Overview

As the first monk in the desert, Antony became an early Christian superstar, eclipsing his many ascetic predecessors. The introduction of asceticism into the wilderness also represented an encounter between Christian and Hellenistic ideas. For centuries Greeks had considered the uncultivated geography intrinsically primordial, a chaotic place where man struggled to remain human. The wilderness represented an eternal ordeal, where man always faced fierce beasts, disorder, and death, but also where simultaneously he could attain boundless wealth, wisdom, and even physical immortality. Through Athanasius of Alexandria's fourth-century biography of Antony, we learn how the Christian appropriation of Greek ideas on geography, bodies and immortality raised asceticism to an entirely new level. Placed in his uncultivated landscape, Antony became a true martyr, an athlete of God, and a holy man able to retrieve the bodily incorruptibility lost in the Fall, which all Christians could look forward to at the end of times. In this way Athanasius employed a traditional Greek worldview to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity over Paganism, which never promised ordinary people anything but an eternal existence as dead and disembodied souls.

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9781433101816

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«Dag oistein Endsjo's 'Primordial Landscapes, Incorruptible Bodies' is a pioneering attempt to interpret the life of Saint Antony within its wider Greco-Roman context and not only in Christian terms. Endsjo's innovative argument should provoke wide discussion and initiate a much-needed conversation about the relationship between Christian bagiography and traditional religion in antiquity. This book will interest students of ancient religion and not just specialists in Athanasius or asceticism. -- David Brakke

Dag Oistein Endsjo's 'Primordial Landscapes, Incorruptible Bodies' is a pioneering attempt to interpret the life of Saint Antony within its wider Greco-Roman context and not only in Christian terms. Endsjo's innovative argument should provoke wide discussion and initiate a much-needed conversation about the relationship between Christian hagiography and traditional religion in antiquity. This book will interest students of ancient religion and not just specialists in Athanasius or asceticism. (David Brakke, Professor and Chair, Religious Studies Department, Indiana University) Dag Oistein Endsjo shows how Antony's successful ascetic labors in the desert and the resulting incorruptibility of his body could have been understood from the perspective of a traditional Greek worldview in terms of the traditional hero and his amazing feats in peripheral lands. In a striking manner, Endsjo helps to overcome the Judaism/Hellenism divide that plagues scholarship's attempts to understand early Christianity. (Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Professor of New Testament Studies, University of Copenhagen)

Dag Oistein Endsjo's 'Primordial Landscapes, Incorruptible Bodies' is a pioneering attempt to interpret the life of Saint Antony within its wider Greco-Roman context and not only in Christian terms. Endsjo's innovative argument should provoke wide discussion and initiate a much-needed conversation about the relationship between Christian hagiography and traditional religion in antiquity. This book will interest students of ancient religion and not just specialists in Athanasius or asceticism. (David Brakke, Professor and Chair, Religious Studies Department, Indiana University) Dag Oistein Endsjo shows how Antony's successful ascetic labors in the desert and the resulting incorruptibility of his body could have been understood from the perspective of a traditional Greek worldview in terms of the traditional hero and his amazing feats in peripheral lands. In a striking manner, Endsjo helps to overcome the Judaism/Hellenism divide that plagues scholarship's attempts to understand early Christianity. (Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Professor of New Testament Studies, University of Copenhagen)

Author Information

The Author: Dag Oistein Endsjo is Associate Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway, specializing in Greek religion and early Christianity.

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