Tag: christianity

Monks listening to the Bible being recited.
Daniel, Readings

Listening, Speaking, Knowing: The Divine Auditory in Daniel

The human life is a mediated experience: we do not encounter an unfiltered world, but rather we process every input through our senses. Among our five senses, sight often reigns supreme; this article is not one of Professor Saltzmann’s podcasts, and I assume you aren’t understanding it via tactile telepathy. However, in the Old English poem Daniel, visuality is typically portrayed as an incomplete phenomenon through which one cannot fully…

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Andreas, Life of St. Margaret

Exploring the Precedent of the “draca” Episode in St. Margaret

Of all the fascinating passages in The Life of St. Margaret, the passage that most gave me pause was Margaret’s interaction with Rufus (the “brother of the devil”) in the form of a dragon. As a student who has had relatively little interaction with hagiography, I had rarely encountered dragons in Christian texts; as such, I decided to dig a little deeper into the tradition of battling dragons within Christian…

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Boethius, Questions

Boethius and Free Will for the Sake of Reason

.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…

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Art, Genesis, Questions

“What is the Role of Beauty in Genesis?

By Faryn Thomas, Jennifer Morse, Joseph Marques, and Robert Carhuayo           God’s divine goodness and beauty are often mentioned in the same breath. But there are other things that are somewhat surprisingly portrayed as beautiful, for example, Sodom. “The people’s settlements there were beautiful — the men without honor, hateful to their creator” (137) The Sodomites are obviously without any sort of goodness or grace, and…

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Genesis, Prudentius, Readings

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…

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Prudentius, Theories

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…

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