Sacred Places

Robert Wilken ( The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought ) has written that “Eusebius directed attention, for the first time in Christian history, to the religious and theological significance of space.” In describing the church of the Resurrection, he uses “a sacral vocabulary that has few precedents in Christian literature before his time.” Yet, Wilken also recognizes that long before the fourth century “Christians gathered for worship at the places where the faithful departed had been buried.”

PC Finney in a 2004 article has challenged the notion that Christians began to venerate places only after Constantine. He attributes this view to what he calls the “Ritschl/Harnack paradigm,” which he describes as a paradigm that assumes “discontinuity between pre- and post-Constantinian Christianity.” With regard to sacred places in particular:

“before Constantine Christians are said to have opposed the hallowing of place, whereas during and after Constantine’s rule, prompted by Imperial largesse and the taste of secular power, the new religionists did an about-face, reversing three centuries of principled opposition to the sacralization of space and place. This is an old paradigm. Its modern roots are found in Reformation (Calvinist) historiography. A familiar component of this paradigm is the idealization of a primitivist essence which Germans like to call Urchristentum —the latter takes numerous shapes depending on who is at the helm, but one of the most familiar fantasies is of early Christianity as a spiritually pure, aniconic-iconophobic form of religiosity— Thümmel has recently revived this old saw. The latter is noteworthy in the present context because rejection of pictures and of sacred place are obverse and reverse of the same Ritschl/Harnack coin.”

In fact, there is literary evidence of interest in sacred places prior to Constantine, though Finney admits that it is slim: “As for material evidence or documentary evidence attesting real places or real people frequenting holy places, there is so little of this that the subject can be very briefly summarized. In a passage (HE 4.26.3-4) that is perhaps historical, Eusebius says Melito visited Palestine to confirm events described in the Bible, and in his Commentary on John 1.28 Origen writes that he went to Palestine to ‘trace the footsteps of Jesus.’ These two passages suggest an early interest in topos , well before the growth of fourth century pilgrimage spirituality. In the epigraphic realm we have the graffito at Peter’s grave in the Vatican necropolis, attesting veneration of this topos hieros ca. AD 160.”

Instead of venerated places per se, a theology of holy person develops. According to what he calls “the personalization of place (the messiah= topos hieros ), there is a “spiritualization of cult (with its multiple Qumran parallels)” and this “lays the groundwork for the theios aner ideology that plays such a conspicuous role in the years 300 to 600.” He notes that “the single strongest statement of a personcentered topos hieros appears near the end of Clement’s Stromateis. In Clement’s scheme, “t he gnostic Christian is God-like, a kind of sacramental presence in the world, a temple, a divine image, a dwelling place of God — at one and the same time the gnostic Christian is (like God) beyond topos and in topos . Clement’s discussion of the gnostic Christian as sacred topos and metatopos borders on mystification and is as close as pre-Constantinian Christianity comes to principled rejection of topos hieros , understood as a real-world place on the ground.”

The evidence for attention to holy places certainly increases after Constantine, so much so that Finney can say that Constantine’s patronage was the “main catalyst” for changes in attitudes and practices. Yet, “the Ritschl/Harnack paradigm assumes what we do not know, namely that before Constantine Christians opposed such piety — the sources simply do not support this argument from silence. We might just as well assume the opposite, namely that the earliest Christians supported traditional hiera, but under marginalized conditions, and that Constantine opened the flood gates of a suppressed piety, thus mainstreaming a version of placecentered early Christian piety that had been rooted from the beginning in traditional Jewish and pagan models. This alternative assumption has exactly the same evidentiary value as the Ritschl/Harnack paradigm, namely a value of zero.”