The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought <\/a> ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=leithartcom-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0300060831\")
) has written that \u201cEusebius directed attention, for the first time in Christian history, to the religious and theological significance of space.\u201d In describing the church of the Resurrection, he uses \u201ca sacral vocabulary that has few precedents in Christian literature before his time.\u201d Yet, Wilken also recognizes that long before the fourth century \u201cChristians gathered for worship at the places where the faithful departed had been buried.\u201d <\/p>\n 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 \u201cRitschl\/Harnack paradigm,\u201d which he describes as a paradigm that assumes \u201cdiscontinuity between pre- and post-Constantinian Christianity.\u201d With regard to sacred places in particular: <\/p>\n
\u201cbefore Constantine Christians are said to have opposed the hallowing of place, whereas during and after Constantine\u2019s 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 <\/em> \u2014the 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\u2014 Th\u00fcmmel 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.\u201d <\/p>\n In fact, there is literary evidence of interest in sacred places prior to Constantine, though Finney admits that it is slim: \u201cAs 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 \u2018trace the footsteps of Jesus.\u2019 These two passages suggest an early interest in topos <\/em> , well before the growth of fourth century pilgrimage spirituality. In the epigraphic realm we have the graffito at Peter\u2019s grave in the Vatican necropolis, attesting veneration of this topos hieros <\/em> ca. AD 160.\u201d <\/p>\n Instead of venerated places per se, a theology of holy person develops. According to what he calls \u201cthe personalization of place (the messiah= topos hieros <\/em> ), there is a \u201cspiritualization of cult (with its multiple Qumran parallels)\u201d and this \u201clays the groundwork for the theios aner <\/em> ideology that plays such a conspicuous role in the years 300 to 600.\u201d He notes that \u201cthe single strongest statement of a personcentered topos hieros <\/em> appears near the end of Clement\u2019s Stromateis. In Clement\u2019s scheme, \u201ct <\/span> he gnostic Christian is God-like, a kind of sacramental presence in the world, a temple, a divine image, a dwelling place of God \u2014 at one and the same time the gnostic Christian is (like God) beyond <\/span> topos and in <\/span> topos . Clement\u2019s discussion of the gnostic Christian as sacred <\/span> topos and <\/span> metatopos borders on mystification and is as close as pre-Constantinian Christianity comes to principled rejection of <\/span> topos hieros , understood as a real-world place on the ground.\u201d <\/span> <\/em> <\/p>\n The evidence for attention to holy places certainly increases after Constantine, so much so that Finney can say that Constantine\u2019s patronage was the \u201cmain catalyst\u201d for changes in attitudes and practices. Yet, \u201cthe Ritschl\/Harnack paradigm assumes what we do not know, namely that before Constantine Christians opposed such piety \u2014 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.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Robert Wilken ( The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought ) has written that \u201cEusebius directed attention, for the first time in Christian history, to the religious and theological significance of space.\u201d In describing the church of the Resurrection, he uses \u201ca sacral vocabulary that has few precedents in Christian literature before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theology-liturgical"],"yoast_head":"\n
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