Mary Farag | What Makes a Church Sacred?

In the wake of the Jesus Movement’s emergence from the underground, designated worship spaces like churches began to be seen as sacred spaces in and of themselves. How did this happen? According to Mary K. Farag, it was the result of centuries of debate between ancient Roman jurists, Catholic bishops, artists, and theologians. Farag is Assistant Professor of Early Christian Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, and her research focuses on Christian liturgical practices in late antiquity and their role in the wider Greco-Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic worlds. In this episode Farag shares from her book “What Makes a Church Sacred?: Legal and Ritual Perspectives from Late Antiquity.”  

Guest: Mary Farag | Host: Shari Oosting

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The Distillery:
In the wake of the Jesus movement’s emergence from the underground, designated worship spaces—what we would call churches—began to be seen as sacred in and of themselves. How did this happen? According to Mary K. Farag, it was the result of centuries of debate between ancient Roman jurists, Catholic bishops, artists, and theologians. Farag is assistant professor of Early Christian Studies here at Princeton Theological Seminary, and her research focuses on Christian liturgical practices in late antiquity and their role in the wider Greco-Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic worlds.
In this episode, we speak with Farag about her book, What Makes a Church Sacred? Legal and Ritual Perspectives from Late Antiquity.

Introduction:
You're listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Shari Oosting:
Thank you so much for talking with me today, Mary.

Mary Farag:
It's such a pleasure. Thank you, Shari, for inviting me.

Shari Oosting:
So today we're talking about a book that you recently wrote, and I would love for you to start by sharing what sparked your interest in thinking about what makes a church sacred?

Mary Farag:
That is a great question. The project really took shape, I have to say, when I was reading two kinds of sources from late antiquity. One of them I ended the book with, and they’re stories preserved in Coptic and in Arabic translation of Coptic texts about the consecration of churches—the ritual that made a building a church in late antiquity and made it a sacred space. And these stories were very fascinating, they had been difficult for scholars to understand because the stories seem sort of fantastic at face value. They generally describe a bishop—and it's because bishops were the ones who [were] the ritual agents for consecrating a church—but it would be a first-person narrative from the voice of a bishop from the 400s or 500s, who basically tells the story from his perspective of what happened, where Christ and his court literally come down and join in this consecration!

When I was first reading these stories, I had a hard time understanding why anyone would go through the trouble of composing such a text. Most people took them as just pious fiction—folks who wanted to write an extended tale about how a church was consecrated and why it was sacred, namely by the agency of these heavenly beings themselves. And so that stuck with me, but it was hard to try to understand how to analyze these sources.

Shari Oosting:
So, you started with the consecration stories and then where did that journey lead you?

Mary Farag:
Well, in the midst of that, I met John F. Matthews, who was a professor of Roman law at Yale University. I did an independent study with him—a directed reading course, so that I could learn Roman history from him—and he introduced me to Roman law. And I remember...

Shari Oosting:
Now, I have to say that doesn't sound—on the surface—to be the most fascinating thing, but was it?

Mary Farag:
Well, here's where it got fascinating for me. He gave me a handbook that was written in the second century by a jurist named Gaius. And it was organized with a Book about Persons, a Book about Things, and then a Book about Actions. And it's the sort of thing that was meant as a teaching resource—folks in the Roman Empire who wanted to become lawyers, this would be one of the first texts they encounter to learn the whole craft of being a lawyer, becoming a jurist, and so on.

And, so, when I read in that Book II about Things that there was this category called “sacred thing” in Roman law, and that he pinpointed the ritual of consecration as the event that made something a sacred thing, I was actually shocked because I thought this was something so basic, I should have known it already. And I was surprised that I didn't. I never knew that churches in late antiquity had a particular legal status if they were consecrated.
And so that took me on a journey. It was a welcome distraction from the stories that I couldn't make head or tail of, but it took me on a very long journey into Roman law, and I had a lot to learn, and I'm so grateful that I did learn it. But I spent many years trying to understand this category—"sacred thing”—and in particular trying to understand what happened to it once the Roman Empire allowed Christianity to be a legal practice with Constantine, and then once it became officially the religion under Theodosius in the fourth century. So, lots of change going on in the fourth century, and then lots of implications for what happens in the fifth and sixth centuries after that.

So, the first part of the book is really trying to tell the story of how it is that churches get slotted into this existing category of “sacred thing” which wasn't made for Christian places of worship—someone like Gaius has in mind when he's talking about this category, traditional Greco-Roman temples. But with Christianity becoming legal in the early fourth century, it enters into this legal sphere legitimately for the first time, and so it gets slotted into this category. And the first half of the book is telling the story of how that happens, and how bishops tried to work with this category and tried to expand it to help it fit what churches were for.

Shari Oosting:
Yeah, and it's interesting to think about too, there's one way of understanding the word “church” to mean a gathered group of people, but we're really talking specifically about buildings, and of course that has implications for the people who gather there. But we're really talking about what makes a church building a “sacred thing.”

Mary Farag:
That's exactly right. Although I'm glad you brought that up because that has to do with the second part of the book, where actually these two come together in very interesting ways. So, in the second part of the book, I really focus on the ritual of consecration. So thinking, okay, if the law specifies this is the event that makes a thing sacred, well, what's happening at these consecratory rituals which were major festivals in late antiquity—often multi-day festivals—where you would have markets set up, people coming and visiting from lots of different places—it was a major event for any city or town that would host something like this. And you would have lots of bishops visiting, often a lot of dignitaries visiting from the imperial government.

But anyway, in looking at those sources—mostly homilies, hymns, and also images installed in the churches, including the one that's on the front cover of the book—so, in looking at those sources, you hear actually a lot about the people, like you just pinpointed. And actually the bishops and their homilies focus a lot on how the church is merely a blueprint for what the souls of people—at both the individual and the gathered community as a collective—how they ought to be sacred, which was very fascinating to me to see that at this major moment where a monumental church where a lot of money and time and effort has been invested to make it absolutely beautiful—I mean, these were magnificent churches!—at that moment where everyone is gathering together to inaugurate it and to recognize it as a sacred place and legally recognize it as such, it's downplayed. It's actually the people who are lifted up as the truly sacred—I don't want to say “thing”—but the truly sacred individual and collective, which was absolutely fascinating to me. At this wonderful moment to celebrate the church, they actually say, “This is just a blueprint for you!” That's all it is.

Shari Oosting:
Let's talk a little bit more about legality and illegality and then think about the way that then played out through people as things changed and shifted. So, it seems that one of the central debates that bishops were engaging in, in this quest to have a church building be defined as a “sacred thing” was getting this kind of legal status. So, can you talk about that process and how it evolved?

Mary Farag:
Oh, sure. Absolutely. So, it was only natural that as soon as Constantine tolerated Christianity with the Edict of Milan in 312 that the existing legal structures would remain in place and that churches would kind of get slotted into that. And we see that already in his time that this is happening. So, I should say a little bit more about what this means.

So, even for the classical jurists like Gaius, a “sacred thing”—the reason why you have this special designation in law—that it's a “sacred thing”—is because that comes with a lot of privileges. And primarily the privilege is that once a thing becomes sacred, it cannot undergo any transaction. It's inalienable. You can't sell it, you can't exchange it, in perpetuity. So it is forever this sacred place that is thought to be protected by God, and hence why there are all these very strict rules about what you can and cannot do with “sacred things.” In fact, even if a church or—well, for Gaius’ time, a temple—would undergo some kind of ruin, say like an earthquake hit—if it was a natural ruin or due to warfare, or what have you—say, you end up with ruins, it's still a sacred place for perpetuity.

Shari Oosting:
So would the ruins be preserved, or how would that play out?

Mary Farag:
Well, you could renovate it and rebuild the place, but you couldn't repurpose the land. It had to be—remain a sacred site. So, just to kind of give a sense of—there's nothing that could change its status, in other words, once it's a “sacred thing,” it's protected by God forever according to this legal understanding.

And where this gets difficult for Christians is that it really put bishops in a catch-22, because prior to this legalization bishops were already considered these people who were protectors of the poor, watching out for the needy, doing everything in their power to use the communal resources for the needy, be they poor, even if you have an elite person who ends up in need for some reason, they're there for the needy.

And unfortunately, church assets kind of get slotted into this category of “sacred thing” where it's very strict what you can and cannot do with it, that limits their ability to use the church's wealth in the ways that they're obligated to do. I mean we have canons that say this is their primary duty: to care, to use the church's assets for the poor and the needy. And so they end up in this catch-22 where there's a lot of wealth getting poured into the churches from Constantine onward, but very limited things that you can do with that wealth. So unless they're getting donations that are specifically earmarked for the poor, all that wealth that's poured in for the consecration can't be used for that purpose. And so I think that's part of the reason why they take the time on these occasions to actually pinpoint the importance of the people and their sacrality and why they are the true church, basically, to make the point that all this wealth is for them. And if it's not used for them, then it defeats the purpose, which it was hard for this to happen.

One really expensive project was to ransom captives, and the church was clearly involved in this and would try to gather sums of money to do this. And you can imagine because of how expensive such a thing is, they would want to maybe take a golden chalice and melt it down. You could immediately make a lot of gold coins from something like that and immediately raise the funds for ransoming captives. So, there are bishops who were doing this, but it doesn't become legal that you can use “sacred things” for the purpose of ransoming captives until quite late, until Justinian in the 500s. So that already gives us a sense of how difficult of a process it was for bishops to try and get the strictures expanded and have exceptions in place to the rules that for specific reasons, yes, we can liquidate the sacred wealth for doing practices of mercy.

Shari Oosting:
That's so interesting. There's this sense in which these “sacred things” receive protection through the law, but then these church buildings are also intended to be a place of protection for others, and that that's an attention that needs to be negotiated through their legal system. It’s fascinating!

Mary Farag:
It is. It's absolutely fascinating. It led me to believe that for the homilies that I just mentioned, that was why there's this focus on the people as opposed to the church, even though all this effort went into celebrating the building, they're taking the opportunity to focus on the people.
And then it finally brought me back to those stories that I couldn't make head or tail of, and I believe that these stories are actually responding to the law, because they're written by folks who were not imperially endorsed bishops. So by the middle of the fifth century, there had been a division among Christians, and by Justinian's time, in the 500s, it was clear that it was one particular side of the dispute that was recognized by the government, and those were the administrators of “sacred things” in the Roman Empire.

Shari Oosting:
It’s the Chalcedonian—

Mary Farag:
That's exactly right.

Shari Oosting:
—the Chalcedonian controversy?

Mary Farag:
That's exactly right. And so non-Chalcedonians were not considered the ritual agents, the administrators of monumental churches. And so, they're basically—you have the rise of rival hierarchies, a Chalcedonian one, and a non-Chalcedonian one. Hierarchies of the clergy, I should say. And so, the non-Chalcedonian are faced with this problem that their churches are not recognized by the government as “sacred things.” And so I think that's why they hyper-valorize the sacrality of the churches through these stories. And I mean, in the most extreme way possible, say and demonstrate that their churches are sacred, because actually the King in Heaven, Christ, is the one who even conducted the ritual in some cases, or Mary the Mother of God is involved in the construction.

Shari Oosting:
So, they're deferring to this even higher authority.

Mary Farag:
That's exactly right—in order to say, “We don't need this intermediary of the imperial government; we don't need their stamp of approval. We have the stamp of approval from above!” And so, basically trying to say, yes, our churches are sacred for the same reasons that the law stipulates, except that the authority comes from a higher up place.

Shari Oosting:
It's striking that throughout there's mention of power and money and authority, and it has just a ton of implications for where things go in terms of the classification of a “sacred thing,” but also how that relates to the people who are in those spaces.

Mary Farag:
That's exactly right.

Shari Oosting:
So can you tell us, you write about in the fourth century there were trials that were really prominent. And I'm wondering if you could tell us about what happened with John Chrysostom.

Mary Farag:
Oh, sure.

Shari Oosting:
A specific example of one of the trials that played out.

Mary Farag:
Yes, absolutely. So, looking at the charges leveled against him, sure enough, there were several charges that had to do with repurposing “sacred things”—asylum. And so, I read through the sources related to this, and what struck me the most was reading about a hospice that he tried to build for lepers, and reading about how he was accused of repurposing wealth—sacred wealth—in order to do this.

When John Chrysostom was in the process of building this hospice for lepers, he chose a riverside location so that they could cleanse their sores. But apparently neighbors didn't like the idea of lepers cleansing themselves in the river and then the river continuing onto their properties. And so, they found a way to halt this project by saying that John Chrysostom was not using the proper funds to undertake this sort of thing, and in particular was liquidating “sacred things.” It's illegal to do so. You cannot repurpose “sacred things” for such a purpose.
And so, accusing him that he was doing so—and they succeed in halting the project—the orator, the speaker of this oration, of this funeral speech, he specifically says that the roof never made it onto this building that was being constructed, and paints this vivid image of this ideal that John Chrysostom had to show mercy to people who were really shunned in society. I mean, lepers were really—not even the most philanthropic people could bring themselves to do things for lepers in this time period. So really, if you could think of the neediest of the needy, the poorest of the poor, it would be lepers.

And so, painting this vivid image of John Chrysostom doing something very refreshing for them—a beautiful building on a riverside location—and painting that vivid image in our minds of what he had planned, and then contrasting that with what happens due to the malicious intent of neighbors, you end up with this image in your mind of this unfinished building coming into ruins. And of course, lepers not having a home due to the neighbors finding a way to ensure that this project does not come to completion.

Shari Oosting:
And finding a legal way to halt that work! I mean, Mary, what comes to mind is this still common argument—not in my backyard—don't put poor people in my neighborhood. It just seems like this recurring theme throughout history that's playing out in a particular way around the concept of “sacred things.”

Mary Farag:
Yes, absolutely! And I hope that also this book might be useful for Christian leaders today who have to think through these issues. For example, in the United States, when you have to think about how to repurpose a church when there's no longer a community gathering there and it doesn't make sense to continue having that property. Well, how do we repurpose this in a faithful way? And like you just mentioned now, how do we work through these issues where, for whatever reason, we're not being loving neighbors and to work with our communities to make that happen?

Shari Oosting:
Yeah, I thought a lot about church buildings—modern church buildings—as I was reading this, thinking about Europe and the United States right now, and how many buildings are underutilized, or the church membership has dwindled, but they still have these incredible assets. And I wasn't sure how connected that was to your study, but it was on my mind a lot as I read it. So, it sounds like you've been thinking about that as well when you think about Christian leaders today.

Mary Farag:
Absolutely.

Shari Oosting:
Say more about that.

Mary Farag:
Oh, sure. Well, I can't say I have answers for Christian leaders being faced with these kinds of decisions today, but what I hope is that by seeing how Christian leaders of the past dealt with this—with their own legal strictures in place and their own community dynamics, whether healthy or dysfunctional, how they try to be faithful leaders no matter what—including folks like John Chrysostom who really paid the price for things that he believed were actually the right thing to do—maybe those kinds of stories can give us hope and resilience and strength in hardship, but also help us maybe think outside the box of what we can do.

Of course, in the United States and Europe, the legalities are completely different. Churches aren't categorized as “sacred things.” My understanding in the US is that they're typically nonprofit organizations. And so, there's a completely different legal landscape to this, and sometimes it can be helpful to think through the problems that a completely different society faces that are similar to our problems and just to see how they dealt with them.

Shari Oosting:
Yeah. One thing that also comes to mind when I think about that, connected to some contemporary issues, is there's a lot that you write about that has to do with donors. And this comes up a lot in decision-making processes. And in particular, I was fascinated by the art, you know, there were mosaics. Can you talk a little bit about the way that donors played into how some of these things moved forward and the role of art and architecture in that?

Mary Farag:
Yeah, absolutely. So, most donors, when they would donate something to a church, would expect that it would follow this legal process. They would be consecrated in perpetuity. So, I'm going to just give an example from the fourth century with Ambrose of Milan. So, he writes a response to claims that people are making about what he did with sacred vessels. So, let's imagine it like a chalice, that he melted down for the ransom of captives, and folks accused him—by his time, it seems that the donor, the actual donors, were no longer alive, but there were people who carried on the memory of this donation—and he was accused of liquidating sacred assets that ought to have been—that chalice should have remained in perpetuity, a sacred chalice.

And so, the way he kind of argues himself out of this is to say that these captives are the true gold, not this chalice. And so actually, when you melt down the chalice, get the coins to ransom these captives, you've actually put the donor's donation on a whole new scale: it amplifies the donation. Whereas the other side would say the donor gave this chalice, say, for in perpetuity, for folks to pray for them, for the salvation of their souls—and you've interfered with this exchange between the donor and the heavenly realm. And so how Ambrose would argue against this would be to say, “Actually no! Well, it is true that I've interfered with this exchange, but actually to make it an even greater exchange than it was before, so that it becomes true gold as opposed to what we know of as gold commodities.”

Shari Oosting:
So I'm curious, as you've studied this, how has this work shaped how you think about “sacred things” in our world today?

Mary Farag:
I've spent so much time trying to live in late antiquity and understand that world for what it is that I often, when I'm walking around here, looking around and seeing the things that are happening today, that would have been considered just beyond imagination for folks in this time—say, for example, a church gets sold and gets transformed into a restaurant—a gorgeous restaurant with stained glass and everything!—but for folks in this time period—in particular lawyers and bishops—I think if they were to come back and see that would kind of shudder at the thought that a sacred place could become something completely what they would consider not sacred.

But then again, we can also see how they were actually doing the same thing in their own time. We don't have a particular example where a place becomes a restaurant, but we have cases where those sites get confiscated and used for other purposes. It becomes increasingly common that they actually get confiscated and given to imperially recognized bishops to become sacred places for them. And sometimes this involves reconsecrating the place, or also having these rituals that—what's the word? Like expel demons from the place. And so, you can look back and see how in their society they were doing exactly the same things that they might come back here and push us about. If that makes sense.

Shari Oosting:
Yeah. There's still these similar impulses and conflicts within the social fabric that we live in—even though the landscape has changed, the technology has changed, but the human struggle remains.

Mary Farag:
Oh, absolutely.

Shari Oosting:
Wow.

Mary Farag:
It's amazing how true that verse from Ecclesiastes is, that there's nothing new under the sun.

Shari Oosting:
Yeah. Thank you so much, Mary.

Mary Farag:
Thank you, Shari.

Outro
You've been listening to the Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. Interviews are conducted by me, Sushama Austin Connor, and Shari Oosting. Our producer is Brooke Matika.
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