On
Kissing: A Q&A
with Michael Penn
 A kiss is still
a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh. Right?
Actually, despite
the lyrics to the famous torch song from the movie Casablanca,
the answer
is no.
Kissing has
many meanings—from an expression of
erotic love to the social equivalent of a handshake. But,
the act of "touching
somebody or something with the lips, either gently or passionately," as
one dictionary defines kissing, is not just a modern phenomenon.
Kissing has a long, colorful history that moves into some unexpected
terrain, such as the early Christian Church.
Long neglected
by scholars, the role kissing played in the development of
early Christianity is both important and complex
and is the
subject of Kissing Christians, its first full-scale scholarly
investigation.
In his new
book, Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late
Ancient Church, just published by the
University
of
Pennsylvania
Press, assistant professor of religion Michael
Penn explores
how and why the kiss rose to symbolic and liturgical prominence
among
early Christians.
According to the publisher: "Throughout the first six centuries
of the common era, early Christians kissed each other during prayer,
Eucharist, baptism, ordination, and funerals, when taking monastic
vows, in greeting, and at events surrounding martyrdom. Controversies
concerning whether men and women should kiss each other, could
one kiss a heretic, or do Jews even have a kiss became part of
larger debates regarding the internal structure of Christian communities
and their relations with outsiders.
"Kissing
Christians is the first comprehensive study of this ubiquitous
early Christian rite. Through an examination of the ways
ancient Christians described and practiced the kiss, Kissing Christians shows how early Christian leaders utilized ritual kissing
to help construct Christian identity."
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Assistant
Professor of Religion Michael Penn |
In the following
Q&A, Penn answers
questions about his new book.
What prompted
you to write Kissing Christians?
As you can
imagine, my friends have many of their own theories for why I
spent years studying kissing. The
real answer,
though, is by comparison a bit anticlimactic. I wanted
to help correct
a bias that I think many of us have regarding religion
in general and Christianity in particular. For most
Americans, Christianity
is all about belief. Consider, for example, the often-quoted
question, “Do
you accept Jesus as your personal savior?” And
yet, when one looks at religion in a broader context,
it becomes clear that
religion isn’t just about what one thinks,
but also about what one does. So when I decided to
concentrate
on the history
of early Christianity, I wanted to produce a work
that investigated what role early rituals had in
defining
who was and who was not
Christian. As I began my research, I discovered that
one of the most widely practiced and discussed early
Christian rituals was
the exchange of a kiss. The more I explored this
ritual, the more intrigued I became. As I discovered
that early
Christian women
and men often kissed each other, in church, on the
lips, my vision of early Christianity radically changed.
I quickly decided that
there was enough material here for a book, and especially
as kissing is such a bodily centered action, I thought
it would be the perfect
case example for exploring the role of religious
practice in early Christian communities.
First,
tell us a bit about the history of kissing
and what kissing meant in the Greco-Roman world.
As
in our own society, kissing had many different
meanings in the ancient world. Not surprisingly,
Greco-Roman
artwork and
texts
often depict the kiss as an erotic gesture; it
appears in everything from Greek pornography
to the Roman
equivalent of a Harlequin
novel. In other contexts kissing was seen as
a familial gesture;
several
sources even claim that the reason men always
kiss female relatives is to perform a sort of breath
check and make
sure the women
aren’t
stealing the family wine. Friends frequently
kissed each other; politicians seeking office
would kiss
constituents (the ancient
equivalent of “kissing babies”).
Individuals would kiss the hand of rulers (I
think of this
as an early version of “kissing
up”). The kiss also played a role in patronage,
slavery, celebrations, magic, elections, funerary
rites, contracts, departure,
reunions. Just when I thought my collection of
ancient kisses was complete, I’d come across
an unexpected reference such as the statement
that kissing a donkey’s nostrils cures
the common cold, a description of animal trainers
kissing tigers, or a discussion of a woman trying
to seduce
a man who recently was
transformed into a mule! It was this huge diversity
of meanings that provided both the opportunity
for and a challenge to the early
church appropriating the kiss as a Christian
ritual.
What
was the meaning of kissing in the early Christian
church?
Just as kissing
had many different meanings in the wider ancient world, so too
early Christians
interpreted
the
kiss in various
ways. Because ancient kissing was often seen
as a familiar gesture, many early Christians
kissed
each
other to
help construct themselves
as a new sort of family, a family of Christ.
Similarly, in the Greco-Roman world, kissing
often was seen
as involving a transfer
of spirit; when you kissed someone else you
literally
gave them part of your soul. The early church
expanded on this
and claimed
that, when Christians kissed, they exchanged
the Holy Spirit with one another. Christians
also emphasized
the kiss as
an indication of mutual forgiveness (it’s
from here that we get the term “kiss
of peace”). These different meanings
influenced and were influenced by the sorts
of rituals kissing became associated with.
For example, because the kiss helped exchange
spirit, it made perfect sense for it to become
part of baptism and ordination, rituals
in which you wanted the Holy Spirit to descend
and enter the initiate. The flip side of
the coin is that before someone was baptized
you
wouldn’t want to kiss them. Early Christians
often believed that previous to exorcism
and baptism people were inevitably demon
possessed. Given that they also thought that
kissing resulted in spiritual exchange, it’s
pretty clear why you wouldn’t
want to kiss non-Christians. I sometimes
think of this as an ancient form of “cooties.” It
resulted in early Christian debates over
whether one could
kiss a pagan relative, if one should kiss
a potential heretic, or if Jews even had
a kiss.
One has to
ask. What kind of kissing are we talking about here? A peck on
the
cheek? Lips
to lips?
Or more passionate?
Almost always
lip to lip. The amount of passion depended on the participants.
Two
of my favorite
second-century
Christian references
allude to overly enthusiastic kisses.
The first essentially says no “French
kissing” in church. Instead one
must kiss with, “a closed and chaste
mouth.” The
other warns against those who kiss a
second time because they enjoyed the
first
kiss too much; they’re going to
hell. Starting in the third century,
Christian
sources began to prohibit men and women
from
kissing each other. Other writers tried
to modify opposite-sex kissing to insure
that everything stayed under control.
For example,
one author suggests that women wrap their
arms in cloth and only then can men approach
and kiss their hands. That’s
a long ways away from a French kiss.
How
have those kissing codes from the formative
centuries influenced contemporary
practices
in Christianity
and contemporary society?
Modern
Christians still kiss. In Catholicism,
for example, there is a practice
of kissing the Pope’s ring. Among
Eastern Orthodox, it’s common
to kiss holy objects or particularly
reverent individuals. For example,
one summer when I was in Egypt I was
speaking with a monk, and throughout
our conversation Coptic Christians
who were passing by would take his
hand and briefly kiss it. This must
have happened a dozen times while we
were talking but the
monk never missed a single word of
our exchange. Among Protestants there’s
a moment in most worship services when
congregation members are to “exchange
a sign of the peace,” a handshake
or some other gesture. I once knew
a pastor who when running a bit long
with his sermon declared that in interest
of time that
service was limited to a “two
hug Sunday.” All
of these practices have their roots
in ancient Christian kissing.
Why has
kissing in the early church
been largely ignored up to now?
In
many ways this question brings us back to the reason I wanted
to
concentrate
on
early
Christian ritual in
the first
place.
Until the last few decades, the
study of early Christianity was mostly
done in the context of religiously
affiliated institutions,
especially seminaries and schools
of theology. Those institutions
most closely
associated with Protestantism often
inherited a lengthy Protestant
tradition of opposing
what they
saw as “Catholic ritualism.” The
last thing they’d want to
do would be to emphasize the importance
of ritual in the earliest strata
of Christianity. Catholic scholars
more often concentrated on early
rituals, such as baptism or confession,
that formed the basis for the later
system of sacraments. Even as religious
studies became increasingly secularized,
scholars
often ignored or intentionally
down
played the role of kissing in early
Christianity. One modern translation
of the New Testament
takes the apostle Paul’s
command for the followers of Christ
to “greet
one another with a holy kiss” and
changes it to “give one another
a hearty handshake.” I’m
hoping that my investigation of
the kiss challenges scholars to
reevaluate
the role
of ritual in
early Christianity and suggests
that the exploration of other rarely
studied rites may provide additional
insight into
the dynamics of early Christian
communities.
On the Web:
University
of Pennsylvania Press
View
Michael Penn's Faculty Bio
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