Seasonal Collectivity in the Lenten Homilies of Michael Choniates

This talk offers a new perspective on one of the most securely established collective identities in Byzantium—the church, with a focus on provincial urban communities in the twelfth century. It has long been clear that bishops served as focal points within the collective life of the rapidly growing cities of this era, not only representing these towns toward the imperial center but also articulating communal experience and group dynamics on the ground. Relatively few studies, however, have attempted to investigate how this articulating role worked in practice, and those which have done so have tended to encounter persistent and somewhat perplexing tension at the heart of the relationship. These communities’ relationship to their supposed leaders seems to be characterized by opposition at least as much as obedience. Taking seriously the notion of a collective subject, this paper proposes, offers a means of resolving this apparent contradiction. From Plato to Freud to modern neuroscience, theorists of the psyche have repeatedly seen the tension and competition between different constituent (sub)parts as essential to the emergence of individual subjectivity. While acknowledging the very real differences between dynamics within a single human being and among a group, this talk will investigate how analogous processes of individuation-through-tension run through the extant episcopal addresses to their congregations, via the case study of the Lenten homilies of Michael Choniates. Seen in the light, both the season of Lent and homiletics as an admonitory genre emerge as privileged sites for articulating collectivity precisely because they foreground penitence as a mechanism of psychic conflict—and the constitutive nature of contention may offer a model for thinking through forms of collective subjectivity beyond the exceptionally well documented case of ecclesiastical communities.