pilgrimage, and so on), Halbwachs does not ignore the challenges raised by the passage of time and by changing circumstances. Indeed, as he understands it, religious collective memory is paradoxically and simultaneously open to change and vulnerable to stasis, and both potentialities can pose a threat to the ongoing viability of a shared memory. This danger can be seen clearly in Halbwachs’s rendering of collective memory as a component of Christianity. Here, Halbwachs operates with a doubled vision of collective memory. On the one hand, he sees that collective memory always operates under the threat of change, disintegration, and loss. On the other hand, he argues that collective memory also tends toward atrophy, fixity, and stasis. This tendency toward solidity—although the apparent opposite of the tendency toward deterioration that Halbwachs also diagnoses—can present a problem for memory in shifting circumstances. That is, a memory can lose its tone and texture; as a consequence, it can potentially become insufficiently malleable to survive changing social and historical circumstances. To describe what happens in the historical development of early Christianity, Halbwachs invokes his technical notion of permeability of memory, arguing that the story of Christian origins is a narrative of movement from the permeability of memory borders to ever increasing levels of impermeability.³⁰ Hence, the fluidity of collective memory gels over time, and the past’s story becomes increasingly fixed.

    This tendency toward a solidifying of collective memory is not simply an unconscious and inevitable result of the passage of time. According to Halbwachs, collective memory—which one might describe as a form of Foucault’s history of the present avant la lettre—is articulated through attempts to secure it by means of localization and commemoration. That is, social practices of reinscription render collective memory available; collective memory is sustained through the agency of a group and its members. Nevertheless, collective memory is also always potentially vulnerable to transformation through changes in everything from topography and architecture to ritual and narrative. Moreover, since time does not stand still, collective memory is susceptible to the inevitable processes by which the object of memory recedes ever-backwards in time, placing the memory itself at risk. In his developing vision of collective memory as manifest most poignantly in the places of memory, to use Pierre Nora’s later formulation,³¹ Halbwachs recognizes the paradox that both stability and decay are present simultaneously in memory and its material embodiments. Jerusalem

    was a city built with stones and made of houses and streets that were familiar to them [Jerusalem’s Christian inhabitants]. It is on account of the stability of these things that their memories endured. But that stability is at the mercy of all the material accidents that slowly transform or even destroy cities—just as the memories we constantly compose regarding a person with whom we live are at the mercy of the physiological accidents that slowly transform or even destroy an organism.³²

    For those who do not live with this daily transformation of material memory, the memory itself becomes more easily fixed within symbolic representations. Here, ideology—or what Halbwachs calls dogma or doctrine (terms he uses interchangeably)—takes on the central and determinative role. This symbolic value is repeatedly projected back upon the locales in question. As Halbwachs puts it in relation to Jerusalem, The Christians outside Palestine could invoke Jerusalem without fear of being contradicted by a clashing reality. The image had to adjust itself to beliefs, not to real places.³³ Whether this fixing of memory ought to be read as a consolidating, stabilizing effect or as an ossification depends upon how the memory is preserved. It is of the nature of remembrances, Halbwachs writes, when they cannot be renewed by resuming contact with the realities from which they arose, to become impoverished and congealed.³⁴ It is not fully clear

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