Christians, and most likely Jews, increasingly came to view their places of worship and burial as holy over the course of the third and fourth centuries, as demonstrated by the literary and material evidence reviewed in the previous four chapters. Use of the term sacra or sancta in connection with their community’s buildings, their inscriptions, or their memorials, demonstrates a growing identification of holiness with tangible objects, most notably sites. Generation after generation, leaders and worshippers imbued these sites with layers of symbolic meaning, so that they became “super-symbols,” charged with power that was not only significant to their users, but discernible to outside observers as well. With this increased valuation of space, or localization of religious identification, competition over holy sites in late antique North Africa emerged first among Christians, then between Christians and non-Christians, namely Roman traditionalists and Jews. The strategy of localization employed was two-pronged, consisting of both the rhetorical technique of spatial supersessionism and the physical tool of architectural dispossession.
As so-called Catholics sought to distinguish themselves from other Christian groups, and those dissident groups carved out their character in opposition to Catholics, sacred space served as both a literal and symbolic arena in which to perform conflict and display shifting identifications. The idea of using space to distinguish between different groups with conflicting religious commitments had already been employed by Tertullian in the second century to delineate various “pagan” places for Christians to avoid. This imaginal map continued to inform how Christians perceived their lived environment. As Christians began building their own monumental structures, whether martyria or basilicas, their identification with their own buildings became increasingly pronounced. The earliest sources about the North African schism include conflict between Catholics and dissidents over ritual space, such as the violent incident in the Sicilibba basilica.
As the winds of political power shifted back and forth over the course of the ensuing century, control over sacred sites alternated between Catholics and dissidents. As each group vied for power and carved out distinct ways for group members to self-identify and be identified by nongroup members, commentators interpreted the battle over ritual space providentially, as symbolizing a cosmic struggle between Christ and his adversaries; they conceived of control over these sites as nothing less than universal triumph. As this rhetoric of spatial supersession took hold among its audience, architectural dispossession was extended to non-Christian spaces: first to traditional Roman shrines and temples, and then to Jewish synagogues.
Initially the separation of competing groups into distinct spaces helped to reify their differences, forcing those who may have not embraced the distinction for their own self-definition to make a concrete choice about which building they would frequent and which building they would claim as their own. The “lived experience” of these spaces, to use Lefebvre’s typology, created and reinforced sectarian differences. Such distinctions allowed Augustine’s episcopal audience to conjure up an actual building filled with people when he referred to the churches of those he deemed heretics and schismatics as “their congregations.”Footnote 1 Eventually Christian leaders coupled this physical division with a rhetoric of supersession in an attempt to create the perception that the visible, tangible landscape bore witness to Catholic victory.
Legal prohibitions progressively restricted the ritual arenas available to dissident Christians. Rhetorical strategies, like invoking epithets such as superstitio and praecipitates, then error and haeresis, created the impression that these other Christians were not only beyond the pale; they were outside the fold. This symbolic arrangement was concretized in spatial terms both rhetorically, by attaching delegitimizing labels to dissident spaces, and physically, by seizing dissident spaces and reinscribing them as Catholic. Periodically, the power dynamic was reversed, and by the Vandal conquest, a new group of Christians joined the battle over sacred space.
What caused this originally internal spatial rhetoric to spill over into adjacent religious communities was Christian leaders’ growing anxiety over interreligious boundaries. As increasing numbers of the aristocracy came into the Church, the need arose for Christians to sharply distinguish the dispositions and behaviors used to identify them as Christian from their previous traditionally Roman religious ways (still practiced by those family members who did not convert). Rebillard noted that church-going was “the most obvious way to make public one’s Christianity,” of “expressing Christian membership.”Footnote 2 Buildings, therefore, were the primary locus for Christian identification.
The forging of a new, imperial Christian identification relied not only on differentiation from but triumph over both traditional Roman religion and Judaism; the distinction of space lent a tangible dimension to an otherwise abstract notion, a notion that was particularly alien to a religious worldview that was accustomed to aggregating and translating unfamiliar deities and customs rather than excluding them from its worship.Footnote 3 Whether replacing a synagogue or a temple, the image of a church built on top of an earlier religious building evoked the kind of triumphal image that drew from military visual idiom. As a prevalent symbol of Roman supremacy, the gesture of superimposition proved to be a powerful weapon in the rhetorical arsenal of late antique North African Christians.
Despite the fact that, or perhaps because, Christians and Jews seemed to coexist in relative harmony, some Christians nevertheless chose to portray the transformation of the Tipasa synagogue into a church in triumphalist language. Using the rhetoric of architectural supersessionism that had been deployed in their intra-Christian conflict, these writers found such imagery useful for delineating their theology of replacement in concrete terms. Unfortunately, in the case of synagogues, the archaeological record is too sparse to determine the relationship between this rhetoric and the technique of architectural dispossession. As in the case of the Lepcis Magna synagogue, it is more likely that transformation resulted from environmental rather than human processes.
At the dawn of the Vandal invasion, displacement was proving to be an effective strategy in the Catholic bid for power. With state support, dissident Christians and Roman traditionalists were eventually pushed to the periphery of ancient towns. Catholics took over sites like Mascula, where they obliterated a dissident inscription and replaced it with their own. They also targeted venerable martyr shrines, such as the one at Vegesela and the Basilica Maiorum/Perpetua Restituta of Carthage, and defunct Roman sanctuaries, like the Ceres temple at Thuburbo Maius. Ironically, the Vandals’ intolerance of Catholics would lead the new conquerors to deploy the same strategy of architectural dispossession to weaken their religious adversaries.Footnote 4
During the greater century from Constantine to Honorius, North African Christians learned and deployed an important strategy in their new acquisition of and struggle for political power: the use of sacred space. As Christians became increasingly spatially focalized, they invested their houses of assembly with perceptual-symbolic meanings for which the term “holiness” was short-hand. This transformation of perceptual-symbolic meaning made these spaces ideal targets for negotiating group relations and boundaries. With increasing awareness of the power of buildings, both as places to perform religious identification and to display wealth and political influence, spatial contestation helped to concretize the more abstract process of delineating religious differences. The rhetorical strategy of interpreting shifts in the changing late antique landscape in these same terms of spatial contestation proved sufficiently useful to deploy against non-Christians as well. In the Byzantine period, this strategy continued to serve the interests of Christian building policies. The rhetoric of spatial supersession, therefore, aided the phenomenon of architectural dispossession; indeed, this reimagining laid the groundwork for later widespread dispossession. Tension between the imperial respect for property and Christian desire to materially eradicate traditional religion continued into the fifth century, yet it was not until the Byzantine reconquest of North Africa under Justinian that this tension was resolved in favor of Christianity.Footnote 5
Further Observations
Although the dynamic studied in this book drew on ancient examples, the phenomenon of architectural dispossession still afflicts the world today. On February 23, 2006 a New York Times headline read, “Blast at Shiite Shrine Sets Off Sectarian Fury in Iraq.” The attack on the Askariya Shrine in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, destroyed the shrine’s golden dome. According to the Times, the attack “ignited a nationwide outpouring of rage and panic that seemed to bring Iraq closer than ever to outright civil war.”Footnote 6 The article went on to quote a fifty-year-old government employee as saying “I would rather hear of the death of a friend than to hear this news.”Footnote 7 This response may shock a twenty-first-century American audience. Some might wonder, “In what universe of values does the worth of a building outweigh that of human life?” Others may ask, “What was it about that particular site that elicited such an impassioned response?” Or perhaps this response was a hyperbolic exclamation of grief, a rhetorical flourish uttered in the heat of the moment. Yet it may call to mind the comment of Nectarius regarding the Calama basilica attack: “I think it is more grievous to be stripped of one’s assets than to be slain.”Footnote 8
The dynamics revealed in the Askariya Shrine incident and its aftermath are surprisingly not unique. The attack erupted in the context of sectarian conflict, an internal rivalry between two branches of Islam. Yet equally violent and symbolic attacks are regularly launched by one religious group against another. Religious buildings mean more to their builders, users, and observers than reasoned explication admits; impassioned laments and actions suggest that people ascribe to these buildings deep and multiple levels of meaning. The stated reason for attacking religious sites might be that they symbolize a religious group’s collective identification and power, yet the Iraqi government employee’s reaction suggests that they are of greater value than the human beings to whom they owe their existence. Associated with age-old stories, rites, and meanings, these places symbolize what their users regard as defining their collective identification and most cosmologically significant. In the final analysis, it is the practices of spatial supersession and architectural dispossession discussed in this book that produced and reproduced a context in which place could be perceived as more important than human life.
I have chosen to end this book with examples from our own time, far beyond the chronological and religious parameters of this study, to highlight the fact that what makes headlines today is not so very different from what caught people’s attention in antiquity. Although these headlines were taken from a modern case, dramatic examples of how religious adherents exploit each other’s sacred spaces for ideological purposes are not new. Spatial violence rivets our gaze no less now than in ancient times.
The centrality of space in religious conflicts like those in late antique North Africa serves as a caution even to those who live in a society where church and state are legally separate. Perceptual-symbolic value deeply embeds such buildings in people’s imagination and fosters profound emotional attachments to them. To the people who use these buildings as their ritual arenas and share the structural symbolism with which they are imbued, these spaces hold significance that may even exceed that of human life. Such deeply held place attachment explains how someone could assert: “I would rather hear of the death of a friend than to hear this news.”Footnote 9 This book has investigated ancient examples of religious leaders willing to die rather than relinquish their sanctuaries, and of people willing to kill in order to seize or destroy them.
Such cases still abound. In the contemporary United States and Europe, religious buildings are regularly defaced with hateful slogans and symbols, and are occasionally the targets of vandalism and willful destruction. Throughout the African countries of Mali, Egypt, and Libya, militants of the radical Salafi group Ansar Dine (“Defenders of the Faith”) have destroyed shrines of Sufi saints, whose worship is not only considered forbidden by their interpretation of Islamic law but whose graves must remain separate from worship spaces for reasons of purity.Footnote 10 Although regularly condemned by political, humanitarian, and cultural organizations such as UNESCO, this spatial violence will continue as long as sacred spaces hold such perceptual-symbolic value and meaning to their builders and users.
The violence of architectural dispossession derives its perceptual-symbolic value, its place meanings, and attachment from the symbolic meaning of the buildings themselves. Having become a symbol, spatial violence can be invoked as a powerful and influential rhetorical strategy for performing identification and cultivating a climate of conflict. As a symbol, spatial violence remains perpetually available for assigning new meanings and representing even more than the original builders, users, and destroyers might have intended. Those new meanings could potentially be even more destructive than the original destruction in provoking hostility and conflict.
Our observations about late antique North Africa suggest that society is continually engaged in the process of mapping its shifting ideologies onto the spaces it reconstructs, and is in turn continually reshaped by its spatial production. How Christians encountered and reshaped the spaces of others whom they materially bumped up against – namely Roman traditionalists and Jews – reveals aspects of their ideas about those others that are not always evident in literary texts. The reconfigured lived environment was perceived by its occupants anew, reshaping their attitudes toward the others whose spaces had been reconfigured. These architectural transformations gave rise to new constructions of self and other, insider and outsider, which refashioned the Roman self as Christian and recast the other as Jewish and “pagan.”
As we have seen throughout this book, space is the medium through which human beings experience and express their existence. As Martin Heidegger observed, built space is how human beings dwell, or live in a particular time and place.Footnote 11 Since this built environment is produced by social factors, we should expect that buildings will continue to serve as useful tools in all types of human conflict because of the social processes involved in their construction, their material role in everyday life, and their perceptual-symbolic meanings. Analysis of the contestation over sacred spaces and places, both material and ideational, built and imagined, helps illuminate the dynamics of religious conflict and social transformation that continues to punctuate human history.
