The Classics and Ancient Christian Pedagogy
Pusey House – 12th February 2025
2:00 – 5:20pm.
An afternoon mini-colloquium considering how early Christian educational practices and cultural production evolved to read, teach, critique, and absorb the Greco-Roman literary heritage at the beginning of Late Antiquity.
Sin, Muse…Christian Greek Epic in Late Antiquity
2:00–2:50, Emma Greensmith (St John’s College).
“How and why did Greek speaking Christians write epic poetry? After an initial foray into the debates and anxieties about Homer in early Christian teaching, this talk dives into some of the earliest surviving examples of hexameters composed on Biblical themes. In these little-known poems, the language and values, substance and style of heroic epos and Christian scripture collide and combine in specific and surprising ways, showing the first steps towards a new form of an ancient genre, and a different approach to the inherited literary tradition.”
Christians in the Classroom: The Educational Spaces of Early Christianity
2:50–3:40, Stuart Thomson (Faculty of Classics).
The development of theology in the first centuries of the Church goes hand in hand with educational practices: Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian (for example) all present themselves in the guise of teachers – not as clergy. Their literary production and claims to authority rest within the educational structures of antiquity, and are best understood in the contest of Greco-Roman agonistic paideia. Early Christianity was not a religious outsider, but an educational competitor – along with rhetorical and philosophical schools – for the allegiance of the wealthy international youth who expected through their education to taste a variety of different teachers and sects before settling into final allegiance and/or professional life.
3:40–4:00, Coffee Break.
Paideia in Practice: Exemplarist Ethics in the Fourth-Century Culture Wars
4:00–4:50, Brian Lapsa (Memoria Press).
Paideia, or education and literary culture, was a major point of friction in the fourth-century pagan-Christian Kulturkampf. Partisans on both sides were constantly invoking exemplars of virtue and vice drawn from mythology, literature, history, and Scripture. This talk examines the role such exemplars played in writings of a small group of fourth-century writers from Cappadocia. Central here are St. Gregory Nazianzen and his nemesis (and sometime coursemate), Julian the Apostate Emperor. How and why did they present such figures as Zeus, Abraham, Socrates, Alexander the Great, Jesus, or Trajan to their audiences? What about those of their contemporaries whom they turned into exemplars? How exactly were listeners and readers meant to relate imaginatively to these figures? What were they to do with them? Addressing these questions will clarify the nature of exemplarist ethics in some of the most prominent culture-shapers of the later Roman empire. It will also shed light on exemplarism more generally, and, by way of conclusion, raise questions about relation between exemplarist mimetics and the Christian understanding of theosis.
4:50–5:20 Discussion.
