Scholarship on Christianity in late antiquity has seen tremendous growth in the last decade and this edited volume exemplifies the best fruits of that development. The book is the product of a three-day workshop of the same title held at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in June 2014 as part of an Israel Science Foundation grant directed by Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony (ISF 903/11). Collectively, the essays offer an introduction to the latest scholarly approaches to Christian prayer, worship, and liturgy in late antiquity. Individually, the chapters open new windows into specific practices, contexts, and sources that demand further inquiry. The book makes contributions both to scholarship on the intersection of Christian theology and practice and to our understanding of the interrelationship of the Christian communities of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East.
A focus on late ancient Christian prayer and liturgy is the organizing principle of the essays, nevertheless, the geographic orientation of the volume is also worth noting as exemplary.
The term “eastern Christianities” in the title does not fully capture its scope. The religious traditions examined here are not merely eastern Mediterranean in origin but also flourished largely East of Constantinople, as far as Mesopotamia (the book does not treat Central or East Asia). This is the swath of Christianity that once led Peter Brown to comment, “What we now call distinctively “European” Christianity was unthinkable in the year 500 AD.” Bitton-Ashkelony's essay traces one set of philosophical and theological roots of this world from Maximos of Tyre (second century) in the Roman Mediterranean to Isaac of Nineveh and John of Dalyatha (seventh and eighth centuries.) in Islamicate Mesopotamia. Columba Stewart and Jack Tannous take the same broad approach across the porous boundaries of the Syriac and Greek monastic and liturgical milieu. They note that Chalcedonian divisions did not prevent “cross-confessional appropriations” (161) of practices and texts between East Syrian, Syrian Orthodox, Maronite, and Greek communities. Essays by Leah Di Segni, Anne Marie Yasin, and Daniel Galadze similarly evoke a world of eastern Christianities (in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian) in which “Christian division did not simply mean Christian difference” (1). Accordingly, the plural “Christianties” in the book's title implies an emphasis on identifying both continuity and change across the linguistic, political, and ecclesiastical boundaries which marked the Christians of late antiquity.
The chapters examine trajectories of incremental development in Christian practice, devoting the most attention to “prayer.” Bitton-Ashkelony convincingly maps an intellectual genealogy in which a new Christian theory of prayer developed from Evagrius of Pontus (fourth century) to Isaac of Nineveh, portraying prayer as physical, mental and mystical engagement of the self and the divine. Sabino Chialà continues the same line of inquiry with a clear and detailed analysis of Isaac of Nineveh's three stages of prayer (“prayer,” “pure prayer,” and “non-prayer”). Although the final stage is a mystical experience beyond mental comprehension, Chialà observes that the “non-prayer” stage is firmly grounded in a praxis “in which the body plays a very important function” (41) through prostration and ascesis. Attention to physical contexts for prayer is found throughout the book. For example, Di Segni's chapter presents a valuable corpus of over one hundred twenty prayer inscriptions, largely from Roman Palestine and Arabia. Di Segni's argument that “many epigraphic expressions of prayer fulfill other functions than a purely devotional one” (82) could be nuanced more, but the evidence makes it clear one cannot separate the intercessory messages of the inscriptions from their other significations. Di Segni reveals how Christians could flexibly repurpose the words of scriptures to carry multiple meanings simultaneously. The same use of scripture is examined in Krueger's chapter on liturgical joy and Stewart's chapter on monastic psalmody. Stewart notes that “despite its central importance in their daily lives, early Christian ascetics tell us surprisingly little . . . of their experience praying the psalms” (44). To fill this lacuna, Stewart surveys six Syriac manuscript witnesses to the psalter preface used in Syriac and Greek monasticism from the seventh through twelfth centuries. This reviewer hopes that Stewart's chapter might inspire a book or dissertation.
Indeed, the evidence assembled across the book is ripe for further research (over one hundred manuscripts are cited in the index). It is impossible to summarize here each of the essays, any of which would be worthy of expansion. Yasin and Volker Menze examine church renovation and Eucharistic practice (and the lack thereof), respectively, to show how contexts for prayer evolved. Krueger, Sergey Minov, and Hillel Newman call attention to Christian and Jewish liturgical and textual contexts used to “demand and cultivate emotional responses” (144) ranging from joy, to curtailed grief, or apocalyptic awe.
Given the accomplishments of this book, it seems unfair to suggest improvements. The editors have achieved the rare distinction of producing a multi-author volume that remains intellectually coherent. One underdeveloped aspect is the contextualization of Christian prayer within the other religious traditions of late antiquity. Newman examines Jewish traditions and a few chapters evoke Greco-Roman philosophy or cultus, but at times the Christian context is so implicit as to leave the reader uncertain if the practices and evidence described were unique to Christians or widely shared. The book's rich findings suggest the value of a similar approach to prayer in Islam, Manichaeism, etc. Another latent strength of the book is the wealth of supporting data included as tables or appendices, such as the table of inscriptions with scriptural citations (70-79). Minov's chapter includes, as an appendix, an editio princeps of a Syriac text, Story of a Woman from Jerusalem, in two recensions with English translation (226-232). In the physical sciences, it is now standard for scholars to deposit online the data sets that underlie the findings in their publications. With the advent of the digital humanities, it is now possible for humanists to do the same thing through institutional repositories, research archives such as Zenodo, or field specific collections such as the recently released Digital Syriac Corpus. Because the printed volume is priced at a level unavailable to most scholars and even some libraries, it would provide a valuable service to future research if the authors or the publisher could make the data tables and edition available online with open access licenses.
