Status Updates From The Suffering Self: Pain an...

Opponents had apparently suggested that in certain circumstances it might be impossible to separate out the flesh of two human bodies for the reconstitution of the resurrected body. They apparently proposed for an example the situation when animals eat human flesh and then in turn are themselves consumed by humans

What

Martyrs often allude to the deaths they particularly fear. Later in the Passion, Saturus expresses his fear of the bears and hopes he will be finished off by one bite of a leopard (21.2). His concern is probably well-founded. Names of some of the bears are recorded: Homicida, Crudelis, Phobos (Robert 1982:247).

Epictetus picked out Heracles for praise because he could abandon his children without groaning or yearning for them (3.24.14) and censured Homer’s depiction of Odysseus sitting upon a rock and weeping for his wife (3.24.18).

Lol

Epictetus had this to say about the person who could not control his sorrow about the loss of a city or a woman; “why does he who is at liberty to leave the banquet, and to play the game no longer keep on annoying himself by staying. Does he not stay like children only as long as he is entertained?”

I hate stoicism

Galen’s narratives in particular worked to create a cultural “self” as body—a body able to signify its inner life, but difficult to keep in order and needing outside supervision; in many instances, a sick body, needing a doctor. The cultural shift toward the body also worked to downplay differences of class and gender.

Graham Anderson has aptly caught the essence of the romance in his description of the central couple “as a single organism trying to unite themselves” (Anderson 1984:62). Rather than being about individuality, the romance was about how individuals are transformed into enduring social unities.

Origen’s rebuttal of Celsus made clear that Celsus had accused Christians of “being mad and stirring up for themselves tortures and death”

I enjoy the Roman confusion to Christianity. It’s very good. Valid tbh.

The traditional explanation for the emphasis on suffering in Christian texts has been that it reflected the desperate situation of a hounded community, but modern scholarship has called this explanation into question. Persecution in the second century appears to have been in T.D.Barnes’ words “local, sporadic and random” (Barnes 1968a:38).

The traditional explanation for the emphasis on suffering in Christian texts has been that it reflected the desperate situation of a hounded community, but modern scholarship has called this explanation into question. Persecution in the second century appears to have been in T.D.Barnes’ words “local, sporadic and random” (Barnes 1968a:38).

Tertullian offered actual examples of judges in Africa who released confessed Christians unpunished; he cited the notorious and very likely hyperbolic example from Asia when all the Christians in a community presented themselves before Arrius Antoninus who let most of them go commenting, “wretched men if you wish to die, you have cliffs and ropes to hang yourselves”

For Ignatius, discipleship entailed death: “I write to you (fully) alive, longing to die”. Ignatius completely rejected this world and its power: “of no profit to me will be the ends of the world and the kingdom of this age: it is ‘better for me to die’ to Jesus Christ than to rule the ends of the earth.” He renounced his life in this world: “I no longer want to live in human fashion.”

In Aristides’ text, the place for self-regulation has shifted, it seems, from the traditional Hellenic model of self- mastery, of an administration of the body for the society. Instead, self-mastery is relinquished; the “self” is displayed recumbent, exposed inside and out to the survey and management of the divine. The “self” is incapable of even life itself...

In Aristides’ representation, bodies become texts on which the god’s purposes and intentions are written.

Aristides’ text suggests that part of his adherence to the cult was the construction of a subjectivity that was understood as a body turned over to the constant surveillance and regulation of the divine. Self-erasure in the face of the divine was part of Aristides’ sense of his own worth. Being eclipsed by the power of the god was a sign of the honor given him.

The cult of Asclepius offered one institutional answer for the regulation of the body: turning it over to the divine regulation of the god, Asclepius. In this context, healing itself becomes less important, since suffering can be validated as the basis for the divine relationship (Festugière 1954:86). Aristides explained how he had come to understand his illnesses and treatments themselves as sources of honor

“The romance narratives functioned as part of a cultural script that represented poverty, pain, and suffering as unauthentic human conditions estranging those experiencing them from legitimate society. Hagiographic discourse offered a radically different script and continued the work of martyr texts...”

Honestly I don’t remember Greek romance novels well enough to comment