scholarly journals Eriugeny koncepcja powrotu: dzieło natury czy łaski?

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 31-58
Author(s):  
AGNIESZKA KIJEWSKA
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Gregory Of Nyssa ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
First Cause ◽  
Maximus The Confessor ◽  
Pseudo Dionysius

This paper tackles upon John Scottus Eriugena’s concept of the return while presenting it against the background of the Neoplatonic teaching about return (epistrophe). The return belongs to the conceptual triad: mone-proodos-epistrophe which used to serve Neoplatonic thinkers to describe the structure of reality and its dependence on the First Cause. In the system of Eriugena who bequeathed that very teaching from the Christian Neoplatonists (Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa), we talk about the return on metaphysical and mystical level in addition to the general return (reditus generalis) and the return of the elects (reditus specialis). Eriugena indicates the cyclical processes in the whole nature but at the same time he stresses that the return is caused by divine grace and the very condition of its possibility is the fact of taking fl esh (incarnatio) and taking human nature (inhumanatio) by Jesus Christ.

Carolingian renaissance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Marenbon
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
Gregory Of Nyssa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Maximus The Confessor ◽  
Pseudo Dionysius ◽  
The Middle Ages

The ‘Carolingian renaissance’ is the name given to the cultural revival in northern Europe during the late eighth and ninth centuries, instigated by Charlemagne and his court scholars. Carolingian intellectual life centred around the recovery of classical Latin texts and learning, though in a strictly Christian setting. The only celebrated philosopher of the time is Johannes Scottus Eriugena, but the daring Neoplatonic speculations of his masterpiece, the Periphyseon (On the Division of Nature) are not at all characteristic of the time and are based on Greek sources (Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor) generally unknown to his contemporaries. The mainstream of Carolingian thought is important for the history of philosophy in three particular ways. First, it was at this time that logic first started to take the fundamental role it would have throughout the Middle Ages. Second, scholars began to consider how ideas they found in late antique Latin Neoplatonic texts could be interpreted in a way compatible with Christianity. Third (as would so often again be the case in the Middle Ages), controversies over Christian doctrine led thinkers to analyse some of the concepts they involved: for instance, the dispute in the mid-ninth century over predestination led to discussion about free will and punishment.

The Dialectics and Therapeutics of Desire in Maximus the Confessor

2011 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-451
Author(s):  
Paul M. Blowers
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Human Origins ◽  
Gregory Of Nyssa ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Human Transformation ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Maximus The Confessor

Maximus the Confessor’s Ambiguum 7 has long been considered the anchor of a substantial refutation of Origenist cosmology and teleology, with Maximus still seeking to rehabilitate the ascetical “gospel” of Origen. Yet in commenting on Gregory Nazianzen’s Oration 14 in Ambiguum 7, Maximus acknowledges that Gregory is dealing less with the scheme of human origins per se than with the miseries attending life in the body, which opens up the whole question of how embodied, passible human existence is the frontier of human salvation and deification. I argue that for Maximus human desire in all its cosmological and psychosomatic complexity—both as a register of creaturely passibility and affectivity, and as integral to the definition of human volition and freedom—is central to the subtle dialectic of activity and passivity in the creaturely transitus to deification. The morally malleable character of desire and the passions, and their ambiguous but ultimately purposive status within the economy of human transformation, decisively manifest the divine resourcefulness in fulfilling the mystery of deification—especially in view of Christ’s use of human passibility in inaugurating the new eschatological “mode” (tropos) of human nature. In his engagement of Gregory of Nyssa, in particular, Maximus develops a sophisticated dialectics and therapeutics of desire that integrates important perspectives of the Confessor’s anthropology, christology, eschatology, and asceticism.

Jansenist Augustinianism and the Springs of Pastoral Rigorism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Divine Grace ◽  
Human Liberty

The central controversy surrounding Jansenism concerned its alleged heterodoxy in respect to divine grace and human liberty. Five propositions regarding fallen human nature, the operation of grace, and the ability of man to cooperate with it were extracted from Jansen’s Augustinus, and condemned by Innocent X in 1653. The Jansenists denied that they maintained the propositions in the condemned sense. Their position was framed against a teaching developed by Molina and other Jesuits (analysed in section II), which, they claimed, attributed so much power to fallen nature as to fall into Pelagianism. The chapter balances accounts which relate the Jansenists’ moral rigorism wholly to their pessimistic assessment of human nature and their predestinarianism. They aimed to establish human freedom and the responsibility of each individual for his own conversion, and the counterpoint to their view of the fall was a mystical optimism regarding the destiny of nature under grace.

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.

Three Ways to Imitate Paul in Late Antiquity: Ekstasis, Ekphrasis, Epektasis

2021 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-117
Author(s):  
Michael Motia
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Gregory Of Nyssa ◽  
Dionysius The Areopagite ◽  
John Chrysostom ◽  
Heaven And Earth ◽  
Pseudo Dionysius ◽  
Scholarly Attention

AbstractRobert Orsi’s argument that religion, more than a system of “meaning making,” is a “network of relationships between heaven and earth” helps us understand what is at stake in imitation for early Christians. The question for Orsi is not, “What does it mean to imitate Paul?” as much as it is, “In what kind of relationship is one engaged when one imitates Paul?” Christians argue over both what to imitate (Who is Paul?) and how to imitate (How should Christians relate to Paul in order to be like him or to render him present?). The what has received lots of scholarly attention; this paper focuses on the how. I compare the range of possibilities of how to imitate Paul by focusing on three influential accounts of mimesis: Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (ekstasis), John Chrysostom (ekphrasis), and Gregory of Nyssa (epektasis).

Note per l’attribuzione a Massimo il Confessore di parte degli Scholia al Corpus Dionysiacum

Augustinianum ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 237-262
Author(s):  
Alberto Nigra ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Maximus The Confessor ◽  
Pseudo Dionysius ◽  
Latin Version

This article intends to provide a further contribution to the attribution of the Greek Scholia on the Corpus Dionysiacum by examining the Latin version by Anastasius Bibliothecarius. In particular, some Latin manuscripts have recently been identified, which retain many of the critical signs used by Anastasius in order to mark the scholia dating back to Maximus the Confessor. The collation of these cruces not only allows us to identify the contribution of Maximus as a scholiast of the Corpus Dionysiacum, but also to ascertain further the work of John of Scythopolis and to point out a possible way to research the contribution of other commentators of Pseudo-Dionysius.

scholarly journals Struggling with christology: Apolinarius of Laodicea and st Gregory of Nyssa

Vox Patrum ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 243-251
Author(s):  
Robin Orton
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Adequate Account ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Gregory Of Nyssa ◽  
Significant Step ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Trinity

The argument in the 380s between Gregory and Apolinarius, as set out Gregory’s Antirrheticus adversus Apolinarium, can be seen as a significant step in the development of the Church’s Christological teaching. Apolinarius’s no­tion that the eternal Logos took the place of Jesus Christ’s human mind is de­signed to establish the unity of his person, by providing a basis for the ontic con­tinuity between the Second Person of the Trinity and Christ in his two natures. Commendably, he wants to counter any suggestion of separation between the hu­man and divine natures (“two Christs”), which he sees as inevitably leading to an “adoptionist” view of Christ as a “God-filled man”; that would put Christ on the same level as the Old Testament prophets and could not form the basis of an adequate soteriology. Gregory argues convincingly however that Apolinarius’s “enfleshed mind” Christology would mean that Jesus Christ was not fully hu­man and could not therefore save humankind. But in the face of Apolinarius’s challenge he cannot give an adequate account of Christ’s unity during his earthly career. He remains open to Apolinarius’s charge of a “divisive” Christology by in effect postponing the complete unity until after Christ’s glorification, when his divinity overwhelmed his humanity and removed all his human characteristics, in the same way as the water of the sea overwhelms a drop of vinegar dropped into it. On this basis he has, anachronistically but not unreasonably, been accused of taking a Nestorian view of Christ before his glorification and a monophysite one after it. Both Apolinarius’s stress on the unity of Christ and Gregory’s on the no­tion that ‘what is not assumed is not healed’ (Nazianzen’s phrase) were essential elements in what emerged seventy years later in the Chalcedonian definition.

Christ in Gospel and Creed

1955 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-237
Author(s):  
James Barr
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
The Other ◽  
Main Body ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
Essential Nature ◽  
Definitive Statement ◽  
Christian Century ◽  
The Church

It was not until the fifth Christian century that the Church reached at the council of Chalcedon a definitive statement of its belief concerning the nature of Jesus Christ. This decision was preceded by a long era of controversy, first that in which against the Arians it was affirmed that the Son of God is not a created being but is of the essential nature of God Himself, and secondly that in which there was hammered out the relation between this divine, uncreated nature of the Son of God on one hand and the human nature of the Man Jesus on the other. To this latter question the Chalcedonian formula gave what was for the main body of the Church the nearest approach to an adequate answer, and it reads as follows:‘One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, inconvertibly, indivisibly, inseparably.… ’

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