Robin Whelan
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520295957
- eISBN:
- 9780520968684
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520295957.003.0003
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
This chapter argues that a sophisticated culture of Christian disputation continued in Vandal Africa. It explores an understudied cache of heresiological literature, written in all the genres that ...
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This chapter argues that a sophisticated culture of Christian disputation continued in Vandal Africa. It explores an understudied cache of heresiological literature, written in all the genres that underpinned late-antique ecclesiastical controversies (letters, sermons, tractates, florilegia, question-and-answer texts, and dialogues). Their authors used familiar tropes to present their opponents as heretics and themselves as orthodox. Particularly significant are a (rather surreal) series of imaginary debate texts that presented Nicene church fathers like Athanasius and Augustine triumphing over historical Arian heretics like Arius and Pascentius. These virtual dialogues both mirrored and modeled various forms of real debate between Nicene and Homoian authority figures. The striking resemblance between these texts and those written by earlier Christian controversialists was not merely a continuity of literary form. These works suggest that the practical implications of controversy for Christian clerics remained the same.Less
This chapter argues that a sophisticated culture of Christian disputation continued in Vandal Africa. It explores an understudied cache of heresiological literature, written in all the genres that underpinned late-antique ecclesiastical controversies (letters, sermons, tractates, florilegia, question-and-answer texts, and dialogues). Their authors used familiar tropes to present their opponents as heretics and themselves as orthodox. Particularly significant are a (rather surreal) series of imaginary debate texts that presented Nicene church fathers like Athanasius and Augustine triumphing over historical Arian heretics like Arius and Pascentius. These virtual dialogues both mirrored and modeled various forms of real debate between Nicene and Homoian authority figures. The striking resemblance between these texts and those written by earlier Christian controversialists was not merely a continuity of literary form. These works suggest that the practical implications of controversy for Christian clerics remained the same.
Robin Whelan
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520295957
- eISBN:
- 9780520968684
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520295957.003.0005
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
This chapter examines the fundamental Nicene response to their opponents’ claim to Christian orthodoxy: they made them into Arians. It shows the intellectual effort this (deceptively difficult) move ...
More
This chapter examines the fundamental Nicene response to their opponents’ claim to Christian orthodoxy: they made them into Arians. It shows the intellectual effort this (deceptively difficult) move required. Nicene controversialists drew on the history and heresiology of both the Arian Controversy and the Donatist Schism to portray contemporary Homoians as heretics. To establish the link between their opponents and the Arians of the past, Nicene authors imaginatively rewrote fourth-century ecclesiastical history, reworking what they saw as an authoritative past to match the needs of the present. In so doing, they made the contemporary controversy into a reenactment of earlier conflicts—one from which they, as the heirs of Athanasius and Augustine, would inevitably emerge triumphant. Of course, Homoian clerics were exploiting the same histories of the church to support their own ecclesiological claims. For both sides, this controversy was not new, but rather an extension of fourth-century Trinitarian debates.Less
This chapter examines the fundamental Nicene response to their opponents’ claim to Christian orthodoxy: they made them into Arians. It shows the intellectual effort this (deceptively difficult) move required. Nicene controversialists drew on the history and heresiology of both the Arian Controversy and the Donatist Schism to portray contemporary Homoians as heretics. To establish the link between their opponents and the Arians of the past, Nicene authors imaginatively rewrote fourth-century ecclesiastical history, reworking what they saw as an authoritative past to match the needs of the present. In so doing, they made the contemporary controversy into a reenactment of earlier conflicts—one from which they, as the heirs of Athanasius and Augustine, would inevitably emerge triumphant. Of course, Homoian clerics were exploiting the same histories of the church to support their own ecclesiological claims. For both sides, this controversy was not new, but rather an extension of fourth-century Trinitarian debates.
