The Revision of Histories and Landscapes in Late Antiquity
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3 Memories of trauma and the formation of a Christian identity Jonathan P. Conant Conflict casts a long shadow over the landscape of Christian memory. Scholars routinely acknowledge, for example, that, whatever its lived realities, the experi- ence of persecution was deeply traumatic to the early church, and that memories of victimisation profoundly shaped Christian worldviews for centuries to come. While trauma has long been well studied in modern populations ( Herman 1992 ; Leys 2000 ), much work remains to be done in terms of exploring its enduring effects on group behaviour in the pre-modern world. On one level, then, this chapter is an appeal to consider the role that collective trauma may have played in shaping late-Roman society in general, and in shaping memory and conflict within contemporary Christian communities in particular. Here, of course, it is of paramount importance to proceed with caution, if for no other reason than that, with few notable exceptions, the interior lives of inhabitants of the later Roman world are not readily accessible to modern observers. Nonetheless, in recent years scholars have become more attuned to the emotional and psychological realities of ancient and medieval societies (see e.g. Barton 1993 ; Konstan 2006 ; Rosen- wein 2006; Harper 2013; Meineck and Konstan 2014; Turner and Lee 2018). In this context, it is surely also worth considering the long-term impact of events in Late Antiquity that overwhelmed a ‘sense of control, connection, and meaning’ on either an individual or a collective level, and which would thus be defined in a modern context as ‘traumatic’ ( Herman 1992 : 33). Doing so has the potential not just to add complexity and nuance to our narratives about the past but also to enrich our understanding of why Christians remained extremely sensitive to perceived threats to their faith community even after any substantive danger had long since faded away. Such an endeavour might thus help illustrate why, from the fourth century onward, Christians began to appear so frequently in the sources as perpetrators of religiously motivated violence, or at least violence legitimated in religious terms—a problem that continues to bedevil modern scholarship on Late Antiquity (see e.g. Drake 1996 ; Gaddis 2005 ; Drake 2006 ; Shaw 2011 ). This study is by its nature a preliminary one, as much a thought-piece as a proof-piece. It is impossible to consider here the diverse and multifaceted land- scape of the Christian Mediterranean in its entirety. I shall therefore focus on the case of early fourth-century North Africa, which provides a particularly illuminat- ing example for two reasons: first, the survival of a small but exceptionally rich Memories of trauma 37 constellation of contemporary and near-contemporary sources, and second, the centrality of conflict and its memory to that source base. When fourth-century African Christians asked themselves why their society was so riven by religious violence, the stories they told invariably returned to the so-called Great Persecu- tion. Focused on the suppression of Christian worship, this series of increasingly repressive measures was initiated by the eastern augustus Diocletian on 23 Feb- ruary 303. In the West, however, it was only half-heartedly implemented by his imperial colleague Maximian, and the persecution was rescinded by Maximian’s son and successor Maxentius upon his accession in the winter of 306–7. In suc- ceeding generations, North African Christians would come to dwell on the betray- als of faith and of fellow Christians that they believed had rent their community in these years, and which they remembered as acts of primordial evil that paralleled Judas’s betrayal of Jesus ( Shaw 2011 : 66–106; see e.g. Opt. 1.13–20; Aug. c. litt. Petil . 2.93.202; Passio Saturnini 20). The sectarian rivalry sustained by stories of this sort, somewhat inaptly labelled the ‘Donatist conflict’ by modern historians, has been so thoroughly explored that it might seem there is little new to say about it (see esp. Frend 1952 ; Shaw 2011 ; Miles 2016 ). As the recent study of Brent Shaw (2011 ) has made clear, however, much work remains to be done in terms of understanding the religious tensions unquestionably present in early fourth- century North African society—and doing so from a vantage point that does not assume the inevitability of the region’s eventual polarisation into ‘Catholic’ and ‘dissident’ or ‘Donatist’ factions. Furthermore, recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the sociological, discursive, spatial, and even neurological founda- tions of religious conflict in the late-antique Mediterranean (see esp. Gaddis 2005 ; Sizgorich 2009 ; Shaw 2011 ; Shepardson 2014 ; and, for a recent overview, Mayer 2013 ). Such studies invite us to reconsider the dialogic and mutually reinforcing relationship between violence and memory both in the world of Late Antiquity in general and in North Africa in particular. Indeed, I shall suggest that in late Roman Africa memories of the persecution were dynamic and that, as these memories changed over time, the construction of narratives served as only one among many ways of remembering the past. Reconsidering developments in Africa in the first decades of the fourth century in this light allows us to move beyond oppositional dichotomies and to gain new insights into the underlying factors that may have been at work as simmering hostilities erupted into religious conflict, but before that conflict was aggressively polemicised, factionalised, and deeply embedded within African society. In order to understand how Christians processed and came to terms with vio- lence and its associated trauma in Late Antiquity, it is imperative to understand events as far as possible through sources as close in time as possible to the events that they describe. Yet most of the available North African sources reflecting back on the aftermath of the Great Persecution date from two or more generations after the event, by which point conflicting and competing memories about the past were already being reshaped by the intense and bitter rhetoric of sectarian disputa- tion ( Shaw 2011 , esp. 146–94). This chapter therefore deliberately sets aside the best-known accounts of the origins and development of Africa’s fourth-century 38 Jonathan P. Conant ecclesiastical schism, those of Optatus and Augustine, except in the key instances where these authors claim to collect, transcribe, or quote earlier documents. In the place of these later, self-consciously ideological narratives, this chapter draws on the few sources whose origins can, with greater or lesser degrees of plausibility, be attributed to the early fourth century, for the most part before the death of Con- stantine in May 337. These include early acta and passiones of the martyrs, but also a remarkable set of records drawn up by one of the city officials charged with the implementation of the Great Persecution and two Constantinian-era inquests into how events unfolded at the municipal level in the spring of 303 (all pre- served by Optatus; on which, see Duval 2000 ); a brief excerpt from the acts of an ecclesiastical synod putatively held in Cirta in Numidia shortly after the cessation of the persecution (quoted by Augustine); as well as a handful of early inscrip- tions and archaeological evidence. None of these sources are unproblematic. As we shall see, for example, all the relevant martyrs’ acta continued to be edited after the cessation of the persecution. The polemical context in which Optatus preserved early fourth-century documentary evidence casts at least a shade of doubt on its reliability. The same is true of the acts of the council of Cirta ( Barnes 1975 : 14–16). Moreover, these sources—material and textual alike—were for the most part composed against the backdrop of a contentious legal dispute between fractious North African bishops over control of ecclesiastical property and the succession to the see of Carthage. From at least 312 onward, this dispute was to range from Africa to Rome, Arles, and the imperial court at Trier, and to consume the attention of municipal and imperial officials, an array of western bishops, and even the emperor Constantine himself ( Lenski 2016 ). Read critically, the evidence nonetheless suggests that, though the scope of imperial anti-Christian activity was fairly limited in Africa in 303–4, the perse- cution was still both troubling and disruptive to those who lived through or wit- nessed it. Indeed, the stories that Christians told themselves at the time about the experience of state violence suggest that its rending of normative social bonds and social expectations could be as traumatic as the torture and execution of physical bodies. Before examining those stories, though, it will be important to consider first how the persecution unfolded in Africa, what its effects were on African Christians, and how Africans remembered the events of 303–4 over the course of the succeeding generation. In doing so, I will argue that the narratives fourth-century Christians chose to construct about the past probably reinforced the communal trauma of the persecution, creating a culture of hypervigilance and aggression with respect to perceived threats that helps to explain the regularity of conflict both in Africa and, in all likelihood, mutatis mutandis , across the late Roman world. Revisiting the Great Persecution in Africa Scholars agree that the implementation of the Great Persecution was considerably less harsh in Africa—as in the West in general—than it was in the East (see inter alia Rebillard 2012: 58–59; Barnes 2010: 97–150; Clarke 2005: 647–65; Lepelley Memories of trauma 39 1979 /1:333–43; Ste. Croix 1954 : 84–96). The western augustus Maximian pro- mulgated only the first of Diocletian’s four increasingly severe edicts of persecu- tion. This edict, issued in February 303, forbade Christians to hold assemblies and ordered the destruction of their churches and the burning of their scriptures ( Rebillard 2012 : 58; see Euseb.