By Julia Liu, Wren McMillan, Ann Rayburn This is a genuine question. For all we know, God most probably speaks a language. Or rather, language holds an incredibly role in the Bible as well as the Old Testament narratives. In Genesis, God created the world by commanding. He said, “let there be light”. And there was light. It was God’s words that made the world. In the Old Testament narrative,…
I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that the universal consensus is that suffering is something everyone experiences and tries to avoid. No one enjoys suffering, even people such as masochists, because the moment they begin to enjoy it they are no longer suffering. I would like to go so far as to say that no one deserves suffering, but I have trouble coming to that…
By Faryn Thomas, Jennifer Morse, Joseph Marques, and Robert Carhuayo How is witnessing acts of God treated across Genesis, Daniel, and Margaret? In Margaret, page 131, a huge crowd of people witness Margaret pray to God for salvation at the end, before her feet and hands are to be burned. God hears her and there is an earthquake, after which God speaks directly to her from the heavens. As…
By Clare Kemmerer, Dannie Griggs, Maya Ordonez, and Kaedy Puckett Part I How did medieval viewers experience martyr stories? Were they fascinated by the lurid details of martyrdom–the grievous bodily harm, the horrifying demons, the beautiful virgins? Did they become afraid or inspired, measuring themselves up to an unmeetable example of Christian virtue? Were they spiritually transported, or were they something nearer to a modern superhero story, a fanciful legend…
With the overt descriptions of violence and the anthropomorphization of Vices and Virtues into grandiose warriors, it is perhaps a foreign notion to consider Psychomachia as a properly Christian text. Yet while it may clash with a modern conception of Christianity, Psychomachia presents a notably Foucauldian sense of human community and utopia through the filter of Christian ideals, and the violence is more of a medium of storytelling, not a…
A repetition in the Old English Life of St. Margaret that stands out to me is the use of “dumb and deaf” to describe idols. This is a rejection of Pagan gods’ ability to witness, but not their existence. Previous discussions have focused on God’s status as a universal, perfect witness in Medieval thought. Humans may be fallible, but God’s omniscience enables Him to witness. Prior texts, however, have not…
Group: Julia Liu, Ann Rayburn, Wren McMillan Painting by Wren This untitled painting strives to visually represent a gruesome battle between the Virtues and the Vices in Prudentius’s Psychomachia. This battle, fought for the control of the human soul, is fraught with blood, gore, and the desecration of the body, although most of the blood loss rests on the side of the Vices. When producing this painting, I seeked not…
“It is very right for us that we should praise with words the guardian of the heavens, the glorious king of hosts, should love him in our minds.”(Anlezark, 3) The above quote functions as a thesis statement for Anlezark’s translation of Old Testament Narratives, as an absolute reverence for god pervades the text from the very start. Following the opening, the writer gives praise to God in the form…
Continuing on the thread of agency over one’s faculties of reason from the Boethius blog post, we will now apply this question to Prudentius’ Psychomachia to see if we can’t complicate the matter further.
.aoBoethius, like many other philosophers, feels the need to reason out the existence of free will in Book V of his Consolation of Philosophy. It is a natural question to come up when contemplating matters such the existence of evil amidst God’s providence. In the process though, Boethius and Lady Philosophy stumbled upon a conclusion that I think is worth exploring a bit more: “And human souls are more free…
