INTRODUCTION

In the previous part, I considered Chrysostom's and Libanius' ways of writing about religious identity and religious allegiance. We saw that Chrysostom was trying to construct for his audiences clear-cut identities of Christian, Greek and Jew and of believer and unbeliever. He demanded that they adopt being Christian as an identity that dominated their whole lives and that would be externally visible at all times. He required not only that they be Christian but also that they display their Christianity. In doing this, Chrysostom not only presented a stark contrast between what it was to be Christian and what it was to be Greek or Jewish but also suggested that all non-Christian identities could be aligned and characterized as demonic. This allowed Chrysostom to present his audiences with the starkest of choices: either they accepted being Christian on his terms or they were the total antithesis of what was Christian and godly. There was absolutely no room for compromise and no room for having a different understanding of what it meant to be Christian. In the case of Libanius, in contrast, we saw that most of the time he was not interested in marking out permanent religious identities. His habitual sense of the appropriate ways to represent religious allegiance in each situation gave him ‘a feel for the game’ for when it was right to refer to this factor and for when it was better to let it fade into the background.