Ritual and the Christianization of Urban Space

This article examines the growing scholarly interest in urban religion, situating the topic in relation to the contemporary analytical significance of cities as sites where processes of social change, such as globalization, transnationalism and the influence of new media technologies, materialize in interrelated ways. I argue that Georg Simmel’s writing on cities offers resources to draw out further the significance of “the urban” in this emerging field. I bring together Simmel’s urban analysis with his approach to religion, focusing on Christianities and individuals’ relations with sacred figures, and suggest this perspective opens up how forms of religious practice respond to experiences of cultural fragmentation in complex urban environments. Drawing on his analysis of individuals’ engagement with the coherence of God, I explore conservative evangelicals’ systems of religious intersubjectivity to show how attention to the social effects of relations with sacred figures can deepen understanding of the formation of urban religious subjectivities.

The aim of this paper is to provide the historical research on both religion and the city with a serviceable analytical distinction between 'urbanisation' and 'citification' as two sets of socio-spatial phenomena related to the role of religion in city-spaces. Inspired by modern social and political theory, the notion of 'citification' has been crafted with the purpose to be tested on early Christ religion in order to better foreground its character of an 'urban religion'. The paper ends by suggesting how the concept of 'citification' can be profitably applied to the historical study of other ancient constellations of religiously infused spatial practices in interaction with the urban space. Focus, applied concepts and methods Testing 'Urban Religion' on past cities and ancient religions*1 The path to the study of urban religion has to be cleared. The urban world, […], is alive with the competing and divergent dreams projected onto it and found within it by outsiders. It is crisscrossed by discrepant narratives and fissured by incommensurable visions of what is possible and good in cities. Before we look at cases of religious engagement with the urban world, then, we have to step back and examine what converges on that world ; to see what Moishe Sacks, Mama Lola, and the other religious improvisors who appear in this collection of essays made of the city for themselves, we have to consider first the broad outlines of what was being made of the city for and against them, in the plans and programs of others (Orsi 1999a: 12; emphasis mine). These lines are taken from Robert Orsi's introductory chapter of Gods of the City (Orsi 1999a), the collective volume on lived religion in contemporary American cities that, more twenty years ago, sparked the study of 'urban religion' (Garbin and Strhan 2017b: 4; see Rüpke 2020: 4-8). The epistemological barriers created by the academic division of labour probably explain why it took almost fifteen years to fully realise that Orsi's agenda, as instantiated by the quotation above, might apply also to past cities and ancient religions: namely, to 'cases of religious engagement with urban world(s)' that are not 'alive' and out there, like in social science ethnographies (e.g., Orsi 1985; Hall 1997; McGuire 2008), but dead and nowhere but in archaeological findings and written records. Indeed, the ERC-funded project on 'Lived Ancient Religion' (LAR) has shown that there always existed 'religious improvisers,' small religious entrepreneurs, and self-styled religious experts among the urban commoners (e.g., Gasparini et al. 2020; Albrecht et al. 2018; for the initial agenda, see Rüpke 2011). An extensive body of cross-temporal and-disciplinary research spanning from Karanis to Palmyra, from Pergamum and Carthage to Pompeii and Rome, the LAR approach has demonstrated that embarking on the search of the ancient Mediterranean 'colleagues' of the creative protagonists of Gods of the City does make sense. Rather, the unaccomplished task is to foreground the 'spatiality' of these ancient local religious practices (Soja 1985) by zooming in on the city, that is, to speak with Orsi, by considering 'what was being made of the city' that enabled and constrained the appearance of these religious agents, facilitated and hindered their 'job.' The study of ancient lived religions needs an 'urban turn' that builds on the key achievements attained by the 'spatial turn' in research on religion (see Knott 2010). Borrowing from and bringing together categories, approaches, and insights from religious studies, sociology of religion, archaeology, and spatial theory, the aim of this article is to present a particular view about how to bring specific bits of the sociological conversation on urban religion to bear on a historical enquiry of the millennia-spanning, reciprocal formation of religion and urbanity. The article builds on the assumption that both religious communication and urban life are cross-cultural, deep-rooted, and significantly related strategies of handling, enhancing, and buying into human 'sociability' (Simmel 1911). It moves from the observation that, however increasingly refined archaeological and historical accounts on the genesis and structuration of urban forms have become (see Yoffee 2015), religion still plays a rather standard role in the study of its intersections with urbanisation in early societies: namely, that of a driving force and stabilising factor of political integration and social stratification. The article contends that the connection between the cross-disciplinary emphasis on the 'urbanising' function of religion in the multiple beginnings of large-scale settled life (Rüpke 2020, 53-58), on the one hand, and the dominant focus on the integrative quality of the 'polis/civic religion' in historical research on Ancient Mediterranean religions, on the other, has contributed to crystallise the role of religion in the construction of stratified political communities through sanctifying the core values of the polity. The heuristic and explanatory deficits of this main narrative do not live up to its cross-disciplinary interpretive dominance. Another story needs to be told. This article calls for a different and more articulate view of the co-evolution of religion and urban life by proposing an analytical distinction between 'urbanisation' and 'citification' of religion as two sets of processes and states of affairs concerning the role of religion in city-spaces. In order to justify this differentiation, I will first (1) embark on a brief 'world tour' in the deep history of the relation of religion and the urban by sifting through different narratives on the earliest cities and the role of religion in urbanisation processes. Then (2), once I have discussed a specific use of the verb 'to citify' in contemporary sociology of religion, I will sketch out the short and highly idiosyncratic history of the term Brought to you by | Universitäts-und Forschungsbibliothek Erfurt/Gotha

2024

Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament) The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailled bibliographic data are available on the Internet at https://dnb.dnb.de.

2020

Intersecting religion and urbanity in late antiquity 1U rban Religion: readdressing historical change in latea ntiquity The period of Late Antiquityischaracterised by dramatic and even contradicting developments, especiallyf or the urban networks in the Mediterranean and beyond. On the one hand manyp rosperous cities downsized their earlier territory. The development in the Western part of the (former) Imperium Romanum could outrightlyb ec alled ap eriod of de-urbanisation, impacting on the density and strength of the urban networks as much as on the fabric of individual cities from the late third century CE onwards(Osborne and Wallace-Hadrill 2013, 56 f.). Due to the invasion of the Vandals, the western part of Northern Africa witnessed awidespread desertion of cities in the fifth and sixth centuries CE (Leone 2007,2 013;s ummarilyO sborne and Wallace-Hadrill 2013). On the other hand, and in particulari nt he Eastern part of the Mediterranean, several new cities emerged, and existingcities wereexpanded, even raised to the status of acapital city.The category of the urban, seen globallyasthe product of specific economic and social developments in the aftermath of the Neolithic revolution (Childe 1950) and regionallya st he resulto faspecific Greco-Roman circum-Mediterranean offspring and conscious production of ad ense network of interrelated and competing urban settlements (Cunliffea nd Osborne 2005;O sborne 2005; Zuiderhoek 2017), changed significantlya nd in correlation to local developments. Thishappened much in continuity in the East and far into the Islamic period and the second millennium CE, much contrary to the forms of political power and the loci of culturalp roduction in the West. Unsurprisingly,these developments had tremendous effects on the religious sphere. Religious actions, communications, and identities offer tools for carving out social spaces and making or at least modifying urban space. Neither is religion specificallyu rban nor the city specificallyr eligious. But historically, in manyp eriods and cultures,t he shape and development (includingg rowth as much as decline) of cities-and, even more, the different urban spaces created by individuals and different social groups within such built environments-and the shape and developmentofreligious practicesand ideas have significantlyin-OpenAccess.

Mythos

2021

2014

Christians often express a negative attitude toward the city. They see the city as a place where immorality flourishes and Christian beliefs are eroded. Apart from careful reflection, the scripture may appear to support such a view. The descendants of Cain, the first murderer, are city builders (Gen 4). Sodom and Gomorrah are so evil they are destroyed by fire from Heaven (Gen 19:24). However, the scripture also depicts the city as a positive place provided by God where people are drawn to dwell.

Religion in the Roman Empire, 2023

In ancient cities, space, social organisation, and religion were closely intertwined. Religion shaped space and space shaped religion. Density, concentration, and rapid exchange were key factors in this process and distinguished the urban environment from the non-urban. Yet, we must consider the fact that in many cities the major sanctuaries were located outside the perimeter of the city walls. They were extraurban. Examples are legion. The distance between a city and her main sanctuary could be so substantial that frequent or spontaneous visits were impossible. Extraurban cults played an important role in the religious life of many cities and were crucial for the forging of urban identity, but the dynamics of interaction between urban dwellers and sacred space differed from the dynamics we see in intra-urban sanctuaries. Therefore, an urban archaeology of religion needs to include extra-urban sanctuaries and consider the distinctive ways in which they interacted with the distant urban space. In this contribution, three prominent cities of Roman Anatolia and North Syria with major extra-urban sanctuaries are discussed: Antioch on the Orontes, Amaseia in Pontus, and Caesarea in Cappadocia.

2017

In the tradition of The First Urban Christians by Wayne Meeks, this book explores the relationship between the earliest Christians and the city environment. Experts in classics, early Christianity, and human geography analyze the growth, development, and self-understanding of the early Christian movement in urban settings. The book's contributors first look at how the urban physical, cultural, and social environments of the ancient Mediterranean basin affected the ways in which early Christianity progressed. They then turn to how the earliest Christians thought and theologized in their engagement with cities. With a rich variety of expertise and scholarship, The Urban World and the First Christians is an important contribution to the understanding of early Christianity.