![]() ![]() Martyrdom, both as discourse and practice was, after all, one of the most influential discursive formations in early Christianity. ![]() For the purposes of this article, I will examine how John Chrysostom uses the discourse of death, or thanatology, as a tool to explain Christian self-fashioning.įew experiences have so profoundly shaped the ancient Christian imaginaire as death. I am interested in these religious languages, specifically the early Christian dialect we so often utilise to articulate the ineffable problem of death. Michel de Certeau ( 1984) explains this difficulty as follows:Ĭonsidered on the one hand as a failure or a provisional halt in the medical struggle, and on the other, removed from common experience and thus arriving at the limit of scientific power and beyond familiar practices, death is an elsewhere … given over, for example, to religious languages that are no longer current … Death is the problem of the subject. For an event so mutual among human beings, death is often quite difficult to express, let alone fully understand. ![]()
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