THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR: THE PRESENCE OR ABSENCE OF CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN SECULAR WRITING IN THE LATE ANTIQUE WEST

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 493-509
Author(s):  
Mark Humphries ◽  
David M. Gwynn
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Latin West ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Interpretative Framework ◽  
Secular Life

The impact of Christianity on secular life in Late Antiquity is often conceived in rather negative terms, as various characteristic features of classical Antiquity are regarded as coming to an end. Within this interpretative framework, most studies of the literature of Late Antiquity have focussed on the survival of ‘classical’ (or ‘pagan’ or ‘secular’ ) traditions and tropes in Christian writings. This paper examines the question from the opposite perspective. It aims to forefront various ways in which Christian discourses penetrated writings that were not primarily religious in content in the Latin West from the 4th c. to the 6th.

Marauders, Daredevils, and Noble Savages: Perceptions of Arab Nomads in Late Antique Hagiography

Der Islam ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Konstantin M. Klein
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Past ◽  
Christian Saints

AbstractThis contribution investigates perceptions of Arab nomads in the hagiography of the Late Antique East. Over the past decades, these texts, mostly saints’ lives and episodes from church histories, have often been used to provide social and cultural historians with information on the ethnography, geography, customs and manners of those labelled “Saracens” or “Ishmaelites” in the texts. However, the historicity of the narratives is difficult to assess, and a closer inspection reveals that most of the motifs used in Late Antiquity revert to older models from Classical Antiquity. The article therefore focuses on specific aspects, such as how the writers depicted the Arabs’ manners and customs as contrasting with their own societies and constructed a dichotomy between the civilisation and the animal-like ferocity of the former. It becomes clear that Christian authors used the depiction of the Arabs’ seemingly deviant lifestyle in order to both reassure their readership and excite its curiosity. The display of God’s omnipotence in a large number of the texts discussed here offered a chance to demonstrate that Christian saints could eventually convert such people, or, when conversion was not possible, could still hope for very potent miracles.

Asceticism and syneisaktism in Asterius’ Liber ad Renatum monachum

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hajnalka Tamás ◽  
Liesbeth Van der Sypt
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Latin West ◽  
Depth Study

AbstractThis article offers an in-depth study of Asterius’ often neglected Liber ad Renatum monachum in relation to its compositional context and other similar writings from Late Antiquity. It starts with a thorough discussion about the possible date, author, and place of the Liber ad Renatum monachum. One will see that the context of the writing was the (early) fifth century, but also that the treatise cannot be connected to a place more precisely than the Latin West. In the second part of this article, a closer look is given to the ascetic content of the Liber ad Renatum monachum. Although the treatise has many topics worth discussing, the present authors have chosen to direct their attention to the rather unknown late antique ascetic practice of syneisaktism, a practice in which an ascetic man and a virgin lived together unmarried with the (unofficial) promise to remain chaste. For this reason the final part of this article is wholly dedicated to the question of how Asterius used and reworked a centuries-old tradition of arguments against syneisaktism. The analysis extends over a wide range of polemical writings, starting from Asterius’ proven sources (e.g., Jerome’s Epistulae and the anonymous De singularitate clericorum) to sources previously not connected with this work (e.g., John Chrysostom’s Adversus eos qui apud se habent subintroductas virgines and Quod regulares feminae viris cohabitare non debeant, and several works of the Cappadocians).

Iamblichus, Ficino and Schleiermacher on the Sources of Religious Knowledge

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Hankins
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Friedrich Schleiermacher ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Marsilio Ficino ◽  
Latin West

In one of the Platonic schools of late antiquity Iamblichus developed a philosophical defence of religious experience, describing it as a precognitive awareness of humanity’s existential dependence on a divine principle of unity. The argument was directed against the high rationalism of Porphyry. Marsilio Ficino, the first student of Iamblichus in the Latin West since antiquity, made the argument a foundational one in his own philosophy, implicitly responding to sceptical themes in Renaissance scholasticism. The argument was revived a third time by Friedrich Schleiermacher in response to the scientific materialists of the Enlightenment and as a development of Rousseau’s religious thought.

Inscriptions of Early Byzantium and the Continuity of Ancient Onomastics

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Feissel
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Personal Names ◽  
Local Origin ◽  
Latin West ◽  
Byzantine Era ◽  
Greek East ◽  
Local Traditions ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Ancient Texts

Greek and Latin inscriptions are now fully embraced within the study of Late Antiquity and the Byzantine Era. At Constantinople, inscriptions of the Byzantine era were displayed along with ancient texts imported from elsewhere in the Empire, symbolising the welding of Hellenism and Romanitas. While the number and variety of texts do not match those of earlier eras, they can furnish evidence for several aspects of society. Personal names recorded on inscriptions reveal the impact of the Latin West and of Christianity on the Greek East, in the choice of names and the styles of nomenclature. The survival of names of local origin, from Thrace, Anatolia and Syria, areas where Greek was later imposed on an earlier substrate not always written, reveals the vigour of local traditions.

Monogrammatic Culture in Pre-Carolingian Europe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Latin West ◽  
Visual Phenomenon ◽  
Visual Characteristics ◽  
The Impact

This chapter first examines various material media manifesting the use of monograms as signs of authority for early medieval kings and bishops and as visual tokens of social status for sixth- and seventh-century elites. It also surveys the functional usage of invocational cruciform devices, christograms, and the sign of the cross on material artefacts and manuscripts, both in the Christian East and the Latin West. The final section analyses the impact of late antique monogrammatic culture on the evolving early medieval discourse on the extralinguistic qualities of letters and the symbolic significance of their visual characteristics and on the appearance of monogrammatic lettering in Latin manuscripts. It also examines the importance of this cultural tradition for the origins of ‘monogrammatic initials’—initials that were composed of several letters combined in the manner of a monogram—a new visual phenomenon characteristic of early medieval graphicacy.

scholarly journals Thirty-four Years after "Leda Christiana". Misery and Splendour of the First Century of Coptic Art History

1970 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 217-251
Author(s):  
László Török
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Egyptian Culture ◽  
The Impact

The course of the research of Egyptian Late Antique art was influenced for more than seven decades in a most unfortunate manner by the erroneous intrepretation of the archaeological context of the foruth century AD mythological reliefs discovered in the 1890s by Édouard Naville at Heracleopolis Magna (modern Ahnas). The misinterpretation of the find circumstances led to the postulate of a Christianisation of pagan themes in Coptic art and of their employment in the decoration of Christian churches. The actual architectural and iconographic context of mythological reliefs from Ahnas and other Egyptian Late Antique sites was identified by Hjalmar Torp in a 1969 paper in which he suggested that the mythological reliefs, as well as the contemporary carvings with Christian themes, came from pagan and Christian funerary edifices. Torp also pointed out the impact of Roman funerary iconography on the decoration of third-fifth century Egyptian tomb chapels. The present study discusses the trends prevailing in the research of Egyptian Late Antique art before and after 1969 from the special point of view of Torp’s seminal work. Particular attention is paid to the interconnected issues of chronology, social-cultural context, and quality stratification. The analysis of individual groups of sculptures, paintings, and luxury textiles presents new data for the assessment of the international context of Egyptian art in the Late Antique and early Byzantine periods as well as for the investigation of the transfiguration of Egyptian culture in Late Antiquity.

Late Antique Letter Collections

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
The Social ◽  
Letter Writer ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Letter Collection ◽  
Latin Letter

This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the extant Greek and Latin letter collections of late antiquity (ca. 300-600 C.E.). Bringing together an international team of historians, classicists, and scholars of religion, it illustrates how letter collections advertised an image of the letter writer and introduces the social and textual histories of each collection. Nearly every chapter focuses on the letter collection of a different late ancient author—from the famous (or even infamous) to the obscure—and investigates its particular issues of content, arrangement, and publication context. On the whole, the volume reveals how late antique letter collections operated as a discrete literary genre with its own conventions, transmission processes, and self-presentational agendas while offering new approaches to interpret both larger letter collections and the individual letters contained within them. Each chapter contributes to a broad argument that scholars should read letter collections as they do representatives of other late antique literary genres, as single texts made up of individual components, with larger thematic and literary characteristics that are as important as those of their component parts.

Principles for sharing economy formation in the digital society

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 800-821
Author(s):  
E.V. Popov ◽  
K.A. Semyachkov
Keyword(s):  
Network Effects ◽  
Sharing Economy ◽  
Network Effect ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Digital Society ◽  
Modern Economy ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The Impact

Subject. The article addresses economic relations that are formed in various areas of economic application of digital platforms. The target of the research is the modern economy of digital platforms across different economic activities. Objectives. The aim is to systematize principles for share economy formation in the context of the digital society development. Methods. We employ general scientific methods of research. Results. The study shows that the development of digital platforms is one of the most important trends in the development of the modern economy. We classified certain characteristic features of modern digital platforms, analyzed principles for their creation. The paper emphasizes that the network effects achieved through the use of digital platforms are an important factor in the development of the share economy. The network effect describes the impact of the number of the platform users on the value created for each of them. The paper also considers differences in the organization of traditional economy companies and companies that are based on the digital platform model, reveals specifics of changes in socio-economic systems caused by the development of digital platforms, systematizes principles of the sharing economy formation in the context of the digital society development. Conclusions. The analyzed principles for sharing economy development on the basis of digital platforms can be applied to create models for the purpose of forecasting the transformation of economic activity in the post-industrial society.

Liturgical Poetry in the Late Antique Near East

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ophir Münz-Manor
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Near East ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Biblical Poetry ◽  
Contemporary View ◽  
Cultural Dialogue ◽  
The One

The article presents a contemporary view of the study of piyyut, demonstrating that Jewish poetry of late antiquity (in Hebrew and Aramaic) was closely related to Christian liturgical poetry (both Syriac and Greek) and Samaritan liturgy. These relations were expressed primarily by common poetic and prosodic characteristics, derived on the one hand from ancient Semitic poetry (mainly biblical poetry), and on the other from innovations of the period. The significant connections of content between the different genres of poetry reveal the importance of comparative study. Thus the poetry composed in late antiquity provides additional evidence for the lively cultural dialogue that took place at that time.

Unearthing Houses in Porphyreon and Chhim. Structure, Spatial Development, and Decoration of Domestic Spaces in Late Antique Phoenicia

2020 ◽  
pp. 173-195
Author(s):  
Tomasz Waliszewski ◽  
Julia Burdajewicz
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Research Team ◽  
Wall Painting ◽  
Domestic Architecture ◽  
Functional Study ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Rural Settlements ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Residential Architecture

Porphyreon (Jiyeh/Nebi Younis) and Chhim were large rural settlements situated on the coast of modernday Lebanon, north of the Phoenician city of Sidon. As attested by the remains of residential architecture, they were thriving during the Roman Period and late Antiquity (1st–7th centuries AD). This article presents the preliminary observations on the domestic architecture uncovered at both sites, their spatial and social structure, as well as their furnishing and decoration, based on the fieldwork carried out in recent years by the joint PolishLebanese research team. The focus will be put on the wall painting fragments found in considerable numbers in Porphyreon. The iconographical and functional study of the paintings betrays to what extent the inhabitants of rural settlements in the coastal zone of the Levant were inclined to imitate the decoration of the urban houses known to them from the nearby towns, such as Berytus, but also from religious contexts represented by churches.

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