Christine Shepardson. A Memory of Violence: Syriac Christianity and the Radicalization of Religious Difference in Late Antiquity. University of California Press, 2025.
For readers familiar with the history of late antique Christianity, the fraught legacy of Ephesus (431 CE) and Chalcedon (451 CE) is well known. There is a seemingly simple “truth” about these councils: they led to the fracturing of ecclesial unity along Christological lines—Chalcedonians, miaphysites, and the Church of the East. However, Christine Shepardson joins a growing movement among scholars to scrutinize previous historiography to offer a more nuanced picture of this period. There is a complicated story separating 451 from today, one marked by heated theological debates and communal divisions, reflected in literature and visual arts, including the painting on the cover of this book. The factors that led an artist to depict Christians adhering to a different Christological viewpoint as burning in hell did not spring up overnight. Instead, Shepardson argues, the miaphysite churches (those who hold that Christ has one nature) as a distinct group were created by concerted rhetorical work on the part of miaphysite luminaries. Shepardson focuses her work on the memory-making efforts of important figures in the emerging miaphysite movement from the 5th and 6th centuries to excavate the origins of Syriac miaphysite genealogies of “orthodoxy.” Their writings, Shepardson argues, soon became foundational to collective memory and community identity.
Shepardson’s monograph reflects a broader interest among scholars of religion in the construction of communal identity in late antiquity. Thomas Sizgorich and Jennifer Barry have both explored the complex relationship between violence and communal identity in Late Antiquity, though not with an eye to Syriac authors. Jack Tannous also traces the fight for “simple believers” by miaphysite clergy but largely focusing on the period after the rise of Islam. Shepardson, then, contributes to this conversation by offering a narrative grounding this history in both theories of memory and theories of violence directly after Chalcedon. She shows the complexity of the memory-making process, with close attention to the networks and regional pressures that different authors faced, as imperial policies shifted and local politics shaped their lives. Her careful integration of social, environmental, and political factors in describing how miaphysite clergy created “religions of resistance” and fought “memory wars” for the soul of their communities makes her book a relatively comprehensive narrative of the formation of Syriac miaphysite identity in Late Antiquity. Shepardson shows the “truth” about Chalcedon: it was not simply one event, but a set of stories told and retold, tinged with violence, that had to be constructed in collective memory.
Shepardson begins her work by introducing her theoretical approach, highlighting some important terms of analysis, such as: “grey zones”, or zones of ambiguity, which authors seek to eliminate through their violent rhetoric and “memory wars” where authors fight for their legitimacy through crafting memory. She explains that violence can be seen as a way to delegitimize opponents, and that clergy sought to shape the self-understanding of their audiences by using the techniques of ancient rhetoric to produce specific memories through attention to violence (and through symbolic violence itself).
Armed with vocabulary from studies on memory, violence, and rhetoric, the first chapter sets out to retell a familiar story, that of the Council of Chalcedon. Shepardson introduces readers to key events and leaders involved in the controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries. She observes how a cooling climate and plague placed pressures across the empire and also how important regional diversity was during the reigns of Zeno, Anastasius, Justin I, and Justinian. In particular, Shepardson underscores the key role of Gaza as a miaphysite center in which Zacharias Rhetor, John Rufus, and Severus of Alexandria all spent time.
Having established Syriac miaphysite networks and their political and physical locations within the empire, Shepardson turns in Chapters Two and Three to the genealogies they constructed. In her words, these authors labored to create “the illusion of seamless constancy from the beginnings of Christianity” to their own teachings (p. 49). This creation of genealogies was not merely aesthetic, but “these writings reveal that miaphysite leaders hoped to leverage such insults and other forms of verbal violence into action to bring more people into communion with miaphysite clergy and cause their followers to separate from and anathematize Chalcedonian Christians in a form of increased religious radicalization” (p. 110). Miaphysite clergy linked themselves and their followers to biblical and early Christian heroes, such as Cyril, and their opponents to traditional “enemies” of the orthodoxy from the centuries past, such as Arius and Paul of Samosata. This is, Shepardson argues, a particular type of radicalization to create a religion of resistance and enforce the separation of miaphysite Christians from pro-Chalcedonians.
Chapter Four turns from the verbal violence that miaphysite clergy committed to their narratives about the violence they and their followers faced. Against more triumphal Chalcedonian narratives in which God’s favor is shown to the Orthodox through earthly blessing, miaphysite leaders argued that real Christians have always faced suffering. This other kind of genealogy of orthodoxy traces a direct line of continuity from the authenticity of earlier martyrs to the suffering of Syriac miaphysite clergy in the fifth and sixth centuries. Through this genealogy, they constructed their identity as a church of martyrs.
As the miaphysite church envisioned itself as an embattled community, they also spoke vividly of the future sufferings of apostates and opponents. Chapter Five shows how Miaphysites like Severus “did not rely solely… on promises of heaven to persuade people to live as he hoped” (p. 168). Instead, the clergy spent time warning their flocks “in violent detail about the painful torments they would face for eternity if God did not judge them to be among the just” (p. 168). Suffering may be inevitable, but one has a choice between temporary suffering in the present for God’s true people or an eternal one for those outside the community.
The purpose of this violence experienced by the holy ones was to prevent mingling with heretics, or worse, taking their demon-infested communion. Shepardson explores the perceived dangers of intermingling in Chapter Six, where she shows how “the Eucharist served as a marker par excellence of religious identity in the politicized conflicts of their day” (p. 181). This chapter ends her analysis of the works of the miaphysite clergy who lived primarily under the miaphysite-friendly Emperor, Anastasis, and she turns in her last chapter to the next generation of miaphysites represented by John of Ephesus, who lived under the violent persecutions of Justin I and Justinian. In Chapter Seven, Shepardson shows how the strategies developed by Severus and others were adapted to a new, more tumultuous time. The epilogue continues this trajectory, briefly pointing towards how these same strategies changed after the rise of Islam in homelands of miaphysite Christians.
A Memory of Violence offers a useful overview for anyone interested in understanding Chalcedon and its effects at a more detailed level, as well as those interested in the history of Christianity writ large. Following the legacy of Elizabeth Clark, Shepardson grounds familiar figures in their contexts and networks to reveal startling and challenging insights. A Memory of Violence is written clearly and concisely enough to be useful to those unfamiliar with the Chalcedonian controversies, but also offers detailed observations valuable to specialists who have been studying Chalcedon for many years.
Briana Grenert is a graduate student at Duke University in the Graduate Program in Religion. Her dissertation covers the use of Jezebel in Late Antique Jewish and Christian polemics.