El cristianismo primitivo como religiosidad popular en el mundo mediterráneo

Early Christianity as a Popular Religiosity in the Mediterranean World

Paulo A. S. Nogueira pasn777@gmail.com

Pontifícia Universidad Católica de Campinas, Brasil

The compendiums of social history on Imperial Rome show surprising data: The elites of Rome, in their three ordines, did not cover more than 1% of its total population.^[1] That is, within about 60 millions of Empire habitants, there was probably only a small fraction that benefitted from the privileges granted to the elite. However, we must remember that we are not talking about a class society similar to the modern ones that define their social status by capital. For pertaining to the elites, it was necessary to have the correspondent blood, possession, land property and education. There was nothing like the phenomenon we can observe in contemporary occidental societies, namely the social ascenders who, leaving the bottom of the pyramid by means of successful businesses, might possibly reach the top. For being recognized as an elite member, it was necessary to be born into the orders. The class system was relatively static. However, this did not mean that all people below the elites were equal. There were huge differences between qualified workers (like artisans) and day-workers without specific qualification; and in the same way it was not possible to equate slaves who administered affairs and businesses for their masters to slaves who worked in the fields. The differences could be even greater if we compare the documentation referring to men and women, to habitants of the big centers and rural workers of distant regions. One fact, however, made them equal: be it the most successful, be it the ones who worked only to gain their everyday bread, nobody would ever belong to the elites. Their exclusion due to the factors mentioned above was still more enhanced by cultural practices as language, clothing, table manners, in short, by the life style of the elites. The social differences not only existed, they had to be evidenced.

An aspect frequently mentioned by the Roman historiography is the fact that we have access to the history of this complex and multifaceted society mainly by documentation means which refer to that 1% of the population. To the present, the history of Rome is still written in the form of narratives on emperors, wars and public administration, without asking for the daily life and for the struggles of the remaining 99%. And when there is some asking, it is not seldom made in the perspective of the literate and educated elite.

With the shifts of course in historiography during the 20^th century, made e.g. by the Annales School and mainly by Cultural History, new questions were presented to the past. Indeed, a whole set of issues, until then not considered for being allegedly “too low”, came to offer us ideas about the life of ordinary people in the Empire. It is sufficient to mention the efforts made in this sense in the first volume of the History of Private Life, edited by Philippe Ariés and Georges Duby, whose part on the Roman Empire was written by Paul Veyne.^[2] In this work we find the approach that starts from the private and domestic relations, with questions about intimacy, family relations, prejudices, excesses, and so on. In spite of the gaps in the documentation, this approach allows us to consider the perspective of ordinary men and women, of the inferior strata of the society. Today, the historiography of Rome in Antiquity disposes of specialized studies on quotidian aspects in the fields of gender, ethnicity, professions, etc. In Brazil, this production which privileges the view from below and the quotidian is aligned to the methodical vanguards of these studies.^[3]

In our intention to approach the history in the perspective of popular culture in the Roman Empire, we were inspired by an approach which seems complementary to the perspective of the history of private life. We are talking about of the studies of popular culture in the Middle Ages, made by the Russian historian Aaron Gurevich.^[4] Even if the historical period he studied is different, his approach to popular culture as a semiotic system seems us very appropriated also for the study of our sources on Antiquity. Gurevich, who presented his historiographical efforts as allied to the Annales School, suggested the developing of a cultural history of the categories by the means of which the popular groups themselves organize their world visions and their social practices. To this aim, he made the analysis of these conceptions as a language system that oscillated between broad categories as time, space, the divinity, etc., and more concrete categories from the labor world. For his study of the popular categories, Gurevich used documents of different semiotic regimes: oral, gestural, written and visual. To study the intersection between texts of the different regimes, he analyzed and compared religious images, visions of the after-world, the literary gender of exemplum, instructions for confessions, liturgies, etc. This approach allows describing not only the private life, but also the categories, perception forms and sensibilities of the lower classes in what is called popular culture.

Popular culture is not a field easy to define, principally in Antiquity. The studies of popular culture are dedicated, in their huge majority, to the modern world and mainly to our contemporary world. In this sense, issues like pop culture, mass culture, relations between Medias (e.g. digital) and culture, and the globalization make this field very complex and nuanced.^[5] In many aspects, Antiquity scholars cannot benefit much from this debate, as it is the case of the relation between popular culture and the contemporaries Medias. Albeit images, visual urban identity and imperial ideology were central aspects in the social life of Antiquity, we cannot compare them to the intense exposition in all types of image technology and mass images to which people in our contemporary world are subjected.

Also in its social aspect, a definition of popular culture is an undefined and polemical field. What does popular culture refer to? To the culture of all who do not belong to the elite? In this case, would we have to include into popular culture the middle class, a concept which, by the way, did not exist in Antiquity? Or should we limit us to the poorer? But there are poor people who are literate. Or should we lower the level even more, as Carlos Rodrigues Brandão did in his 1986 study Os Deuses do Povo,^[6] namely to the workers of Brazil’s interior, bare of shirt and shoes? There are alternatives to these positions. Due to the complexity of the discussion about the definition of what refers to the elites and what to the ordinary people, Roger Chartier reminds us of the fact that dominant culture is not always received by the dominated exactly as the dominators expect. So the “modes of use” come on the scene; after all, the product imposition by one class on another does not eliminate the «essentially human practice of creating sense».^[7] Thus, he suggests that “popular” should be defined on the bases of reception and appropriation, never developed “in a separated and specific symbolic universe”.^[8] These ideas of Chartier bring us to another author cited in his essay: Carlo Ginzburg. In his classical study of the religious ideas held by heretic Menocchio, from Italian Friuli of the 16^th century, that came to us only via the inquisition acts, he works a with a concept of popular culture which is able to adapt ideas coming from the dominant classes by means of filters that deform these ideas so that they adjust to its knowledge horizon and to its social reality.^[9]These approaches permit us to study the popular culture without romantic presuppositions of purism and remember us that the elite’s cultural production does not have the final word, that the subjects of the lower classes have something to say, even in the desconfiguration of their readings, in their deformation process.

For several reasons, and in spite of the above mentioned efforts, the studies of Rome in Antiquity show gaps in the research on how the lower classes lived and how they processed their experience in society. However, I would like to emphasize two recent studies which contribute to the issue with innovating perspectives and orientated me considerably in the treatment of Early Christianity. The first one is the work of Jerry Toner, Popular Culture in Ancient Rome, from 2009,^[10] who suggests a sophisticated discussion on the subject, avoiding stereotypes like the equation of popular culture exclusively with carnival (or carnivalization), or with folklore. He also resists to a dualist definition of popular culture, in contraposition and isolation to the elite culture. He recognizes that the lower classes are not unified by class interests, and attributes to the popular culture dynamism and elements of intern conflict. Rivalries, disputes, gossip and violence were experienced by these people not only concerning the elites, but also in their intern relations. His approach is very sensible for the intern organization of people’s culture and for the language with which they expressed it. Thus he understands that popular culture is mainly oriented towards the solution of problems. He suggests that the Mediterranean societies in Antiquity presumed that the available goods were limited, and that a person could ascend socially within his or her stratum only by means of competition, by appropriation of the goods available to the others. Here we have to add also the high rate of infant mortality and the low life expectancy of people in general. In face of little resources, high taxes, social tensions, and precariousness of sanitary and health conditions, it was necessary to find forms of survival. And this is where the popular culture came on the scene, as a repository of strategies in its narratives (fables, folkloric accounts), in the wisdom of the people (in moral maxims, sayings and in exempla), in consultations of oracles and the interpretation of dreams, in technics of protection and problem solution by magical means.

The second work which inspired my approach is the book by Robert Knapp, Invisible Romans, published in 2011,^[11] whose goal is to «enter into the mind» of the lower classes, understanding their attitudes, fears and hopes. To this aim, the author effects a division of the 99%: ordinary men, ordinary women, the poor, the slaves, the liberated, soldiers, prostitutes, gladiators, bandits and pirates. The main point in his analyses, however, which called our attention, was the comparative proceeding. Being aware of the scarcity of sources on popular culture, Knapp uses basically the following sets of sources: the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM), the New Testament, manuals for dream interpretation, amulets and images, among others. We already observed this comparative proceeding in the work of Toner, when he interprets religion and magic, astrology, and divination applying data and interpretation of dreams as a means to administrate risks, dangers, violence, and poverty. Again, we will comment on these comparative proceedings later on.

Christianity had its origin in the disadvantaged groups of Palestine in the 30ies and 40ies EC., and before the end of the first century, it had already spread through several parts of the Empire, where communities were founded also among groups of disadvantaged. Without counting one or another exception, the members of their communities came from the lower stratums, and maybe the main variation between the origins and the first expansion was the fact that it began as a rural movement and became predominantly urban.^[12] The expansion that took place in the second century, even including intellectual exponents like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyon, Tertullian, and Marcion of Sinope, among others, did not change this sociocultural profile of Christianity. Nevertheless, in the perspective of my argumentation, the statement that the Christians originated from the lower classes is not sufficient. In this research, I do not focus on the social stratification, but on the question of how the religious movement surges in the combination of categories and issues of the popular culture to which it belongs and how it configures itself as a part of it. Therefore, my issue is the perception and configuration of the world in the perspective of these lower classes which we call popular culture. Thus, the relevance of this proposal is justified by the fact that, even if there is a huge bibliography on the status and the social stratification of the first Christians, their political positions, their relations with the imperial power and their protests against it, we state a considerable gap in studies of Early Christianity and popular culture or, more exactly, of Early Christianity as a popular culture.

Repeating the perspective of traditional historiography, New Testament exegesis continues to interpret the history of Christianity in the first and second centuries using the narratives of the elite sources, in the discussion with the Roman juridical system, with the religious politics of the imperial power, with its administrative measures and how they affected the Empire’s populations and the development of Christianity. According to Justin Meggitt, the relation with the popular culture of Rome seems to exegetes like a dialogue with sources of a very strong «atypical and not representative» character.^[13] He also emphasizes that exegesis must consider the fact that popular cultures are sufficiently strong to cope with a grade of incompatibility between believes and practices inside their realm. Maybe we see here the reason of the difficulty in Bible interpretation, especially the one which looks for the origin of doctrines and practices which are exemplar for religious institutions. Popular culture inserts issues, categories and sensibilities that bring Christianity more and more into this universe of popular believes which show little organization and are barely reasonable. Meggitt also emphasizes that it is important to consider the reception processes when it comes to study popular culture. When we are in face of a monument of the imperial cult or of an elegiac poem to the Emperor, we have to ask how they were received by common people and by Christians. According to him, this did not happen without appropriation processes that may even implicate rejection. This means that the official may not be overvalued, as the meanings of a text are not received in a direct and transparent way.

The study of Early Christianity in relation to the popular culture of the Empire also presents problems concerning the source delimitation. I faced this problem already in a former text, and it forced me to suggest a delimitation.^[14] Here I will resume my argument. To make an analysis of Early Christianity, we cannot, on one hand, accept the New Testament canon as an exclusive textual body. The division between canonical and apocryphal texts is anachronistic and does not stand a historic and literary examination of the texts. Also the limit dating of the sources, i.e. from the beginning until the end of the first century, is not adequate. The historical and cultural processes attested in the first writings develop in the following decades, as the separation from Judaism, the identity definitions of the group, the development of literary genres, sets of practices, ritual and semantic configurations of the religious group. These processes can only be studied completely in a long duration, despite of more limited local manifestations. On the other hand, we hold that old writings (and their literary genders) may not be used indiscriminately for the study of Early Christianity. Philosophic and polemical texts and texts of systemizing character cannot be used primarily for the study of this group, and this much less in the perspective we suggest here. The Church Fathers, like Irinaeus of Lyon, Tertullian and Justin Martyr, represent an ecclesial and intellectual elite that does not reflect the issues, preoccupations and forms of expression of a Christianity of popular character.

We suggest that Early Christianity in this initial period reaches from its beginnings until the Constantine period in the beginning of the 4^th century, and that the main sources are the New Testament writings and the Apocrypha, primarily in their narrative genres (gospels, acts, apocalypses, among others). In this sense, “Early Christianity” is not only a designation of a religious group, but also of a social stratum and of a cultural level.

To proceed to our analysis of Early Christianity in relation to popular culture I suggest, as an initial approach, as an access door, a provisory definition of popular culture inspired by the approaches of Terry Toner and Robert Knapp, but this definition may be expanded and changed during the specific analyses. In this perspective, I approach popular culture as a form of elaboration of texts, narratives, poetry, rituals, practice systems, moral references etc. with the aim of orientation and survival in society. With the aim of making this suggestion clearer, I present in the following a working definition. We emphasize that it does not intend to be exhaustive, but only an initial orientation.

For the aims of this project, which is focused on religious studies, we define popular culture as follows:

«A set of practices and representations of religious order, belonging to subaltern groups of the society, by means of which they cope with social tensions (rivalries, violence, social asymmetry) and shortness of resources for their survival. The texts, rituals, gests etc. produced in this context are concrete, that is, destined to certain practical functions, and simultaneously complex in their structures, that is, endowed with poetic force and polysemy. These practices and representations are coming from the material world of these groups (even if metaphorically); however, they also may proceed to adaptations of elite’s genres and issues in their own perspective. In the case of these adaptations, we see the active reception of literary genres, be it in their emulation, be it in their inversion by means of parody, satire, among others».

Therefore, my perspective is not exclusively the perspective of social history. I do not intend to ask primarily about the issues of social stratification, about production modes or social conflicts. These issues will come on the scene when expressed in the cultural artifacts of the popular culture (fables, fantastic accounts, magic instructions, and texts of Early Christianity, among others). The focus will be put on the cultural categories, in the words of Gurevich, or on the mind-set, according to Toner.

Here are some fundamental presuppositions of this approach to popular culture:

a) Popular culture does not aim coherence or a systematic character.

To the contrary, given its strongly metaphoric and narrative character, we frequently find in its expressions fragmentary, ambiguous, contradictory and grotesque elements. The task of the interpreter is to cope with them and not to look for a certain coherence and rationality as they can be found in the elites’ culture.

b) Popular culture has an allover circulation.

It does not remain restricted to a group. It crosses and influences broad sectors of society. Even if it is a resistance culture, in some of its manifestations, it is not a culture of a protest group or of a sect, but it virtually pervades the whole society. Indeed, popular culture stands in a process of constant circularity with the elite’s culture, even in Antiquity. Although they are antagonist in certain aspects and interests, they do not behave one in relation to the other in an excluding and dualistic form. It is necessary to pay attention to the dynamic reception processes between both of them.

c) Even if popular culture pervades the whole society, its expressions can be studied the best at a local level, given the concrete and pragmatic character of its organization.^[15] Its practices and representations are organized in relation to groups, places, traditions, rituals, gests, images etc.

d) Popular culture is a space of power dispute, internally and externally.

Inside the popular culture, there are disputes for agency and leadership (e.g. between magicians). And popular culture is generally viewed with disdain and prejudgment by the elite culture. This conflictive aspect coexists with the appropriations that are made on a profounder level.

e) Popular culture coexists with the rhetoric of exclusivity of religious groups.

The rhetoric of exclusivity which the first Christians developed in face of their context appears as an apparent impeditive for its analysis in relation to popular culture. After all, they present themselves as a “holy people”, separated by God as “peregrines in the world”, as if they would not belong to the world, and they are waiting for the imminent end of the time. Do these elements not point to a religious group that is developing at the margins of culture and that avoids syncretistic relations with its surroundings? Should we not study therefore the Christianity in the first centuries as a movement of resistance against the Empire and as a negation of the polytheist culture inside which it was born? Would they not have intended to be an alternative for their society?

Our departure point is that in societies the profound relations to the culture in which they live and develop, beginning with the language, with value systems etc., are not an alternative. This does not imply conformism, because in a society there are several religious, political, moral etc. positions, even within popular culture. However, the articulations in any direction can be made only through categories of world comprehension which are made possible by language. We hold that the exclusive consideration of Early Christianity as an alternative movement, isolated in the Mediterranean society, is a result of a short-sighted analysis that does not consider the rhetoric of this discourse or its broader implications. Research used exhaustively the model of a sectarian religious group, suggesting a model of sociocultural isolation of this group. It is a fact that Christianity, born from a Jewish messianic group in the first century, proposed reforms and paradigm changes in its society, but these changes only could be idealized and communicated based on the cultural standards of the society in which they were inserted.

Thus, putting the focus on the Roman Empire’s popular culture in its categories of knowledge, sensibilities and action forms in the world of the great majority of the population, we start from the presupposition that Early Christianity, despite of its rhetoric of exclusion and singularity, and despite of the suspicions the local populations had in face of this group, is constituted and organized by these same parameters of the lowest social stratums in the society. It is the culture of average men and women. If this affirmation and starting point of ours are not acceptable, then we have a problem for the history of Christianity in its beginning: How a religious movement that comes from the lower classes and has broad adherence among it, would not constitute itself on the base of their culture?

So it is necessary to approach the subject starting from the presupposition that Early Christianity not only began among plain people, but that it organizes itself as popular religiosity with the same elements we find in popular religions and religiosities: predominance of the magical practices (healing, protection, oracles), presentation of the its protagonists in the format of plots provided by literature (preceded by its orality) and of the folklore forms, emulation and subversion of morality etc. This change in the problem’s formulation may have implications for the research, in the critical discussion of the rhetoric of exclusivity, despite of the difficulties that they present to the research. It is about an effort to see how the religious movement structures itself on the base of categories of its own social stratum and to identify changes, subtle and fundamental, in the interior of these categories.

In the following we explicit possible implications of the understanding Early Christianity from the perspective of the popular culture in Mediterranean World.

Given the amplitude of the sociocultural field of the “popular culture” in the Roman Empire and also in the (necessary) range of an analysis of Early Christianity in a long duration, we suggest an analysis in three fundamental axes. The first is related to a field of frequent or even characteristic religious practices of the popular culture; the second centers its focus on a social space where this culture can be observed in its intern articulations and in the conflicts with other social stratums; and the third refers us to a space that combines creation and dissemination of narratives, from orality to the creation of narrative niches where the repertoires of popular wisdom are put into circulation.