UC Press Blog

by Christina Shepardson, author of A MEMORY OF VIOLENCE: SYRIAC CHRISTIANITY AND THE RADICALIZATION OF RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE IN LATE ANTIQUITY

“Religious violence flared up in the eastern Mediterranean. Leaders were exiled and sometimes killed; government officials chose sides; and some religious communities faced persecution. So went the late fifth and sixth centuries after a theological controversy about the relation of the divine and human aspects of the second Person of the Christian Trinity became sharply politicized. The emperor Marcian had called the world’s bishops to the Council of Chalcedon in 451, but many Christians, including those whose “miaphysite” (“one-nature”) doctrine conflicted with the council, rejected its outcome and political favor vacillated as subsequent emperors sought a solution. By the late sixth century, the church was permanently divided in schism, fueled by decades of political rivalries, hostile propaganda, and sporadic persecution. Today the Syrian, Coptic (Egyptian), Armenian, and Ethiopian Orthodox churches continue to reject the outcome of this council, many of the same communities who have faced new violence in the twenty-first century. The early history of this conflict and its crystallization into long-lasting schism through the example of the Syrian Orthodox Church are the subject of this book, which argues that fifth- and sixth-century church leaders’ writings constructed a community memory of persecution and resistance that polarized and radicalized the devotion of many miaphysite Christians, equipping them to survive imperial hostility. Recent studies on violence, including by and against religious individuals and communities, and the insights of memory studies shed new light on this historical example of conflict, radicalization, and schism, while making the mechanics of these processes – such as how a community constructs its identity and history – more visible as the world struggles to understand and respond to new conflicts” (A Memory of Violence, 1-2).

I think about the contributions of this book in several layers – the study of Syriac Christianity; early Christian history more broadly; and then the much wider questions of religion and violence that span then and now. For Syriac Christianity, I hope that A Memory of Violence inspires more integrative work that sees these ancient authors in conversation with one another, and keeps in mind the bigger picture of the region, politics, and conflicts. For early Christian studies more generally, I hope this book is a reminder of the significant role that these less familiar church leaders played, and the importance of keeping Syriac (and Coptic, etc.) materials visible even though they were not preserved in Latin or Greek and were thus omitted from many Western narratives about late antiquity. It’s also, I hope, an example about perspective – that is, of how different the story of these decades is when seen from different perspectives. The story from Constantinople is not the same as the story from Gaza, or northern Mesopotamia, or Antioch... and when we tell the story of these conflicts through the writings of these miaphysite leaders, we see the history of this period in a new way and new regions and people come to the fore. 

For the larger questions, I hope that readers will see this study of late antiquity as also a case study for thinking about much larger questions that are still relevant today, such as relationships between violence and religion, the dynamics of claiming religious legitimacy, and the strategies by which a smaller group might successfully resist a more powerful opponent. I think we continue to see examples where knowing how these early stories turned out might help readers navigate new situations today. As such, this project is also part of much larger current conversations around whose history we tell. I started this project in 2016-17 thanks to an NEH Fellowship, but it was further shaped by conversations that took place in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. This analysis of early Christian conflicts has furthermore taken shape against the backdrop of ever more polarized U.S. political conversations, including an increasingly powerful insistence that certain interpretations of Christianity should define U.S. health care, laws, ethics, and more. At the moment there seems to be no shortage of examples for thinking about how this historical example might inform interventions in the intersections of religious devotion, polarization, and various forms of harm, but it’s my hope that this study might make visible some of the narrative strategies that support both resistance and devotion and therefore offer paths for reducing violent outcomes in the future.