Gripla - 20.12.2008, Blaðsíða 144

GRIPLA142
IV. Justification or Understanding?
The Conceptualization of Mythology and the Past
The world of Late Antiquity was marked by fusion of the Graeco-Roman
and Judeo-Christian traditions, and the conceptualization of the pagan
past, not least its intellectual heritage, became a matter of prime concern
in patristic writings. Sailing between the two extremes exemplified by
Tertullian and Origen in the third century early Christianity developed
theological schemes of understanding the pagan past and its relations to the
Christian present, three of which are of prime importance and dominated
medieval intellectual culture: natural theology/religion, euhemerism, and
demonology.
The Pauline theology of natural religion was read most frequently by
Late Antique and medieval authors from Rom.1:19–20,56 arguably the
most important scriptural passage in medieval thought, and cited and built
heavily upon by Augustine among others. By arguing in a platonic fashion
that paganism was at heart a perverted and imperfect understanding of
true religion, deduced from the physical and visual world through reason
vis-à-vis divine illumination, a conceptual link between past and present,
paganism and Christianity, was formed. Gregory the Great’s Moralia in
Job is fundamental in this respect, and the topos of the “Book of Nature”
became standard in early and medieval Christianity.57
Euhemerism offered another, albeit closely related and complementary,
conceptual tool. Although of pre-Christian origin it was employed early
on by many of the most widely read and influential Christian writers to
account for the emergence of pagan deities, arguing that pagan gods were
deified historical persons of heroic status. Wisdom 14 offered scriptural
support (20):
56 “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.
Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though
they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.”
57 “A certain philosopher asked St. Anthony: ‘Father, how can you be so happy when you are
deprived of the consolation of books?’ Anthony replied: ‘My book, O philosopher, is the
nature of created things, and any time I want to read the words of God, the book is before
me.’” The Wisdom of the Desert, transl. Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions,
1960), 29.