This superb festschrift volume forms a fitting tribute to Gillian Clark's immense contribution to late antique and early Christian studies. A stellar cast of international scholars offer essays that range widely across the diverse world of late antique Christianity, and yet the volume retains an overall coherence that such compilations too often lack. The theme that binds the work together, and which runs through Clark's many books and articles, is simple to summarize in theory but challenging to define in practice. What did it mean to ‘be Christian’ in Late Antiquity? The difficulties raised by terms such as ‘Christianization’ are now well known, and yet it remains essential that we seek to understand the changing nature of Christian identity in this crucial formative period for the history of Christianity and the Roman Empire. The fifteen articles collected here, organized into three blocs of five each under their own thematic heading, bear powerful witness to the many and varied approaches that must be brought to bear if we are truly to engage with so great a question.
The stage is prepared by the introduction from Averil Cameron, before the first five articles are assembled in Part I: ‘Being Christian through Reading, Writing, and Hearing’. The complex inter-relationship between Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity is highlighted by Simon Goldhill's exploration of the lack of biographical writing in rabbinical Judaism and by Tessa Rajak on the elderly mother as the heroine in the martyr stories of the Fourth Book of Maccabees. Guy Stroumsa returns to the long debate over the status of the book in early Christianity, with the rise of the codex and the adoption of silent reading, while Josef Lössl provides a new insight into the equally familiar but still controversial use of the term ‘pagan’ and early Christian memories of the ‘pagan’ past in Clement of Alexandria and Dionysius the Areopagite. The last article in this first section sees Carol Harrison reflect on the art of reflection, the rôle of the hearer rather than the speaker, through an unusual but thought-provoking comparison between Augustine's De catechizandis rudibus (Instructing Beginners in the Faith) and the less familiar De recta ratione audiendi (The Art of Listening to Lectures) of Plutarch.
Part II is headed ‘Being Christian in Community’. The transformation in the status of Christianity during the fourth century inspired new models for how Christian communities should be created and maintained, and forced both Christians and non-Christians to reconsider the relationship between the Church and the existing structures of authority. Andrew Louth sets the background, surveying the shift from the Church of the martyrs to the Christian Empire in light of Tertullian's famous dictum ‘fiunt, non nascuntur Christiani’ (‘Christians are made, not born’). The response of Julian ‘the Apostate’ to Christianity's expansion receives its rightful attention through Neil McLynn's re-examination of Julian's notorious attack upon Christian teaching and its impact. This is followed by the inevitable yet entirely justified appearance of Augustine's City of God, with Augustine's understanding of civitas illuminated by Catherine Conybeare in collaboration with Cicero and the German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt. The closing two articles then take up the theme of Christianity and authority from contrasting but complementary perspectives. Karla Pollmann explores the concept of auctoritas from its Latin roots via Tertullian and Cyprian to Augustine. And Ralph Mathisen shifts the focus to canon law and the development of the Gallic Libri canonum, where regional concerns and local authority were issues of primary concern.
The final section, Part III, takes up ‘The Particularities of Being Christian’ from multiple viewpoints that vary by gender, culture and geography. Given Clark's pivotal rôle in shaping modern interpretations of late antique Christian women, it is only natural that two of these contributions continue the search for female identity in this patriarchal world. Jill Harries presents the often neglected evidence for the Christian empresses of the first half of the fourth century, notably Fausta and Constantina, before Dennis Trout turns our eyes towards the coemeterium of St Agnes in Rome and the vision of being female revealed by the verse inscriptions dedicated to Christian women that are preserved there. Education is then the common element uniting the next two articles. The De herediolo of Ausonius of Bordeaux is the subject of Oliver Nicholson, placing Ausonius within his patrimony to better understand a man sometimes described (or indeed dismissed) as a ‘conventional Christian’. Ausonius also appears alongside Jerome and Symmachus in Mark Vessey's consideration of the legacy of Varro, which culminates with Augustine and Varro's influence upon the De doctrina christiana and the City of God. At the end of the volume, isolated in subject and context and thereby reinforcing the vast diversity of late antique Christianity, stands Fergus Millar's meditation upon the Life of St Symeon the Younger, the second of that name to adopt the dramatic life of the stylite monk.
No single volume could ever hope to capture the full complexity of what it meant to ‘be Christian’ in Late Antiquity. The diversity achieved in the articles gathered here merits great praise, and yet more might have been attempted. The emphasis on Augustine can hardly be faulted, particularly in a festschrift dedicated to Gillian Clark. But the western bias is perhaps carried too far, and one looks largely in vain for the insights into eastern Christian life provided by the Cappadocian fathers or John Chrysostom. This is only a minor complaint. Being Christian in Late Antiquity can justly be hailed as a model of its kind and, like the works of Clark herself, offers much to challenge and inspire students and scholars alike.
