Join us for the next installment in our "No More Than A Page" series. This series gives an opportunity for faculty and advanced graduate students to receive feedback on their research in process. Presenters provide attendees with a one-page summary of their current research and attendees engage in a lively discussion.
This installment will feature Caspian Goggin, visiting assistant professor in the Department of History.
Scholars often point out that late antique Christian literature drew sharp, polarizing distinctions between "correct" Christians and everyone else, from pagans to heretics to indifferent brethren. Caspian's research examines a habit in the sources that complicates those polarizations, which they have labeled the "rhetoric of visibility": authors urged Christians to alter their behavior because others were watching and might misunderstand Christianity as a result of what they saw. Instead of simplifying the world into stable binaries, the rhetoric of visibility framed everyone as a potential insider and attempted to place responsibility for expanding the inner circle—and, with it, the author’s influence—onto everyday Christians.
This event is free, open to the public and welcoming to everyone. Co-hosted by the Center for the Study of Religion, the Department of Comparative Studies and the Humanities Institute.
Watching eyes and social specters: the rhetoric of visibility in late antiquity
Caspian Goggin
The fourth and early fifth centuries were a time of profound change for Christianity in the Roman Empire. Christianity’s transformation from a target of imperial crackdowns into an imperial religion was a rocky one, plagued by theological controversies and heavy-handed or ineffective government interventions. The Roman Empire’s transformation into a Christian empire was similarly turbulent, and in the late fourth century, religious diversity was still a fact of life in many Roman communities.
It is unsurprising, then, that Christian sources from this period had a great deal to say about pagans, Jews, and “incorrect” Christians, much of it uncomplimentary. Preachers might urge their congregations to resist peer pressure around traditional festivals and practices or to avoid befriending pagans altogether; some delivered vitriolic homilies against Judaism or dedicated significant time in their sermons to the evils of heresy and schism. Scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to the boundary-making, boundary-policing purposes of such rhetoric, and for good reason. From the perspective of Christian leaders, defining orthodoxy and enforcing its boundaries were urgent necessities in the unstable and rapidly changing religious landscape of the fourth century.
At times, however, Christian authors expressed very different concerns about their communities: when outsiders or less-convinced Christians observed Christian behavior, what would they see? What did Christian behavior communicate about Christianity, and what consequences might result from visual miscommunication? My research examines sermons and letters in Latin, Greek, and Coptic that construe the behavior of Christians in public—exemplary or otherwise—as crucial to Christianity’s public image in the eyes of the community at large, which included many people who were still, from the author’s point of view, in need of persuasion. I argue that this “rhetoric of visibility” serves as a valuable counter-perspective to the polarized and polarizing frameworks to which Christian authors so frequently resorted.
In contrast to the hard boundaries and sharp divisions that Christian leaders so often tried to construct, the rhetoric of visibility reveals a world of interconnected social networks and connections between people with a diverse spectrum of relationships to Christianity. Some people in these networks were positioned close to the author’s ideal of “true” Christianity: fully committed, well informed, and zealous. Others were further away, either because they were not Christian or because the author viewed them as indifferent, ill-informed, or incorrect. Crucially, the preachers and writers who employed the rhetoric of visibility relied upon the existence of social contact across this spectrum in order to expand their authority. By convincing people to change their behavior in public, authors hoped to socially influence community norms and reach audiences beyond the church. By convincing listening Christians that their behavior was watched and judged by everyone, not only by dedicated Christians, authors could also attempt to counteract social pressures outside the church by conjuring imagined social pressures, describing in detail the onlookers who would react to Christian misbehavior with scorn or criticism.
People outside the church were therefore potentially useful as a tool for persuading congregants while also being vulnerable to persuasion themselves, and both scenarios were useful for authors seeking to expand their influence. In these texts, outsiders’ opinions might be depicted as misguided, incorrect, or even dangerous, but they were also framed as deeply significant. Although Christians were urged to resist the “wrong” kind of peer pressure, preachers and writers also exhorted them to be continuously aware of others’ watching eyes in their daily lives.
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