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BAPTISMAL AS A MEANS OF PURIFICATION IN ANCIENT

GIOVANNI FILORAMO

Introduction

One of the most interesting and, at the same time, least investigated problems in the formation of the identity of ancient Christianity, is the transformation that the Hebrew system of the purity rules under• went in the new . 1 We know the interpretation in which the original Christian message was an ethical message which had defini• tively replaced the ritual system of the of the time of Jesus, beginning from its material conception of impurity (Mark 7, 13). But we must bear another possible explanation in mind, and more pre• cisely, the possibility that what we are confronted with, is not the elimination but the substitution of a certain system of purity rules with another. To explain this passage and, therefore, following the aims of our workshop, to focus on the nature of the Christian "purification" better, I propose to analyse some aspects of the Christian initiation: .2 Also as a consequence of its novelty, we can actually see the formation of a new practical and symbolic network in this rite. Through the construction of the new man by baptism, this symbol• ism, without eliminating it, has transformed and reinterpreted the ancient concept of pollution, the material impurity. We must bear in mind the fact that, from its beginnings, the Christian baptism has shaped itself in an original way. While the of the contemporary were lost in the history of time, the Christian initiation was an essentially new rite which aimed at the construction of a new social through a typical ritual of spiritual palingenesis. On the one hand, in a different way from the Jewish rituals of ablution, its aim was not the restoration of the previous

I See A. Destro - M. Pesce, La normativa del Levitico: interpretazioni ebraiche e proto• cristiane, in "Annali eli storia dell'esegesi" 13/1 (1996), 15-37, here 37. 2 On the Christian baptism, see A. Benoit, Le bapteme chretien au II' siecle, P. Lang, Bern - New York 1994 (1st ed., Paris 1953). 394 GIOVANNI FILORAMO condition of temporarily lost purity, but the restoration of the orig• inal paradisiacal reality lost following the sin of and : an aim pursued not through ablutions repeatable in time and space, but through a unique and irrepeatable act, thought of as an escha• tological act through which some thing definitive happened. On the other hand, in a different way from the pagan mystery rituals as those described in the book Xl of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius of Madaura, the Christian baptism implied a radical change of status, a conversion which involved the passage from a religion connected to a people and to an ancestry to a universal religion. This decisive passage is a complex ritual process, an initiation rite which had an essential characteristic: the need to form, through this unique and irrepeatable act, a new man, the basis and foundation of a new sec• tarian society. 3 Even if we will concentrate on Christian texts of the 4th and 5th century, the problem of the particular nature of the purification involved in the baptismal ritual was already present in Paul. Actually, his letters betray two different concepts of purity-impurity. On the one hand, in the famous passages of Romans 14, 14 and 20, he affirms that he knows and is convinced by the LordJesus that "there is nothing unclean in itself. .. all things indeed are pure", under• lining in this way, in relation to food and natural elements, that no source of impurity exists. Therefore, the problem of the ritual purity has been overcome. On the other hand, we can find other passages, such as 1 Corinthians 7, 12-14, which seem characterised by the ancient material concept of impurity. The members of the ekklesia have gone through the baptismal bath; they are, therefore, sanctified and justified, have gone from a state of impurity to that condition of sanctity which characterises the new man. But what happens in the particular case of mixed marriages, where a holy man, a purified Christian, lives with a pagan, with a non purified man or woman? Paul's answer is clear: only if the man and the woman are purified, will their children be holy, otherwise "your children were unclean" (akatharta). In other words, the impurity, that now resides only in the man and no longer in the things, for Paul too continues to be some• thing concrete and material: the materiality of the ritual impurity,

3 See W.A. Meeks, 1he Moral World qf the First , Westminster Press, Philadelphia 1986, 99.