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Authored by an interdisciplinary team of experts, including historians, classicists, philosophers and theologians, this original collection of essays offers the first authoritative analysis of the multifaceted reception of Greek ethics in late antiquity and Byzantium (ca. 3rd-14th c.), opening up a hitherto under-explored topic in the history of Greek philosophy. The essays discuss the sophisticated ways in which moral themes and controversies from antiquity were reinvigorated and transformed by later authors to align with their philosophical and religious outlook in each period. Topics examined range from ethics and politics in Neoplatonism and ethos in the context of rhetorical theory and performance to textual exegesis on Aristotelian ethics. The volume will appeal to scholars and students in philosophy, classics, patristic theology, and those working on the history of education and the development of Greek ethics.
In this volume, Costache endeavours to map the world as it was understood and experienced by the early Christians. Progressing from initial fears, they came to adopt a more positive view of the world through successive shifts of perception. This did not happen overnight. Tracing these shifts, Costache considers the world of the early Christians through an interdisciplinary lens, revealing its meaningful complexity. He demonstrates that the early Christian worldview developed at the nexus of several perspectives. What facilitated this process was above all the experience of contemplating nature. When accompanied by genuine personal transformation, natural contemplation fostered the theological interpretation of the world as it had been known to the ancients.
Is the difference of male and female to be “completely shaken off” so that men and women are no longer men and women but merely human beings? The great seventh-century saint Maximus the Confessor said yes, but such thinking is difficult if not impossible to reconcile with much else in Christian tradition that obliges men and women to live as either men or women. Origen’s Revenge contrasts the two main sources of early Christian thinking on male and female: the generally negative view of Greek philosophy, limiting sexual distinction to the body and holding the body in low regard, and the much more positive view of Hebrew Scripture, in which sexual distinction and reproduction are both d...
The complex nature of Christian communion with a personal God requires a nuanced expression. Since its inception, the early church affirmed God’s unknowable nature and also participation in God through Christ. The church fathers employed the language of theosis in talking about union with God and human transformation in the likeness of God. However, the term theosis or deification is a broad category and requires precise explanation to avoid human dissolution into the divine in the mystical union it attempts to describe. In Triadosis, Eduard Borysov offers a new approach to the conundrum of the imparticipable divine nature and the prospect of personal union between human and the Trinity. Most significantly, he proposes that if God is Trinity, then we are created and restored in the image of the same tri-personal God.
The church in its first centuries split on whether Christ saved everyone or a few, Universalism versus Exclusivism. In the sixth century, the church settled the issue seemingly and held that Universalism was heresy. This book reviews this history as well as what provoked it—Scripture, on its face, gives two contradictory accounts of salvation’s extent: everyone is ultimately saved and everyone is not. In contrast to both Exclusivism and Universalism, the book takes Scripture’s two accounts of salvation’s extent as true—that is, as a paradox. This is the approach the church has taken with other scriptural paradoxes. Saying one God is three, or one Son is both God and man, appeared to be contradictory too, but, to embrace Scripture entirely, these were seen as paradoxical. The Trinity modeled how one can be three, and the hypostatic union modeled how one can be two. For the paradox of salvation’s extent, the answer lies in the individual’s divisibility in the afterlife, one can be two. That is, in ultimate salvation, each individual can be both saved and unsaved.
How did Origen, one of the major Patristic thinkers, construct his philosophical theology? What are his main innovations in metaphysics, protology, Trinitarian Theology and Christology? How did he view the relation between philosophy and theology? This is a collection of over twenty essays, mostly from world-leading journals and books from outstanding publishers, besides two new ones, from Professor Ilaria L.E. Ramelli’s life-long, and always continuing, research on Origen. This coherent set of studies is grouped around Origen’s metaphysics, protology, Trinitarian theology and Christology, and the relation between theology and philosophy, with reception aspects. The essays address Origen...
Platonic discourses concerning the soul are incredibly rich and multitiered. Plato's own diverse and disparate arguments and images offer competing accounts of how we are to understand the nature of the soul. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that the accounts of Platonists who engage Plato’s dialogues are often riddled with questions. This volume takes up the theories of well-known philosophers and theologians, including Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, the emperor Julian, and Origen, as well as lesser-known but equally important figures in a collection of essays on topics such as transmigration of the soul, the nature of the Platonist enlightenment experience, soul and gender, pagan ritual practices, Christian and pagan differences about the soul, mental health and illness, and many other topics. Contributors include Crystal Addey, Sara Ahbel-Rappe, Dirk Baltzly, Robert Berchman, Jay Bregman, Luc Brisson, Kevin Corrigan, John Dillon, John F. Finamore, Lloyd P. Gerson, Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum, Elizabeth Hill, Sarah Klitenic Wear, Danielle A. Layne, Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, Gregory Shaw, Svetla Slaveva-Griffine, Suzanne Stern-Gillet, Harold Tarrant, Van Tu, and John D. Turner.