I have not posted very much over the period of COVID. This was due in part due to the predictable psychological effects of living under COVID (maybe a mild case of “languishing,” as the press has called it). More importantly, though, it is because I have been hard at work on a new book that focuses on the lived religious experience of those in Late Antiquity – the time (second to seventh centuries CE) of the formation of Judaism and Christianity as we presently know them. The reading, writing, and working out of my ideas has not left me with the mental space and emotional energy that usually drives my blogging. I do hope, though, that this post will help to get me back into the habit of doing so.
I have been finding one particular chapter of the new book extraordinarily vexing to write. This is the chapter on “sacred time,” on trying to understand how people in Late Antiquity understood the timing of their rituals and festivals. Part of my process for developing ideas is to present them to public audiences and talk about them when they are still rough, after which I often substantially revise my thinking. Over the past couple of years I have had little opportunity to do this, but was, finally, able to discuss a version of this chapter with a group at Brown University, the Cultures and Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean seminar. After reflecting on that conversation, I have begun to rewrite the chapter. Below is my latest draft of the beginning of the chapter (stripped of the notes). I’m not yet sure whether it will work and survive the writing of the rest of the chapter (again), but I would be interested in reactions. Does it make you want to read further?
It would have been hard, anywhere in the Roman Empire, not to notice the Kalendae Ianuariae. The kalends – the first day – of the month of January had been observed as a festival by Romans for centuries, and over time had become a raucous, multi-day festival. In the fourth century, the Greek rhetorician Libanius, writing in Antioch, observed that the three day holiday, capped off by a day of revelry, was so joyous that on the fourth day, as people began to return to work, they “prayed to see the same festival again.” It was one of the few Roman holidays so pervasive and important that even the rabbis, who studiously avoided mentioning nearly all Roman and Christian holidays, speculated about its origin and meaning. The bishop John Chrysostom, writing shortly after Libanius, himself devoted a sermon to the holiday, sputtering in anger at his congregants who seemed to have participated widely in the “demonic” celebrations, and emphasizing that Christians do not need special holidays, and should, in fact reject them: all of time now is a continual feast, he argued, in which one day is not more “sacred” than any other.
We will return later to the Kalendae Ianuariae, but for the moment, it is worth thinking about the many complex issues that it raises. Everybody knew that timing was no less important than space and method for communicating effectively with invisible beings. John Chrysostom might cavalierly dismiss the importance of sacred time, but even he knew that there was no chance he could convince his congregants that time was now entirely uniform. The problem, though, was how one could actually identify a propitious moment: What actually made one period of time more sacred than another? Was sacred time baked into nature itself and made visible in such signs as the rising and setting of the sun; the movement of the planets; and phases of the moon? Or was it sacred because some commanding body – the Roman Senate, a city council, God – said it was? Moreover, how did one person’s sacred time, such as the Roman Kalendae Ianuariae, layer onto other and competing sacred calendars, such as that of the rabbis? And what was at stake, not only theologically but also in the exercise of power? For motives that are not entirely pure, groups throughout history have struggled to control the calendar and its holidays.
Today, when we think of sacred time, we normally think of dates on the calendar, whether a particular day of the week or holiday, marked especially by official days off from work. This was also true in antiquity. Like today, people in antiquity were constantly reconciling multiple calendars, especially the festival calendars of Roman imperial authorities, municipalities, and their spiritual leaders. Scores of such calendars from Late Antiquity survive, often inscribed on stone or prepared in codex form for individual rich patrons. These festivals would be most palpably experienced in the closing of the law courts (which was, like today’s closure of government offices and services, the way holidays were officially recognized), gatherings – often accompanied by free refreshments – and noisy and sometimes spectacular processions. These were, perhaps like our own official festivals, complicated affairs that intricately linked notions of the sacred with commerce and projections of power and authority.
People in antiquity, though, also experienced sacred time in ways that were less connected to the calendar. Sacred time was an inherent part of the natural order, which also made it visible. The cosmos, and the motion of the planets, were visible signs of time, if only one knew how to read them. Sunrise and sunset, so often dramatically distinguished from the flow of the rest of the day, were clearer. The moon, particularly the full and new moons, was also a visible marker of time. Birth, death, and menstrual cycles – often hard breaks in the course of an individual’s life – could hold private significance, for individuals and families. It goes without saying that extraordinary weather events and other natural events, such as earthquakes, were also seen as irruptions of the sacred into the undifferentiated flow of profane time.
How people actually experienced and understood sacred time – how it actually worked in practice – is among one of the more difficult dimensions of ancient religiosity to recover. While some representations of time survive in inscriptions, calendars, and zodiacs, these artifacts can only indirectly reveal how people actually experienced time. The often-polemical writings of the elite too are informative, but they frequently obscure the more direct experience of sacred time. As we have come to expect, almost nothing survives from antiquity that shows how the non-elite – and especially women, children, and slaves – experienced time. Nevertheless, a careful and critical investigation of the fragments that we do have, bolstered with some informed speculation, can help us to bring into better focus the basic contours of how sacred time “worked” in Late Antiquity.