Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah’s Son traces the stories these writers crafted and the ways in which they shaped the lived experience of familial bereavement in ancient Christianity. A compelling social history that conveys the emotional lives of people in the late ancient world, Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah's Son is a powerful portrait of mourning that extends beyond antiquity to the present day.
Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah’s Son traces the stories these writers crafted and the ways in which they shaped the lived experience of familial bereavement in ancient Christianity. A compelling social history that conveys the emotional lives of people in the late ancient world, Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah's Son is a powerful portrait of mourning that extends beyond antiquity to the present day.
Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah's Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity
416
Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah's Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity
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Overview
Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah’s Son traces the stories these writers crafted and the ways in which they shaped the lived experience of familial bereavement in ancient Christianity. A compelling social history that conveys the emotional lives of people in the late ancient world, Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah's Son is a powerful portrait of mourning that extends beyond antiquity to the present day.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520972964 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 01/02/2020 |
| Series: | Christianity in Late Antiquity , #8 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 416 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Children's Deaths in Late Antiquity in Ritual and Historical Perspective
After the pregnancy, they say that the newborn child is wrapped in swaddling clothes on the third [day], and that on the ninth [day] it becomes stronger and tolerates being touched; and on the 40th [day] it acquires the ability to laugh and it begins to recognise its mother.
And in [the body's] decomposition, they say, nature rounds the turning post and observes precisely the same numbers again, and falls apart by the same [numbers] by which it came together. Indeed, after one has died, on the third day the body is altered completely and its appearance can no longer be recognised. On the ninth [day] everything dissolves in liquidity, although the heart is still preserved. And on the 40th [day], this too disintegrates along with the rest.
— John the Lydian, De mensibus
Quickly did You remove his life from the earth; and now I recall him to mind with a sense of security, in that I fear nothing for his childhood or youth, or for his whole self.
— Augustine, Confessions
The death of Adeodatus makes only a scant appearance in Augustine's Confessions, the bishop's quasi-autobiographical narrative of his own youth and adulthood leading up to his eventual embrace of Christianity. Augustine had doted on the boy, his only son; when Adeodatus's mother, Augustine's long-term partner, departed for North Africa, Augustine kept the child with him, personally tended to his education, and in due course gave him, just sixteen years old at the time, a prominent role in one of the dialogues Augustine composed at Cassiciacum. Yet despite his father's evident attachment and prodigious literary output, the cause of Adeodatus's death, his burial and last rites, and the commemoration he had enjoyed after his passing do not figure in Augustine's oeuvre, and thus remain beyond historians' grasp.
The obscurity that attaches to what is for contemporary readers perhaps late antiquity's most famous prematurely deceased youth signals the challenges of situating the deaths of children in their ritual and socio- historical context. To be sure, children are not alone in presenting historians with this dilemma. For much of the first millennium of the Common Era our understanding of the practices and liturgies surrounding the death even of Christian adults is, at best, sporadic: prior to the emergence of the first orders of burial at the beginning of the eighth century, the processes by which any deceased individual moved from life to death and from deathbed to burial to commemoration are surprisingly opaque. Hints about them appear in hagiographic writings, in homilies, and occasionally in other, prescriptive texts, including the acts of local councils, typically because the latter sought to prohibit a particular practice. Éric Rebillard has fruitfully compared the last rites and burials of two of the best-attested décédées of late antiquity: Macrina, the sister of Gregory of Nyssa, and Monnica, the mother of Augustine of Hippo. And yet even amidst the relatively fulsome depiction of their final earthly moments, it remains difficult to discern what ought to be attributed to their special status — in Macrina's case, for example, her function as head of a women's monastic community —, to regional differences, or simply to the personal preferences of the families and clergy involved.
These uncertainties weigh more heavily for the burial and commemoration of children and subadults, not least since we lack equivalent accounts about the deaths of particularly influential children. Late ancient hagiographies frequently feature children of various ages, but contain few details of their burial and commemoration by their families. As a result, the evidence discussed below involves a bricolage of data arguably imputable to children from adult burial rites, mentions in textual sources of children's liturgical commemoration, and evidence derived from material culture. Even the latter, however, is not as reliable a fount of historical insight as might be desirable, and this despite the commendable amount of excavation and publication of children's graves and cemeteries that has emerged in recent decades. Material witnesses suggest, for example, that throughout late antiquity, certain young children could be buried in communal cemeteries alongside adult dead, while other, to modern eyes indistinguishable infants in the same communities were buried in workshops or houses. What motivated these parallel practices remains a matter of contestation: we know that, without knowing why, and as such are constrained in drawing conclusions about their meaning.
These concededly ample caveats notwithstanding, we are not without resources for envisioning the days leading up to and weeks immediately after the death of children in late antiquity. The following pages provide a glimpse of the framework in which the literary, liturgical, and rhetorical witnesses discussed in subsequent chapters unfolded. As such, many aspects of the narrative call ahead to fuller discussion in later parts of the book.
FROM SICKBED TO BURIAL
Given the precarious nature of children's lives in late antiquity, many families were not prepared to leave an offspring's health to chance. Nor did aid in cases of illness necessarily come from physicians and midwives. As Maureen Carroll has noted, "No doubt medical care would be sought if a child fell ill, but it was not always available, nor was it necessarily on time or of any use." Instead, parents who feared for their children's well-being might turn to protecting them with charms, amulets, and spells. These measures were evidently in common use among many late ancient Christians: the remnants of incantations, prayers, and protective symbols crafted in papyrus, fabric, and other, more durable materials suggest as much, as do the pervasive and virulent arguments bishops leveled against these items.
Despite ecclesiastical critiques, many parents who sought to shield their children in this way doubtless saw themselves as wholly pious: after all, clergy themselves were apparently at times involved in preparing protective charms, and the language many of them invoke is replete with biblical invocations. A fifth-century-C.E. amulet from Oxyrhynchus demonstrates both the anxiety that may have moved a parent to seeking additional protection for her child, and the profoundly Christian tone such writings could take. The piece of papyrus, designed to be folded and worn on a string around the neck of its recipient, reads in part as follows:
Lord * Christ, son and word of the living God, the one who healed every disease and every sickness, heal and look upon your female slave Joannia also, to whom Anastasia alias Euphemia gave birth, and expel from her and put to flight every fever-heat and every kind of chill, quotidian, tertian and quartan and every evil, on account of the prayers and entreaties of our mistress, the God-bearer, and of the glorious archangels and of John, the holy and glorious apostle and evangelist and theologian, and of saint Serenus and of saint Philoxenus and of saint Victor and of saint Justus and of all the saints.
Amulets often sought to provide wholesale protection from illness or envious demons. In this instance, however, the entreaties suggest, as AnneMarie Luijendijk has pointed out, that Joannia received hers when she was already afflicted with the illness the amulet was intended to counter. The text does not indicate whether Joannia was a child or an adult, nor does it tell readers about the extent to which her mother, Anastasia/Euphemia, was responsible for procuring the item. Yet ample examples point to both the desire to protect children by way of such charms and ecclesiastical concerns over the deployment of "magic" to these ends. John Chrysostom, writing in Antioch shortly before the production of the aforementioned amulet, for example, suggests that the sight of children with amulets or miniaturized gospel books around their necks was common in his city. Such practices might, the reader infers from Chrysostom's complaints, indeed serve their purpose and provide protection for their wearers; in the bishop's view, however, and that of many of his episcopal contemporaries, they seriously compromised the recipient's hope for salvation. It was far better, Chrysostom argued, for a child to die than to survive by means of charms and enchantments.
Whether or not a parent heeded such dire warnings or sought out protective measures for their offspring, the high incidence of childhood mortality ensured that most parents witnessed the death of one or more of their children at some point. In these situations, sources suggest, the moments leading up to a loved one's passing were precious. In the following days and weeks, what was said and done at the time of death could be brought to mind again by grieving family members and could provide a source of solace. Late ancient sources describe tender scenes between parents and children, as in the case of an anonymous Greek homilist:
When ordinary parents have a son who is about to breathe his last breath, they sit around him, they listen to his last words, they embrace his hands, they join the promises about the unexpected, they kiss his mouth, the last kisses of the parents. Once the child has given up the ghost, at the command of Him who has given it, the parents put him in a certain position, they stretch out his hands, they close his eyes, they set his head right, they stretch out his feet, they wash him, they clothe him with worthy winding-sheets.
In this process of performing these emotional and liturgical labors for a child, parents could "soften their own misfortune." When families were deprived of the opportunity to spend these final moments with a child, writers suggest, deaths were experienced as particularly grievous.
Similarly painful was the absence of physical tokens by which parents could recollect the departed loved one. A Syriac homilist thus ascribes a rousing lament to a mother, the biblical matriarch Sarah, who here expects the nature of her son's death to rob her of both final communion with and lasting mementos of his person:
I wish I were an eagle or had the speed of a turtle-dove, so that I might go and behold that place, where my only child, my beloved, was sacrificed!
That I might see the place of his ashes, and look on the place of his binding, and bring back a little of his blood to be comforted by its smell. [That] I had some of his hair to place somewhere inside my clothes, and when grief overcame me, I had some of his clothes, so that I might imagine him, as I put them in front of my eyes; and when suffering sorrow overcame me I gained relief through gazing upon them I wish I could see his pyre and the place where his bones were burnt and could bring a little of his ashes and gaze on them always, and be comforted.
The desire for physical reminders of a departed loved one, particularly a child, were limited neither to Christian discourse nor to the homiletical imagination. Indeed, at times those who were remembered thus were not even the commemorator's offspring. The emperor Augustus, for example, according to Suetonius, kept in his chambers a statue depicting one of the general Germanicus's dead sons. This statue, its image taken perhaps from the boy's death mask, Augustus "used to kiss ... fondly whenever he entered the room." In other instances, such statues were displayed as part of a child's funerary monument; and while many families no doubt lacked resources or even inclination for such a display, late ancient sources hint at the common practice of keeping present the corporeality of one's departed by preserving a kind of relic from their bodies or attire.
Both passages noted above showcase parents' desire to engage physically with their children's corpses, whether to prepare them for burial or to obtain a final reminder of the loved one. These narratives reflect the fact that in late antiquity, when it came to the death of a child, as in the case of deceased adults, initiative for the ensuing ceremonies, and decisions regarding her body, would be made by her family. The latter would prepare the child's body for burial, by washing and dressing her, closing her eyes and arranging her limbs, and, perhaps depending on the child's age, by placing her on the funeral bed on which her body would be carried to the place of burial.
Depending on the family's geographic location, custom dictated that burial would occur either on the day of the death or after a few days' time, allowing for a period of the body's "lying in state" in the home. Beyond the household, however, late antiquity knew of no standardized burial procedures. In the East, the earliest attempt to describe or prescribe such ritual strictures comes from the end of the fifth century and the pen of the author known as Pseudo-Dionysius, who in his Ecclesiastical Hierarchy lays out the processes for preparing for burial the bodies of clergy. In the West, comparable orders appear later still: even in the seventh century, Isidor of Seville's De ecclesiasticis officiis makes no mention of funerary liturgies.
Our evidence for the rites by which even an adult body — to say nothing of a child's — was brought to burial during this period is thus by necessity piecemeal. Historians at times suggest that in classical antiquity, children's funerary rites had to take place at night, before the day following their deaths had dawned. This claim, however, has been recently debunked: Nathalie Baills-Talbi and Véronique Dasen have called it "untopos moderne." By the onset of the imperial era, in any case, children's burials had moved into the light, and were apparently at times no less dramatic an occasion than those of adults. Their procession to the grave thus might be accompanied by family members and friends, as well as the local bishop or presbyters. At times, Christians would also employ "professional" mourners as well: wailing women who announced the family's grief to the community. Bishops tended to disapprove vociferously of such ritual additions; John Chrysostom, in fact, threatened to expel from the church "for a long time" any members of his Constantinopolitan congregation who took recourse to such traditional measures. Yet nearly two centuries later, less than 150 miles from Antioch, another bishop found similar cause to complain about his communities' habits of grieving. The continued vigor of episcopal venom suggests that lay Christians did not always heed religious leaders' exhortation on how to bury and mourn their loved ones.
During the procession, clergy or laypeople might take the initiative to chant psalms, as well as perhaps hymns composed for such occasions. Among the extant works of Severus, the sixth-century bishop of Antioch, for example, one finds hymns for specific parts of the burial, including the lowering of the body into the grave. Severus similarly composed chants designed for the commemoration of members of a particular demographic stratum, including ones designed to accompany the burial of children and infants. Like most of his liturgical writings, these hymns are replete with biblical intertexts and designed to train the community's eyes on the eschatological future rather than the transient life in this world:
Let us not weep beyond measure for those who through death have been separated from their loved ones, like the peoples who have no hope. For the man-loving Lord has led them to himself, who bore witness and said, "Suffer the children and hinder them not from coming unto me, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them and those like them" (Mt 19.14). With them we also shall after a little time be; but let us beseech and entreat the merciful Lord that with them we may be admitted to be heirs of the everlasting mansions which he has from of old prepared for the just and for the righteous, according to the abundance of his great mercy.
Once the procession arrived at the child's grave, the deceased would be inhumed there amidst prayers and hymns, followed by the traditional funeral meal or perhaps a Eucharist. Their final resting places, as well as the physical arrangements of their burial sites, nevertheless differed considerably by time, place, and families' socioeconomic standing.
GRAVES AND THEIR MARKERS
Writing more than thirty-five years ago, Keith Hopkins cast a striking vision of the city of Rome both defined and represented by its funerary memorials, the grand tombs of the Empire's most elite families thriving alongside the equally spacious, if far less eye-catching, mass graves for burial of the city's poor. Children's graves, like those of other Romans, could be found among the graves of every economic stratum in Roman society, even if their mausolea did not reach the grandeur of Gaius Cestius's pyramid. Their burial places, like those of adults, varied, depending on a family's resources and local burial customs; at times, too, their age and anticipated role within the family's social configuration similarly contributed to the shape that their interment took.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah's Son"
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Copyright © 2019 Maria E. Doerfler.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments(Premature) Death as a Good: An Introduction
1. Children’s Deaths in Late Antiquity in Ritual and
Historical Perspective
2. East of Eden: The First Bereaved Parents
3. Mourning Sarah’s Son: Genesis 22 and the Death
of Children
4. Echoes of the Akedah: Jephthah’s Daughter and the
Maccabeans’ Mother
5. Death, Demons, and Disaster: Job’s Children
6. Children and the Sword: The Holy Innocents and the
Death of Children
Conclusion: Children in the Quicksand
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index