This book by Robert Wiśniewski explores Christian practices of divination as they developed across the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity. The title is worth unpacking. The term “divination” refers to the inquiries into the hidden future, present, and past. The adjective “Christian” implies specifically Christian or at least Christianized divinatory methods used by “good Christians” who (1) were seriously concerned about their salvation and shunned the traditional Greco-Roman divinatory practices as the work of demons and (2) who looked for the methods that would be effective and acceptable in religious terms and would not receive severe reproaches from the Church. This sets very important boundaries, as discussed below.
Wiśniewski states that “the main question which this book aims to answer is what did late antique Christians do when they wanted to gain the kind of hidden knowledge that their non-Christian contemporaries gained using traditional Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Celtic and other divinatory practices” (11). The author analyzes a wide range of literary, legal, and material sources, including the theological treatises, homilies, polemical, and historical compositions of Christian literati, hagiography, papyrological evidence (oracular tickets, miniature codices, amulets), manuscripts containing signs of divinatory practices, archeological remains, and material objects (dices, casting lots, knucklebones, oracular steles).
The book is meant to fill the gap in current scholarship between fundamental but outdated opus magnum on divinatory practices in Antiquity (Bouché-Leclerq, Histoire de la divination dans l’Antiquité [Paris, 1879–1888]), the studies of Ancient Greek divination—William Halliday's Greek Divination: A Study on its Methods and Principles (London, 1913) and Sarah Iles Johnston's Ancient Greek Divination (Oxford, 2008)—which focus on the periods before Late Antiquity, various collections of conference papers, which explore ancient divination within the framework of social and cultural history but often present a diverse array of case studies with limited opportunities for generalizations (Vernant, Divination et rationalité [Paris, 1974]; Smadja and Geny, Pouvoir, divination, prédestination dans le monde antique [Paris, 1999]; Ciraolo and Siedel, Magic and Divination in the Ancient World [Leiden, 2004]; Struck and Johnston, Mantikê: Studies in Ancient Divination [Leiden, 2005]; Luijendijk and Klingshirn, My Lots are in Thy Hands: Sortilege and Its Practitioners in Late Antiquity [Leiden, 2019]), and works that analyze individual divinatory methods. The archeological discoveries in recent decades, newly identified divinatory texts, and the need for a comprehensive study of late antique Christian divination necessitated the appearance of this book.
Following the lists of abbreviations and illustrations, there are the Introduction, seven chapters, Conclusion, Bibliography, and Index. Chapter 1 “Attitudes to Divination” examines what can be called the official perspective expressed by elite Christian writers and Church officials. Each following chapter focuses on a specific divinatory activity practiced by Christians: prophecy (chapter 2); the divinatory uses of the Bible (chapter 3); divination based on other texts intentionally created as divinatory tools (chapter 4); divinatory practices linked to specific sanctuaries and relics (chapter 5); interrogations of demoniacs (chapter 6); and incubation (chapter 7).
The greatest strength of the book—but also its weakness—lies in its scope: “this book is not aimed at presenting the whole spectrum of techniques used by Christians in Late Antiquity . . . The methods I am going to examine were specifically Christian, or at least noticeably Christianized” (19). The non-religious approaches used by Christians (numerology, physiognomy, and astrology) are left aside (19). While the author acknowledges that many Christians resorted to old “pagan” practices and that their patterns of behavior did not change dramatically with their new religion—“there is good evidence showing this, ranging from sermons and other literary texts to secular laws censuring those who sought the help of ‘pagan’ specialists” (12)—these practices and these people again remain out of the scope of the book.
My question is whether it is possible to separate “Christian divination” from “divination practiced by Christians” and to fix the blurring boundaries between hybrid practices of various stripes of Christians, non-Christians, and everyone in-between. I would dare to say that the “good Christians,” for whom divinatory practices not approved by the Church were an absolute “no-go” for reasons of their salvation, were statistically outnumbered by those Christians, especially from the sub-elite strata of Roman society who considered them acceptable (specifically in spheres like female fertility, procreation, miscarriages, childbirth, newborn, and infancy mortality—the underwater iceberg of everyday family life being virtually untouched by Church regulations). The book prioritizes practices that were not explicitly condemned by legal documents and elite Church writers. This creates a circular argument that allows access only to a refined version of the social reality in Late Antiquity. The author does an amazing job of reconstructing the social context of the divinatory practices, inquiring into individuals and groups resorting to divination (63–74, 146–154, 167–171), and asserting that any fictional narrative still reflects idealized perceptions of social practices (78, 89). And yet the analysis occasionally leads to one-sided conclusions—for example, that women were much less represented in divinatory activities than men (71, 151, 167). This seems to be very unlikely, especially given the traditional role of women in Mediterranean societies as supervising liminal states such as death and birth. This can be explained by the source selection, the position of the Church that often marginalized women when it came to accessing the sources of spiritual authority, and, eventually, by the very scope of the book limited to divination in “normative” Christianity.
Similarly, the conclusion that “except for prophecy, . . . there is no evidence whatsoever suggesting that Christian divination came into existence before the mid-fourth century” (249) is another consequence of the selective approach adopted in the book, which limits “divination in Late Antiquity” mostly to the practices attested in the fourth to sixth centuries. Then, the problem of connections between Christian and pagan divinatory practices: the author acknowledges parallels, sometimes very close ones, between Christian and non-Christian techniques, yet insists on the impossibility to demonstrate the continuity in many cases (83, 165, 204–223, 251–252). Yet the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, and the significance of the shared cultural milieu of the ancient Mediterranean should not be downplayed. Christians and pagans simply could not have remained unaware of each other's practices, and their longer coexistence likely led to more instances of cultural interference, especially on sub-elite levels.
Those, however, are caveats explicitly acknowledged by the author. Therefore, the book is a wonderful resource for the Christian divinatory practices that clerical authors, if not explicitly recommended, “neither were . . . so eager to condemn” (15).
