Professor Teresa Morgan: List of publications

‘Faith’ is one of Christianity’s most significant, distinctive and complex concepts and practices, but Christian understandings of faith in the patristic period have received surprisingly little attention. This article explores two aspects of what Augustine terms fides qua, ‘the faith by which believers believe’. From the early second century, belief in the truth of doctrine becomes increasingly significant to Christians; by the fourth, affirming that certain doctrines are true has become central to becoming Christian and to remaining within the Church. During the same period, we find a steady growth in poetic and imagistic descriptions of interior faith. This article explores how and why these developments occurred, arguing that they are mutually implicated and that this period sees the beginning of their long co-existence.

This chapter studies E.R. Dodds’s lectures published in 1965 as Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, which marked a pivotal moment in the modern study of late antiquity. By 1963, Dodds had a long history of combining his scholarly and other interests to create new fields of study. Pagan and Christian draws both on his non-academic interests and on his past research into Neoplatonism, Greek literature, Greek religion, and the ‘irrational’, encompassing the supernormal or paranormal in antiquity. Dodds argued for seeing common ground between pagan and Christian mentalities in a way which can now be taken for granted but was anything but typical at the time. In the process, he created a new field of study and, if not many scholars have followed him in studying the whole breadth of the field, there has been much more serious discussion since of many of its elements.

These three short papers were delivered at the 72nd General Meeting of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, held in Pretoria, South Africa, on 8–11 August 2017. The ‘Quaestiones disputatae’ session was chaired by the President of the Society, Professor Michael Wolter. The first two papers engage with Teresa Morgan's book, Roman Faith and Christian Faith, and Professor Morgan responds to them in the third.

This essay builds on work by the author on ancient cognitive religiosity and the Aesopic corpus. Focusing on fables datable to the early principate, it argues that, despite their debt to Aesop, their representations of divine-human relations are in some ways distinctive. Three fables are read closely to show the complexities of religious thinking, particularly about relations between individuals and gods, that may be embedded in apparently naive stories.