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Author: Andrew J. Summerson
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2020-12-29
Total Pages: 159
ISBN-13: 9004446559
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Exegesis of the Human Heart Andrew J. Summerson explores Maximus the Confessor’s use of biblical interpretation to develop an adequate account of Christian human emotion.
Author: Andrew Mellas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2020-07-09
Total Pages: 219
ISBN-13: 110880067X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explores the liturgical experience of emotions in Byzantium through the hymns of Romanos the Melodist, Andrew of Crete and Kassia. It reimagines the performance of their hymns during Great Lent and Holy Week in Constantinople. In doing so, it understands compunction as a liturgical emotion, intertwined with paradisal nostalgia, a desire for repentance and a wellspring of tears. For the faithful, liturgical emotions were embodied experiences that were enacted through sacred song and mystagogy. The three hymnographers chosen for this study span a period of nearly four centuries and had an important connection to Constantinople, which forms the topographical and liturgical nexus of the study. Their work also covers three distinct genres of hymnography: kontakion, kanon and sticheron idiomelon. Through these lenses of period, place and genre this study examines the affective performativity hymns and the Byzantine experience of compunction.
Author: Craig L. Blomberg
Publisher: Brazos Press
Published: 2020-06-16
Total Pages: 239
ISBN-13: 1493423592
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPeople regularly give certain reasons for not believing in God, but they are much less aware of what the New Testament actually teaches. Although challenges to Christianity are perennial and have frequently been addressed, they are noticeably more common today and are currently of particular interest among evangelicals. Skeptics of Christianity often ask highly regarded biblical scholar and popular speaker Craig Blomberg how he can believe in a faith that seems so problematic. How can God allow evil and suffering? Isn't the Bible anti-women, anti-gay, and pro-slavery? Isn't the New Testament riddled with contradictions? What about the nature of hell, violence in Scripture, and prayer and predestination? Following the author's successful Can We Still Believe the Bible?, this succinct and readable book focuses on what the New Testament teaches about 10 key reasons people give for not believing in God.
Author: Saint Maximus the Confessor
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2021-08-15
Total Pages: 175
ISBN-13: 150175534X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDespina D. Prassas's translation of the Quaestiones et Dubia presents for the first time in English one of the Confessor's most significant contributions to early Christian biblical interpretation. Maximus the Confessor (580–662) was a monk whose writings focused on ascetical interpretations of biblical and patristic works. For his refusal to accept the Monothelite position supported by Emperor Constans II, he was tried as a heretic, his right hand was cut off, and his tongue was cut out. In his work, Maximus the Confessor brings together the patristic exegetical aporiai tradition and the spiritual-pedagogical tradition of monastic questions and responses. The overarching theme is the importance of the ascetical life. For Maximus, askesis is a lifelong endeavor that consists of the struggle and discipline to maintain control over the passions. One engages in the ascetical life by taking part in both theoria (contemplation) and praxis (action). To convey this teaching, Maximus uses a number of pedagogical tools including allegory, etymology, number symbolism, and military terminology. Prassas provides a rich historical and contextual background in her introduction to help ground and familiarize the reader with this work.
Author: Joseph H. Nguyen SJ
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2018-02-21
Total Pages: 73
ISBN-13: 153264518X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTo many modern people, apatheia (being "without suffering"/"without passion") sounds like cold-heartedness and indifference to others, a condition to be avoided. However, in the classical world and for many in the historic Christian church it was a spiritual state to aspire to. What exactly is apatheia? What is its origin? How has it been used in spiritual writings throughout the centuries of Christian practice? And how may it help us today to articulate a Christian understanding of the soul's spiritual well-being? The central aim of the book is twofold: to rediscover the meaning and function of the Greek term apatheia as it was understood and employed by the Stoics in their philosophical and religious writings, and to explore how the theologians of the church--Origen, Evagrius, John Cassian, Maximus, and Ignatius of Loyola--interpreted apatheia for their spiritual practice. Nguyen argues that the concept of apatheia in the Christian spiritual tradition connotes the state of "spiritual peace" or "well-being" of the human soul wherein excessive and negative emotions--such as lust, excessive desire for food and drink, anger, envy, resentment, self-love, and pride--are replaced by reasonable desires, love, and humility.
Author: Paul M. Blowers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-02-04
Total Pages: 267
ISBN-13: 0191068810
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis study contextualizes the achievement of a strategically crucial figure in Byzantium's turbulent seventh century, the monk and theologian Maximus the Confessor (580-662). Building on newer biographical research and a growing international body of scholarship, as well as on fresh examination of his diverse literary corpus, Paul Blowers develops a profile integrating the two principal initiatives of Maximus's career: first, his reinterpretation of the christocentric economy of creation and salvation as a framework for expounding the spiritual and ascetical life of monastic and non-monastic Christians; and second, his intensifying public involvement in the last phase of the ancient christological debates, the monothelete controversy, wherein Maximus helped lead an East-West coalition against Byzantine imperial attempts doctrinally to limit Jesus Christ to a single (divine) activity and will devoid of properly human volition. Blowers identifies what he terms Maximus's "cosmo-politeian" worldview, a contemplative and ascetical vision of the participation of all created beings in the novel politeia, or reordered existence, inaugurated by Christ's "new theandric energy". Maximus ultimately insinuated his teaching on the christoformity and cruciformity of the human vocation with his rigorous explication of the precise constitution of Christ's own composite person. In outlining this cosmo-politeian theory, Blowers additionally sets forth a "theo-dramatic" reading of Maximus, inspired by Hans Urs von Balthasar, which depicts the motion of creation and history according to the christocentric "plot" or interplay of divine and creaturely freedoms. Blowers also amplifies how Maximus's cumulative achievement challenged imperial ideology in the seventh century—the repercussions of which cost him his life-and how it generated multiple recontextualizations in the later history of theology.
Author: Paul M. Blowers
Publisher:
Published: 1991
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThrough a study of his second largest work, explores the role of Maximus (580-662) as an important philosopher-theologian in the Byzantine monastic tradition, and how that is related to his role as teacher and spiritual advisor. Excerpts of the Thalassius Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Daniel L. Smith-Christopher
Publisher:
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781594711718
DOWNLOAD EBOOK(©2013) The Subcommittee on the Catechism, United States Catholic Bishops, has found that this catechetical high school text is in conformity with the Catechism of the Catholic Church and fulfills the requirements of Elective Course A of the Doctrinal Elements of a Curriculum Framework for the Development of the Catechetical Materials for Young People of High School Age.Sacred Scripture: A Catholic Study of God's Word presents the Bible to students as a living source of God's Revelation to us. It gathers the two covenants of Scripture and the seventy-two books of the Bible under the umbrella of Church teaching, which holds that in Sacred Scripture, "God speaks only one single Word, his one Utterance in whom he expresses himself completely" (CCC, 102).This introduction to the biblical texts is both a companion for prayerful study and a survey of the context, message, and authorship of each book. It also provides students with a plan for reading and studying the Bible in concert with the Holy Spirit and Church teaching.The text provides historical context for biblical literature and its analysis is mindful that Scripture must be read within the living Tradition of the Church; in so doing, the text examines the relationship between Scripture and the doctrines of the Catholic faith. While modern historical-critical scholarship is not ignored, the text is balanced by emphasis on the multiple senses of Scripture: literal, spiritual, allegorical, moral, and anagogical.
Author: Clarence E. Rolt
Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.
Published: 2007-10-01
Total Pages: 213
ISBN-13: 1602068364
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFirst published in 1920, this book is a translation-the only known work of British scholar CLARENCE EDWIN ROLT (1880-1917)-of On the Divine Names and The Mystical Theology, by Dionysius the Areopagite, a first-century bishop of Athens. The author is often also referred to as "pseudo-Dionysius" because a variety of anachronisms suggest that the manuscript was actually written much later by an unknown writer. Despite the book's unclear origins, the writings are still greatly valued for their theological insight. Saint Thomas Aquinas often quoted from pseudo-Dionysius, as did many other famous and influential theologians and philosophers. Pseudo-Dionysius deals, here, with the Supra-Personality of God. Personality, by definition, is a quality limited to an individual. God, on the other hand, is the opposite of an individual. God is in all things, so one cannot speak of a personality for the divine. Rather, pseudo-Dionysius proposes a Supra-Personality, which describes aspects and qualities of the universal being. Religious scholars and Christians wanting a different understanding of the relationship between God and the universe will find this a challenging but ultimately thought-provoking study.
Author: Richard Viladesau
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2005-12-01
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 0198040660
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom the earliest period of its existence, Christianity has been recognized as the "religion of the cross." Some of the great monuments of Western art are representations of the brutal torture and execution of Christ. Despite the horror of crucifixion, we often find such images beautiful. The beauty of the cross expresses the central paradox of Christian faith: the cross of Christ's execution is the symbol of God's victory over death and sin. The cross as an aesthetic object and as a means of devotion corresponds to the mystery of God's wisdom and power manifest in suffering and apparent failure. In this volume, Richard Viladesau seeks to understand the beauty of the cross as it developed in both theology and art from their beginnings until the eve of the renaissance. He argues that art and symbolism functioned as an alternative strand of theological expression -- sometimes parallel to, sometimes interwoven with, and sometimes in tension with formal theological reflection on the meaning of the Crucifixion and its role insalvation history. Using specific works of art to epitomize particular artistic and theological paradigms, Viladesau then explores the contours of each paradigm through the works of representative theologians as well as liturgical, poetic, artistic, and musical sources. The beauty of the cross is examined from Patristic theology and the earliest representations of the Logos on the cross, to the monastic theology of victory and the Romanesque crucified "majesty," to the Anselmian "revolution" that centered theological and artistic attention on the suffering humanity of Jesus, and finally to the breakdown of the high scholastic theology of the redemption in empirically concentrated nominalism and the beginnings of naturalism in art. By examining the relationship between aesthetic and conceptual theology, Viladesau deepens our understanding of the foremost symbol of Christianity. This volume makes an important contribution to an emerging field, breaking new ground in theological aesthetics. The Beauty of the Cross is a valuable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the passion of Christ and its representation.
