School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemRoman Slavery and Humanitarian Ideas( 2020)The Thesis evaluates humanitarian ideas in the ancient world around Roman slavery, including from proponents of Stoicism and early Christianity. The Thesis examines Seneca and Epictetus as Stoics and John Chrysostom and Gregory of Nyssa as Christians. They are evaluated according to the principles of personhood, treatment and freedom to determine what extent they can be taken as humanitarian authors in the ancient context. They are also compared with each other to determine what lessons we can draw about slavery and humanitarianism in the ancient world.
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ItemHeterodoxy and contemporary Chinese protestantism: the case of Eastern Lightning( 2010)This dissertation examines new religious movements that are loosely related to Protestantism and have emerged in China in the past thirty years. In particular, it introduces the largest and most notorious of these movements. Eastern Lightning (dongfang shandian) emerged from Henan province in the early 1990s, and teaches that Jesus Christ has returned to earth in the form of a Chinese woman to judge humankind and end the present age. It has predominantly attracted women in poor rural areas of northern China, who have been overlooked amidst the nation's rapid social and economic transformation. This dissertation shows that Eastern Lightning combines elements of both tradition and innovation with respect to doctrine, recruitment techniques and symbols, indicating that Protestantism has become a cultural resource from which Chinese religious movements now draw. The dissertation also investigates the responses of Chinese government organs to Protestant-related new religious movements. The government has banned them and targeted them in its campaign against Falun Gong and "evil cults" (xiejiao). In so doing, it has redeployed familiar ways of labeling heterodoxy, tailoring them to fit the Protestant context. However, its efforts to suppress Eastern Lightning have met with only limited success. They have also led Eastern Lightning to intensify its own rhetoric against the Chinese Communist Party, and to employ radical recruitment practices. Chinese Protestants, too, have engaged in vociferous condemnation of new religious movements and attempted to educate their own members against them. This dissertation explores the ways in which different religious factions defend their own doctrinal correctness and attack that of others. Orthodoxy is central to the identities and discourses of all of these groups. Yet while Protestants are united in their condemnation of new religious movements, nuances in their responses reflect their own varying relationships with the state. Hence, this study uncovers the dynamic, complex and fraught interactions between an array of political and religious actors.
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ItemThe sins of the Fathers: a study of the lay concept of guilt in late medieval England( 2010)This dissertation is an enquiry into why there was an explosion of lay devotion and piety in fourteenth- and fifteenth century England when the Church offered faithful penitents the perfect, divinely ordained means of forgiveness, absolution, reconciliation and salvation through the administration of the sacraments. Certainly the late medieval period was one of persistent social, political and economic upheavals and corruptions and inefficiencies in both spiritual and secular institutions, but these have occurred throughout history without resulting in such profound and sustained steriological angst. It is the contention of this thesis that for the laity there was another influential factor at work, a concept I have labelled ‘collective guilt’. Guilt results in punishment, therefore it would seem that punishment is indicative of guilt; however, from biblical exegesis theologians demonstrated that the conversion of the argument is untenable. But for those without access to scholarly discourse the experience of widespread and ongoing disasters which were interpreted as divine punishment for post-baptismal human sin but suffered by the good and wicked as though they were equally guilty, was evidence that the guilt of personal sin was shared; a theologically erroneous concept but nonetheless seemingly confirmed by ecclesiastical sanctions and punishments meted out by both church and secular courts. Moreover, and again contrary to theological opinion but unexplained, lay people believed that the same collective punishment would continue after death. This was a frightening prospect because as every soul had to be entirely cleansed of sin and guilt before it could enter heaven, the length of purgation for others’ post-baptismal sin and guilt would exceed the time left before the Last Judgement. Thus, collective guilt not only resulted in communal punishment on earth but threatened personal salvation. This thesis is a study of the origins of the misconception, and the influence of the belief in collective guilt in the devotional lives of the laity in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England and as such, the study is divided into two parts. In the first, I trace the theological justification for the punishment of communities for the sins of one or a few, and of children for the sins of their parents, through the works of Thomas Aquinas, the foremost scholar of his age. I examine the inferences of collective guilt in texts and sermons, and in the celebration of Baptism, Penance, the Mass, and Last Rites – those sacraments by which the individual was identified with Christ and reconciled with the Church and the universal community outside of which there could be no hope of salvation. In the second part I demonstrate how, by forming religious gilds which by common consent admitted only people with a pious reputation and regulated and disciplined the behaviour of members, lay people endeavoured to control the sinful behaviour of members, and augment the collective merit of the community with which they were spiritually identified. Private devotions are then considered. I argue that, by enlisting the help of the most powerful mediators in heaven, penitents sought to overcome the burden of collective guilt at death; and postulate that the visionary experiences of mystics encouraged others to seek personal identification with the supreme salvific act of atonement wrought by Christ on the Cross. And finally, I show that the similarities between ecclesiastical and folk rituals suggest that traditional charms were practiced to draw down divine power to counteract the physical effects of collective guilt. My conclusion is that the concept of collective guilt, albeit theologically wrong, was the cause of profound spiritual angst, and that as a facet of late medieval religious thinking it is a useful tool for helping to explain the fervour of lay devotion and piety of the laity in fourteenth and fifteenth century England.