The purpose of the present paper is to examine one way in which divine being or divine existence was expressed in the Ancient World, and to see how in late antiquity the expression of some aspects of divine existence was abandoned, while others survived. The inquiry therefore seeks to contribute to the discussion on change and continuity, and, more specifically, to the problem of what may be understood by conversion from paganism to Christianity in late antiquity.

Imperial ceremony was a vital form of self-expression for late antique society. Sabine MacCormack examines the ceremonies of imperial arrivals, funerals, and coronations from the late third to the late sixth centuries A.D., as manifest in the official literature and art of the time. Her study offers us new insights into the exercise of power and into the social, political, and cultural significance of religious change during the Christianization of the Roman world.

Where is the church? And what is it? In transposing to Spanish America a question that arose in the bitter confrontations between Catholics and Donatists in Augustine's North Africa, I would like to explain some aspects of the impact of Catholic Christianity, and thus of the Europe that had created it, overseas. Specifically, I will tell the story of Peru, the outlines of which are paralleled, not only throughout the Andes, but also in Brazil, Mexico, and Central America. The works (...) of Augustine, including his writings against the Donatists, were read by Spanish missionaries in America, but it is not merely, nor even primarily, the influence of Augustine that I am tracing here. Rather, what concerns me is to reveal the functioning of a series of tensions and contradictions in the impact of Europe on the world. It is fashionable, of course, to highlight the oppressive and destructive nature of colonial regimes and to stop at that. But this, however justified, along with reference to the all-pervasive power of a dominant culture will not on its own help us understand the ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions that filled the minds of people at the time, and that in one way or another motivated their actions. (shrink)

During the era in which the Spanish first encountered public religious practices that they perceived to be idolatrous in the Americas, the study of Hermetic and Platonic texts in Europe was reactivating interest in the power of images and idols, and in the agency of demons. In the Americas, Spanish newcomers encountered idolatry, the cult of deities present to their worshippers in material objects of various kinds, as part of daily religious practice. The resulting battle over idols and the beliefs (...) surrounding them is in one sense only an outcrop of debates over idols and demons in the ancient Mediterranean and in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Yet while ancient beliefs about idols were reiterated in Peru, arguments shifted in this new context. At question is whether these arguments achieved anything beyond imposing European ideas and cognitive models on the Andean world? (shrink)