Christian Divination in Late Antiquity by Robert Wiśniewski

Abstract

Reviewed by: Christian Divination in Late Antiquity by Robert Wiśniewski Jennifer Eyl Robert Wiśniewski Christian Divination in Late Antiquity Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020 Pp. 287. €105.00. If a Christian in late antiquity wanted to divine secret information about the past, present, or even the future, what would he or she do? If a Christian wanted to know how to proceed with regard to an important decision, how would he or she find divine counsel? If a Christian sought to be healed of an intractable ailment, where might he or she go? What practices and strategies were available for gaining access to the hidden information about what did or would happen in the world, what one ought or ought not do, or how one could be cured? These questions stand at the center of Robert Wiśniewski’s Christian Divination in Late Antiquity. A much-revised English version of his earlier 2013 book in Polish, Wiśniewski primarily divides the monograph into chapters based on divinatory technique or practice. Chapter One explores attitudes towards forms of divination among Christian ecclesiastical leaders such as Athanasius, Origen, and Eusebius of Caesarea. The chapter also details a history of legislation against divination among the emperors Constantine, Constantius II, Valentinian, Theodosius, and Honorius. Wiśniewski does not suppose that “ordinary Christians” complied with all such laws and ecclesiastical teachings but uses the chapter as a starting point to discuss how Christians continued to employ divinatory techniques despite such top-down prohibitions. The second chapter focuses on prophecy. Wiśniewski points to a dip in references to prophetic activity in Christian sources in the third century, on the heels of Montanism. Yet, we see a resurgence, in the literary record anyway, of prophetic claims in the hagiographies of the desert monks and other ascetics of the fourth century and the centuries that follow. The Life of Antony, the Life of Paul, and the writings about Martin of Tours, for example, assert that ascetics had the ability to answer questions that depended on a kind of clairvoyance. Wiśniewski also considers numerous letters sent to ascetics, enquiring about the future (e.g., “Should I marry?” “Will my servant recover from a dog bite?”). The third chapter, “Take and Read,” explores forms of bibliomancy among late antique Christians. In addition to Augustine’s quite famous account in Confessions, the chapter considers evidence from the Life of Antony, Theophanes’s Chronographia, and the Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite. Wiśniewski looks at evidence for bibliomantic practices that range from opening a gospel or Pauline letter and drawing mantic information from the first words seen on the page, to [End Page 457] the assumed divine power of the physical codex itself for warding off headaches. He suggests that the expanded use of the codex among Christians may account for an increase in bibliomantic uses of divine text. Chapter Four focuses on the sorts of texts which were created for the specific use of divination, for example, the Sortes Sanctorum, the Gospel of the Lots of Mary, and the Sortes Monacenses. The writing of divinatory lot-texts was hardly invented by Christians, and here Wiśniewski deliberates on the process of “Christianizing” the practice. This chapter demonstrates the difficulty of working with categories like Christian, pagan, religious, and secular (more on this problem in a moment). Chapter Five examines the divinatory power ascribed to the bodies of saints—touching the body, possessing relics of the body, or even being in proximity to the body (in a shrine, martyrium, or altar). The author also considers what appears to be a widespread practice of using lots at the graveside of a saint or on an altar containing saints’ relics. These “oracular tickets” (a Christianized form of cleromancy) have been discovered at Oxyrhynchus and at various Christian sanctuaries across Egypt, and we find a sole literary reference to the practice in Gregory of Tours’s Lives of the Fathers. Chapter Six explores the extent to which late antique Christians consulted demoniacs, or energumens, for information not accessible to regular humans. The practice is not mentioned in any canons or laws produced by the church, but is condemned by Athanasius...