A Passionate Pacification: Sacrifice and Suffering in the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1594–1767

This dissertation tracks Jesuit discourse about suffering in the missions of Northern New Spain from the arrival of the first missionaries in the sixteeenth century until their expulsion in the eighteenth. This research project asked why tales of persecution became so prevalent in these borderland contexts and describes how missionaries sanctified their own sacrifices as well as native suffering through martyrological idioms. It argues that in both corporeal and textual forms missionaries were passionate in their efforts to pacify the northern frontier of Mexico. It also correlates colonial martyrologies to longer traditions of redemptive death in the history of Christianity. The belief that sacrifice begets growth reaches back to the biblical writers and church fathers like Jerome and Tertullian. More recently, Talal Asad has argued that “dying to give life” lies at the foundation of western civilization and its capacity for war. This dissertation charts a transitional moment in the longer geneaology of matyrological discourse that extends early Christian tales of persecution to the modern logic of redemptive sacrifice. It argues that Christian martyrdom traditions helped early modern Jesuits rationalize their participation in the Spanish colonization of the Americas and explain rebellion, disease, and death as providential.

In addition to accounts of the deaths of specific missionaries at the hands of rebellious converts, this thesis takes up the wider motif of martyrdom that permeated their entire evangelistic enterprise in New Spain. Through histories, annual letters, personal correspondence, and maps it describes how metaphors of agricultural growth, economic exchange, cosmic war, exile, and “prolonged martyrdom” downplayed the material causes of violence and instead elevated converts’ and missionaries’ suffering as ultimately redemptive. The dissertation shows how Jesuit martyr language had a symbiotic, though conflicted relation to native religious practices, spurring native revolt, aggressive retribution, and spatial redistribution. In distinction from early Christians who cultivated martyrdom as a rhetoric of victimization under imperial persecution, early modern missionaries used their own passion stories to justify imperial expansion and the often difficult pacification of indigenous groups. When located in Christian history, the blood of Jesuit martyrs helped place native landscapes within an imagined Christendom in the minds of European audiences who encountered their tales of sacrifice through letters, histories, maps, paintings, and reliquaries. Whether positioning themselves vis-à-vis other religious orders, petitioning superiors, preparing campaigns to extirpate native “idolatries,” or protecting converts from European and indigenous enemies, Jesuits believed that their greatest victories would be resurrected from stories of victimization.

Adviser: David Hall

The Force of Union: Affect and Ascent in the Theology of Bonaventure

The image of love as a burning flame is so widespread in the history of Christian literature as to appear inevitable. But as this dissertation explores, the association of amor with fire played a precise and wide-ranging role in Bonaventure's understanding of the soul's motive power—its capacity to love and be united with God, especially as that capacity was demonstrated in an exemplary way through the spiritual ascent and death of Saint Francis.

In drawing out this association, Bonaventure develops a theory of the soul and its capacity for transformation in union with God that gives specificity to the Christian desire for self-abandonment in God and the annihilation of the soul in union with God. Though Bonaventure does not use the language of the soul coming to nothing, he describes a state of ecstasy or excessus mentis that is possible in this life, but which constitutes the death and transformation of the soul in union with God. In this ecstatic state, the boundaries between the soul and God—between active and passive, mover and moved, will and necessity—are effectively consumed in the fire of union.

This dissertation offers a new approach to the role of affect in Bonaventure's theology through three lenses: his elaboration of the soul's union with God as inspired by the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite; Bonaventure's conception of synderesis or the soul's natural affective “weight” or inclination to God; and the ecstatic death of the soul that Bonaventure describes in the Itinerarium mentis in Deum and which is witnessed in the body of Saint Francis in the Legenda Maior. This dissertation argues that Bonaventure's “affective” gloss on the Dionysian corpus was not an interpolation but a working out of the Dionysian conception of eros. In elaborating the soul's natural motion to the good, moreover, Bonaventure situates divine desire within an Aristotelian cosmos. And as the manifestation of this desire in Francis's dying body makes evident, for Bonaventure affectus plays at the boundary of body and spirit and names a force that is more fundamental than the distinction between the corporeal and incorporeal.

Adviser: Amy Hollywood

Silent Statements: Narrative Representations of Speech and Silence in the Gospel of Luke

Even a brief comparison with its canonical counterparts demonstrates that the Gospel of Luke is preoccupied with the power of spoken words. Words, Luke tells us, can deceive and mislead (21:8), entrap (20:26), or save (12:11–12). Despite this emphasis, words alone do not a language make. Just as music without silence collapses into cacophony, so speech without silence signifies nothing: silences are the invisible, inaudible cement that hold the entire edifice together. Although scholars across diverse disciplines have analyzed silence in terms of its contexts, sources, and functions, these insights have barely begun to make inroads in biblical studies.

Utilizing conceptual tools from narratology and reader-response criticism, this study represents an initial exploration of what remains largely uncharted territory —the various ways that narrative intersections of speech and silences function together toward particular rhetorical ends in the Gospel of Luke. Although speech and silence are often considered to be mutually exclusive—silence as the absence of speech—this common perceptual frame limits, rather than opens up, interpretive possibilities when reading ancient narratives. In the work presented here I consider speech and silence to be mutually constituted in intricate and inextricable ways.

Specifically, I demonstrate that attention to both characters’ silences and the narrator's silences (such as gaps, omissions, or delays in recounting information) helps to delineate the complex interactions between plot, characterization, theme, and readerly experience in Luke's Gospel. Focusing on both speech and silence in the Third Gospel reveals that the Lukan narrator seeks to shape readers into ideal witnesses who use speech and silence in particular ways; one way to read the Lukan text is as an early Christian proclamation—not only of the gospel message—but also of the proper ways to use speech and silence in light of that message. Thus, we find that speech and silence are significant matters of concern within the Lukan story and that speech and silence are significant tools used in its telling.

Adviser: François Bovon

Stoning in the Islamic Tradition: The Case of Northern Nigeria

This dissertation asks how it came to be that Amina Lawal, a peasant woman from Northern Nigeria, was sentenced to death by stoning in 2002 for committing the crime of zinā, or illegal sexual activity, three years after full Islamic sharī'ah penal law began to be implemented there by way of massive grassroots demand. Each chapter examines a factor I deem necessary to explore this question. Drawing on ethnographic evidence gathered during fieldwork in Northern Nigeria, I first examine “sharī'ah as social text,” concluding that sharī'ah is thought to offer the radical societal ordering and historical and cultural legitimacy necessary to combat the corruption and poverty associated with the Federal State structure. However, the integration of the stoning punishment into the formative period of Islamic law (1st–3rd AH/ 7th–10th c.e.), taken up in chapter two, reveals stoning to have presented theological problems, challenging its reception in contemporary Nigeria as a symbol of stability. Chapter three traces the slow integration of Hausaland into a legalistic milieu identified with an eastward Arab-Islamic epistemic tradition by the eighteenth century, culminated in the Sokoto Caliphate's (r. 1809–1903) identification with the Mālikī school of Islamic law. The British arrival in the late nineteenth century ended the Caliphate, changed Islamic penal law, and promulgated the “Native Courts Proclamation,” which outlawed the stoning punishment despite its absence during the Sokoto Caliphate. This history is often recalled in contemporary Northern Nigeria, but only recently, as the State weakens and the Muslim north loses political power. Chapter four analyzes Lawal's trial as the stage where the boundaries and mandates of post-1999 sharī'ah are delineated. I call several features of legal argumentation endemic of “post-modern Islamic law”: legal reductionism, reliance mainly on primary texts, combining Islamic and constitutional arguments, and eschewing the jurisprudential tradition. These factors combine to make it easier (relative to Islamic history) to mete out stoning. Finally, I examine gender and the Western reaction to the case, arguing that these discourses collude to ironically elide the voice of Amina Lawal, Nigerian women more generally, and the stoning punishment in particular.

Adviser: Leila Ahmed

Esther and the Politics of Negotiation: An Investigation of Public and Private Spaces in Relationship to Possibilities for Female Royal Counselors

The primary question that this dissertation seeks to answer is, “How might we characterize the narrative depiction of Esther's political involvement in the affairs of the Persian state?” Many scholars have answered this question by considering the degree to which Esther is either typical or exceptional vis-à-vis portrayals of other biblical women: Does she represent an aberration from gender norms or an embodiment of male patriarchal values? This dissertation challenges the set of problematic assumptions underlying this entire way of framing the question, a framing that can only lead to further interpretive difficulties by either denying commonalities between Esther and other biblical women or ignoring the dynamics at play when the very same descriptions are used of men. In addition, reliance on these two categories has created a self-replicating logic according to which scholarship about men and women and their respective roles tends to occupy separate and divided spheres within academic discourse.

This dissertation begins with a review of scholarship on Esther. Although many scholarly assessments, whether they see Esther as typical or exceptional, rely on problematic assumptions, the body of Esther scholarship also contains insights suggesting a more nuanced approach to evaluating her character. One common problem is the reliance on an assumption of gendered and separate public and private spheres for men and women respectively, a construct that suffers from a number of theoretical shortcomings. In addition, portrayals of Esther as a politically powerful and persuasive woman connect her to a wide variety of biblical texts, suggesting that she is not the exceptional figure that some have claimed but deeply embedded within a tradition. None of the evidence regarding Persian women—the book of Esther, Greek historiography, or indigenous Persian sources—indicates that women were categorically confined to a private sphere, opening up the historical possibility for women's participation in the political role of royal counselor.

Adviser: Jon D. Levenson

The Religious Pursuit of Race: Christianity, Modern Science, and the Perception of Human Difference

This dissertation is a work in intellectual history that chronicles racial theories within Western science and medicine. Therein, I address two interrelated questions: First, has Christianity shaped modern scientific perceptions of race? Second, is the search for the origin of human life, vis-à-vis theories of race, a purely scientific matter or, a more basic human existential concern? To answer these questions I undertook archival research within the history of European and American racial science, analyzing contemporary scientific work, archival data of primary scientific material, biblical commentaries, literary monthlies, and early maps of the major continents. I argue that Christian ideas about nature, humanity, and history have facilitated modern scientific perceptions of race since the time of the Enlightenment. This is true despite what is believed to be the “Death of Adam” within Western science following the emergence of Darwinian evolution.

In defense of my thesis I trace the currency of three ideas derived from Christianity that have shaped the assumptions and reasoning styles of early modern and contemporary scientific theorists of race. These ideas are: common human descent (derived from the Biblical creation narrative), the ontological uniqueness of human life (drawn from Biblical claims about the “image of God” mirrored in “mankind”), and the longevity of racial traits (an idea that has its roots in theological claims about the stability and inherent order of nature). I chart the development of these three Christian concepts across four different historical moments that reveal how religious and scientific perceptions of race share a common foundation in the West. These moments are: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's attempt to develop anthropology as a secular science during the end of the eighteenth century; mid-nineteenth-century debates in the U.S. over common human descent; early-twentieth-century theories of race and disease that relied on polygenist assumptions about distinct human ancestry; and finally the recent discovery of Neanderthal DNA exclusively in the descendents of Eurasia. Ultimately, this thesis concludes that religious and scientific ways of viewing race have been interconnected and are animated by irresolvable questions about what it means to be human.

Adviser: Janet Browne

A Linguistic Frame of Mind: Ar-Rāġib al-Isfahānī and What It Meant to Be Ambiguous

The mediaeval Islamic world was dominated by a language-obsessed culture that placed great value on words and their meanings. These words and meanings could, for those who used them, make the difference between both earthly success or failure, and salvation or damnation in the hereafter. Scholars were also conscious of the contingency of the links between words and their meanings, and the potential this created for ambiguity. This dissertation is about the mechanisms, models, and assumptions those scholars used to manage linguistic ambiguity. My investigation focuses on ar-Rāġib al-Isfahānī (fl. ≤ 409/1018), one such language-obsessed scholar. I provide a comprehensive review of his life, works, and times. He put together a portfolio of intellectual positions in exegesis, theology, ethics, and poetics that was guided by a philosophy of language that accepted and negotiated linguistic ambiguity. Underpinning that philosophy was a theory of meaning that used the pairing of expression and idea (lafz and ma ‘ nā) to deal with polysemy, the intent of the speaker, and the function of the lexicon. Ar-Rāġib's philosophy was emblematic of what I call the Arabic Language Tradition, the shared assumptions of which constituted an indigenous philosophy of language that was able to supply its own answers to the central questions of linguistics and then use those answers across all of the genres encompassed by its scholarship, from grammar to poetics, law, and theology. It was an Arabic Language Tradition that is best understood through comparison to an alternative Classical Language Tradition that had its roots in the Organon and a theory of meaning with little space for ambiguity. Re-telling Islamic intellectual history through the lens of language in this way shows us that in addition to the well-known and oft-studied Islamic engagement with Hellenistic philosophy there was another, indigenous tradition with its own answers to the problems of mediaeval scholarship. This Arabic Language Tradition saw in language a solution to these problems, rather than seeing language as just another hurdle to be overcome.

Adviser: Wolfhart P. Heinrichs

Law, Equity, and Calvin's Moral Critique of Protestant Faith

This dissertation examines the themes of law and equity in John Calvin's moral and legal thought. Part one of the dissertation focuses on Calvin's immanent critique of Lutheran faith, particularly his nuanced recalibration of Luther's law-gospel dialectic and Melanchthon's doctrine of the third use of the law. Building on the work of I. John Hesselink, the study explores how Calvin simultaneously defines the relation between law and gospel in terms of an antithesis, thereby preserving Luther's (Pauline) doctrine of justification by faith, and in terms of a continuum, thereby creating the theological warrant for the law's normative use. Calvin does this by distinguishing between the “bare law” (nuda lex), which stands in antithesis to the gospel and the “whole law” (tota lex), which stands in a “sacred link” (sacrum nexum) with the gospel when the law is seen through a Christological lens.

Part two of the dissertation examines innovations to the tradition of equity during the early stages of the Protestant Reformation. Within the context of the sixteenth century, Luther sought to harness the Aristotelian conception of equity (epieikeia) as a legal rationale for discretionary departure from traditional Catholic laws and precedents. But while Luther offers significant (and underappreciated) innovations to the Aristotelian tradition of equity, his privileging of the virtue of equity, as “necessary” and to be “praised most of all,” combined with inadequately developed ideas about reestablishment and regulation of laws, left Protestant teachings vulnerable to abuses. Luther's definition of and placing of priority on epieikeia, thus would set the agenda for second generation reformers like Calvin, who, in response, sought to constrain appeals to equity within a natural law framework. Calvin's appreciation for the potential abuses of epieikeia partly explains the care he gives to formulating a new Protestant theory of equity, one that is more compatible with the goals of reconstructing a moral and legal order. In granting discretionary powers to rectify deficient laws, which the task of reform requires, Calvin appeals to natural law elements in the tradition of equity so that arguments from equity would not be interpreted as sanctioning unbridled, unprincipled acts.

Adviser: Arthur Dyck

Contesting the Theo-Ethical Rhetoric of Home: Feminist and Postcolonial Politics of Space

Although the rhetoric of home is broadly used and may seem banal, it is a notion that has been significantly contested in recent decades. This dissertation critically analyzes the politics of space within the rhetoric of home by locating “home” within socio-economic constellations of power. To underscore the linkages between the domestic family home and the political homeland, I place critiques of home in feminist Christian discourses into critical dialogue with postcolonial critiques of home.

After beginning with a contextual discussion of the rhetoric of home in U.S. history, I thematically address the rhetoric of home in feminist and postcolonial discourses. Firstly, I examine the rhetoric of violence and the home. By engaging both feminist and postcolonial texts, I show how home is not only a site of violence, but also functions as a tool of violence. Secondly, I explore the rhetoric of work and home in feminist Christian discourses. Critically analyzing differing articulations of the relationship between work and home reveals alternative spatial models of the socio-economic dynamics that construct the social and material landscape. Finally, I show how the rhetorics of home and heaven in Christian discourses express utopian visions for dwelling together. Examining these discourses raises important questions about how the rhetoric of home functions to create ethical and cultural norms.

In conclusion, the dissertation surveys the range of strategies feminist and postcolonial discourses have used to intervene in the politics of space in the rhetoric of home. To these strategies, I add an argument for engaging the alternative rhetoric of “dwelling together.” The rhetoric of home and homeland has a problematic legacy of violence and exclusion that masks critical intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, marital status, and national identity. A feminist, postcolonial Christian rhetoric of dwelling together seeks to create a theo-ethical framework that more adequately addresses the ethics of spatio-socio-economic interrelations.

Adviser: Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

Encyclopaedism in the Mamluk Period: The Composition of Shihāb al-Dīn al-Nuwayrī's (d. 1333) Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab

This dissertation explores the emergence of a golden age of Arabic encyclopaedic literature in the scholarly centers of Egypt and Syria during the Mamluk Empire (1250–1517). At the heart of the project is a study of Shihāb al-Dīn Ahmad b. ‘Abd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī's (d. 1333) Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (“The Ultimate Ambition in the Branches of Erudition”), a thirty-one-volume encyclopaedic work composed at the beginning of the fourteenth century and divided into five parts: i) heaven and earth; ii) the human being; iii) animals; iv) plants; and v) the history of the world.

My study examines the formal arrangement, thematic contents, and codicological features of this seminal work, arguing that the rise of encyclopaedism in this period was emblematic of a certain intellectual ethos, a systematic approach to the classification of knowledge, which emerged in the discursive context of a rapidly centralizing imperial state. I argue that the Nihāya grew out of an amalgam of several genres—including the adab anthology, the cosmographical compendium, the chancery scribe manual, the dynastic chronicle, and the commonplace book—developing into a new form and serving a different purpose from its literary predecessors. Such texts, long considered tokens of intellectual and cultural decadence, demonstrate the strategies used by Mamluk religious scholars, chancery scribes, and littérateurs to navigate an ever-growing corpus of accumulated knowledge.

Adviser: Wolfhart P. Heinrichs

“Is the LORD in Our Midst or Not?” Conceptions of Divine Presence in Ancient Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the Calf Incident

This study examines various notions of divine presence as integral to the depiction of Israel's apostasy at Mount Sinai within the redacted Pentateuch as well as to interpretations of that composite text by ancient Jews and Christians. The concepts of presence articulated by ancient interpreters express not only particular images of an immanent and intimate Deity, but also distinctive understandings of redemption and of communal identity as an elect people. And those exegetical-theological reflections are necessarily a by-product of how each community construes its biblical canon, especially its construal of the role of the Torah/Law.

Within Exodus 25–40, contact with the divine is intimately related to sacred artifacts, with the golden calf acting as foil to the covenantal tablets and the Priestly Tabernacle. The earliest extant Christian appropriations of the calf narrative, 1 Corinthians 10 and Acts 7, offer another antipode to idolatry—adherence to Jesus as Lord and Son of Man. And both do so while utilizing scriptural juxtapositions—the covenant-making ceremony versus idolatry at Sinai and the calf vis-à-vis the Tabernacle. The latter juxtaposition is also significant for several rabbinic interpretations of Exodus 32, with the Shekhinah's entering into the Tabernacle emblematic of Israel's ongoing election and of the lord having forgiven his chosen people.

Those midrashic depictions of divine condescension resonate with the interpretations of two fourth-century Christians, Ephrem the Syrian and Gregory of Nyssa, who further the hermeneutical trajectories begun by Paul and the author of Luke-Acts. For Ephrem and Gregory, the restored tablets that supplant the calf prefigure the incarnation of the Logos, the remedy for the baneful effects of the Fall. This use of the calf narrative significantly complicates the ancient Christian dichotomy of “carnal Israel” and “spiritual church.” And while certain rabbinic interpreters presume (if not directly express) the centrality of the mitsvot as a means of redemption and encounter with God, patristic readers of the calf narrative understand the Law as ultimately provisional vis-à-vis the Christ event. The above conceptions of divine presence, whether Israelo- or Christo-centric, are thus ineluctably particular and depend on the hermeneutical circle of interpretive communities and their scriptures.

Adviser: Jon D. Levenson

Textual Loss and Recovery in the Hebrew Bible

This dissertation is a study of four ancient stories about the creation and transmission of all or part of the Hebrew Bible: Moses and the stone tablets (Exodus 32–34), Josiah and the discovery of the law-book (2 Kings 22–23), the scroll of Jeremiah and Baruch (Jeremiah 36), and Ezra's legendary restoration of the entire Bible (4 Ezra 14). Each story is a variation on the common narrative pattern of textual loss and recovery. This narrative theme stands in tension with one of the cardinal aspirations of scribal culture in antiquity, as it is known from scribal colophons: the fixity, permanence, and inviolability of writing. When the scribal creators of biblical literature told stories about the texts they produced, they represented the text in its early history as vulnerable and threatened. The purpose of this dissertation is to account for that counter-intuitive choice. My central argument is that in each of the three biblical stories, the common narrative pattern of textual loss and recovery serves as the vehicle for a particular argument related to the textualization of divine revelation, and that the stories function in ways that a plotline of uninterrupted textual transmission would not. Stories of textual loss and recovery can be viewed as strategic transactions in which the ideal of the pristine text is sacrificed in order to express other arguments about divine written revelation. After discussing three texts from the Hebrew Bible, I examine the legend of Ezra's miraculous restoration of the entire Bible after the exile, reconstructing the biblical-exegetical background of 4 Ezra 14 and tracing the meanings of the story in later Jewish, Christian, and Islamic literature.

Adviser: Jon D. Levenson

Patrul Rinpoche on Self-Cultivation: The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Tibetan Buddhist Spiritual Advice

Buddhist forms of “ethical advice”—instructions that address life's problems and offer methods for alleviating them—are widespread in Buddhist literary history. This dissertation studies four such works, all written by the nineteenth-century Tibetan teacher Dza Patrul Rinpoche (Rdza dpal sprul O rgyan ‘jigs med chos kyi dbang po, 1808–1877). I provide a rhetorical analysis of these compositions and endeavor to show how each aspires to reach outside of itself to act on its respective audience. The compositions do so, I argue, by deploying special literary devices that encourage their audiences to invest themselves, emotionally and imaginatively, in the practices of self-development that the works themselves advocate. The aim of this project is to use Patrul's writing as a case study to suggest modes of analysis that can offer us insight into the ways in which specially designed forms of writing enable moral self-cultivation.

The dissertation specifically addresses the relationship between the recurring themes of singularity, performativity, and reflexivity as they appear in Patrul's advice writings. I argue that these compositions employ discursive devices that play on their audience's feelings and expectations, aspiring to generate affective responses that range from utter hopelessness to profound relief. They utilize expositional strategies designed to compel their audiences to imagine familiar practices anew. Finally, their performative character calls attention to the status of Patrul, the model author, as a singularly capable and skillful teacher. The reflexive nature of Patrul's works thereby serves to provoke the implied audience's imagination about “Patrul,” the heroically talented teacher.

These self-reflexive writings also act as devices for Patrul's own self-transformation. They are sites of imagination, opportunities for Patrul to enact a self-creation via the medium of advice writing. Patrul's compositions not only aspire to work on their audience but they, in and of themselves, constitute transformative work for Patrul.

Adviser: Janet Gyatso

Exemplarity and its Limits in Thomas of Cantimpre's Hagiographical Corpus

This dissertation examines the hagiographical corpus of the Dominican preacher Thomas of Cantimpré (ca. 1201–1270), a critical early respondent to the burgeoning women's religious movement in the Southern Low Countries. Writing at a time when both lay and religious spirituality were being radically refigured in light of new organizational structures and devotional practices, Thomas's hagiographical corpus reflects the diversity of vocational possibilities available for women and men in a period of great religious experimentation and innovation. Using historical, literary, and theological methods, the dissertation examines the ways in which Thomas's vitae struggle with the question of how lay and religious, male and female readers might, in Thomas's words, “take up” the different kinds of figures Thomas provides as models for practice and objects of devotion. Each of the vitae offers unique solutions to this question even as they represent different sorts of persons as exemplary.

An important assumption governing the dissertation is that hagiography is a vital part of the spiritual and theological tradition of Christianity. Thomas's vitae, I argue, attempt to articulate a theology of exemplarity in order to address the issue of what constitutes sanctity, who can become a saint, and by what means sanctity is attained. For Thomas, exemplarity is animated by theological notions of incarnation and scriptural revelation. Christ, as manifest in his life and in the words of scripture, is the great exemplum for embodied lives. For each of Thomas's saints, Christ is both the singular figure who saves and the one in whom the saint participates, raising the question of how the individual human being embodies and exemplifies Christ's singularity. Thomas's Lives are shown, in the course of their narratives, to illuminate the tension between the singularity of Christ and its repetition in the saintly figures represented by the vitae and readers of those vitae. Exploration of this tension reveals great richness in Thomas's works, showing that Thomas's narrative voice often speaks doubly within a single vita, thematizing the limits and possibilities of exemplarity and its hagiographical representation.

Adviser: Kevin Madigan

The Subject of Emancipation: Critique, Reason and Religion in the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Paul Tillich

Through a focus on four rubrics—emancipatory rationality, anthropology, metaphysics, and religion—this dissertation demonstrates clearly that with similar resources yet different emphases, Paul Tillich, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno uniquely structure what are largely complementary critical interpretations of a modernity, which they see to be diseased, and whose subjects are unable to realize the promises of enlightenment. They shine similar lights on the “steel-hard cage” of a modernity, which they hope to overcome, and possibly to redeem, in largely compatible ways.

In demonstrating this, the dissertation unearths some striking similarities shared by these three thinkers, and simultaneously reveals clear lines of dissimilarity between them in other key areas. This includes important distinctions between Adorno and Horkheimer, not only in the 1930s, but also in the 1940s, by which time they claimed to be writing with a single mind and purpose. Key similarities that will be disclosed include an initial reliance upon Hegel's dialectical structure and Marx's emancipatory social vision and a trenchant critique of the reifying and dehumanizing forces of capitalism. The modern subject thinks itself free but cannot achieve the liberation promised by enlightenment; instead, the subject experiences alienation and estrangement.

Central shared goals include an increase in justice and the hope for not only ending barbarism and the suffering it causes, but also holding the memories alive of those who have died without justice. In a similar manner, major differences arise from common sources and hopes. The drive for transcendence takes a very different form in Tillich's theological system than it does in the secular-Jewish longing for a hypothetical messianic moment found in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer during the period 1929–1950, on which this study focuses.

When the writings of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Tillich are placed alongside of one another, and in conversation with one another, something greater than demonstrable intellectual influence is revealed. Despite some substantial differences in methodology and assumptions, there are remarkable consonances between the types of critical social theory developed, and when read in concert, new insights into each thinker's oeuvre become clearer and increasingly reveal a kaleidoscopic consonance.

Adviser: Francis Schüssler Fiorenza

Harnessing the Prophetic Voice: Rewriting and Allusion in Prophetic Collections from the Second Century b.c.e.

This dissertation examines the use of hypertextual and allusive compositional practices in prophetic collections from the second century b.c.e. Our analysis centers on the three best-preserved examples: 4QApocryphon of Jeremiah C, 4QPseudo-Ezekiel, and Daniel 7–12. While previous scholarship has observed that each of these works contains allusions and often, in some sense, “rewrites” earlier texts, there has not yet been a study that examines the multifarious referential quality of any one of these works as a whole and, much less, one that has examined them comparatively with regard to these features. This dissertation fills that gap. Our most basic claim is that, compositionally, these prophetic collections are characterized by a rhetorically central use of allusion and a multifaceted reliance on hypertextuality. The approach to hypertextuality that is adopted is heavily indebted to Gérard Genette and allows us to appreciate the several ways in which these writings may be termed “rewritten.”

Our discussion is distributed among six chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the main issues in depth. Here, we position our argument in light of earlier work that has been done on the use of allusion and rewriting in our texts, explain our methodology, and justify the plan of the ensuing chapters. Chapter 2 takes up a necessary preliminary issue in treating 4QApocryphon of Jeremiah C and 4QPseudo-Ezekiel (4Q383–391), namely, the issue of whether these should be understood as one or more literary works. Chapters 3–5 are the centerpiece of our analysis, where we examine the use of allusion and hypertextuality in 4QApocryphon of Jeremiah C, 4QPseudo-Ezekiel, and Daniel 7–12. These chapters also discuss other issues relevant to the compositional nature of these works, such as their overall structure and redactional history. Our chapters on 4QApocryphon of Jeremiah C and 4QPseudo-Ezekiel also give a fresh appraisal of their dating. Finally, chapter 6 brings together much of the information discussed in the preceding chapters in order to arrive at a general typology of the forms and functions of allusion and hypertextuality that are represented in these works.

Adviser: Peter Machinist

An Examination of the Relationship between Humans and Animals in the Hebrew Bible

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the relationship between humans and animals in the Hebrew Bible. Although the Hebrew Bible contains a multitude of different perspectives on animals, I argue that there are two basic categories into which these perspectives fall. One group of biblical texts, most notably Gen 1:28, affirms humans’ dominion over animals. Despite the ubiquity of this perspective in scholarly literature, an examination of the entire biblical corpus suggests that these texts represent the minority. A larger group of biblical texts, most notably Job 39:9, depicts animals as beyond the dominion of human beings. Rather than attempting to account for every mention of animals in the Hebrew Bible, I examined a select group of passages that represent each of the two positions. Regarding passages that depict animals as under humans’ dominion, I conclude that while these passages suggest that humans have some authority over animals, that dominion is neither complete nor absolute. Regarding passages that depict animals as beyond humans’ dominion, I conclude that they, in fact, indicate that animals are under the direct dominion of God. The Hebrew Bible nowhere grants humans absolute dominion over animals but instead typically presents humans as having little, if any, dominion over animals. In general, the Hebrew Bible presents humans as possessing dominion over domestic animals and lacking dominion over wild animals. This presentation probably reflects the actual relationship that the Israelites had to the animals around them.

Adviser: Jon D. Levenson