Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic

1: From Peripety to Prose: Tracing the Pauline and Augustinian Paradigms

30 ch a p t er 1 From Peripety to Prose Tracing the Pauline and Augustinian Paradigms Convert and converter will have to live on united in one and the same person, like two movements of our respiration, like a constant dying and coming to life again of our faith. —e ug e n ro s e n s t o c k-h u e s s y, The Christian Future In medieval Christian sources, conversion very often takes the form of a narrative, in particular a narrative derived from biblical, largely New Testament, models. Conversion itself, as a textual drama of transformation , might be considered a Judeo-Christian invention of the late Second Temple period, a fusion of Hebrew tropes and Greek vocabulary . Although abundant images of religious change can be found in many religious traditions, both ancient and modern, Eastern and Western , early Christian renditions marked a decisive shift in the meaning and representation of conversion. In Greece, what first emerged as a distinctive notion of cultic exclusiveness within mystery religions and Orphism was partly fused in Hellenistic culture with a notion of personal commitment to the philosophical pursuit of truth and a stoic turn from passion and illusion to self-mastery. Similarly, an Israelite notion of monotheistic exclusivity and the prophetic call to return to God came to be expressed in new terms within the Hellenistic Jewish world. Upon the emergence of Christianity, traditional biblical tropes of the renewal of faith, a return to an exclusive monotheistic piety, and the call to prophecy began to merge with classical philosophical notions of a commitment to truth and of religious change as a process of turning from one faith to another and one identity to another. In a number of late antique fictions, these tropes came together and took on a distinctively narrative form, but it was the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament , written at the end of the first century or the dawn of the second, From Peripety to Prose 31 that would be best known among medieval readers and would come to serve as a definitive model for future representations. It was not uncommon in ancient literature to depict personal change in a narrative guise. But unlike ancient fictions of change or of calling such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses or the transformation of Lucius in Apuleius ’s Golden Ass—or even more ancient fictions such as, to take just one extreme example, the commission narrative of Rekhmire, vizier of Thutmose III and Amenhotep II (fifteenth century b.c.)—some Jewish and Christian stories situated an account of personal change, both inner and outer, within the social context of religious exclusivity. The Acts of the Apostles was only one of a number of texts, which included various apocryphal scriptures and ancient fictions, aiming to define both institutional and spiritual or philosophical identity. But, unlike similar contemporary documents, the Acts of the Apostles was canonized as Scripture and disseminated on a vast scale.1 The canonical Acts, like some of its less famous apocryphal cousins and fictional contemporaries, fused the process of spiritual transformation and repentance with the image of an equally decisive change in social and “religious” affiliation, mapping both onto the structure of a narrative climax and resolution.2 In such formulations, conversion’s sudden epistrophē, or inner turning of mind—Plato’s “conversion of the soul,” Plotinus’s “return” of the soul to its one source—becomes at the same time a repentance and a sudden change in outer social identity.3 The old self disappears and gives way to the converted self, just as the former religion cedes to and is replaced by a new faith. Conversion came to signify a simultaneous turning of mind and turning of identity only when it came to be structured as a narrative in which the individual’s transformation reflected the transformation of society. This process of fitting Old Testament and Hellenistic images into the mold of a narrative of the origins of the Church, however, was not smooth or easy. The images recast in the book of Acts, especially in their depiction of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus into Paul the Apostle , did not immediately cohere as a unified concept in Christian tradition but instead gave way to a variety of disparate and competing ideas about the meaning of faith and its relation to the Jewish past. The attempt to resolve these debates and answer these challenges by the fourth-century theologian and...