The Roman Christians sought, as Christians, to affirm by contrast a particular experience of time in their own bodies, bodies transformed in the course of adulthood. The Christians hoped that through religious conversion the chaos of bodily desires would cease to afflict them; the weight of the flesh would lighten as a Christian moved to union with a higher, immaterial Power. For change to occur, believers like St. Augustine emphasized St. John’s horror of the “lust of the eyes”; compelling visual images created attachment to the world.’ A Christian’s visual imagination was to form around the experience of light, God’s Light, which blinds the beholder, effacing the ability to see the world or look into a mirror.
As their faith in God grew stronger, the early Christians believed in turn they would feel ever less attached to the places in which they lived. In this they drew on the long Judaic heritage affirming dispossession, Jews who saw themselves as spiritual wanderers in the world, in it but not of it. Yet the devoted Christians eventually ceased to wander; they came to pray in Hadrian’s temple. The civic fiction of Roman place reappeared, “the old became new,” the art historian Richard Brilliant writes, “the past the present.” And with that resurgent sense of place Christians felt less urgently the need to transform their bodies.
The passage from pantheism to monotheism thus unveiled a great drama about body, place, and time. The intense polis-love of the Greeks had already given way by Hadrian’s era to a more anxious desire for security and an uneasy obsession with images, among people troubled about their traditional gods and their place in the world. The passage to monotheism now emphasized inner change at the expense of urban continuity, put greater value on personal history than on civic membership. Yet if the pagan would not give himself Over to the realm of stone without nagging doubts, the Christian could no more entirely give his body over to God.
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As in the provincial cities, the geometry of power in Rome’s center eroded the display of human diversities. As the Forum Romanum became more regular, the city’s butchers, grocers, fishmongers, and merchants took themselves off to separate quarters of the city, leaving the business of the forum, in later Republican times, to lawyers and bureaucrats; then, as the emperors built their own forums, these political pets left the Forum Romanum to follow their masters into new spaces. The buildings became, in modern planning jargon, more “mono-functional,” and by Hadrian’s time many were largely empty. “Many of the political and commercial activities that in the agora required free space have been displaced to the periphery,” the archeologist Malcolm Bell writes; “in this well-planned world ... there was little need for the ambiguous values of the stoa.”
As diversity ebbed, this ancient center of Rome became a place given over to the ceremonial, the Forum Romanum becoming a point at which power donned the reassuring robes and roles of pantomime. For instance, until about 150 B.c. both trials by jury and certain voting by citizens occurred within a building at the side of the Forum Romanum, the Comitium. As urgent appeals to buy a rare apricot from Smyrna or to make a good deal on bulls’ testicles faded from the Forum Romanum, voting and political discussion moved outside. Speakers harangued the crowd from the Rostra, originally a curved platform jutting out from the Comitium, the voice of the speaker reinforced by a solid building behind him. When Julius Caesar moved the old Rostra to a new site in the Forum Romanum, from the side in to the northwest end, he meant this new speaker’s stand to be a place for ceremonial declaration rather than participatory politics. The speaker no longer spoke surrounded by people on three sides; instead, he was placed like a judge within the earliest basilicas. Outside, his voice now projected poorly, but no matter. The orator was meant to appear, to point a finger, to clutch his breast, to spread out his arms: he was to look like a statesman to the vast throng who could not hear him, and who had lost the power to act on his words in any event.
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In their early years, urban Christians in some ways resembled the adherents of revolutionary communism in the early twentieth century. Both were organized into little cells of believers meeting in houses, spreading news by word of mouth or by reading aloud secret documents; lacking a unifying structure of command, schism and conflict between cells was rife in both early Christianity and communism. But the first communists discounted the house as a significant scene of action; their beliefs focused on infiltrating the public sphere of the city, its factories, newspapers, and government institutions, For the first Christians, the house was the place where their “pilgrimage through time” began.
The house began to serve Christian fellowship from the generation after Jesus’ death to about the middle of the second century, when Christians moved out of houses into other buildings. In Hadrian’s reign, Christianity was entirely confined to domestic space; the state forbade public practice of the religion, and the faithful also protected themselves against harassment by staying within walls. Because of these restrictions, it had long seemed to Church historians that early Christians were powerless, if not poor. We now know better: urban Christianity drew converts from a wide economic spectrum. They seem absent from the middle and upper classes of society because these Christians had to engage in evasion when others were en féte; to compromise themselves in public if they hadn’t the strength for martyrdom; above all, to practice secrecy.
Within the shelter of the house, their journey of faith began in the dining room. The small Christian cell shared a common meal, during which the faithful talked, prayed, and read out letters from Christians elsewhere in the Empire. Though the experience of conversion was intensely individual, this social setting gave a particular kind of emotional support. As St. Paul explained, gathering around a common table echoed the gathering of the Last Supper.2° Moreover, 4 modern Church historian observes, “dining in individual house church groups was fundamental” because “eating was a sign of social relations with others. The extension of hospitaliry through the meal setting was the central act that served to define the worshipping community.” Christians as a whole were called by St. Paul an Ekklesia using the Greek usage for the body politic. Christians called this meeting-dinner agape, which can be translated as “a celebration o fellowship,” But agape also had connotations of passionate love—which is why, when pagans heard about these feasts, they imagined they were orgies.
The Christian feast sought to break the patterns of pagan sociability, of the sort Petronius described in his novel Satyricon illustrated with almost cartoonlike exaggeration. Petronius writes about a feast given by Trimalchio, an immensely rich ex-slave, who almost buried his guests under mountains of rich food and drowned them in expensive wines. After several courses had been served, they fell into a stupefied trance, while Trimalchio’s energy never faded and he never stopped talking. The dinner became a kind of theatre of cruelty, as the guests farted, gagged, and vomited their way through the evening. In place of the commonality at the Greek symposion, Trimalchio’s feast dramatized the dominance of a single individual over those around him. There was no mutual competition, instead an active host and his passive, fawning guests. Yet Trimalchio’s guests were not unwilling victims; their gullets always had a little space left for another mouthful of oysters in cream, the guests managed just enough energy to hold out their cups for another glass of wine. If everything at the dinner drew attention to Trimalchio’s own wealth and power, if Trimalchio’s luxury literally took possession of the guests’ bodies, still they came back for more, they gave him their bodies to fill, rhey ate themselves into submission.
Agape sought to break the impulse of clientage. The feast shared equally by all sought to mark that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond {slave} nor free, there is neither male nor female.” Whereas people mostly attended pagan banquets by invitation, strangers bearing Christian news were openly and easily welcomed at the table. It was to Romans gathered around a dining-room table that St. Paul sent his great Letter to the Romans, setting out the principles which would later define the structure of the Church. This letter dates from about A.D. 60, which is also the time when St. Peter preached in Rome. Phoebe, his envoy, carried the letter into the household cells of the Christians at Rome, each time reading out Paul’s propositions to the faithful, who in turn debated and discussed the letter, and other discussions of it followed in other houses. In these discussions, unlike Trimalchio’s feast, no one voice dominated, by right, as host.
In the early house gatherings, the Christian ethos changed where people sat. The Roman code of linear seating placed the mor important person at the head, people ranged around him in descending rank. The Christian gathering broke this order, instead placing people in the room according to the strength of their faith. Posty, lants, who were individuals interested in Christian teaching but no yet Christian, and catechumens, who were converted but not ye, baptized, stood at the door or along the sides of the dining room, while full Christians sat together around the table. Although the evidence is sketchy, all the faithful seemed to sit directly at table together for the crucial moments of the meal, at least until about A.D. 200, when formal rituals replaced the informal common meal.
“The impulses of nature and the impulses of the spirit are at war with one another,” St. Augustine wrote in his Confesszons about wha he felt during such a feast when the smell of food, the kick of alcohol in his blood, aroused him.”? “Time and again I force my body to obey me, but the pain which this causes me is cancelled by the pleasure of eating and drinking.”*4 Augustine sought comfort in the words of Luke 21:34: “And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life.” Yet agape served to test him, a test which would first lead him to understanding the meaning of the phrase “the alien body of Christ.”
Both fellowship and test culminated in the Eucharist, drinking the wine and eating the bread which symbolized the blood and flesh of Christ. By the time St. Paul wrote his First Letter to the Corinthians, the ritual of the Eucharist had become defined in its enduring form: “And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. After the same manner, also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink, in remembrance of me.” The cannibalistic overtones of the Eucharist joined early Christianity to many other cults which also sought to eat the bodies of their gods. Yet the Christian who “partakes” of the god’s blood and flesh did not feel imbued with god’s power, as the Aztec priests felt when drinking the actual blood of a sacrificial victim. The test lay in resisting the surge of bodily energy provided by bread and wine. As Origen preached, the soul triumphed when the senses tasted nothing. In this way, writes thé Church historian Wayne Meeks, the Eucharist gave ritual meaning FO the biblical adage to “strip off the old human” and put on “the new human, Christ.”
The ritual of baptism was the other way Christians sought in the pouse to “strip off the old human” and put on “the new human, Christ.” In this ritual, as in dining, they also radically departed from sociabiliry. The importance of baptism lay in the challenge i indeed posed to one of the most important pagan Roman civic experiences, the experience of bathing together.
By Hadrian’s time, Rome had filled with public and private bathing establishments; the baths were great domed structures, covering pools and exercise halls. Insututions in which all Romans met, usually in groups, the baths, unlike Greek gymnasia, accommodated women as well as men, old as well as young. Until Hadrian’s era, men and women bathed ar the same ume; he was the first to segregate the sexes, the women bathing before the men. Bathing occurred in the afternoon and early evening, after the day’s visits and labors had concluded. Very wealthy people had their own private baths, and went to the public ones only when they needed to curry favor or make a point to the general populace. Hadrian himself often bathed in public with his subjects, which earned him their immense regard. The poor lingered inside the public baths, finding there a refuge from che squalor of their own homes until the buildings closed at sunset.
Pagan bathing was organized in a regular sequence: the bather, after paying a small fee and undressing in a common room called the apodyterium, moved first to a large pool filled with hot water, the caldarium, where he scraped his sweating pores with a bone brush; then he moved to the pool of warm water called the tepidarium, and finally plunged into a cold pool called the frigidarium. As in a modern public swimming pool, people lolled around the edges of the pools, chatting, flirting, and showing off.
Seneca scorned the bath as a scene of noisy self-regard, for instance, “the hair plucker keeping up a constant chatter in his chin and strident voice, to attract more attention, and never silent except when he is plucking armpits and making the customer yell instead of yelling himself,” or che “cries of the sausage dealer and confectioner and of all the peddlers of the cook shops, hawking their wares.” Procurers for boy and girl prostitutes worked the baths, and baths more generally released people from the harshness of the life outside, as in the Roman saying that “baths, wine, and women corrupt our bodies—but these things make life itself.”
Yet people also felt thar bathing dignified their bodies; Roman descriptions of barbarians obsessively stereotyped the foreigners as unwashed, Cleanliness was a shared civic experience, and a public bath was the most popular building a ruler could erect. The baths mixed the enormous diversity of the city together in a common nakedness.
Christians frequented public baths just like other Romans. But their religious immersion in water had a personal and religious, rather than civic, importance. Baptism in water signified that the individual felt he or she had come sufficiently far in the struggle with bodily desire to make a life-long commitment to the faith. As practiced in the early Christian house, someone who felt ready for baptism undressed completely, then plunged into a tub of water in a room or space separated from the space of the ritual feast. Upon emerging from the pool, the celebrant put on entirely new clothes to signify that he or she was now a changed person. “The bath [became] a permanent threshold between the ‘clean’ group and the ‘dirty’ world.”
This water ritual helped set the Christians off as well from their Jewish ancestors. In ancient as in modern Judaism, women bathe in mikveh pools to purify themselves symbolically, particularly to wash away menstrual blood. As the Hebrew scholar Jacob Neusner notes, the mikveh pool has no connotation of the washing away of sins; it is a purifying but not self-transforming ritual.*° The women who leave it have not become different human beings; rather, their bodies are ready to participate in rituals. Baptism was instead a permanent threshold, one the believer crossed when he or she felt a life-long commitment to the religion. The cleansed, transformed Christian body reflected the story of Christ’s own death and Resurrection: Paul writes in his Lecter to the Romans, we are “baptized into his death.”
In the early Church, baptism was for adults rather than for infants; itcould have no meaning for babies because baptism entailed making a decision, the most serious decision of one’s life. For this same reason, the early Christians renounced the Jewish practice of circumcision. One source in the New Testament does speak of baptism as “the circumcision of Christ,” but in this Christian “circumcision” the penis would not have been altered. St. Paul, in writing against circumcision, sought to erase any predtcate on the body, any marking of those persons who from birth were automatically included within the faith. The refusal of circumcision arose again from the early Christian belief that people were not born as Christians; they came to be Christian.
Baptism sharply broke the command to “Look and believe” which tuled pagan Rome. The baptized Christian carried a secret within which could not be seen. Male Jews could be identified and perseCuted by stripping them naked and examining their genitals, while “the circumcision of Christ” left no mark on the body. More generally, it was impossible to understand what Christianity meant by looking at a Christian; his or her appearance was meaningless. And yet the practices of house worship began to root Christians to the Cities in which they worshipped.
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