The Intellectual World Of Late Antique Christianity

This book is for scholars and students of the ideas, literatures, and cultures of early Christianity and late antiquity, ancient philosophers, and historians of theology. It offers new perspectives on early Christian modes of knowing and ordering knowledge in relation to changing discourses, institutions, and material culture of late antiquity.

The Intellectual World of Late-Antique Christianity explores new perspectives on early Christian epistemology in relation to the changing discourses, institutions, and material culture of late antiquity. Early Christian modes of knowing and ordering knowledge involved complex processes of appropriation, reproduction, and reconfiguration of Jewish and classical epistemologies. This helped Christians develop cultures of interpretation and argument as textually oriented religious communities within the Roman Empire and beyond. It laid an intellectual foundation that would be built upon and modified in a variety of later contexts. Encompassing Greek, Latin, and Syriac Christianity, and an historical arc that stretches from the New Testament to Bede, this volume traces how diverse theological commitments resulted in distinctive Christian accounts of knowing. It foregrounds the myriad ways in which early Christian epistemology was embedded in earlier intellectual traditions and forms of life, and how they established norms for communal life and powerful ways of acting in the world.

It is estimated that only a small fraction, less than 1 per cent, of ancient literature has survived to the present day. The role of Christian authorities in the active suppression and destruction of books in Late Antiquity has received surprisingly little sustained consideration by academics. In an approach that presents evidence for the role played by Christian institutions, writers and saints, this book analyses a broad range of literary and legal sources, some of which have hitherto been little studied. Paying special attention to the problem of which genres and book types were likely to be targeted, the author argues that in addition to heretical, magical, astrological and anti-Christian books, other less obviously subversive categories of literature were also vulnerable to destruction, censorship or suppression through prohibition of the copying of manuscripts. These include texts from materialistic philosophical traditions, texts which were to become the basis for modern philosophy and science. This book examines how Christian authorities, theologians and ideologues suppressed ancient texts and associated ideas at a time of fundamental transformation in the late classical world.

This book studies the complex attitude of late ancient Christians towards classical education. In recent years, the different theoretical positions that can be found among the Church Fathers have received particular attention: their statements ranged from enthusiastic assimilation to outright rejection, the latter sometimes masking implicit adoption. Shifting attention away from such explicit statements, this volume focuses on a series of lesser-known texts in order to study the impact of specific literary and social contexts on late ancient educational views and practices. By moving attention from statements to strategies this volume wishes to enrich our understanding of the creative engagement with classical ideals of education. The multi-faceted approach adopted here illuminates the close connection between specific educational purposes on the one hand, and the possibilities and limitations offered by specific genres and contexts on the other. Instead of seeing attitudes towards education in late antique texts as applications of theoretical positions, it reads them as complex negotiations between authorial intent, the limitations of genre, and the context of performance.

Religion requires education. Soon after the emergence of Christianity, religious education became crucial to the development of Christian communities in towns and in the countryside. The present volume analyzes the human agents of this education: bishops, catechists, mothers and fathers, monastic teachers. It thus offers a comparative analysis of teachers' roles in Christian educational contexts, dealing with questions such as: Who taught in late antique Christianity? Which imagery is used to describe such teaching? What impact do gender ascriptions have on teaching roles and processes? And where do conflicts emerge between different roles and their social settings? Contributors: Christoph Birkner, Carmen Angela Cvetkovi'c, Juliette Day, Therese Fuhrer, Peter Gemeinhardt, Katharina Greschat, Henrik Rydell Johnsen, Olga Lorgeoux, Andreas Muller, Maria Munkholt Christensen, David Rylaarsdam, Arthur Urbano

The essays in Eastern Christianity and Late Antique Philosophy provide valuable insights into the central role of philosophical ideas in a period when paganism was in decline and Eastern Christians were forging their community identities.

What do we mean when we talk about 'being Christian' in Late Antiquity? This volume brings together sixteen world-leading scholars of ancient Judaism, Christianity and Greco-Roman culture and society to explore this question, in honour of the ground-breaking scholarship of Professor Gillian Clark. After an introduction to the volume's dedicatee and themes by Averil Cameron, the papers in Section I, `Being Christian through Reading, Writing and Hearing', analyse the roles that literary genre, writing, reading, hearing and the literature of the past played in the formation of what it meant to be Christian. The essays in Section II move on to explore how late antique Christians sought to create, maintain and represent Christian communities: communities that were both 'textually created' and 'enacted in living realities'. Finally in Section III, 'The Particularities of Being Christian', the contributions examine what it was to be Christian from a number of different ways of representing oneself, each of which raises questions about certain kinds of 'particularities', for example, gender, location, education and culture. Bringing together primary source material from the early Imperial period up to the seventh century AD and covering both the Eastern and Western Empires, the papers in this volume demonstrate that what it meant to be Christian cannot simply be taken for granted. 'Being Christian' was part of a continual process of construction and negotiation, as individuals and Christian communities alike sought to relate themselves to existing traditions, social structures and identities, at the same time as questioning and critiquing the past(s) in their present.

Classifying Christians investigates late antique Christian heresiologies as ethnographies that catalogued and detailed the origins, rituals, doctrines, and customs of the heretics in explicitly polemical and theological terms. Oscillating between ancient ethnographic evidence and contemporary ethnographic writing, Todd S. Berzon argues that late antique heresiology shares an underlying logic with classical ethnography in the ancient Mediterranean world. By providing an account of heresiological writing from the second to fifth century, Classifying Christians embeds heresiology within the historical development of imperial forms of knowledge that have shaped western culture from antiquity to the present.