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Unfinished Christians

Unfinished Christians

Ritual Objects and Silent Subjects in Late Antiquity

by Georgia Frank

Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press

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9781512823967
Published: February 2023

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What can we know about the everyday experiences of Christians during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries? How did non-elite men and women, enslaved, freed, and free persons, who did not renounce sex or choose voluntary poverty become Christian? They neither led a religious community nor did they live in entirely Christian settings. In this period, an age marked by “extraordinary” Christians—wonderworking saints, household ascetics, hermits, monks, nuns, pious aristocrats, pilgrims, and bishops—ordinary Christians went about their daily lives, in various occupations, raising families, sharing households, kitchens, and baths in religiously diverse cities. Occasionally they attended church liturgies, sought out local healers, and visited martyrs’ shrines. Barely and rarely mentioned in ancient texts, common Christians remain nameless and undifferentiated.
Unfinished Christians explores the sensory and affective dimensions of ordinary Christians who assembled for rituals. With precious few first-person accounts by common Christians, it relies on written sources not typically associated with lived religion: sermons, liturgical instruction books, and festal hymns. All three genres of writing are composed by clergy for use in ritual settings. Yet they may also provide glimpses of everyday Christians’ lives and experiences. This book investigates the habits, objects, behaviors, and movements of ordinary Christians by mining festal preaching by John Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nyssa, and Romanos the Melodist, among others. It also mines liturgical instructions to explore the psalms and other songs performed on various feast days. “Unfinished,” then, connotes the creativity and agency of unremarkable Christians who engaged in making religious experiences: the “Christian-in-progress” who learns to work with material and bring something into being; the artisans who attended sermons; and, more widely, the bearers of embodied knowing.

"In Unfinished Christians, Georgia Frank seeks the sensory and affective experiences of non-elite Christians in late antiquity. She finds them in workshops, nighttime prayer, songs, and processions, and she comprehends them through the metaphor of craft...Frank’s lyrical prose, sensitive insights, transdisciplinary reading, and deep endnotes make this a joyous and enriching contribution to early Christian studies. But Unfinished Christians is also a model for readers in other subfields of the humanities who seek to integrate text, material, and sensation in understanding the formation of religious practices and subjectivities." ~Material Religion

"This is a book that is easy to read and elegantly argued...[I]t breaks new ground and makes an important contribution both to lived ancient religion research and, by virtue of its interest in affect, to the increasingly large body of literature on the history of the emotions in late antiquity." ~Vigiliae christianae

"The subjects of Georgia Frank’s Unfinished Christians are elusive – 'ordinary Christians,' as she calls them...Almost by definition, they leave little mark on the historical record. And yet most late ancient Christians would have fallen into this category. How, then, might we gain access to their lives and experiences, however partial and indirect that access might be? This is the challenge that Frank takes up in this carefully researched and beautifully written book." ~Church History

"Frank offers innovative approaches to the study of non-elite late antique religion. We are still in many ways with the elite—this is inescapable—but Frank’s case for a 'peripheral perception' is welcome in broadening new perspectives and, perhaps even more helpfully, ways of thinking about elite texts. The study is effective in revitalizing our thinking on ritual behaviors and the feelings these evoked." ~Studies in Late Antiquity