Between a House of Prayer and a Den of Robbers: Violence in Church Space and the Politics of Christian Victimhood in the Fourth Century CE

Abstract

Modern media bombard us on a near daily basis with stories and images of sacred and highly symbolical spaces that have been violently desecrated. These are usually accompanied by pleas for help directed at fellow believers around the world or at policy makers at home and abroad. Inevitably, modern audiences have become all too familiar with these stories and the standard repertoire of prejudice, inter-communal strife, and physical horrors they contain. Closer scrutiny of such narratives and images in Late Antiquity reveals that, regardless of whether these were fashioned by orthodox or heterodox Christian communities, such stories tend to exhibit very similar characteristics and employ some of the very same rhetorical strategies to frame the ways in which they convey their sense of victimhood to the outside world. There are nuances and differences, of course, but what emerges overall is a common idiom that readily cuts across Christianity’s religious boundaries, and similar ways in which victimhood and outrage at the violent desecration of symbolic space and imagery is expressed, or, in fact, produced. In this thesis I want to uncover and explain the nature and dynamics of this remarkable phenomenon. As such, my thesis is centred on the hypothesis that this common desecration idiom has its roots in the first half of the fourth century C.E., that it specifically arose out of the new religious constellation characteristic for this period, and that the parameters that were set then and there help explain why the typical reporting on the desecration of Christian religious space assumes the standardized format it does throughout Late Antiquity. In practical terms, my thesis seeks to unravel these developments by studying and comparing the narratology and symbolism of a carefully selected set of late antique stories that describe the violent desecration and destruction of religious space