Foucault’s Heterotopia in Christian Catacombs: Constructing Spaces and Symbols in Ancient Rome by Eric C. Smith (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Foucault’s Heterotopia in Christian Catacombs: Constructing Spaces and Symbols in Ancient Rome by Eric C. Smith Nicola Denzey Lewis Eric C. Smith Foucault’s Heterotopia in Christian Catacombs: Constructing Spaces and Symbols in Ancient Rome New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013 Pp. 216. $90.00. This book originated as a dissertation at Iliff and, in structure and scope, still betrays its origins as such. Organized into eight chapters that run more-or-less chronologically, the final chapter offers only a few pages of conclusions and an epilogue. Endnotes rather than footnotes tend to be more discursive than bibliographic—both their location and content can provoke some inconvenience and frustration. Nevertheless, this brief monograph is gracefully written and cogently argued. The book explores the Foucauldian concept of a heterotopia, that is, a space which mimics, mirrors, subverts, and critiques other spaces, to paraphrase the prologue (3), as applied to one particular space: the Cubicula of the Sacraments at Rome’s Catacombs of Callixtus. After a brief introduction, Smith surveys the history of the catacombs (Chapter Two); the concept of a heterotopia (Chapters Three and Four); early Christian art seen from the perspective of a heterotopia (Chapter Five); early Christian texts such as the Shepherd of Hermas, which he also sees as expressing heterotopias (Chapter Six) and finally, Chapter Seven’s “Heterotopia as Lived Space.” With its attentiveness to critical theory, particularly the work of Foucault and Lefebvre on spatiality, this book marks part of a refreshing new interdisciplinary approach to the study of early Christianity. The book is perhaps at its weakest in the second chapter, the history of the catacombs, drawing on only a few English-language studies, notably Greydon [End Page 132] Snyder’s Ante-Pacem and a coffee-table book on the Christian catacombs published under the auspices of the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology. This is perhaps no fault of Smith’s, since the most helpful scholarship (the work of John Bodel, Eric Rebillard, and Barbara Borg) came out relatively recently. But the omission of more reliable studies means, unfortunately, that from the outset Smith argues his case from very insecure footing, starting with the assumption that a third-century Christian community, in conflict with Rome, created a coded burial chamber in a purely Christian complex that reflected their disaffection. This simply cannot be discerned from the extant evidence. The Church writ large did not administer the catacombs in the third century, as Smith assumes; the catacombs themselves were not distinctively Christian spaces but contained people of every religious affiliation. That some continue to perceive Rome’s catacombs as exclusively Christian speaks to the success of nineteenth-century catacomb scholarship. There is some indication that Smith himself recognizes this (see 9–11; 91) but, frustratingly, he relies on an ideologically-driven picture of Christian antiquity that ultimately undermines the persuasiveness of his argument. The third chapter is stronger. Smith elucidates the concept of heterotopia, noting that Foucault himself did not fully articulate the concept, but that it has continued to develop within cultural studies. Useful for Smith’s purposes is Foucault’s distinction between a “crisis heterotopias,” often sites of burial and mourning (20), and “heterotopias of deviation,” sites of anti-hegemonic resistance. Smith sees the Cubicula of the Sacraments as both: “Such a spatial analysis reveals how the community of the catacombs saw themselves in relation to Roman power and cultural hegemony: as critics of, foreigners to, and even opponents of the Roman ideology that surrounded them” (3). I would argue that Smith would be on firmer ground seeing the cubicula as a “crisis heterotopia” exclusively, since it is easy to see how these chambers functioned as a Christian answer to the finality of death. Throughout this monograph, Smith applies a recurrent set of fundamental assertions to Christian life in third-century Rome. To presume Christian “community” in this era seems to me fraught with potential interpretive pitfalls. Why need it have been set in conflict and resistance against Rome as a whole? And unfortunately, a “community behind the Cubicula of the Sacraments,” continuously assumed here, remains entirely opaque, despite Smith’s attempts to conjure one. A family burial vault—all such vaults were...