Alienation: The Experience of the Eastern Mediterranean (50-600 A.D.)

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Table of Contents Introduction 1 1. Life is a Theatre 19 A. The Theatricality of Everyday Life 21 I. The Emperor 22 i. The acting of tyrants 22 ii. Good and bad models of the philosopher-king 30 iii. The eclipse of the emperor-actor 39 II. The Nobility 45 III. The Self 56 B. From Distantiation as Affirmation to Distantiation as Negation 67 I. Distantiation as Affirmation 67 II. Distantiation as Negation 85 2. ‘Dead to the World’: Asceticism and its Pleasures 103 I. Dead to the City 108 II. Dead to the Family 116 III. Live Unnoticed 125 IV. True Life: The Pleasures of Virtue 134 V. Between Life and Death 142 3. From Stigmatization to Deculpabilization: Attitudes towards the Mentally Ill in Late Antiquity and the Healing Process in their Religious and Social Context 153 A. What is Mental Illness? The Case of the Epileptic Stageirios 160 i. ‘The wounded healer’ and his patient 165 ii. Demon or depression? Mental illness as a family, social and religious crisis 171 iii. Sin as mental illness 175 B. The Solutions of Despair: The Rationality of the Irrational 187 4. Sun’s Justice: Social Utopia as an antidote to Alienation 205 I. The Utopia of Compassion 210 II. The notion of Public Good 225 III. Christian Distributive Justice and the Problem of the Just Wage 235 5. Imperialism and Christianity 253 A. Imperialism and its Discontents 256 B. Christian Attitudes towards Hypoteleia 269 C. The Political Implications of Christian Historical Hermeneutics 281 I. Jews and Christians as Marginal Political Groups 281 II. Christian revisionism of Jewish History 292 III. Responses to Defeat: Jewish Ingredients of Christian Triumphalism 298 IV. After the Defeat: The Persistence of the Spirit of the Fourth Philosophy 313 D. The Use and Abuse of Hellenism 319 I. Hellenism as an Opposition Ideology 319 II. Graeco-Roman and Christian Universalism 341 E. Imperialism and Orthodoxy 357 6. Martyrs, Criminals and Convicts: Christians show Solidarity towards the Outlaws without, ultimately, questioning the Law 365 A. The Name ‘Christian’: Its Criminal and Emancipatory Aspects in their Historical Context 366 I. The Symbolism of Power as Idolatry 366 II. What Crime in a Name? 372 i. Freedom of Conscience: the Socratic legacy 384 ii. The name ‘Christian’ bestows Freedom: Freedom as Equality 391 III. Torture and Truth: The Internalization of Martyrdom 401 B. Earthly and Divine Justice 408 I. Earthly Justice 408 II. Divine Justice as a Support and Correction of Earthly Justice 417 III. Law and Anomie 434 7. True Life: Reading as Salvation 443 I. The Odyssey of Interpretation and the Odyssey of Life 445 II. The Reader as an Individual 452 III. The Reader and the Text 461 IV. Alienations 473 Conclusions 477 Bibliography 491 Index 553