Abject Joy Paul, Prison, and the Art of Making Do

Free Download Ryan S. Schellenberg, "Abject Joy: Paul, Prison, and the Art of Making Do"
English | ISBN: 0190065516 | 2021 | 248 pages | EPUB | 1215 KB
No extant text gives so vivid a glimpse into the experience of an ancient prisoner as Paul's letter to the Philippians. As a letter from prison, however, it is not what one would expect. For although it is true that Paul, like some other ancient prisoners, speaks in Philippians of his yearning for death, what he expresses most conspicuously is contentment and even joy. Setting aside pious banalities that contrast true joy with happiness, and leaving behind too heroic depictions that take their cue from Acts, Abject Joy offers a reading of Paul's letter as both a means and an artifact of his provisional attempt to make do. By outlining the uses of punitive custody in the administration of Rome's eastern provinces and describing the prison's complex place in the social and moral imagination of the Greek and Roman world, Ryan Schellenberg provides a richly drawn account of Paul's nonelite social context, where bodies and their affects were shaped by acute contingency and habitual susceptibility to violent subjugation. Informed by recent work in the history of emotions, and with comparison to modern prison writing and ethnography provoking new questions and insights, Schellenberg describes Paul's letter as an affective technology, wielded at once on Paul himself and on his addressees, that works to strengthen his grasp on the very joy he names.