scholarly journals Logos-sarx christology and the sixth-century miaenergism

Vox Patrum ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 197-223
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Kashchuk
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Active Principle ◽  
Cyril Of Alexandria ◽  
Severus Of Antioch

The article discusses the question of the relation between the sixth-century Miaenergism, which is the idea of Christ having one divine-human operation, and the Logos-sarx type of Christology. The purpose of the article is to argue that the Miaenergism was dependent on the Christology centered on the divinity of incar­nate Christ. The Logos was acknowledged as the active principle even of Christ’s humanity, so that the human volition and operation of Christ was neglected in fa­vor of the Logos. This model of Christology was being developed especially from the second century in the writings of Clemens of Alexandria, Origen, Athanasius of Alexandria and Apollinarius of Laodicea; then it was continued by Cyril of Alexandria and Severus of Antioch; it also influenced Leontius of Byzantium and Theodore of Pharan. The Miaenergism of the sixth and then of the seventh century was being developed on a ground of the Logos-sarx type of Christology, although it acknowledged the Dyophysitism of Chalcedon.

Sailing to the Britannic Isles: Some Mediterranean Perspectives on the Remote Northwest from the Sixth Century bc to the Seventh Century AD

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wilkes
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Astronomical Observations ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
A Minor

If you were training to be an athlete you would not spend all your time doing exercises: you would also have to learn when and how to relax, for relaxation is generally regarded as one of the most important elements in physical training. To my mind it is equally important for scholars. When you have been doing a lot of serious reading, it is a good idea to give your mind a rest and so build up energy for another bout of hard labour. For this purpose the best sort of book to read is not merely one that is witty and entertaining but also has something interesting to say. This advice from the satirist Lucian, sometime itinerant lecturer and at other times a minor government official, seems as valid today as it was in the second century AD. For students engaged in the history and archaeology of Europe in the first millennia BC and ad, I can currently think of no better respite from the structures, models and databases, that are the currencies of modern research, than Barry Cunliffie’s monograph on the explorer Pytheas published in 2001. Unencumbered with footnotes and with minimal bibliography, a text of barely 170 pages introduces one of the great mysteries of antiquity, the fantastic voyage of exploration by a citizen of Massalia, the Greek ancestor of modern Marseilles, to the British Isles and beyond to Iceland and the Arctic Circle and then in the direction of the Baltic (Cunliffe 2001). Nothing is known of Pytheas himself and the only reasonably certain fact we have concerning the voyage is that it was undertaken around the time of Alexander the Great (d. 323 BC). No less remarkable is that all we know of Pytheas’ own account of his travels is preserved in later writers, who at the least denigrated his achievement and often branded him a downright liar with considerable vehemence, while still exploiting his detailed account of the lands and seas he saw. Despite this the value of his astronomical observations was recognized by some of the greatest minds of antiquity and as a result his place in the development of the geographical sciences is assured.

The Impact of Inscriptions on the Interpretation of Early Śaiva Literature

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 211-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Sanderson
Keyword(s):  
Early History ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Prescriptive Literature ◽  
Fundamental Cause ◽  
History Of ◽  
Popular Devotion ◽  
The Impact

This paper considers the limitations of the Śaivas’ prescriptive literature as evidence of the reality of their religion and stresses the benefits of reading it in the light of inscriptions and other forms of non-prescriptive evidence. It utilizes these other sources to address a number of questions that the prescriptive texts do not or cannot address. The first is that of the early history of Śaivism between the Mauryas and the Guptas. It concludes that when initiatory Śaivism achieved its dominance, as it did after the Gupta period, it did so on the basis of a widespread tradition of popular devotion that goes back at least to the second century bc, and that while the ingenuity and adaptability of the emerging Śaiva traditions were instrumental in this rise, a more fundamental cause may have been that in investing in these traditions their patrons were adopting an idiom of self-promotion that would be efficacious in the eyes of an already predominantly Śaiva population. It then presents evidence of this rise to dominance, explains the contradiction between the power and wealth of the Atimārga’s pontiffs seen in inscriptions and the ascetic disciplines prescribed in its literature, shows that the Āmardakamaṭha, the Mantramārga’s earliest monastic centre, at Auṇḍhā, was already active in the sixth century, argues that it was the initiation of rulers, seen in inscriptions from the seventh century on, that enabled the Mantramārga to spread throughout the subcontinent, and demonstrates that already in the seventh century Śaiva initiation had become routinized as a calendrically fixed duty imposed on temple-attached officiants as a condition of their tenure, thus illustrating how inscriptions can reveal mundane realities that the high-minded prescriptive literature is designed to conceal and transcend.

Secular Monograms, Social Status, and Authority in the Late Roman World and Early Byzantium

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Noble Identity ◽  
Late Roman

This chapter examines the use of monograms as graphic signs of imperial authority in the late Roman and early Byzantine empire, from its appropriation on imperial coinage in the mid-fifth century to its employment in other material media in the following centuries. It also overviews the use of monograms by imperial officials and aristocrats as visible signs of social power and noble identity on mass-produced objects, dress accessories, and luxury items. The concluding section discusses a new social function for late antique monograms as visible tokens of a new Christian paideia and of elevated social status, related to ennobling calligraphic skills. This transformation of monograms into an attribute of visual Christian culture became especially apparent in sixth-century Byzantium, with the cruciform monograms appearing in the second quarter of the sixth century and becoming a default monogrammatic form from the seventh century onwards.

The Roman Martyrs

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Lapidge
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Roman Society ◽  
Christian Literature ◽  
The Church

The Roman Martyrs contains translations of forty Latin passiones of saints who were martyred in Rome or its near environs, during the period before the ‘peace of the Church’ (c. 312). Some of these Roman martyrs are universally known — SS. Agnes, Sebastian or Laurence, for example — but others are scarcely known outside the ecclesiastical landscape of Rome itself. Each of the translated passiones, which vary in length from a few paragraphs to over ninety, is accompanied by an individual introduction and commentary; the translations are preceded by an Introduction which describes the principal features of this little-known genre of Christian literature. The Roman passiones martyrum have never previously been collected together, and have never been translated into a modern language. They were mostly composed during the period 425 x 675, by anonymous authors who who were presumably clerics of the Roman churches or cemeteries which housed the martyrs’ remains. It is clear that they were composed in response to the huge explosion of pilgrim traffic to martyrial shrines from the late fourth century onwards, at a time when authentic records (protocols) of their trials and executions had long since vanished, and the authors of the passiones were obliged to imagine the circumstances in which martyrs were tried and executed. The passiones are works of pure fiction; and because they abound in ludicrous errors of chronology, they have been largely ignored by historians of the early Church. But although they cannot be used as evidence for the original martyrdoms, they nevertheless allow a fascinating glimpse of the concerns which animated Christians during the period in question: for example, the preservation of virginity, or the ever-present threat posed by pagan practices. And because certain aspects of Roman life will have changed little between (say) the second century and the fifth, the passiones throw valuable light on many aspects of Roman society, not least the nature of a trial before an urban prefect, and the horrendous tortures which were a central feature of such trials. Above all, perhaps, the passiones are an indispensable resource for understanding the topography of late antique Rome and its environs, since they characteristically contain detailed reference to the places where the martyrs were tried, executed, and buried. The book contains five Appendices containing translations of texts relevant to the study of Roman martyrs: the Depositio martyrum of A.D. 354 (Appendix I); the epigrammata of Pope Damasus d. 384) which pertain to Roman martyrs treated in the passiones (II); entries pertaining to Roman martyrs in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum (III); entries in seventh-century pilgrim itineraries pertaining to shrines of Roman martyrs in suburban cemeteries (IV); and entries commemorating these martyrs in early Roman liturgical books (V).

After Chalcedon

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian E. Daley, SJ
Keyword(s):  
Eighth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
John Of Damascus ◽  
Perceived Impact ◽  
Orthodox Theology ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Maximus The Confessor ◽  
Severus Of Antioch

The Council of Chalcedon’s definition of the terms in which Nicene orthodoxy should conceive of Christ’s person remained controversial. Leontius of Byzantium argued for the correctness of the Council’s formulation, especially against the arguments of Severus of Antioch, but suggested that more than academic issues were at stake: the debate concerned the lived, permanently dialectical unity between God and humanity. In the mid-seventh century, imperially sponsored efforts to lessen the perceived impact of Chalcedonian language by stressing that Christ’s two natures were activated by “a single, theandric energy,” also remained without effect: largely because of the monk Maximus “the Confessor”, who argued that two complete spheres of activity and two wills remained evident in Christ’s life. Maximus’s position was ratified at the Lateran Synod and at the Third Council of Constantinople. The eighth-century Palestinian monk John of Damascus incorporated these arguments into his own influential synthesis of orthodox theology.

Capital Scripts

2020 ◽  
pp. 78-97
Author(s):  
David Wright
Keyword(s):  
Eighth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Augustan Era

This chapter surveys capital letterforms, which have been in use from the second century BC until the present day. It defines two types of capitals in use since the Augustan Era: formal Square Capitals and informal Rustic Capitals, and traces the development of Rustic Capitals as a text hand in manuscripts of classical authors until the sixth century AD as well as the use of Square Capitals until the late fifth century AD. It closes with a look at the use of Rustic Capitals in rubrics of eighth-century manuscripts from England, and Rustic and Square Capitals found in Carolingian contexts.

scholarly journals New perspectives on Byzantine Spain: the Discriptio Hispaniae

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-308
Author(s):  
Oriol Olesti Vila ◽  
Ricard Andreu Expósito ◽  
Jamie Wood
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Southern Spain ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Territorial Division ◽  
Short Section

AbstractThe Discriptio Hispaniae is a passage from the Geometry of Gisemundus, also entitled Ars Gromatica Gisemundi (AGG), a medieval treatise of agrimensura written by an unknown author, probably a monk known as Gisemundus who had some agrimensorial experience. The work was compiled around AD 800 by collecting passages of a range of sizes, from just a few words to several pages, extracted from ancient and medieval sources. Although modern research into Roman agrimensorial texts has admitted the importance of the AGG, its corrupt condition has not invited sustained analysis. The passage now known as the Discriptio Hispaniae, a short section from chapter three of the second book of the AGG entitled III De segregatione provinciarum ab Augustalibus terminis, is particularly interesting for the information that it provides concerning the territorial division of Hispania in Late Antiquity. This article presents an edition and English translation of the Discriptio Hispaniae and argues that the most likely point of origin for the Discriptio Hispaniae is during the Byzantine occupation of parts of southern Spain during the second half of the sixth century and the first quarter of the seventh century. We suggest that the Discriptio Hispaniae was preserved because the Byzantine authorities were keen to keep on record information about the borders of the province of Carthaginensis, perhaps the main theme in the text.

Aspects of the Vocabulary of Chariton of Aphrodisias

1991 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 484-489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Consuelo Ruiz-Montero
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Linguistic Data ◽  
The Third

There has been little research on the vocabulary of the Greek novelists. Gasda studied that of Chariton in the last century. He compared some of his terms with those of other authors and he concluded he should be placed in the sixth century A.D. Then Schmid considered that Chariton's language was not Atticist, and dated his novel in the second century or beginning of the third. In 1973 Chariton's language was studied by Papanikolaou. His research dealt above all with several syntactic aspects and the use of some vocabulary, which led him to conclude that this language was closer to the koiné than that of the other novelists. But Papanikolaou went further in his conclusions: finding no trace of Atticism in Chariton, he considered him a pre-Atticist writer and, using extra-linguistic data, such as the citing of the Seres, the Chinese (6.4.2), placed him in the second half of the first century B.C. This chronology has been accepted by some, but already Giangrande has observed that this lack of Atticisms could have been intentional, in which case that date would be questionable.

An Overview of the Catenae

2021 ◽  
pp. 135-154
Author(s):  
Gilles Dorival
Keyword(s):  
New Testament ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Recent Progress ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Biblical Commentary ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Persuasive Arguments ◽  
Severus Of Antioch

Catenae appeared in Judaea/Palestine at the beginning of the sixth century. They consist of commentaries, homilies, scholia of the past centuries, and any other literary form in which Scripture verses are explained. Ecclesiastical writings are quoted in the form of extracts, sometimes literal, sometimes rewritten, according to the order of the verses of each Biblical book. Each extract is normally preceded by the name of its author in the genitive case. With time, the catenae were formed not only from commentaries, homilies, scholia, and other patristic writings, but also from pre-existing catenae mixed with these sources. After the sixth century, catenae became the most important media of biblical commentary until the end of the Byzantium Empire (1453). Many debated issues remain. Is Procopius of Gaza (470–530) the father of the catenae? Maybe the two-author catenae predate him, even if this form is better connected with the Byzantine humanism of the ninth and tenth centuries. As for the multiple-author catenae, it is not certain if any of them do are prior Procopius. The compilers of the catenae began their project with the Old Testament, as it was considered to be obscure and foundational to the New Testament, whereas the New Testament was considered to be clear and explicative of the Old Testament. The identity of the compilers of the catenae is shrouded in mystery. Only a few names are known: chiefly, Procopius of Gaza in Palestine and Nicetas of Heraclea in Constantinople. Other names have been proposed: the patriarch Photius, Peter of Laodicea, John Drougarios, but without any persuasive arguments. A final issue concerns Monophysite (or Miaphysite) catenae: were some catenae Monophysite? Or was this literary form indifferent to questions of orthodoxy? In some catenae, Severus of Antioch is called ‘saint’, which may indicate a Monophysite origin. Finally, despite recent progress, many catenae still await publication. For instance, Nicetas’ catena on the Psalms is a monumental work of Byzantine scholarship and it deserves to be available to modern readers.

Art, Nature, Power

2019 ◽  
pp. 339-354
Author(s):  
Steven D. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Imperial Power

This final chapter demonstrates the importance of contextualizing epigrams into the sociohistorical circumstances of their era if we want to achieve a deeper comprehension of the transformations that various motifs undergo through space and time. The chapter analyses a cluster of epigrams on imperial gardens that date from the first to the seventh century CE, and shows how these poems reflect diverse views about imperial power, aesthetics, pagan culture, and Christianity. The chapter discusses first an epigram from the Neronian era, then moves forward to late antiquity to consider a sequence of garden epigrams from the age of the Emperor Justinian (sixth century CE). The chapter concludes with an explicitly Christian garden epigram from the reign of the Emperor Heraclius (seventh century CE).

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