Urban Religion in Late Antiquity

in: Lätzer-Lasar, A. & Urciuoli, E. R. (eds.), Urban Religion in Late Antiquity, Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 76, Berlin, 1-14, 2020

Mythos

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.

Mythos, 2018

The claim formulated in this article is that city-space and interaction with city-space engineered the major changes that revolutionised ancient Mediterranean religions. Whereas previous research on ancient religion has stressed the role of religion for cities and urban topography, we are suggesting a new focus on the impact of cities on religion and on how the interaction with city-space changed religion. This side of the dialectic is what we call urban religion. This concept is paramount, since it encompasses the development of specific religious agencies and practices (e.g. neighbourhood shrines, theatrical processions; authors and entrepreneurs), specific forms of religious knowledge and imaginaries (imaginative places; imagined communities, heavenly cities) and societal phenomena such as civic rituals or religious communities in the appropriation (and hence modification and formation) of urban space in cities of different size and character. The major questions that we propose are: how and to what extent is religion shaped by density, urban aspirations, diversity and conflict, city governance, heterarchy and division of labour, and urban identity, that is urbanity? The basic assumption is that religious change needs to be investigated in terms of the ongoing interaction between space and a variety of different agents, including residents, immigrants, and people who live off religion.

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

Wawasan, 2023

From a historical perspective, cities have served as more than mere locations where religious practices are observed; they have consistently exhibited an elevated level of historical documentation. The claim advanced here is that the interrelationship between religious change and urban development necessitates thorough analysis. It is imperative to critically examine the significant developments in local and trans-local religions, particularly emphasising their distinct urban contextual factors. At the same time, such urban conditions, the practices, and discourse that shape the understanding of these conditions as urban are not independent variables in the study of religious change. Rather, they are influenced by religious practices and individuals, thereby forming a reciprocal relationship. The choice of areas is an assumption that the pertinent aspect in establishing a connection is the spatial character of religious practices and ideas and their material manifestation in physical space. The article concisely examines various aspects related to the transformation of urban spaces and religious practices. These include the process of monumentalising urban areas and gods, the public display and the articulation of communication with God and gods, the imaginative and widespread utilisation of scripture in religious activities and thought, the increasing division of labour and professionalisation, the emergence of individual urban actors who are not solely defined by their ancestral lineage, the formation of religious groups, the religious organisation of time and the influence of temporal concepts on religious ideas and practices, and lastly, the conceptualisation of alternatives to urban life through the religious exaggeration of rural and natural environments. Such a cursory review of religious changes in urban settings and their impact on urbanism does not yield any definitive assertions on these developments. However, the collective evidence confirms the effectiveness of the presented approach.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

An article bringing together a range of scholars from a variety of disciplines – including history, archaeology, religious studies, sociology and anthropology – currently part of the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities "Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations", based at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. The article summarises and recapitulates some of the research results from the years 2018 until 2022. The "Religion and Urbanity" group argues that it is possible to draw broader conclusions about the reciprocal formation of religion and urbanity by taking a historical approach. The dynamics of this reciprocal formation are context-specific; however, only by taking a long-term perspective on a wide range of cities can we fully grasp the significance of urbanity for religion and the importance of religion in shaping urbanity. The ‘reciprocal formation of religion and urbanity’ is not just some further approach but has been developed into a method: an organised and interrelated set of questions that can be addressed in a cross-cultural and cross-epochal manner towards a wide range of historical subjects. The research group "Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations" (FOR 2779) has been funded by the German Research Foundation/Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) since 2018 and in 2022 was successfully evalutated for a second funding period (until 2026). Research results are published continuously via the open access platform and journal "Religion and Urbanity Online" (de Gruyter): https://doi.org/10.1515/urbrel

Archaeology and Economy in the Ancient World – Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Classical Archaeology, Cologne/Bonn 2018, 2022

City and religion as subjects of archaeological research in the Mediterranean are often limited to sacred buildings within the spatial and social fabric of the city. However, specific urban factors such as the concentration of economic potential, control of financial resources, but also heterogeneous populations, marginalization, and power imbalances impact religious practices and their reflections in material culture. The contributions in this volume discuss how economic characteristics of urbanity are reflected in institutional, medial, and performative expressions of religion(s) in cities of Italy and Asia Minor. These interactions are not only of interest for Greco-Roman antiquity, but are relevant in our modern world of globalized markets: With the concentration of economic power the potential for tensions and religious conflicts increases as rapidly as cities grow.

Religion

The concept of urban religion demands us to start operationally with analyzing characteristics of urban environments and their impact on religious forms of communication. Yet this notion was not necessarily designed to apply only to the city and related phenomena exclusively observed in city spaces. Practices, beliefs, even institutions developing as urban religion spread out beyond the city. Thus, the geography of lived urban religion and of agents of urbanity is different from what the same people imagine and geographically locate as city space. This article intends to develop the conceptual tools for analyzing this blurring of boundaries produced by religious semantics, discourses and practices interacting with implicit and explicit border-constructions linked to practices of 'urbanity'. The highly debated 'urban' or 'anti-urban' character of ancient Christianities serves as our point of departure for developing comparative tools.