Teng He : Grace and free will in Augustine's Ad Simplicanum II

This paper aims to deal with the relationship between grace and free will in Augustine's Ad Simplicanum II (396/397). The development of Augustine confronts its interpreters a crucial difficulty, whether Augustine changes his mind on the will, as what he comments in Retractationes.In regard of Ad Simplicanum II,there are basically two interpretative options available: separate reading (Peter Brown;Kurt Flasch) and continuous reading(Carol Harrison;Brachtendorf). Following the first option, there are two distinctive Augustine. After the year of 395/396, Augustine loses his confidence on human's intellect and is lost in the future. According to the second reading, there is no difference between young and old Augustine. In this article, a third interpretation is defended that tries to combine the advantages of the previous two. Firstly, I would like to show Augustine indeed changed his mind on grace through the contrast between his commentaries on Roman.Besides, I will present his comments on early work in Retractationes, to show that he changes his position on human's ability.Secondly, I will show the difference between free choice(liberum arbitrium)and will (voluntas),which goes through Augustine's works.Based on this distinction, he also explains the sin of human inAd SimplicanumII. Lastly, I would like to show the inability of will (voluntas) and work (opera) to achieve grace (gratia).God is beyond of human knowledge, but he effects on human's reason/will in its time (in suo tempore).

Mary Hansbury: Shem ‘on the Graceful and the Solitary Life

Shem‘on
the Graceful, called the Graceful possibly because of his insistence on the
role of divine grace in salvation history. He was a medical doctor before
becoming a monk who lived in eastern Syria, and died ca 680. He saw humans as
the ‘bond of creation’ in a mediatory position between God and the universe,
influenced by Theodore of Mopsuestia. In my translation of Shem‘on’s Consecration
of the Cell, I quote from
others of ‘the golden age of Syriac
Christian literature’ who also lived periods of solitary life. Shem’on speaks of entering into the cell and
persevering inside oneself. The Solitary alerts others to a dimension of life
which can only be perceived in solitude but which is the ‘new creation’ in the
inner world of all Christians.

Demetrios Harper: Self-determination and the Question of Subjectivity: Autexousion Agency in Maximus the Confessor

This paper seeks to interpret the conceptual mechanisms that give rise to Maximus the Confessor’s understanding of human self-determination, examining them through the lens of contemporary philosophical discourse concerning the origin of the philosophical categories of autonomy and heteronomy. Although the term αὐτεξούσιον is sometimes translated as “autonomy,” many contemporary scholars have argued persuasively that the philosophers and theologians of the pre-Renaissance world who employ the term do not have the same anthropological presuppositions that inform the contemporary understanding of the concept. Christopher Gill, Alasdair McIntyre, and Charles Taylor, et al., concur that the notion of an autonomous “self” arises in the wake of the Enlightenment and especially Kantian approaches to moral psychology. Post-enlightenment autonomy is dependent in turn upon the invention of subjectivity, which is inaugurated by René Descartes’s formulation of the Cartesian “ego.” As Gill argues in his two massive treatises, the diverse philosophical approaches in the pre-Renaissance world, mutatis mutandis, possess a common notion of self-hood, regarding an individual not as a distinct subject or “I” but rather as an “objective participant” in a larger human community. While Gill’s arguments appear to stand on firm ground in relation to pagan sources, his otherwise superb analysis largely ignores the Christian tradition and especially influential Greek patristic sources like Maximus the Confessor. In an effort to address this gap, this paper shall consider the principles of moral psychology that underlie Maximus the Confessor’s approach to self-determination, examining them in light of Gill’s subject/objective participant dichotomy. 

András Handl: Migrants of Faith and the Faith of Migrants: Migration and inner-religious conflict in the Christian Communities of Rome

Migrants imported Christianity to Rome and there, migration shaped Christianity ever since. Settled for a shorter or longer period at the capital of the Empire, migrants were often also ambassadors of doctrinal or liturgical impulses, continuously diversifying the versatile and factionalised character of the local Christianities. As a result of the gradual formation of a local ‘Roman’ Christian identity alongside with the slowly emerging centralised hierarchy to the turn to the third century, clashes between newly arrived migrants and the “well-established” determined the agenda over and over again. Generations of bishops, Victor, Zephyrinus and Calixtus, experimented with various coping strategies to engage with the migrants and their ideas, theologies and traditions.The paper will present an overview and several fine-grained case studies of migration to Rome, charting migration, analysing the impact and the prompted conflict caused by migration, and examine how migration shaped local identity and facilitated the unification and the emergence of a majority church.

Meghan Henning: “That They May Not Look with Their Eyes or Listen with Their Ears”: The Reception History of Isaiah 6:9

This paper will examine the way in which the prophetic text of Isaiah 6:9 is read in early Christian contexts, beginning with Mark and John, and then moving to late antique readers (Tertullian, Origen, Augustine to name a few possibilities). The late antique reception of this text will demonstrate the way in which metaphorical Deafness is configured in multiform ways by early Christian authors, as ignorance, as loss, and even as an asset which enables one to perceive the prophets and parables better than those who are able to “look with their eyes and hear with their ears.” The conclusions of this paper will consider whether some late antique readings of this passage may contribute to contemporary discussions around DeafGain.

Thomas Hunt: Breath and Jerome’s literary production

Jerome disguised the true nature of his relationship to his patrons and to his sources so that he might present himself as exemplar and arbiter of orthodoxy. Recent scholarship has shown how his asceticism, heresiological writing, commentary, and translation all fed in to this wider project of authorial self-fashioning. Despite recent excellent work tracking the connections between Jerome’s asceticism and his literary production, there remains almost no extended treatment of the way that Jerome conceptualised breathing in his work. This gap in scholarship is important. Breath was a fundamental component in speech and was recognised as such in the linguistic theories of late antiquity. At the same time, breath had a particular function in late antique biological and medical science. In late antiquity, then, attending to the breath was key to the production of language and to understanding human bodies in the world. Drawing on theories of language and embodied affect from late antiquity and from modernity, this paper sketches out a late antique culture of breath and then positions Jerome within it. It argues that breath offers a useful site from which to analyse Jerome’s ascetic literary production.

Susan Holman: Shaping Water: Public Health and the ‘Medicine of Mortality’ in Late Antiquity

This paper explores medical and religious texts from Christian late antiquity to consider the ethics of water aid in public or social policy and humanitarian relief at the intersection of past and present global health concerns. Drawing from geographical theorist Doreen Massey and South African theologian, Steve de Gruchy, on theology and sanitation today, it considers points of commonality and difference with medical and Christian writers in late antiquity, the role of water in health and mortality, the moral ethic of water equity and justice for all, and how water shapes the holy in ways relevant to public health. It concludes with examples of how the literal shape of water may image liturgical space and the narrative flow of social intersections across politics, productivity, and history.

Michael Hanaghan: Christian Visions and Sozomen’s Julian

According to Sozomen (6.2), a friend of the emperor Julian lodged in a church as he traveled into Persia to join up with the emperor. On successive nights a dream vision appeared to him in which a group of apostles and prophets predicted Julian’s death. Soon afterwards Julian, mortally wounded by an unknown assailant in battle, threw his blood into the air. Sozomen provides competing explanations for this behavior, including that Julian hoped to besmear a vision of Christ which had just appeared to him.This paper argues that these stories respond to Julian’s criticism of Christianity in his Contra Galilaeos. At Contra Galilaeos339E-340A Julian criticizes Christians for soliciting dream visions and cites Isaiah 65.4 in support of his condemnation. For Julian solicited dream-visions (enupnia) are a form of trickery (magganeia). Sozomen’s inclusion of this story makes Julian’s friend the proxy target of Julian’s criticism for his conscious decision to spend another night in the church so that the revelatory dream could complete itself. In Contra Galilaeos358D-E Julian cites Genesis15 to show that the appearance of God to Abraham occurs after sacrifice and darkness. In Sozomen’s account darkness descends on the battle just before Julian’s sacrificial throwing of his own blood in reaction to his vision of Christ.Sozomen’s account justifies his claim that divine wrath caused Julian’s death, highlights Julian’s failure to predict it, and reveals that Christian criticism of Julian continued to develop in reaction to Contra Galilaeos.

Matyáš Havrda: The order of education and knowledge in Clement of Alexandria

In his Pedagogue and the Stromateis, Clement outlines the order of education and knowledge within the tradition of the church. Two basic levels of education may be distinguished – one of practical instruction, whose goal is temperance (sōphrosunē), and one of theoretical instruction, divided into ethics, physics, and theology. Within the realm of (theoretical) ethics, dealing mainly with virtues and the goal of life, topics are also arranged in a particular order, corresponding to the order of progress from rational obedience to knowledge. Neither Clement’s physics nor theology has been preserved; but they may be partly reconstructed on the basis of various adumbrations in the Stromateis and other texts. Physics, based on the notion of divine economy, appears to follow the chronological order from the creation of the world to the “end without end”. In a sense, theology permeates the process of education from the beginning – it is encapsulated already in the confession formula –, but it seems to be presented in an ascending order of clarity. We shall explore this complex structure of education and knowledge in Clement’s œuvre, with a particular focus on the question of whether and to what extent it follows contemporary models of Greek education and philosophy.

Julia Hintlian: Metz Mayr Miriam: The Embellished Armenian Lineage of Marutha of Maipherkat

Little scholarship has focused on the Armenian Life of Marutha of Maipherkats ince Ralph Marcus published his 1932 English translation. Marutha, a fifth-century bishop, participated prominently in the East Syriac Council of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 410. His Lifes urvives in Greek, Arabic, Armenian, and in Syriac fragments, all of which derive from a lost Syriac original. The Armenian version was copied by the tenth-century Armenian monk Gagik at a monastery in Arzanene, and commences with a lengthy discourse on Marutha’s grandmother, Miriam, which is absent from other versions. While Greek sources fail to acknowledge Miriam, and Arabic sources mention her only in passing, Gagik’s Lifeemphasizes Miriam’s noble Armenian blood, and credits her with converting Marutha’s entire family to Christianity and for his episcopal success. Given the discrepancies among the Greek, Arabic, and Armenian sources, this paper proposes that Gagik embellished the Syriac description of Miriam to emphasize a historical connection between the East Syriac and Armenian Churches. Whereas the tenth-century Armenian Church in Arzanene faced Byzantine and Arab invasions, the East Syriac Church, centered just south in Mesopotamia, experienced relative stability under the Abbasid Caliphate. Thus, this project suggests Gagik stressed an Armenian grandmother in the life of an East Syriac bishop to foster amity with the Church of the East at a time when the Armenians in Arzanene sought regional Christian allies. Ultimately, this project examines tenth-century Armenian appropriation of a fifth-century East Syriac bishop to probe the understudied relationship between the ancient Armenian and East Syriac Churches.

Andy Hilkens: Armenian hagio-historiographical traditions about Jacob of Serugh

In the early fifteenth century Gregory of Khlat (d. 1425) published his version of the Armenian synaxarion, which would quickly surpass earlier versions in popularity. Not only did Gregory include translations of Jacob of Serugh's homilies on Stephen the protomartyr, New Sunday and the apostle Thomas, and on the Nativity, for the first time Jacob of Serugh himself was included in an Armenian synaxarion. Surprisingly, Gregory's source for this vita was neither an Armenian nor a Syriac Vita. Instead, Gregory found this information in one of the Armenian adaptations of the Chronicle of Michael the Elder (d. 1199), which were produced by the Armenian polymath Vardan Arewelc'i (d. 1271) and the Syriac Orthodox priest Yeshu' in 1246 and in 1248.This paper investigates the representation of Jacob of Serugh to an Armenian audience by analyzing how Vardan and Yeshu' adapted Michael's narrative, integrating episodes from Syriac hagiographical traditions about Jacob and adding others, and how in turn this material was used by Gregory in order to create an Armenian Vita of Jacob for his synaxarion.

Benjamin Hansen: The Martyrs and Their Master: Martyrdom and the Figure of Christ in the Divine Institutes

The Diocletian Persecution was formative for Lactantius. His De mortibus was a vigorous account of the vindication of God’s persecuted elect. His De ira treated divine wrath in a manner which pulsed implicitly with the memory of a singular historical event. For a proper understanding of Lactantius, therefore, we must understand him as an author whose mind was saturated with the implication of his contemporary crisis. This was no doubt true for the writing of his Institutiones as well, a work which sought to defend a faith whose critics denounced it as both dangerous and stupid. Thus to read the Institutiones with this “hermeneutic of persecution” serves to tease out Lactantius’ sense of divine history, a history which is always bound up with the suffering of a righteous minority. In reading the Institutiones in this manner, moreover, the figure of Christ takes on a remarkable new significance – and one that has largely been overlooked. For Lactantius, I will argue, reads contemporary persecution in light of a series of biblical precedents leading up to the persecution of Christ. This understanding allows him to emphasize the divine patterning of history and to place the martyrs of the fourth century into a sacred chronology which, linked to the figure of Christ, repeats itself at three key points: the cause of persecution, the effect of persecution, and the fate of the persecutors.

Charles Hill: The Capitulatio Vaticana. The Earliest Biblical Chapter System, with Some New Tradents

The first known, large-scale effort to order the text of Scripture by means of numbered chapters is found in Codex Vaticanus 1209, the famous fourth-century codex that once contained the entire Bible. Tregelles referred to the result as the capitulatio Vaticana. In the Gospels, this capitulation almost certainly predates the better known Kephalaia or Old Greek Divisions first evidenced in the fifth-century Codex Alexandrinus. But the capitulatio Vaticana exists not only in the Gospels but throughout the NT and in most of the OT books in the codex. By any measure, this is an impressive achievement. Yet in terms of generating a significant paradosis, this early attempt to facilitate reading, reference, and interpretation of Scripture by means of numbered chapters is generally believed to have failed. To my knowledge, only two witnesses to its chapter divisions in any single book have so far been documented. This paper will summarize my research into both the prehistory of the capitulatio, as well as into some previously unrecognized successors of this system of textual structuring. For instance, the capitulatio for some OT books is known to Theodoret and Olympiodorus, as their work is catenized in Vat. Barb. 549 (Rahlfs 86), a ninth- or tenth-century manuscript containing text, commentary, and catenae on the Prophets. This paper will offer evidence that the capitulatio Vaticana was more widely diffused than previously known, and will suggest that further witnesses may lie overlooked in other commentary and catena manuscripts.

Matthew Hale: Meaning, Self-Transcendence, and Conversion in St. Maximus the Confessor’s Account of Theoria

For Maximus the Confessor, contemplation of the created order, or theoria, constitutes an important advance in the spiritual life and the proper means by which the mind relates to created things. Rather than becoming distracted by desire for the things in themselves, the mind is now able to discern the divine intentions for these creatures, or the logoi, and from there be turned ever more to God. Theoria is usually considered with reference to its finality in theologia, unitive knowledge of God. But in this paper, drawing primarily from the Ambigua and Quaestiones et dubia, I wish to consider another reference point for theoria: that of the situatedness of theoria within a mode of activity proper to union with Christ, i.e. the cooperation of the ascetic with Christ in the redemption and deification of created things. Within this context, theoriais an embodying of Christ both in the ascetic’s knowing itself but also in the extension of that knowing into the ascetic’s activity vis-à-vis created things. This construal of the relationship of contemplative knowing to redemptive activity is highly suggestive and begs for a transposition into contemporary categories. In my concluding remarks, I will suggest an outline of such a transposition in conversation with Bernard Lonergan, specifically his account of religious conversion, the transformation of the human person from being to being-in-love, which has a powerful impact on her knowing and deciding.

Sean Hannan: The Enforcement of Violence & the Force of Love in Augustine: Epistle 93 & its Aftermath

In her theo-political reading of Augustine, Hannah Arendt expressed discontent over the rhetoric of love in Augustine, insofar as it could lead to a totalitarian blurring of distinctions between individuals in the public sphere. To paraphrase Eric Gregory, Arendt preferred a kind of ‘Kantian respect’ between persons to the reckless abundance of Augustinian ­_caritas_. And yet it remains possible that Augustine’s rhetoric of love harbours transformative political potential in a way that Arendtian ‘respectability politics’ does not. To make that case, this paper re-reads Augustine’s controversial defence of coercion in Epistle 93, both in light of Peter van Nuffelen’s recent work on coercion and with an eye to contemporary theo-political applications of the letter. Doing so will allow us to better appreciate how, for Augustine, the coercive force of the Christian community was akin to a “mother’s love.” (93.13.53)

Felicity Harley: Magi in Motion: marking identity in early Christian art

From the Constantinian period onwards, the story of the “wise men” who traveled from the east to Jerusalem and Judea in search of the Messiah played a prominent role in Christian art. The iconography of their adoration across the third-sixth centuries has been closely studied. While much scholarly attention has focused on clothing and gesture as pictorial strategies by which to mark their identity, and their “otherness”, this paper turns attention to the representation of motion. Focusing on images produced in Rome during the fourth and fifth centuries, it will argue that the iconography of movement within the scene contained important information for the ancient viewer about the identity of the Magi, and so preserves evidence about the intersection of cultures in early Christianity.

Metha Hokke: Ambrose on misericordia in his virginity treatises

In his virginity treatises, Ambrose emphasizes human effort and individual spiritual growth in the choice for and perseverance of a virginal way of life. How does this relate to the virtue of misericordia? What is the connection between divine and human misericordia? Does man’s reaction to God’s misericordia(fides, pietas, chastity, virginity, charity) in the virginity treatises proper (De Virginibus, De Virginitate, De Institutione Virginis, Exhortatio Virginitatis) differ from that in De Viduis? Finally, what can be said about misericordia’s opposite, the vice invidia? While envy is associated with equality and one’s nearest and dearest, misericordia is based on inequality and its recipients need clarification. The continuous passage De Virginitate1.1-3.13; 5.24b-26 provides a good starting point for a discussion of these questions in Ambrose’s virginity treatises, De Viduis included.

Ernest Marcos Hierro: The Contest of beauty and sainthood: The empress bride as the mirror of perfection

A handful of mostly hagiographical texts from the 9th and 10th centuries (The Lives of St. Philaretos the Merciful, of Empress Theodora, of Empress Theophano and of St. Irene Abbess of Chrysobalanton) provide apparently evidence of the practice of a bride-show at the Byzantine court to choose a new empress. While W. T. Treadgold (1979) affirmed its historicity based on these reports, L. Rydén (1985) denied it and dismissed them as literary fiction. M. Vinson (1999 and 2004) analysed them with good results as rhetorical pieces with narrative content in the context of the traditional logos basilikós in praise of an empress. The aim of my contribution is to resume my previous research on the subject (2001) and to focus on the way in which these texts draw the portrait of the ideal empress bride as the mirror of all human perfections. In accordance with a general literary development in Byzantine medieval age, her virtues are not merely rhetorically praised using traditional topoi such as in the case of Gregory of Nyssa but shown off through narratives in which they provide success to their owner. I intend to prove that, as in the previous cases of the Book of Esther and the story of Emperor Theodosius II and Aelia Eudocia in the Chronicle of John Malalas, the narrative of the bride-show provides an explanation for a marriage between unequal partners because of their different religious beliefs thus portraying the orthodox empress as superior to her heretical and/or unsuitable husband.

Vít Hušek: Scholia of Clement of Alexandria in the Arabic Gospel Catenae

The fragments of Clement of Alexandria in the Arabic Catenae were first discussed in H. Fleisch’s article (1947/48). Fleisch focused on Vat. ar. 452 and 410 (which are a translation of Curzon’s Coptic catena) and identified and translated into French four fragments on Matthew and one fragment (or two closely connected) on John. The fragments on Matthew (including one omitted by Fleisch) were discussed by F.J. Caubet Iturbe in his edition of the catena, with Spanish translation (1969-70). Recently, all fragments were examined by J. Plátová (2010, 2013, 2014 with Czech translation, and 2017).However, there are more fragments attributed to Clement in Vat. ar. 452 and 410. The present paper will discuss all fragments attributed to Clement: their relation to the Coptic catena and possible authors/sources.

Carol Harrison: Ordo Amoris and the Unknowability of God

Recent work on Augustine has highlighted the many ways in which his theology is informed by a conviction of God’s unknowability and ineffability. In this paper I would like to examine how Augustine uses the idea of an order of love to articulate something about the unknowable and ineffable Godhead. It will focus on those passages in which he reflects on naming God; his observation that names such as Deus or Idipsum are not so much names as gestures towards what cannot be named, and it will ask how these verbal gestures function. Using the work of scholars such as Roland Barthes ( A Lover’s Discourse) and Jean Luc Nancy (A l’Écoute), alongside what Augustine has to say about the double commandment of love as the meaning and end of Scripture, it will argue that words function in an order of love to evoke what they cannot express. It will pay particular attention to the role of voices which might be said to exceed words (and if there is space, compare Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa on the voice of the beloved in the Song of Songs).