African Teacher

The beautiful church of S. Zeno Maggiore in Verona celebrates the city’s patron saint. Zeno came from North Africa, and the sculpture in the church shows him to be dark skinned with distinctive facial features. As the biography of Augustine makes clear, Italy and Africa were of course closely connected during the Roman Empire, so it makes fine sense that an African would lead the church in northern Italy. Still, given the current hostility towards African refugees, the story and sculpture’s presence does seem marvelous.

Struck with the grandeur of the church and the enigma of Zeno himself, I started reading up on the bishop once I returned from Italy. Studying is my way of extending the loveliness of travelling in Italy. The sensual wonder of great architecture reverberates in the tomes that describe its inhabitants and namesake.

Zeno preached in Verona during the period we would now recognize as the transition where the Roman Empire became Christian. Emperor Constantine’s conversion set a slow process in motion whereby the old temples were phased out. Reports from 332 and 346 indicate that temples were being demolished and taken over, however Constantine continued to appoint priests. Constantine passed a law banning offerings and closing temples on pain of death, however the law was rarely enforced. His successors Gratien and Theodosius were more energetic in confiscating temples and redirecting religious taxes for the military. For the state the appeal of taking over old houses of worship must have been similar to the motives felt by Protestant princes during the Reformation—suddenly a wealthy, well-landed institution falls into the hands of the government.
Zeno’s collecting sermons cover the decade around 360, a time when pagans still worshipped openly and proudly.

From his sermons you get a sense of the domestic life in the early Church in Verona.

The treatment of women in Christianity distinguished it from pagan practices. One of Zeno’s sermons deals with the question of adultery. Under Roman law only women were subject to judgment for breaking their marriage vows. Christianity introduces the possibility that women could publically object to their husbands having other sexual partners. Constantine had introduced a law forbidding married men from holding concubines in 326. Zeno preached that Christian laws were needed to punish adulterous men. He assures his audience that in his Christian community women would have the same standing as men.

Another issue for the Christian church at the time was the marriage between Christians and pagans. Church fathers acknowledged that in previous times Christians had married outside their religion, but they warned that those who did so were throwing the bones of Christ to the unbelievers, opening the temple of Gods to the devil. Zeno also preached in this vein, drawing tears to his eyes at the thought that in his community Christians were married to pagans. If a Christian wife refuses to accept her pagan husband’s beliefs, the house will be filled strife, God’s name cursed. If she does not respect his gods, will he understand her reserve as just a matter of faith?

Zeno warned that there were many pagan rituals in early Christianity. Church goers would still go out at night to pour libations over graves in order to satisfy the dead. Christians claiming to celebrate martyrs festivals would find a secluded place to hold a drinking bacchanal.

The sermons reflect the competition between sects and religions in the Roman Empire. He preaches against Jews as no longer being the chosen people, as blind. Andreas Bigelmeier writes frankly about the anti-semitism of the early church. The most serious conflict however was with the followers of the priest Arius of Alexandria, who taught that Jesus Christ was not equal in divinity with God the Father, but that he was the First Creation, a supernatural being between the eternally divine and the mortal. Arianism split the early church; it was far and away the most serious challenge to its teaching. As Christianity grew, the large masses that converted did not have the same intense devotion and rigorous understanding of doctrine as the first generations of believers. Zeno responded to the charge that he was too mild in reproaching heretics.

He preached against the excessive wealth of Christians in contrast to their neighbors who starved and froze during the winter. Like many, he used the familiar example of the wealthy Christian woman who spent much of the day in front of her mirror, applying makeup and arranging her hair. His sermons against luxury must not have been successful, for he returns to the topic often. He celebrated the Christian ideal of serving the unfortunate, ransoming the imprisoned, aiding the poor and the abandoned. The doors of Christian house stood open to the wanderer. The Verona church gathered every day to Zeno’s sermons. Easter was the most important holiday, the culmination of the year, for included by baptismal celebrations.

Best source on Zeno, so far: Andreas Bigelmeier, Zeno von Verona (Münster: Aichendorfflichen Verlag, 1904)
picture found at http://santiebeati.it/immagini/?dispsize=Original&mode=view&album=49300&pic=49300E.JPG

Fertility cults

The debate over abortion is a fight over the mythic belief in fate. People like to believe that getting pregnant is one of those archaic moments of divine intervention.

The issue is not so much a Christian concern for life. It is the far more ancient belief that some higher being, the gods written in small letters and never really identified, have brought about fertility. Abortion riles conservatives not because of their interpretations of the old testament, but because it runs against the fatalistic urge to reproduce. Fertility is treated as a sacred blessing that cannot be denied for fear that worse punishment will appear, death.


Life is sacred to the conservative right because they are more prone to mythic thought, to looking for the intervention of chance, the possibility of a random selection which when granted must be accepted. If you are picked then you must accept your lot, so the mythic logic.

Christianity is simply layered on top of this much older belief. Pro-life defenders want to believe that there is still a place for divine intervention in the world, and pregnancy, to the extent that it has not been determined by science, seems like one of the few remaining instances when the hand of the gods might be felt.

The language of the old testament still applies to current discourse: “a couple is blessed with children,” “they are left barren.” The implication is not that it is their fault. Mythic thought is discerning enough to know that the virtuous are quite as likely to be denied children as anyone else, --a quality which makes pregnancy an even more random, archaic gift. Even the evil doers have children.

Fertility is beyond good and evil.

Many people barely believe in the gift of Christian salvation, yet they can accept that children are a divine present. Our consumer desires readily adapt to the older mythic sense of receiving fertility.

A Christian face can easily be put on the gift, it can be ascribed to the Christian God , and thus doubly deserving of defense, as a last proof of the Lord’s care for us on earth and as a communal fear that one ought never spit in the face of the chthonic gods of fertility.

That this more ancient concern not to deny fertility precedes Christianity is demonstrated by the great tolerance Christians show premarital sex in relation to abortion. While sex outside marriage is warned against, once pregnancy occurs, another set of rules appears. The sin of adultery is acceptable if it results in fertility, a far more fundamental human concern than the proper regulation of sexual practice.

The pro choice position arises from the Enlightenment, and it implies religious tolerance as much as it does personal rights, the question of whether one would give oneself over to the reasoning of fertility cults or whether one would declare self-disciplining control over reproduction is the kind of ethical concern first extended to women as a result of the Enlightenment

That women have always practiced abortion is the something that neither the Enlightenment nor conservative Christian discourse knows how to address.

The prochoice position would leave the matter to the individual as if the question would be a matter of personal faith. The anti abortion activists want to characterize the matter as a communal threat. It is not just a personal decision with isolated implications, rather is affects the entire community.

So too with fertility rituals; they were never confined to isolated couples, but were readily understood as applying to the entire community. For one person to defile the fertility rites was to threaten the entire community. The life of the fetus argument is an attempt to make the question juridical, to find an Enlightened argument to counter the tolerance defence.

However the real concern of conservatives, their primal anxiety, is that the community as a whole will be denied future fertility because of one person’s sacrilige. The abortion debate concerns our understanding of what we might deny happening, our sense of the future.

Fertility superstition swirls through us all.

The depression of frustrated women, the male fear of impotence, the urgency to have children, the so called biological clock are manifestations of an older thinking, one that does not have to be reduced to just biology, but involves older practices and beliefs that have saturated our culture so completely that we don’t see them until they come into play