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    The Baptized Muse

    Early Christian Poetry as Cultural Authority

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    Author(s)
    Pollmann, Karla
    Language
    English
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    Abstract
    With the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire, increasing numbers of educated people converted to this new belief. As Christianity did not have its own educational institutions, the issue of how to harmonize pagan education and Christian convictions became increasingly pressing. Especially classical poetry, the staple diet of pagan education, was considered morally corrupting (because of its deceitful mythological content) and damaging for the salvation of the soul (because of the false gods it advocated). But Christianity recoiled from an unqualified anti-intellectual attitude, while at the same time the experiment of creating an idiosyncratic form of genuinely Christian poetry failed (the sole exception being the poet Commodianus). This book argues that, instead, Christian poets made creative use of the classical literary tradition, and—in addition to blending it with Judaeo-Christian biblical exegesis—exploited poetry’s special ability of enhancing the effectiveness of communication through aesthetic means. It seeks to explore these strategies through a close analysis of a wide range of Christian, and for comparison partly also pagan, writers mainly from the fourth to sixth centuries. The book reveals that early Christianity was not a hermetically sealed uniform body, but displays a rich spectrum of possibilities in dealing with the past and a willingness to engage with and adapt the surrounding culture(s), thereby developing diverse and changing responses to historical challenges. By demonstrating throughout that authority is a key in understanding the long denigrated and misunderstood early Christian poets, this book reaches the ground-breaking conclusion that early Christian poetry is an art form that gains its justification by adding cultural authority to Christianity. Thus, in a wider sense this book engages with the recently emerged scholarly interest in aspects of religion as cultural phenomena.
    URI
    http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/30511
    Keywords
    early christian literature; poetic aesthetics; anti-intellectualism; pagan education; biblical exegesis; religion and culture; myth; cultural authority; classical literary tradition; late antiquity; God; Paganism; Virgil
    DOI
    10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198726487.001.0001
    ISBN
    9780198726487
    OCN
    971364910
    Publisher
    Oxford University Press
    Publisher website
    https://global.oup.com/
    Publication date and place
    2017
    Classification
    Ancient, classical and medieval texts
    Christianity
    History of religion
    Pages
    288
    Public remark
    Relevant Wikipedia pages: God - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God; Paganism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paganism; Virgil - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil
    Rights
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
    • Imported or submitted locally

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    License

    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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