The Faces of the Other: Religious Rivalry and Ethnic Encounters in the Later Roman World ed. by Maijastina Kahlos (review)

The concept of ‘Othering’ is particularly useful and interesting across the late Roman period, when, as Maijastina Kahlos’s Introduction suggests, ideas of identity were themselves so mutable. Kahlos describes the process of Othering as defining ourselves in the negative. By saying our opponents are weak, for instance, we imply that we are strong, and so come to know ourselves through the contrast. But still, those who were ‘true’ can claim the rhetorical high ground by pointing at the Other, at the flaws of the outsider, and in doing so, reduce the diversity among an external group to a faceless band of homogenised barbarians, pagans, or atheists, not only unknowable but not even worth attempting to know. The late Roman world especially was one of incredible political and cultural flux and Kahlos highlights the ways in which the flexibility of Othering was itself key to its success – it did not really matter who ‘us’ were, as long as ‘us’ was not like ‘them’.

Each paper in the collection is fairly meaty: the shortest are just under twenty pages and the longest around forty. Divided into two parts, the first half of the collection considers religious difference, while the second looks at ethnic. Unfortunately, the most verbose paper starts off the collection: a close reading of Paul by Anders Klostergaard Petersen, which examines Othering in ii Corinthians and only manages to produce one concrete case. Perhaps the case study approach was not as fruitful as intended and something more contextual could have been used to identify Othering in Paul and other early apostolic writings. Despite this paper, however, this is overall a very interesting collection of essays.

The paper by Marika Rauhala on the Cult of Cybele and its changing depictions by Romans and Christians is a good reminder of how appeals to masculinity (the cult involved ritual castration) complicated just how ‘Roman’ its antecedence and prestige was. In this case, the Others were the castrated priests, rejected by the pagan Roman elite while their goddess was embraced. The depiction of Cybele even changed as pagan apologists sought to reaffirm the need for ritual under a growing Christian majority.

Similarly, solid papers by Päivi Vähäkangas and Kahlos examine the ways in which, through rhetorical effects and binary comparisons, Christians depicted heretics and pagans as an unformed mass. It is clear that Othering occurred, even though the Christian mainstream was still undefined. It was easier to work out what they were not (‘immoral’, ‘stupid’, ‘barbarous’, ‘provincial’, etc.), although Kahlos also observes how the figure of the good Pagan could be used as a moral incentive to spur Christian adoption of moral norms. Othering could be used reflectively rather than negatively: the constructed figure of the Other invites questions as to how and why it was constructed, not whether it had any basis in reality.

Anders-Christian Jacobsen’s article on ‘Images of the Other in Tertullian’ is most comprehensive, although it, like the Kahlos article, exhibits a tendency to veer into lists of examples from primary sources. What keeps both scholars focused is the clear theoretical framework from the Introduction, a framework that underpins and brings together the whole collection robustly.

Turning to the second part, Antti Lampinen ably demonstrates the ways in which Gauls were constructed as a barbarous, ferocious Other, and how the same traits were then transferred to Germans. The images persisted, however, as Gaul broke into rebellion and dissent in the third century. The use of the same imagery to describe both Gauls and Germans reaffirms both the use of Othering as a purely cultural device of rhetoric and stigma – everyone outside was Other in all the same ways, the same non-Roman ways – and hints perhaps at lingering social stratification well after the integration of Gaul into the Empire proper.

Benjamin Issac...