Bronwen Neil

Exploring the limits of literal exegesis : Augustine's reading of Gen 1:26

The author aims to examine Augustines understanding of the literal and figurative approaches to interpreting scripture, using a single verse, Gen 1:26, as a lens to view his changing understanding of what “literal” meant over the course of thirty years of commentaries on the book of Genesis. In his earlier commentaries, he seeks to redeem the verse from the Manichaean charge of anthropomorphism by giving it an allegorical reading. Some years later, now ordained and on the road to being made a bishop, Augustine attempts a literal reading in the Incomplete Commentary on Genesis. In the complete Literal Commentary on Genesis 3.19, he furnishes a Trinitarian reading of “Let us make humankind to our image and likeness”. By the completion of his great manual on exegesis, De doctrina christiana, he displays a more complex attitude towards the interpretation of scripture: the reader has to determine whether a verse is meant literally or figuratively (or both).

Studying Dream Interpretation from Early Christianity to the Rise of Islam

Early Christian and early Islamic texts on dreams and dream interpretation have come under increased scrutiny in recent decades. Dream literature from pagan and Jewish antiquity to the early medieval period demonstrates that dreams, especially prophetic dreams, were used to establish spiritual authority, enforce compliance, and justify violence in a religious context. The common cultural roots of Christianity and Islam emerge when we recognise the crucial role played by dreams and prophecy in the two traditions. The various methodologies used in recent scholarship on dreams and their interpretation are surveyed with a view to identifying those most relevant to the analysis of first-millennium CE literary sources in Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Arabic. The key texts from the three major religious traditions in this period (Western Christian, Eastern Christian, and Islamic) are then analysed with a view to assessing whether early Christians and Muslims understood and taxonomised dreams differently. Literary genre and audience (lay, clerical, or monastic) are revealed as the key determinants of difference, rather than religious origins.

Displaced Peoples: Reflections from Late Antiquity on a Contemporary Crisis

Episcopal letters offer valuable evidence concerning the widespread problem of population displacement in the fourth and fifth centuries, and more specifically on a subset of displaced persons, refugees and asylum-seekers. In a search for historical antecedents this article compares contemporary Australian approaches to refugees and asylum-seekers with the approaches of bishops in Late Antiquity. It offers two case studies of episcopal responses to displacement and individual displaced persons in that period, and concludes with some caveats and reflections upon future directions.

Byzantine Culture in Translation

This collection on Byzantine culture in translation, edited by Amelia Brown and Bronwen Neil, examines the practices and theories of translation inside the Byzantine empire and beyond its horizons to the east, north and west, from Late Antiquity to the present.

Maximus the Confessor: Jesus Christ and the Transfiguration of the World by Paul M. Blowers (review)

of a civil judgment by the eleventh-century judge Eustathios Romaios. As the judge’s anonymous admirer recorded, Eustathios “also cited laws” in reaching a verdict that he justified mainly by rhetorical argument seasoned with philosophical concepts and literary allusions. The law, Simon concluded, was just one of the intellectual tools in the Byzantine application of justice. Wagschal’s book-length development of this thesis has profound implications not only for Byzantine legal history, but for Byzantine studies in general, because it demonstrates that Byzantine law has to be studied as a function of Byzantine logos, a polysemic word that can be roughly rendered, in this context, as “learning” or “intellectual/literary discourse” or “reasoning eloquence.” This reviewer was particularly struck by the proximity of Wagschal’s discussion of the manuscript tradition of the canons (24–32) to the approach now adopted by scholars examining the transmission of literary, particularly anonymous texts: an approach that respects the autonomy and integrity of each manuscript witness and starts from the principle that the compiler/scribe knew better what he was doing than did the editors of printed texts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In demonstrating the importance of law as logos, Wagschal adds, moreover, to the significance of logos as a defining characteristic of Byzantine civilization. He rightly underlines the “need to investigate more carefully the influence of ancient Greek legal thought on Byzantine law . . . While the image of law that has emerged in this work in many respects conforms quite poorly to our (traditional) formalist image of Roman jurisprudence, it is striking how well it echoes ancient Greek and Hellenistic patterns” (285). This is a promising line of inquiry in the ongoing debate about Byzantine identity. Paul Magdalino, University of St. Andrews

Reading first Thessalonians as a consolatory letter in light of Seneca and ancient handbooks on letter-writing

In his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul addressed the occasion of deaths among Christians with stock arguments of the consolatory genre, without using the typical epistolary structure associated with consolation in ancient handbooks of letter-writing. It is demonstrated that three of Seneca the Youngers letters also employed stock arguments of consolation, but did not follow the usual structure for a letter of consolation. Using Senecas letters as a test case for what constituted pagan ideas of consolation, we highlight some compelling reasons for reading First Thessalonians as a letter of consolation, a reading that offers some new insights into the passage on the right Christian attitude towards death in 1 Thess 4.13–5.11.

Gregory the Great: Ascetic, Pastor, and First Man of Rome by George E. Demacopoulos (review)

eleventh-century church, presenting a comprehensive narrative covering monastic culture, heresy, the rise of the mendicant orders, scholasticism, religious education, popular religion, papal monarchy, and Jewish/Christian relations. Throughout, Madigan engages with the influential and much-critiqued “two-tiered model” of medieval religious history, using vivid examples to show that medieval society was hardly composed of “two distinct cultures” (p. 91)—that is, educated, Christianized clerics on the one hand and superstitious, folkloric laypeople on the other. Rather, medieval culture was characterized by “dynamic interaction” (p. 94) between clergy and laity.

Ancient Author Profiles

This appendix of the book Crisis Management in Late Antiquity (410-590 CE): A Survey of the Evidence from Episcopal Letters presents a list of ancient author profiles. Profiles of each of the bishops are presented according to region and linguistic origins, with references to critical editions of their letters, as appropriate. The book focuses on a critical period in European history, the fifth and sixth centuries, when social and religious disturbances were rife, a period which, however, has received little attention to date from the perspective of the bishop and of letter-writing as a tool of social control and information-transfer. Keywords: crisis management; European history

Breakdown in the Structures of Dependence

The crisis in the structures of dependence from the fourth to sixth centuries has recently become the focus of great scholarly attention, partially inspired by Browns Poverty and Leadership . From the late fifth through the sixth centuries, these traditional social structures were breaking down. In Christian antiquity the civil legal system was overloaded with litigation, leaving most plaintiffs without the time or the resources to achieve justice in the secular system. Augustines Letter 24 is one of the most important witnesses to a breakdown in North African society in Late Antiquity. It also demonstrates the kinds of problems bishops faced in reconciling the tenets of Christianity with the dictates of civil law. The general crisis in the structures of dependence obscures the reality of episcopal responses to poverty and social displacement in the period under scrutiny. Imperial administrative structures held on to some extent, longer in some regions than others. Keywords: bishops court; breakdown; Roman legal system; structures of dependence

Crisis Management in Late Antiquity (410-590 CE)

Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil investigate crisis management as conducted by the increasingly important episcopal class in the 5th and 6th centuries. Their basic source is the neglected corpus of bishops’ letters in Greek and Latin, the letter being the most significant mode of communication and information-transfer in the period from 410 to 590 CE