Religion

Discusses Gregory’s understanding of faith (pistis) as a faculty of apophatic union with God. After presenting an overview of important work done on Gregory’s understanding of faith and announcing the lines of argument the will pursue, we analyse how Gregory views the mind and its varying cognitive states, and how the mind responds to scripture, baptism, and the presence of God. This is followed by a detailed examination of Gregory’s use of the word ‘faith’ as a technical term for apophatic union with God. This apophatic union, however, is only one side of this coin: at the apex of an apophatic ascent, faith unites with God the Word, but by virtue of this union the believer takes on the qualities of the Word, who speaks (logophasis) in the deeds and discourse of the believer. Finally, this study redresses Gregory’s over-identification with a ‘mysticism of darkness’ and shows that he proposes no less a ‘mysticism of light’.

The 4th-century Christian thinker, Gregory of Nyssa, has been the subject of a huge variety of interpretations over the past fifty years, from historians, theologians, philosophers, and others. This study analyses these recent readings of Gregory of Nyssa and asks: what do they reveal about modern and post-modern interpretations of the Christian past? What do they say about the nature of Gregory's writing? Working thematically through studies of recent Trinitarian theology, Christology, spirituality, feminism, and post-modern hermeneutics, the book develops an approach to reading the Church Fathers which combines the benefits of traditional scholarship on the early Church with reception-history and theology.

This study explores the early history of purgatory as it developed from the first to the eighth centuries. Approaching the subject from a variety of angles, the book examines how ideas of post-mortem purgation as religious belief were forged from contested theology and eschatology, and how purgatory became the focus for such religious practices as prayer for the dead and the hope for intercession. Illuminating the various interests and influences at play in the formation of purgatorial ideas in late antiquity, this book discusses ideas about punishment and correction in the Roman world, slavery, medical purges at the shrines of saints, visionary texts, penitentials, and law codes. Confronting arguments that have viewed purgatory as a symptom of cultural shifts or educational decline, this book questions the extent to which Irish and Germanic views of society, and the sources associated with them — penitentials and legal tariffs — played a role in purgatory’s formation. In reassessing the significance of patristic discussion of purgatory, this study highlights Bede’s contribution to purgatory’s theological underpinnings allowing the future acceptance of purgatory as orthodox belief. Among those whose writings are examined are Origen, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Bede.

Hilary of Poitiers (c300–368), who was instrumental in shaping the development of pro-Nicene theology in the West, combined two separate works, a treatise on faith (De Fide) and a treatise against the “Arians” (Adversus Arianos), to create De Trinitate; his chief theological contribution to the 4th-century Trinitarian debates. Scholars have long recognized the presence of these two treatises in Hilary's De Trinitate but have been unable to settle the questions of when and why Hilary did this. This book addresses these questions concerning the structure and chronology of De Trinitate by situating Hilary's treatise in its historical and theological context and offering a close reading of the text. It is argued that De Fide was written in 356 following Hilary's condemnation at the synod of Béziers and prior to receiving a decision on his exile from the Emperor. When Hilary arrived in exile, he wrote a second work, Adversus Arianos. Following the synod of Sirmium in 357 and his collaboration with Basil of Ancyra in early 358, Hilary recast his efforts and began to write De Trinitate. He decided to incorporate his two earlier works, De Fide and Adversus Arianos, into this project. Toward that end, he returned to his earlier works and drastically revised their content by adding new prefaces and new theological and exegetical material to reflect his mature pro-Nicene theology. These revisions and textual alterations have never before been acknowledged in the scholarship on De Trinitate.

Who was the Church Father Hippolytus? The answer to this question has eluded scholars for centuries. His true identity was unknown even to Eusebius, the church historian, in the fourth century and to subsequent writers of the ancient Church. Yet his corpus was largely preserved through the early centuries and influenced numerous theologians and exegetes, including Origen, Ambrose, and Jerome. Using ancient, Byzantine, and modern sources, this book charts the growth of the Hippolytus question from its inception to the present day. It traces how early speculations led to the formation of various traditions of a prolific and controversial writer. This book is the first thorough analysis of the Hippolytus question in English for more than a hundred years. Drawing on leading scholarship of the twentieth century, it untangles millennia of theory and points to the evidence of the Asian roots of the great biblical commentator known as Saint Hippolytus. It suggests that this writer, so influential on the rethinking of Western liturgical practice in the twentieth century, is best viewed as a scion of the East.

The fourth century Christian sermons, letters, and poems of Basil, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus, provide one of the best‐documented examples of early Christian responses to poverty. This book explores how these Cappadocian texts construct the body of the poor, socially and individually, in terms of hunger and starvation, economic penury, and medicine and disease. It especially considers three dominant themes: first, gift economics and patronage, especially in terms of liturgies (leitourgia); second, paidea and classical rhetoric; and third, Christian incarnation theology. Ch. 1 provides an overview of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian philanthropy. Ch. 2 examines Basil's famine relief efforts and the physiology of starvation, while Ch. 3 studies his sermons on economic poverty as they discuss debt, usury, and wealth. Ch. 4 considers Gregory of Nazianzus's and Gregory of Nyssa's three sermons on the homeless poor, particularly those sick with leprosy, sermons rich in social and medical images about disease, Christian incarnation, and healing. The book concludes with a consideration of Gregory of Nazianzus’ sermon addressing a potentially violent mob during an agricultural crisis, a sermon that brings together many of the themes discussed in previous chapters. An Appendix supplies provisional English translations of Basil of Caesarea's sermon “In time of famine and drought” and Gregory of Nyssa's two sermons “On the love of the poor.” The book argues that these Cappadocian texts provide a vital witness to the christianization process of late antiquity which appropriated the poor into civic and religious liturgies, thereby giving them a newly defined identity and gaining episcopal power over their social and physical body. The themes embodied in these texts continue to influence moral and social ethics, philanthropy, and the Christian theology of incarnation in modern religious practice.

Irenaeus' theology of the Holy Spirit is often regarded highly, but that regard is not universal, nor has an adequate volume of literature supported it. This study provides a detailed examination of certain principal, often distinctive, aspects of Irenaeus’ pneumatology. In contrast to those who have suggested Irenaeus held a weak conception of the person and work of the Holy Spirit, this work demonstrates that Irenaeus combined Second Temple Jewish traditions of the spirit with New Testament theology to produce the most complex Jewish-Christian pneumatology of the early church. In so doing, Irenaeus moved beyond his contemporaries by being the first author, following the New Testament writings, to construct a theological account in which binitarian logic did not diminish either the identity or activity of the Holy Spirit. That is to say, he was the first to support his Trinitarian convictions by means of Trinitarian logic.

This book explores the earliest works of St. Augustine to discover the anti-dogmatic Augustine, one who gives questioning, uncertainty, and human limitations their due role in his theology. These early works are considered performances, through which multiple questions can be raised and multiple options explored, both in words and through their dramatic framework. It is shown that the very idiosyncrasy of Augustine’s arguments and his manner of pursuing them are of immense significance, which suggests possibilities for interpretation of the more idiosyncratic riches in his later works. The book is divided into three parts. Part I analyzes Augustine’s use of the genre of philosophical dialogue, why he may have chosen the genre, and what he achieves with it. Part II discusses the roles played by Augustine’s mother. Part III focuses on the dialogue, the Soliloquia.