CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Gara, Misel |
|---|---|
| Title | Agape: Social Aspects of the Early Christian Love-Feast |
| Summary | The present thesis examines the social aspects of the early Christian love-feast. Following the social-historical contextualization and critical analysis of surviving written sources about the love-feast from the first three centuries CE, the thesis attempts to refute the widespread misconception in contemporary scholarship that a main cause of Christianity’s success was the love-feast’s charitable nature towards non-Christians. After presenting the love-feast’s relation to the Eucharist, and through the examination of basic early Eucharistic theology, the thesis argues that the meal’s primary function was to establish the “Holy Communion” by the spiritual bond of agape, the metonymically identified divine love. Upon the examination of the social-religious functions of the pagan sacrificial meal, the thesis argues that, in the pagan paradigm, koinonia or communion is not merely a key concept spiritually, but most importantly a necessary precondition for citizenship in the Hellenistic legal tradition. By drawing a parallel between the Hellenistic concept of citizenship and the Christian concept of “heavenly citizenship,” the thesis argues that in the Christian understanding, the concept of politeia in itself already bore the meaning of the principle of social care, within the community. Therefore, the love-feast was not simply the platform of Christian social care, but the rite was meant to draw the cultic boundaries of the community, which provided the social basis for political unity and solidarity among Christians. |
| Supervisor | Geréby, György; Perczel, István |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/gara_misel.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University