Divine Scripture and Human Emotion in Maximus the Confessor

Divine Scripture and Human Emotion in Maximus the Confessor PDF Author: Andrew J. Summerson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004446559
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
In Exegesis of the Human Heart Andrew J. Summerson explores how Maximus the Confessor uses biblical interpretation to develop an account of human passibility, from fallen human passions to perfected human emotions among the divinized. This book features Maximus’s role as a creative interpreter of tradition. Maximus inherits Christian thinking on emotion, which revises Stoic and Platonic thought according to biblical categories. Through a close reading of Quaestiones ad Thalassium and a wide selection of Maximus’s works, Andrew J. Summerson shows that Maximus understands human emotion in an exegetical milieu and that Maximus places human emotion at the heart of his soteriology. Christ redeems passibility so the divinized can enjoy perfected emotional activity in the ever-moving repose of eternal life.

Divine Scripture and Human Emotion in Maximus the Confessor

Divine Scripture and Human Emotion in Maximus the Confessor PDF Author: Andrew J. Summerson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004446559
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
In Exegesis of the Human Heart Andrew J. Summerson explores how Maximus the Confessor uses biblical interpretation to develop an account of human passibility, from fallen human passions to perfected human emotions among the divinized. This book features Maximus’s role as a creative interpreter of tradition. Maximus inherits Christian thinking on emotion, which revises Stoic and Platonic thought according to biblical categories. Through a close reading of Quaestiones ad Thalassium and a wide selection of Maximus’s works, Andrew J. Summerson shows that Maximus understands human emotion in an exegetical milieu and that Maximus places human emotion at the heart of his soteriology. Christ redeems passibility so the divinized can enjoy perfected emotional activity in the ever-moving repose of eternal life.

From Moses to the Daughters of Zelophehad

From Moses to the Daughters of Zelophehad PDF Author: Mark Elliott
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
ISBN: 3647502103
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
This volume explores the patristic treatment of biblical characters and character. Patristic authors interpret the Bible and use it in the development of their theology and in debates on theological, Christological and ecclesiological issues. The individual contributions deal with the view of the Church Fathers on the person of Moses, with Maximus Confessor's depiction of King Hezekiah, with the interpretation of the texts on the daughters of Zelophehad, with the theological interpretation of the story of Elijah on Mount Horeb, with the spiritual interpretation of the Psalms in Jerome's letters, the significance of the Psalms for the Christological argumentation in Cassiodorus, the interpretation of the Book of Job in various commentaries, the Christological interpretation of the Twelve Prophets and the understanding of the nation angels in John Chrysostom. The volume concludes with a summarising response.

Struggle for Freedom

Struggle for Freedom PDF Author: Basilius J. Groen
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643916930
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
This book examines the religious character of Nikos Kazantzakis’ literary work. The author of famous novels like Zorba the Greek, Christ Recrucified, Captain Michalis and The Last Temptation, as well as the programmatic essay Asceticism: The Saviours of God and the monumental Odyssey, wrestled with the numinous nearly lifelong. Though raised in and saturated with the liturgical and spiritual tradition of the Orthodox Church, he soon dissociated himself from the ecclesiastical establishment of his youth and searched for a new form of religion. A passionate ‘hunter’, he sought out the absolute truth and definitive redemption. In his quest for ‘God’, his steady and farthest goal was the incessant search for freedom – even freedom to such an extent as freedom from the liberator! Yet the Greek Orthodox inheritance has influenced his work to a quite considerable extent. He held on to various Christian elements which appealed to him, although he filled them in with altered contents. This especially concerns the emphasis on asceticism, the Cretan religious popular culture, the language of Scripture, various liturgical rituals as well as Byzantine hymnody and iconography.

Liturgy and the Emotions in Byzantium

Liturgy and the Emotions in Byzantium PDF Author: Andrew Mellas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110880067X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
This 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.

Maximus the Confessor

Maximus the Confessor PDF Author: Paul M. Blowers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191068810
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This 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.

St. Maximus the Confessor's "Questions and Doubts"

St. Maximus the Confessor's Author: Saint Maximus the Confessor
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501755358
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Despina 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.

Apatheia in the Christian Tradition

Apatheia in the Christian Tradition PDF Author: Joseph H. Nguyen SJ
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 153264518X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 73

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Book Description
To 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.

Salvation Through Temptation

Salvation Through Temptation PDF Author: Benjamin E. Heidgerken
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813234123
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
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.

On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture

On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture PDF Author: Saint Maximus (Confessor)
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813230314
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 607

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Book Description
Maximos the Confessor (ca. 580-662) is now widely recognized as one of the greatest theological thinkers, not simply in the entire canon of Greek patristic literature, but in the Christian tradition as a whole. A peripatetic monk and prolific writer, his penetrating theological vision found expression in an unparalleled synthesis of biblical exegesis, ascetic spirituality, patristic theology, and Greek philosophy, which is as remarkable for its conceptual sophistication as for its labyrinthine style of composition. On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture, presented here for the first time in a complete English translation (including the 465 scholia), contains Maximos’s virtuosic theological interpretations of sixty-five difficult passages from the Old and New Testaments. Because of its great length, along with its linguistic and conceptual difficulty, the work as a whole has been largely neglected. Yet alongside the Ambigua to John, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios deserves to be ranked as the Confessor’s greatest work and one of the most important patristic treatises on the interpretation of Scripture, combining the interconnected traditions of monastic devotion to the Bible, the biblical exegesis of Origen, the sophisticated symbolic theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, and the rich spiritual anthropology of Greek Christian asceticism inspired by the Cappadocian Fathers.

Sacred Scripture

Sacred Scripture PDF Author: Daniel L. Smith-Christopher
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781594711718
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
(©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.