Pagan and Christian Consolation

Abstract

It is well known that the early Church Fathers usually received a thorough classical education based upon pagan writers before they turned to their own literary production. As a result of their belonging to either Greek or Roman educated elites, they self-consciously adopted various pagan literary models and inherited fully developed pagan genres. At the same time, however, they actively transformed what they inherited by adapting the existing genres to their own goals and using them as vehicles for conveying the Chris-tian message. It gave rise to specific literary hybrids that, on the one hand, clearly showed formal (and not only formal) similarities with their role models, but, on the other, significantly differed from them in content as well as in context. Scrutinizing those intentional similarities and differences can be highly rewarding as it can give us a hint of the literary strategies applied by some of the early Church Fathers in their effort to emu-late their models and distance from them at the same time. The purpose of this text is to closely examine the above-delineated question within the genre of consolation (kayos actQaatiOnttx6c) which under the influence of Greek and Roman rhetoric and philosophy gradually evolved from one single topos to a genre of its own.' Although it could be delivered as a funeral speech, the usual form of consolation was the epistolary. Consoling the bereaved is a natural urge that received its literary formation as early as in the Iliad, in a scene of Achilles solacing Priamus.2 But more than being merely a sign of compassion, literary consolation provided the author with an opportunity to express and expound his own philosophical attitudes and convictions, and to convey them to the addressee (and thus to the readers). In this way, epistolary consolation often approached the form of philosophical treatise dealing with topics such as death, afterlife, fate, grief, etc.