Christianity

By Christopher S. Wood 

Nativity of Christ by the Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden, painted in the middle years of the fifteenth century, plants a portrait of the artist’s donor Pieter Bladelin at the site of the Nativity. The embedded portrait casts doubt on the factuality of the persons and events described by the rest of the picture and introduces the modern myth of human subjectivity and self-awareness.

Religious art of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe was marked by the creeping presence of the prosaic, the concrete, the familiar, the everyday. Vivid descriptions of furniture and clothes, local flora and landscapes, hometown buildings and skylines, vignettes of laboring and sporting peasants threatened to distract the devout beholder from the sacred narrative. The purpose of the painting, after all, was to train the mind on the episodes of the lives of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. A dramatic instance of this profanation of the cult image was the embedded portrait, the topic of my research at the IAS in fall 2011.

The embedded portrait is the image of a real, modern person, usually the donor or person who paid for the painting, introduced into the narrative. The donor has him- or herself depicted in an attitude of pious attentiveness. A good example is the Nativity of Christ by the Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden, painted in the middle years of the fifteenth century—the exact date is unknown—and today in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. This is the central section of a three-paneled altarpiece, or triptych, perhaps once mounted on an altar in a chapel, perhaps displayed in an altar-like space in a home. Mary and Joseph, sharing quarters with an ox and an ass, contemplate the naked body of the Child. The stall is pictured as an ancient building in ruins, a symbol of the Jewish and pagan belief systems that Christianity was meant to supersede. The city in the background re­sembles neither Bethlehem nor Jerusalem but rather, with its spires, gables, and tiled roofs, a modern northern European town. The gentleman at the right, finally, wears an ex­pensive-looking fur-lined coat and wooden clogs to protect his fine pointed shoes. He presses his hands to­gether in reverence. This is the donor. He is not identified by an inscription or a coat of arms. But there is good reason to believe, on the basis of the painting’s whereabouts in the seventeenth century, that he is Pieter Bladelin, a man of respectable origins who rose through political acumen to a high station in the court of the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, in Bruges.

By Julia M. H. Smith 

After presenting her lecture at the Institute, Julia Smith was introduced to Elena Petronio, a member of the Chairman’s Circle of the Friends of the Institute, who had brought with her some small silver display cases of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century date, in which carefully labeled relics had been sealed with an official ecclesiastical seal. Between them, the two containers contained the relics of three saints, each relic a speck of matter far smaller than the label that accompanied it.

Reliquaries were designed as receptacles for tiny bundles of sacred stuff such as handfuls of dust, pebbles from Biblical sites in the Holy Land, tiny fragments of the hair, clothing, and even bone of those deemed to be saints and martyrs by the Christian church. Wrapped in cloth and carefully labeled, these paltry, nondescript objects were transformed into things of eye-catching beauty and great prestige by the containers crafted to house them—reliquaries. But, prior to about 1200 C.E., reliquaries did not make their contents visible to the viewer: instead, they were designed to conceal them. The specifics of the content were nevertheless important to medieval Christians, and hence their care to label and inventory their contents in minute detail.

Several medieval reliquaries, upon scientific investigation, have been shown to retain their original contents to this day. These collections of relics can be mapped to reveal the social and geographical networks of contacts that contributed to their formation. These anchored a church in its locality and region, but might also extend across much or all of Christendom. In this way, the items inside a reliquary represented the key events and notable places of the Christian story from the perspective of the particular patron who commissioned the craftsman to produce these stupendous works of art. The contents are as fascinating as the container; when we look inside a reliquary, we see “Christianity in miniature.”

By Caroline Walker Bynum 

Medieval reliquaries such as this one from a church in Cologne were among the devotional objects examined in the conference “Matter for Debate.” The conference was made possible with support from the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.

Material objects play a role in all religions. Jewish women light candles for the Sabbath; Christians sprinkle or douse bodies with water to baptize; Hindus offer coconuts and clarified butter to images of the gods and goddesses; the ancient Incas preserved mummies of their ancestors in caves, and Quechua-speaking peoples in the Andes still feel uneasy about these remains. Such objects—coco­nuts and images, candles and mummies—carry with them a com­­­mu­­nity’s past, making it present and at the same time underlining its location in the past. They convey holiness from place to place, focus prayer and meditation, enforce or undermine hierarchy. But religions do not all venerate or fear the same objects or use them in the same ways. Over the past hundred years, historians of religion have been particularly interested in a subset of devotional objects that have been designated by worshippers with a word that can be translated as “relics” or “remains”: holy bodies or parts of bodies, or physical objects that have been in contact with them or their burial sites. Given this definition, relics are not found in all religions. Jews, for example, do sometimes venerate gravesites (although rabbis have been very dubious about this practice) but they do not revere dead bodies as holy. Hindus return the ashes of the dead to the Ganges rather than preserving them, but Buddhists build monumental containers or stupas for the ashes of the Buddha, and these stupas are considered so powerful that even their shadows convey healing or harm. Moreover, traditions vary over both space and time in how far such objects are crucial. Protestant Christians in the sixteenth century rejected the relic cult of Catholic Christians as superstition or idolatry. So it might seem as if it would be an interesting exercise in comparative religion to explore why some religions have relic cult and some do not. That is what Julia M. H. Smith of the University of Glasgow (see article, page 5) and I thought we were setting out to explore when we began to plan a workshop titled “Matter for Debate: Relics and Related Devotional Objects,” to be held at the Institute in July 2010. But the topic ended up being far more amorphous and far more challenging than that.

By Angelos Chaniotis 

Figure 1. Aeneas, the son of Aphrodite and the founder of Rome, escapes from Troy in this relief panel in the Sebasteion (a building dedicated to imperial cult) at Aphrodisias (mid-first century C.E.).

“Who are you?” A simple question sometimes requires a complex answer. When a Homeric hero is asked who he is (e.g. Iliad 7.123 ff.), his answer consists of more than just his name; he provides a list of his ancestors. The history of his family is an essential constituent of his identity. When the city of Aphrodisias (in Asia Minor) decided to honor a prominent citizen with a public funeral (ca. 50 B.C.E.), the decree in his honor identified him in the following manner:

Hermogenes, son of Hephaistion, the so-called Theodotos, one of the first and most illustrious citizens, a man who has as his ancestors men among the greatest and among those who built together the community and have lived in virtue, love of glory, many promises of benefactions, and the most beautiful deeds for the fatherland; a man who has been himself good and virtuous, a lover of the fatherland, a constructor, a benefactor of the polis, and a savior . . .

The components of Hermogenes’ identity include his name and nickname (Theodotos = “the gift of the gods”), his social class, the history of his family, and his personal achievements.

We can define “identity” in an elementary manner as the answer to the questions “who and what are you?” Depending on the context in which the question is asked and who wants to know, the answer may vary and change over time.

It is hard to imagine contexts in which a modern-day citizen of a European country when confronted with these questions would give the answer: “I am a European.” And yet discussions about European identity abound, usually tacitly taking the existence of European identity, cultural rather than political, for granted. Studies of how identity was defined in other cul­tures invites us to critically reflect on modern discourses of European identity.

By Glen W. Bowersock 

The negus Kaleb celebrated his campaign in Arabia with an inscription set up in Axum. The text is in classical Ethiopic but written in South Arabian script (right to left). Note the cross at the left end of the first line.

In these turbulent times in the Middle East, I have found myself working on the rise and fall of a late antique Jewish kingdom along the Red Sea in the Arabian peninsula. Friends and colleagues alike have reacted with amazement and disbelief when I have told them about the history I have been looking at. In the southwestern part of Arabia, known in antiquity as Himyar and corresponding today approximately with Yemen, the local population converted to Judaism at some point in the late fourth century, and by about 425 a Jewish kingdom had already taken shape. For just over a century after that, its kings ruled, with one brief interruption, over a religious state that was explicitly dedicated to the observance of Judaism and the persecu­tion of its Christ­ian population. The record sur­vived over many centuries in Arabic historical writings, as well as in Greek and Syriac accounts of martyred Christians, but incredulous scholars had long been inclined to see little more than a local monotheism overlaid with language and features borrowed from Jews who had settled in the area. It is only within recent decades that enough inscribed stones have turned up to prove definitively the veracity of these surprising accounts. We can now say that an entire nation of ethnic Arabs in southwestern Arabia had converted to Judaism and imposed it as the state religion.

This bizarre but militant kingdom in Himyar was eventually overthrown by an invasion of forces from Christian Ethiopia, across the Red Sea. They set sail from East Africa, where they were joined by reinforcements from the Christian emperor in Constantinople. In the territory of Himyar, they engaged and destroyed the armies of the Jewish king and finally brought an end to what was arguably the most improbable, yet portentous, upheaval in the history of pre-Islamic Arabia. Few scholars, apart from specialists in ancient South Arabia or early Christian Ethiopia, have been aware of these events. A vigorous team led by Christian Julien Robin in Paris has pioneered research on the Jewish kingdom in Himyar, and one of the Institute’s former Members, Andrei Korotayev, a Russian scholar who has worked in Yemen and was at the Institute in 2003–04, has also contributed to recovering this lost chapter of late antique Middle Eastern history.