Kalleres repeatedly remarks that scholars have tended to identify early Christian demons either as metaphors for cosmic instability or as rhetorical sites of impure boundary penetration that require expulsion. Smith has argued-meaning, a standard against which, say, Christian and non-Christian identities were culturally constructed-but also a definitive target of exorcistic assaults spearheaded by “highly mobile, aggressive holy men and women” (95-97). Strikingly, for urban bishops, and John Chrysostom in particular, the “demonic” was not solely a “locative” mapping device, as Jonathan Z. In framing her discussion around experiences with the demonic, Kalleres intuitively reconfigures scholarly assumptions about the relation between demons and humans. non-orthodox identities, episcopal figures perceived and credited demons with the power of profoundly disturbing every gesture, word, and sensory experience of the physical world. In other words, orbiting the nexus of Christian vs.
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Borrowing from Birgit Meyer’s study of Pentecostalism in Ghana, Kalleres describes in colorful abundance how “urban ecclesiastical and episcopal leaders gain power and authority in and over their city through diabolizing others’ forms of ritual and rhetoric, the public and performative practices that ultimately organize and coordinate the city’s wider enchanted and social environments into a series of coordinating dualities: divine against the demonic, the Nicene party against those who are enemies of Nicene Christianity” (202). An instrumental facet of Christianization was the diabolization of all Greco-Roman and Jewish practices and beliefs. Christianization, in this context, denotes the deliberate assimilation of city space through ritual activity and rhetoric. She recursively employs the designations “Christianization” and “diabolization” to describe processes of cultural engagement and competition between Christians and others living in their immediate municipal environs. Two key terms in City of Demons warrant attention as they open up a number of discursive trajectories taken by Kalleres. Most provocatively, the city sphere in late antiquity emerges as a way of spiritually perceiving, even confronting, demons in direct public battle. As such, John, Cyril, and Ambrose preoccupied themselves in sermons and baptismal lectures with the complex task of Christianizing urban spaces co-inhabited by Greco-Roman paraphernalia and custom, and thus demonic infestation. Focusing on the fourth-century figures of John Chrysostom in Antioch, Cyril of Jerusalem, and Ambrose of Milan, Kalleres stresses how urban bishops were also significantly adept demonologists and exorcists. These soldiers of Christ engaged in strategic “spiritual warfare” against a horde of malevolent spirits plaguing post-Constantinian Christianity. She foregrounds the rhetorical, ideological, and ritualized construction of Christian identities as baptized Christian soldiers, equipped to battle the demonic in the city. Where City of Demons contains a great deal of vivid detail on the physical geography of the late antique city-maps of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Milan precede the introduction and chapters 1, 4, and 7 include painstaking, descriptive research-this is of marginal importance to Kalleres’ argument. This rich and tantalizing book explores how demonically embattled cityscapes in the late Roman world were creatively structured and restructured by Christian ecclesiastical leaders. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. City of Demons: Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity.
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