I consoli di dio: un topos poetico cristiano

Abstract

With the conversion to Christianity in the Theodosian age, the Roman aristocracy projected their class ideology and self-representation into the conception of religious sanctity and the vision of the Afterlife. On a literary level, this gives rise to an eschatological imagery in which the holy souls are the nobility and the ‘notables’ (proceres) of the eternal res publica, they constitute the ‘heavenly senate’ (caelestis curia) seated around the throne of God, and the martyrs of Christ are given the title of ‘consuls’. This paper aims to describe the development of such images in the Christian Latin poetry of the 4th-6th centuries AD.

Religious Dilemmas

“…A kind of "official" entry of atheism into European civilization, however, occurred during the French Revolution. d, 14 Atheism convinces people that outside this world there is nothing that would transcend man, some supreme being, creator and master of nature, source of values, moral and social laws. If man is by nature a religious being (as confirmed by the atheists Feuerbach, Sartre, Bloch...), then why does someone become an atheist?…”