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  • 21 - Classical genres in Christian guise; Christian genres in classical guise

  • from A - LITERARY GUIDE
  • Edited by Frances Young, University of Birmingham, Lewis Ayres, Emory University, Atlanta, Andrew Louth, University of Durham
  • Assisted by Augustine Casiday, University of Durham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    01 April 2004, pp 247-258

  • Summary

    The 'Golden Age of Patristic Literature', the fourth and fifth centuries provides a mass of material which carries weighty literary and theological significance. Christian rhetoricians began to produce a new literature which had classical styles and genres but Christian content. The Constantinian revolution had reinforced the tendencies for Christians to come from the educated literary elites and to adapt classical modes of writing to Christian ends. History, for Eusebius, had become a kind of apologetic, an alternative method of proof that Christianity was true. Little of the Christian literature of the fourth and fifth centuries escapes influence from the classical traditions of antiquity, yet little of it can be analysed neatly according to the classical genres. The descriptions 'apologetic' and 'dogmatic' both appear as subsequent classifications, and raise questions about genre, and the point of generic analysis.