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Religious Dissent, Heresy and Households in Late Antiquity*

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Religious Dissent, Heresy and Households in Late Antiquity* RELIGIOUS DISSENT, HERESY AND HOUSEHOLDS IN LATE ANTIQUITY* BY HARRY O. MAIER When scholars have turned their attention to the function of domestic space as a place for Christian assembly in fourth- and fifth-century Christianity, they have tended to focus on the influence of structural features of the Greek and Roman household in the development of ecclesiastical architecture. This may be seen for example in those accounts which discover in the ancient household the constitutive elements of the Constantinian basilica: the New Testament house church developed into the domus ecclesiae of the second and third cen- turies, which in turn evolved into the basilica.' If such a continuous line of development can no longer be sustained, 2 it is still the case that when attention is given to the place of the household in the architecture of post-Constantinian Christianity, it is primarily with a view to identify- ing whatever traces of earlier domestic or more private structures lay buried beneath or have been incorporated by monumental Christian assembly places (as, for example, in studies of Roman tituli and their conversion into basilicas).3 In one way or another, domestic worship space has been studied in terms of its relationship to monumental structures. This essay seeks to redirect this focus of attention by identifying some of the ways the household functioned in the life of fourth- and fifth- century Christian groups not sanctioned by Emperor and Church. This is a topic to which virtually no attention has been given, a surprising oversight given the abundance of evidence.4 In their condemnation of 'heretical' movements the framers of the Theodosian Code and con- ciliar decrees, ecclesiastical historians, and polemicists often list amongst the complaints of allegedly exotic teachings and practices the private assemblies of devotees. What follows broadly surveys this evidence by furnishing representative examples of different ways in which domestic space functioned for communities meeting apart from official meeting spaces. Households played an important role in the sur- vival, propaganda, self-definition and characteristic disciplines of pro- Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 08:36:40AM via free access 50 scribed groups. This essay is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather to serve as stimulus to fuller investigation of this much-ignored aspect of late antiquity. The anti-heretical decrees of the Theodosian Code provide significant evidence for determining the degree to which domestic space was used as proscribed Christian movements struggled to survive in hostile cir- cumstances. The measures described by Eusebius in his Life of Constan- tine (3.65), forbidding meetings of 'heretics' not only in public 'but in any private house or place whatsoever,' are an early example of anti- heretical legislation that was to be regularly published, with some notable exceptions, in the century and a half that followed. One may describe the policy of Church and State, especially from the reign of Theodosius onward, as a form of 'territoriality,' by which is meant a strategy to 'affect, influence, or control people, phenomena and rela- 5 tionships by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area.' Initially exercised against the Manichaeans and Donatists, the scope of such territoriality spread in the course of time to include Arians, Mon- tanists, Apollinarians and a host of others. 6 This territoriality some- times took the form of a kind of 'ecclesiastical cleansing,' with decrees ordering the purging of all heretics from public worship places ? But more usually it involved proscriptions of private meetings. Excluded from public worship, household space provided groups with a relatively safe place to meet and even flourish. The retreat to private space explains how many movements were able to survive in a hostile environ- ment, and the difficulty those in control of officially sanctioned chur- ches must have had in suppressing them. One may imagine in the places where such legislation was enforced two Christian topographies: an imperially supported one housed in official buildings; the other con- stituted by private households or analogous structures, formed outside more public assembly places. We can expect that these co-existed in a kind of ditente until the shifting winds of political and ecclesiastical for- tunes created opportunities for suppressed movements to enjoy more 9 public profiles. The more general portrayal of private meetings presented by the Theodosian legislation gains more detail when compared with the descriptions of ancient ecclesiastical historians. Charting the rise and fall of Arian fortunes from the 360s onward, Sozomen on several occa- sions describes the exclusion of Arians from official basilicas and their retreat to domestic assembly places. In Alexandria in 361, upon the Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 08:36:40AM via free access 51 appearance of Athanasius (having emerged from the domestic hiding place of a female ascetic's cell and having escaped the Arian bishop George's attempts to prosecute him), the Arian community was expelled from the city's basilicas and was forced to gather around its new bishop Lucius in private homes. ' This same Lucius will lead the opposition against Athanasius in the years that follow, surfacing briefly upon the death of Athanasius from Arian households after his elevation by Valens to the patriarchate as bishop in control of Alexandria's basilicas. " I We next meet Lucius in Constantinople where he migrated according to Sozomen (Hist. eccl. 7.5.6) after his expulsion from the throne by the pro-Nicene Alexandrian populace. Here he joined forces with the Arian bishop Demophilus. Like Alexandria, in Constantinople there was also a tradition of meeting in households when met with persecution. In 360 the Arian bishop Macedonius held church in private when supplanted by the pro-Nicene Paul. ' Later, in 375 when Demophilus controlled the basilicas, a fledgling pro-Nicene community was able to survive and flourish under the leadership of Gregory Nazianzus, who gathered the community in the Anastasis, a relative's private residence converted into an assembly place. ' The fortunes of Arians and Nicenes were reversed when Demophilus and his flock, having been given the choice upon the accession of Theodosius to subscribe to the Nicene faith or be exiled, migrated to the Constantinopolitan suburbs. Judging from the anti- Constantinopolitan decrees from the period that followed, it is likely that the community and others like it, stripped according to Sozomen of their official meeting places, began to worship in house churches In C. Th. 16.5.11, published in Constantinople in 383, amongst the con- demned activities of Arians and others is the furnishing of the walls of homes after the likeness of churches and worshiping privately, a des- cription strikingly similar in content to Sozomen's depiction of Gregory Nazianzus' house church, Anastasia. Like Demophilus, the Anomoean Eunomius, having also been banished to the suburbs of Constantinople in 381, held 'frequent chur- ches in private houses.' ' Again, it was these meetings that Theodosian legislation was published to extinguish.'6 Consistent with Sozomen's description of Eunomius' private meetings is the language of C. Th. 16.5.13, which refers to the domestic Eunomian meeting described in 16.5.11 and 12 as 'hiding places' that are to be diligently searched for. Evidently, such conventicles provided a means for condemned move- Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 08:36:40AM via free access 52 ments to survive and assemble when faced with hostility. The leaders of forbidden conventicles were thus able to form relatively safe congrega- tions, beachheads in hostile religious territory, in which causes could be kept alive until, as in the case of the Arian and Nicene communities of Lucius and Gregory respectively, the opportune moment arrived to move from private churches to official basilicas. Not only did domestic space provide a place to conduct worship when more official buildings were unavailable, it also served as a means of promoting ideas and a place to win adherents. It was one thing for an emperor or bishop to establish control over basilicas and Christian monuments, another thing entirely to control the kinds of contacts the rank and file might have with representatives of forbidden movements outside such spaces. The household provided the venue to meet with and win over potential supporters. There are numerous examples of the uses of private space to pro- pagate teaching. Theodoret portrays Arius as going from household to household teaching his ideas. " And Socrates states that Eunomius, upon assembling his supporters in homes, read his works to them. 18 Thus could theologians, bereft of official pulpits, spread their ideas. Further, households could be the venue of important theological debate. Gaudentius describes Philaster of Brescia, during the halcyon days of western Arianism when Auxentius controlled Milan and Liberius was in exile, as a kind of circuit preacher and apologist for the Nicene cause, touring the countryside around Rome and 'winning many 9 over by public and private disputation.' ' But it was not only the profes- sional theologians who engaged in these domestic forms of propaganda. In the case of the Donatists, the movement was spread from North Africa to Spain largely through the enthusiastic promotion of Lucilla, probably the Spanish impresario whom Augustine describes as welcom- 11
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