Patristics

Se consulta manuscritos, Tárgumes y Padres de la iglesia de primeros siglos (120 citas); se hace análisis exegético de 10 pasajes y se revisa más de 20 en Anexos. Herramienta para evangelizar a arrianistas, judíos y para todo aquel que dude de la deidad del Señor.

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THE HEART OF THE MATTER:
The idea that every conceived human being is naturally evil, guilty, a sinner, or sinful, is itself child abuse and a blasphemous charge against God.

While the author cannot speak for churches of Christ, common among them are unique ways of understanding sacred scripture, believed to have been written by apostles and prophets of the Lord before the destruction of Jerusalem (70 A.D.) and circulated among the early Christian communities (e.g. A letter called First Clement in about 95 A.D., refers to at least ten New Testament books), then collected as a volume by the self-identified Christian community of the second century A.D. or earlier, e.g. the list of Marcion (140 A.D.)

Also see MEANING THERAPY here
https://issuu.com/collegeofmentalhealth/docs/meaning_therapy3

This essay was published in The Bible and Early Trinitarian Theology, edited by Christopher A. Beeley and Mark E. Weedman, for the CUAP Studies in Early Christianity (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018); this is the uncorrected proofs. Exploring the humanity and divinity of Jesus, the Son's relation to the Father, and the agency of the Holy Spirit, it is one of five essays suggesting Johannine contributions to trinitarian discussions in the early church.

One the earliest non-Islamic testimonies to the existence of the Prophet Muḥammad can be found within the Byzantine apologetic tract known as the
Doc-trina Iacobi nuper baptizati
. Frequently dated by modern historians to as early as July 634 󰁣󰁥, the tract curiously asserts that the prophet who had appeared “among the Saracens” claimed to possess “the keys to paradise.” This essay investigates this claim and the prevalence of the “keys to paradise” motif in late-antique Chris-tian literature and the early Islamic tradition to provide a new evaluation of the text’s place in and importance to the historiography of Islamic origins.

More than 20 years after presenting his first interpretation of the mosaic from the House of Aion in a paper entitled “Uwagi na temat mozaiki z Domu Aiona w Nea Paphos (Cypr)” (Meander 9/10, 1987, p. 421-438, in Polish, and translated to English: « The Immortality of the Human Soul and the Dionysiac Mysteries in the 4th Century Allegory [in Connection with the Interpretation of the Mosaic from the “House of Aion” at Paphos in Cyprus]»), where he proposed reading the five mythological panels (1. Leda and Zeus; 2. Dionysus on Mount Nysa; 3. The Dionysian thiasos; 4. Apollo and Marsyas; 5. The Apotheosis of Cassiopeia) as an allegory of the destiny of the human soul and body, starting with conception and ending with the liberation of the soul and its apotheosis, the author now enhances his initial interpretation with numerous reflections concerning the historical context of this work of art, created in the years 320-360.
If, according to the author, the mosaic is a “Hymn” in honour of the pagan gods, Man (his soul) and his place in the (pagan) universe, then at the same time it polemicises with the Christian faith and its God, Jesus Christ.
The author puts forward numerous new solutions relating to the mosaic’s iconography and iconology. Analysis of the mosaic also leads him to propose a solution to the as-yet unanswered question regarding the absence of images of the crucified Christ in Christian art of the 3rd and 4th centuries, up until 420/430, when the first images of Christ on the cross appear.
CONTENTS:
Introduction
1. Research to-date (recap)
2. Description of mosaic (recap)
2.1. Composition of five mythological scenes
2.2. Brief iconographic description of mythological panels
2.3. Outline of individual iconographic elements and their respective roles
2.4. The pagan gods’ air of majesty and dignity as an expression of piety
3. A few words about the pagan reaction
4. An apology of pious human life according to pagan principles and a polemic on the Christian model of Man and his theological idol, Jesus Christ
4.1. Divine intervention in the act of human conception (allusion to/polemic on the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary)
4.2. The Epiphany of Dionysus (an allusion to the Epiphany of Christ – Theou Pais)
4.3. The procession and dissemination of Dionysian order (allusion to/polemic on Christ’s entry into Jerusalem)
4.4. The error of Marsyas (polemic on/allusion to the error of Jesus the Messiah): arrest, sentencing for arrogance and lack of piety (asebeia) and condemnation to a martyr’s death
4.5. The anabasis (or anagoge psyches) of a ‘beautiful soul’ (allusion to/polemic on the Ascension of Christ)
5. A few words on the mosaic programme prior to final conclusions
Final conclusions
Key words: mythological mosaic, House of Aion, Nea Paphos, Late Antiquity, Roman art, allegorical narrative, allusive language of mythological pictures, wordplay (Marsyas-Messias), Jesus Christ, anti-Christian polemic, Dionysos, Cassiopeia, Apollon, Nereides, Abstract Personifications, Greek Mythology, ΚΥΠΡΟΣ

This article deals with the theory of the so-called ‘intelligible Triad’ (esse, vivere, intellegere) to show in what way this theory was developed in Neoplatonism (by Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus and Proclus) and transformed in the Patristic Thought (in Marius Victorinus, Augustine, Dionysius Areopagita, Maximus the Confessor, John Scott Eriugena),
where this theory was used to describe three main attributes of God as well as mutual relations between three Persons of the Holy Trinity and the structure of the created world and human soul.

Jesus’s human soul plays a crucial role in the Christology of Origen, providing the necessary link between Christ’s humanity and divinity and the focal point of Christian salvation and biblical exegesis. Paradoxically, Origen’s musings on the soul of Christ quickly became one of the most controversial aspects of his theological legacy, requiring later generations to make significant qualifications, modifications, and omissions to correct the master’s work. Yet despite these points of contention, a central regard for Jesus’s mental and emotional life remains a hallmark of the continuity of Origenist tradition among the Greek fathers of the fourth to eighth centuries, by contrast with other theologians for whom Christ’s human soul plays relatively little role. This article compares Origen’s pathbreaking account of Christ’s human soul with that found in the last great Origenist theologian of the patristic age, Maximus the Confessor. After noting the key corrections of Origen’s work that Maximus adopted from his main teacher, Gregory Nazianzen, we will examine how Christ’s human soul continues to play a central role in Maximus’s work both before and during the monothelite controversy, thus preserving this basic element of Origenist theology for subsequent orthodox tradition.

The paper argues that Christological discussions in the Easter Church after the Council of Chalcedon had a considerable but largely neglected impact on philosophy. The paper narrates a story that starts with the 'classical theory' of the Cappadocian theologians of the 4th century. This theory, it is then shown, came into crisis when applied to the Christological problem. Miaphysitism and Chalcedonianism are presented as alternative attempts to modify the classical theory. In order to achieve that goal, both schools eventually develop philosophical ideas incompatible with traditional Greek metaphysics and thus anticipating much later Western developments.

https://www.mohr.de/en/book/maidens-magic-and-martyrs-in-early-christianity-9783161544507
In this work, Jan N. Bremmer aims to bring together the worlds of early Christianity and those of ancient history and classical literature – worlds that still all too rarely interlock. Contextualising the life and literature of the early Christians in their Greco-Roman environment, he focusses on four areas. A first section looks at more general aspects of early Christianity: the name of the Christians, their religious and social capital, prophecy and the place of widows and upper-class women in the Christian movement. Second, the chronology and place of composition of the early apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and Pseudo-Clementines are newly determined by paying close attention to their doctrinal contents, but also, innovatively, to their onomastics and social vocabulary. The author also analyses the frequent use of magic in the Acts and explains the prominence of women by comparing the Acts to the Greek novel. Third, an investigation into the theme of the tours of hell suggests a new chronological order, shows that the Christian tours were indebted to both Greek and Jewish models, and illustrates that in the course of time the genre dropped a large part of its Jewish heritage. The fourth and final section concentrates on the most famous and intriguing report of an ancient martyrdom: the Passion of Perpetua. It pays special attention to the motivation and visions of Perpetua, which are analyzed not by taking recourse to modern theories such as psychoanalysis, but by looking to the world in which Perpetua lived, both Christian and pagan. It is only by seeing the early Christians in their ancient world that we might begin to understand them and their emerging communities.

In the latter portion of The Triads, St. Gregory Palamas describes deification as an event that is inclusive of the entirety of man’s being, inasmuch as he becomes “entirely God in his soul and body by grace”. This bold assertion on the part of St. Gregory is demonstrative of the way in which he consciously follows in the footsteps of his theological forebearer, St. Maximus the Confessor, by synthesizing Evagrian-style spirituality with Biblical anthropological presuppositions. Man qua being, for Palamas, can only be defined as such to the extent that he possesses both soul and body, both of which are eternally predetermined for deification. The ascetic life and the practice of the virtues therefore constitute not a rejection of the body or its powers, but rather function as a way of redirecting man away from an inordinate obsession with the physical world that he may become receptive to the deifying grace of God. In his rigorous defense of the practitioners of hesychia, Palamas makes it clear that he considers prayer and the ecstatic experience of the uncreated light to be events that are inclusive of man’s entire hypostasis, even asserting that man’s bodily senses become capable of participating in this foretaste of the eschata. My paper shall focus upon Palamas’ ‘eschatological’ view of the body and his insistence on the relevance of man’s somatic dimension in the spiritual life. I shall also strive to illuminate the ontological presuppositions of his synthesis that enable his anthropological perspective, with particular emphasis on those which he received from his predecessors. Finally, I will argue that the Incarnation is a sine qua non of his theology and, consequently, of his eschatology of body.

Theologians have long recognized that the Cappadocian fathers are a valuable resource for contemporary reflection on the Holy Spirit. The modern use of their work, however, tends to reflect only a thin sampling of their many writings; it shows little awareness of their complicated historical situation; and it generally operates on the false assumption that Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa offer but three versions of the same theological project. This article provides a new comparative assessment of Cappadocian pneumatology in connection with larger Trinitarian concerns and with practical matters of spirituality, monasticism, and the role of divine grace in the Christian life. It highlights the distinctive character of each theologian's approach to the Holy Spirit by analyzing their relationships to prior fourth-century traditions, their respective uses of Origen, and their differing stances in the contemporary debates with the Pneumatomachians. It argues that Basil's work on the Spirit is less fully Trinitarian and ascetically weaker than that of the other two, that Gregory Nazianzen offers the most fully Trinitarian and methodologically insightful pneumatology of the three, and that the Holy Spirit plays only a minor role in Gregory of Nyssa's theological and ascetical system. In conclusion, it identifies three key areas in which the Cappadocians can still make a significant contribution to current work on the Holy Spirit.

This book explores how first- and second-century Christians read the Old Testament in order to differentiate the one God as multiple persons. The earliest Christians felt they could metaphorically “overhear” divine conversations between the Father, Son, and Spirit when reading the Old Testament. When these snatches of dialogue are connected and joined, they form a narrative about the unfolding interior divine life as understood by the nascent church. What emerges is not a static portrait of the triune God, but a developing story of divine persons enacting mutual esteem, voiced praise, collaborative strategy, and self-sacrificial love. This conversational divine story is explored as it ebbs and flows across the cosmos and through time. The result is a Trinitarian biblical and early Christian theology. While tracing this story, it is simultaneously argued that a new historical model is required for the New Testament and other early sources to explain how the doctrine of the Trinity first emerged—a model rooted in a little-known person-based ancient reading technique called prosopological exegesis. It is shown that prosopological exegesis is present throughout the earliest strata of Christian literature. This calls into question proposals that suggest Christology developed over time in the earliest church from low—Jesus as merely a messianic claimant—to high—Jesus as the preexistent Son of God. To the contrary, in agreement with Richard Bauckham’s Christology of Divine Identity (but simultaneously taking a different approach), it is argued that the earliest Christology was the highest.  Keywords:  Trinity, Christology, Christology of Divine Identity, prosopological exegesis, person, dialogue, Son of God, New Testament, Old Testament, early Christian

An overview of the variety of textual differences that exist between the Apocalypse in Codex Sinaiticus and the book in modern critical editions, thereby offering a window into the book's early readership. There is also a YouTube link to the lecture version of this paper, which was recently delivered at Samford University for their Holley Hull Lecture Series: https://vimeo.com/878444925/a35492dd8b?share=copy&fbclid=IwAR10Iu7HKuAjjcEcDdxgfT7XKqe2F6W6Bwb1cVHafNO0Yz6g4VhsIhXHMz4

Bulgakov’s psychological and spiritual evolution can be reckoned as representative for his entire generation. Moving from Marxism to Idealism and finally conceiving his best known theory, namely Sophiology, he was considered by many one of the most influential and sometimes controversial Orthodox thinkers of the 20th century. The theory of Sophiology, his most disputed premise which lies at the center of his theological vision, is considered “a systematic attempt to work out the basis on which political action and policy could be seen as philosophically – and, eventual, theologically - legitimate” . If we reflect on our present cultural and political context we will find a renewed relevance in studying the evolution of Bulgakov’s theological and politic thought, due to the similarities of both periods. Just like in the last turn of the century, we also face issues of legitimacy of the political action, a new cultural paradigm and an economical crisis.

The reception history of the theophany in Genesis 18 records a transition from the christological interpretation of the passage, widespread in earlier centuries, to a Trinitarian reading, dominant after the fifth century. This exegetical shift occurred first in doctrinal and exegetical writings, and only significantly later in hymnography and iconography. The current scholarly concepts fail to distinguish properly between the various types of exegesis involved in each of these cases, and obscure the importance of the earliest and most enduring Christian exegesis of Old Testament theophanies.

In this text I seek to give an overview of the development of theories of the universal from roughly the 4th to the 8th centuries. I show how trinitarian theology around the middle of the 4th century necessitated for the first time systematic theological reflection about the nature of the universal. Its historically most influential result, which I then sketch, is Gregory of Nyssa's complex theory which he applies to a variety of other theological questions as well. One of those is Christology, but it turns out that this particular application becomes the crux of Gregory's theory. The latter part of my paper is dedicated to the proof that and how theological developments after the Council of Chalcedon (451) caused fundamental modifications to that theory, which in their turn had a wide-ranging impact on broader metaphysical issues.

This paper has been published in: St Isaac the Syrian and his spiritual legacy: Proceedings from the International Patristics Conference, Moscow, October 10-11, 2013 / Ed. Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev. New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2015. P. 123–134.
In this paper I argue that the cosmology and eschatology of St Isaac the Syrian, including his teaching on the “universal salvation”, are quite strongly dependent on the eschatology of Evagrius, which in its turn represents a creative development of that of Origen. However, this Origenistic eschatology is not expressed by St Isaac as clearly and systematically as by Evagrius, while its elements are scattered through
different Homilies of the Second Part of his works. Besides, it is clear that Evagrius was not the only source of Isaac’s teaching on the “universal salvation”. Isaac himself names the other two Church writers authoritative for the Church of the East, namely, Theodore of Mopsuestia and Diodore of Tarsus. It is quite probable that under their influence and in the light of his own mystical and ascetical experience of prayer and union with God, St Isaac developed a fundamental insight concerning the infinitely merciful Love of God Who equally loves all rational beings and leads them to salvation. That is why his eschatology is radically different from the thoroughly rationalistic eschatology of Origen and Evagrius.

This article discusses the objects found within churches, using the testimony of inventories. These describe items such as church plate, lighting apparatus, textiles and censers often not often found in archaeological excavations of churches. Comparison of inventories reveals churches of different status, and also something of their atmosphere. The differing style of these texts includes terms that are far from easy to interpret. It can also be difficult to correlate the items in inventories with real objects in museums, as it is shown in a case study of censers.

When speaking of Neoplatonism in the Patristic context, we should be cautious not to confuse it with non-Christian Neoplatonism. An essential difference between them is that the former functions like a language, while the latter, like a self-standing philosophical system. The purpose of the former is to express and to communicate faith. It is more open and addressing beyond itself. The latter is a more closed system, which pretends to con- tain truth, rather than to indicate it. The former is for everyone, while the latter is for an intellectual elite only. The former can be eclectic, while the latter cares to be consistent.
Christian Neoplatonic language was shaped in the 5th-6th centuries by various ele- ments. Alexandrian and Athenian Neoplatonisms were a major resource for it. Never- theless, it also absorbed terms and categories from a wide variety of other languages, traditions and systems, including Scripture, Nicean and Neo-Nicean theology, Cyril of Alexandria and his disciples, Aristotle and his commentators, Stoics etc. This language was elaborated in response to contemporary theological challenges, like controversies over the natures of Christ. As such, it was part of developments within Chalcedonian and Neo-Chalcedonian theology.

The paper argues that theological debates in late antiquity had a considerable impact on conceptions of individuality. It discusses in particular the trinitarian debate of the late 4th century and the post-Chalcedonian Christological debates. The conclusion is that the real novelty of Christian ideas about the individual only come out by taking into account these latter developments.

Introduction to a collection of prayers to the Mother of God ascribed to St Ephraim the Syrian. These prayers were written in Greek by a writer (or writers) whom scholars call Ephraim graecus, or the "Greek Ephraim" (and I have been told that these are the first published English translations of the Greek Ephraim since the early 18th-century.) The collection also includes canons to the Virgin by Theodore the Studite, Methodios of Constantinople, and John Euchaita. On the corpus of Greek Ephraim writings, along with a number of English translations, see: https://saintephrem.wordpress.com/manuscripts/

In his extant letters and speeches, Emperor Constantine often referred to God. However, these references were seldom theological elaborations on the concept of God. Instead, they were usually limited to the use of certain ambiguous titles of God. Accordingly, this article examines the emperor’s concept of God with the help of the so-called title-theology. Arguably, Constantine’s understanding of God developed from inclusive “pagan” henotheism to a qualified Christian monotheism, yet so that it retained the promise of accommodating various views of God. Vagueness in theological matters served the purpose of establishing the widest possible religious consensus in the Roman Empire. At the same time, this calculated vagueness also enabled different interpretations of Constantine’s theological utterances and perhaps contributed indirectly to the Trinitarian controversies within the Christian church. A comparison between Constantine’s concepts of God and that of Nicaea shows both a significant agreement and the existence of different underlying incentives.

From the Preface: The title of this collection of essays is meant to reflect the flow of ideas in the ancient world from east to west, especially in the area around the Mediterranean. Two great rivers, the Nile and the Rhone, represent symbolically two cultural poles: Egypt, one of the cradles of civilization in the ancient world, already the repository of ancient wisdom in the eyes of the Greeks, and Gaul, younger but by the fourth century A.D. already the recipient of eastern influences for over a thousand years. Marseilles, not far from the mouth of the Rhone, had been founded as a Greek colony by 600 B.C. and Greek may still have been spoken there in the fourth century A.D.
The flow of ideas from east to west in the ancient world was particularly true of monasticism, a movement that arose in the East, in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, then attracted travelers from the West and finally was imitated in the West. Contemporaries were aware of this movement, as is clearly indicated by Athanasius in his preface to the Life of Antony, where he mentions the monks from abroad, who had asked him to write about Antony, so that they might have something to take home with them. They seem to have been from the Latin speaking West.

Christopher Buck, Paradise and Paradigm: Key Symbols in Persian Christianity and the Baha’i Faith. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. ISBN-10: 0791440613. ISBN-13: 978-0791440612. (Release date: May 13, 1999.)

NOTE
This is the first formal (academic) comparison of the Baha’i Faith and Christianity, notwithstanding a wealth of apologetic literature on this topic.

OPENING PARAGRAPH
Religions enshrine symbols, the stained-glass windows of faith. Sacred symbols present an explorable treasury of religious thought—an information-rich, condensed language of spirituality. Symbols are the prisms of ideals and of other religious concerns. Symbols are susceptible of analysis and are proper objects of study. As symbols encode ideas, they require interpretation to be both understood and meaningfully compared. “We can see that an essential ingredient of the modern study of religion,” writes Ninian Smart, “is symbolic analysis, which tries to throw light on the various themes which can be discovered cross-culturally through the exploration of various worldviews” (1985, 33). Symbolic analysis involves not only the exploration of religious worldviews intrinsically, but comparatively as well. – Paradise & Paradigm, p. 1.

CONCLUSION
Symbols ensoul ideas. In the Abrahamic faiths generally, the most important symbol complex is eschatological imagery, the positive focus of which is Paradise. Visions of the empyreal realm have, historically, had an extraordinary power to inspire. Paradise is iconoplastic. The beatific panorama, the symbolic landscape, the ideals and imagery that inform Paradise in the religious imagination are grounded in root metaphors and are animated by key scenarios reflecting a theology of activity, in a dynamic interplay of belief and behavior, myth and ritual, within the religious grasp of totality.

Paradise allegorizes ideals. These ideals are projected onto heaven. There, in the wish-images of the communal dream, ideals are reified and beatified. In a Bergeresque process of paradisical world building, Heaven functions as the impressionistic blueprint of the ideal faith-community. Paradise imagery is then dislocated from the speculative and refocused on Earth. When once the heart is transformed and society reformed, Paradise is realized. In the intersection of eschatology and ethics, in the interplay of ideas and imagery, and as a function of an organizing principle, an overarching paradigm, Paradise becomes utopia. – Paradise & Paradigm, p. 329.

REVIEWS
•  Kathleen McVey. International Journal of Middle East Studies 35.3 (Aug. 2003): 494–496. 
Will C. van den Hoonaard. Studies in Religion. Sciences Religieuses 31.3–4 (2002): 501–502.
• Brannon Wheeler. Religious Studies Review 28.3 (July 2002): 293:
“Buck’s theoretically innovative analysis of ‘paradigmatic differences’ in East Syrian (or Nestorian) Christianity and the early Baha’i faith is a fascinating and intellectually challenging book. … In all, a forceful and clearly argued book which should be read by scholars interested in questions of religious symbolism and the comparative method.”
• Andrew Rippin. University of Toronto Quarterly 71.1 (Winter 2001/2002): 170–172. 
• William Collins. Baha’i Studies Review 10 (2001/2002): 157–160. 
• Edward G. Farrugia, S.J. Orientalia Christiana Periodica 66.2 (2000): 480–483.
• John Renard. Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 34.2 (2000): 212–213.
• Daniel Grolin. H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences (July 2000). 
Harold Coward. (Unpublished) (2000). 

POST-PUBLICATION SCHOLARSHIP
Paola Orsatti, “Syro-Persian Formulas In Poetic Form In Baptism Liturgy,” Persian Origins – Early Judaeo-Persian and the Emergence of New Persian. Collected Papers of the Symposium, Göttingen 1999. Edited by Ludwig Paul (Iranica Vol. 6, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2003), pp. 147–176.

LIBRARIES WORLDWIDE
Total (print & ebook editions): 1,886. [WorldCat, July 11, 2019.] Also available as a Nook Book.

The biblical commentaries of the church fathers (ca. 200–600): a concise compendium with a survey of research and an anthology of texts. – Towards the end of the second century CE, the first Christian commentaries on biblical books were written, and the genre quickly established itself as the most common literary genre used by Christians. Five types of commentary are distinguished abnd characterised. theological commentary, homiletical commentary, scholion, questiopns-and-answers, and catena. Also included in the survey are genres that come close to the commentary genre: preface, textbook, and monograph on biblical realia. The paper's final section comments on the reception and the cultural relevance of the commentary. Appended is an anthology of ten commentary excerpts in annotated German translation to illustrate the various kinds of commentary and their procedure.

The question of the relationship between nascent Christian thought in late antiquity and the philosophical tradition is neither new nor original.  Of the various answers that have been proposed, however, many can be classified into a binary according to which Christian thought in the Patristic period is either seen as primarily opposed to philosophy or as strongly, potentially unduly, dependent on it. In this book chapter, I query this alternative and argue that it rests on an ultimately anachronistic distinction between philosophy and theology. Instead I seek to demonstrate that Patristic ‘theology’ can helpfully be understood in analogy to a philosophical school. By carefully examining the potential as well as the limitations of this analogy, my paper aims at an understanding of ancient Christian thought as fully embedded in its historical context while reckoning with its sui-generis character.

Recent Patristic and Medieval scholarship regarding Trinitarian theology has been critical of many of the major voices working in the "Trinitarian renaissance" of the 1980's and 90's regarding the faulty nature of their historical narratives.  Typically absent among these criticisms is the name of T.F. Torrance who is much more detailed and cautious regarding his understanding of the history of Trinitarian doctrinal development.  Nonetheless Patristic scholarship has not stood still since Torrance wrote his works, and so this essay intends to look at Torrance's account of the history of Trinitarian doctrine and compare it to recent developments and opinions.

Since the time of Harnack, it has become a commonplace among many Augustinian scholars that Augustine’s teaching on predestination is in insoluble tension with his insistence on the importance of maintaining ecclesial communion.  This tension arises from ambiguities concerning the relationship between God’s decree of predestination and his foreknowledge of each person’s ultimate destiny.  This paper will offer a critical assessment of three possible ways of resolving this tension.

In early Christian iconography, Jesus, the saints, and other biblical figures are often depicted dressed in the characteristic cloak of the Greek philosophers. The garment, known as the pallium in Latin and the tribon in Greek, was a symbol of moral virtue,self-sufficiency, and wisdom. Literary sources demonstrate that this manner of dress was not limited to portraiture, but was worn by some prominent Christian teachers and clergy into the fourth century. Figures such as Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Heraclas of Alexandria, and others wore the philosopher’s mantle as a public, visual communication of their intellectual expertise and moral authority. This article presents several examples and offers an analysis that employs a theoretical framework anchored in the field of dress studies in order to adduce the array of meanings signified by the garment in various contexts. Each example is seen as a case of what Roland Barthes termed ‘real clothing’, that is, clothing as it is manufactured and worn, and as ‘verbal-clothing’, that is, clothing as it is verbalized and infused with meaning through written language. Attention is given to both positive and negative assessments of the garb. The wearing of the pallium by Christians communicated claims to moral and pedagogical authority in the context of the shifting contours of the philosophical field in late antiquity. Christians who dressed in the mantle enacted a visual engagement with and challenge to contemporary pagan philosophy. At the same time, the cloak aroused tensions among Christians as they debated among themselves the value of Greek education and participation in contemporary philosophical debates.