Psychomachia and How the Difficult Nature of Allegory still Resonates within Modern Works

On a chaotic battlefield in some unknown place, good and evil are fighting to the death in an ecstatic battle for the soul. Chastity slices through lust causing fountains of blood to erupt into the air. Good works has greed held in a chokehold watching her face turn blue and then purple as the last vestiges of air slip away. Faith strikes the head of worship of the Old Gods…

Perspectives on Medieval Allegory in Psychomachia

Medieval Allegory and Classical Structures in Psychomachia Though biblical figures, stories, and sentiments form the backbone of Prudentius’ Psychomachia, echoes of classical structures weave their way into the allegory. Prudentius utilizes few explicit callbacks to Greek or Roman mythology. While Boethius calls upon the Muses and regularly references gods such as Boreas or Bacchus, Prudentius relies upon biblical stories for background, including the tale of Holofernes and Judith or the…

Creating new idioms in Prudentius’ Psychomachia

Prudentius’ Psychomachia is known as one of the first examples of the literary and artistic form known as allegory, in which  abstract concepts are illustrated through the use of an extended metaphor . In the case of the Psychomachia, Prudentius explains how Christians should live a virtuous life by illustrating a violent battle between personified virtues and vices. (For example: “Faith first takes the field to face the doubtful chances…

Recipe for Violence

      One of the big questions is how complex a recipe for violence is. Many people would believe that violence is an acquired taste, but there are ways to make it taste good. With the right spices, violence can be more palatable. An important spice is the idea of the just war theory which was harvested even during ancient times. Beginning in ancient Greece, philosophers were utilizing this…

Justified Suffering?

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…

Prudentius’ Panopticon of Christianity

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…

An Abstract Visualization of Prudentius’ Psychomachia

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…

Blood, Guts and Virtue: the Gory Details of the Psychomachia

Drenched in blood and covered in gore, there is no shortage of violence in Prudentius’ Psychomachia — a gruesome battle between Vices and Virtues for control of the human soul. However, despite all the blood in the poem, and the fact that the Virtues do not always clearly have the upper hand, it is striking that the Virtues only actually bleed once:  Discord had entered our ranks wearing the counterfeit…

The Religious Context for Psychomachia’s Feminine Virtues and Vices

By Faryn Thomas, Jennifer Morse, Joseph Marques, and Robert Carhuayo One of the aspects of the Psychomachia that our group found particularly interesting was the fact that the virtues and vices are all presented as women. This is an initially surprising choice, as the virtues and vices are all warriors engaging in battle, and this is obviously not a role traditionally inhabited by women. This choice isn’t merely accidental, as…