A Christian's Defense of Paganism: The Efforts of Nonnus of Panopolis to Recapture the Receding Paganism of the Late Antique East

Abstract

The 5th century poet, Nonnus of Panopolis, forces us to re-think our understanding of late-antique culture. This Egyptian Poet, now understood to be a Christian, was responsible for two striking works of verse, the Paraphrase of St. John, and the Dionysiaca. The former is a nuanced re-writing of St. John’s gospel into epic metre; the latter, a grand tour of the ancient world, modelled on Homer, paying special attention to the myriad of cults and myths in their physical context. The Dionysiaca has for a long time been understood as the last gasp of Greek Epic literature, a final episode in the literary tradition started over a millennium before by Homer and Hesiod. Writing at a time when the Church was vigilant in working to defend a perceived ‘Orthodoxy’, Nonnus’ work cannot be easily understood in our current framework. With an old-fashioned acceptance of the Christian/Pagan Binary, it makes no sense that a Christian writer should contribute such a monolithic work to the Pagan tradition. I hope to instead rehabilitate Nonnus’ Dionysiaca as a work that was very much a product of its time. The attentions of my presentation shall be focused on this second work and the way in which, by giving Pagan myth a geographic location, Nonnus showed a concern for the homogenizing influences of a Christian binary. It can be argued that Nonnus sought to accommodate Christianity within the broader Hellenic tradition, at a point when the future image of Christianity in the Mediterranean was unsure.