There Is No Crime for Those Who Have ChristReligious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire

Gaddis, Michael

doi:10.1525/california/9780520241046.001.0001

Cited by 15 publications

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“…In an existential sense, the exploration of martyrdom has taken for granted a separation of human existence and context to try to understand martyrdom. 11 Recent historical treatments of Roman Late Antiquity help provide an institutional context for Christian participation in different modes of violence (Gaddis, 2005;Grig, 2004). Countering the nearly exclusive blame placed on monotheism for intolerance and coercive violence, a familiar trope since Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1896), Hal Drake (2000) distributes responsibility for Christian violence through the demands of broader political or social organization that developed rapidly in the era of Constantine.…”

Section: Modalities Of Violence and The Historiography Of Christian Martyrdommentioning

confidence: 99%

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Homo profanus: The Christian martyr and the violence of meaning-making

Recla

2014

Critical Research on Religion

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The martyr is a potent symbol of sacrifice in Western cultural discourse. Understanding martyrdom as sacrifice, however, blunts the potency of the martyr's action. It obscures the violence by which the martyr's death becomes, paradoxically, a means to define institutional life. In this article, I propose an analogous relationship between the early Christian martyr and Giorgio Agamben's enigmatic homo sacer. Like homo sacer, the Christian martyr provides an ''other'' against which to organize institutional life. Read as a sacrifice, the martyr also exemplifies the threat of biopolitics that Agamben describes, where mere existence can be isolated from political life and made subject to sovereign violence. Distinguishing the martyr from their institutional appropriation is a step toward exposing the modes of violence inherent in sovereign power. It provides the possibility of reconceptualizing the martyr as an autonomous figure of resistance, not as homo sacer but as homo profanus.

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Section: Modalities Of Violence and The Historiography Of Christian Martyrdommentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For the original argument, see Gibbon (1896). Michael Gaddis (2005) classifies Late Antique violence as on a sort of continuum to argue how suffering violence in martyrdom could transfer to committing it in the name of God. 13.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Homo profanus: The Christian martyr and the violence of meaning-making

Recla

2014

Critical Research on Religion

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“…12 Among the imperial jurists themselves there was frequently much confusion, a fact that some 11. For violence in Late Antiquity, see Gaddis 2005;Drake 2006. 12.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Altering Infamy

Bond

2014

Classical Antiquity

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This paper investigates the application of the legal stigma of infamia (disrepute) in Late Antiquity. The legal status is used as a lens through which to view the changing systemic, religious, and social landscapes between the reigns of Diocletian and Justinian, indicating the various uses and, ultimately, abuses of the status, as well as the marked consequences of expanding its definition. The use of the legal status to marginalize religious deviants in particular is inspected. This analysis reveals that the amendment of infamia to include heretics, apostates, and pagans signals the use of classical law to define orthodoxy and to articulate the anxiety over the pagan-Christian religious transition. The unforeseen consequences of infamia's expansion were the abetment of violence in the fourth and fifth centuries. Moreover, the disqualification of religious deviants from serving on curial councils had a noticeable impact on some municipalities in the later empire, and may have created a loophole with which to avoid curial service altogether.

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“… 90 A strange event known only through Augustine's furious letter to the city's leaders, Ep. 50; an attempt at reconstruction in Gaddis 2005: 118–19. The date is usually given as 399, but only to synchronise with the imperial measures in that year.…”

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A Feast in Carthage: Testing the Limits of ‘Secularity’ in Late Antiquity

Gassman

2020

J. Rom. Stud.

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A now conventional model, developed by Robert Markus, sees late Roman cities as fundamentally secular landscapes. Focusing on Augustine's sermon against a feast of the genius of Carthage (Sermo 62), this article argues that narratives of ‘secularity’ have neglected pagans’ own attitudes and the circumstances that drove ordinary Christians’ participation in civic rites. Behind Augustine's charges of ‘idolatry’ lay the religious convictions of the feast's non-Christian sponsors and behind their expectations of Christian attendance lay the recent destruction of a pagan shrine on church property. For Augustine's listeners to construe the feast as religiously irrelevant was an expression not of routine social solidarity, but of fear before powerful patrons. What was ‘secular’ was open to doubt and negotiation, both here and in empire-wide celebrations such as the Kalends of January; the boundary between the ‘pagan’ and the ‘secular’ can be located only with careful attention to the diversity of opinions about each particular rite.

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There Is No Crime for Those Who Have ChristReligious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

Homo profanus: The Christian martyr and the violence of meaning-making

Homo profanus: The Christian martyr and the violence of meaning-making

Altering Infamy

A Feast in Carthage: Testing the Limits of ‘Secularity’ in Late Antiquity

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