Christian Victory Research Articles

Inventing Synagogue Conversion

Historians of the ancient synagogue often use the term “conversion” to describe any kind of adaptation of a building once designated as a synagogue into a church. This label oversimplifies and misconstrues complex processes, both rhetorical and architectural, that were at work in transforming the landscape of the late antique Mediterranean. I explore the dynamic of this triumphalist rhetoric and architectural strategy, showing that Christian writers meant something very specific by the term “conversion,” and that they invented the paradigm of synagogue conversion in order to interpret the changing landscape to their readers. The architectural program of replacement as a strategy for converting subject populations to Christianity emerged in the sixth century. By characterizing changes made to building structures and changes in religious belief as “conversion,” imperial policy concretized the association of sacred space transformation with the victory of Christianity over Judaism and paganism.

Surviving Christianity

In his essay ‘The Deconstruction of Christianity’, Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Christianity with the heart of the West, thus following René Girard's claim that Christianity is the religion that exposes the workings of scapegoating and mimetic violence that drive most religions and cultures. However, in On Touching, Derrida distances himself from Nancy's project, and I argue that this is precisely because he is aware that a straightforward embrace of the deconstruction of Christianity is a ruse, as it will end up in a Christian victory that ultimately overcomes deconstruction. The problem, however, is that a simple opposition to Christianity is also insufficient because it gets caught in a similar trap where Christianity ultimately wins (religion will always triumph, as Lacan says). The workings of this ‘trap’ will be explored through a reading of Derrida's essay ‘What is a Relevant Translation?’ and particularly his discussion of Shylock's situation in Merchant of Venice, where Derrida recognizes the ruse of Christianity in its ability to trump Shylock's literal translation of the law, but still he ‘insist[s] on the Christian dimension’. Why? To answer this question this paper turns to another: how do we survive Christianity?

Inventing Synagogue Conversion

Historians of the ancient synagogue often use the term “conversion” to describe any kind of adaptation of a building once designated as a synagogue into a church. This label oversimplifies and misconstrues complex processes, both rhetorical and architectural, that were at work in transforming the landscape of the late antique Mediterranean. I explore the dynamic of this triumphalist rhetoric and architectural strategy, showing that Christian writers meant something very specific by the term “conversion,” and that they invented the paradigm of synagogue conversion in order to interpret the changing landscape to their readers. The architectural program of replacement as a strategy for converting subject populations to Christianity emerged in the sixth century. By characterizing changes made to building structures and changes in religious belief as “conversion,” imperial policy concretized the association of sacred space transformation with the victory of Christianity over Judaism and paganism.

Kingship, Crusade, and the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in the Chronica latina regum Castellae

The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) is widely regarded as a decisive moment in Christian Spain's “re-conquest” of Al-Andalus. But when did the story of that battle assume its central place in the conventional history of theReconquista and of Castile more broadly? Only a short time after Las Navas, theChronica latina regum Castellae (Latin Chronicle of the Kings of Castile) capitalized on the propagandistic potential of the battle, using a retelling of the Christian victory to legitimate Castilian royal authority and promote the idea of Castile's dominance on the Iberian Peninsula. TheChronica latina's account of Las Navas served immediate political ends while also setting the tone for later histories.

Kant and Milton (review)

Reviewed by: Kant and Milton Gordon Teskey Sanford Budick , Kant and Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Pp. 330. $51.50. This book might be a great idea. One wonders why no one before has thought to do a comparative study of Milton and Kant, especially when Milton—or rather the idea of Milton—seems to be behind much of what Kant has to say in the Third Critique, The Critique of Judgment, and elsewhere (for example, in the Anthropology) about poetic genius, and the sublime. Poetical art is the sensuous representation of "something lying beyond the bounds of experience" ["etwas über die Erfahrungsgrenze hinaus liegenden"]. In poetry, the imagination uses sensuous experience to create a world more unified than our ordinary experience can ever be. That certainly is Miltonic. Milton shows us heaven, hell, and eternity (things Kant actually names as "poetic"), which lie beyond our experience; you feel yourself in Heaven and you feel yourself in Hell—and you feel yourself on earth, a very different, satisfying earth. But Kant also says the imagination imitates reason by extending toward the infinite. As Sanford Budick reminds us, citing J. H. Tisch, "sublime" and "Miltonic" had become practically interchangeable in Germany in the later eighteenth century, when English aesthetic thought was at its highpoint of influence there (18). Byron is repeating a longstanding commonplace when he says that the word "Miltonic" now means "sublime." It was Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, who gave the fullest development of the idea of the sublime, a concept known to Milton through Longinus's Peri Hypsous. The sublime was the recurring theme of eighteenth-century aesthetics before Kant. Kant's aesthetics is not the only reason to compare him with Milton. The central problem of Kant's philosophy is the securing of real human freedom and moral uprightness ("pure reason") while abandoning the false freedom of dogmatic metaphysics, and the pseudomorals and pseudoaesthetics that follow from such dogmatism. (Like all great philosophers, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, Kant is easy to summarize but exceedingly demanding at the level of reading.) Freedom and Reason are central to Milton's poetry and they are central to Kant. Moreover, Milton sees freedom as related to moral choice—to be truly free is to choose what is right—and Kant's categorical imperative—act as if your action were what you would will as a universal law—is a philosophical refinement of this idea. Milton himself would accept the categorical imperative, once he had freed himself of his regressive attachment to dogmatic trust in the Bible. But, of course, he didn't. Milton was not a man of the Enlightenment like Kant, who was the genius of Enlightenment. Let us go a little farther before reining in this somewhat naively comparative line of thought, in which differences like the Bible don't count. It seems to me the broad subjects of Kant's three critiques—the critique of pure reason, the critique of moral judgment, and the critique of aesthetic judgments—give us the main points of concern in Milton's epics, and in the same order of development. What is human reason and what are its limits? How is moral judgment performed in relation to reason? And how do judgments of taste—aesthetic judgments—reflect back upon reason and morals, unifying them, even as they extend beyond the boundaries of experience? These three questions align with the important moments in Milton's epics. First, in Paradise Lost, Adam and Raphael discuss the limits and the powers [End Page 315] of reason. They do so in the one passage of Milton of which Kant has some faint awareness, though it is inaccurate, as we shall see, and evidently at second hand. Second, the tragic separation of moral judgment from reason is the subject of Book Nine of Paradise Lost. Third, Christ's victory over Satan, in Paradise Regained, is accomplished by superior aesthetic judgment. It is a judgment of taste, prepared for by (of all things) a comparison of the merits of Pindar on the one hand (to name only one of the Greek lyric poets alluded to) and of the Hebrew Psalms on the other...

From The Gods in Exile

From The Gods in Exile HEINRICH HEINE (Translated by Diskin Clay) I will content myself with saying in a few words that, after the decisive victory of Christianity, the pagan gods of the ancient world came to grips with their difficult situation and the hard necessity they had already experienced in an early age. This was the age of the Revolt of the Titans, who burst the gates of Tartarus, heaped Pelion on Ossa, and scaled Olympus. These poor gods and goddesses were compelled to flee ignominiously with their entire court and they came to conceal themselves among us upon the earth and assume every manner of disguise. Most of the gods took refuge in Egypt, where for self-protection they transformed themselves into animal shapes, as Herodotus tells us. It is exactly in this same manner that the pagan divinities were obliged to flee and seek safety in all manner of disguise and in the most remote hiding places, when the true God appeared with his cross and when the zealous iconoclasts, a black band of monks, shattered their temples and cast anathemas upon the banned gods. A good number of these Olympian refugees had neither ambrosia nor a place of asylum and they had to resort to an honest occupation on earth to gain their daily bread. Some of these gods whose property and sacred woods had been confiscated were even compelled to work as day laborers in our native Germany and drink beer instead of nectar. In this extremity, Apollo seems to have resigned himself to enter the service of cattle farmers. Just as once he herded the cattle of King Admetus, he lived as a herdsman in Lower Austria. But there his melodious singing awakened the susarion 21.1 spring/summer 2013 picions of a learned monk who recognized that he was one of the ancient pagan gods and delivered him up to an ecclesiastical tribunal. Under torture he admitted that he was the god Apollo. He asked for permission to play his lyre and sing a last song before he was led to execution. Now he sang so tenderly and sweetly and there was something so powerful in his singing—and in addition he was so handsome and tall—that the women broke into tears. There were even some who had fallen ill from the intensity of their emotion. After some time had passed, the authorities wanted to remove his body from his tomb and drive a stake of holly through his stomach. They believed that be must be a vampire and that the women who had fallen ill would be cured if they administered this home remedy, which was generally recognized as successful. But, when the tomb was opened, they found it empty. As for Mars, the ancient god of war, I would be inclined to believe that during the age of feudalism he followed his former occupation as a robber knight. The tall Schimmelpenning , the nephew of the Munster executioner, encountered him in Bologna, where he served as Maître des Hautes Œuvres . Some time latter, Mars served as a lansquenet under the command of General Frondsberg and took part in the sack of Rome. No doubt, he must have felt cruel pangs of distress when he witnessed his beloved city, the temples where he himself had been worshipped and the temples of the gods who were cousins to him destroyed so ignominiously. After the Great Defeat, the fate of Bacchus, the handsome Dionysus, was happier than that of Mars and Apollo. On this subject, there is a medieval legend bearing on his fate. In the Tyrol there are great expanses of lakes, surrounded by forests whose trees touch the sky and are reflected in the lakes’ rippling blue waters. From these waters and woods emanate mysterious sounds; they provoke an eerie feeling in the solitary walker in these parts. On the shore of one of these lakes there was the hut of a young man who lived on the fish he caught; in addition to fishing he worked as a ferthe gods in exile 194 ryman whenever a traveler wanted to cross the lake. He had a large boat that he moored...

Was Las Navas a decisive battle?

From the perspective of military history, the Christian victory of 1212 was neither a decisive battle in the history of the peninsular kingdoms nor a significant tipping point in the balance of power between Christians and Muslims. Neither was the fate of the “Reconquest” resolved, nor was the “West” saved from Islam, on the morning of 16 July 1212. The historical events that took place during the following decades after the battle – the crisis of the Almohad Empire, the collapse of al-Andalus, the Christian expansion southwards – depended more on a range of complex socio-political factors than on the result of a mere pitched battle, important as it was.

Las Navas de Tolosa: the beginning of the end of the “Reconquista”? The battle and its consequences according to the Christian sources of the thirteenth century

The Christian victory of 1212 had an enormous impact within and beyond the Iberian Peninsula. While the sources initially depict the exceptional dimensions of the event, the passage of time allowed the battle and its consequences to be evaluated and interpreted from a broader perspective. Some saw Las Navas as the beginning of the decay of the Almohad Caliphate; others believed that it had initiated the beginning of the end of Muslim domination in the Iberian Peninsula. This contribution deals with the memory of the battle in the sources of the thirteenth century.

‘More than conquerors’ (Rom 8:37): Paul’s Gospel and the Augustan Triumphal Arches of the Greek East and Latin West

This paper investigates the social and theological import of Romans against the iconography of the Augustan arches, focusing on Paul’s indebtedness to Greeks and barbarians, the reconciliation of enemies, the victory of Christ on behalf of believers, and his rule over the nations. D.C. Lopez and B. Kahl investigated the iconographic evidence of Aphrodisias and Pergamon when discussing the political implications of Paul’s gospel in the Roman province of Asia. Paul visited neither city, so arguments about the apostle’s interaction with the imperial ideology of ‘victory’ depends more on the ubiquity of the Julio-Claudian propaganda than on any contact Paul might have had with those specific monuments. The Augustan arches throughout the Empire stereotypically depict the humiliation of barbarians at the sites of Pisidian Antioch, a city visited by Paul (Acts 13:14-50), as well as at La Turbie, Glanum, Carpentras and the triple arch at the Roman Forum. However, there were other iconographic motifs on the arches that conflicted with the relentless triumphal ideology of Augustus. They articulated an alternate vision of social relations between conqueror and conquered.

The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and the Battle for the Strait (review)

Reviewed by: The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and the Battle for the Strait Sam Zeno Conedera Joseph F. O’Callaghan, The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and the Battle for the Strait (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2011) vii + 376 pp. In 2003, Joseph O’Callaghan made an important scholarly contribution with the publication of Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain. While his latest book picks up where Reconquest left off chronologically, it is significant that [End Page 248] The Gibraltar Crusade is not presented as a second volume in a series. It mostly steers clear of the debate over Reconquest and crusade, opting instead for a straightforward narrative of the battle for the Strait between 1248 and the death of Alfonso XI. Gibraltar is divided into eleven chapters. The first describes the geography of the Strait, gives a brief synopsis of major events prior to 1248, and identifies the main sources that the author has used. The next eight chapters proceed chronologically through the back-and-forth contest for control of the Pillars of Hercules. The book is rounded out with a thematic chapter on the waging of the crusade in general, and a conclusion that very briefly describes the final Christian victory over the Strait in the age of the Catholic Monarchs. The conclusion may indicate that O’Callaghan does not intend to write another monograph on Reconquest and crusade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Gibraltar displays all the hallmarks of the scholarship that has made O’Callaghan one of the great historians of medieval Iberia. His masterful command of the sources allows him to put together a clear and detailed account of events. One particular area of strength is the attention to numbers. O’Callaghan offers the best approximation of how many troops participated in campaigns, the cost of expeditions, and so forth. Obtaining reliable numbers is a difficult task thanks to the exaggeration of contemporary chronicles, but O’Callaghan is meticulous in his calculations. The reader learns, for example, that the Battle of Salado, though much less well known than Las Navas de Tolosa, was not only decisive for the war of the Strait, but was also the largest battle ever fought in medieval Iberia in terms of troop participation (188). There is no lack of colorful episodes during a century of war. O’Callaghan revisits the tragic story of Alfonso X’s decline and humiliation, about which he had written at greater length in his biography of the Learned King. Readers will enjoy the tale of Robert Bruce’s posthumous participation in the siege of Teba in 1330. Sir James Douglas, on his way to the Holy Land to bury the Bruce’s heart, was persuaded to participate in the Iberian crusade. The Scottish historian John Barbour tells us that Douglas flung the silver casket containing the heart at the Moorish armies before going into battle after it, ultimately to his own death (279). There is also the case of Alfonso Pérez de Guzmán, who earned the sobriquet of el Bueno for his defense of Tarifa. When his son was captured and threatened with death, Guzmán threw down a knife from the city walls, in case the captors needed a weapon with which to do the deed. A frequently forgotten detail of this episode is that it was not the Moors who executed the boy, but the rebel Infante Juan (107). Guzmán himself, before his heroics at Tarifa, had once been in the service of the Marinid emir (258). The habit of making alliances across religious lines, a practice that was documented in Reconquest, remained alive and well in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In writing such a thorough yet concise and readable account of the oft-neglected post-1248 Reconquest, O’Callaghan has done an important service to the field. I have the feeling, however, that something is missing from Gibraltar. O’Callaghan offers little sense of how ideology or the social reality of chivalry changed during the period, nor how such changes were relevant to the battle for the Strait. To be fair, he does not altogether neglect the theoretical questions [End Page 249] that were more prominent in his...

THE GREEK-PLAY BISHOP: POLEMIC, PROSOPOGRAPHY, AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY PRELATES

ABSTRACTDiscussions of classical scholarship and of the Anglican church in Victorian England have both at times identified an ‘age of the Greek-play bishop’ during which there was a close relationship between classical distinction and episcopal promotion. Closer investigation reveals few prelates fitting the description. This article explains this paradox by tracing the idea of the ‘Greek-play bishop’ across a variety of nineteenth-century literatures, in the process suggesting the significance more generally of the migration of ideas between overlapping Victorian print cultures. The article demonstrates how the concept originated in the radical critique of Old Corruption around 1830, before in the 1840s and 1850s satirists (notably Sydney Smith) adopted it in ad personam assaults on two bishops, J. H. Monk and C. J. Blomfield. In the 1860s, the concept became a less polemical category in the context of more wide-ranging analyses of the composition of the episcopate, gradually acquiring an elegiac aspect as new intellectual challenges arose to Victorian Christianity. By 1900, the ‘Greek-play bishop’ had begun to find the place in the conceptual armoury of historians of the nineteenth-century church that it would hold for much of the twentieth century, its polemical origins long forgotten.

Stricken by God? Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ – Edited by Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin

Stricken by God? Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ – Edited by Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin

Propaganda campaign of the Viennese court in Turkish War 1716-1718 on maps and engravings

At the beginning of the 18th century the public sphere in Europe was a broader communication model different from the old representational public. It implied a more active audience participation. Tendencies such as 'image building' of a ruler in public and 'improving reputation' demanded well thought out propaganda campaign with clear goals, targeting specific audience and accomplished through specific media. The Habsburgs insisted on the universal dimension of combat between Christianity and Islam during Turkish wars. The Emperor Charles VI considered himself the protector of the Christian world and counted on general approval in that battle. To ensure support of European powers and states within the Empire for the new war against Turkey (1716- 1718), the Viennese court employed all its propaganda capacities that included the use of printed visual media. Considerable production of maps, siege views, panoramas and engravings with battle scenes were part of the propaganda campaign. War events significant for the Emperor and the state politics were commemorated by various visual products meant to influence public through 'media strategy'. The intention of the highest court officials was to 'win' wider European public and public within the Empire for the Emperor's crusade mission with prolific printed production and its distribution. Mass production of graphic sheets was relatively fast and cheap, its distribution was easy and that made it suitable for informing and propaganda. The media campaign targeted the public in the Empire, especially German principalities that had not provided Habsburgs' military forces with arms. The campaign appealed to the German solidarity and dynastic patriotism. Propaganda that targeted wider European public was aimed to win universal approval and support. The Viennese court campaign was well received and became a practice of many European courts to commemorate their participation in 'glorious victory of Christianity', and independent publishers saw profit in their publishing.

MALIGNANT FAITH AND COGNITIVE RESTRUCTURING: REALISM INADAM BEDE

I begin this essay by quoting twobooks that deeply shaped George Eliot's thinking because I want to draw attention to the problem of “faith” in her writings, which I believe illuminates an important aspect of her realist project. I am not so much interested in her well-documented personal loss of faith, or her deconstruction of Victorian Christianity into religious humanism (Knoepflmacher 44–59; Wright 173–201; Dolin 165–89), as I am in her positive theorization of faith, throughout her early writings, as a cognitive structure that shapes perception, interpretation, and action. Faith materializes as beliefs shape perception, perceptions shape belief, in hermeneutical spirals coiling out to exert benign or malignant force on believers’ material lives. For Eliot, Christian faith enables social violence, and literature must both expose this malignant relationship and instill more benign (and less totalizing) cognitive patterns for bringing one's faith to bear on materiality. Among other effects, such a transformation changes the way the Bible itself can be read. The realism Eliot articulates inAdam Bede(1859) and elaborates for the rest of her career is modeled on her understanding of the cognitive structure of faith – and calculated to infiltrate and eradicate it.

Le chroniqueur, l'hagiographe et la mer.

Guillaume de Machaut's last work, La prise d'Alexandrie takes the form of a verse chronicle of the life of Peter 1 of Lusignan, King of Cyprus. It focuses on the Battle of Alexandria in 1365, which concluded with a Christian victory and the - admittedly very short-lived - occupation of the town by Lusignan and his armies. In this article, 1 will start from the hypothesis that La prise d'Alexandrie is a hybrid text, the result of a kind of literary syncretism buttressed by three traditions: hagiographic, epic, and historical. From this perspective, 1 propose to analyze the place occupied by the maritime element in Machaut's writing by positioning it in relation to the concerns of the Rheims poet and the models that might have influenced his historical narrative.

Book Review: Stricken by God?: Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ

Book Review: Stricken by God?: Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ

Sanctification in Milton's Academy: Reassessing the Purposes in Of Education and the Pedagogy of Paradise Lost

Sanctification in Milton's Academy: Reassessing the Purposes in <i>Of Education</i> and the Pedagogy of <i>Paradise Lost</i>

Book Review: Stricken by God? Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ

Book Review: <b>Stricken by God?</b> Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ

Stricken by God? Non Violent Identification and the Victory of Christ, edited by Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin

Stricken by God? Non Violent Identification and the Victory of Christ, edited by Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin

Stricken by God? Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ – Edited by Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin

Stricken by God? Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ – Edited by Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin