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When barbarians invaded the Roman Empire in the years around 400 AD, Christian monks hid their cloisters. Conrad Leyser shows that monks in the early medieval West were, in fact, pioneers in the creation of a new language of moral authority.
A study of how Christians understood the Holy Spirit in the 5th and 6th centuries. Humphries argues that we can see various schools of thought within Christianity in this period, but that many of them are occupied with similar questions about how to understand human life and how to understand divine life.
The Life of Peter the Iberian by John Rufus records the ascetic struggle of a fifth-century anti-Chalcedonian bishop of Mayyuma, Palestine. Cornelia Horn presents a historical-critical study of the only substantial anti-Chalcedonian witness to the history of the conflict in Palestine and analyses the formative period of fifth-century anti-Chalcedonian hierarchy, theology, and its ascetic expression. Important themes are pilgrimage as an ascetic ideal and asceticism assource of theological authority. Archaeological data on many places in the Levant and textual sources in Syriac, Coptic, Greek, Armenian, and Georgian are examined. This book contributes to our understanding of the origins of anti-Chalcedonian theology and the influence of asceticism on its development, theChristian topography of the Levant, and the history of the anti-Chalcedonian movement in Palestine.
The book is an important contribution to the current debate about the usefulness of Egyptian hagiography as a historical source for late antique Egypt and to the study of the reception of the desert fathers in the medieval West.
The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies responds to and celebrates the explosion of research in this inter-disciplinary field over recent decades. As a one-volume reference work, it provides an introduction to the academic study of early Christianity (c. 100-600 AD) and examines the vast geographical area impacted by the early church, in western and eastern late antiquity. It is thematically arranged to encompass history, literature, thought, practices, and material culture. It contains authoritative and up-to-date surveys of current thinking and research in the various sub-specialties of early Christian studies, written by leading figures in the discipline. The essays orientate readers to a given topic, as well as to the trajectory of research developments over the past 30-50 years within the scholarship itself. Guidance for future research is also given. Each essay points the reader towards relevant forms of extant evidence (texts, documents, or examples of material culture), as well as to the appropriate research tools available for the area. This volume will be useful to advanced undergraduate and post-graduate students, as well as to specialists in any area who wish to consult a brief review of the 'state of the question' in a particular area or sub-specialty of early Christian studies, especially one different from their own.
In late antiquity the rising number of ascetics who joined the priesthood faced a pastoral dilemma. Should they follow a traditional, demonstrably administrative, approach to pastoral care, emphasizing doctrinal instruction, the care of the poor, and the celebration of the sacraments? Or should they bring to the parish the ascetic models of spiritual direction, characterized by a more personal spiritual father/spiritual disciple relationship? Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church explores the struggles of five clerics (Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen, Augustine of Hippo, John Cassian, and Pope Gregory I) to reconcile their ascetic idealism with the reality of pastoral responsibility. Through a close reading of Greek and Latin texts, George E. Demacopoulos explores each pastor's criteria for ordination, his supervision of subordinate clergy, and his methods of spiritual direction. He argues that the evolution in spiritual direction that occurred during this period reflected and informed broader developments in religious practices. Demacopoulos describes the way in which these authors shaped the medieval pastoral traditions of the East and the West. Each of the five struggled to balance the tension between his ascetic idealism and the realities of the lay church. Each offered distinct (and at times very different) solutions to that tension. The diversity among their models of spiritual direction demonstrates both the complexity of the problem and the variable nature of early Christianity. Scholars and students of late antiquity, the history of Christianity, and historical theology will find a great deal of interest in Five Models of Spiritual Direction in the Early Church. The book will also appeal to those who are actively engaged in Christian ministry.
Salvation through Temptation describes the development of predominant Greek and Latin Christian conceptions of temptation and of the work of Christ to heal and restore humankind in the context of that temptation, focusing on Maximus the Confessor and Thomas Aquinas as well-developed examples of Greek and Latin thought on these matters. Maximus and Thomas represent two trajectories concerning the woundedness of human emotionality in the wake of the primordial human sin. Heidgerken argues that Maximus stands in essential continuity with earlier Greek ascetic theology, which conceives of the weakness of fallen humankind in demonological categories, so that the Pauline law of sin is bound to external demonic agents that act upon the human mind through thoughts, desires, and sensory impressions. For Thomas, on the other hand, this wound consists primarily of an internal disordering of the faculties that results from the withdrawal of original grace: concupiscence or the fomes peccati. Yet even in this framework, the devil plays a significant role in Thomas’s account of postlapsarian temptation. On the basis of these differing frameworks for human temptation, Heidgerken demonstrates the centrality of Christ’s exemplarity in the Greek account and the centrality of Christ’s moral perfections in the Latin account. As a consequence of these emphases, the Greek tradition of Maximus places distinct limits on the ability of human emotionality (even that of Christ) to be perfected in this life, whereas Thomas’s approach allows Christ to completely embody a perfected form of human emotionality in his earthly life. Reciprocally, Thomas’s account of Christ’s moral perfections and virtue places distinct limits on his affirmation of Christ’s experience of postlapsarian temptation, whereas Maximus’s account allows for Christ to experience interior forms of temptation that more closely mirror the concrete moral experiences and circumstances of fallen human beings. Salvation through Temptation recommends a retrieval of early ascetic theology and demonology as the best contemporary systematic and ecumenically-viable approach to Christ’s temptation and victory over the devil.
Making Early Medieval Societies explores a fundamental question: what held the small- and large-scale communities of the late Roman and early medieval West together, at a time when the world seemed to be falling apart? Historians and anthropologists have traditionally asked parallel questions about the rise and fall of empires and how societies create a sense of belonging and social order in the absence of strong governmental institutions. This book draws on classic and more recent anthropologists' work to consider dispute settlement and conflict management during and after the end of the Roman Empire. Contributions range across the internecine rivalries of late Roman bishops, the marital disputes of warrior kings, and the tension between religious leaders and the unruly crowds in western Europe after the first millennium - all considering the mechanisms through which conflict could be harnessed as a force for social stability or an engine for social change.
The volume offers the acts of a meeting held at the University of Turin on the foundations of power and the conflicts of authority as documented by the monastic sources of East and West in Late Antiquity, with special reference to Max Weber's analysis of these notions. The issue is here examined from a variety of perspectives: the different meanings of power and authority in ancient monastic sources; the criteria by which authority is established within the monastic organizations; the kind of power and authority exercised towards outsiders; the relationship between monks and other authorities, especially the Church; the monks and their economic activity; the strategies for the solution of conflicts. The wide range of historical and cultural problems raised by these questions is what the present volume tries to illuminate through individual studies of a number of specific phenomena, events, and figures (from Shenute to John Cassian, from Abraham of Kashkar to Maxim the Confessor), paying particular attention to monasticism in Egypt, Palestine, Africa, and Persia.
This volume in the ongoing Late Antique Archaeology series draws on material and textual evidence to explore the diverse religious world of Late Antiquity. Subjects include Jews and Samaritans, orthodoxy and heresy, pilgrimage, stylites, magic, the sacred and the secular.