View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses July 2019 “GREETINGS, I AM AN IMMORTAL GOD!”: READING, IMAGINATION, AND PERSONAL DIVINITY IN LATE ANTIQUITY, 2ND – 5TH CENTURIES CE Mark Roblee Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons Recommended Citation Roblee, Mark, "“GREETINGS, I AM AN IMMORTAL GOD!”: READING, IMAGINATION, AND PERSONAL DIVINITY IN LATE ANTIQUITY, 2ND – 5TH CENTURIES CE" (2019). Doctoral Dissertations. 1551. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1551 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “GREETINGS, I AM AN IMMORTAL GOD!”: READING, IMAGINATION, AND PERSONAL DIVINITY IN LATE ANTIQUITY, 2ND – 5TH CENTURIES CE A Dissertation Presented by MARK ROBLEE Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY MAY 2019 University of Massachusetts Amherst/Five College Graduate Program in History © Copyright by Mark Roblee 2019 All Rights Reserved “GREETINGS, I AM AN IMMORTAL GOD!”: READING, IMAGINATION, AND PERSONAL DIVINITY IN LATE ANTIQUITY, 2ND – 5TH CENTURIES CE A Dissertation Presented by MARK ROBLEE Approved as to style and content by: _______________________________________ Carlin A. Barton, Chair _______________________________________ Kevin Corrigan, Member _______________________________________ Richard Lim, Member _______________________________________ Jason Moralee, Member _______________________________________ Anna L. Taylor, Member ____________________________________ Brian Ogilvie, Department Head Department of History DEDICATION To my Mother and Father. EPIGRAPH Consciousness, Hermes reveals, is a great subject and very holy, no less than an account of divinity itself. The Latin Asclepius Understanding our selves—our natures, capacities, and possibilities—is the hardest thing in the world and yet endlessly fascinating because it cannot be finally settled by empirical research. There are no facts to decide, once and for all, whether the mind is part of the body, or whether it is a spiritual substance, or an epiphenomenon of the brain. We still do not know, in a scientific sense, what consciousness is. A. A. Long, Greek Models of Mind and Self ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation could not have been written without the generous direction, engagement, criticism, and encouragement of my advisor, Carlin Barton. I am honored to have had the opportunity to work so closely alongside her and for the friendship that grew out of the struggle to produce this work. I wish to thank the members of my committee: Richard Lim and Jason Moralee, for the time and attention they devoted to my formation as a scholar. I thank them both for many kindnesses over the years. They remain exemplars in my mind of the best of late antique scholarship. I have benefitted from Anna Taylor’s editorial eye, good humor, innovative pedagogy, and practical advice over the years. I am thankful for the kind support offered by Kevin Corrigan whose expert reading of Neoplatonism (and generous spirit) I can only hope to approximate. Even with such excellent supervision, all errors and short sightings in this dissertation are my own which remains a work in progress as I prepare to revise it for publication. The following scholars have also provided valuable feedback on various sections of the work in progress: Gregory Shaw, Daniel Boyarin, Claire Fanger, Marla Segol, Frank Klassen, David Porrecca, Arthur Versluis, Lee Irwin, Andrew Olendzki, and Christopher Merwin. Feedback in the conference setting from Sarah Iles Johnston and Fritz Graf gave me much encouragement. Conversations with Patricia Cox Miller and Michele R. Salzman contributed to the project. I benefitted from my interactions with the Five College Faculty Seminar in Late Antique, especially Scott Bradbury, Michael Penn, Frederick McGinness, Carole Straw, Christopher van den Berg, Robert Doran, and John Higgins. I am deeply indebted to my Greek and Latin teachers: Joel Tansey (in memoriam), Dale Sinos, Jason Moralee, Melissa Mueller; Kenneth Kitchell and Andrew vi Morehouse. In many ways, this dissertation draws from and returns to conversations begun as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University with Louis Mink, Howard Needler, and Eugene O. Golub. I wish to thank the members of the Department of History who have supported my work as a graduate student and helped create an atmosphere conducive for work especially: Joye Bowman, John Higginson, David Glassberg, Brian Ogilvie, Jennifer Heuer, Sam Redman, Daniel Gordon as well as Graduate Program Directors Barbara Krauthamer and Marla Miller. I would be lost without Graduate Program Coordinator, Mary Lashway, and History Office Manager, Amy Fleig, who make all things possible. I am grateful to Lara Matta for her sympathetic readings and rhetorical expertise and to Cheryl Harned for adventures in public history. I thank Elizabeth Chilton who hired me as a teaching assistant for the Department of Anthropology when I first entered the program. Diana Wolfe Larkin was the first to suggest that I should pursue graduate study. David Frankfurter and Jay Bregman helped me when I was applying to graduate school. I thank the History Department alumni who contribute to the graduate student conference travel fund, the Graduate School for research funding, and the Office of Professional Development for dissertation retreats as well as the librarians and staff at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, especially James Kelly, the Amherst College Frost Library, and The Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies where much of this dissertation was written. I wish to thank good friends for support, especially Chris, Don, Guiniviere, Patty, Toby, and Neal, who believed in me and Peter who inspired me to attempt the summit. I would like to thank my parents, John and Bee Roblee, for helping me “keep going,” and my in-laws, Monica Strauss, and Max and Sissy Strauss, for endearing vii support. I thank my sons, Nick and Robin, lights of my life, who contributed to this project in ways they will never know. Parents start off divine and if they are lucky become human. Furry, four-legged friends at home gave much comfort. Finally, this odyssey would never have been possible to begin with without the constant encouragement, patience, and support of my beloved wife, Jacqueline Strauss, ever graceful and wise. viii ABSTRACT “GREETINGS, I AM AN IMMORTAL GOD!”: READING, IMAGINATION, AND PERSONAL DIVINITY IN LATE ANTIQUITY, 2ND – 5TH CENTURIES CE MAY 2019 MARK ROBLEE B.A., WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY M.A., HOLY NAMES COLLEGE M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Carlin Barton In City of God, Augustine entertains “personal divinity”—the idea that a person could become an immortal god. Recent scholarship has focused on the social function of such beliefs. The divine status of public figures such as emperors and martyrs has become a trope widely understood in its social and institutional dimensions. I add to this sociological understanding by inquiring into individual experience. How did a late antique person become divine? How did she understand divinity and the limits of the self? In City of God, Augustine assembles an archive that includes references to works by Platonists Apuleius, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, as well as Hermes Trismegistus (the eponymous mystagogue portrayed in the Corpus Hermeticum). With ancient and modern theories about reading and the imagination in mind—from Quintilian to Cognitive Poetics—this dissertation interrogates the way reading (or hearing) texts about personal divinity function as implicit “spiritual exercises” or imaginative technologies of self- transformation. My dissertation shows how the power of mental representations— ix imagined images of self and world that reside within the mind—affect experience and construct “reality.” Considering the role of imaginative reading and its transformative effects adds a layer of complexity to how historians of religion and religious studies scholars interpret texts about personal divinity, yielding greater compassion for how ancient peoples may have understood themselves on their own terms. Furthermore, the heightened self- reflexivity that results from imaginative engagements with discourses on personal divinity is part of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans that Otto ascribes to the divine “Wholly Other.” The awe we experience at a thunder and lightning storm, for example, is as much the awe of being able to feel or perceive the storm. The texts I interpret explicitly provoke such awe. My research invites the modern reader into a numinous world where human consciousness itself becomes “divine” through a complex process of self-sacralization. Finally, this dissertation suggests that the writing of history informed by a reflexive philosophy of history functions much like the “spiritual exercises” that constitute my source texts.