The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity

An exploration of nature in the poetry of late antiquity. Nature engaged late ancient authors in a variety of ways. It produced sheer wonder at its strange beauty, but it also provoked complex readings that treated it as a cache of riddles that needed to be deciphered. Beginning with the Hellenistic "Physika" (literary compendia of the elements of nature often arranged alphabetically) and continuing through the late ancient Christian genre of the Hexaemeron (commentaries on the six days of creation in the book of Genesis), interpreters surveyed the natural world for the wisdom it has to offer. Generally animals claimed attention in this period not as objective specimens to be classified scientifically but rather as indicators of a dynamic process that was defined both theologically and psychologically. The author calls this the "bestial imagination", and this is the focus of some of the essays in the book.

ISBN 0754614883   DEWEY edition DC21 ISBN13 9780754614883 (What's this?)   Pages 272 Publisher Ashgate Publishing Group   Volumes 001 Imprint Ashgate Publishing Limited   Weight (grammes) 612 Format Hardback   Published in Aldershot Publication date 05 Jun 2001   Height (mm) 159 Library of Congress PA3015.R4   Width (mm) 238 DEWEY 809.19382   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly

		Acknowledgements
		List of Abbreviations
		Introduction		1
Pt. I		Poetic Images and Nature
1		"Adam Ate From the Animal Tree": A Bestial Poetry of Soul		19
2		Origen on the Bestial Soul: A Poetics of Nature		35
3		The Physiologus: A Poiesis of Nature		61
4		Jerome's Centaur: A Hyper-icon of the Desert		75
Pt. II		Poetic Images and the Body
5		"Plenty Sleeps There": The Myth of Eros and Psyche in Plotinus and Gnosticism		107
6		"Pleasure of the Text, Text of Pleasure": Eros and Language in Origen's Commentary on the Song of Songs		123
7		The Blazing Body: Ascetic Desire in Jerome's Letter to Eustochium		135
8		Desert Asceticism and "The Body from Nowhere"		159
Pt. III		Poetic Images and Theology
9		"In My Father's House Are Many Dwelling Places": ktisma in Origen's De principiis		181
10		Origen and the Witch of Endor: Toward an Iconoclastic Typology		199
11		Poetic Words, Abysmal Words: Reflections on Origen's Hermeneutics		211
12		In Praise of Nonsense: A Piety of the Alphabet in Ancient Magic		221
13		"Words With An Alien Voice": Gnostics, Scripture, and Canon		247
		Bibliography		271

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