19 Flights of Fancy: Some Imaginary Debates in Late Antiquity

Since her doctoral work on the ecclesiastical history of Evagrius Scholasticus, subsequently published as her first book,1 Pauline Allen has been an unfailing and indefatigable elucidator of Greek Christian texts from late antiquity, and especially those from the sixth and seventh centuries. From ecclesiastical history to homiletic and heresiology, she has opened up the possibilities for other scholars with her critical editions, commentaries, and discussions. She has guided younger colleagues and pupils and inspired collective research on a scale one can only describe as impressive. And hers has been and remains a major voice in the field of patristics, not only in Australia but also internationally through the International Association for Patristic Studies and her own regular appearances at the Oxford Patristic Conferences. That Pauline was once my student seems extraordinary today, when we celebrate her own huge and sustained contribution to patristics as a profession and an academic field. She is a scholar who has never been afraid of making others think, or of giving them good questions to think about. I am delighted to offer her these thoughts about a question that has intrigued me for some time and that I hope she will find interesting too. I have long been interested in the more literary and rhetorical features of Christian writing and in the thought processes and emotion in the minds of those who wrote. It is one of the great shifts in modern approaches to late antique and early Byzantine texts that the role played by these aspects and their importance are now taken for granted, in sharp contrast to the old positivistic attitude that saw genres such as hagiography only in terms of the