Review | Heirs of Roman Persecution: Studies on a Christian and Para-Christian Discourse in Late Antiquity

Éric Fournier and Wendy Mayer, eds. Heirs of Roman Persecution: Studies on a Christian and Para-Christian Discourse in Late Antiquity. Routledge, 2020.

In recent decades, scholars have challenged the narrative of Christian persecution that was constructed in Roman antiquity. In the popular imagination, a steadfast and pious Christian church resisted the onslaught of an oppressive Roman government hellbent on eradicating the faithful from its realm. In reality, anti-Christian persecution was sporadic and not often the result of imperial directives. There is no doubt that some Christians fell victim to the Roman state, but the cases seem to have been relatively few and far between.[1] Even after Christianity attained hegemony in the late Roman empire, accounts of persecution at the hands of the impious appear frequently in the historical record. In fact, late ancient authors continually mobilized what the volume calls the “discourse of persecution” throughout the late ancient Mediterranean to various ends. That discourse and its many manifestations form the volume’s object of inquiry.

The volume under review, edited by Éric Fournier and Wendy Mayer, stems from two panels held at the 2016 meeting of the North American Patristics Society. The editors have arranged the sixteen contributions into five parts. The first is an introductory essay by Fournier. Three temporal-geographical “moments” – the Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries, and the post-Roman west and east respectively – follow Fournier’s introduction. Lastly, a theoretical essay by Mayer concludes the volume. These chapters present intriguing and informative analyses of different contexts in which the discourse of persecution appears in the historical record.

Fournier’s first contribution introduces the questions at hand. He approaches persecution as an emic category linked to the totalizing discourse of Christianity.[2] Fournier lays out three primary aims for the volume: to examine Christian claims of persecution, even after attaining hegemony; to critique scholarly terminology around the study of persecution; and, to analyze the ends to which late ancient authors employed such rhetorics.

Part I, which chronicles the late Roman empire, features six essays, the first three of which treat the discourse of persecution in accounts of various emperors’ reigns. The first essay, chapter 2 by Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, challenges traditional narratives of Diocletian’s (r. 284-305) and Constantine’s (r. 306-337) reigns, suggesting that an “apocalyptic frame” hides Christianity’s prominence in the late third century. In Constantine’s case, she argues, this frame elides many of the difficulties the emperor faced early in his reign. In chapter 3, Nathaniel Morehouse examines Julian (r. 361-363), the emperor’s decision to withhold violence as part of his attempts to restore traditional polytheism, and the resulting reconsideration and re-articulation by the Christian communities of what constituted trauma and martyrdom. Maijastina Kahlos then turns in Chapter 4 to Valens (r. 364-378), arguing that the sectarian polemics handed down by Nicene Christian authors cast the emperor’s efforts to keep the peace as anti-Nicene persecution, a continuation of earlier persecutions of “true” Nicene Christianity.

The second group of essays in Part I explores the discourse of persecution in theological contexts. Byron MacDougall assesses in chapter 5 how Gregory of Nazianzus situated Nicene readers of his Theological Orations as a persecuted group in a competition for legitimacy with readers of Aetius’s Syntagmation. In chapter 6, Adam Ployd then scrutinizes Augustine’s rhetoric of “beneficial persecution,” exploring the rhetorical strategies that enabled Augustine to justify various anti-Donatist measures. Features of forensic rhetoric that aimed to justify an illegal or immoral act provided a model for Augustine’s claims that persecuting Donatists was for their own good, argues Ployd. Lastly, Mattias Brand examines in chapter 7 the discourse of suffering in Manichaean texts and its similarities to the discourse of persecution. Ongoing persecution, asserts Brand, was part of the Manichaean worldview, entwined with the past, present, and future in Manichaean literary culture.

Part II extends the analysis of the discourse of persecution into the post-Roman west. In chapter 8, Fournier’s second contribution considers how Victor of Vita (born c. 430) employed a discourse of persecution to depict any anti-Nicene measure as analogous to the harshest persecution he witnessed. Victor invoked persecution as a narrative framing device through various means, including intertextual allusions to Greek, Latin, and biblical texts. Samuel Cohen turns our attention to Gelasius and the Acacian Schism in chapter 9. In the wake of the eastern emperor Zeno’s attempt to impose Christological unity with the Henotikon, Gelasius (Bishop of Rome from 492-496) employed the rhetoric of persecution to defend the Council of Chalcedon’s creed. In chapter 10, Fournier centers the historical accounts of Gregory of Tours (who had served as Bishop from 573-595) and the absence of the persecution discourse in his accounts of Gallic history. The Merovingian rulers’ general respect for ecclesiastical procedures, suggests Fournier, led Gregory to eschew persecution rhetoric in his discussion of violent episodes. Shifting our attention to Visigothic Iberia in chapter 11, Molly Lester queries how Nicene writers crafted the memory of the “Arian” King Leovigild (r. 568-586) after his successor Reccared’s (r. 586-601) embrace of Nicene Christianity in 587. Lester contends that pro-Nicene authors minimized accounts of persecution in order to integrate formerly anti-Nicene figures and institutions into the new Nicene order.

Part III focuses on the eastern Mediterranean of the fifth through seventh centuries. In chapter 12, Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos examines the discussions of Arian violence by the ecclesiastical historians Socrates and Sozomen. These authors, she argues, situated their historical accounts in relation to the “habit of persecution” (pg. 237). Forging this connection advanced their efforts to legitimize and unify the Constantinopolitan Nicene community at a time when the city’s social landscape was highly contested. Jason Osequeda shows in chapter 13 how authors could mobilize the discourse of persecution to achieve different ends despite describing the same emperor and his actions: Basiliscus (r. 475-476) was cast as either persecuted or persecutor, depending on a given author’s point of view. Turning to the writings of John of Ephesus (c. 507-588), Christine Shepherdson demonstrates in chapter 14 how the historian crafted his accounts of contemporaneous coercion in light of a shared past of persecution. John employed an “expansive understanding of martyrdom” (pg. 286) that emphasized violent continuities between the pre-Constantinian persecutions and non-physically violent means of coercion predominant in the post-Constantinian Christian empire. In the last of the case-study chapters (chapter 15), Ryan Strickler extends the volume’s chronological and geographical scope by looking to the seventh-century Persian empire. He examines the persecutions at the hands of Sassanid Persians, rival Christians, and Muslim conquerors recounted in texts like the Life of Theodore of Sykeon, the Life of George of Choziba, and the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius. Strickland suggests that Christian authors emplotted themselves in narratives of persecution to cope with the instability and warfare of the seventh century.

Wendy Mayer closes the volume with a reflection on the thematic threads that weave together the studies in this volume. Taking a cue from the wide array of approaches displayed by the volume’s other authors, Mayer turns to cognitive psychology, Moral Foundations Theory, studies of fundamentalism, and other developments in the social sciences to suggest that the rhetoric of persecution appeals to a moral value that reifies and reinforces communal boundaries through processes of inclusion and exclusion in both the past and present. It is a rich essay that opens many potential paths for further work going forward.

Taken together, these thought-provoking essays offer scholars of late antiquity much to think about. As the volume’s title suggests, Christians and Para-Christians participated in a cohesive discourse that employed intelligible historical narratives, various topoi, and particular vocabularies to communicate certain ideas to their audiences. At the same time, the volume’s authors reveal how various late ancient writers appealed to this discourse of persecution – the concerted use of these narratives, topoi, and vocabularies – to accomplish a multitude of aims: not only were they purporting to recount historical events, they were also mobilizing them in their contemporary contexts. As a discursive strategy, the rhetoric of “persecution” was malleable enough to legitimize or delegitimize an emperor or bishop and their actions, to demarcate a communal boundary, or to justify acts of violence and suppression. As Falcasantos so astutely notes in her chapter, persecution is “in the eye of the beholder” (pg. 246): it is a rhetorical tool an author could use as necessary, not a stable, easily-identifiable historical phenomenon we can objectively locate in the past. Finally, the volume’s various authors collectively remind their readers of the innate interdisciplinarity and capaciousness of late ancient studies as they embrace a variety of models and interlocutors from a wide array of scholarly disciplines, including (but, of course not limited to) the study of rhetoric, narratology, and political philosophy.

In sum, this volume stands as a striking reminder of our responsibility as scholars and critics to scrutinize claims of persecution – whether in the ancient or contemporary world – in their rhetorical and historical contexts, and, perhaps more importantly, that there are many ways to do so.

Contents

Ch. 1: The Christian discourse of persecution in Late Antiquity: An introduction, by Éric Fournier

Part I: The later Roman Empire of the fourth and fifth centuries

Ch. 2: Breaking the apocalyptic frame: Persecution and the rise of Constantine, by Elizabeth DePalma Digeser

Ch. 3: Begrudging the honor: Julian and Christian martyrdom, by Nathaniel Morehouse

Ch. 4: A misunderstood emperor?: Valens as a persecuting ruler in late antique literature, by Maijastina Kahlos

Ch. 5: Theologies under persecution: Gregory of Nazianzus and the Syntagmation of Aetius, by Byron MacDougall

Ch. 6: For their own good: Augustine and the rhetoric of beneficial persecution, by Adam Ployd

Ch. 7: In the footsteps of the Apostles of Light: Persecution and the Manichaean discourse of suffering, by Mattias Brand

Part II: Post-Roman kingdoms of the Western Mediterranean (fifth to seventh centuries)

Ch. 8: “To collect gold from hidden caves”: Victor of Vita and the Vandal “persecution” of heretical barbarians in late antique North Africa, by Éric Fournier

Ch. 9: “You have made common cause with their persecutors”: Gelasius, the language of persecution, and the Acacian Schism, by Samuel Cohen

Ch.10: Everyone but the kings: The rhetoric of (non-)persecution in Gregory of Tours’ Histories, by Éric Fournier

Ch. 11: Persecutio, seductio, and the limits of rhetorical intolerance in Visigothic Iberia, by Molly Lester

Part III: Eastern Mediterranean in the fifth to seventh centuries

Ch. 12: The city a palimpsest: Rewriting Arian violence in fifth-century historiography, by Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos

Ch. 13: The name of ill-omen: Basiliscus and the church in Constantinople, by Jason Osequeda

Ch. 14: Martyrs of exile: John of Ephesus and religious persecution, by Christine Shepardson

Ch. 15: Persecution and apostasy: Christian identity during the crises of the seventh century, by Ryan W. Strickler

Part IV: Theorizing persecution discourse

Ch. 16: Heirs of Roman persecution: Common threads in discursive strategies across Late Antiquity, by Wendy Mayer

[1] Candida R. Moss. The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom. HarperOne, 2013 offers one version of this argument.

[2] cf. Averil Cameron. Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse. University of California Press, 1991.

Carl R. Rice (carl.rice@yale.edu) is a first-generation college student and a Ph.D. candidate in ancient history at Yale. His dissertation examines law and normative notions of religio in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries CE. You can follow him on Twitter and the Humanities Commons.