Thomas Hunt: Ruined Reading: violent creativity and Christian grammar

This workshop examines how early Christians did religious work through textual practices. It will show how such work served to locate Christians in time, as heirs of a literary patrimony and custodians of learning and truth for the generations to come. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary literary critical and philosophical approaches, we argue that Christianity made a violently creative appropriation of the literary and cultural past, addressed to the very Christian future such appropriation created.
Taking textual practices as the location of religious work renders visible the processes by which a new religious world was generated and sustained. Writers as diverse as Didymus, Jerome and Cassiodorus remoulded the tools of literary production which had made them educated Romans. As they rewrote grammars, canons, and rhetorics they fashioned Christianity as a textual Rome that was able to continue after the ruin of the physical Rome. These thinkers' ingenuity was often heavy handed, creating monuments to the patrimony which were weathered and already slipping into ruin, In so doing they revealed the creative and probing mode of their literary work even while insisting on its adherence to established convention.
The workshop will invite its participants to look anew at early Christianity, to ask what kind of thing emerged after Rome was ruined, when that thing was made of ruinous textual practices.
Razored passages from St Jerome: the logic of circumcision in On Famous Men
Curating the Patrimony: Julian, Didymus, and Schools

Christopher Wojtulewicz: The Reception of Augustine in the Theology of Alexander de Sancto Elpidio OESA

If known at all, Alexander de Sancto Elpidio is perhaps best remembered for his Tractatus de ecclesiastica potestate; his theology, however, remains somewhat shrouded in obscurity. Besides some references to his opinion in the sentence commentaries of various Augustinians of the early fourteenth century, we do not yet possess any real conception of Alexander’s theological positions, despite his prominence in Paris and as General of the Order from 1312. Both Doucet and Courtenay have made reference to a quodlibet in Naples, which Glorieux had considered likely to have been penned by Alexander. Now that his authorship is confirmed, this paper will present the positions found in the questions of the Naples manuscript and look into their use of Augustine. In particular it will consider Alexander’s contribution to Trinitarian debates and the contextualisation of the reception of Augustine more broadly in the Order of Hermits of St. Augustine during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.

Henny Fiskå Hagg: Diadochus of Photike and the Experience of God

Diadochus, bishop of Photike in Epirus (ca. 400-ca. 487), is among the earliest witnesses to the Jesus Prayer. In his theology he puts much stress on man’s experience of God – how his presence and love are felt in the “sense of the heart”. In my paper I will especially study what is meant by “experience” (peira) – how it is described and how it relates to prayer, contemplation and knowledge.

Florian Woeller: Turning towards the Literal Sense: Augustine in Late Medieval Exegesis

One of the characteristic features of late medieval exegesis (14th and 15th centuries) consists in a special attention for the literal sense of Scripture with which many biblical theologians dedicated themselves to biblical interpretation. This tendency marks an important 'turn' in the history of biblical exegesis and as such directs our attention to later, i.e. Early Modern developments. Yet, it must also be understood as a 'turn' to the past, since to a fair extent it was Augustine's idea of the literal sense which inspired late-medieval exegetes.
In my paper I will discuss two prominent biblical theologians, Nicholas of Lyra (ca. 1270-1349) and Peter Auriol (ca. 1280-1322), who both developed influential accounts of Scripture's literal sense and of its meaning for biblical exegesis. Although these Franciscan confrères both heavily draw upon Augustine, they come to strikingly different conclusions and thus offer excellent examples for the late-medieval transformations in the reception of Augustine, more specifically of his principles of biblical interpretation.

Warren Smith: Narrating Magnanimity: Ambrose on Joseph, Justice, and Mercy

Wayne Meeks in The Moral World of the First Christians argues that, given early Christian formation in and reliance upon the nomenclature of ancient virtue theory, there is little if anything distinctive about early Christian moral discourse. Yet many early Christian moralists saw themselves as having a higher moral standard than that of the pagan schools upon which they relied. Drawing on Arthur Urbano's account in The Philosophical Life of biographical narrative as a form of moral discourse, I will focus on how Ambrose's deployment of the language of magnanimity (magnanimatas) within his re-narration of the lives of the patriarchs, especially Joseph, both preserves elements of the classical ideal of the Great-souled person and yet reshapes the ideal in ways that are, from Ambrose's perspective, distinctive of the perfect duties (officia perfecta) of a Christian. To illustrate how Ambrose rhetorically crafts his ideal Christian magnanimity, I will compare his narrative interpretations in the catechetical homilies De Ioseph and De Officiis with the narration of magnanimity in Plutarch's Lives, specifically that of Phocion.

Nozomu Yamada: Pelagius’ Narrative Techniques – Rhetorical Influences and Negative Responses from Opponents

The aims of this presentation are to describe Pelagius’ narrative techniques and their rhetorical influences on his followers, and then to clarify why his opponents responded negatively to his rhetorical assertions. I will focus on two kinds of rhetoric used by Pelagius. One of them is the same-person narrative in his Pauline commentaries. Here, Pelagius overlays the subject of himself onto the subject of Paul’s text, and simultaneously overlays a third subject, that of the text readers. That is, Paul’s ‘I’ sees his opponents at this time; Pelagius’ ‘I’ sees the negative circumstances persisting in the Roman churches of his day; and the reader’s ‘I’ sees her or his personal situation that is to be overcome. The other rhetorical technique I will explore is the classical method of reasoning ‘from the minor to the major’. Pelagius used these two narrative techniques to encourage his followers.

Such rhetorical techniques played a very important role in intensifying the will of Pelagius’ followers, particularly Roman women Christians. However, at the same time, Pelagius’ narrative rhetoric was misunderstood and in some cases intentionally distorted, and came to be considered ‘heretical’ assertions by his opponents in polemical contexts. For example, in the proceedings of the Synod of Diospolis, only a part of his rhetorical narratives was cited and attacked sarcastically. His opponents often separated his work from their original contexts, in which Pelagius criticized the excessive immorality he saw in the very inside of the Roman churches.

Krastu Banev: "Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ" (Rule of St Benedict 53): Revisiting Hospitality in Early Monasticism

Early monasticism was a doctrinally diverse phenomenon. Such is the conclusion of much recent scholarship on the origins of the movement. When emphasised in a given source, as it is in the Life of Anthony or the Apophthegmata, doctrinal unity often tells more about the doctrinal priorities not of the monks themselves but of the authors or editors of their lives or sayings (D. Brake, S. Rubenson). What then attracted new converts to asceticism? First of all, it was the ascetic -- or the 'philosophical' -- life itself, followed by a shared desire for an uninterrupted meditation on the Scriptures (D. Burton-Christie). Both of these priorities could be achieved under the inspired guidance of an Abba or an Amma. In this paper, I will focus on the process by which late antique Christians appropriated and affirmed the ancient, non-Christian, practice of hospitality as a specifically Christian and monastic duty. Examining a variety of sources from the fourth to the sixth century, I will argue for this Christianization of hospitality as yet another key factor contributing to the growing popularity of the ascetic movement.