Exploring Space: A Response to Bishops in Flight

How might closer attention to space and place provide insight into the phenomenon of bishops in flight in the fourth century CE? This is an underlying question for Jennifer Barry in her book, Bishops in Flight. It arises in part because space and place operate as an imaginative exercise for the writers and writings she examines (p. 23). It is a question and framing perspective I find interesting because I am not a specialist in late antiquity, but rather in spatial theory and the work of Michel Foucault, whose comments about heterotopias Dr. Barry also cites in this book. Thus, it is with theoretical matters that I join in conversation with Dr. Barry. One of the goals of scholarship, for me, is to present arguments about our primary materials that generate and encourage conversation. This is a goal Dr. Barry has achieved very well with her book, so I look forward to our conversation.

Dr. Barry begins with a discussion of how Constantine’s embrace of Christianity, and its elevation to favored imperial cult, led in turn to a push for religious conformity in Christianity. Banishment of bishops into exile was one mechanism by which political authorities sought to create that conformity. The different views of exile among ancient writers poses a challenge for historians today who seek to reconstruct it as a social phenomenon (p. 5). Situating her work within the larger body of scholarship on exile, Dr. Barry argues “the discourse of exile served as a new rhetorical and discursive mode in heresiological discourse” (p. 11). It was a discursive performance that influenced imaginative processes for ancient writers (p. 11). By examining the development of exilic discourses in literary texts (p. 22), she pays particular attention to space and place to identify topographical themes and how they function as an imaginative exercise for ancient writers (p. 23). This is where critical spatial theory aids her argument.

Citing the work on space and place by, among others, Christine Shepardson and Tim Cresswell (p. 23–24), Dr. Barry notes how boundaries and their crossings contribute to the creation of social classifications and identity construction (p. 24). This is the primary way she employs critical spatial theory. Adding a bit of spice to this critical spatial work is Michel Foucault’s article, “Of Other Spaces,” in which he discusses heterotopias.[1] I characterize Dr. Barry’s use of Foucault and heterotopias as spicing up her critical theory because it is used sparingly. She argues, for example, that Athanasius reconceptualizes his desert displacement as time spent in a counterspace filled with generative possibilities (p. 54). This idea of counterspace comes from Foucault. Like her use of critical spatial theory, Dr. Barry is selective in what she uses from Foucault’s heterotopia article, limiting it to his comments about how they can be mirrors of certain social ideals that interact with the ways societies enact and practice their spaces (pp. 53–54).

There are, then, a couple of ways Dr. Barry uses spatial theory that stood out to me and are matters to discuss. First, she acknowledges her approach is focused on literary evidence, and therefore that her examination of space and place focuses on rhetorical and discursive descriptions of space rather than material practices. Her discussion of space, in other words, is textually focused, not materially. Second, her consideration of space and place enable her to address the larger social, political, and religious controversies of late antiquity. On both points, I don’t have much to argue about with Dr. Barry and what she concludes. Rather, her arguments invite further explorations of how critical spatial theory can do more work for us as we study these texts and times. It also invites us to consider in greater detail the ways these texts and controversies participate in matters of subjectivity and government.

The first area in which Dr. Barry’s work enlivens my thinking is about how much more critical spatial theory offers us. For me, it offers more than raising our awareness that ancient authors thought about space and place differently, and in more varied ways, than we do (p. 23). It also can do more work than explaining how crossing spatial boundaries reinforced identifiable social boundaries such as orthodox or heretical (p. 23). Critical spatial theory is a broad, diverse field of study. A wide variety of analytical tools and perspectives are on offer that can expand our analyses of ancient materials, literary and otherwise. I have written about the social space of Israel’s tabernacle as described in Exodus. This might seem odd because no material evidence of it remains or perhaps, ever existed. But spatial theory, particularly the work of Henri Lefebvre, offered me a vantage point from which to think carefully about what types of spaces are being created and why in those texts. Specifically, Lefebvre offered a triadic analytic framework that I adapted to strengthen my analysis of this structure. I called the elements of this triad spatial practice, conceptual space, and symbolic space.[2] Spatial practice refers to material space, how people build and shape their physical environment. Conceptual space involves the organized ways in which a society conceptually plans and organizes space, such as the ways a grid plan might organize a town or city (e.g., Manhattan), or how a map is created, or how the tabernacle complex was oriented in space. Symbolic space refers to the ways people interpret and give meanings to space, such as San Antonio being a Texas town, specifically the one where the Alamo is located. The Alamo is a space and place with one set of meanings for some members of the community, state, and nation, while it carries a different set of meanings for others. Ancient Israel’s tabernacle complex was a tent and courtyard, but symbolically it was where YHWH was located on earth.

What Dr. Barry points to in Bishops in Flight is how much more remains to be done by engaging critical spatial theory more thoroughly. We can make theory do more work in our interpretations. What I mean is that the materials examined in Bishops in Flight have more to offer if we use an analytical framework like Lefebvre’s in our analyses. Lefebvre’s framework, for example, parses space into different categories. The greater precision of these categories helps us analyze its material realities and practices, how it is thought about, and how different spaces come to have different meanings. This helps us speak with greater clarity about how ancient writers use space and place.

Dr. Barry’s work highlights how symbolic space is the register within which so much of the evidence she examines is working. For Athanasius, the walls and doors of a church—its built environment—separate the pious and profane, an understanding challenged by Victorinus (according to Augustine in the Confessions) when he asks if walls make Christians (p. 31). What I find interesting here is that the issue is not one rooted in spatial practice, that is, in material, physical space. A church’s walls and doors are physical features of the space. There is nothing inherent about them, however, that separates the pious from the profane. Neither is the issue about what orientation a church has, such as that its entry door must face east or west. Athanasius and Augustine ignore questions of orientation. It is, rather, an issue involving symbolic space, about the social effects and meanings of those physical walls and doors. Symbolic space is very important to Athanasius as he transforms the meaning of his repeated exilic experiences. The desert is a place of askesis, of discipline, something that confirms his orthodoxy (p. 49). Thus, he can cite biblical accounts of others who spent time in the wilderness—Abraham, Moses, Jesus—as part of his resignification of desert exile (p. 46). John Chrysostom can argue Constantinople is the new Rome (p. 27; p. 87), a claim that has nothing to do with the physical spaces of Constantinople or Rome, nor with how they are laid out, and everything to do with their meaning and social significance. When Pseudo-Martyrius argues (p. 117), along with Chrysostom (p. 84), that people make spaces orthodox, not vice-versa, this is a claim about symbolic space, not physical or conceptual space. It is to Dr. Barry’s credit that she draws our attention as readers to the fact that the fourth-century writers themselves recognized space is imbued with cultural and religious significance, at least in certain circumstances (p. 134). I would go further and argue this happens all the time, but that only certain aspects of symbolic space were being debated by those writers. Investigation into the other aspects of symbolic space might be a way of expanding our understanding of the larger context within which these writers worked.

If symbolic space is the register within which these fourth-century debates most often occurred, how might the other elements of Lefebvre’s spatial triad help us be attentive to what else is at issue in them? Dr. Barry provides us with small samples of the possibilities, but the theory or theories we use can shoulder more of the work. For example, Dr. Barry briefly discusses the conceptual spaces of Alexandria and the Nitrian desert in late antiquity. She explains that the Nitrian desert, south of Alexandria, was organized with an “outer desert” strip that was adjacent to cultivated land, and then, further south, the “inner desert” (pp. 34–35). This is conceptual space, that is, the mental map that organizes and defines different social spaces and guides social practices on the ground. What was permissible in one zone of space was not allowed, or at least was uncommon, in another. When she argues that Constantinople and Alexandria were imagined alongside one another to form a theoretical boundary for orthodox space, on one side, over against Nicomedia and non-orthodox (or, heretical) space on the other (p. 23), this is conceptual space at work. More can be done with it.

Similarly, spatial practice—the material practices of space—can push us to consider how geography and topography were at work in these debates, if at all. Does it matter that Constantinople is in a different geographical location than Alexandria? Do building materials, orientations, architecture, street widths, the angle of the sun, rainfall, and myriad other material and physical realities of these cities matter? I’m inclined to think they did and that we have yet to give them sufficient consideration. How do we get at such things? Archaeology is one way, but how can our theoretical frameworks help us identify others?

There is another way I think theory can do more work for us, and I was mindful of this every time heterotopias and Michel Foucault appeared in this book. This is the second area of Dr. Barry’s work that enlivened my thinking. While I can see why the idea of a heterotopia appeals to her, I admit to being more hesitant to do much with it, because Foucault did not explain it well and did not take time to develop it. I also know it resulted in an entire sub-discipline of scholarship. This being said, Foucault said several things about heterotopias in “Of Other Spaces,” and they offer additional resources for examining the exiling of bishops in late antiquity. Specifically, Foucault lists six principles of heterotopias.[3] What is useful about these principles for our discussion is that he argues human beings live in spaces of different sorts (they are heterogeneous), which means human existence occurs within a larger set of social relations.[4] This understanding further develops Dr. Barry’s arguments about heterotopias, for example, that Athanasius understands the desert as a heterotopia because it contains multiple meanings (p. 54). Foucault’s principles also offer us the opportunity to think about the governing rationality of this period. It is the governing rationality that provides the conditions and parameters of what it is possible to think in a society. When Christianity transformed from being a marginalized religion to being the imperial religion, the governing rationality for it also changed. This is something that is yet to be explored, at least to the best of my knowledge.

Foucault’s work on heterotopias also reflects his interests in government, that is, the conduct individuals enact to create themselves as certain types of subjects. Many of us may know and have read Foucault’s History of Sexuality, especially volumes 2 & 3 (The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self), and perhaps even the recently published volume 4, Confessions of the Flesh, so we are familiar with his arguments about confession in early Christianity, including how he traced it in some of the writers Dr. Barry examines.[5] What struck me while reading Bishops in Flight is the extent to which subjectivity is being created and contested in these texts. Even more important is how space and subjectivity are working together in this process. In other words, I think there is generative potential in taking Dr. Barry’s arguments and going further with them. I have in mind an analysis of how examining social space is part of the government of self and others (to cite the title of Foucault’s 1982–83 lectures at the Collège de France) and develops the truth about Christians, Christianity, and orthodoxy.[6] How one comes to understand these bishops as orthodox (or not), the practices and gestures and words they performed as bishops, in what spaces and places they did them, are mechanisms by which they themselves and others came to know them as subjects of orthodoxy or heresy. Victorinus’s question about what role the church walls and doors play in creating Christians lies at the intersection of social space and subjectivity. How does critical spatial theory offer analytical tools to us for understanding the processes and techniques individuals (and groups and cities and the empire) used to become orthodox and know they were orthodox? How, in other words, does critical spatial theory enhance our analyses of subjectivity?

In conclusion I want to summarize by saying I think Dr. Barry’s book sets the table for more work and analysis and points to a way by which this might be done. Critical spatial theory offers historians even more than she undertakes in Bishops in Flight. My own thinking for what is useful veers to Henri Lefebvre and his triadic framework, but there is a good deal of excellent theoretical work available to be brought into the conversation. If the textual evidence largely restricts itself to symbolic space, how do conceptual spaces and spatial practices fill in our arguments and the gaps in the literary evidence? Do new aspects of the social, political, and cultural contexts of this period come into view once we shift our perspective by considering these other spaces? The work of Foucault also offers avenues for investigation of how an orthodox subjectivity is being created at this time. I do not think this engagement need follow Foucault along the path of confession, but it can be combined with critical spatial insights to offer something related, yet different.

Mark K. George is Professor of Bible and Ancient Systems of Thought at Iliff School of Theology and Director of the Joint Ph.D. in the Study of Religion at the University of Denver and Iliff School of Theology.

[1] Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. by Jay Miskowiec (Diacritics 16, no. 1 [1986]:22–27). Originally published as “Des espaces autres,” conference au Cercle d’études architecturales, 14 mars 1967 (Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 [Octobre 1984]: 46–49); reprinted in Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits 1954–1988, II, 1976–1988, Quarto (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), no. 360, 1571–1581.

[2] Lefebvre’s elements are spatial practice (la pratique spatiale), representations of space (les représentation de l’espace), and spaces of representation (les espaces de représentation); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (trans. David Nicholson-Smith; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 33. Translated from Le production de l’espace (4th ed.; Paris: Anthropos, 2000).

[3] These are: 1) no culture fails to create heterotopias; 2) societies can make existing heterotopias “function in a very different fashion” (p. 25); 3) a heterotopia can juxtapose several spaces in a single real place, even if some of the individual spaces are incompatible with one another; 4) heterotopias usually are “linked to slices of time” (heterochronies; p. 26); 5) heterotopias always include a system of openings and closings that simultaneously “isolates them and makes them penetrable” (p. 26); 6) they function in relationship to all other space. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” pp. 24–27; “Des espaces autres,” Dits et Écrits II, 1575–1580.

[4] Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 23; “Des espaces autres,” Dits et Écrits II, 1574.

[5] Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 2: L’ Usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 3: Le souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (trans. Robert Hurley; New York: Vintage Books, 1990); Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self (trans. Robert Hurley; New York: Vintage Books, 1988); Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 4: Les aveux de la chair (Paris: Gallimard, 2018); Michel Foucault, Confessions of the Flesh (4; trans. Robert Hurley; New York: Pantheon Books, 2021).

[6] Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983 (ed. François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Arnold I. Davidson; trans. Graham Burchell; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Michel Foucault, Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours au Collège de France, 1982–1983 (ed. Frédéric Gros; Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 2008).