the circumcision of Christ signals how Christians could rewrite Judaism as a legible symbol of Christianity itself, transmuting the negatively coded Jewish traits of “Law” or “flesh” into positive Christian values. I introduce the erotapokriseis texts as an internalized form of Christian dialogue to demonstrate how profitably Christians might imagine their own identity as a chorus of (not always harmonious) voices even as they insisted on the monophonous singularity of orthodoxy. For Ambrosiaster or the serial authors of the Questions to Duke Antiochus, Christ’s circumcision at the same time celebrated and amplified anxieties about boundaries, making Jesus into a paradigmatic symbol of Jewish-Christian paradox and contradiction.
While these dialogic “encounters” with the other serve the particular goal of creating a sense of Christian community, the strategies by which other voices are conjured to construct Christian culture were neither unique nor entirely invented by Christians. That “culture” should be hybrid, polyphonous, and embedded in an asymmetrical confrontation with “others” lay, as we have seen many times so far, at the heart of Roman imperial identity. We must also keep in mind, however, that, by staging in so spectacular a fashion that confrontation with the “other” inside the empire, the Roman self was also rendered unstable, liable to the threatening otherness within.
Likewise circumcision, this symbol of Jewishness par excellence, came to be incorporated into the fractured singularity of Christian identity on Christ’s body. This assumption of Jewish otherness becomes visible to us through texts that most clearly and deliberately stage the multiple voices of self and other composing Christianity: the dialogue texts. Here, in texts traditionally read as the vanguard of religious boundary formation, we glimpse the partial and even contradictory ways in which Christianity configured itself vis-à-vis the Jewish other. Much like the cultural economy of Roman imperialism, moreover, this Christian staging of the simultaneous repudiation and internalization of difference could generate a fragile sense of self, always vulnerable to the other it maintains within.
Yet even as we can sketch a plausible historical context for such a maneuver in the analogous operations of Roman imperial culture, we can also attend to the lasting effects of this sly internalization of Jewish otherness that always supports yet threatens the coherence of cultural identity. Perhaps the Christian absorption of its originary Jewishness, evident in these dialogue texts through the paradoxical circumcision of Christ, has left its lasting marks on the formation of cultural identities even into our postmodern period.129 At the very least we can appreciate the resonances between the premodern and the postmodern that are made visible. Although speaking of twentieth-century articulations of race and hybridity, Robert Young’s description of “culture” works well for the strategies of an early Christian dialogic imagination as well: “Culture never stands alone but always participates in a conflictual economy acting out the tension between sameness and difference, comparison and differentiation, unity and diversity, cohesion and dispersion, containment and subversion.”130 As we turn now to consider a different category of Christian other, the heretic, we should nonetheless keep this sense of culture—unified and divided, contained and subverted—close at hand.
Chapter 3
Heresy, Theology, and the Divine Circumcision
The various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions.
—Julia Kristeva
Abject Heresy
In the fifth century, Vincentius of Lerins famously described Christian orthodoxy as “that which everywhere, always, and by everyone was believed.”1 Traditionally, we have understood Vincentius to be asserting the continuity of orthodoxy through time and space.2 Yet we might hear this claim to singular discourse differently within the political framework of the late Roman Empire. As I explained in Chapter 1, no overarching “Romanness” defined participation in the Roman Empire. Rather, the empire existed by virtue of its ability to contain and manage difference. Reading historically between Vincentius’s lines, then, we might hear him trumpeting not continuous assent stretching back to the time of the apostles, but rather a more fluid economy of doctrinal control patterned on the cultural economy of Roman authority.3 Orthodoxy literally comprises all manner of Christian belief, even that which it seems to reject.
In this chapter, I explore how the articulation of orthodoxy and heresy simultaneously asserted and negated Christian boundaries, visible through the variegated uses of Christ’s circumcision in theological debate. I argue that the logic of ancient Christian orthodoxy, despite its own rhetoric, was not a logic of the exclusion of the theological “other,” but a logic of the partial absorption and internalization of that “other.” As I lay out in the introduction, scholars treat Christian theological assertions of orthodox unanimity with a healthy skepticism: no longer do we believe that heresy constitutes deviation from a continuous line of orthodox truth stretching back to Jesus. Yet we remain drawn to models of binary self-definition, imagining that orthodoxy constitutes a “self” coming into being in direct relation to a heretical “other,” a figure of opposition identified (or constructed) to sharpen the boundaries of individual and communal identity.4 There are, however, other ways of tracing the curious and complex methods by which individuals and groups define “self” and “other,” models that may, in fact, fit better the fluid cultural economies of late Roman identity, and illumine the strategies by which orthodox Christianity likewise strove for dominance.
Whereas anthropologists and sociologists might view the formation of the “self” as a scene of definitive rejection of the “other,” psychoanalytic theorists like Julia Kristeva (drawing, ultimately, on Freud and Lacan) speak of abjection:5 a violent expulsion of “otherness” that is, by virtue of its very processes, always incomplete and recursive.6 Elizabeth Grosz comments on abjection: “The subject must disavow part of itself in order to gain a stable self, and this form of refusal marks whatever identity it acquires as provisional, and open to breakdown and instability.”7 For Kristeva, the abject can be any reminder of that incomplete disavowal, which gives the lie to bodily and subjective coherence: food, excrement, a cadaver.8 The abject is neither object (Other) nor subject (Self); it occupies an uncomfortable “in-between” space that challenges the boundaries of identity. To confront the abject—in Kristeva’s psychoanalytic terms—is to confront the impossibility of my-self, to return to a moment (horrifying or purifying) before “I” existed.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными
