The evidence the Church Fathers offer about the economic practices of late antiquity are often dismissed as empty rhetoric. The aim of this article is first, to examine the historical value of their arguments against usury in the light of papyrological and hagiographic sources as well as οf archaeological findings; secondly, to assess the extent to which the churches and monasteries in Syria and Egypt accommodated themselves to the “credit economy” of late antiquity; and, thirdly, to evaluate the reasons for the church’s compromise with the established credit practices and its impact on the implementation of the Christian redistributive ideals.
This article explores the notion of experience in the work of Gregory of Nyssa. It examines the nature of the qualified empiricism of the Cappadocian Father and its relation to some of the basic assumptions of the school of Medical Empiricism. Its main thesis is that the key reason for Gregory’s valorization of experience as an inevitable step to one’s moral maturation was his conviction that only through the exercise of their free will might humans learn to be virtuous. The article also examines in what sense experience conferred authority on the spiritual guide and Gregory’s debt to the Greek philosophical tradition in his understanding of the notion of the ‘canon.’
Verö entlicht auf Englisch. Wie wurde die Nachricht von der Erlösung Christi aufgenommen? Antigone Samellas untersucht den griechischen und jüdischen Ein uß auf die griechische Eschatologie und sucht nach den hellenistischen Wurzeln der christlichen Trostphilosophie. Dabei ist von Interesse, in welchem Maße die neue Religion die existierenden Einstellungen zum Tod und die gebräuchlichen Funktionen der Trauer und Gedenkrituale beein ußt hat. Ferner arbeitet die Autorin heraus, welche Aspekte des Christentums attraktiv und welche abstoßend für Heiden und Juden waren.
This article is a study of pain from a comparative perspective according to the criteria that have been established in the patristic, philosophical, and medical literature of late antiquity. My overall aim is to examine the mode of evaluation of the severity of a pain and, especially, whether Christianity brought about a change in the prevailing attitudes towards pain. On the evidence of the works of Gregory of Nyssa and Galen, it will be claimed that public calamities were deemed far more grievous than any private misfortune. I will also examine the medical and patristic sources that deal with disfiguring diseases in order to make evident that in the period under observation the homilies of the Church Fathers betray a novel sensitivity to the pain provoked by the isolation and marginalization of those in need. This new awareness, I shall argue, was related to the forging of a Christian emotional community of co-sufferers. Some key passages of Gregory of Nazianzus, but also of Chrysostom and Gregory of Nyssa, will show how the transformation of the ancient pedagogy of pain into a life-long martyrdom brought the Christians closer to the suffering body.
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