‘We began to have no hope any longer in this world.’ — St Perpetua, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas
Presented are four early Christian baptismal font models from the 4th–6th centuries CE; two panels with cut-out floor plans of the Basilica Pacis in Hippo Regius (modern Annaba, Algeria), where the 4th-century North African theologian-philosopher St Augustine held his episcopal seat; and a wall text constructed from selected words placed before commas in the 4th-century Cappadocian theologian St Basil of Caesarea’s homily On the Firmament. Of particular interest are the formal and contextual relations between the works and the lived experiences they suggest through their indexical reading.
Each baptism site (Mallorca, Susa, Ephesus, and Hippo Regius) is connected through poignant histories of conquest and persecution which facilitated ecclesiastical exchanges, and the presented fonts share both formal and theological concerns in their cruciform basin plans and two tripartite staircases.
Alternative carriers of water and thought appear in the homily referenced in the wall text, where rivers flowing through Africa are listed to elucidate the ordering role of water systems in Basil’s natural philosophy. The wall text itself is fragmentary, composed of individual words drawn from the homily for their signifying properties.
In the floor plans of the Basilica Pacis, a small section has been cut out of the poplar plywood to mark the location of the baptismal font, as studied in the Hippo Regius model. The basilica’s plan discloses an austere style characteristic of early North African spiritual sensibilities. The work’s material and method engage in dialogue with Philipp Otto Runge’s botanical paper cuttings and the Impressionist trope of ‘poplars’ as means of isolating thought.
Collectively, the works may be considered in relation to Augustine’s De civitate Dei (City of God), where a pervasive sentiment of human frailty and dependence confronts the injustice inherent in the dominant ideologies of the time. Above these ardent cries is a stillness and a light that, for Augustine, might direct our gaze toward immutable beauty itself.
Models of partially eroded baptismal fonts no longer in use; plans of a basilica now in ruins; and broken utterances in acquiescence to the pull of obscurity—all mark the restless spirit of fragile human life, and the silent, decaying forms shaped by thought, experience, and the impartial necessity to which all matter is subject.