Spiritual Direction As a Medical Art in Early Christian Monasticism PDF Download
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Author: JONATHAN L. ZECHER
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198854137
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
What expectations did the women and men living in early monastic communities carry into relationships of obedience and advice? What did they hope to achieve through confession and discipline? To explore these questions, this study shows how several early Christian writers applied the logic, knowledge, and practices of Galenic medicine to develop their own practices of spiritual direction. Evagrius reads dream images as diagnostic indicators of the soul's state. John Cassian crafts a nosology of the soul using lists of passions while diagnosing the causes of wet dreams. Basil of Caesarea pits the spiritual director against the physician in a competition over diagnostic expertise. John Climacus crafts pathologies of passions through demonic family trees, while equipping his spiritual director with a physician's toolkit and imagining the monastic space as a vast clinic. These different appropriations of medical logic and metaphors not only show us the thought-world of late antique monasticism, but they would also have decisive consequences for generations of Christian subjects who would learn to see themselves as sick or well, patients or healers, within monastic communities.
Author: JONATHAN L. ZECHER
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198854137
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Get Book Here
Book Description
What expectations did the women and men living in early monastic communities carry into relationships of obedience and advice? What did they hope to achieve through confession and discipline? To explore these questions, this study shows how several early Christian writers applied the logic, knowledge, and practices of Galenic medicine to develop their own practices of spiritual direction. Evagrius reads dream images as diagnostic indicators of the soul's state. John Cassian crafts a nosology of the soul using lists of passions while diagnosing the causes of wet dreams. Basil of Caesarea pits the spiritual director against the physician in a competition over diagnostic expertise. John Climacus crafts pathologies of passions through demonic family trees, while equipping his spiritual director with a physician's toolkit and imagining the monastic space as a vast clinic. These different appropriations of medical logic and metaphors not only show us the thought-world of late antique monasticism, but they would also have decisive consequences for generations of Christian subjects who would learn to see themselves as sick or well, patients or healers, within monastic communities.
Author: Jonathan L. Zecher
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780192595980
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
What conceptual frameworks did the inhabitants of early monastic communities carry into relationships of spiritual direction? What did they hope to achieve through confession and discipline? This study shows how early Christian writers applied the logic and pretensions of Galenic medicine to develop practices and concepts of spiritual direction.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004549978
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 414
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Book Description
Aiming to develop a less studied literary genre, this book provides a well-rounded picture of spiritual and physical diseases and their remedies as they were ingrained in the imagination and practices of Middle Eastern Abrahamic cultures, with a special emphasis of Christian communities (Greeks/Byzantines, Syrians, Armenians, Georgians, Ethiopians). The volume traces traditions dealing with the onset of a disease in the body and soul, the search for remedy, the maintenance of healing, and the engagement of these processes with faith—either through their affirmation in the public sphere or remaining within the personal framework, as in monastic traditions. A recurring presence in religious literature and the history of the intellectual world, the confrontation between disease and healing may well still be current for our modern understanding of the paths to seeking and maintaining the health of one’s body and soul, without excluding the factor of faith as a core principle.
Author: Susan R. Holman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000922944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
Using contemporary theories drawn from health humanities, this volume analyses the nature and effects of disability, medicine, and health discourse in a variety of early Christian literature. In recent years, the "medical turn" in early Christian studies has developed a robust literature around health, disability, and medicine, and the health humanities have made critical interventions in modern conversations around the aims of health and the nature of healthcare. Considering these developments, it has become clear that early Christian texts and ideas have much to offer modern conversations, and that these texts are illuminated using theoretical lenses drawn from modern medicine and public health. The chapters in this book explore different facets of early Christian engagement with medicine, either in itself or as metaphor and material for theological reflections on human impairment, restoration, and flourishing. Through its focus on late antique religious texts, the book raises questions around the social, rather than biological, aspects of illness and diminishment as a human experience, as well as the strategies by which that experience is navigated. The result is an innovative and timely intervention in the study of health and healthcare that bridges current divides between historical studies and contemporary issues. Taken together, the book offers a prismatic conversation of perspectives on aspects of care at the heart of societal and individual "wellness" today, inviting readers to meet or revisit patristic texts as tracings across a map of embodied identity, dissonance, and corporal care. It is a fascinating resource for anyone working on ancient medicine and health, or the social worlds of early Christianity.
Author: Claire Burridge
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004466177
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
Carolingian Medical Knowledge and Practice explores the practicality and applicability of the medical recipes recorded in early medieval manuscripts. It takes an original, dual approach to these overlooked and understudied texts by not only analysing their practical usability, but by also re-evaluating these writings in the light of osteological evidence. Could those individuals with access to the manuscripts have used them in the context of therapy? And would they have wanted to do so? In asking these questions, this book unpacks longstanding assumptions about the intended purposes of medical texts, offering a new perspective on the relationship between medical knowledge and practice.
Author: Alessandro Palazzo
Publisher: E-theca OnLineOpenAccess Edizioni, Università degli Studi di Torino
ISBN: 8875903182
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 421
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Book Description
During the Middle Ages, physicians, philosophers, and theologians developed a complex and rich discourse on the concept of sickness. Illness (infirmitas) was perceived as the natural state of existential imperfection for homo viator, fallen due to sin and impaired in his bodily integrity. Leprosy, smallpox, plague and the other collective diseases that constantly plagued medieval societies prompted reflections on etiology and modes of transmission of epidemics. Building on Galenic teachings, medieval medicine – both Arabic and Latin – delved into the study of fevers. Key concepts in medical pathology, such as the humors, humidum radicale, and spiritus, were assimilated and reinterpreted within philosophical and theological frameworks. The ten contribution collected in this volume explore this rich array of concepts and themes by closely examining the theories and works of prominent and lesser-known figures in medicine, theology, and philosophy active across Latin Christendom, the Islamic context, and the Jewish world: from Augustine to ʿAlī ibn al-ʿAbbas al-Maǧūsī, from Avicenna to Constantine the African, from Maimonides to Albert the Great, from Arnau de Vilanova to Gentile da Foligno, from Henry of Herford to Michele Savonarola. Nel Medioevo medici, filosofi e teologici intrecciarono una complessa e ricca trama di discorsi sul concetto di malattia. La malattia (infirmitas) era considerata la condizione normale di imperfezione esistenziale dell’homo viator, decaduto a causa del peccato e menomato nella sua integrità corporea. La lebbra, il vaiolo e la peste e le altre patologie collettive che flagellavano costantemente le società medievali stimolarono riflessioni sull’eziologia e sulla trasmissione delle epidemie. Nel solco dell’insegnamento galenico, la medicina medievale, araba e latina, approfondì lo studio delle febbri. Concetti fondamentali per la patologia medica (umori, humidum radicale e spiritus) vennero assimilati e riformulati in ambito filosofico e teologico. I dieci contributi raccolti in questo volume esplorano questa ricchezza di concetti e di temi attraverso l’approfondimento delle teorie e delle opere di alcuni medici, teologi e filosofi, noti e meno noti, attivi nella Cristianità latina, nell’Islam e nel mondo ebraico: da Agostino a ʿAlī ibn al-ʿAbbas al-Maǧūsī, da Avicenna a Costantino Africano, da Maimonide ad Alberto Magno, da Arnaldo da Villanova a Gentile da Foligno, da Enrico di Herford a Michele Savonarola.
Author: Michael C Magree
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198896662
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
The self-emptying of Christ, proclaimed in the letter to the Philippians 2:7, remains a much-debated topic in modern theology and exegesis. This book brings the insights of Greek Christianity to the understanding of kenosis to illustrate that new dimensions of the topic open up when it is examined in the historical era of early Christianity.
Author:
Publisher: American University in Cairo Press
ISBN: 1649033699
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
Hyperechios's Exhortation to the Monks for the first time in English translation Hyperechios is a little-known monk of the fourth to fifth centuries, who is thought to have lived in Roman Palestine, possibly coastal Sinai. He wrote the Exhortation to the Monks, 160 short sayings, much like the apophthegmata, or sayings of the desert fathers and mothers, but also structurally very different—most of the sayings are two lines of poetry that offer instruction. The Exhortation, and early Christian monastic writings in general, teach that a spiritual life requires a life of training and practice, individually and as a neighbor and friend within one’s community. This volume studies Hyperechios’s Exhortation to better understand the moral and spiritual values in a fourth to fifth-century Christian monastic community, while reflecting also on how these are contemporary with the modern day. Drawing on modern works by scholars and placing the Exhortation in conversation with contemporary writers on the spiritual life, Tim Vivian begins with an introduction about Hyperechios, his location, the text, then a lengthy reflection on spiritual matters. He follows this with an English-language translation of the Exhortation and the Greek text, both accompanied by footnotes that offer biblical and patristic cross-references. Exhortation to the Monks by Hyperechios will be of interest to scholars and general readers of early Christianity, early monasticism, and Christian spirituality, both ancient and contemporary.
Author: Donald Fairbairn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198936214
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
The monastic writers in fifth-century southern Gaul have long been branded as 'Semi-Pelagians' because of their opposition to Augustine's teaching on predestination and grace. But an overlooked aspect of the grace-related discussions is the role that Christology plays in the articulation of grace, and in fact, the so-called 'Semi-Pelagians' all wrote on Christology in opposition to Nestorianism, as well as writing on grace. Their thinking was sparked at least as much by their opposition to Nestorius as it was by their disagreements with Augustine. This book examines the relation between Christology and grace in the later writings of Augustine, in Leporius both before and after his correction, and in the Gallic writers John Cassian, Vincent of Lérins, Prosper of Aquitaine, and Faustus of Riez. It argues that the Gallic writers hold to a Christology very similar to that of Augustine, a Christology of divine descent in which the incarnate Word is the subject of the human actions and experiences of Christ. Furthermore, the book argues that Augustine and the Gallic writers all affirm the priority of divine grace in salvation, but they differ in the way they establish that priority. Augustine and the Gallic writers reason between Christology and grace with a different logical sequence. Augustine starts with the incapacity of fallen humanity to save itself, then reasons to the predestination of the elect, and then understands the incarnation of the Word in terms of the particular effects on the elect. Predestination thus dominates his understanding of grace and soteriology. In contrast, the Gallic writers (including the later Prosper after he began to move away from Augustine) reason from human incapacity to the incarnation, thus understanding the descent of the Word as holding general effects for all humanity. Only then do they reason to the particular aspects of grace in Christian life. Predestination is thus less central to their thought and can be understood in a different way than in Augustine's later works.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004677461
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Why is it so difficult to talk about pain? As we do today, the Greeks and Romans struggled to communicate their pain: this required a rich and subtle vocabulary which had to be developed over time. Pain Narratives traces the development of this language in literary, philosophical, and medical texts from across antiquity: poets, physicians, and philosophers contributed to an ever-growing lexicon to articulate their own and others’ feelings. The essays within this volume uncover the expanding Greco-Roman vocabulary of pain, analyse the medical discussions on pain symptoms, and explore the religious reinterpretations of pain concepts in late antiquity.
