La version païenne du Frigidus : Eunape, ses éֹpigones et Alan Cameron (The Last Pagans of Rome, pp. 110–111)

During the Baroque period, artists worked in a style—encouraged by the Roman Catholic Church and the Council of Trent—that revealed the divine in natural forms and made religious experiences more accessible. Cosmas Damian Asam, painter and architect, and his brother Egid (Aegid) Quirin Asam, sculptor and stuccatore, were the principal exponents of eighteenth-century, southern-German religious decoration and architecture in the grand manner, the Gesamtkunstwerk. Cosmas Damian's visionary and ecstatic art utilized light, both physical and illusionistic, together with images of meteorological and astronomical phenomena, such as solar and lunar eclipses. This paper focuses on his representations of eclipses and demonstrates how Asam was galvanized by their visual, as well as metaphorical, power and that he studied a number of them. He subsequently applied his observations in a series of paintings for the Benedictine order that become increasingly astronomically accurate and spiritually profound. From the evidence presented, especially in three depictions of St. Benedict's vision, the artist harnessed his observations to visualize the literary description of the miraculous event in the Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great, traditionally a difficult scene to illustrate, even for Albrecht Dürer. Asam painted the trio at Einsiedeln, Switzerland (1724–27); Kladruby, the Czech Republic (1725–27), where he captured the solar corona and the "diamond-ring effect"; and Weltenburg, Germany (1735), where he also depicted the diamond-ring effect at a total solar eclipse. We conclude that his visualizations were informed by his personal observations of the solar eclipses on 12 May 1706, 22 May 1724, and 13 May 1733. Asam may have also known the eclipse maps of Edmond Halley and William Whiston that were issued in advance. Astronomers did not start studying eclipses scientifically until the nineteenth century, making Asam's depictions all the more fascinating. So powerful was the image that Asam invented to visualize St. Benedict's vision that it found reflection in the subsequent Bavarian Benedictine visual tradition. Total solar eclipses are among the most spectacular sights in Nature. Therefore, in an age obsessed with revealing the divine through natural idioms and making religious experiences direct—not to mention that light had long functioned as a symbol of divinity in the Christian tradition—it seems fitting that solar eclipses would be interpreted as a metaphor of a divine presence or a miracle.

Selfsacrifice is not an exclusively Christian virtue, but Christians say that the life and death and continuing inspiration of Jesus Christ have transformed human possibilities and human relationships: people need not limit our concern to ourselves and the few people who naturally matter in our lives. Christian tradition is not formed in isolation from the general culture. Aristotle produced a classification of friendships which many Christian writers have found helpful: friendships are based on pleasure, utility, or shared concern for what is truly good. Aelred of Rievaulx, writing for a monastic community in the twelfth century, followed Cicero and Ambrose in his praise of friendship. Christian Aid, as its collectors often have to explain, is not restricted to Christian donors and recipients. Christians are expected to extend help and concern beyond the Christian group, to ‘love their enemies’.

‘Let one man worship God, another Jove’ ‘Colat alius Deum, alius Iovem’. With this lapidary plea Tertullian establishes himself as one of the earliest advocates of religious tolerance in the Christian tradition. In the Roman Empire of the late second century, the Christians were in great need of some religious toleration. Those Christian writers whom we call the Apologists aimed, precisely, at convincing Roman intellectuals in the corridors of power that toleration of the Christians and of their religious beliefs would in no way harm the state, and that such a toleration was, moreover, congruent with principles of reason shared, at least in theory, by all people. One of the major historical paradoxes reflected by the development of early Christianity is its transformation, during the course of the fourth century, from a religio illicita seeking recognition and tolerance into an established religion refusing to grant others (and its own dissenters from within, the ‘heretics’) what it had sought for itself until the recent past. The traditional answer to our paradox is that, as long as the Christians were in need of religious toleration for themselves, they knew how to make a case for its necessity. As soon as they came to power, however, they forgot their early virtues and learned how to deprive others of what they had just acquired. Christian intolerance, in such a view of things, would be rooted in human nature, rather than in some implicit aspects of Christian theology. This explanation no doubt suffers from an oversimplification of complex phenomena.

The study with which Cerulli supports his edition of the Libro della scala is a model of historical research, tracing, as it does, by strict lines of literary dependence the spread of the knowledge of Muslim otherworld beliefs among certain Christian writers in the later Middle Ages. With Dante it attempts to follow the same delimited pattern, resisting the temptation to canvass all of Islam for analogues, and centers chiefly on the Libro itself. It thus avoids one of the chief methodological pitfalls which hampered Asin. Dante, however, never refers to the legends or quotes them as some of his contemporaries do. Whatever the historical possibilities now apparent, therefore, the editors of the Islamic text are in the end obliged, as scholars have been for various other sources, to attempt proof of connection by means once more of parallels and comparisons. The Libro della scala is a description of Muhammed's otherworld experiences which includes both the ascension and the visit to the places of torment. It thus combines the incidents of the Micraj and the Isr2', in a form that places it with Asin's Cycle III.112 This is the most elaborate of the cycles, displaying in repetition and inconsistency its composite character. Much of what it contains is already known to Dantists from Asin's texts and summaries, and whatever valid objections were voiced against them might be raised, with reference to that part of the contents, in the present case also. But there are also certain details, particularly in the section on Hell, which take a shape peculiar to this text and bring up new questions for the Inferno. Though marked in general by considerable restraint, Cerulli's comparisons, as they concern the Paradiso, hardly ever surmount the stage of doubt. Beyond the general consideration of the vision in large as a flight through the heavens, together with its astronomical assumptions, they chiefly deal with the motifs of the angelic guide who answers questions, the heavenly ladder, the eagle, the garden of Paradise, and the celestial Rose.'13 To the student of the vision literature the first of these motifs will be recognizable as one of the commonest of all its themes, and the next two are equally widespread in Christian tradition, which provided both the figures themselves of ladder and eagle and a range of allegorical -mystical uses that molded them in part to Dante's needs, With respect to the eagle, Asin had already insisted on comparing it with the gigantic Cock of Heaven in Muslim legends, and Cerulli cannot quite give this up. While recognizing the prior importance of the traditional figure of the imperial eagle and of such biblical references as those of Ezek. 17:3, Isa. 40:31, and Matt. 24:28, he thinks that se la questione concerne la concorrenza di un motivo del Libro della Scala ... con altre fonti, [il Gallo] a mio parere 6 ammis-

In the dominant tradition of Christian epic poetry, Pilate’s judgement of Jesus is not explained by his brute political calculations. Rather, Pilate is literally conquered by Caiaphas and his Judaean allies. In this Christian tradition, the Roman trial of Jesus has not one but two judicial victims—Pilate and Jesus. For instance, in Marco Girolamo Vida’s Renaissance epic, Christiad, the dramatization of Pilate’s inner life permits the legal reality of his judgement to be recognized, and its moral reality to be denied. For many Christian writers, the Roman magistrate who interrogates Jesus is (virtually) guiltless. It is thus not only in pagan, Judaic, and Islamic traditions, but in early and august Christian traditions that Pilate has enjoyed—in many circles—twenty centuries of innocence.

‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God’ (Matthew 5.8; NRSV), so says Christ at the beginning of his greatest sermon, the Sermon on the Mount. But just what it is to be pure in heart and what it is to see God, he never explains. Following this beatitude, Christian writers in Scripture, and in the subsequent Christian tradition, have developed the doctrine of the beatific vision, according to which a person who is completely sanctified (is pure in heart) has immediate knowledge of God (sees him). While this doctrine has exerted considerable influence on the Christian tradition, it has received scant philosophical attention. In this issue, we begin to sketch what a philosophy of the beatific vision would look like.

Be it fair trade coffee or foreign oil, our choices as consumers affect the well-being of humans around the globe, not to mention the natural world and of course ourselves. Consumption is a serious ethical issue, and Christian writers throughout history have weighed in, discussing topics such as affluence and poverty, greed and gluttony, and proper stewardship of resources. These voices are often at odds, however. In this book, Laura M. Hartman formulates a coherent Christian ethic of consumption, imposing order on the debate by dividing it into four imperatives: Christians are to consume in ways that avoid sin, embrace creation, love one's neighbor, and envision the future. An adequate ethics of consumption, she argues, must include all four considerations as tools for discernment, even when they seem to contradict one another. The book includes discussions of Christian practices such as fasting, gratitude, solidarity, gift-giving, Sabbath-keeping, and the Eucharist. Using exemplars from the Christian tradition and practical examples from everyday life, The Christian Consumer offers a thoughtful guide to ethical consumption. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/religion/9780199746422/toc.html

From earliest apostolic and patristic times, Christian writers have generally been suspicious of the common human desire to improve one's economic status. In Britain, however, by the end of the seventeenth century, this suspicion had all but vanished as most Christians began to accommodate themselves to the exigencies of an increasingly dynamic commercial society. This article takes up the early eighteenth-century controversy over the compatibility of traditional Christian moral virtues with the demands of economic and material progress as reflected in the writings of the two most important antagonists in the controversy, Bernard Mandeville and William Law. Although both Mandeville and Law spoke the language of Christian rigorism and perfectionism, and proclaimed attachment to the full austerity of the Christian Gospels, Mandeville, it is explained, was really a hedonist in disguise who feigned attachment to traditional Christian and Stoic ascetic principles merely to be able to discredit those principles. Law, it is explained, was a man of uncommon piety and devoutness who was shocked by the increasing secularism and materialism of his age, and who sought to recall his contemporaries to a life of true Christian holiness. The article concludes with an evaluation of the relative merits of the positions of each of the two thinkers.

The Kingdom Is Always But Coming: A Life of Walter Rauschenbusch. By Christopher H. Evans. [Library of Religious Biography] (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 2004. Pp. xxx, 348. $25.00 paperback.) Evans's biography of the most influential and sophisticated Protestant theological social ethicist and reformer early in the twentieth century serves two audiences. It offers those who have studied Rauschenbusch in depth a rich account of his life and thought in relation to other Christian writers during this period and in relation to Christian scriptures and tradition. Evans exhaustive, and sometimes repetitive, reporting on his subject's personal life surpasses in comprehensive detail the only other balanced biography of Rauschenbusch, the one by Paul Minus. Evans has combed the many boxes of the Rauschenbusch archives at the Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School for correspondence revealing personal matters such as Rauschenbusch's relations to the institution of the family and his own family members and his embrace of an upper-middle class financial and social status. Evans ably uses these discoveries to show connections between his subject's life and his theology and ethics that have escaped other interpreters of Rauschenbusch. I, for one, would have written a richer understanding of Rauschenbusch on justice had Evans's book been available. Second, Evans offers those interested in American Christian social ethics a readable and enjoyable introduction to its principal Protestant progenitor. Evans competently explicates Rauschenbusch's most prominent theological and ethical innovations as well as the evangelical and Anabaptist roots of these contributions to social ethics. Although this biography does not render Paul Minus's book otiose, it provides at least as adequate an entree into the fertile thought of Rauschenbusch. Relying solely on Evans to introduce Rauschenbusch, however, can mislead and diminish the penetrating creativity of his theology and his legacy for social ethics. Evans proposes to interpret Rauschenbusch as a window for a better understanding of Protestant thought in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century in a strictly chronological approach to his subject, mingling interpretations of Rauschenbusch's professional and personal activity during distinct periods in his life. The result portrays Rauschenbusch as embodying the most prominent typical expression of Protestant liberal theology and the Social Gospel within the cultural constraints of his era. …

We are now moving on from early Asia to medieval Scandinavia and Europe — from China, India, and Babylonia to Norway, Ireland, and England. The cultural focus will be placed on sources from the Christian tradition moving over a wide geographical range from the lands of the medieval Rus’ to the Atlantic archipelago in the west, crossing linguistic, political, and religious boundaries. Christian scholars, scientists, and theologians in the European Middle Ages developed their own responses to the science, experience, and interpretation of total solar eclipses. Many medieval thinkers also held a religious office and tried to reconcile their vision and knowledge of the material world with their beliefs as well as with their theological knowledge from scripture. The description of the 1133 total solar eclipse as simultaneously ‘Wretched, Horrifying, Black, Remarkable’ goes hand in hand with the wider contemporary efforts of bridging of empirical and interpretative astronomical approaches in the Christian twelfth century.

The publication presents a translation of the Latin poem "Triumphus Christi heroicus" (The Heroic Triumph of Christ), accompanied by an introductory article and commentary. The work describes Christ's descent into hell after his atoning sacrifice, his victory over Pluto, the pagan god of the underworld, and his minions, as well as his encounter with the dead Old Testament righteous and their deliverance from hell. The authorship of this work remains a matter of debate: for a long time it was attributed to the ancient Roman Christian writer of the 4th century Juvencus. However, Pseudo-Juvencus (another unknown early Christian writer), an anonymous medieval author, and recent studies point to the sixteenth-century German humanist Johann Spangenberg as a possible author. The introductory article analyses the history of the text and hypotheses about the author, and considers the publication history of the Triumph as reconstructed by G. Vredeveld and his theory, which explains why for a long time the authorship was attributed to Juvencus. The artistic features and plot of the poem are examined from the perspective of the Christian literary tradition of the "descent into hell". The main sources in the tradition of texts with the motif of "decens ad infernos", which could have influenced the creation of the text of "Triumph", are given. The mixing of pagan and Christian discourse within one work is separately noted. Three directions of cross-cultural interaction in the text are distinguished: Christian and ancient Roman pagan parallels, ancient Roman realities in Christian interpretation, as well as literary allusions to ancient authors, primarily Ovid and Virgil. "The Heroic Triumph of Christ" is part of the Christian tradition of triumphal Easter hymns, which can be traced from early Christian literary works to Neo-Latin authors. This is the first time this work has been translated into Russian.

The Platonic philosopher Hierocles claimed—and some modern exegetes have claimed—that Jesus and his followers engaged in violence. This non-Christian tradition is contradicted, not only by the gospels but by an ancient tradition from Palestine in which Jesus’ cousins, facing a Roman emperor, echo the words of Jesus before Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world.” If this piece of Christian tradition can be trusted, the trial of Jesus’ cousins may have changed the Roman policy towards Christians in the latter part of the first century CE. But the historicity of this trial is immaterial. The argument of this chapter (and of this book) is that the saying attributed to Jesus by the writer of John, and the idea attributed to Jesus’ cousins by later Christian writers, altered the history that we still inhabit.

In this final edition of his classic study of St. Thomas Aquinas, Etienne Gilson presents the sweeping range and organic unity of Thomistic philosophical thought. The philosophical thinking of Aquinas is the result of reason being challenged to relate to many theological conceptions of the Christian tradition. Gilson carefully reviews how Aquinas grapples with the relation itself of faith and reason and continuing through the existence and nature of God and His creation, the world and its creatures, especially human beings with their power of intellect, will, and moral life. He concludes this study by discussing the life of people in society, along with their purpose and final destiny. Gilson demonstrates that Aquinas drew from a wide spectrum of sources in the development of his thought-from the speculations of the ancient Greeks such as Aristotle, to the Arabic and Jewish philosophers of his time, as well as from Christian writers and scripture. The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas offers students of philosophy and medieval studies an insightful introduction to the thought of Aquinas and the Scholastic philosophy of the Middles Ages, insights that are still revelant for today.

Reviewed by: From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category Max Rosenkrantz Thomas Dixon . From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 287. Cloth, $60.00 Thomas Dixon's From Passions to Emotions defends a provocative set of theses. (1) The concept of "emotion" is of relatively recent vintage, having been designed by secular Scottish writers in the first half of the nineteenth century. (2) That concept embraces a range of phenomena that earlier Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas understood in terms of a manifold of concepts such as "appetites," "passions," "affections," and "sentiments." (3) The concept of "emotion" is too crude an instrument for understanding human psychology. Further, (4) today the secular conceptual framework has completely displaced the religious one. This has nothing to do with the former's greater proximity to the truth, as is shown by the persistence of cogent Christian theories in the second half of the nineteenth century, the period of secularism's triumph; and (5) The opposition between reason and emotion arises only when theorists begin to think of "emotions" rather than "appetites," "passions," "affections," and "sentiments." Christian writers did not see the passions as simply the enemies of reason. The basis for Dixon's argument is his interpretation of nineteenth-century psychological theory in the English speaking world. Specifically he argues that the concept of "emotion" was invented by the Scottish thinker Thomas Brown (1778-1820). Brown's innovation was then appropriated and developed by Spencer, Darwin, and William James. The foil for this story is the Christian tradition represented most compellingly by Augustine and Aquinas and carried on by a host of lesser nineteenth-century figures. In my judgment, the story thus told cannot bear the weight Dixon places upon it. The centerpiece of Dixon's argument is his claim that Brown "invents" (109) the emotions and thereby initiates a conceptual revolution in western thought. While Dixon may be right in asserting that Brown is the first to use the word 'emotion' in a systematic fashion, this achievement is merely terminological. Brown deploys the term to develop a mechanistic account of human nature, one in which the springs of action are located not in the will and reason, but in the emotions. Replace 'emotion' in the preceding sentence with 'passion' and one gets a concise characterization of Hobbes's view. Dixon is aware that Brown and others work within a Hobbesian framework (250) but does not attend to that framework. Thus his claims for the significance of the developments he describes fail to convince. The real innovation in psychological theory—as in so much else—took place in the seventeenth century. Just as Dixon overestimates the importance and originality of the Scottish writers he discusses, so too he overestimates the intellectual importance of Augustine and Aquinas. His presentation of their views (26-62) is accurate, but he does not note that they take over the Platonic-Aristotelian view of the soul according to which reason can and should penetrate, educate and direct the passions. Thus the guiding thought that structures the work—the nineteenth century witnesses an ultimately successful revolt against Christian psychology—must be rejected. The revolt is against ancient, pre-Christian modes of thought and is undertaken and largely won in the seventeenth century. The events Dixon describes are skirmishes in that larger campaign. The rest of the theses Dixon defends can be dispatched with more quickly. The idea that the modern concept of "emotion" is insufficiently subtle is averted to frequently, but never adequately defended. At no point does Dixon demonstrate, or even claim to demonstrate, that Christian thinkers recognized something secular thinkers miss. Roughly the same can be said for his claims about the persistence of Christian psychology in the nineteenth century. What Dixon means is not just that such thinkers exist, but that their thought remains vibrant. Again I see no argument for such a verdict. Finally, there is the matter of the opposition between reason and passion. To his credit Dixon rejects the view according to which almost all Western thought is hostile to the passions. As he shows, this...

This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part traces the influence of the Two Ways in the early church. It is of importance to know whether the indirect Christian tradition attests to the diffusion of the original Greek document and/or of its Latin translation. The chapter analyzes the following question: Are there quotations and testimonies of church fathers and of other Christian writings available evidencing an independent Two Ways tradition? The chapter's concern, however, is with the function of the Two Ways manual in its first Christian setting. The second part of the chapter investigates the influence of the Two Ways manual on the Latin church literature dating from later (Merovingian and Carolingian) periods. The evidence surveyed shows that the Merovingian and Carolingian documents in their own order and in their own way reproduce features of a Two Ways tradition.Keywords: Carolingian period; Christian literature; Greek document; Latin church literature; Merovingian period; Two Ways