RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

Christianity and the Mediterranean World : Religious Plurality, Cohexistence and Conflicts. Towns and Peripheries (1th-8th Centuries)

University Co-ordinator

Università degli Studi di ROMA "La Sapienza" - STUDI STORICO-RELIGIOSI - ()

Research Unit Leader

Alberto Camplani

Description

The Roman équipe has as the object of its study the relationship of the cities of Rome and Alexandria to their surrounding hinterlands. This study is rooted within the tradition of historiographical and literary reconstruction, but it also relies upon the advances that have been made in various humanistic disciplines with regard to literary analysis, sociological aspects of cult and worship, geopolitical models, and the history of ideas. The concept of periphery, which will play a leading role in this study, will be considered under three of its possible meanings: periphery in the strictly urbanistic sense, i.e. the outlying regions as opposed to the urban centre of a large city (suburbs), often the site of the first Christian buildings; periphery as a region, even one of extraordinary size, that is strictly subordinate to a centre of economic, political, or ecclesiastical power (e.g. the Valley of the Nile in relationship to Alexandria or southern Italy vis-à-vis Rome); periphery as a complex of marginal cultural areas (linked to communities), religious movements, single individuals excluded from the direct exercise of power. The programme of research that is here proposed has four objectives. 1) It will examine both the means whereby the orthodox Christian communities of Rome and Alexandria asserted themselves and the processes that led to the marginalisation of minorities belonging to traditional religions, to Judaism, to different forms of Christianity, as well as that of archaic institutional figures within Christianity (viz. prophets and didaskaloi). It is from this perspective that attention will also be given to the relationship obtaining between centre (urban or cultural) and periphery. 2) The evolution of the reciprocal recognition accorded to one another by the forms of Christianity dominant in Rome and Alexandria will be reconstructed as will be that of the crises that frequently marked their relationship. Attention under this heading will also be given to their struggles with the other megalopoleis for hegemony within the Mediterranean world. 3) The relationship of antagonism, competition, or collaboration that existed between each megalopolis and its periphery will be analysed. Here our category of periphery will be extended to cover even urban centres of significant dimensions, e.g. Carthage. The impact of the concept of political, cultural, or economic capital upon the life and self-understanding of the urban Christian community will be reconstructed. 4) We shall delineate the zones that the Christian communities of the two megalopoleis viewed as spaces complementary to their exercise of power.

The following lines of research are proposed in detail as regards these four individual objectives.

1. The Christian communities of Rome and Alexandria interacted with a plurality of religious cultures that were in competition amongst themselves.
a) Especial attention will be reserved for the evolution and marginalisation of traditional religions, normally grouped together under the label of “paganism”. This will be done both from the point of view of urbanism and from that of culture. In so doing, we shall attempt to answer the following question: In what direction did the progressive Christianization of Rome and Alexandria move? What concrete urban spaces and what representations of these did it evoke both in those groups attached to the traditional religions and in those groups that were in the process of asserting themselves as the Christian majority of the population?

b) A series of notices, actions, and testimony reveal the assertion - at different moments in the two cities - of a majority that is active at the intellectual (production of texts) and institutional level. For this reason we shall also analyse the events and cultural and institutional phenomena that lead to the marginalisation of certain figures (for instance, the prophet and the didaskalos) and to the assertion of new models for the episcopate. On the other hand, this research has the goal of highlighting the ways in which individuals and groups reacted to this marginalisation (e.g. analysis of texts produced by the minorities, as in the case of the numerous Gnostic texts that exist in Coptic).

2. a) The relationship between the Christian majorities of the two megalopoleis and their mutual recognition of one another permeate a troubled history in which it is possible to discern the first signs of the great rift that was to occur between Eastern and Western Christianity. From this perspective, it is essential that we reconstruct certain moments of this relationship by means of the analysis of a selection of the epistolary documentation and texts that are historiographical, canonical, hagiographical, exegetical and theological in nature. We shall be concerned with those that fall between the third and seventh centuries and which illustrate most clearly these two different models of urban Christianity that were elaborated by the ruling elite. In this research, especial attention will be devoted to the formation of archives in the two cities and to the exchange of documents between the ecclesiastical sees. Within this context will an attempt be made to highlight the ways in which the bureaucracy of the two great ecclesiastical capitals progressively assimilates itself to the political and administrative structures of civil society. The assertion of a normative literature that is tied to the great capitals is extremely important for properly understanding the position that each of them claimed within the Mediterranean world. (For example, the elaboration and above all the transmission of the canons of Nicaea [325], Constantinople [381], and Chalcedon [451] in the documents and literature subsequent to these councils, which was produced by theologians or members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. One thinks of the example offered by the value attached to Nicaea and even Constantinople by the anti-Chalcedonian patriarchs of Alexandria.) Another object of research will be the relationship between Gregory the Great and the pro-Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria Eulogios, which relationship would appear to have left traces even within the Roman archives (e.g. an unpublished letter of Eulogios of Alexandria that is to be found at the Greek monastery of Grottaferrata.)

b) Within this same animated historical dialectic, attention will be given to the impact had by the political and cultural ideas of a capital upon the self-representation that the Christian community. For example, how did the idea of Rome as capital of the Empire manifest itself in different ways as a consequence of the historical periods experienced by the city? This is a question to be answered with explicit reference to the vision that the Christian community had of itself and will cover a time-scale ranging from the pre-Constantinian to the post-Constantinian period, from the dissolution of the Empire in the West to the romano-barbarian kingdoms.
A similar question can be posed for Alexandria: With what historical-cultural arguments and with what means of propaganda did Alexandria further its candidature as the Christian capital of the East?
These and similar questions will be answered on the basis of texts that belong to a wide range of different literary genres. We might note, for the sake of illustration, that the following are amongst the categories to be deployed: theological and exegetical texts (Letter of Clement the Roman to the Corinthians, the corpus of works attributed to Hippolytus), papal letters and documents (Damasus, Leo, and Gregory), hagiographical texts (for Rome the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, the Acts of Peter and Paul by Pseudo-Marcellus, and the Actus Silvestri; for Alexandria, the Acta Marci in their different versions, the Passio Petri Alexandrini, and apocryphal texts in Coptic), historiographical texts that are manifestly apologetic in scope (the History of the Church of Alexandria and Roman historiographical texts), and canonical texts (Nicene and Serdican material at Rome, the Alexandrine synod).

3. The perspectives and texts from which this research proposes to analyse the relationship between periphery and immense urban centre are different. First of all, it must be noted that over the course of time the peripheries of the large megalopoleis underwent both growth and diminution that were due to competition between the episcopal sees or to historical events of a civil and military nature. Such events include the Germanic invasions of the fifth century, the Justinianic reconquest, the changing relationship between the Popes and the Longobards, and the Arab conquest of Egypt. These events resulted in significant changes to the pre-existing network of geo-ecclesiastical stability.

a) On the one hand, the documentation that the members of the équipe propose to examine allows the affirmation that the two megalopoleis claimed to represent their peripheries and that they wished to impose upon these their own cultural and institutional models. However, it also reveals that such a claim met with resistance (e.g. the relationship between Rome and Christianity in North Africa; conflicts between Alexandria and the Valley of the Nile). This complex situation can be reconstructed via the study of the history of events, but also by means of analysing the texts that were created and developed in order to lay the basis for the claims of the ecclesiastical capitals or so as to assist them in the imposition of their cultural models. Two texts and one line of thought that will be analysed in the course of this research may serve as an example. Through an articulate recounting of his missionary activity, the Alexandrine Acts of Mark the Evangelist justify the claims of Alexandria with regard to the diocese of Cyrenaica. The Dialogues of Gregory the Great reveal the dialectic that existed between the construction of a hagiographical model typical of the capital and the appropriation of a charisma that was generated in the periphery. The Augustinian movement experienced a similar fate at the moment of its transferral to the capital: at the time of its reception by the hierarchy within the megalopolis, this theological trend from the periphery is both transformed and tamed.

b) On the other hand, the attitude of the peripheries as regards the megalopoleis offers us an interesting discourse that merits diachronic observation over the long-term. In fact, aside from the conflicts with the ecclesiastical power of the great capitals that resulted in more or less explicit forms of repression (Melitians in Egypt, Donatists in Africa), the tendency to negotiate for their own rights is also manifested on the part of religious movements, individual dioceses, and marginal monastic communities. There is the tendency to offer collaboration in return either for economic support or for the permission to follow their own life-style and to adhere to their own ideological orientation. In this regard, we shall study a variety of texts that were produced in the peripheries. These will include literary and canonical texts (rules and works of monastic origin, collections of canons coming from Alexandria or produced in Egypt, e.g. the canons of Pseudo-Basil, provincial textual archives of a Christian nature like those of the Chapter Library of Verona), hagiographical texts (the Life of Fulgentius) and documentary texts. This study is aimed at highlighting the institutional instruments (e.g. individual representation within the capital, which often translates into the construction of houses or monasteries inside that city) and propaganda (texts giving voice to the indispensable contribution of the periphery to the glory and power of the Christian community of the megalopolis) that were deployed in the course of this negotiation.

4. The concept of a complementary zone of influence and that of periphery are only partly identical in the history of ancient and medieval Christianity. Each capital had its own particular periphery, which experienced extensions or reductions over the course of time. However, each capital also attempted to bring within its power other regions where direct domination was impracticable. There are areas that were disputed for lengthy periods, e.g. regions of Asia Minor that were contested between Alexandria and Constantinople or areas of the Balkan peninsula that were fought over by Rome and Constantinople. Numerous texts, especially those of the fourth to sixth centuries, allow us to study the representations that each megalopolis fashioned itself as regards its own ability to influence zones that did not belong to its periphery.