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129 John Chrysostom strongly tied religious identity to Antioch’s physical places, and this is true also of the distinction that he made between the rural space around the city and the urban space within its walls. Although scholars have demonstrated that geographical boundaries are often more permeable than rhetorical descriptions of them allow,1 boundaries nevertheless ideologically separate places from one another, distinguishing one side from the other in ways that accumulate cultural significance.2 It should, therefore, come as no surprise when rhetorical descriptions of mass boundary crossings depict them as transforming the places on either side, as those who are seen to represent the culture of one side move to the other, which had initially been understood to differ in some significant way from the first.3 Cultural geographer Tim Cresswell’s discussion of contemporary 1. Roman scholars have noted this particularly for the border regions of the empire. See, for example , C.R. Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 130–31. This is also, of course, a topic that has been addressed in other contexts; see Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/ Aunt Lute Press, 1987). 2. Tim Cresswell discusses the ideological construction of geographical boundaries, and the meanings associated with placement on either side, as well as transgressions across boundaries, in his book In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 3. This becomes acutely evident in the case of modern national boundaries, such as the boundary between the United States and Mexico. Stephen Castles and Alastair Davidson agree: “Western European countries have . . . tended to write immigration out of their histories, because it contradicted myths of national homogeneity” (Castles and Davidson, Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging [New York: Routledge, 2000], 60). 4 Transformative Transgressions Exploiting the Urban/Rural Divide 130 Transformative Transgressions borders provides a useful model for thinking about Roman Antioch as well. Cresswell argues that boundaries often become more rigidly defined and defended at moments of transgression, and that such boundaries are not inherently selfevident or “natural” in their location, but that they are actively naturalized through the ideologically motivated narratives of the people who wield the power to define them.4 He writes, “Value and meaning are not inherent in any space or place— indeed they must be created, reproduced, and defended from heresy.”5 In this sense, normative societal forces create narratives that certain people are “out of place” when they move beyond locations socially defined as their appropriate domain.6 The transgression of socially constructed spatial expectations frequently leads to the transformation of the places themselves.7 The writings of Libanius and of his student and later Christian leader John Chrysostom are rich resources for studying such spatial constructions in Roman Antioch. Like the actors in Cresswell ’s twentieth-century examples, John Chrysostom and his teacher Libanius participated in boundary construction and maintenance, albeit toward quite different ends. John Chrysostom, in particular, also explicitly narrated the transformation that he perceived taking place when the boundaries drawn by his sharp rhetoric were crossed. By rhetorically manipulating traditional Roman stereotypes of urban and rural places and privileging the ideals of Christian asceticism, John Chrysostom contributed to shifting local power dynamics and perceptions of Antioch’s topography , elevating the prestige and authority of his Christian community in the process . Despite a common assumption that urban life and urban dwellers were far superior to their ostensibly uneducated and less advantaged rural counterparts, the status quo in Chrysostom’s rhetoric is that the city, represented by such places as the agora and theater, calls to mind a populated and corrupt place whose citizens do not embody Christian orthodoxy, while the space outside the city, represented by such places as ascetics’ caves and martyrs’ shrines, calls to mind a sparsely populated good and safe place whose inhabitants reflect true Christian orthodoxy and orthopraxy.8 In John Chrysostom’s rhetoric, the inverting civic 4. Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place, 3–27. 5. Cresswell, In Place/Out of Place, 9. 6. Cresswell gives an example of three young black men eating at a pizzeria in an affluent all-white neighborhood who were perceived by the neighborhood’s inhabitants to be threateningly out of place (In Place/Out of Place, 3, 5–6). This also calls to mind the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida. 7. Cresswell, In...

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