(Ebook) Christianity, Philosophy, and Roman Power. Constantine, Julian, and the Bishops on Exegesis and Empire by Lea Niccolai ISBN 9781009299312, 100929931X

(Ebook) Christianity, Philosophy, and Roman Power. Constantine, Julian, and the Bishops on Exegesis and Empire by Lea Niccolai ISBN 9781009299312, 100929931X

This book rethinks the Christianisation of the late Roman empire as a crisis of knowledge, pointing to competitive cultural re-assessment as a major driving force in the making of the Constantinian and post-Constantinian state. Emperor Julian's writings are re-assessed as key to accessing the rise and consolidation of a Christian politics of interpretation that relied on exegesis as a self-legitimising device to secure control over Roman history via claims to Christianity's control of paideia. This reconstruction infuses Julian's reaction with contextual significance. His literary and political project emerges as a response to contemporary reconfigurations of Christian hermeneutics as controlling the meaning of Rome's culture and history. At the same time, understanding Julian as a participant in a larger debate re-qualifies all fourth-century political and episcopal discourse as a long knock-on effect reacting to the imperial mobilisation of Christian debates over the link between power and culture.