[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
The foretitle of this innovative collection (based on a workshop held in Fribourg in 2021) might inspire thoughts of spring-, tomb-, or mountain-shrines, which drew visitors and devotees from wide catchment areas, both traditional villagers and (at various times and places) those affiliated with Judaism or a nascent form of Christianity.[1] Or one might think of the Palestinian site of Mamre, where the simultaneous participation by multiple groups in an annual festival (still in the fifth century) is described by the church historian Sozomen (Hist. eccl. 2.4). Or the Egyptian Isis shrine in Menouthis, outside Alexandria, whose regional popularity still in the late fifth century (according to Zachariah of Mytilene) extended even to Alexandrian intellectuals. “Sharing” religious sites tends to imply that the dedication of the multiple constituencies is so regionally constituted that larger religious affiliations move into the background; traditions are what matter. Innumerable shrines like this have operated across Europe, as the anthropologist Robert Hayden describes in his Afterword to the volume.
But the editors have conceived the mandate in this volume as as an exploration of the ways that Christians and “Pagans” battled over temples and how Christians negotiated the monumental or cultic legacy of temples in cities through destruction and replacement. The editors draw a theoretical program from Hayden’s own earlier work, which looked at the vicissitudes of major shrines over modern times for patterns behind conflict and tolerance.[2] “Site-sharing” in these modern cases involves not particular regional cultures coming together, but “Orthodox Christians,” “Sufis,” “Sunni Muslims,” “Hindus,” and other modern religious constructions tolerating or detesting an (equally modern) Other. In modernity, that is, people most commonly think of shrine-sharing in terms of such broad community markers, not simply cultural or regional contiguity, and so it is indeed an Other that must be negotiated. Which religious authority has political dominion over the shrine and the network (or, in Hayden’s term, “religioscape”) of shrines?
Hayden’s model, which has examined relationships between religious groups at a shrine when one or the other religion has authority in the area, can be extraordinarily insightful in cases like the 2010 mosque destruction in Ayodhya, India, and its 2024 replacement with a glittery Hindu temple under BJP authority, or the highly conflictual coexistence of Muslims and Jews at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Palestine (with a devastating massacre of Muslim worshippers by an Israeli settler in 1994). Such cases involve highly reified senses of “Jew,” “Hindu,” and “Muslim.” But does Hayden’s model apply to the various senses of “Jew,” “Christian” and its Other in late antiquity?[3] For example, does recourse to the simplistic “othering” category “Pagan” when the historian is teasing out the local politics around a particular temple actually aid our understanding of conflict, or does it simply enshroud religious nuances in ecclesiastical discourse? And is Christian domination and triumph in religious spaces really the whole story of “shared religious sites” in late antiquity? What indeed of those spring sanctuaries and healing shrines that persisted through late antiquity as elements of regional culture irrespective of Christian imperial authority?
The editors, Attali and Massa, make clear in the first chapter that the subject is competition, dominance, and real or fictional violence. Late antiquity is a period of an advancing Christian “religioscape”—Christian cult buildings and monuments—against or amidst (what bishops perceive as) a heathen religioscape. So an especially salient issue for Attali and Massa is what they call “diachronic occupation of religious sites”: temple conversions and the intolerant rhetoric that surrounded the (real or storied) transformation of sites—although sequential occupation of the same precinct isn’t remotely the same as sharing shrines. Helpfully, the authors also go through the principal examples of known shared shrines in late antiquity, from Mamre to Daphne (by Antioch) to Menouthis, and then the common engagement of visitors, regardless of religious affiliation, in similar practices (like lamp-lighting) at shrines. But the sharing they unpack is “Christian,” “Jewish,” and “Pagan”—a world neatly organized in clear religious categories, but hardly representative of the actual, hybrid or momentary collectives that gathered at shrines. The phenomenon is sociological, not just archaeological or theological.
The second two chapters address types of data for gauging aspects of religious sharing: Nemo-Pekelman on the status of “other” religious spaces in the Theodosian Code; Lenkaityté Ostermann on the evidence of ecclesiastical councils. Nemo-Pekelman discusses the basis for laws around traditional temples and religious spaces—as public or private properties—and concludes that “no general law ordered the general closing of the temples in the East” through the early fifth century” (69), while synagogues fared worse due to their status as private space. The discussion finds its place among the many historical assessments of the Theodosian Code, but does not explain the relevance for the sharing of religious sites.
Lenkaityté Ostermann’s discussion of the evidence of church council canons, on the other hand, offers an invaluable and closely grained picture of local shrines and their practices during the fourth century: “Christians” sharing meals at traditional shrines, communal festivals that everyone attended, and even local inventions of new Christian shrine-spaces apart from churches. While the genre of the canons was to complain and to censure, the picture of local religion they offer provides essential data for the topic of the volume.
Peter Talloen’s contribution looks for archaeological evidence for shared shrines and finds only sequential occupation: i.e., Christian reuse of traditional holy sites, often after many decades, like the church built inside the Serapeion in Ephesus. While this issue of Christian appropriation of temples has spawned extensive discussion in past decades, this phenomenon is not the same as the sharing of religious sites.[4] Talloen’s data, which includes epigraphy showing Christian rejection of a prior religious order, is rich and in some cases could indicate coexisting religious communities. Yet behind the simplistic dichotomy of “Christian” replacing “Pagan” that dominates Talloen’s discussion one detects a far more ambiguous, even fluid situation on the ground. The whole notion of the shared shrine presumes practices and stories that would have been traditional to devotees (Christian or not), even if those practices seemed “heathen” or “Jewish” to some bishops (who then might respond to such religious ambiguity with a church building or an incised cross). Perhaps for this topic of the shared shrine it does not suffice to plead license to use the word “pagan” out of convenience (98) when the phenomenon itself demands more nuanced terminology.
Maria Chiara Giorda looks at what might be understood as religious sharing in monasteries, focusing on the region of Alexandria: that is, the coexistence or intolerance of monks of different theological traditions inhabiting the same monasteries. Giorda wants to capture both a “top-down” (ecclesiastical authorities’) perspective and a “bottom- [or] middle-up” (monks’ own) perspective on theological diversity among monks, to get beyond a simple Chalcedonian vs. Miaphysite dichotomy. She discusses the complex relationships and conflicts between bishops and monasteries (Canopus, Metras, Angelion, Enaton, et al.), turning finally to the well-discussed political dynamics around the Menouthis healing shrine, targeted apparently by monks of Enaton and Canopus monasteries (together!) in the late fifth century, and then replaced by a popular incubation shrine of Saints John and Cyrus. Giorda ignores the amazing diversity of supplicants to the John and Cyrus shrine that Sophronius of Jerusalem describes in his Miracles, which would have augmented any discussion of “bottom-up” sharing. She concludes that, in the monasteries themselves, “there was no doctrinal uniformity or assimilation” (193), but we might still wonder how monastic diversity evinces the “sharing” conceptualized by Hayden, Massa, and Attali.
Katharina Heyden, who covers the ancient temple complex of Hierapolis with both literary and archaeological materials, is one of the few contributors who had already thought seriously and comparatively about the question of shared shrines, with a programmatic 2020 article on the history of the Mamre cult.[5] While the Atargatis temple is best known from Lucian’s second-century De dea Syria, Heyden advances an ingenious interpretation of the pre-fifth-century Christian “Legend of Aphroditianus,” that Christians too may have made use of the temple precinct. What would they have sought at the Atargatis temple? Here Heyden, influenced by comparative approaches, is particularly nuanced, describing a regional cult visited regularly out of tradition; that people affiliated with Christianity would not have regarded such tradition as inimical to their church affiliations; and indeed that Christian visitors would have elaborated the holiness of the site through Christian legend and perhaps even iconography, as at Mamre.
Gaetano Spampinato’s essay on “heretical places” is the most abstract in its understanding of shared religious sites. Spampinato looks at the way the heresiographer Epiphanius of Salamis strategically places—or imagines the spaces of—heretics in order to elide heresy with heathenism or to critique extreme asceticism. As with Giorda’s discussion Spampinato shows us “places” and “sharing” in some sense, but not one that aids in the conceptualization of real shared religious sites. For Epiphanius, religious sharing is anathema in any form, and he brings this perspective to the construction of the Panarion.
Following these topical essays Shared Religious Sites includes two “Afterwords”: one by the eminent historian of ancient religions Nicole Belayche, the other by Robert Hayden himself, whose models of “antagonistic tolerance” in modern settings inspired the volume. Both are superb contributions for their general insights and their provocations to students of late antiquity (and implicitly to the authors) to refine their understandings of the phenomenon of the shared shrine. Using a wide range of evidence (from epigraphical to hagiographical) Belayche points out that religious mixing was an inevitable religious phenomenon that persisted outside the theological debates and purified notions of religious community that dominate patristic sources, and more often in the countryside than the urban center. Often it was simply a function of common devotional practices that brought together multiple groups, like animal slaughter, night vigils, festivals, and healing. The vicissitudes of shrine architecture—temple, synagogue, church—often themselves functioned as top-down religious domination of a site, so conflict (when it took place) pertained to visible structures rather than devotional practices. Christian authorities in particular fought for clear boundaries in religious situations that ignored them.
Hayden’s essay rehearses some of the principal observations of his past work: how conflict and tolerance around shared shrines are functions of the dominance exerted by some political authority, symbolized through architectural strategies in the “religioscape”—the infrastructure of the dominant religious order. But on the ground one often finds less of the particular religious community and more community of the shrine itself, with (echoing Belayche, but with modern examples) practices and traditions shared across religious affiliations. Indeed, Hayden recommends that students of late antiquity look for such shared shrines not in major urban sanctuaries, but in rural and natural sites: springs, mountains, and so on. Devotees to such shrines may well bring with them some sense of religious affiliation, but an affiliation that does not disrupt—and often sanctions—shared behavior.
This volume is important as a corrective to broad-scale, theologically inflected histories of Christianization and “Pagan/Christian conflict,” and the student of religion in late antiquity will gain much from the programmatic essays of Belayche and Hayden and the exemplary studies by Heyden and Lenkaityté Ostermann. For those who want to take “religious sharing” in alternative directions from the regional shrine and its diverse devotees, Giorda and Spampinato’s chapters are provocative, but ultimately demand a more documentary assessment of theological diversity in monasteries. Overall, the volume should challenge us to weigh the convenience of a “Christian/Pagan” dichotomy when the topic itself involves practices and social worlds between and beyond such dichotomies.
Authors and Titles
Maureen Attali and Francesco Massa, “Sharing Religious Sites in the late Antique Roman Empire: Definition, Dynamics, Tentative Inventory”
Capucine Nemo-Pekelman, “’Law as a Weapon’: The Status of Temples, heretic Churches, and Synagogues and the Legal Mechanisms for Their Confiscation and Reallocation to Catholic churches (4th—5th c.)”
Manté Lenkaityté Ostermann, “The (Non-)Sharing of Religious Sites in the Greek Canonical Sources of the 4th Century”
Peter Talloen, “Competitive Sharing in Late Antique Asia Minor: Religious Sites or a Different Arena?”
Maria Chiara Giorda, “Sharing Monasteries: Mapping Late Antique Religious Competition at Alexandria”
Katherina Heyden, “Hierapolis/Mabbug in late Antiquity: A Place of Competitive Veneration and Co-Production between Atargatis, the Syrian Mother Goddess, and Mary, the Mother of God?”
Gaetano Spampinato, “’Heretical Places’ in Ancient Heresiology: Two Cases of ‘Competitive Sharing’ in the Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis?”
Nicole Belayche, “Shared Religious Sites in Late Antiquity: An Afterword”
Robert M. Hayden, “Antagonistic Tolerance in the Late Antique Eastern Empire: The View from Rumelia”
Notes
[1] E.g., Maddalena Bassani, Marion Bolder-Boos, and Ugo Fusco, eds., Rethinking the Concept of ‘Healing Settlements’: Water, Cults, Constructions and Contexts in the Ancient World (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2019).
[2] Esp. Robert A. Hayden, “Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites in South Asia and the Balkans,” Current Anthropology 43, 2 (2002): 205-31; idem, et al., Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites and Spaces (London: Routledge, 2016).
[3] It must be said that Hayden himself does retroject his concept of antagonistic communities—“members of groups that identify themselves and each other as Self and Other communities, differentiated primarily on the basis of religion” (Antagonistic Tolerance, 10)—to periods long before modernity. But in late antiquity, even if (non-monastic) “Christian” groups viewed themselves as cohesive and differentiated from a religious Other (which is not at all certain), those non-Christian folk on the other side rarely if ever regarded themselves as united ideologically in some “paganism,” although they might well claim allegiance to a shrine. For this reason Hayden’s Antagonistic Tolerance model works much better for modernity, when particular religious self-definitions (“Christian,” “Muslim,” etc.) assumed a distinctive political role.
[4] See esp. Johannes Hahn, Stephen Emmel, and Ulrich Gotter, eds., From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2008).
[5] Katharina Heyden, “Construction, Performance, and Interpretation of a Shared Holy Place: The Case of Late Antique Mamre (Rāmat al-Khalīl), Entangled Religions 11, 1 (2020).