Dear all,
We cordially invite you to our next CRASIS Ancient World Seminar *today*.
We are happy to introduce you *dr. Bert van den Berg*. He will expound on
the literary polemics between Neo-Platonists and Christians in late
antiquity. His lecture has the following title:
*Fighting Plato's Violent Readers: Neo-platonic Literary Criticism and
anti-Christian Polemics*
The pagan Platonic philosophers of late Antiquity, the so-called
Neo-Platonists, regarded the unstoppable rise of Christianity from the 3th
century onwards as a major crisis. Among other things, they much resented
the appropriation of Plato by Christian intellectuals. They tried to
disqualify such Christian readings of Plato by arguing that the Christians
were morally bad people and that such people make bad readers of Plato who
do violence to his sacred texts. The Christians, so the argument went, by
rejecting the Greek gods of old, had thereby rejected Greek culture
altogether, including sophistication in literary matters. Hence,
Neo-platonic attacks on Christian readings of Plato are in part cast in
terms of contemporary literary criticism, be it that these acquire a new,
philosophical dimension. In my talk, I shall illustrate this aspect of the
polemics between pagan and Christian readers of Plato with examples from
Plotinus’ Against the Gnostics, Proclus’ Commentary on the Timaeus, and the
reply to the latter by the Christian philosopher John Philoponus.
Dr. Bert van den Berg has been a lecturer in ancient philosophy and NWO
researcher at the Leiden University department of Classics since 2001,
where he also finished his PhD on Poclus’ Hymns in 2000. He spent the
interceding year as a research associate at King’s College in London and
postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. His research focuses on the
philosophy of late antiquity (Neoplatonism, the philosophy of the
commentators) and that of Proclus in particular. He is especially
interested in Neoplatonic ethics, religious practice & theology, linguistic
theories & literary criticism and their intersections. His current project
The Neo-Platonists on Moral Education studies the theory and practice of
moral education in the (Neo)Platonic tradition.
The session takes place, as usual, in *room 130* of the Faculty of Theology
and Religious Studies, Groningen, *16.15 – 17.30*.
Join us for drinks afterwards!
The organizing committee of CRASIS.
--
CRASIS is the Groningen Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies in Culture,
Religion and Society of the Graeco-Roman World. Follow CRASIS on Facebook
<https://www.facebook.com/rug.crasis>or find out more about us on
www.rug.nl/crasis.
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