There are several thrusts and forceful propositions underlying Teresa Shawcross’s Wisdom’s House, Heaven’s Gate (hereafter WHHG), which lays claim to offering a radically revisionist cultural history of the Byzantine Empire and the Fatimid Caliphate, not simply in the context of their synchronicity during the eleventh century as rival geopolitical presences in the eastern Mediterranean, but more specifically as organically intertwined polities and civilisations. As Shawcross posits, there was not merely contact and interaction (political, commercial), outright enmity and military confrontation, but also direct and emphatic mutual influence and developmental interdependence. The publishers hail the book as “the first cultural and intellectual history of the entanglement” between the two in its breadth and scope, in the positioning of its claims, and in the perspectives from which it seeks to offer its insights—philosophy, theology, archaeology, epigraphical and textual studies, art history, and gendered sociohistorical analysis (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-35263-8).
For Shawcross, there is a fundamental dialectic (positive and negative) between the two empires as sociopolitical and cultural entities, and between their engagement with the past (their own, as well as what is not theirs to own), which can serve to inform, realign and elucidate our investigations and current debates about pastness, historicity, cultural identities, and processes of critical self-definition. Underpinning Shawcross’s project is the dictate for “a more nuanced picture [and] for revisionist work [as] initiated by a new generation of scholars” (vi); for “an alternative historical narrative” (vii) on the relationship between Byzantium and the various Islamic caliphates, in this case the Fatimids. It follows the broader injunction current in academia and elsewhere for a non-Eurocentric approach to “the study of Byzantium and the Islamic world” (4), Christendom and Islam. WHHG argues that, thanks to this revisionism, “Athens is freed from the weight of the narratives...inherited from centuries of scholarship that have sought to claim the classical city as the cradle of western civilisation and...dismissed post-classical layers as...a sleepy backwater whose parochialism was symptomatic of a wider societal decline. [Is Shawcross’s subtext Edward Gibbon?] Instead of relegating it to merely marginal importance, we can identify mediaeval Athens as the location and symbol of a re-invention of categories of knowledge and understanding that accompanied competing claims to empire by two remarkably successful societies...that of Orthodox Christianity, and...Ismaʿili Shiʿi Islam” (5).
This is a powerful remit, of great import. Its claims of novelty, however, are not as strong, given the cornucopian nature of the field since at least the 1800s (if not earlier), and the metanarrative engagements with Christian Hellenism in art, literature, philosophy etc. from at least the maniera greca onwards (to restrict the timeframe to a conscious response to post-classicalGreekness,as distinct from Latinity). What is new is not the revalidation of post-classical, Christian Hellenism, but rather its presumed interlacing with a single, specific, purported counterpart (Islam). This exclusivity of vision (and exclusionism of perspectives) may raise questions for readers.
WHHG proposes the methodology of “an investigation into the physical topography and symbolism of...Athens and Jerusalem” (xi). This central conceit has significant potential of intellectual interest and real substance. It entails a sharp notional and geographical displacement of some of the postulated stereotypical perceptions regarding the Greek Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire, and the Shiite Muslim Fatimid Caliphate of Cairo. It implies a robust selectivity in terms of historical and cultural categories and definitions, regarding the alpha and omega of Shawcross’s argument, namely the topos or topoi of Athens and Jerusalem, taken together as a dyad of material historical reverberations, or as distinct singularities, with likewise terrifically poignant symbolisms and histories.
Shawcross contends that Athens and Jerusalem acquired central and symbolically overlapping/interchangeable positions for both Byzantines and Fatimids, as they each refined their doxologies, and sought to confirm the centrality and pre-eminence of their Empires. Athens, Shawcross contends, assumed, through its systematic transformation into a primary centre of Christian worship, the role of a New Jerusalem for Byzantium and the Christian West (and the Christian East, facing religious persecution from the Fatimids). The Parthenon’s Church of Panagia Atheniotissa acquired a position equal, or even rival to that of Jerusalem’s Church of the Resurrection (destroyed by the Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim in 1009, as part of the persecution of Christian communities). In WHHG this transformation is presented as contemporaneous with, a conscious direct response to, Fatimid projects to incorporate Neoplatonism within their religious exegesis. Concurrently, Shawcross shows, the Fatimids transformed Jerusalem into their emblematic sacred space, a gesture of Islamic overlordship regarding Christian pastness and presentness, and an Ismaili Shiia alternative (and antagonist, on theological and non-theological levels) to Mecca and Medina, as they sought to enforce their interpretation of Islamic doctrine and history.
Shawcross posits as terminus post quem the turn of the millennium (ca. 1000), which thus isolates her exposition from discussion and acknowledgement of a vital anteriority: the Hellenistic (if not earlier) entanglement between Judaism and Hellenism, and palpably the primordial interrelationship of Judaism and Hellenism within Christianity, especially within Orthodox Greek theology, and the resulting lived experience of faith in Byzantium. This isolationism of analysis and reference has critical ramifications overall on multiple levels, especially on questions of the organicity and continuity of tradition, and the understanding of tradition and history as dynamic processes of engagement, reflection, and inner development for a particular culture and sociohistorical community. It also plays on the level of impressions, artificially positing Byzantines and Fatimids as equally external to a classical past and heritage, and therefore as analogous rivals contending for ownership on comparable if not identical terms: “Propagandists on both sides appropriated the cultural capital of antiquity” (331 added emphasis); “a quarrel with far-reaching consequences...between the defenders of Islam and Christianity over their appropriation of the resources of Hellenic philosophy” (229 added emphasis). The problematics of this notional slide and dislocation of Byzantium/Christianity from its core Hellenic component are obvious, or ought to be.
As Shawcross extracts Athens and Jerusalem from the continuum of their history, Athens seems solely the Christian Athens of a historically and ethnoculturally neutralised Byzantium, inhabited, one feels, by a population with no sequential belonging to anything prior to its presentness, pagan or otherwise; Jerusalem is given a pervasively Islamic current identity, a spectrality of Christian presence. For both, the proposed concept is a difficult one to reconcile with the polysemous periplous of each city-cosmos, as these are; the rhetorical/argumentative gesture is even more problematic, given the questions of appropriation and acculturation, the histories of invasion, occupation and denaturalisation involved in each case. One cannot but reflect on questions of [dis]orientalism, and later geopolitical complications and forced realities.
Endorsing a literal reading of Tertullian’s “Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?” and a somewhat slanted translation of Paul, Colossians 2:8, rendering συλαγωγῶν as “spoils” (2), and therefore Greek philosophy as predatory/corruptive (1), rather than as “taking as spoils,” thus an injunction against embedding uncritically (as spolia) Greek philosophy into Christian doxa, Shawcross uses both as the basis for an a priori postulation of wholescale hostility between Hellenism and Christianity prior to the eleventh century, mitigated only by circumstantial interest for exegetical or hegemonic purposes (i.e., either appropriation or appropriative assimilation). The “Christianisation” of Hellas (isolated from the broader Hellenistic-Roman world) is presented as a concerted campaign of aggression, rather than as a particular society’s process of natural transition to a new engagement with, definition and worship of, the divine (notwithstanding the friction all radical transition entails).
It seems an oversimplified stereotype of presumed pagan/Christian antinomy. Crucial evidence for a transition (rather than aggression) paradigm, by scholars Shawcross uses as basic references, such as Anthony Kaldellis (The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens),appears overlooked: to cite an example, absent from WHHG,“the ‘pagan’ and the ‘Christian’...were never to be fully separate in Byzantine Athens” (Kaldellis, 23). “The [Parthenon’s] role in the topography and civic ideology of Athens was preserved, among both Christians and pagans. One patron 'saint' took over from another just as healing gods were replaced by healing saints... It is also possible that for the Athenians of late antiquity the Parthenon had historic and civic associations that transcended the difference between pagan and Christian.” (Kaldellis, 44, added emphasis). [1]
For Shawcross, the Orthodox Christian attitude towards essentially half at least of its notional past, deems that “all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and Aristotelian composition should be rejected utterly since curiosity, probing analysis, and argument were not appropriate for those who, through the Gospel, had come to Christ” (2). Dialecticity for Shawcross between Athens and Jerusalem only materialises with the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
Sidestepped in such selective distillation is the unignorable reality of fundamental, continuous, and constitutive dialectics, throughout Christianity’s history, between Christian doxology and theology, and Greek thought, culture, paideia, eschatology, as evinced by the education (paideia) of Gregory of Nazianzus, Macrina the Younger, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, St Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, Athanasius of Alexandria, Gregory the Great, or Origen, or the monastic scriptoria and studia across Byzantium, Europe, pre-Islamic north African and Middle Eastern Christian centres—such as the Pandidacterion, the School of Magnaura, Alexandria’s School of Neoplatonic Philosophy, and Byzantine schools of philosophy in Gaza and Berytus. Underlying its high rhetoric, Tertullian’s project was to understand how, rather than how not, to engage with a pagan precedent to Christianity. [2] A notable absence in Shawcross’s discourse is also the reemergence of the anxiety for that delicate balance between analysis and understanding, pure reason and transcendent inner light, in Matthew Arnold’s discussion of Hellenism and Hebraism in Culture and Anarchy (1869).
In order to press for an instrumental causality between the Fatimids’ engagement with classical philosophy, especially Neoplatonism, and a particular development in Byzantium’s awareness of its Hellenic core, Shawcross pushes for a later dating of the Parthenon’s conversion into a church, again against the evidence of sources she relies on (once more Kaldellis, op. cit., 23ff, esp. 37, where he establishes a 450-480/1 window). Necessity-driven practical steps (creating alternatives for pilgrims to the Holy Land, given the risk to life entailed due to religious persecution), and conscious strategies of response to an act (Fatimid appropriation of Neoplatonic philosophy and of aspects of Christian worship) are neither identical nor covalent. Comparative juxtaposition, rather than presumption of deliberate antiphony and instrumental mutuality might have yielded a more nuanced cultural-historical analysis, allowing for outright admiration of the richness and breadth of Shawcross’s project and material, and for an engagement with WHHG’s propositions without a frequent sense of perplexity and double-vision.
Shawcross is exhilaratingly passionate about Greek Orthodox liturgy, doxology, the world of Byzantium, minutiae of material culture, women’s bioi; she is superbly knowledgeable about the Islamic world. It is this rich, extraordinary thematic range which ought to have been allowed to occupy pride of place. WHHG ambitiously seeks to offer sweeping, panoptic surveys of the Parthenon’s transformation into a Christian church; the phenomenology and doxology of Light in Christian and Islamic doctrine; the geopolitics and cultural semantics of cities (Byzantine Athens and Fatimid Jerusalem); the identity politics of Fatimid society vis. its Muslim brotherhood and Byzantium/Christendom; the engagement of Islam with Christianity and Antiquity; and gendered cameos of Marian apocryphal lore and worship (and “embodiment” in historical women) in Byzantium and Islam; all through the prism of cultural angst and ambition. A format of Parallel Lives, allowing subjects to reveal their distinct comparables as dynamic propositions, rather than as foregone conclusions, would have been thrilling. The current structure is unwieldy and perplexing in turns.
Sections appear rearranged or heavily redacted, often leaving readers at a loss regarding omitted/implied content, or specific references (some details are provided later than their first citation or have incorrect pages). Crucially, the relationship with sources/scholarship warrants problematisation: “In tentatively formulating an outline for an alternative historical narrative, I have preferred, instead of offering a running commentary [drawing] attention to points of disagreement and offer[ing] a critique, to acknowledge rather in my footnotes our very considerable dependence on the advances made by earlier researchers. This recommended itself as the approach that was not only the most straightforward, but also the most likely to achieve an exposition that would be as accessible as possible to readers” (vii). The concerns with such an approach are especially visible in the omission of scholarship contradicting certain assertions (e.g., gender in Byzantium), [3] the selective presentation of evidence to create the impression of conclusiveness, [4] and insufficient accuracy over sources. [5]
There are also semantic elisions: in the analysis of pseudo-Kufic/Arabising inscriptions/ornamentation, the denomination Arab(ic) tacitly obscures the Christian Arab Holy Land tradition (noted passim 204) as the source and reason of use, creating superimposed cultural associations of Islamic influence; the missing Greek original of the pseudo-Dionysian corpus is glossed over as of Syrian-Palestinian origin, creating similar semantic ambiguities (354; Greek again noted passim 244); “Maids of Athens” (318ff) posited as a topos, with no reference; perplexing inclusion of historical figures (e.g. Sill-al-Mulk, 315) with no further mention; idiosyncratic choice of scholarship, e.g. Margaret Barker for Marian apocryphal tradition and its “parallelisms;” the total omission of Exodus 3:14 for “I am that I am” (216); the omission, when analysing number/letter esotericism, of Plutarch, the Sefer Yetzirah, the very brief note on the Pythagoreans; the omission of the Eleusinian Mysteries or the Kabbalah in the context of Michael Psellos’s ἀπόρρητα. Other quibbles with use/selection of material could be mentioned.
One particularly perplexing case is Shawcross’s claim that “Stories circulated [added emphasis] that [Athens] had been founded by Solomon and constituted the truest expression of his vision—a reinvention of the past that replaced the lawgiver Solon, the founder of the Athenian constitution, with the wise King Solomon, the builder of the Jewish Temple” (344). The evidence provided is not contemporary, but a seventeenth-century Ottoman travel-writer, Evliya Çelebi. The critical authority given, Elizabeth Key Fowden, notes that these stories were derivative of “Arabic and Ottoman literary, geographical and historical writings [concerning] outstandingly impressive ancient buildings or ruins [where it was “commonplace” for them] to become associated with King Solomon” (Key Fowden, as in WHHG fn.48, 366, 72; cf. Key Fowden, as in WHHG fn. 4, 344, 271). Shawcross leaves readers to infer that these stories circulated at, or prior to, the time of the Byzantine-Fatimid entanglement she is claiming.
Shawcross embarks on a tremendous journey. The particulars of her course, her chosen portolans, are not always rigorous enough or properly calibrated for the resulting account to have the stimulating impact and value that it might have had. Her concluding section causes perhaps the greatest bewilderment of all: advocating vocally for Athens’ Ottoman imago, and lamenting the loss of a second mosque built on the Parthenon’s site, Shawcross finishes with a rhetorical flourish, relinquishing Byzantines, Fatimids, Christianity, Islam, philosophy, for an altogether different trail, perhaps a new heir to the translatio studii et imperii subtextualised throughout: “one may question whether the uncompromising purism of recent centuries is more enlightened than the syncretism of previous eras...like killing ‘a battered but still-living organism in order to expose and bleach into pristineness the bones of a skeleton before exhibiting them’” (370). Which is the “battered but still-living organism”? Mediaeval Hellenism and Panagia Atheniotissa? Florentine occupation and Santa Maria di Atene? Or Ottoman occupation and the subsequent mosques? And the syncretism? Both questions should perhaps be asked with Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s The Assassins of Memory in mind, assassins who have “devoted all...efforts and a variety of means...to destroying not the truth (which is indestructible) but a general awareness of the truth. ...The assassins of memory chose their target well: they are intent on striking a community in the thousand painful fibres that continue to link it to its own past.” [6] The assassins’s method of preference is, Vidal-Naquet notes, revisionism.
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Notes:
1. Similarly, Judith Herrin, Margins and Metropolis: Authority Across the Byzantine Empire(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), idem, The Formation of Christendom, new edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), et al.
2. Cf. indicatively Justo L. González, “Athens and Jerusalem Revisited: Reason and Authority in Tertullian,” Church History 43 no. 1: 17-25 (1974); Geoffrey Dunn, Tertullian: The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2004); Wendy Helleman, “Tertullian on Athens and Jerusalem,” inHellenization Revisited: Shaping a Christian Response within the Greco-Roman World, ed. Wendy Helleman (Lanham: University Press of America, 1994); Eric Osborn, Tertullian, First Theologian of the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
3. E.g. Neil Bronwen and Lynda Garland, Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society (London: Routledge, 2013), Elizabeth James, Women, Men and Eunuchs in Byzantium (London: Routledge, 1997), or Barbara Hill, Imperial Women in Byzantium 1025-1204: Power, Patronage and Ideology (London: Routledge, 1999) are not even listed in the bibliography.
4. Cf. 300ff: the overall iconographic scheme of the Iakovos of Kokkinobaphos manuscript does not bear out Shawcross’s claims.
5. cf. 365: her claim for Laonikos Chalkokondyles’ name is disproven by Anthony Kaldellis, A New Herodotos: Laonikos Chalkokondyles on the Ottoman Empire, the Fall of Byzantium, and the Emergence of the West (Washington D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2014), 1.
6. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1993), xxiii.