Debate and Dialogue: Christian and Pagan Cultures, c. 360-430.(Book review)

doi:10.1017/S0009640709000559

Debate and Dialogue: Christian and Pagan Cultures, c. 360-430. By Maijastina Kahlos. Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology, and Biblical Studies. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007. x + 215 pp. $99.95 cloth.

Maijastina Kahlos sets out to explore the discursive construction of Christian and pagan identities in early Christian polemical and apologetic literature. In the introduction, Kahlos discusses some classic interpretive problems posed by early Christian apologetics. Christian apologists argue against a highly contrived "paganism" that usually bears only a distorted relationship to the material realities of traditional religious practice. Apologetic literature (and particularly the post-Constantinian texts that are the focus of Kahlos's study), moreover, presents a triumphalist historical narrative of Christianization that influences modern understandings of the history of late ancient religions. Thus, by laying bare the strategies by which late ancients constructed pagan-Christian difference, Kahlos seeks to "attain a deeper wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein, a historical-effective consciousness of Christianity" (5). The book's second chapter, "Constructing and Deconstructing Dichotomies," examines the various binary oppositions that Kahlos locates at the core of Christian apologetic discourse. Such dualistic thinking, the author points out, is not uniquely Christian, but is one example of "the basic antithetical structure of thinking" (11). Modern scholars must avoid reiterating the binary oppositions of early Christian discourse in their studies of late ancient religions, Kahlos continues, but to do so they must grapple with alternative terminologies that are often problematic in other ways, such as "polytheism," "traditional cults," and so forth.

Kahlos recognizes that discourses based on rigid dichotomies are inherently unstable. Drawing on Derridean insights into the differance characteristic of all discursive constructions, Kahlos points to the inherent instability of early Christian rhetorics of difference. Here Kahlos introduces the concept of "incerti," "those unclassifiable and indefinable individuals who appear in the grey area between hard-line polytheism and hard-line Christianity ... and who elude the rigid pagan-Christian dichotomy" (31). As subjects who deny and challenge the ostensible certainty of the pagan-Christian dichotomy, incerti catalyze rhetorics of anxiety on the part of Christians and "pagans." It was the reality of incerti, Kahlos argues, that motivated rhetorics about apostates, false converts, and "crypto-pagans."

The subsequent four chapters enumerate and discuss various rhetorical elements in late fourth and early fifth century Christian apologetics. Kahlos's main focus is on Latin apologists, especially Augustine, although some major Greek apologists (for example Justin, ...