CONVERSION NARRATIVE AND CHRISTIAN IDENTITY: 'HOW CHRISTIANITY CAME TO ICELAND'

Abstract

Conversion Narrative and Christian Identity: 'How Christianity came to Iceland' Conversion, in the Middle Ages as today, has a range of different meanings: as Muldoon has commented, it encompasses a 'spectrum' of experiences, not one. 1In the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, the root meaning of the verbs used is 'to turn', 'to return', 'to repent'; in his Confessions, Augustine uses a range of word-forms with the root 'vert' ('to turn') in describing his own conversion (e.g.'convert', 'avert', 'pervert', 'adverse', 'universe'). 2In a classic study of conversion in late Antiquity, Nock defined it as 'the re-orientation of the soul of an individual, his deliberate turning from indifference or from an earlier form of piety to another, a turning that implies a consciousness that the old was wrong and the new was right'. 3This is frequently quoted in works on conversion in the Middle Ages, with certain qualifications.Many historians have pointed out that this individualizing definition of conversion can hardly apply to the description of the large-scale conversion of whole peoples, for whom Christianity is just as likely to have been a pragmatic choice as a theological one. 4Some scholars prefer to use different terms for the conversion of peoples ('acculturation' or 'Christianization'), but it is not necessarily useful or accurate to reserve the term 'conversion' only for individuals: the biblical call torepent is, after all, addressed to the community as a whole. 5 The other qualification is that, while Nock assumes that conversion represents a single turning point, most would now conceive of it as a process: Morrison has shown that, in twelfth-century monastic writing, conversion is predominantly understood as a way of life, a process of 'empathetic transformation' that begins with entry into the monastic life and ends only with death. 6Although one might argue that his definition applies only to an intellectual élite, the idea of conversion as a process has the support of contemporary psychologists like Rambo, who would divide it into stages such as 'crisis', 'quest', 'encounter', 'interaction' and so on. 7Conversion, then, can be individual or communal, personal transformation or institutional affiliation; it can be depicted as a single moment of crisis or as a lifelong process of change.Just as difficult to pin down is the relationship between the experience of conversion and its representation in narrative, which is often dismissed as derivative and therefore suspect in historical terms. 8It is common for those writing on conversion to distinguish between the experience of conversion, which is 'beyond thought and words' and the narrative of conversion, which is retrospective and

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