Between the fifth and the ninth century ad, the church in Constantinople commemorated nine earthquakes that struck the city, prescribing an elaborate liturgical rite annually for each occasion.Footnote 1 Worshippers sang specially composed hymns, heard carefully chosen passages from Scripture, and engaged in mass processions that retraced the steps of the city’s earthquake evacuation route. The rite, in its original fifth-century form, communicated a theology of earthquakes as divine and terrestrial judgment for collective sin but showed confidence in the power of collective repentance to turn aside natural disaster and divine wrath. These and other rituals and prayers related to earthquakes in Byzantine Constantinople were means by which city-dwellers could make meaning from disaster and renegotiate their relationships to God and the land around them in the face of its most destabilizing ecological characteristic: its seismicity.
Located on the North Anatolian Fault, Constantinople (today Istanbul) has experienced countless earthquakes over the course of its history.Footnote 2 Rather than suffering from a lack of meaning, as natural disasters often do in the modern world, earthquakes in the ancient and medieval Mediterranean held a surplus of meaning.Footnote 3 Because of Constantinople’s status as East Roman capital, its place as the seat of the Roman imperial court, and its self-consciousness as the center of the oikoumene, its local earthquakes were particularly freighted with significance, both theological and political. The church’s earthquake rite offered a theological account of natural disasters that unfolded over the course of ritual performance, using language and symbols derived from Christian Scripture.Footnote 4 In liturgy, the church circumscribed the meaning of local earthquakes and raised them up to a universal plane by placing these seemingly random environmental events on a liturgical calendar that was populated with the most important moments of sacred history—the birth, death, resurrection, and glorification of Christ—as well as holy days celebrating the Virgin Mary and the saints. Placing natural disasters alongside moments of triumph, the church both acknowledged their misfortune and also searched for signs of redemption within them. Yet the meaning the church ascribed to local earthquakes was but one of many interpretations of natural disasters in the East Roman capital. Views on the meaning of earthquakes varied widely, and the church’s rituals and prayers constituted a single yet important voice within a fierce cultural debate about the relationship of natural disasters to the city’s—and the Roman Empire’s—historical and eschatological destiny.
The story of earthquakes and liturgy in Constantinople is a story about what happens when ecological instability collides with a society whose shared world of meaning was highly structured by public ritual and whose view of its own identity and place in history reached the highest of stakes. This book seeks to answer two questions. First, what do rites and prayers surrounding earthquakes tell us about the entanglement of liturgy, the environment, and politics in Constantinople in the first millennium? And second, what can the story of earthquakes in Constantinople tell us about Byzantine understandings of the natural world? I argue that liturgical rites for earthquakes constructed Constantinople as a site of theophany and provided a means for the people of “New Rome” to understand themselves as the biblical people of God by making local history into universal, sacred history. However, in framing the people as sinful rather than victorious, the church’s earthquake rites threatened the foundations of Constantinopolitan self-identity as “New Rome” and the triumphant epicenter of Mediterranean political power. Yet earthquakes garnered conflicting interpretations. While the church’s commemoration rite, in its original form, framed earthquakes in terms of divine wrath and chastisement, some objected to the theology of the rite, especially imperial rulers who saw it as politically disadvantageous and produced counter-interpretations and counter-rituals that framed local quakes not as manifestations of divine wrath but rather divine blessing on the city. Later, in the middle Byzantine period, the connection between earthquakes and the actions of the people of Constantinople was largely severed, even in the liturgy. Earthquakes became seen as outside threats unconnected to human sin but for which the protection of saints’ intercessions was required. The history of earthquakes in Constantinople and the shifts in liturgical and other modes of response to them reveal that Byzantine understandings of the natural world were subject to change depending on historical and political circumstances and the agents interpreting them. Earthquakes were deeply meaningful for Constantinopolitans and shaped their worship, cosmology, and politics, but the relationship they revealed between the people, the earth, and God was highly contested and never definitively settled.
Earthquakes and the Study of Byzantine Liturgy
Earthquake rituals in Constantinople were part of a complex and multifaceted ritual system that liturgical scholars call the Byzantine Rite.Footnote 5 The church was not only a place where people went for special occasions like baptisms, marriages, and funerals. It offered, in its cycles of feasting and fasting, its blessings of water and harvest, and its rich artistic edifices and images, a particular vision of the world, God’s action in history, and a way of finding one’s individual and communal place in them. Liturgy was understood to make heavenly realities present on earth. As Andrew Mellas writes, they “were not simply a remembrance of biblical events or a theatrical display of divine things; they enacted a sacred drama that created a space of participation for the faithful in the mystery of salvation.”Footnote 6 Rituals and prayers surrounding earthquakes were an important part of liturgy’s symbolic world-making function in the context of the highly seismic ecology in which Constantinople was situated. Although scholars have long known about Constantinople’s rituals and prayers for earthquakes, they have received very little focused attention.Footnote 7 This absence can be attributed to the fact that much of the scholarship on the Byzantine Rite has concerned itself with establishing the origins and historical evolution of the central sacraments of Eucharist and baptism, largely to the exclusion of more “peripheral” rites.Footnote 8 Using methods first formulated in the nineteenth century under the influence of German higher criticism, liturgiologists trace the origins and development of various liturgical “units”—prayers, ritual actions, feasts, fasts, and so on—and identify patterns of influence and cross-fertilization among various liturgical traditions to pinpoint a given rite’s unique lex orandi: its ritual, textual, and theological core.Footnote 9 In recent years, scholars of Byzantine liturgy have expanded their theoretical toolbox to paint a more comprehensive picture of Christian worship in the East Roman capital, utilizing ritual theory alongside other cultural theories and methodologies to complement the traditional method of comparative liturgiology and focusing on rites in both the center and the periphery of Christian worship.Footnote 10 This is the first monograph-length historical study of the Byzantine Rite to combine liturgiology with methods from the environmental humanities.Footnote 11 As my primary data, I examine local rituals and prayers for earthquakes, which are found in abundance in the main kinds of sources consulted in liturgiological studies: liturgical manuscripts, homilies, theological treatises and letters, hymnography, hagiography, conciliar decrees, and historiographical texts. Drawing from research on seismology and ecological theory, this book also contextualizes liturgical and theological data within an ecology marked by a combustible mixture of orthodox Christianity, late Roman imperial ideology, and high seismicity.
Earthquakes in Constantinople: Ecology and Empire
Earthquakes are always inconvenient, but they were inconvenient in a special way for Constantinople. Just a half-century after the city of Byzantium’s reestablishment by the Emperor Constantine (r. 306–337) in 330 as Constantinople, its bishop claimed the second place of authority in the Catholic Church after the Pope of Rome.Footnote 12 Over the course of late antiquity, the Roman imperial court, having relocated to Constantinople in the 380s, sought to make it the center of the oikoumene, the inhabited world.Footnote 13 Constantinople’s moniker “New Rome” encapsulated the ambitions of the imperial court and the imperial church. There was a difficulty, however, in making Constantinople a truly new Rome due to its lack of an illustrious past. Old Rome housed government institutions, aristocratic families, and symbolic monuments that made up a monumental landscape difficult to replicate elsewhere. Raymond Van Dam writes:
The problem with Rome was that it had too much history that was now incompatible with the reality of barbarian invasions and the establishment of alternative imperial residences. The problem with Constantinople, however, was that it had no history. Emperors and historians hence had to construct a new past for the new capital. Even imaginary histories would be better than no history.Footnote 14
As in Rome, Constantinople’s system of symbolic monuments and public ritual came to serve as the primary means by which the people conceived of their shared Roman history and its ideologically organizing principle: eternal victory.Footnote 15 The imperial court imported public monuments and civil ceremonies from Rome and other cities around the empire that celebrated eternal victory, especially triumph in battle. For instance, one of the seven pignora imperii, material objects or charms that were thought to protect Rome, was secretly moved to Constantinople: the palladium, a wooden cult image said to have been stolen from Troy and taken to the future site of Rome by Aeneas.Footnote 16 Pagan writers had attributed to these objects a certain power and agency, an attribution that was ridiculed by Christian writers like Augustine of Hippo.Footnote 17 Nevertheless, the transfer of the palladium from Rome to Constantinople contributed to late antique traditions that Constantine had transferred the gods of Rome and guarantors of its empire to his new city.Footnote 18 Even more strikingly, the statue of Emperor Constantine located in the Forum of Constantine in the city’s center was modeled on the god Apollo and was probably a repurposed ancient statue of the pagan deity.Footnote 19 With the god-emperor holding a spear in his right hand and a globe in his left hand, the statue could have signified not only that the city was the center of the world but that its rulers upheld the order of creation itself. Earthquakes, to the extent that they signaled divine displeasure on the people and places they struck, threatened this ideological narrative in New Rome, just as they had in Old Rome.Footnote 20 Especially troubling for Constantinople’s bourgeoning ideological narrative was the Christian message of earthquakes as manifestations of the wrath of the all-powerful creator. Christians may well have recalled the words of Jesus about the signs of the last days, when the temple would be destroyed, and earthquakes and other signs would herald the end of the age: “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs” (Mark 13:7–8). The pagan statuary that surrounded Christians in Constantinople may have led them to recall the great earthquake in the book of Revelation and the fall of the evil city of Babylon.Footnote 21
Yet, as the imperial court imported pagan statues and monuments, it also collaborated with the church to import the relics of Christian martyrs and other holy objects from elsewhere in an effort to fashion Constantinople as a Christian metropolis, a “New Jerusalem.”Footnote 22 The import of Christian relics and the building of churches and shrines corresponded to an expansion in public ecclesiastical ritual. After initially borrowing liturgical prayers and practices from Antioch and the greater West Syrian region under the influence of bishops like Gregory of Nazianzus (Archbishop of Constantinople 379–381) and John Chrysostom (Archbishop of Constantinople 397–404), the church in Constantinople began to develop its own local liturgical practices in the late fourth century, in particular, stational liturgy.Footnote 23 Stational liturgy, in the words of Aidan Kavanagh, was worship “on the town.”Footnote 24 In liturgical services, the worshipping congregation moved in procession outdoors along the streets and alleys to churches, shrines, and other sites for prayer and the celebration of the Eucharist. In his seminal study of stational liturgy The Urban Character of Christian Worship, John Baldovin argues that Constantinople’s stational liturgy was an integral part of the city’s self-understanding as New Rome, the permanent home of the emperor and his court:
Christianity, therefore, represented the public religious life of the city by means of its cult. It made the civitas not only civilization, but also holy civilization, a civilization defended as much by icons and relics and processions as it was by walls and military and political power. Thus, the city as holy civilization was a concept that was expressed above all liturgically.Footnote 25
According to Baldovin, the public, stational liturgy of Constantinople harmonized two worlds—church and Roman civitas—and integrated them symbolically into a single “holy civilization.” Indeed, many lavish public ceremonies, in which the line between “Roman” and “Christian” blurred, communicated the notion that the emperor was a divinely chosen ruler and vicegerent of the Christian God.Footnote 26 They displayed a seemingly coherent, theocratic narrative that reconciled the Christian and Greco-Roman traditions, creating what ritual theorist Catherine Bell calls “a sense of cosmological fit” typical of grand political rituals.Footnote 27 However, despite Constantinople’s highly structured, ornamental system of public ritual, the compatibility of Christianity with Romanity was much more contested than it may seem. Indeed, I argue that the earthquake commemoration rite, one of the most elaborate and lengthy stational liturgies of the year in Constantinople, seriously challenges the view that Byzantine Constantinople’s public ritual successfully “harmonized” the competing ideologies of the capital into a coherent whole.Footnote 28
Major natural disasters have a way of provoking conflict and debate about societies’ deepest concerns and identities. Hurricane Katrina, for example, the massive storm that struck New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2005 that resulted in the death and displacement of thousands of residents, prompted a nationwide debate about America’s identity and history, especially in relation to its racial and ethnic minorities who comprised the majority of those most adversely affected by the hurricane.Footnote 29 In early Byzantine Constantinople, the ideological tensions between Christianity and Romanity frequently bubbled to the surface of social life but in no more dramatic fashion than in earthquakes.Footnote 30 As an apocalyptic attitude was increasingly taking hold among the population from the beginning in the sixth century, earthquakes and other catastrophes fueled speculation about the end of the world and the fall of the Roman Empire.Footnote 31 There was much agreement among the populace that Constantinopolitan earthquakes were extraordinarily meaningful events and that they communicated an important message about the role and fate of the city and the Roman Empire in the grand scheme of history.Footnote 32 Yet there was serious disagreement about what that message was. For the church, especially in the early centuries of Constantinople, local earthquakes primarily signified divine judgment. Here, New Rome was not glorious; it was guilty. As New Israel, the city’s collective sin had potentially disastrous ramifications for the success of God’s coming Kingdom in their midst, a destiny they trusted was their own.Footnote 33 The attribution of sinfulness was magnified when earthquakes entered the liturgical calendar, which was the record and representation of sacred history, in participatory, repetitive form.Footnote 34 The commemorations placed Constantinople at the center of the story of God’s providential action in history, the divine oikonomia.Footnote 35 Just as the city of Constantinople was beginning to understand itself as the center of the oikoumene in political terms, the church declared that it was the center of the kosmos in theological terms. Earthquake commemorations fit into this schema but in a condemnatory fashion, singling out the people for their sins rather than their triumphs.
However, one of earthquakes’ often felicitous aspects is that they (eventually) come to a definitive halt. For this reason, the central meaning of a given earthquake could be located not in the fact that it happened but that it stopped—especially if the quake itself took few or no human lives. The inherently polysemantic nature of earthquakes afforded limitless possibilities for interpretation. While the church’s early Byzantine liturgical commemoration of local earthquakes emphasized their violence and cast a dark shadow over imperial ambitions and values, the East Roman imperial court could focus on their cessation. Indeed, throughout the history of earthquakes in Constantinople, the imperial court at times seized upon the possibility of framing earthquakes (or, more precisely, their cessation) not as manifestations of divine wrath but of divine blessing. Divine blessing on Constantinople was a much easier thing to prove in the case of military victories, but because of earthquakes’ multivocality, they too were sometimes able to be corralled into grand historical narratives of the city’s, and the empire’s, special election by God to incarnate his Kingdom on earth. Even the church, in later centuries, sometimes contradicted its own liturgical narrative of sin, wrath, repentance, and redemption by separating earthquakes from human sinfulness. In this way, these two poles of interpretation, “Christian” and “Roman,” remained ever in tension. But they also interacted with each other in a dialogical process of reflection about the meaning of local earthquakes that never found a final resolution in Byzantium.
Natural Disasters, Liturgy, and Byzantine Views on the Environment
The rituals, prayers, and other cultural productions surrounding earthquakes in Constantinople provide a unique window into Byzantine views about the natural world.Footnote 36 Although it is a dubious project to attempt to articulate a society’s “view” of the natural environment from great historical distance, John Haldon has argued that one need not despair utterly as long as due hermeneutical caution is exercised:
While we cannot know much, if anything at all, about the beliefs of most of the individuals who populate the history of the seventh- and eighth-century east Roman world, we may still deduce something of their views and of the issues that concerned them from their reactions to events as described in chronicles and histories, in letters and in sermons, in the acts of church councils, in the writings of hagiographers and theologians and, sometimes, in the writings of the individuals themselves.Footnote 37
These are the kinds of sources that I attend to in this book, with a prominent foregrounding of liturgical rituals and prayers, which can also provide a window—when treated carefully—into popular beliefs.Footnote 38 As Derek Krueger and Andrew Mellas have argued, liturgical rituals and texts in Byzantium could produce and maintain norms and scripts for enacting beliefs and emotions, both of individuals and worshipping communities.Footnote 39 As such, they can provide a privileged window onto ideas about the natural world as well. Beliefs are always caught within a symbolic universe of knowledge, concepts, and affects in which people lived.Footnote 40 Church rites and prayers were a major part of this symbolic universe for Christians in early Byzantium, who, by the sixth century, constituted the majority religious group in the empire and viewed their public ritual as an image of the eternal, celestial realm.Footnote 41 What do church rituals surrounding earthquakes, to the extent that they comprised part of this symbolic universe, disclose about Byzantine beliefs about the natural world?
Greek patristic authors prominently informed Byzantine views of nature. In treatises and homilies, they conceived of the kosmos as a unified whole, a harmonious organism whose purpose was to glorify God. “The whole world, with all its various parts, [God] bound together by some unbreakable law of attraction into one fellowship and harmony; thus even those [parts] farthest away from each other in position, it seems, are united through their affinity,” wrote Basil of Caesarea (d. 379) in his widely read homilies on the six days of creation.Footnote 42 One can find this view of the kosmos represented also in artistic creations like church architecture that constructed worship spaces as kosmoi in miniature.Footnote 43 For the fathers of the church, creation was a “theophany,” a beautiful manifestation of divine will and energies that reflected the purpose for which it was created.Footnote 44 But earthquakes threatened this harmonious picture of the kosmos. They create a sense of panic and confusion, leading to a disruption of one’s sense of the order and stability of the world. Writing on the experience of earthquakes from the perspective of phenomenology, David Allan Rehorick argues that earthquakes engender a sense of disconnection between the body and its surrounding environment: “The tremors disrupt … the ties between [the] body and its surrounding sphere, thus threatening the organization of the embodied person as a whole.”Footnote 45 Social scientists have noted that earthquakes interrupt the everyday rituals and habits that structure our perception of the coherence of the world around us. Earthquakes can create the impression that the world itself has become unstable or that it is about to fall apart. One subject of a recent study of survivors of quakes was “anxious to assure himself that the whole supporting world [had] not collapsed.”Footnote 46 Although people affected by quakes may well be cognitively aware that the earthquake is not actually a worldwide apocalyptic event, such expressions reflect the breakdown of one’s world of meaning at the moment.Footnote 47 Turning to ancient authors, Seneca seems to describe this perplexing experience in his discussion of the massive earthquake in Pompeii in AD 62. He writes, “All places have the same conditions and if they have not yet had an earthquake, they none the less can have quakes. Perhaps this night or, before tonight, this day will split open the spot where you stand securely … Nature formed nothing to be immovable (nihil ita ut immobile esset natura concepit).”Footnote 48 Here Seneca makes the “objectively” false claim that every place in the world is susceptible to seismic destruction, but the scientific veracity of his assertion is not the main point. Rather, the instability of the whole world feels true in the event of a major earthquake. Seneca’s comments give voice to the experience of cosmic instability engendered by earthquakes in the ancient Mediterranean world. Earthquakes seem to threaten the patristic notion of a harmonious kosmos.Footnote 49
Veronica Della Dora has shown that patristic and Byzantine views on the kosmos were mediated by experiences of particular landscapes and sacred environmental spaces she labels topoi. Individual topoi were hyper-meaningful sites of perception into the whole, symbols in the classical sense of the “coming together of two halves, the visible and the invisible.”Footnote 50 By attending to smaller, localized ecologies rather than abstract concepts of “nature,” one gets a better view of the concrete ways in which Byzantines constructed their understandings of the natural world. Yet Della Dora does not account for altered or destroyed landscapes. Earthquakes were disasters that destroyed habits of seeing and walking, familiar routes, landmarks, and monuments—all the elements of familiarity and repetition that are so important for making a “space” a “place.”Footnote 51 By destroying cities and altering landscapes, earthquakes alienated people from their homes and familiar environments in profound ways.Footnote 52 In Libanius’ comments on an earthquake in the Eastern Mediterranean city of Nicomedia in ad 358, the Antiochene orator gives voice to the sense of loss and grief when urban landscapes were altered or destroyed. Commenting on the destruction of city space, he writes,
Everything was falling in disarray. What was hidden became visible and what was visible was hidden. … Where [are] the alleys? Where are the colonnades? Where the avenues? Where the fountains? Where the market places? Where the schools of rhetoric? Where the shrines? Where the former happiness? Where are the young people? And the old men? Where are the baths of the Graces and Nymphs themselves, the greatest of which takes its name from the emperor who completed it and is the equivalent of a whole city? Where now [is] the Council? Where the commonwealth? Where the women? Where the children? Where the palace? Where the hippodrome, which was mightier than the walls of Babylon? Nothing is safe from violence, nothing is invulnerable. Everything is liable to catastrophe.Footnote 53
Libanius here equates one’s familiar surroundings with “happiness” itself, describing the streets and monuments of the city as key components of local city-dwellers’ sense of well-being, now destroyed by an earthquake. For people living in locales destroyed by earthquakes and their accompanying tsunamis and landslides, these were no mere “little tragedies” but blows to their larger sense of belonging in the world. A painted Greek inscription found at the necropolis in Cyrene referring to a late-fourth-century earthquake poignantly illustrates how earthquakes affected not simply “history,” broadly construed, but families and communities: “Demetra, daughter of the landowner Gaius. She lies here with (?) this tomb, [buried?] after her son Theodulus. They died in the fields at Myropola, as the result of an earthquake.”Footnote 54
The notion of “natural disasters” implies that they are events whose meaning is shaped by the people who experience them as disasters.Footnote 55 Traditionally, environmental historians, following the monumental work of Fernand Braudel, have attempted to show how the natural environment shaped broad historical and civilizational changes.Footnote 56 Such longue durée studies of environmental history, while often illuminating, run the risk of falling into misleading determinisms, and thus many recent scholars have preferred to conduct environmental histories on smaller scales in order to get a clearer view of their connection to their correlation with the human.Footnote 57 As Haldon notes, examining climatic changes alone is insufficient for explaining long-term trends and changes or, I would add, short-term trends as well.Footnote 58 A singular focus on the nonhuman in history risks falling into the modernist trap of extrisicizing nature as wholly “other” to human culture and experience, a trap that has been rightly challenged by theorists of the Anthropocene.Footnote 59 As archaeologist Catherine Kearns warns, “When climate or geology are [sic] seen as exogenous forces or mechanisms driving social change, they confirm and reproduce the compartmentalization of nature outside society.”Footnote 60 Indeed, such a compartmentalization of nature, especially in “pre-modern” Western societies, would have been unthinkable. Broadly outlining a more holistic approach to environmental history, Kearns continues,
If we consider environmental changes and historical ecologies holistically as the explanandum, that which needs to be explained, we open up diverse objectives centered on discovering the disorderly interfaces between human actions, social change, and the material world. Beyond mere description or reconstruction of past ecologies, pivoting our inquiries towards human-environment relationships accentuates their participation in and codevelopment with historical processes.Footnote 61
The term “human-environment relationship,” often deployed in the environmental humanities today, implies that the history of human and other-than-human subjects and objects is a mutually dependent and co-evolving one. Haldon, writing on the use of environmental history for studies of the Byzantine past, similarly points to the necessary complexity of doing environmental history in such a mode: “When the phenomena in question are examined more closely from the perspective of a historian or archaeologist, they appear much more complex, particularly in light of the interaction between human societies and their ecology.”Footnote 62 The concept of “human-environment relationship,” which I adopt in this book, helps to unpack that complexity and render it legible. However, because of the inextricability of the natural world and God in Byzantine thought, I expand the notion of “human-environment relationship” to include “divine.” The term “human-environment-divine relationship” does not imply I am seeking to write divine action into the history of Byzantium but rather that early Byzantines could not have conceived of nature, and certainly not natural disasters, otherwise.
My adoption of this terminology belies two fundamental assumptions. First, the change and evolution of human agents, cultures, and societies are inextricably bound together as part of a unified human and other-than-human ecology within a given time and place. It is imperative to see cultural products of a given society—including rituals, liturgies, and prayers—as created and composed within this matrix. Secondly, a given society’s religious outlook, to the extent it concerns itself with the world or kosmos, should also be understood in light of that society’s local ecology, its landscapes, or topoi. When early Byzantines spoke and thought about God’s interaction with the kosmos (or ktisis, “creation”), their first and most immediate reference was their own unique surrounding environment, both built and non-built.Footnote 63 The explanatory power of the triad “human-environment-divine” resides in its adaptability. In the history of Constantinopolitan earthquakes, the roles of each of these three agents were constantly shifting and rearranging depending on a wide variety of circumstances. Even in the case of a single earthquake, interpreters variously see the earth as an agent in its own right, duly responding to the sin inflicted upon it by human beings, or as a tabula rasa, a mere stage for the interaction of God with human society. Similarly, human beings could be seen as having the power to halt quakes through repentance, while at other times they were framed as powerless in the face of the threats of a kosmos suddenly foreign and hostile to them. Often, these differences were motivated less by purely theoretical concerns than by practical ones, concerns having to do with survival or political and religious legitimacy.Footnote 64 The flexible notion of “human-environment-divine relationship” helps to see clearly the complexities at work in Byzantine views of the natural world as people encountered earthquakes. It illuminates the connections that ritual and theology forged and maintained, as well as severed, between the people, the earth, and God.
Outline of Chapters
Chapter 1 reconstructs the liturgical rite for the commemoration of earthquakes in its original fifth-century form. Drawing from and mimicking the immediate responses of the people to earthquakes in the capital, especially their evacuation of the city while desperately crying out to God, the rite framed local earthquakes using biblical narrative tropes, especially the framework of sin, divine and terrestrial wrath, collective repentance, and divine forgiveness characteristic of the Deuteronomic history in the Old Testament.Footnote 65 As it unfolded in ritual performance, the rite depicted the earth as responding to human sin by shaking in an expression of divine displeasure and also halting in response to collective repentance in an expression of divine mercy. In framing the meaning of earthquakes in this scripturalizing way, the rite implicitly affirmed the people of Constantinople as continuous with the biblical people of God and their city and church as the center of God’s providential action in history.
Chapter 2 discusses how two Roman emperors in Constantinople, Arcadius and Theodosius II, took advantage of earthquake rite’s chastisement theology to acquire and maintain political and spiritual authority. These two emperors led the crowds in evacuating the city during the earthquakes of 396 and 447, respectively, and were described as making public displays of repentance and humility as they walked. Imperial displays of humility were risky in late antiquity since they went against the grain of acceptable postures for male rulers in traditional Roman ideology. Their success depended largely upon positive reception and appraisal by supporters. When successful, as in the case of Arcadius and Theodosius, such displays of humility during and in the aftermath of earthquakes could relocate the power the liturgical earthquake rite invested in collective repentance to the iconic bodies of individual rulers.
Chapter 3 examines two earthquakes, in 438 and 557, in which imperial and ecclesiastical officials eschewed the chastisement theology of the earthquake rite and created alternative interpretations for the quakes in order to frame Constantinople not as a topos of divine wrath but as divine blessing. In the quake of 438, according to a legend, a young child was lifted up to heaven, where he heard angels singing the Trisagion hymn. After teaching it to the people gathered at a large field outside the city during the quake, they sang it, and the earthquake stopped. After the church split that ensued following the Council of Chalcedon in 451, pro-Chalcedon (imperial) ecclesiastical officials used this legend as a proof of their orthodoxy (a heretical hymn could not, they argued, halt an earthquake) over and against their anti-Chalcedon opponents. They thus argued that the quake was a sign of divine blessing on Constantinople and its church and its doctrine, not wrath. Similarly, in the aftermath of a major earthquake of 557 that partially destroyed the church of Hagia Sophia, the court of the emperor Justinian I constructed an elaborate ceremony for the rebuilding of the church that contradicted the earthquake rite’s penitential focus. They thus attempted to shift the cultural narrative away from divine wrath and toward divine blessing upon the emperor’s project of renovatio imperii in Constantinople.
Chapter 4 discusses responses to earthquakes in the seventh and eighth centuries when Byzantium witnessed a sharp rise in devotion to the Virgin Mary “Theotokos” and the saints. It first examines the early-seventh-century Life of St. Symeon Stylites the Younger, a Syrian pillar saint with ties to Constantinople. Riddled with accounts of earthquakes and the holy man’s response to them, the Life provides a window into how Eastern Mediterranean Christians could construct saintly authority and power in response to natural disasters. It then examines the liturgical commemorations of two earthquakes in eighth-century Constantinople, especially the massive quake of 740. These commemorations newly and prominently incorporated the Theotokos as intercessor against the threat of natural disasters, using texts and rites borrowed from the commemoration of enemy invasions of Constantinople in the seventh and eighth centuries. In borrowing from the theology of enemy invasions and locating power to halt earthquakes not in collective repentance but in prayers of the saints, the earthquake rite exteriorized natural disasters so that they ceased to be intimately connected with (earthly) human action.
Chapter 5 examines the expeditious growth of liturgical texts and hymnography in Constantinople between the eighth and tenth centuries and the simultaneous cessation of the city’s practice of commemorating new earthquakes in the liturgical calendar. New hymns were added to the commemoration of the earthquake of 740, making it “earthquake day,” the one day of the year in which Constantinople reflected theologically upon earthquakes at the expense of other earthquake commemorations. Yet, instead of canonizing a single theology of earthquakes, the hymnography only complicated the picture by placing several contradictory visions of earthquakes side by side in the same commemoration rite. However, a separate, standalone prayer created in the eighth century for use whenever earthquakes would strike, which would eventually overshadow the earthquake commemoration rite as the primary mode of liturgical response to earthquakes in Byzantium, displayed a theology somewhat more consistent with the early vision of the earthquake rite.
Constantinople’s seismicity forced its residents to confront and integrate the experience of environmental instability into their broader inherited vision of an ordered kosmos. Even in an ecology like that of the eastern Mediterranean, where seismic events were occasionally to be expected, they still disrupted everyday life and provoked a collective confrontation with a world that did not seem orderly, beautiful, and harmonious but rather terrible and fierce. As the book traces the history of earthquakes and ritual responses to them in Constantinople in the first millennium, continuities and discontinuities abound. The roles of the people, the earth, and God shifted along with political circumstances and historical developments. The dualities of righteousness and sinfulness, history and apocalypse, divine blessing and divine wrath, earth as both agent of destruction and victim of human oppression—such were the cultural and religious stuff of seismicity in New Rome in the first millennium. But despite all of these contradictions, one thing remained constant: earthquakes pointed to a greater reality beyond the here and now. Even if earthquakes were not always signs of a harmonious kosmos, they were signs of a theophanic kosmos.
