I have my own slightly Humpty Dumpty way of immediately assessing a book. Admittedly, it is a rudimentary and somewhat idiosyncratic way of examining its merits, but it gives a quick first indication of its intellectual value. The primary measure is the time spent reading it. The second is the number of post-its I insert. The former is an indicator of the monograph’s ability to capture and retain my interest, while the latter is a barometer of the inspiration I draw from the text. On both scales, Urciuoli’s book scores highly. The book’s introductory chapter, together with the nine previously published chapters that make it up, demonstrates a considerable depth of knowledge and a dazzling ability to offer new and surprising views on the subject – epiphanies, in Joycean terminology. For example, the reader is taken on a highly entertaining and thought-provoking promenade through Ad Diognetum, inspired by a late nineteenth-century Parisian flaneur walking his turtle. This stroll is further enriched by Urciuoli’s use of the Candomblé lens of fundamentos to filter the text’s use of closure and revelation.
Some readers will undoubtedly dismiss the book on the grounds of its alleged theoretical flagrance and obtrusive anachronisms, but they should think more carefully before dismissing the argument. Urciuoli is relentless in his concern for proper theorising, just as he is aware of the philosophical implications. As he writes in the epilogue, “theory is an essential and intrinsic element of any historical research. Theorizing, whether it is done explicitly or (alas!) implicitly, shapes the entire process of studying and interpreting the past” (246). This is undoubtedly true, although I would have liked Urciuoli to have included the indispensable aspect of models (Jensen 2011:247-250), whether explicitly formulated or (alas!) impressionistic, through which perspective is filtered. But as he writes—with reference to Maia Kotrosits: “Despite such favorable conditions for justifiable theorizations, specialists of antiquity are still particularly prone to believe ‘credulously, that historical work is something other than speculation. It preserves the past as a known or at least knowable territory, a there and then that can be, must be protected from here and now. A past unflustered by the exigencies of the present, by the tender what if and the anguished why’ ” (246-247 and quoting Kotrosits 2023, 5 in the inserted quotation).
The book’s title is enigmatic, even for colleagues familiar with the current research project on Religion and Urbanity institutionally embedded in the vibrant history of religions milieu at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies under the auspices of Jörg Rüpke. Despite the somewhat enigmatic title, it allows the concept of “citifying Jesus” to denote the “citification of Christ religion”, which can be defined as the various—often very concretely spatial—engagements with urban environments and worlds (in the Heideggerian understanding of ‘Welt’, although he is not referred to).
It is clear that Urciuoli did his post-master’s training at the Max Weber Institute, just as he has contributed to both this and the previous project on Lived Ancient Religion. The institutional modus operandi of this academic beehive, both in terms of intellectual conceptualisation and the design of research projects, shines through in the exposition of the relationship between religion and urbanity. The quintessential idea that runs through all the chapters is the heralding introductory title from Lived Ancient Religion to Urbanity or, rather, “An Urban Turn to ‘Lived Ancient Religion’” (1), linking the earlier and the current project. The nodal point lies in the bottom-up analysis of religion and urbanity, with a focus on the everydayness of citified religion and much less, if at all, on the beliefs and basic rituals of Christ religion – I note to my satisfaction that Urciuoli has taken up a concept, i.e. early Christ religion, that I introduced 15 years ago, although a credit would have been appropriate.[1] Urciuoli’s accent on the everydayness of Christ religion is a fair and necessary approach, and one that aptly serves to counterbalance the still overwhelming number of accounts based on a ‘doctrinaire’ and overly symbolic understanding of formative Christ religion. What is missing, though, is a complementary and equally important emphasis on a shared ontology as a prerequisite for any attribution of meaning. Any study of the level of parole must, in the nature of things, entail the existence of a langue. The same is obviously true of any semiotic system. This is not to say that there is a philosophical merging between parole and langue, but the former cannot exist without the latter, which gives meaning to any representation. As much as Urciuoli emphasises the everydayness and singularity of representations, he fails to similarly accentuate their iconic embedding in a shared ontology.
The nine chapters that make up the bulk of the book function as individual trajectories of citification, highlighting different aspects of Christ religion as an urban phenomenon. In the first trajectory, “Jumping Among the Temples: Against the Polytheists’ Spatial Fix”, Urciuoli makes it plausible to see how the symbolic spatial nailing of Christ religion to the cross of polytheistic practices primitivised and de-religionised them, when compared to a competing self-styled superior understanding of space of a utopian bent. Unsurprisingly, however, the latter could not escape spatial indexicalisation (in the strict Peircian sense) either, since it eventually also ‘fell victim’ to incorporating the basic indexical components of the urban form of religion, such as altars and distinct church buildings. The second trajectory, entitled “An Archetypal Blasé? Justin Martyr, the Metropolitan Man, and the Segmentation of Urban Life”, focuses on Rome in the latter part of the second century. Through the metropolitan lens of individuality – famously introduced by Simmel – Urciuoli focuses on Justin as a Christ-believer (rather than this unfortunate term, reminiscent of an obsolete fideism, I would prefer Christ follower or adherent), teacher, and heretic, situated in a city as a fractioned ensemble of Christ groups with potential friends, enemies, disciples, and dissenters or heretics.
The third chapter, “(Good) People Next Door: Christ Religion in the Neighborhood”, takes us into the neighbourhood and examines its impact on Christ religion. This is a highly important dimension, neglected in most research, but crucial in studies of, for example, gossip, which can hardly be ignored in a religious movement of accelerating growth. In chapter four, entitled “The Poverty Plateau: The Space of the Urban Street Poor”, we really enter into everyday life by being transposed to the city street, where we are met by both beggars and almsgivers. It is a co-spatiality full of changes and transfers of social imagination and religious valorisation of beggarly poverty.
In the fifth chapter, “Urban/e Distances: Secrecy, Discretion, and a Religious Guide to Urbanity”, Urciuoli presents the reader with the exquisite fish of Christ religious literature, the Epistle of Diognetus. A lost jewel of antiquity, it reappears in a codex used to wrap fish bought in the market of Constantinople in 1436, only to disappear in the fire of a Prussian cannonball that hit the municipal library of Strasbourg on 24 August 1870. Urciuoli’s reading of the Ad Diognetum, with its fascinating play of secrecy and sharing, shows how social life in Rome (as elsewhere, I would add) required the ability to navigate between mutual knowledge and ignorance, discretion and intrusion, suspicion and trust.
Nothing is more specta-cular in early Christ religious literature than the literary exhibitionism of martyr texts, which on the level of the recounted story play with voyeurism, visibility and theatricality on the one hand, and with the inner lives of the martyrs on the other, while on the level of enunciation they propel the intended addressees to full commitment. In an article co-authored by Urciuoli with Harry O. Maier (“Death in Smyrna: The Martyrdom of Polycarp as Urban Event,” Mortality 27 [2022]), retitled for the present volume as “Smyrnean Detours: The Martyrdom of Polycarp as Urban Religious Event”, the two authors use a quintessentially urban avant-garde artist group, the Situationists, as a lens through which to view the transformation of a hideous Roman spectacle of death into a powerful, pervasive and long-lasting priming of the moods and motivations (recalling Clifford Geertz’ ingenuity in both thinking and writing) of Christ’s religious audience. A truly quirky but genuinely innovative and thought-provoking read.
At this point Urciuoli leaves Rome and, in chapter seven (“Leading by Writing: Cyprian’s Management of a Herarchical Crisis”), travels to North Africa, to Carthage, where Cyprian manages a heterarchic crisis by creating his cultural territory and exercising his power through textualization. Taking advantage of available urban resources such as book production, libraries, and benevolent circles of literates and semi-literates, a small group of Christ-religious literate entrepreneurs could use the means at their disposal to create new textual practices and cannibalise existing ones. A textually designed and subtle project of ecclesiastical order reveals the Christ religion of the mid-third century as an exemplar par excellence of human mindshaping.
The remaining two chapters, eight and nine, are paved with a focus on the “right to the city”, i.e., the exercise of collective power over processes of urbanisation (a Lefebvre-inspired reading of Eusebius supplied by an exposé of distinct church architecture in ch. 8: “Time to Build: Christians’ ‘Right to the City’ Between Dura and Tyre”), and “cityscaping” or the construction of imaginary cities as in Revelation’s portrayal of the New Jerusalem and in Augustine’s De civitate dei. Hence the Dickens-alluding title: “A Tale of No Cities: Searching for Urbanity and Urban Religion in Augustine’s City of God”. The book’s argument is summed up in a conclusion, “Recaps, Clarifications, Confessions, and Disclaimers: The Religion of Urban Religion”.
The book is an excellent and indispensable read for historians of religion, ancient historians and scholars of Christ religion. It is almost flawless (errors on pp. 40, 75, 138, 266, and, regrettably, a remarkably sparse index of subjects), but it also has its moot points, arguments of a controversial nature, and things that need more elaboration to appear convincing. Two problems in particular come to mind. As I read, I had a growing unease about a tautological conclusion of circularity: If A → B, then B → A, implying that urbanisation is religion, therefore religion is urbanisation. In other words, I lack a clearer theoretically underpinned understanding of the causal relationship between the two key elements. This is partly related to my second question, which has to do with the book’s overall definition of religion (based on Rüpke’s understanding of the category) and its failure to pay attention to what Paul Veyne spoke of as balkanisation (1983, 67) and what I prefer to call – in the vein of Wittgenstein – the contextual triggering of ‘religious’ representations. Yes, superhuman agents are semiotically invoked and subscribed to, but this does not make them communicatively “observable”, as Urciuoli and Rüpke contend, beyond pertinent cultural framing. Undoubtedly, these are big and inescapable questions that Urciuoli’s excellent book raises. I look forward to future discussions with him. For now, I highly recommend his book.
Bibliography
Jensen, Jeppe Sinding, “Conceptual Models in the Study of Religion,” Peter B. Clarke (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011, 245-262.
Kotrosits, Maia, Theory, History, and the Study of Religion in Late Antiquity: Speculative Worlds, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2023.
Petersen, Anders Klostergaard, “Valentinus as the First Church Father: Philosophy and Religion in the Gospel of Truth,” in Jesus Traditions and Christian Philosophical Discourse in the Second Century, edited by Jason Wendel and Nicholas List. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2025 (forthcoming).
Veyne, Paul, Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes? Paris: Des Travaux/Seuil 1983.
Notes
[1] My reason for preferring early or formative Christ religion to early Christianity is twofold. First, I want to emphasise the estranged, alternate, and past nature of Christ religion by distinguishing it from what I call Christianess (covering the period from about 600-1200) and Christianity (denoting the period from about 1200 to the present). Second, by naming the category in this way, I want to allow it to appear as part of the overall genus of past Judaic religion. I use similar arguments for the typology I advocate for ‘Judaism’, which I also divide into a number of nominally distinct entities (see for instance Petersen 2025).