The Process of Christianization in the Greek Islands

A number of people have sent along information regarding Georgios Deligiannakis’ talk at Princeton tomorrow. It’s titled: Process of Christianization: Pagans, Christians, and Jews in an Island Landscape (pdf). Deligianakis’ work on the islands (particularly the Dodecanese) is fairly well-known and interesting, so it’s a shame that I won’t be able to hear his talk.

I am particularly interested in his discussion (Byzantion 78 (2008), 142-157) of a individual named Anastasios who dedicated a statue base to Heracles and a statue depicting (apparently) the sleeping Maron (Od. 9.196-197) some time perhaps in the 5th century on the island of Rhodes. The former text received a graffiti of KE (an abbreviation for a short prayer: “Lord, help”) and a crude cross. In contrast, the latter text featured a well-wrought cross at its start.  Both texts are classicizing not only in their theme but in the language and meter.

While such classicizing inscriptions are not particularly rare in the Late Antique Greek world, these two texts make up a conspicuous pair. They obviously served to celebrate the dedication of statues with pagan themes. Moreover, the first text featured a sufficiently ambivalent Christianity to warrant a later intervention. The latter is Christianized more formally with the inclusion of the small cross, but nevertheless, escapes easy Christian interpretation.  These two inscriptions, then, evidence the persistent importance of Classical themes in elite self-representation and complement texts like Nonnos Dionysiaca which tells the story of Dionysos journey to the East in Homeric meter and mosaic floors from across the Eastern Mediterranean that include scenes with conspicuously pagan pedigrees.

These two inscriptions form a strange complement to an inscription from Ikaria which preserve the text of a late prophesy of Apollo apparently derived from a text known as the Tübingen Theosophy (discussed here). The inscription preserves the response to a question to an oracle about the conversion of a temple dedicated to Rhea.  In the inscription, Apollo responds to the question by saying to do “whatever is conductive to virtue and order, a single triune Good ruling on high whose imperishable Logos will be conceived in a innocent… Hers will be this house. Her name is Maria.” The text appears to be associated with a church of the Virgin built on the site of an earlier temple.

To my mind (and I perhaps differ from Deligiannakis on these points), both the Ikarian text and the texts from Rhodes demonstrate the blurry lines between pagan practices as a manifestation of culture life and those associated with religious life. While the separation between religion and culture (itself an ambiguous and problematic term) is perhaps best seen in our modern age, it is clear that the intersection of Christianity and traditional pagan learning (paideia) in Late Antiquity demanded non-religious understandings of certain aspects of pagan thought. This practice, of course, was evident in Greek philosophy (particular Neoplatonism) somewhat earlier, but in that context, it would never have been as problematic as it was in a Christian context especially when the dying embers of paganism continued to glow dimly in the Late Roman world.

Part of the strategy designed to complete the transition of pagan knowledge from religion to “culture” (for lack of a better word) involved the cultivation of an ambivalent hybrid space between traditional expectations of paganism and paganism as part of a historical language designed to distinguish learned (pagan and Christian) elites from their less well-educated peers. Among Christian elites – like Anastasios – references to pagan culture provided them with a idiom that existed outside of the religious power of the church; in other words, paganism provided a “secular” outlet for self-expression that escaped the growing authority of Christianity and provided space to present power independent of the church’s expanding grasp. In the case of the oracular inscription, we can see what may well be a response from the Christian church which likewise sought to appropriate the language of the pagan past to validate their own position within Late Antique society.  By regarding paganism as complicit in its own demise, the church sought to occupy the territory of the receding pagan religiosity. In other words, the Late Antique discourse on paganism is less about actual pagan practices and more about establishing control over neglected discursive positions without the contested space of the Late Antique elite discourse.

Like the abandoned spaces of the Classical city, the church and non-ecclesiastical elites sought to carve out space from the neglected remains of the pagan past. Christianization, in this context, was less about the suppression of threatening pagan practices and more about the limits of Christianity within a traditional elite society.  The crude inscribing of a prayer on Anastasios’ dedication to Herakles, then, stands as a subversive effort to project Christian power.