Nemesius of Emesa on Desire, Pleasure, and Sex

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 206-232
Author(s):  
Chris L. de Wet
Keyword(s):  
Medical Literature ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Sexual Culture ◽  
Christian Philosophy ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Anthropology ◽  
Descriptive Account ◽  
Roman Syria

Abstract This article investigates the views of Nemesius, the bishop of Emesa in Roman Syria at the end of the fourth century CE, on desire, pleasure, and sex, mainly from his work, De natura hominis, asking specifically how Nemesius’s account represents what we might term the “medical making” of an early Christian sexual culture. Nat. hom. was most likely composed at the end of the fourth century CE, and represents the first full and formal Christian anthropology, incorporating views from Christian and non-Christian philosophy (especially Plato and Aristotle) and, of course, extensively utilising (and often even quoting verbatim) ancient medical literature (especially Galen). The study commences by providing a descriptive account of Nemesius’s framework on the dynamics of desire, pleasure, and sex, and then draws some conclusions on how these views of Nemesius translate into a very particular Christian sexual culture in late antique Syria.

Amulets and the Ritual Efficacy of Christian Symbols

2019 ◽  
pp. 349-366
Author(s):  
Rangar H. Cline
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Insight Into

Although “magical” amulets are often overlooked in studies of early Christian material culture, they provide unique insight into the lives of early Christians. The high number of amulets that survive from antiquity, their presence in domestic and mortuary archaeological contexts, and frequent discussions of amulets in Late Antique literary sources indicate that they constituted an integral part of the fabric of religious life for early Christians. The appearance of Christian symbols on amulets, beginning in the second century and occurring with increasing frequency in the fourth century and afterward, reveals the increasing perception of Christian symbols as ritually potent among Christians and others in the Roman Empire. The forms, texts, and images on amulets reveal the fears and hopes that occupied the daily lives of early Christians, when amulets designed for ritual efficacy if not orthodoxy were believed to provide a defense against forces that would harm body and soul.

scholarly journals Figurative Images in the Early Christian Funeral Paintings of Chersonese

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 38-54
Author(s):  
Irina Anatol’evna Zavadskaya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Artistic Tradition

The paintings of the 11 early Christian burial vaults of Chersonese uncovering the image of the Garden of Eden fully correspond to the traditions of the Late Antique art. There figurative images are very rare, and not all of them have been interpreted properly. Single man’s figures preserved in the painting of three vaults (of the years 1853/1905, 1909 and in the vault on N. I. Tur’s land) are of particular interest for the determination of the time and ways of penetration of this artistic tradition into early Christian Chersonese. A comparative analysis of funeral paintings from different regions of the Eastern Roman Empire makes it possible to determine the function of the mentioned images of men in the painting of these tombs and to explain their origin in early Christian burials. According to the fragments that survived, all three figures of young men are very similar in dress and posture. Probably, they all held a burning candle in the hands, the image of which survived only in the vault of the year 1909. These images are comparable to the figures of servants from a number of tombs discovered in the Balkans, Asia Minor, North Africa, and Levant. The young men from Chersonese are most close to the images of male servants from the tombs in Bulgaria and Serbia. From the analogies given in this paper there are reasons to interpret the figures of young men in the three vaults of Chersonese as images of servants. Figures of servants were widespread in ancient art and also in Christian burials to the end of the fourth century. Most likely, these figures appeared in the paintings of Chersonese under the influence of the Eastern Balkan artistic tradition.

The Early Christian Archaeology of the Balkans

2019 ◽  
pp. 536-556
Author(s):  
William Bowden
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Rural Landscapes ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Balkan Region ◽  
New Religion

Textual sources attest to the early spread of Christianity across the Balkan region, and archaeological evidence demonstrates how the new religion transformed the built environment and material culture of the area in Late Antiquity, although dating and analysis of these buildings have tended to focus on stylistic and typological approaches. Prior to the late fourth century archaeological evidence of Christianity is mainly found in funerary contexts, but in the fifth and sixth centuries the urban and rural landscapes were transformed by the construction of Christian architecture, including the monumentalization of martyrs’ graves at towns such as Salona and the creation of major episcopal centers at provincial capitals such as Stobi and Nicopolis. These churches were funded by multiple individuals, evidenced by inscriptions that reference ecclesiastical and lay donors of both sexes. The location and design of many of the churches also reflect the increasingly militarized nature of the Late Antique Balkans.

Commentaries

2019 ◽  
pp. 169-186
Author(s):  
Josef Lössl
Keyword(s):  
Late Antique ◽  
Augustine Of Hippo ◽  
Christian Philosophy ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Biblical Commentary ◽  
Origen Of Alexandria ◽  
History Of ◽  
Commentary Tradition

This chapter offers an introduction to the origins, main characteristics, and some main representatives of the early Christian biblical commentary. It outlines the emergence of the biblical and Late Antique philosophical commentary from the context of the late Hellenistic and early post-Hellenistic study of grammar and rhetoric (e.g. in Homeric scholarship), and discusses the role of Origen of Alexandria as the main theorist and practitioner of the early Christian biblical commentary, including Origen’s treatment of commentary topics (topoi) and his conceptualization of his commentarial activity as a form of Christian philosophy, or science. It then continues with an overview of the history of the early Christian biblical commentary after Origen, touching upon the history of the Antiochene school of exegesis and upon the Latin commentary tradition culminating in Jerome of Stridon and Augustine of Hippo.

scholarly journals Pauca tamen memorans : A selection of late antique epitaphs commemorating young women

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Kristin Harper
Keyword(s):  
Young Women ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Roman Italy ◽  
Cultural Negotiations ◽  
Selection Of

My dissertation examines a selection of fourth- and fifth-century inscribed Latin funerary poems commemorating young, Christian women in late antique Rome and Roman Italy. An in-depth analysis of fourteen verse epitaphs dedicated to young women reveals how funerary poetry creates an identity of deceased individuals while at the same time demonstrates religious beliefs of the time and offers insights into the role of women through powerful poetic means. Epigraphic commemoration of the dead was a persistent feature of the "epigraphic habit" in Roman Italy, one whose vitality indexes the shifting religious and moral sentiments of an age transitioning from a classical to a Christian system of values. The fourth century not only saw a poetic revival but also a surge in epigraphic production. The epitaphs of my collection expose the intricate interplay of late antique poetic and consolatory literary topoi employed by epitaph writers to aid in alleviating the grief of the bereaved. My particular questions highlight issues of literary sensibility and biographical representation as well as religious and spiritual ideals. In these epitaphs, classical references to untimely death and astral immortality blend with Christianizing ethical codes and a revised sense of the afterlife drawn from Scriptural images. Close scrutiny of these cultural negotiations reveals the forces reshaping the social identities of non-elite women within their social and religious communities as well as in their own families. In other words, not only do these epitaphs inform us about the social lives of these young women but they also illuminate the lived religion of the time. The reasons for addressing these questions and problems are several. The corpus of late antique funerary poetry, along with the social class that it commemorates, has been understudied by the scholarly community. These epitaphs may reveal how the bereaved honored and identified the female victims of untimely deaths while also demonstrating the importance of young women's roles in early Christian communities.

Christus Virgo

2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-27
Author(s):  
Sissel Undheim
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Female Sex ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

The description of Christ as a virgin, 'Christus virgo', does occur at rare occasions in Early Christian and late antique texts. Considering that 'virgo' was a term that most commonly described the sexual and moral status of a member of the female sex, such representations of Christ as a virgin may exemplify some of the complex negotiations over gender, salvation, sanctity and Christology that we find in the writings of the Church fathers. The article provides some suggestions as to how we can understand the notion of the virgin Christ within the context of early Christian and late antique theological debates on the one hand, and in light of the growing interest in sacred virginity on the other.

Civilizations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Ritual, and Religious Experience in Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Traditions

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Erotic Love ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
The Relationship

Civilizations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Ritual, and Religious Experience in Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Traditions brings together thirteen scholars of late-antique, medieval, and renaissance traditions who discuss magic, religious experience, ritual, and witch-beliefs with the aim of reflecting on the relationship between man and the supernatural. The content of the volume is intriguingly diverse and includes late antique traditions covering erotic love magic, Hellenistic-Egyptian astrology, apotropaic rituals, early Christian amulets, and astrological amulets; medieval traditions focusing on the relationships between magic and disbelief, pagan magic and Christian culture, as well as witchcraft and magic in Britain, Scandinavian sympathetic graphophagy, superstition in sermon literature; and finally Renaissance traditions revolving around Agrippan magic, witchcraft in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and a Biblical toponym related to the Friulan Benandanti’s visionary experiences. These varied topics reflect the multifaceted ways through which men aimed to establish relationships with the supernatural in diverse cultural traditions, and for different purposes, between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance. These ways eventually contributed to shaping the civilizations of the supernatural or those peculiar patterns which helped men look at themselves through the mirror of their own amazement of being in this world.

The Roman Martyrs

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lapidge
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Roman Society ◽  
Christian Literature ◽  
The Church

The Roman Martyrs contains translations of forty Latin passiones of saints who were martyred in Rome or its near environs, during the period before the ‘peace of the Church’ (c. 312). Some of these Roman martyrs are universally known — SS. Agnes, Sebastian or Laurence, for example — but others are scarcely known outside the ecclesiastical landscape of Rome itself. Each of the translated passiones, which vary in length from a few paragraphs to over ninety, is accompanied by an individual introduction and commentary; the translations are preceded by an Introduction which describes the principal features of this little-known genre of Christian literature. The Roman passiones martyrum have never previously been collected together, and have never been translated into a modern language. They were mostly composed during the period 425 x 675, by anonymous authors who who were presumably clerics of the Roman churches or cemeteries which housed the martyrs’ remains. It is clear that they were composed in response to the huge explosion of pilgrim traffic to martyrial shrines from the late fourth century onwards, at a time when authentic records (protocols) of their trials and executions had long since vanished, and the authors of the passiones were obliged to imagine the circumstances in which martyrs were tried and executed. The passiones are works of pure fiction; and because they abound in ludicrous errors of chronology, they have been largely ignored by historians of the early Church. But although they cannot be used as evidence for the original martyrdoms, they nevertheless allow a fascinating glimpse of the concerns which animated Christians during the period in question: for example, the preservation of virginity, or the ever-present threat posed by pagan practices. And because certain aspects of Roman life will have changed little between (say) the second century and the fifth, the passiones throw valuable light on many aspects of Roman society, not least the nature of a trial before an urban prefect, and the horrendous tortures which were a central feature of such trials. Above all, perhaps, the passiones are an indispensable resource for understanding the topography of late antique Rome and its environs, since they characteristically contain detailed reference to the places where the martyrs were tried, executed, and buried. The book contains five Appendices containing translations of texts relevant to the study of Roman martyrs: the Depositio martyrum of A.D. 354 (Appendix I); the epigrammata of Pope Damasus d. 384) which pertain to Roman martyrs treated in the passiones (II); entries pertaining to Roman martyrs in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum (III); entries in seventh-century pilgrim itineraries pertaining to shrines of Roman martyrs in suburban cemeteries (IV); and entries commemorating these martyrs in early Roman liturgical books (V).

Influence on Early Christian Worship

2020 ◽  
pp. 377-391
Author(s):  
Paul F. Bradshaw
Keyword(s):  
Early Christianity ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Hebrew Scriptures ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Ritual Practices

This chapter traces the various ways in which the cultic language and imagery of the Hebrew Scriptures influenced and shaped the liturgical thought and ritual practices of early Christianity, from the first to the fourth century ce. At first, this was primarily through the metaphorical or spiritual application of such concepts as priesthood and sacrifice, but eventually there are indications of the beginnings of the adoption of a more literal correspondence between some elements of the Temple cult and aspects of Christian worship. Both corporate and individual practices of prayer are covered, including the use of the canonical psalms, as well as the appropriation of traditional ritual gestures and the emergence of Christian holy days out of biblical festivals.

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