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  • Introduction:Origenist Textualities
  • Jeremy Schott

The articles that comprise this special issue on “Origenist Textualties” were first presented at two workshop sessions of the same name at the 16th International Conference on Patristic Studies held at Oxford in Summer 2011. Thanks are due the organizers of the Oxford conference and to the audiences at both sessions. The lively question and answer portions of each session and the collegial atmosphere of the workshop format have contributed greatly to these articles. Each of the articles presented here has been substantially revised and expanded since the original presentation at Oxford (my own submission differs in toto from my Oxford paper). I would also like to thank David Brakke and the anonymous reviewers for JECS for their collaboration and critical feedback.

In developing the workshop at which these papers were originally presented, no concerted effort was made to come to a fixed definition of “textuality” or “Origenist.” In practical terms, the present collection takes “Origenist” primarily as a heuristic term to identify individuals and works that stand within a particular intellectual trajectory in the history of early Christianity. Thus Pamphilus, Eusebius, Evagrius, and Rufinus are all “Origenist” in so far as for each Origen of Alexandria and his works represent a key source, influence, inspiration, tradition, or other crucial point of contact. Of course Epiphanius, the subject of two of the five articles, was self-consciously anti-Origenist. In devising the original seminar and this collection, it was felt that including at least one anti-Origenist would offer an important foil to the “Origenist textualities” we hoped to illuminate. Rather than mere foils, however, the two contributions on Epiphanius show just how contingent and specific “Origenist” textualities were, despite their centrality in histories of early Christian thought.

The term “Origenist” necessarily also brings a set of heresiological discourses in tow. Indeed, as a whole and individually, these articles have [End Page 323] much to offer to the study of “Origenist controversies.” Pamphilus, Eusebius, Evagrius, Rufinus, and Epiphanius all belong to the set of social networks and textual relationships that made up the “Origenist controversy” in the fourth century.

The “textuality” of the collection’s title signals a commitment to the centrality of literary texts in early Christian studies. If historians of early Christianity work on texts, the collection asks, what might it look like to write the history/histories of early Christianity as a history of textuality? “Textuality” points, also, to a constellation of theoretical and methodological approaches to “text,” “context,” and “history” that cut across the articles. Included in this constellation are “New Historicist” commitments to the historicity of literary texts and the inescapable writtenness of history. In addition, the collection evinces a post-structuralist resistance to drawing clear and fast boundaries between texts and contexts. Bodies, geography, and time, for example, as well as specific literary texts, are encompassed in the “textualities” under consideration. Each of these articles, moreover, emphasizes textuality as both an aesthetic and ethic. To appeal to an all-too-common (yet useful) etymology, we might visualize a “textuality” as a “texture,” a space of meaning production with a particular pattern and feel to it. The textualities under examination are also ethical fields that make possible (and preclude) certain existential possibilities.

Finally, it is a particular strength of this collection that, while each article draws on contemporary theoretical and methodological insights concerning textuality, none is a simple “application” of theory. Instead, each article is simultaneously engaged with late-ancient theorizations of textuality. In modern and post-modern metanarratives of the history of literature, early Christian discourse (e.g. “orthodox discourse” or “biblical discourse”) is often constructed as a foil to modes of writing and attitudes towards textuality considered in various ways to be new, or even revolutionary, in relation to it. As Mark Vessey puts it, mid-twentieth century post-structuralist literary theory “… habitually defines the literary text by placing [it] in more or less historical opposition to a biblical text or book whose properties are by the same gesture placed beyond the scope of history and theory.”1 This collection challenges such histories by revealing points of contact between contemporary and late-ancient textualities as well as points...

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