This book is about the Christian perception of holy spaces in late-antique North Africa. The volume is divided into two parts: the first (Chapters 1 and 2) presents the theoretical structure and the evidence, most of it literary, highlighting Christian attitudes towards physical space and how it interacted with the divine. The second part comprises specific studies of African Christian relationships with space: a history of the Catholic-Donatist struggle over church ownership (Chapter 3); Christian attempts to apply the same kind of pressure seen in Christian sectarian conflict to pagan temples, and the times when pagans fought back (Chapter 4); and a short fifth chapter on how these same tactics were again applied by Christians to Jewish places of worship in North Africa.
Churches constitute the primary focus. Evidence from North Africa reveals variation in Christian attitudes towards churches, but L. argues that, beginning in the third and fourth centuries, Christians invested their churches with more potency. They became ‘charged with cosmic meaning’ and ‘super-symbols’ (p. 118). Increased valuation made them susceptible to the push and pull we see in the Catholic-Donatist dispute: attacks, take-overs, confiscations and ritualised cleansing. This is interesting, as is the analysis of shifts in language that underscore the importance of physical place. For example: on markers commemorating Christian dead, memoriae, the dative form ‘to the memory (of someone)’, changed to the nominative memoria, as if the marker constituted the memory itself. That is tangible, philological evidence that space and what it symbolised were growing closer. When it came to space, L. implies, the thing and what it represented appeared to be merging.
Again, that is interesting, but this book's potential contribution is compromised by several problems, some structural, others evidentiary. The first part establishes a basis for understanding the historical evidence presented in the second part, but a thick layering of theoretical preliminaries confuses more than clarifies. The second section lacks discipline in pausing on extraneous matters amply covered in B. Shaw's book, Sacred Violence (2011), such as a re-telling of how the Catholic-Donatist split occurred and other events of legal and relational import. Re-presentation is secondary to L.’s more interesting meditations on how Christian understanding of space changed over time.
One may argue that in-depth discussion of the imperial court's participation, to take one example, is necessary to prove how important church buildings became to African Christians. Point taken. The problem is that the forced trajectory of the narrative results in partial treatment of historical events, imperial involvement in property issues being one such example. The book argues that imperial confiscation of churches was about worship space exclusively, implying that emperors issued orders for their symbolic power alone. That is a valid, but incomplete, argument. Emperors, such as Constantine, took things away from Christian groups they did not like because they did not want to finance them (cf. p. 125). Whatever accompanying symbolism may have come with imperial cut-off and confiscation, it is a result, not the force behind, the more important issue of money.
L. is right in saying that the confiscation of church buildings is a rhetorical focus of sectarian conflict. Basilicas are highly visible, and symbolic weight may be assigned to that fact, but Christian writers were sensitive about fiscal matters and were wary of appearing grasping. There is nothing morally questionable about expressing outrage over the loss of a basilica, but it starts getting sticky when lamenting damage to church profits, such as may happen when writing about confiscations of church-owned country estates. Imperial confiscation of church property was about the loss of church buildings, but also about cutting off imperial monies that paid clerical salaries, the confiscation of villas owned by the churches, church farmland and slaves. Hurt them in the pocketbook, wound without making martyrs: it is a well-tried and pragmatic solution that this book completely ignores in favour of an exclusively symbolic message (cf. p. 127).
The book argues that meaning given to space depends on the position of the beholder. Underscoring the differences between participants and onlookers (insiders and outsiders) is productive, but this theoretical approach tends to flatten spatial and historical nuances. For example, if the fundamental distinction made about space is the inside/outside role of the beholder, where do those boundaries actually begin and end? L.’s book draws them boldly, but in doing so, omits the space in between where much of the action occurred. The different spatial privileges of the baptised versus catechumens is brought up only twice, the first time not until page 181. The drama of the excommunicated, whose voyage back to re-incorporation included standing outside churches and requesting those entering to pray for them, receives no mention at all. And what about the pasting of signs, transcripts of conferences and religious songs on external church walls? Was that not a kind of spatial extension into public areas? And what does it mean that a congregation could sometimes hear the chants of a rival church from down the street?
Much of the evidence regarding Christian perception of space is from authors writing prior to imperial recognition as well as the Donatist-Catholic split. Others, like Optatus and Augustine, came after. Over this chronological span, Christians went from meeting in private houses to gathering in public buildings, some of the latter grand, imperially built basilicas. This should be taken into account. The multi-purpose nature of a house church, also serving as a private dwelling, must have had some effect on symbolic power. Would not a building as the occasional locus of divine communion make a difference in perception?
These are questions of a historical and material nature. Space as representation and symbol is another matter. As already stated, L. argues for physical entities moving from representing the holy to being holy themselves. Key to making the argument stick is a sustained look at the imaginative and metaphysical landscape shaped by and imposed on space. Memory and collective celebration of events are discussed in this book, but not to the extent they should be. Christian (p. 83) and Jewish meditations (p. 219) on the relationship between holy space and text are virtually ignored, save for the citations just given. That omission makes no sense to me. Scripture was a portal of sorts to holy space. Those listening to the gospels during services travelled geographically in the mind to different places. One also heard about the geographies of heaven and hell, and in a capable preacher's hands, plumbed layer after layer of the text, which was understood to have spatial depth. Finally, the geographical spaces where martyrs died, as recorded in texts, were brought inside churches and there passion narratives were read aloud. The mind was led outside the walls while all of God's creation was brought inside to this one space. A dialogue between the spatial and textual with demonstration of the conversation's effects on participants would have enriched L.’s claims as to how church spaces came to possess such palpable force.
In arguing for a pronounced fusion of tangible space and its symbolic power, L. suggests this development may be the only way to explain how people, then and now, can value a building more than others’ lives and the peaceful message ostensibly preached by that religion itself (pp. 240–3). The conclusion mentions the destruction of a number of holy sites in modern sectarian conflict, and, oddly, explains the human impetus for coercion and violence in spatial contexts as a distinctly religious phenomenon. The conclusion that the mixture of religion and potent physical space results in nothing good is overreaching. The violence and coercion documented in this book are real, but for religious tension to ignite violence was actually unusual. The most convincing argument for sustained, systematic architectural dispossession of a Christian group would be the 411 conference, but even in this state-backed programme of confiscation of Donatist property, the number of violent incidents accompanying the transfer was small, and there are a number of dioceses where confiscation never happened. Violence's interaction with space and special meaning demand scrutiny, of course, but this book tries to make the unusual typical and the exception the rule. Symbolic value may be able to explain, in part, confiscation and displacement, but violent acts are not a necessary or predictable outcome of a religious entity, spatial or physical, having attained symbolic potency.
