The Larger Context

Professor Dervin’s essay makes a strong case that actual family experience in the early Christian era generated a range of emotional reactions that were then worked-over in the religious thinking and imagery of the period. That argument is persuasive, coherent and traced through a number of theological themes, practices (e.g., baptism) and images. The essay effectively argues that religious culture-making in regard to childrearing served to express and contain many of the feelings, including those least easily managed, that arose in actual family life.

The essay also asserts a relationship in the opposite direction, that religious culture-making altered the world of child-rearing (citing St. John Chrysostom’s instructions as an example). Recognizing that a single essay cannot fully illustrate every point it makes, it would be helpful in a larger work or a follow-up essay to have examples of the child-rearing practices and concepts that preceded Christianity’s influence, with comparisons and contrasts so that the degree and nature of change would be clearer. This essay seems to say there was little, if any, change in rates of abandonment and beatings, but that a more kindly strain of thinking, feeling and treatment was fostered alongside abandonment and harshness, a strain that had not previously existed or had not existed to the same degree. A follow-up spelling out of the “before and after” would be most welcome.

The essay invites questions about another matter not part of its agenda: the historical organization of adult life in its own right, as the context for both family life and religious culture. What was going on in the historical world that left families so inclined to abandon children? Were ordinary families so bereft of resources (like food) that children overtaxed parental

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resources to the point that abandonment was the only solution? If so, as seems to be the case, was this the result of: a population growing faster than the agriculture of the time could support; the organization of the Roman world with its mechanisms for acquiring and distributing wealth; the evolving chaos as Rome’s ability to sustain its legions sank in the face of invading peoples; or other historical or climatic factors? The answers would enlarge our understanding of the context for this intimate portrait of emotional life as experienced in families and religion in early Christendom.

Given the continuity in abandonment and beatings, the essay seems to imply that early Christians, Christian though they might be, nonetheless grew up as members of a Roman world. While Christianity offered its adherents much that was different from the world view of Rome, Christian families lived in the world Rome built, and that was a world built by war. Rome’s existence was steeped in warring with other peoples and in the battling of Roman armies against each other at the behest of its elite in their endless struggles over power. Having created an urban poor with little to no means of self-support, the elite solution to discontent lay in providing mass displays of murder and other slaughter as entertainment (along with grain). So violent were the times that antipathy for Cicero was resolved not only by having him murdered, but by nailing his severed head and hands to the podium in the Senate where he had given his offensive orations. For all its glories, Rome’s was a culture in which physical violence was a normal part of life at home and abroad. With the emotional arousal of physical violence so much a part of adult life, it is little wonder that beatings of children would be common and that parents would find themselves seesawing between rage and affection. The indulgence of violent impulses in a brutality-prone adult world and the indulgence of violent impulses in relating to children would appear to be all of a piece. Can the bulk of the violence in the adult-adult world be attributed to the emotional sequellae of widespread abandonment and childbeating? Or did the adult world have systemic dynamics of its own that fostered a pervasive culture of violence, which, affecting the emotional state of parents, led to their beating their children? Was the fondness for mulling over the mangling of saints and the mangling of Christ’s body in the crucifixion a cultural working-over of sadistic and masochistic elements arising only from childhood experiences, or was it a response to the pervasive violence of the adult world in its own right, did the two act as “independent variables” reinforcing each other?

That question raises another. Children grown into adulthood participate in the economic, political, religious and military life of their times. Given the myriad choice-points when historical circumstances are pushed in one direction or another by the options that seem plausible, actions taken or refrained from, relationships built or abandoned, impulses given free reign or submitted to law, adults whose feel for life ripened in an emotionally seesawing, abandoning, brutal childhood might well choose brutal means over concern for others, and impulse-indulgence over submission to lawful procedure, with enormous import for the kind of world they and their contemporaries would inhabit. Recognition that history’s movers and shakers interpret situations, size up options and take action based in part on emotionally-charged templates forged in early life casts light on an aspect of the project of historical change left out of calls for change that define themselves purely in political, economic, religious, ideological or nationalistic terms. An adult world given to violence appears to be at risk of perpetuating itself in part through the experience it gives its children, teaching them by immersion that this is the kind of world they will have to navigate and these are the means for navigating it. This puts the next generation at risk of finding that the kind of world they knew as children will prove to be the only kind of world they will ever know. The capacities for innovation, reason and generosity offer the prospect of going beyond navigating the world as it has been to reshape that world to be something better. In that context, as Eli Sagan might ask: Did the emergence of the splitting of feelings in relation to childhood and parenting that so marked Christendom’s thinking and art, as documented here, in some way contribute to ameliorating violence in the post-Roman world? Or did violence continue unabated? Did it continue but reorganized into different avenues of expression? If change did occur, did the cultural work performed by Christendom in regard to childhood contribute to producing it–or just follow in its wake? If change happened, was it a result of a change in the level of scarcity regarding food; a shift in the nature of societal organization resulting from

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technological innovation during the middle ages or beyond that shrank the percentage of the population caught in scarcity’s grip; the coming of an outside influence; other historical or climatic factors?

Thoughts about the back and forth interplay of emotional life (born in childhood, worked-over in religion, played out in adulthood) with the organization and events of the larger adult-adult historical context (that impact parenting and thus the world of childhood) would be most welcome, both in their own right and as a context for addressing the role Christendom’s culture-making about childhood may have played in the evolving drama of this civilization’s relationship to its own capacities for violence and for the cherishing of life.

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