Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church (review)

Michael Penn begins his study of the ritual kiss in early Christianity with a quotation from Clement: "There are those who do nothing but make the church resound with the kiss, while not having love within them. This, the unrestrained use of the kiss, also causes shameful suspicions and slander…." Hidden among discussions of fashion, gambling, and the racetrack, this prohibition against unrestrained and passionate kissing in the church gave the author—as I suspect most others who have read Clement—quite a shock! But unlike most of us, Penn followed his instincts and stopped, and listened, and saw anew the importance of ritual, especially the physical act of kissing in early Christian worship. This discovery led Penn to re-evaluate, as he confesses, his image of the ancient Church.

The result is an insightful study of ritual, power dynamics, community formation, and the setting of boundaries that identify the community first to itself and then to those outside. Though not the first study to explore the role and value of the ritual kiss in Christian worship (the work of L. Edward Phillips, Nicolas J. Perella, and others informs much of the historical and liturgical background), Penn brings a fresh and truly interdisciplinary approach to his study on ritual and its meaning. Interacting with the works of Mary Douglas on purity and boundary formation, Catherine Bell on ritual formation, and Pierre Bourdieu on distinction, among others, Penn shows how the ritual kiss functioned as a performative identifier of difference and community demarcations for the initiated and, at the same time, those outside the community.

Having consulted over a thousand ancient references to kissing (p. 6), Penn in his first chapter, titled teasingly, "Kissing Basics", examines how this common and expected public (and of course also private) gesture of kissing family members, friends, lovers, and so forth was distinguished, transformed, and ritualized into a socially productive gesture "within the kiss's larger cultural context" (p. 17). In the growing context of the Christian community, new definitions of "common" and "ritual" were now necessary.

In "The Kiss That Binds: Christian Communities and Group Cohesion," (chap. 2) Penn tells us how kissing emphasized the bonds of the new community, as both Christian and non-Christian authors "viewed kissing as a way to promote group cohesion" (p. 28). To make the point, Penn traces these bonds of social and group cohesion and difference within its Greco-Roman milieu and structures of social stratification, and then moves to a discussion of kissing as a spiritual exchange to show how Christian communities transformed the popular understanding of the physical exchange of souls (or spirit) through the act of kissing and "employed this pneumatological model…to transfer Christ's spirit between community members, to express the community's solidarity, and to reenact a mythical time of original unity" (p. 39). As such, kissing was not simply a boundary forming gesture, but a ritual that promoted reconciliation and restored peace.

In chapter three, "Difference and Distinction: The Exclusive Kiss," Penn shows that by refusing to kiss pagans, Jews, and heretics, Christians differentiated between those who were not like us, too much like us, and claiming to be us, respectively. Of course, then, the catechumens were also established as different from the baptized, the confessors, martyrs (and their relics), from the rest of us, men from women, and, finally, clergy from the laity (and among their own ranks).

So what happens when boundaries are transgressed? And how exactly are they transgressed? That is the focus of the last chapter, "Boundary Violations: Purity, Promiscuity, and Betrayal." Here Penn examines how Christians struggled with the consequence—real or potential—of such an intimate physical act as kissing. Michel Foucault and Mary Douglas are strong voices in this chapter, guiding the discussion on purity, power, promiscuity, and transgression. In this chapter Penn proposes that the resultant refinement of ecclesiastical rhetoric on "purity" and basic "bad...