Introduction
This paper is given at the 70th meeting of the Society, and although it is neither its 70th year nor its 70th anniversary, it still seemed appropriate to find a suitable scriptural precedent for this presidential lecture.Footnote 1 My ‘text’, therefore, is the letter that Jeremiah sends to the exiles in Babylon, in which he encourages them to shape an identity for themselves as a minority people by maintaining their pattern of productivity, social life and faithfulness for seventy years (Jer 29 (36)). This letter duly generated a rich trajectory of imitation in letters associated with Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch, while the number seventy itself also became the subject of exegesis and of reinterpretation (cf. Dan 9.2).Footnote 2
The theme of this paper is ‘the letter’. In recent years it has generally been the Gospel, or the plurality of Gospels, that have served as the primary focus in attempts to articulate and to answer some of the central questions regarding the first two centuries that demand critical attention: the dynamic tensions between the oral and the written; creative author and literary reworking; local and global; private and public; history and faith; context and continual re-reception; intention and interpretation; the path to an exclusive canon and the rediscovery of multiformity, and so on. It is certainly not the case that letters have been ignored, and there has been a new wave of reflection on the letter-form as an intrinsic part of Pauline theology and not just as the medium for it.Footnote 3 Indeed, New Testament scholars have made significant contributions to the more general study of letters in antiquity.Footnote 4 However, this paper will not focus on specific letters, nor on the standard prolegomena regarding the practicalities and categories of letter-writing, which have been well documented in works such as these, but on the role of the letter as a cultural symbol.
Through its history, from the ancient world to contemporary reinventions in email and social media, letter-writing has served as a significant cultural symbol in two distinct ways: it has acted, first, as a symbol of how a variety of relationships within society are structured and managed; and secondly, as a symbol of more general practices and understandings of writing and of reception. Like any effective symbol, letter-writing has also embodied and furthered these practices. Alongside so-called ‘real’ letters, the widespread practice of using letters within or as a form of ‘fictional narrative’ similarly betrays the significance of their cultural associations.Footnote 5 It is not surprising, then, that at particular points, the letter can also be a powerful symbol of the emergence of new patterns of relationship, and of new practices, emerging within an established framework.
Early Christianity has been seen as characterised in particular by its literary creativity and productivity, although this creativity has to be set within the social and literary inventiveness of the contemporary Greco-Roman and perhaps also Jewish contexts. The letter exemplifies this in particular: more, one might suggest, than does the Gospel, the letter gives expression to and it helps bring about the way of being, or of perception, the symbolic universe, the Weltanschauung, the habitus, the identity – chose whichever model most appeals to you – that for convenience we may refer to as ‘early Christianity’. There is good historical justification for this claim; the earliest Christian document is a letter, arguably 1 Thessalonians, and the formation of a collection of Pauline letters, whatever that first collection or collections may have contained, perhaps helped to provoke imitation both by those claiming the Pauline name and by others appealing to alternative apostolic authority.Footnote 6 It has been proposed that the codex was adopted because of its usefulness for such an epistolary collection, and it is also arguable that it was the very notion of collection that formed the nucleus of an ever-expanding apostolic (or ‘canonical’) witness.Footnote 7 From the third century, letters between bishops became essential mechanisms in the negotiation of authority and patterns of allegiance, while in the fourth and fifth centuries letter-writing reached a high point among Christian leaders.Footnote 8 Even then, however different their voluminous and lengthy correspondence may look, some still saw themselves as heirs of Paul, at the same time as modelling themselves on Cicero or Pliny: Ambrose both alludes to and cites Paul (absens erat corpore, sed praesens spiritu), even while describing the letter in terms of the classical tropes, and perhaps arranging them for publication following earlier classical models (Epist. 37).Footnote 9
However, it is not the historical trajectory but the letter as symbol that is our main concern here. This paper will engage in a conversation between epistolary theory in antiquity and the contours of what has just been abbreviated as ‘early Christianity’. This is, then, itself an exercise in theory, an abstraction painted in broad brush-strokes, although rooted in actual epistolary rhetoric and inviting further application.
Of the various social models for conceptualising ‘early Christianity’ mentioned above, that of symbolic universe is most pertinent here, because it is a spatial metaphor – this is the ‘topography’ of the title. Letters instantiate space; they lay claim to space and they shape it; they provide fixed points, boundaries for space; they seek to control it. In what follows three of the cardinal principles of epistolary theory, each of which is ultimately spatial in character, will provide a template against which to explore how early Christian letters exploit those principles in the construction of a new way of ordering experience and reality. These ‘spaces’ are as much metaphorical as they are locational, if not more so, and therefore, inevitably, they overlap each other.
1. Absent as if Present: Geographical Distance
‘A kind of written conversation from one who is absent to one who is absent … one will speak in it as if present to one who is present’ (Ps.-Libanius, Epist. Charact. 2).Footnote 10
Nearly everything else that is to be said about letters – not only in the ancient world – follows from their role as an attempt to overcome physical distance. The trope ‘as if present’ is a familiar and widespread one. ‘As if’ works in two opposing directions, for if the letter seeks to make writer and recipient present to each other, it also acts as a reminder of the actual fact of absence and in this way reinforces the experience of that absence. The use Paul makes of this theme has been much studied, together with its counterpart, the so-called ‘Apostolic Parousia’.Footnote 11 So too has been the response of the recipients of his letters: ‘His letters are weighty and forceful, his physical presence weak and his speech insignificant …’ (2 Cor 10.10–11).Footnote 12
This might suggest, then, that absence and presence to some extent can be mapped on to the written and the spoken; yet immediately, any potential opposition between these modes is illusory, for the letter was intended to be read out – the greeting recalling the ‘Thus says’ spoken by the messenger – and so it favoured a more colloquial style.Footnote 13 The letter moves from the oral to the written, and back to the oral, and hence it serves as a paradigm of the movement of texts more generally, particularly in this period. Even so, the words that are spoken and heard face to face are more quickly lost, although they are also more quickly explained. Conversely, as Paul's troubled relations with Corinth again display, writing may appear to be fixed, but the letter-writer loses control of what s/he has written, letting it fall prey to misunderstanding, no longer able to nuance and to re-explain, except by the interchange of yet more letters. Geographical distance, then, makes the recipient(s) an integral element in the production of the letter as well as in its interpretation. An elision between distance in space and distance in time is already evident in Ephesians and it becomes fundamental in the future reception of all letters.Footnote 14 This is in part why subsequent generations, who are separated also by the distance of time, can read letters in a way that they could not join a face-to-face conversation. It follows that the necessary role of the reader is hermeneutically implicit in the epistolary genre.
Letters mark the space between sender and recipient, and in one sense they also fill that space. This is true both physically and in the imagination. In practical terms, ancient letters relied not on an impersonal, and to that extent invisible, postal service, but on friends, contacts, servants, dependants, acquaintances, travelling, perhaps, along any number of circuitous routes. Addressed to friends, clients, patrons, colleagues, intimates, letters replicated existing networks of relationships between people, and they served to reinforce those networks. Although anchored in the specific context from which they were sent, the letters of Cicero or of Pliny fill the space of the Republic and early Empire with a web of contacts, influence, shared concerns and values, as well as of political manoeuvring or resistance. Such networks could be extended by letters, with the absent author acting as broker, whether between those who would physically meet or between those who would join ‘the community of the absent’: ‘Aulus Trebonius … is confident that by these letters of mine he will become favoured by you’ (Cicero, Ad fam. 1.3); ‘Mark, my son … greets you’ (1 Pet 5.13); ‘hold Irenaeus in esteem’ (Eusebius, HE 5.4.2). At the same time, imperial letters and mandates conveyed the power of the centre, exercised through delegates, over distant provinces marking out the extent of the Empire, setting boundaries or even expanding its sphere of influence. Although much outnumbered by the Greek and Latin traditions, and easily overshadowed by them, letters radiated out to or between at least some of the scattered communities of the Jewish Diaspora, in actual practice but also in the literary imagination, as for example the Jeremiah-Baruch corpus with which this paper started.Footnote 15 In each of these cases letters do not simply bear witness to and reinforce a network; they provide the network with a defining narrative, perhaps offering a challenge to alternative narratives: Cicero's letters present him as a man always able to call on powerful friends to help others; Pliny carefully constructs his relationship with Trajan as one of friendship;Footnote 16 Jeremiah lays down a challenge to Shemaiah's alternative ‘unsanctioned’ missive (Jer 29.24–32); 2 Corinthians offers a composite account of Paul's negotiations with the church; Polycrates sets out a rival narrative of eucharistic practice to that asserted by Victor of Rome (Eusebius, HE 5.24.1–8).
It would be easy to multiply parallels among Christian letters to all of this. When ‘Peter’, ‘through Silvanus’, writes to the elect of the diaspora of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia (1 Pet 1.1; 5.12), they are being constructed not as a haphazard collection of disconnected units, aliens in relation to each other, but as a unified colonised space with its own boundaries – to internal eyes if not to those of outsiders. Ancient readers would not have studied this list of place names with a map at hand, as do modern scholars when attempting to reconstruct a messenger's journey, but as a litany of interconnected regions that dwarfed their own experience. The authors of what our text editions call ‘the Martyrdom of Polycarp’ exploit this further: ‘the Church of God sojourning at Smyrna to the Church of God sojourning in Philomelium and to all the sojournings of the holy (catholic) church in every place’ (Mart.Poly. Praef.; cf. Eusebius, HE 4.15.3).
The letters of Ignatius in particular illustrate this conquest of alien space, or perhaps its redefinition. Through the letters, in deep irony, we observe how Ignatius, a prisoner of the Roman Empire, forced to travel through Asia Minor and Greece en route to Rome, claims for himself the space through which he travels, turning his frog-march into a triumphal, quasi-religious, procession, marking particular points and reaching a climax in the capital city; but then, subversively, he writes to the church there, ‘neither the corners of the universe nor the kingdoms of this age are of any benefit to me’ (Ignatius, Rom. 6.1).Footnote 17 Through his letters Ignatius welcomes delegates and urges the sending of others; in so doing he recreates these delegates as forms of letters themselves, in whom he sees, ‘as if’ present, the absent communities to whom he writes: ‘For I have received and have with me the embodiment of your love in your bishop’ (Trall. 3.2). It is difficult to read the letters of Ignatius other than as a collection; despite their individual characteristics, it is when they are read together that these letters redefine the space on to which they are mapped.Footnote 18 It is for this reason that it is so difficult finally to determine the ‘authenticity’ of the letters, and also their relationship to a Syrian Christian by the name of Ignatius.Footnote 19 This was an age when Collections of Letters became a genre in its own right, with its own potential for experimentation and manipulation.Footnote 20 Any such Collection, by definition, dissolves the bond between the individual letter and the specific places inhabited by the author and by the recipients, and in this way creates the possibility of reading them collectively as a narrative, whether as a narrative of external events or as one of the author's or the recipient's personal journey.Footnote 21
Ignatius self-consciously writes in ‘apostolic manner’ (ἐν ἀποστολικῷ χαρακτῆρι, Trall. Praef.) – an allusion to the concept of an ‘apostolic letter’ but also perhaps to the idea of Collection. Thus he invites us to envisage how those who received a Pauline collection might also reimagine through it a connected world, populated by witnesses to the Gospel, bound to each other: an imagined textual community.Footnote 22 Uncertainties regarding the earliest ordering of the Pauline letters, in particular the place of Romans, and additions or alterations at the textual level (Rom 15–16; 1 Cor 1.2; Eph 1.1), hint at such reimaginings. Yet these imagined communities could take different forms, as they already did in the second century: Marcion's interconnected reading discovers the Gospel and its faithful interpreters under continual threat from the forces of the Demiurge, ‘the God of this world’; for the so-called ‘Marcionite’ Prologues, if they originated as a single Preface, carefully differentiated, locally defined, peoples are recalled to the true faith against the threat of infiltrators – ‘the Galatians are Greeks … the Corinthians are Achaeans’; by contrast, in the Muratorian Canon Paul's address to seven churches echoes the Apocalyptist ‘writing to seven but speaking to all’ (10b.23–7).Footnote 23
Looking forward, our own view of the connectedness and the spread of Christianity in the second century ce is the consequence of the impression that Eusebius creates, and that he consciously intended, in his repeated appeal to letters sent between individuals and communities in the period.Footnote 24 The claim of the anonymous author of the Letter to Diognetus, that ‘Christians are spread throughout the cities of the world’ (Diog. 6.4), might not have been justified by any census figures, but it was surely true when it comes to the epistolary imagination.
2. Half a Conversation: Social Space
‘Artemas, who drew up the letters of Aristotle, says that one should write a letter in the same manner as a dialogue. “For the letter is like one side of a dialogue”’ (Demetrius, De eloc. 223).Footnote 25
We may well be bemused by the letter sent by Octavian: ‘The all-powerful Caesar, son of the divine Julius, to the magistrates, council, and people of Ephesus, greetings. If you are well it is good; I myself am well along with the army …’ (SEG xxxii.1128).Footnote 26 There are, of course, many documents usually classified as letters that drop these conventional marks of personal relations – the greeting, the health wish, closing farewells. But it was taken for granted that the letter should not be an exercise in oratorical declamation by a self-indulgent rhetor or literary stylist.Footnote 27 Demetrius qualifies the ‘half a conversation’ only by admitting there is an element of careful preparation to a letter because it is ‘sent as a sort of gift’ (De eloc. 224). The letter was built around a relationship, replying to something already initiated or anticipating some response, in writing or in action. As appears most effectively in letters of friendship, the letter sustains and reproduces that relationship: friendship and gifts convey or stimulate reciprocal obligations. Sometimes the other half of the conversation may survive, as in the fictional 3 Corinthians;Footnote 28 on occasion we may think we can reconstruct it, as in that letter's more Pauline predecessors; more often the reader is left to complete the dialogue with their own imaginative, but easily misled, response.
The personal character of the relationship established by a letter is enshrined by the repeated ‘I’ (or ‘we’), who variously encourages, appeals to, comforts, makes requests of, the silent ‘you’. Again, there is an irony here; the letter presupposes and reinforces the separate identities and roles of ‘I’ and ‘you’, but it also seeks to overcome them, to bring them into linguistic proximity, to create a shared space: ‘I never receive one of your letters without us immediately being one’ (Seneca, Epist. 40). At the beginning of 1 John, ‘we write to you’ (1 John 1.4), but by its end ‘we’ share a voice: ‘we have known’ (1 John 5.18–20).Footnote 29 Yet not all letters succeeded in this merging of identity, or even wanted to: letters can use distance to preserve independence and private space; the degree to which it was appropriate in a letter to utter rebuke or criticism that could not be said face to face was, and is, a matter of debate, as is already negotiated by Paul and decisively developed by Augustine.Footnote 30
Thus letters create a distinctive social sphere, with its own internal conventions, its own sets of relationships, its own language of relationality. They provide a space within which community beyond the immediate spatial constraints can be explored and imagined. Despite the later – perhaps early in some areas – high value given in early Christian thought to an ascetic ‘being solitary’, letters establish Christian existence as one that is held pre-eminently in relationship with others – as indeed later letters written by the monks themselves also demonstrate.Footnote 31
In this light it is striking that the classic greeting formula is set in the third person, and so treats both the author and the recipient on the same plane: ‘Caesar … to the people of Ephesus’; ‘The Elder to the beloved Gaius’ (3 John 1).Footnote 32 This may serve as a reminder that the ‘you’ is never the ‘real you’, but is one who, or which, is imagined and is shaped by the letter, whether explicitly so – ‘O foolish Galatians’, ‘called to be saints’ – or, in a more subtle but totalitarian way, Seneca's (probably invented) Lucilius.Footnote 33 Without further correspondence there can be no way of knowing how the recipients responded to the role or the character they had been assigned; unless perhaps the survival of the letter indicates a degree of acquiescence. But this is not just to acknowledge the dangers of mirror reading or to justify straining to catch the alternative voices of the widows chastised in 1 Timothy or of the Corinthian community; it is to recognise that letters always project the recipients as they are perceived or idealised by the author.
The same is also true of the author, who is equally given a role denoted by the third person. The self-conscious young person who writes for the first time a love letter has to construct herself or himself as a fluent, passionate lover, finding a voice that would never come naturally in any unmasked face-to-face encounter.Footnote 34 So, too, the letter writer creates for herself a persona: Paul, whose letters were powerful, acquires a different voice from that he would use in other settings. (Where would we be if it had been the other way around?) The confident ‘Paul, apostle’ needs no self-defence, even if he elaborately justifies this. But, it should be remembered, the contrast with the ‘weak in presence’ (see above) is itself part of the overarching self-presentation of the letter-writing Paul. Similarly, Ignatius styles himself ‘God-bearer’ (ὁ καὶ θεοφόρος) even while denying that he ‘was someone’ (Eph. Praef.; 3.1), producing a mask behind which only the imagination can peek; already, Eusebius knew of no Ignatius but the ‘I’ of the letters (HE 3.36), and it is a mistake to introduce Ignatius independently of and prior to his letters.Footnote 35
Narrative-critical analysis of implied authors and implied audiences may have something to offer (more perhaps than they do to Gospel-analysis) in understanding the writing and reading strategies involved here. But we do not have to appeal only to a contemporary methodology. The leading value of letters in rhetorical education was as an exercise in prosopopoiea (or ethopoiea).Footnote 36 This then becomes exemplified in pseudonymous fictionalised letters which self-consciously adopt a fabricated voice, whether of a renowned figure of the past, in the pseudonymous letters of Plato or Apollonius of Tyana, or of some more fantasy-ful role in the present, in those of fishermen or prostitutes.Footnote 37 Yet such an exercise was only possible because there is an element of ‘creating a persona’, of prosopopoiea, in all letter-writing.
This element of construction, if not of fictionality, which is a feature of all letters is all the more obvious when it comes to pseudonymous letters, whether or not overt. Here, too, the actual recipients or first readers of such letters in some sense surely had to collude with the fiction, whether knowingly or not; although fully aware that they were not the epistolary audience, in many cases perhaps not in the epistolary location, they nonetheless presumably read the letter without embarrassment. This act of ‘overhearing’ or of ‘reading over the shoulder’ again is only a specific case of what is potential for all letters. Already as a child I was taught that it was taboo to read other people's letters; however, that is largely a modern constraint, which, particularly in an age of mistyped addresses and of the disclaimer at the foot (and not the heading) of emails, we are learning to treat with appropriate scepticism. A common literary device in the novels even of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (at least in English) is when a letter goes astray or falls into the wrong hands, while the anxious lover looks hastily at the plate of letters on the hallway table, hoping to remove secretly the eagerly awaited missive before someone else sees it and claims the right to hear its contents. The same is true in the ancient world; here, too, letters embedded in the story, and their misadventures, play a crucial role in novels: Chaireas writes to Callirhoe assuring her that he is alive, but through the perfidy of the slaves to whom it is entrusted the letter falls into the hands of his rival Dionysius with devastating effect (Chariton, Chaireas 4.4–5).Footnote 38 Everyone knew, as indeed until recent times, that letters were bound to be read by other people; they might be read by the letter carrier, or by someone into whose hands they fell by mistake; they might be intentionally read aloud in the company of family, friends or servants, or shared with those who were explicitly sent closing greetings; they might be discussed with other acquaintances – whether by the sender or by the recipient, intended or not.Footnote 39 The line should not be drawn too firmly separating private or personal from public; at the same time the extended audience is not an indiscriminate one (at least not in intention) but is contained and controlled, perhaps explicitly so, by the predefined, even if porous, boundaries of the constructed community of reception.
Again, to some extent this may serve as a model or microcosm for the hermeneutical moves that made it possible for much later readers who defined themselves as Christians to reread these letters; through them they were able to imagine themselves in multiple relationships with the earliest readers, but also with other contemporary readers, as sisters, brothers, heirs. Some simply appended their ‘Amens’ to the text, while other scribes more boldly added comments or prayers in their own names. Even the earliest commentators negotiated, as do modern scholars, the perplexities of ‘one who considers Paul's letters with more curiosity, as though Christ is speaking in him’ (Origen, Comm. in Rom. 10.39).
3. A Mirror of the Soul: Interior Space
‘One writes a letter almost as an image of one's own soul’ (Demetrius, De eloc. 227).Footnote 40
The convention that the letter revealed the person as she really was was merely an extension of the fundamental principle that all verbal self-expression reveals the character of the individual, their ethos: ‘Just as is someone's speech so is their life’ (talis hominibus fuit oratio qualis vita, Seneca, Epist. 114.1).Footnote 41 The framework of the personal relationship, and the consequent self-consciously relaxed style, made this supremely true of the letter: ‘I see you entirely in your letters’ (te totum vidi in tuis epistulis, Cicero, Ad fam. 16.16.2). Polycarp's letter allows one to learn ‘the model (χαρακτήρ) of his faith’ (Eusebius, HE 4.14.8). At first glance there is a contradiction between all that has been said above about the prosopopoieic nature of the letter and this convention of its self-revealing character. It is a contradiction that may find some resolution to the extent that the person or self is seen as ‘work in progress’. Michel Foucault made good use of letters in his argument that in the early Empire there was a turn to the self and to a concern with self-fashioning; numerous studies have followed of how Pliny or Seneca ‘fashion’ themselves not only through their letters, but also through the collection and the publication of these.Footnote 42
Recent scholarly analysis of ‘the individual’ or of ‘the self’ in the thought of this period, and particularly within religious thought and practice, still struggles to articulate the implications of the philosophical encouragement to attend to oneself without viewing it through the lens of a post-Enlightenment self-interrogation by ‘I’.Footnote 43 ‘Retreat into yourself as far as you are able’ (recede in te quantum potes, Seneca, Epist. 7.8). Here, perhaps, the letter-framework of intimacy-in-relationship is instructive: the letter provided an appropriate context for self-reflection while at the same time encouraging someone else to do the same, in dialogue, regardless of whether or not that dialogue is fictional.Footnote 44 Although Galen's recently discovered work On Avoiding Distress deals with themes common in moral philosophical treatises, its explicit introduction as a letter in response to an epistolary request as to ‘what training, arguments or doctrines prepared me never to be distressed’ provides a natural framework for its deeply autobiographical yet consciously exemplary character.Footnote 45 The Martyrdom of Polycarp similarly represents itself as a response to a request for information from those addressed but assumes they will learn from it and share in glorifying God (Mart.Poly. 20).Footnote 46 Seneca, the arch-exponent of such a genre, says to Lucilius, ‘You are my work’ (Epist. 34.2), and he would have many Christian successors for whom the letter articulated the dual demand for pastoral responsibility towards others and personal obligation for oneself. Like Paul, Dionysius of Corinth feeds communities or individuals with ‘nourishing food’ by letter (Eusebius, HE 4.23; 1 Cor 3.1). The solitary, reflective or idiosyncratic dimensions, on the one hand, and the relational ones, on the other, of such processes are not easily untwined. At the same time, the rhetoric and vocabulary adopted to create intimacy may leave us uncomfortable, and serve as a reminder that any construction or expression of intimacy, and particularly of epistolary intimacy, is culturally specific: Marcus Aurelius writes to Fronto, ‘Should I not burn with love for you, who have written to me as you have’, and modern scholars speculate about the nature of that love.Footnote 47
A letter was also the appropriate medium for expressing grief or distress, both personal and when sending condolences to another, even, perhaps especially, where such emotions seemed to be in tension with the philosophical ideals of self-control.Footnote 48 The intimacy that made this possible could be signalled within the letter by the epithets used in address, by the adoption of more colloquial language, or by other forms of code-switching. More mundanely, letters often anticipate or provoke express emotional responses. To some extent it is the very fact of distance presupposed by the letter that makes intimacy or the personal in such conditions possible, where face-to face contacts would be culturally more difficult to negotiate; in turn awareness of this fact intensifies the emotional affect of the letter as it is read. Readers are enabled to internalise the experiences articulated in and negotiated by the letter, particularly as they repeatedly rehear or reread it. As new readers encounter the letter(s), they too become intimates. Because it took the form of a letter, those who received the account of the persecution at Lugdunum and Vienne, both initially and subsequently, were offered little choice but to accept the ‘gift’ of the perception of those who sent it, and to share the grief, anxiety and hope at the unfolding of suffering and faithful resilience, not least because as addressees they are described as ‘brethren sharing the same faith and hope of redemption as us’ (Eusebius, HE 5.1.1–2.8). A scribe who copied the letter known as ‘the Martyrdom of Polycarp’ adds his own express (‘I, Pionius’) hope that as a result of these labours Christ might gather him too with his elect (i.e. the martyrs) into the heavenly Kingdom, while the closing ‘Amen’, and perhaps the doxology, was probably added by subsequent readers to signal their participation in that hope (Mart.Poly. 22.3).
Yet these are but extensions of what Paul endeavours to achieve when he asserts that the Philippian believers do indeed ‘have the same contest as you saw in me, and now hear in me’, and as he piles up affective adjectives (ἀδελφοί μου ἀγαπητοὶ καὶ ἐπιπόθητοι … ἀγαπητοί) urging them to imitate him and to stand firm (Phil 1.30; 3.17–4.1).Footnote 49 In letters, an author can explore the direction of the will and the exercise of the emotions through an appeal to personal experience as well as through the example of others. This is even more the case if conventional attitudes are being challenged, and if emotional norms or networks are being redefined.
When Galen grudgingly commends the contempt for death shown by Christians and their pursuit of virtue but decries their failure to rely on reason in so doing,Footnote 50 perhaps he indirectly bears witness to the transformation of what here has been called ‘interior space’, most effectively through letters.
Conclusion
It should be clear that it is not being argued here that all early Christian letters achieve these goals, nor even that any particular letter achieves them all, nor that letters alone achieved them. Moreover, in none of this can one claim any form of uniqueness for early Christianity or for its letters.Footnote 51 More than a century of research has shown that while the question of what are the most appropriate points for comparison may be debated, Christians did write letters in much the same ways as everyone else did.Footnote 52 Yet it is also true that the usefulness of letters was such that it was no accident that under the Christian pen the art was to achieve such a zenith in later centuries. Here they were indeed building on the potentials established in the earliest Christian centuries.
We have started with epistolary theory, and the exercise and its findings therefore might sound like yet another isolation of literary strategies – textual constructs – independent of social practice. This has indeed been the danger of some recent explorations of early Christian identity-making, as a consequence of their proper emphasis that textual rhetoric cannot be taken as straightforwardly descriptive of social actuality. But letters offer a framework for exploring how the textual and the social intersect. Letters are to do with performance; they are to do with ritual. Think of the etiquette of the ‘thank you’ letter, no doubt different in Amsterdam than in Sydney or Heidelberg or Chicago – or in ancient Rome – the note of condolence, the careful language of invitation – all of which ritualise relationships.Footnote 53 This was certainly the case in the ancient world, in the practices of writing, sending, receiving, responding. It is here that what may sound like timeless truisms as discussed in this paper – distance, relationality, intimacy – in fact are articulated in highly distinctive ways in different cultural contexts; they are, as I have tried to show, cultural strategies. Such practices also remind us of the materiality of the letter. Demetrius' description of the letter as a gift removes it from the purely intellectual sphere; letters often accompanied or solicited gifts, whether of goods or of benefits, an expectation Seneca parodies as he adds the gift of a wise saying to his initial letters to Lucilius. Writing, carrying, sending, recording, reading, copying, preserving, collecting, ordering, all involved material cultural practices. These bring us further into the world shared by a broader spectrum of society than that inhabited only by those who had the skills or means to write. All of this is not, of course, only true of letters – once again the letter acts as a cultural symbol for considering other socially defined practices of writing and reception.
Yet the materiality of letters also has its own intrinsic power, perhaps lost with the modern email, and in no way diminished by the oral tasks of the letter-carrier or messenger. Seneca prefers a letter to a picture because it offers ‘the hand of a friend impressed’ on it (Epist. 40.1). Just like a bundle of love-letters tied with a ribbon, the letter almost embodies the affective dimensions of its contents, even beyond those whom it initially bound together. The letter quoted earlier from Octavian to Ephesus was inscribed some 200 or 300 years later on the walls of the city of Aphrodisias, which had hoped through it to recover stolen loot.Footnote 54 It is possible even now at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to stand under the protection of the correspondence between Abgar and Jesus inscribed on the underside of a door jamb from Ephesus, impossible to read without straining neck and eyes (I.Eph. 46).Footnote 55 That fictional exchange of letters was over the centuries one of the most popular Christian texts after the Gospels, and it was its physical reproduction that was treasured.
Not all letters can boast quite as many readers as those the Abgar correspondence has had. Yet fundamental to all that has been explored here is that the effective power of the letter lies in its insistent address to, its creation of a conversation with, its invitation into multiple relationships to, one reader, at least, and, most of all, in the expectation of response, and hence in its ‘conjuring up’ of a continuing community. It is as a consequence of this effective power that, even while drawing on and replicating long-established conventions, letters provided a natural medium for the new discursive practices that were to create the Christian world, and so enable us to explore the contours of that world. More broadly, letters exemplify how Christians were part of contemporary society and yet at the same time shaped an alternative reality through what were shared resources.Footnote 56
