Alienation: The Experience of the Eastern Mediterranean (50–600 A.D.) (review)

This monograph is a recognizable sequel to Antigone Salmellas’s first book, Death in the Eastern Mediterranean (50–600 AD): The Christianization of the East—An Interpretation (Tübingen, 2002). Both are discursive readings of the changed mentalité of the later Roman Empire that can be ascribed to the effects of Christianization. Social and psychological alienation, understood in a very broad sense, provides the subject matter that links the first three chapters of the new book. The first, on life as theater, argues that whereas much “pagan” classical conduct rested on the adoption and acting out of personae on life’s stage, a fully internalized Christian set of values required alienation from secular activity and an emptying of personality. By discarding the masks that made an individual visible and effective in society, the inner person was revealed to God’s judgment. The second chapter on the growth of asceticism deals with alienation in its most recognizable form—the retreat of the individual from communal society and the family, already apparent in some philosophical movements, which took extreme forms in the desocialization of Christian hermits and other ascetics and could lead to a level of social estrangement that was the virtual equivalent of death. The third chapter discusses changing attitudes to mental illness and healing in later antiquity, tracing a line from initial stigmatization to a Christian recognition that the symptoms of apparent madness often were to be understood as revealing the character of the inner person. These three essays in social psychology draw on a rich tradition of late-classical philosophical and patristic literature, but one ancient writer provides a welcome linking thread through all of them—St. John Chrysostom, whose sermons on the theater at Antioch and on the renunciation of earthly pleasures and comforts in favor of the solace of the desert echo through chapters 1 and 2, and whose homiletic letter to the afflicted monk Stageirios is a key reference for chapter 3.

The second half of the book moves away from the single theme of alienation to offer a reading of the intellectual and political transformations that followed from the conversion of the later Roman Empire and the internalization of Christian values by Roman society. Chapter 4 suggests that bishops and other Christian leaders of the Christian Church attempted to replace classical utopias with the actualized charitable institutions of the Church, an aim that was inhibited by their need to act in harmony with, and indeed to reinforce, the authoritarian and hierarchized structures of the Roman Empire. Chapter 5, a thought-provoking study of imperialism and Christianity, charts the transformation of Christianity from initial marginality to become a force that reinforced and transformed Roman imperial power. By detaching itself from Judaism, Christianity avoided the destructive consequences of direct political opposition to Rome and was unthreatened by the decadence of Greek institutions through offering an explicit alternative to Hellenic culture. Thus by the end of the later empire, Christian orthodoxy could claim to occupy the cultural and religious territory of both Greeks and Jews, as it provided reinforcement to Roman political power. Chapter 6 explores the paradox that the extreme punishments inflicted on Christian martyrs, which were central to the self-definition of the faith, but nevertheless were adopted as models for their own understanding of proper punishment both in the context of divine and secular justice. Chapter 7, loosely attached to the rest of the book, examines the question of the psychological importance to individuals of reading scripture.

This book is long and learned, and its loose structure makes it anything but an easy read. However, the writer has an impressive command of the patristic literature and a productively catholic approach to modern scholarship ranging from social psychology to Greek epigraphy. She does not make the case that alienation is the experience that provides the key to understanding late antiquity, but has provided much challenging historical material to...