Christianity localised

From Richard Sennett

In the pagan world, bodily suffering seldom appeared as a human opportunity. Men and women may have confronted it, may have learned from it, but did not seek it out. With the coming of Christianity, bodily suffering acquired a new spiritual value. Coping with pain perhaps mattered more than confronting pleasure; pain was harder to transcend, a lesson Christ taught through His own sufferings. The Christian’s journey in life took shape through transcending all physical stimulation; as a Christian became indifferent to the body, he or she hoped to draw closer to God. 

If the Christian’s journey in time succeeded, away from the body and toward God, the believer would also withdraw from attachments to place. The pagan commands to look and believe, look and obey would not arouse faith; no orientation in space would reveal where God is. God is everywhere and nowhere; Jesus was a wanderer, as were Jewish prophets before Him. The believer following in the 
prophet's path would leave the city, at least spiritually.

The Christian would re-enact the Exile from the Garden, becoming more aware and more compassionate towards other human beings in pain. 

This Christian journey made heroic demands on its followers. A religion aimed at the poor and the weak asked them to find within themselves a superhuman strength. The story of the early Christians in Rome was of a people who clung to that faith yet discovered they, only human, needed ground under their feet. They needed a city. 

1. THE ALIEN BODY OF CHRIST 

Antinous and Christ 

One of the most dramatic passages in early Church history arose from the charge a Christian brought against Hadrian’s most personal building project, a city built in honor of Antinous.

Marguerite Yourcenar had Hadrian consider the possibility that Antinous committed suicide. It was commonly believed in the eastern Mediterranean at this time that one could, through suicide committed using the proper ritual, save the life of a person one loved; the life force would then pass from the dead into the living. Hadrian had been perilously ill shortly before Antinous' death, and Yourcenar conjectured that the young man had killed himself in order to preserve the emperor. In the 1305 the dead Antinous indeed became a popular cult figure as a new Osiris, the young, healing Egyptian god whose death passed his life force into others. 

Because the Antinous cult referred to Osiris, some Romans compared Antinous to other gods who had sacriflced themselves for men. The most famous of these comparisons was made by Celsus, a Roman who wrote a generation after Hadrian in the latter third of the second century; he compared Antinous to Christ. Celsus had declared, probably in a text dating from 177-180, that since Antinous’ suicide to save Hadrian’s life was comparable to the martyrdom of Christ, “the honour which [Christians] give to Jesus is no different from that paid to Hadrian's favourite.“ 

This comparison provoked a generation later a counterattack by Origen, one of the first great Christian intellectuals. He sought to disparage a loving bond between men as weak and unstable: “What is there in common between the noble life of our Jesus and the life of the favourite of Hadrian who did not even keep the man from a morbid lust for women?” But in responding to Celsus, and in challenging the comparison between Antinous and Christ, Origen had a far deeper goal in mind: he wanted to show that the body of Christ IS unlike a human body. 

Unlike Antinous, Origen maintained, Jesus cannot be accused “of having had the slightest contact with the least licentiousness,’ because Christ is not like a pagan god with desires and bodily longings.’ The pagan gods of Hadrian’s time appeared as magnified human beings, endowed with supernatural powers and eternal ltfe. They knew pleasure and fear, jealousy and rage; many of them were monsters of egotism. Jesus, Origen wrote, was different; just as He had no sexual desires, He suffered upon the cross only out of compassion for HIS earthly followers. Christ may well seem strange to pagans for lacking bodily sensations, but this is because He is God, His body is an alien body, unfathomable by human beings. 

Origen dismissed the magical powers of the dead Antinous as mere “Egyptian magic and spells," mocked Hadrian’s construction of Antinopolis, and declared that “the case of Jesus is very different from this." Here Origen took a second, immensely challenging step. He declared that faith in Jesus cannot be created by the state. Christians did not “oblige some king who commanded them to come or to obey the order of a governor.“ In the Pantheon the gods gathered in their niches to attest to the fortunes of the Empire, as they had gathered four hundred years before in the Portico of the Twelve Gods to smile, “agreeing and harmonious," on the felicity of Rome. politlcs and religion were inseparable. Now the state could not decree faith, and all monuments and temples were mere hollow shells. 

The early Christians did not so much publicly challenge the state controlled forms of worship as recoil from them personally. Yet the new religion drew a line with even (he most cosmopolitan and accommodating Christian could not cross. He or she was obliged by the rules of faith, the historian Arthur Darby Nock writes, “to renounce the public cult of the Emperor" Such a divide between politics and faith arose from the very conception of time which marked early Christian belief. 

This belief asserted people are not born Christian, they become Christian; a self-transformation which does not occur by following orders. Faith has to be created in the course of an individual's life, and conversion is not a one-time event; once it starts, it never stops unfolding, Such spiritual time was expressed in theological language by the assertion that believing is an experience of becoming. Conversion separates the person ever further away from dependence on the commands of a dominant power, and so drives a wedge between state and religion. 

When William James came to write about the psychological experience of conversion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, he noted that conversion could take two forms; the first form of conversion is psychologically “cool,” James thought, rather like changing political parties. One may well include bits and pieces of what one believed before in converting, and one preserves a certain measure of detachment about the new doctrine even in subscribing to it. One does not lose one’s place in the world; such an experience is usually a discrete, One-time event. James had in mind people who converted to Unitarianism in New England; reform Judaism might also fit this picture. 

The other experience of conversion, James wrote, is much more impassioned; it comes from a sense that the way one lives now is all wrong, that fundamental change is necessary. But in this form of conversion, "the sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal that we can aim at." This form of conversion has been expressed by Arthur Darby Nock as a “turning away . . . as much as a turning towards.” Because it does not resemble changing political parties, this turning away is never finished in the course of a lifetime. The early Christians converted in the second manner. that of turning away. In the pagan world, the body belonged to the City; yet free from this bondage, where did one go” There was no clear roadmap; the maps of worldly power were useless. And the confusions of becoming were especially potent among early Christians because in the Judaic origins of Christianity a devout person wandered uprooted from place to place. 

The people of the Old Testament thought of themselves as wanderers, and the Yahweh of the Old Testament was himself a wandering god, his Ark of the Covenant portable. In the theologian Harvey Cox's words “When the Ark was finally captured by the Philistines the Hebrews began to realize that Yahweh was not localized even in it. .He traveled with His people and elsewhere. " Yahweh was a god of time rather than of place, a god who promised to his followers a divine meaning for their unhappy travels. 

Early Christians drew on these Old Testament values. The author of the “Epistle to Diognatus” at the height of the Roman Empire's glory, for instance, declared that 

Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity either in locality or in speech or in customs. For they do not dwell off somewhere in cities of their own . . . nor do they practice an extraordinary style of life. . .. They dwell in their own countries, but only as sojourners. . . . Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is a foreign country.

Even if one does not wander physically, one must lose one’s attachments to where one lives. St. Augustine expressed this injunction as the Christian’s obligation to make “a pilgrimage through time." He wrote in The City of God: 

Now, it is recorded of Cain that he built a city, while Abel, as though he were merely a pilgrim on earth, built none. For, the true City of the saints is in heaven, though here on earth it produces citizens in which it wanders as on a pilgrimage through time looking for the Kingdom of eternity.” 

This “pilgrimage through time” rather than loyalty to physical places drew its authority from Jesus’ refusal to allow His disciples to build monuments to Him, and His promise to destroy the Temple of Jerusalem. To be an ardent citizen, engaged in the life around oneself. conflicted with the values of faith in another world. For the sake of one’s spiritual welfare, one had to break the emotional bonds of place. 

That effort began in one's own body. Origen’s attack on Celsus. Antinous, and Hadrian meant to show that Christianity had revolutionized the pagan experience of the body. Origen sought in his writings against Celsus and in his own life to exemplify that revolution. He wrote that conversion may start intellectually, in pondering how Christ's body is so unlike our own. The convert learns not to identify his or her own sufferings with the sufferings of Jesus, nor to imagine that divine love resembles human desire. For this reason, Hadrian’s sin in deifying Antinous, and Antinous’ sin in dying for Hadrian, lay in connecting physical passion to divinity. Pagan Romans like Celsus, who could make little sense of these assertions, thought the secrecy practiced by Christians came from the fact that they conducted orgies in private-perfectly acceptable behavior, and not foreign to the occasional wild patties staged by the gods themselves. 

The Christian’s next step in conversion would be more radical, a step Origen took to an extreme. In a fit of religious ecstasy, he castrated himself with a knife. Again, pagans frequently accused Christians of mutilating their bodies in the secret rites. If few actually did, Origen saw his own passion as more generally significant in following the Passion of Christ, for the effort to confront and overcome pain is a far more decisive step than the mere resolve to abstain from pleasure. We cannot simply decide to abstain from pain. Origen’s self-mutilation had resonances in ancient paganism, moreover, for instance the self-blinding of Oedipus, which led the pagan king to a new moral understanding; or again in other monotheistic cults like early Zoroastrianism, whose followers sometimes stated at the sun until they went blind; as their bodies transformed, they thought they 
began to sense God. 

A modern person may honor these acts as truly ascetic, yet explain them as deriving from a sense of bodily shame, in the Christian case a shame traceable back to the transgressions of Adam and Eve. For Origen, bodily shame could not be an end in itself. The body of the Christian must step beyond the very limits of pleasure and pain, in order to feel nothing, to lose sensation, to transcend desire. Thus Origen reacted most strongly against the charge made by Celsus, who himself turned a gimlet eye on the orgiastic practices of many of the Eastern cults devoted to Osiris, that Christian discipline of the body was a form of masochism. Celsus wrote that Christians “go astray in evil ways and wander about in great darkness more iniquitous and impure than that of the revellers of Antinous in Egypt." 

By describing this arduous and unnatural bodily journey, Origen came to affirm the two social foundations of Christianity. The first was the Christian doctrine of equality between human beings. In the sight of this God, all human bodies are alike, neither beautiful nor ugly, superior nor inferior. Images and visual forms no longer matter. Thus did the Christian principle challenge the Greek celebration of nakedness. the Roman formulas, “Look and believe,” "Look and obey.” Moreover. though Christianity for a long time held to ancient ideas about body heat and physiology, early Christianity broke in principle with the conclusion about the inequality between men and women based on that physiology. The bodies of men and women are equal, among believers there will be no more "male and female.” St. Paul in First Corinthians argued for strict dress codes separating the appearance of men from women; yet he also maintained that male and female prophets are filled with "one Spirit,” and in this sense gender-free. It was thanks to the alien, revolutionary body of Christ that His followers freed themselves from the prison of worldly appearances based on sex or wealth-or any other visible measure. These had no compelling value in this religion of the Other. 

Secondly, Christianity allied itself ethically with poverty, with the weak, and with the oppressed-with all those who are vulnerable bodies. Of prostitutes,John Chrysostom declared, “For say not this, that she that is stripped is a harIot; but that the nature is the same, and they ate bodies alike, both that of the harlot and that of the free woman.” The Christian emphasis on the equality of the humble and the power of poverty derived directly from the religion’s understanding of Christ's body. Perceived as a low-born, weak man by others, His martyrdom was meant in part to restore honor to those who most were like Him in the world. The historian Peter Brown summarizes this connection of Christ‘s vulnerable body and the bodies of the oppressed by saying that “The two great themes of sexuality and poverty gravitated together, in the rhetoric of John and of many other Christians. Both spoke of a universal vulnerability of the body, to which all men and women were liable, independent of class and civic Status.”