Anna Rebecca Solevåg: Medical Metaphors in Ignatius’ Letters

In the letters of Ignatius a number of metaphors draw on the source domain of health and medicine. Christ is referred to as the true physician (Ign. Eph. 7) and the eucharist is called “the medicine of immortality” (Ign. Eph. 20). However, it is not necessarily the healthy body that is good in Ignatius’ metaphors. He advises the readers to “be deaf” when they hear docetic heresy (Ign. Trall. 9), and refers to his own body as an abnormality (ektrōma, Ign. Rom. 9). The paper explores Ignatius’ metaphors in light of early Christian discourses on disability and illness. Conceptual metaphor theory will be used as a theoretical framework.

Helen Rhee: Pain at the Intersection of Ancient Medicine and Early Christianity: Paradox of Agency and Insharability

Pain in ancient medicine (Hippocratic Corpus, Aretaeus and Galen) played a central role in diagnosis as a sign of disease but also functioned as part of the therapeutic process and prognosis in a complex patient-doctor relationship. Pain in patristic treatises likewise had a double role to play on the continuum of illness and health (both physical and spiritual). My paper examines how pain blurs and problematizes a dichotomy of illness/disease and health in the intersections of medical and patristic texts with its affective and social effect through its paradoxical agency and insharability.

Donald Boyce: Ordering Tears: Tears as Physician’s Anesthesia in Augustine’s Experience of Loss in Confessiones

‘The child of those tears shall never parish.’ While these words were once used to console Monica, the ambiguity of the genitive is appropriate since Augustine’s own tears are characteristic of his identity. We will begin by using De Musica, De doctrina christiana,and Book I of Confessionesto provide the interpretive framework for understanding the role of tears in Augustine – particularly as it relates to the deaths he recounts in Confessiones.We will first look at the death of an anonymous friend, then the death of three Christian brothers, before concluding with the death of Monica. Through these examples and the framework of the earlier works, we will show that ‘ordering tears’ can be interpreted in three ways: First, tears in the accusative as an attempt to restrain tears. Second, tears in the nominative as an attempt, in pride, to impose order on rational souls around us. In the last sense, tears take the ablative where the phrase takes the sense of ordering with tears and ordering bytears. Through this last movement and Augustine’s well-known Christological assertion of Christ as Physician we are able to synthesize certain passages where tears appear to be their ‘own end,’ but instead are the Physician’s anesthesia - a step in the process of our ordering. Tears on this account are the ‘food’ in the Neoplatonic example of the pain of an empty stomach. They are a gift in our bodies that the Surgeon uses to help fix our painful brokenness.

Chris de Wet: Medical Discourse, Identity Formation, and Otherness in Late Ancient Christianity

The use of medical discourses is never neutral or innocent. During late antiquity medical knowledge was disseminated through various alternative literary genres, such as homilies, hagiographies, and theological treatises. The social effects of this epistemological shift in medical discourse, however, requires further examination. The purpose of this paper, specifically, is to ask, first, how medical discourse shaped the formation of late antique Christian identities and, second, how medical discourse was utilized in the fashioning of alterities (formations of otherness). Inevitably, issues such as purity and filth, quarantine and contagion, and safety and danger feature extensively in these discourses. But is there perhaps even something more pervasive present? As case studies the works of Theodoret and John Chrysostom will be examined. What I hope to achieve with this study is a deeper understanding of the power dynamics of medical discourse when utilized in contexts that are not conventionally associated with medicine and healthcare. The paper is an exploration into the medically constructed self and other.

Susan Holman: Shaping Water: Public Health and the ‘Medicine of Mortality’ in Late Antiquity

This paper explores medical and religious texts from Christian late antiquity to consider the ethics of water aid in public or social policy and humanitarian relief at the intersection of past and present global health concerns. Drawing from geographical theorist Doreen Massey and South African theologian, Steve de Gruchy, on theology and sanitation today, it considers points of commonality and difference with medical and Christian writers in late antiquity, the role of water in health and mortality, the moral ethic of water equity and justice for all, and how water shapes the holy in ways relevant to public health. It concludes with examples of how the literal shape of water may image liturgical space and the narrative flow of social intersections across politics, productivity, and history.

Siam Bhayro: The Syro-Mesopotamian context of Bar Daisan and Sergius - Syriac scholarship in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

In this paper, I intend to argue that the late antique and early medieval Syriac traditions, in articulating an ideal of how philosophy, theology and medicine should all be studied together, should not be understood as simply reflecting a Greco-Roman ideal. Although dressed in Aristotelean garb, this phenomenon actually reflects a long-held Syro-Mesopotamian notion that associated the healing arts with the scribal or priestly guilds.