De Utilitate Cantorum: Unitive Aspects of Singing in Early Christian Thought

2018 ◽  
Vol 100 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-309
Author(s):  
Frazer MacDiarmid
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
Christian Thought

In this article, I draw from a number of church fathers who almost unanimously affirm the socially and cosmically unifying power of singing the Psalms. Often tacitly but unmistakably, they draw upon singing as a type of the person of Christ, a participative union of the divine with the human. However, investigation of singing's “illegitimate” pagan and Jewish heritage illustrates the reason for singing's ambivalence in the Christian mind. I conclude, however, that singing, employing the human body and its sensory faculties sanctified by Christ, constituted a far more valuable heuristic, pedagogic, and doxological tool in the early Christian centuries than we commonly appreciate today.

The Missing Rhetorical History Between Quintilian and Augustine

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-376
Author(s):  
Mike Duncan
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Classical Rhetoric ◽  
Rhetorical History ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
Rhetorical Force ◽  
Apostolic Church

Current histories of rhetoric neglect the early Christian period (ca. 30–430 CE) in several crucial ways–Augustine is overemphasized and made to serve as a summary of Christian thought rather than an endpoint, the texts of church fathers before 300 CE are neglected or lumped together, and the texts of the New Testament are left unexamined. An alternative outline of early Christian rhetoric is offered, explored through the angles of political self-invention, doctrinal ghostwriting, apologetics, and fractured sermonization. Early Christianity was not a monolithic religion that eventually made peace with classical rhetoric, but as a rhetorical force in its own right, and comprised of more factions early on than just the apostolic church.

scholarly journals Our Common Breath: ‘Conspiration’ from the Stoics to the Church Fathers

2021 ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Phillip Sidney Horky
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
The Church

AbstractThis essay tracks a brief history of the concept of ‘co-breathing’ or ‘conspiration’ (συμπνοία), from its initial conception in Stoic cosmology in the third century BCE to its appropriation in Christian thought at the end of the second century CE. This study focuses on two related strands: first, how the term gets associated anachronistically with two paradigmatic philosopher-physicians, Hippocrates and Pythagoras, by intellectuals in the Early Roman Empire; and second, how the same term provides the early Church Fathers with a means to synthesize and explain discrete notions of ‘breath’ (πνεῦμα) through a repurposing of the pagan concept. Sources discussed include figures associated with Stoic, Pythagorean, and early Christian cosmologies.

scholarly journals Christian insights into Plotinus’ Metaphysics and his Concept of Αptitude (Ἐπιτηδειότης)

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 5-32
Author(s):  
Panagiotis Pavlos
Keyword(s):  
Human Being ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Preliminary Study ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One

Modern scholarship on Late Antique philosophy seems to be more interested than ever before in examining in depth convergences and divergences between Platonism and Early Christian thought. Plotinus is a key figure in such an examination. This paper aims at shedding light to certain aspects of Plotinian metaphysics that bring Plotinus into dialogue with the thought of Church fathers by means either of similarities or differences between Neoplatonist and Christian thought. It proposes a preliminary study of the Plotinian concept of aptitude, as it emerges throughout the Enneads, and seeks to argue that this concept is crucial as it involves the relation between the One and the many, the reality of participation, the relation of the cosmos with, and its dependence on, the superior spheres of being, the bestowal of divine gifts upon beings, and the possibility of the deification of the human being.

Christus Virgo

2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-27
Author(s):  
Sissel Undheim
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Female Sex ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

The description of Christ as a virgin, 'Christus virgo', does occur at rare occasions in Early Christian and late antique texts. Considering that 'virgo' was a term that most commonly described the sexual and moral status of a member of the female sex, such representations of Christ as a virgin may exemplify some of the complex negotiations over gender, salvation, sanctity and Christology that we find in the writings of the Church fathers. The article provides some suggestions as to how we can understand the notion of the virgin Christ within the context of early Christian and late antique theological debates on the one hand, and in light of the growing interest in sacred virginity on the other.

The Enneads of Plotinus

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Kalligas
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Christian Thought

This is the first volume of a groundbreaking commentary on one of the most important works of ancient philosophy, the Enneads of Plotinus—a text that formed the basis of Neoplatonism and had a deep influence on early Christian thought and medieval and Renaissance philosophy. This volume covers the first three of the six Enneads, as well as Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, a document in which Plotinus’s student—the collector and arranger of the Enneads—introduces the philosopher and his work. A landmark contribution to modern Plotinus scholarship, this commentary is the most detailed and extensive ever written for the whole of the Enneads. For each of the treatises in the first three Enneads, the volume provides a brief introduction that presents the philosophical background against which Plotinus’s contribution can be assessed; a synopsis giving the main lines and the articulation of the argument; and a running commentary placing Plotinus’s thought in its intellectual context and making evident the systematic association of its various parts with each other.

scholarly journals Eastern Church Fathers on Being Human—Dichotomy in Essence and Wholeness in Deification

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 575
Author(s):  
Olga Chistyakova
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Gregory Of Nyssa ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Anthropology ◽  
Church Father ◽  
Byzantine Church ◽  
God's Image ◽  
Maximus The Confessor

The article traces the formation of Eastern Christian anthropology as a new religious and philosophical tradition within the Early Byzantine culture. The notion “Patristics” is reasoned as a corpus of ideas of the Church Fathers, both Eastern and Western. The term “Eastern Patristics” means the works by Greek-Byzantine Church Fathers, who in the theological disputes with the Western Church Fathers elaborated the Christian creed. Based on an analysis of the texts of Greek-Byzantine Church Fathers, the most important provisions of Eastern Patristics are deduced and discussed, which determined the specificity of Christian anthropology. In this context, different approaches of the Eastern Fathers to the explanation of the Old Testament thesis on the creation of man in God’s image and likeness and the justification of the duality of human essence are shown. Particular attention is paid to considering the idea of deification as overcoming the human dualism and the entire created universe, the doctrine of the Divine Logoi as God’s energies, and the potential elimination of the antinomianism of the earthly and Divine worlds. The article reflects the anthropological ideas of the pre-Nicene Church Father Irenaeus, the non-canonical early Christian work The Shepherd of Hermas, and the teachings on the man of the classical Eastern Patristics period by Athanasius of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor.

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