The session focuses on conflicts, or tensions, within the Christian tradition between individual consciousness and religious culture. The texts we consider exemplify in various ways the demands, paradoxes, and negotiations incurred by such a confrontation. Hans Popper examines the strife betweeb pacifist piety and forceful action in St Augustine's Confessions and City of God. Margrét Gunnarsdóttir Champuion reads Old English poetry in the light of contradictory conceptions of the soul. Kristina Hildebrand's concern is with the figure of the knight as a site of ideological clash in Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, ou Le Conte du Graal.