Liuwe Westra: Creating a Theological Difference: The Myth of Two Grammatical Constructions with Latin Credo

The theological difference between ‘believing in God' and ‘believing the Church' is presented as a real and significant one in most dogmatic handbooks. However, this difference was only invented in the fourth century. Latin sources show, that the Church (just as Forgiveness and Resurrection) was originally taught the catechumens as something to believe in the same way as they were taught to believe in the Triune God. Thus, the fourth century appears to be an important turning point in patristic ecclesiology.

Stuart Thomson: The Scholar’s Journey: A Christian-Philosophical Topos of Conversion

Plato’s Apology (21a-22e) see Socrates undertaking a literal and metaphorical journey seeking wisdom. This is Plato’s aetiology of Socrates’ distinctive style of philosophy; by the first century AD, this narrative becomes the paradigm for a topos of philosophical conversion. This paper will explore how early Christian apologists used this topos as a method of literary self-construction, to legitimate both their scriptures and their own writing to an elite educated audience.
This paper will explore the trope as a point of commonality between pagan, Christian and Jewish conceptions of identity as commitment to a community formed around shared conviction. Where the novelty of the Christian usage lies is in its application of the trope as a marker of religious, rather than intellectual, identity. This sets Christianity apart from and in competition with both pagan religious practices and the philosophical schools by applying the language of the latter to the practice of the former.
By applying a philosophical narrative to the realm of religious experience, the trope stands in tension with prevalent narrative of religious conversion. Rather than a response to a divine call (as in the Gospel narratives, or in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses), or the redirection of worship from false to true objects (as in the Pauline epistles), conversion becomes the cumulative accretion of wisdom by negation of false options. In turn, however, this allows Christian texts, both those read and those written by the apologists, to be presented as serious philosophical literature, approachable through generic frames already familiar to Greek litterateurs.

Stephen Blackwood: Memory and Meditation: Poetic Metre and Boethius' Consolation

This paper argues that the poetic metres of Boethius' Consolation are an embodied means of Philosophy's therapy, which therapy is above all the work of recollection. The poetic metres are arranged so as to give the prisoner's memory a coherent structure, and, by stabilizing the prisoner's present in the eternal now, mediate between time and eternity. The Consolation's rhythmic-acoustic system, which is comprehensive of every line of its poetry, enacts the theological principles that govern the text as a whole, and give to it the character of a repeated liturgical act.

Douglas Shepardson: Through an Epistemic Magnifying Glass, Darkly: Augustine and Plato's City-Soul Analogy

This paper suggests a Platonic source for Augustine's methodology in the later books of De Trin., where Augustine argues that we can begin to adumbrate the nature of God by examining the soul. Citing Genesis 1:26-7, Augustine finds validity in this procedure because the triune soul bears the likeness of the triune God. This is similar — indeed, formally identical — to Plato's method in Republic II, where Socrates seeks to examine the nature of justice in the soul by examining the nature of justice in the city, which he does because the (triune) city bears the likeness of the (triune) soul. The logic behind both analogies takes the form of an epistemic magnifying glass: If (A) is made in the image of (B), and (A) is easier to understand than (B), then one can begin to understand (B) by examining (A) in (B)'s stead. By plugging “the soul” (A) and “God” (B) into the equation, Augustine's method seems quite similar to Plato's.

David Eastman: Digital Humanities and the Study of Patristics

The rise of the internet, digital publishing, and the instant contact of social media have opened up new possibilities in research and collaboration. As scholars have begun to reflect on how the digital information age impacts their work, an interdisicplinary conversation has emerged under the rubric of "digital humanities". This term describes a broad array of practices, including both research tools and new methodologies in a variety of fields such as history, literature and archaeology. This workshop will examine how the field of Patristics (which already has a long history of digitally-aided research) is benefitting from the increasing number of scholars whose work falls under the purview of the digital humanities. Individual communications will address methodological concerns or present results of recent projects.
Participants:
Charlotte Roueche, King's College London
Sarah Bond, Univeristy of Iowa
David L. Eastman, Ohio Wesleyan University
David Michelson, Vanderbilt Universityh
Jeanne-Nicole Meoon Sain-t Laurent, Marquette University
Michael Glerup, East University

Georg Schöllgen: Überlegungen zur christlichen Mission im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert

Lange war die Forschung sich einig, dass die aktiv betriebene Mission zu den grundlegenden Selbstvollzügen der Kirche des 2. und 3. Jahrhunderts gehörte und die wesentliche Ursache des Wachstums der Kirche darstellte. Brox hat eine Reihe von Beobachtungen vorgetragen, die erhebliche Zweifel daran rechtfertigen. Er macht darauf aufmerksam, dass das antike Christentum keinen Terminus für Mission kannte. Weiterhin ist es erstaunlich, dass es weder Handbücher für den Missionar noch auf Schriften gibt, die das missionarische Wirken der Kirche zum Gegenstand haben. Verblüffend ist ausserdem, dass Mission weithin als eine Aufgabe der Urapostel galt, die von diesen zu Ende geführt wurde. Zudem sind die expliziten Hinweise auf missionarisches Wirken von Christen im 2. und 3.  Jh. erstaunlich selten.
Unbestritten ist dagegen das enorme Wachstum der Gemeinden.
Der Kurzvortrag will einige Argumente für die These vorstellen, daß sich das Wachstum weniger aktiver Glaubenswerbung als der Anziehungskraft des abweichenden Verhaltens der Christen verdankt.

Niki Clements: Cassian’s Conlationes and an Affective Ethics of Reading

John Cassian (c.360-c.435), developing the architecture for Latin monasticism, brings to life the experiential practices of Egyptian desert asceticism for his readers in Gaul. While scholars have addressed the centrality of reading practices to Cassian’s askēsis, such practices’ relation to his project of ethical formation has gone relatively unaddressed. Cassian’s Conlationes Patrum in Scithico Eremo prescribes scriptural recitation and reflection that draw on venerable Egyptian traditions; in an analysis of the Conlationes’ narrative framing techniques, I argue that Cassian also shows his readers what, in practice, to do. On the prescriptive level within Cassian’s texts, the abbas directly exhort the recitation and imitation of the Psalms and meditation on scripture. On the literary level of Cassian’s texts themselves, the young Cassian and his companion Germanus—as well as their wise abba interlocutors—enact this narrative/ethical formation through imitation of everyday activities.

This ethical reconsideration of Cassian critiques Michel Foucault’s influential understanding of Cassian as extolling “interiority” at the expense of “exteriority,” affirming instead the integrating work of affectus. Affectus, within Cassian’s ascetic program, entails emotion, state of mind, disposition, as well as the English cognate “affect.” Cassian’s affectively aware reader integrates the bodily and intellective activities of the person, which in turn, enables the cultivation of ethical dispositions that shape the religious self. Far from the self-renunciatory subject of interior reflection that characterizes Foucault’s reading, we see the Conlationes demanding of its readers an embodied, deliberative, and inter-social affective engagement, all as necessary for progress in the ascetic life.