The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity

The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity
Author: Lewis Ayres
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-10-26
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9781108835299

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.

The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity

The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity
Author: Michael W. Champion
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre: Church history
ISBN: 9781108793124

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.

Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity

Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity
Author: Dirk Rohmann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2016-07-25
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3110486075

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.

The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity

The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity
Author: Lewis Ayres
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1232
Release: 2023-09-30
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1108871917

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 Memory of the Eyes

The Memory of the Eyes
Author: Georgia Frank
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 10
Release: 2000-05-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520222052

Taking a new approach to these texts, Frank finds in them a record of the writers' and readers' spiritual expectations and uses insights to add to our understanding of the purposes and practices of pilgrimage.".

The Rise of the Early Christian Intellectual

The Rise of the Early Christian Intellectual
Author: Lewis Ayres
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3110608006

The study of the growth of early Christian intellectual life is of perennial interest to scholars. This volume advances discussion by exploring ways in which Christian writers in the second century did not so much draw on Hellenistic intellectual traditions and models, as they were inevitably embedded in those traditions. The volume contains papers from a seminar in Rome in 2016 that explored the nature and activity of the emergent Christian intellectual between the late first century and the early third century. The papers show that Hellenistic scholarly cultures were the milieu within which Christian modes of thinking developed. At the same time the essays show how Christian thinkers made use of the cultures of which they were part in distinctive ways, adapting existing traditions because of Christian beliefs and needs. The figures studied include Papias from the early part of the second-century, Tatian, Irenaeus, and Clement of Alexandria from the later second century. One paper on Eusebius of Caesarea explores the Christian adaptation of Hellenistic scholarly methods of commentary. Christian figures are studied in the light of debates within Classics and Jewish studies.

Platonism and Christian Thought in Late Antiquity

Platonism and Christian Thought in Late Antiquity
Author: Panagiotis G. Pavlos
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2019-06-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429803095

Platonism and Christian Thought in Late Antiquity examines the various ways in which Christian intellectuals engaged with Platonism both as a pagan competitor and as a source of philosophical material useful to the Christian faith. The chapters are united in their goal to explore transformations that took place in the reception and interaction process between Platonism and Christianity in this period. The contributions in this volume explore the reception of Platonic material in Christian thought, showing that the transmission of cultural content is always mediated, and ought to be studied as a transformative process by way of selection and interpretation. Some chapters also deal with various aspects of the wider discussion on how Platonic, and Hellenic, philosophy and early Christian thought related to each other, examining the differences and common ground between these traditions. Platonism and Christian Thought in Late Antiquity offers an insightful and broad ranging study on the subject, which will be of interest to students of both philosophy and theology in the Late Antique period, as well as anyone working on the reception and history of Platonic thought, and the development of Christian thought.

The Corporeal Imagination

The Corporeal Imagination
Author: Patricia Cox Miller
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2012-02-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0812204689

With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction. The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in late ancient Christian texts. From hagiographies to literary descriptions of sacred paintings to treatises on relics and theurgy, Miller examines a wide variety of ancient texts to reveal how Christian writers increasingly described the matter of the world as invested with divine power. By appealing to the reader's sensory imagination, Christian texts endowed phenomena like relics, saints' bodies in hagiography, and saints' presence in icons with a visual and tactile presence. The book draws on a variety of contemporary theoretical models to elucidate the significance of all these materials in ancient religious life and imagination.

The Slow Fall of Babel

The Slow Fall of Babel
Author: Yuliya Minets
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2021-12-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108987745

This is the story of the transformation of the ways in which the increasingly Christianized elites of the late antique Mediterranean experienced and conceptualized linguistic differences. The metaphor of Babel stands for the magnificent edifice of classical culture that was about to reach the sky, but remained self-sufficient and self-contained in its virtual monolingualism – the paradigm within which even Latin was occasionally considered just a dialect of Greek. The gradual erosion of this vision is the slow fall of Babel that took place in the hearts and minds of a good number of early Christian writers and intellectuals who represented various languages and literary traditions. This step-by-step process included the discovery and internalization of the existence of multiple other languages in the world, as well as subsequent attempts to incorporate their speakers meaningfully into the holistic and distinctly Christian picture of the universe.

Classifying Christians

Classifying Christians
Author: Todd S. Berzon
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2016-02-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0520959884

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.