Book Note | Constantinople: Ritual, Violence, and Memory in the Making of a Christian Imperial Capital

Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos. Constantinople: Ritual, Violence, and Memory in the Making of a Christian Imperial Capital. Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 2020.

The fourth century C.E. ushered in a large-scale religious transformation of the Roman Empire. The legalization of Christianity and the establishment of Constantinople as the empire’s new capital city marked a switch from “pagan” religious structures to Christian ones seemingly overnight. Or so imperially-sponsored late antique authors would have their readers believe. Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos’ Constantinople: Ritual, Violence, and Memory in the Making of a Christian Imperial Capital—based on her 2015 PhD dissertation at Brown University—argues that imperial Christianity, at least initially, represented a continuity with traditional Roman cultic practices and religious expressions. Efforts to shift Constantinople’s civic and cultural landscape away from both traditional cults and Arian Christianity were gradual, contested, and at times violent. Falcasantos’ study focuses on those circumstances, interactions, and factors—haphazard or calculated—that elided specifically Nicene Christianity with imperial structures in fourth- and fifth-century Constantinople.

Pointing out that material evidence is lacking or barely recognizable in the modern city of Istanbul, Falcasantos relies on extant literary evidence, including speech-acts, orations, and histories, produced by Christians and non-Christian alike. She underscores the value of these polemical and rhetorical texts as “artifacts or residue of the contestations and competitions among the city’s cultural elite and as evidence of the various strategies used to advance different visions of normative imperial identities” (9). Through her analysis of specific episodes of contestation, Falcasantos illuminates the conflicts and rhetorical strategies that formed and changed the city.

In her introduction, Falcasantos focuses on three key dynamics in the development of Constantinople into an imperial Christian city. First, the religious landscape of the fourth century was highly competitive, and this competition sometimes erupted into violence. Falcasantos contends that acts of violence, and the narratives that recalled these violent events, played an important role in articulating ingroup and outgroup boundaries, and in distinguishing “orthodoxy” from “heresy.” Second, drawing on the theory of Catherine Bell, Falcasantos argues that performances of civic life through communal ritual were generative acts that portrayed homogeneity of social groups and masked diversity and disagreements. Rituals formed group cohesion. Thus, bishops, rhetors, and other Christian actors wished to ensure that Christians participated in “correct” rituals, and writers found ways to reorient existing ritual practices toward new (and “orthodox”) religious frameworks. Third, late antique writers skillfully curated memory. They remembered (or intentionally forgot) particular events in order to positively portray their community members, to advance their own ideological commitments, and to vilify outsiders.

Chapter 1 surveys the habits, internal logic, and established framework of cultic practices in the Roman Empire. Falcasantos demonstrates how ritualized, social activities of civic life (whether taught in classrooms or performed in cultic settings) “were essential tools for affirming a sense of the city as a uniform and unified collective” (30). She reveals how these structures and frameworks were so deeply embedded in Roman society that the introduction of Christian civic and imperial spaces in Constantinople did not represent a period of rupture. Christians performed rituals quite similar to traditional cults. Rather, it was cultural authorities, specified in later chapters, that distinguished and differentiated between Christian and traditional cultic practices.

Chapter 2 shifts our attention to cultic expressions in Constantinople. While Constantine’s building program highlighted the favor given to Christianity, his intentions were primarily to visually depict and assert Roman imperialism and hegemony, imbuing Constantinople with a sense of (Greek and Roman) antiquity. Falcasantos writes: “the emperor’s additions privileged a traditionalist environment, including prominent temples that stressed the city’s continuity with classical foundation narratives and genealogies rather than a Christian historical narrative” (62). However, writers such as Eusebius worked hard to reorient the viewer to interpret these architectural changes as Constantine’s investment in an imperial Christian landscape. For instance, in his Life of Constantine, Eusebius subtly transforms Constantine’s mausoleum, a site of imperial cult, into a church dedicated to the apostles of Christ.

Under Constantine’s successor Constantius II, Christian bishops of Constantinople vied for and gained firmer control on the cultic structures of the city. The boundaries between groups continued to be fluid, however, and bishops seized upon projections of group cohesion to articulate imagined communities and enforce group boundaries. Chapter 3 focuses on moments of violence and conflict that enabled bishops to do this constitutive work. Using narratives of violence from Socrates of Constantinople and Sozomen’s fifth-century ecclesiastical histories, Falcasantos interrogates how such stories demonized the actions of rival groups, while simultaneously giving the illusion that Constantinople’s imperial religion was clearly demarcated and bounded.

Chapter 4 analyzes moments of ritual engagement, using John Chrysostom’s hymns and homilies as a case study to demonstrate how rituals could reshape social identifications. Though ritual experts today assert that participation in rituals does not necessarily mean actors acquiesce with their ideologies, John gives the impression that participation causes adherence, arguing that simply being present at a ritual was enough to make it transformative. Ritualized events were loci for communicating the ideology of the dominant class (i.e., imperial forms of Christianity).

The book ends with an examination of the religious structures of Constantinople under Emperor Theodosius II, under whom “this vision of Christianity as the definitive state-sponsored cult of the Eastern Empire was realized” (144). Theodosius’ imperial administration committed to homogenizing civic and imperial cultic practices through strengthening definitional lines between “orthodoxy” and “heresy” and demanding religious conformity, by violent means if necessary. Imperial religion took the shape of Theodosian Christianity, in line with Nicene formulations.

Falcasantos’ Constantinople demonstrates how change and continuity stood in tension in late antique Constantinople. Her study shows how writers embedded in existing civic and cultic structures reshuffled and negotiated them by both design and happenstance. With time, these individuals transformed Constantinople’s cultic landscape to make the city a Christian imperial capital. In her introduction, Falcasantos claims that her central aim is to provide a model for analyzing public ritual activity in late antique Roman cities. Her book achieves this goal through nuanced examination of the literary evidence of urban life in Constantinople. Deploying theoretical lenses that demonstrate how ritual, violence, and memory naturalize social norms and enable behavioral shifts, and through a selective reading of several late antique authors, Falcasantos persuasively shows how to read literary sources as evidence of cultic contestations, negotiations, and transformations; in other words, as “artifacts of competition” (187). The reader is left with a clearer understanding of how civic and cultural identities were formed and performed. This book is a stimulating contribution to the study of late antique cities, imperial Christianity, and the politics of religion.

Stéphanie Machabée is a PhD candidate in Ancient Christianity at Yale University, specializing in collective memory, cultural heritage, religion, and museum studies.