Early Christian Deathscapes in Fourth-Century Antioch

Abstract

How do religious collectives form? What is sensually attractive about religious practices, objects, and spaces? What feelings are dangerous or desirable, to whom, and to what ends? And how are those feelings formed? “Early Christian Deathscapes in Fourth-Century Antioch” addresses these questions through the lens of “deathscapes,” a term which indexes the situated, sensory experience of a place marked by death. Antioch (now Antakya, Turkey) was the capital of the province of Syria on the eastern side of the Roman Empire. In the fourth century, it was home to educated orators, diasporic Jews, and several emperors, as well as increasingly influential Christians who disagreed with each other about a religion that was still under construction. Drawing on the cultural affect theory of Sara Ahmed allows me to elucidate how the Christian faction which ultimately prevailed in Antioch secured its ascendancy in part by stimulating attractive and orienting affects through rhetoric, architecture, and material culture in the city’s preexisting and emerging deathscapes, such as nekropoleis and martyria. Ahmed argues that emotions are not privately generated but socially produced and circulated through memories, stories, objects, and places in what she calls “affective economies.” As affect vibrates in people, places, and things, it moves them, “sticks to” them, and circulates through them. By putting Ahmed in conversation with archaeological and textual evidence from Antioch, this study asks how the nekropoleis and martyria of fourth-century Antioch felt to the people who gathered within them and how affect molded their allegiances. Data as diverse as homilies, mosaic floors, legal edicts, and dish sherds show that in deathscapes Antiochene Christians navigated their loyalties to dead kin, to traditional practices, and to local saints. Through rhetoric, legislation, and building projects, bishops, orators, and emperors attempted to influence these practices by persuading their neighbors how to feel. Could — should — joy inhere in a corpse? Conviviality in a nekropolis? Disgust in a funeral procession? This study takes its readers through Antioch’s southern nekropolis, a Christian outpost in the nekropolis called the Koimeterion, the itineraries of a saint’s corpse, and a monumental cruciform church. Potent affects circulated through these deathscapes. Tracing these affects illuminates the socio-political dynamics of Christianities under construction in fourth-century Antioch.