Christian Platonism

A History

Alexander J. B. Hampton & John Peter Kenney (eds.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020

Description

Platonism has played a central role in Christianity and is essential to a deep understanding of the Christian theological tradition. At times, Platonism has constituted an essential philosophical and theological resource, furnishing Christianity with an intellectual framework that has played a key role in its early development, and in subsequent periods of renewal. Alternatively, it has been considered a compromising influence, conflicting with the faith’s revelatory foundations and distorting its inherent message. In both cases the fundamental importance of Platonism, as a force which Christianity defined itself by and against, is clear. Written by an international team of scholars, this landmark volume examines the history of Christian Platonism from antiquity to the present day, covers key concepts, and engages issues such as the environment, natural science and materialism.

(Text from the publisher) 

Table of contents

Christian Platonism

Introduction  Part  p. 1-10

Christianity and Platonism  p. 3-10

I – Concepts  p. 11-140

1.1 – The Perennial Value of Platonism  p. 13-33

1.2 – The Ideas as Thoughts of God  p. 34-52

1.3 – The One and the Trinity  p. 53-78

1.4 – Creation, Begetting, Desire, and Re-Creation p. 79-100

1.5 – The Concept of Theology  p. 101-121

1.6 – Participation: Aquinas and His Neoplatonic Sources  p. 122-140

II – History  p. 141-352

2.1 – The Bible and Early Christian Platonism  p. 143-161

2.2 – Platonism and Christianity in Late Antiquity  p. 162-182

2.3 – Christian Platonism in the Medieval West  p. 183-206

2.4 – Christian Platonism in Byzantium  p. 207-226

2.5 – Renaissance Christian Platonism and Ficino p. 227-245

2.6 Northern Renaissance Platonism from Nicholas of Cusa to Jacob Böhme p. 246-279

2.7 – Christian Platonism in Early Modernity  p. 280-302

2.8 – Christian Platonism in the Age of Romanticism  p. 303-321

2.9 – Christian Platonism and Modernity  p. 322-352

III – Engagements  p. 353-491

3.1 – Christian Platonism and Natural Science  p. 355-380

3.2 – Christian Platonism, Nature and Environmental Crisis  p. 381-407

Link

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/christian-platonism/FFBC8CEBA9F87CBC6ED52F14FA8D6FED#fndtn-information

The Final Pagan Generation

Rome’s Unexpected Path to Christianity

Edward J. Watts, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020

Description

The Final Pagan Generation recounts the fascinating story of the lives and fortunes of the last Romans born before the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. Edward J. Watts traces their experiences of living through the fourth century’s dramatic religious and political changes, when heated confrontations saw the Christian establishment legislate against pagan practices as mobs attacked pagan holy sites and temples. The emperors who issued these laws, the imperial officials charged with implementing them, and the Christian perpetrators of religious violence were almost exclusively young men whose attitudes and actions contrasted markedly with those of the earlier generation, who shared neither their juniors’ interest in creating sharply defined religious identities nor their propensity for violent conflict. Watts examines why the « final pagan generation »—born to the old ways and the old world in which it seemed to everyone that religious practices would continue as they had for the past two thousand years—proved both unable to anticipate the changes that imperially sponsored Christianity produced and unwilling to resist them. A compelling and provocative read, suitable for the general reader as well as students and scholars of the ancient world.

(Text from the publisher)

Table of contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Growing Up in the Cities of the Gods
2. Education in an Age of Imagination
3. The System
4. Moving Up in an Age of Uncertainty
5. The Apogee
6. The New Pannonian Order
7. Christian Youth Culture in the 360s and 370s
8. Bishops, Bureaucrats, and Aristocrats under Gratian, Valentinian II, and Theodosius
9. Old Age in a Young Man’s Empire
10. A Generation’s Legacy

Bibliography

Index

Link

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520379220/the-final-pagan-generation

The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics

Patristic Philosophy from the Cappadocian

Fathers to John of Damascus

Johanes Zachhuber, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020

Description

It has rarely been recognized that the Christian writers of the first millennium pursued an ambitious and exciting philosophical project alongside their engagement in the doctrinal controversies of their age. The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics offers, for the first time, a full analysis of this Patristic philosophy. It shows how it took its distinctive shape in the late fourth century and gives an account of its subsequent development until the time of John of Damascus. The book falls into three main parts. The first starts with an analysis of the philosophical project underlying the teaching of the Cappadocian fathers, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus. This philosophy, arguably the first distinctively Christian theory of being, soon became near-universally shared in Eastern Christianity. Just a few decades after the Cappadocians, all sides in the early Christological controversy took its fundamental tenets for granted. Its application to the Christological problem thus appeared inevitable. Yet it created substantial conceptual problems. Parts two and three describe in detail how these problems led to a series of increasingly radical modifications of the Cappadocian philosophy. In part two, Zachhuber explores the miaphysite opponents of the Council of Chalcedon, while in part three he discusses the defenders of the Council from the early sixth to the eighth century. Through this overview, the book reveals this period as one of remarkable philosophical creativity, fecundity, and innovation.

(Text from the publisher) 

Table of contents

Introduction

Part I: The Rise of the Classical Theory

The Cappadocians and their Christian Philosophy

The Rise of the Classical Theory and the Challenge of Christology

Part II: The case against Chalcedon

Severus of Antioch: A conservative revolutionary

John Philoponus: Energetic revision of the classical theory

Damian of Alexandria and Peter of Callinicus: Miaphysite antitritheism

Part III: Chalcedonian Transformations of the Cappadocian Theory

Laying the Foundations: John the Grammarian and Leontius of Byzantium

From the Council of Constantinople to the Monenergist Controversy

The Climax of Chalcedonian Philosophy

Conclusion: Patristic Philosophy and its Nachleben

Link

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198859956.001.0001/oso-9780198859956