Psychology

The churches Ignatius of Antioch addressed must have understood that obedience to the bishop was not only an activity that made for good organization, but one that both glorified God and marked an encounter with him in the person of the bishop; thus, one can really speak of a theo-logy of the episcopacy. This article will synthesize Ignatius’s teachings: that the bishops of the particular churches are “being bishoped by” (ἐπισκοπημένῳ) God the Father himself; that obedience to the bishop is true imitation of Christ; and that the obedience of the faithful is a call from the Spirit and brings incarnational union (ἕνωσις). He also recommended what may be considered “canonical norms” for sacramental celebrations and developed the moral implications for Christian living in harmony with the bishop. Finally, this article will explore the relevance of the letters of Ignatius for ecclesial life today.

In certain manuscripts of Sirach, wisdom proclaims herself the “mother of fair love” (Sir 24:18: ἐγὼ μήτηρ τῆς ἀγαπήσεως τῆς καλῆς), a title often attributed to Mary. This paper will explore the beauty of the Mother of God for the various calls or vocations of Christian life. The word “for” is quite intentional here, since hers is no mere appearance to gratify sense perception, but a beauty chosen for God and, therefore, able to elevate, to save, to purify all the creation. Since the radiance of this beauty penetrates into the whole created order, it also does so for the sake of each believer and each vocation. The main sources for the reflections herein will be the dormition homilies of the Church Fathers, the Marian Psalter attributed to St. Bonaventure, and the theology of the body of Pope St. John Paul II.
First, the Church Fathers’ homilies show how Mary’s bodily assumption is the eschatological sign for all believers, and hence the Virgin illumines the mystery of consecrated life especially. Furthermore, she plays an essential role in deification: “For if you had not gone before us, no one would ever become perfectly spiritual,” wrote St. Germanus, and “all things are made holy by your myrrh-like fragrance,” according to St. Andrew of Crete. Secondly, in exploring the Marian Psalter, one encounters in Our Lady a beauty most desirable and fecund that bears fruit for those who praise her. This beauty speaks to the universal call to holiness (universali vocatione ad sanctitatem). Beauty is a thread woven throughout the psalter’s praise of the Virgin. Her body and her face are beautiful; her beauty is pedagogical: “Beautiful are your ways: and your paths are peaceful. In you shine forth the beauty of chastity, the light of justice, and the splendor of truth.” The psalmist even writes in the language of eros concerning the virtue of Mary: “I have coveted your chastity from my youth up.” Finally, this article will show how the image of spousal love given by Pope St. John Paul II in his theology of the body points beyond Eve to Mary, the New Eve. He wrote, “Man appears in the visible world as the highest expression of the divine gift, because he bears within himself the inner dimension of the gift. And with it he carries into the world his particular likeness to God, with which he transcends and also rules his ‘visibility’ in the world, his bodiliness, his masculinity or femininity, his nakedness.” The femininity of the Virgin-Mother exists as gift to her Son, but as sign it also is a sacrament of divine love. In this section, particular attention will be paid to John Paul’s exegesis of the Song of Songs to see how the beauty of the vocation to spousal love is particularly illumined by the mutual love of Jesus and Mary and by the communion of persons in the Holy Family.

In the works of Maximus the Confessor, one clearly sees what could be termed the “book of creation,” which is inscribed with divine meaning. The essay proceeds along several lines: first, it considers the development of the doctrine of the λόγοι in Maximus’s predecessors; second, it considers Maximus’s own contributions to a developing “logology” in the Fathers, especially by Maximus’s pairing of the triads of being, well-being, and eternal being with creation, providence, and circumscription, which are treated in the third and fourth positions in the essay; finally, the essay explores what Maximus’s “logology” has to say to a contemporary account of the ecology of creation, especially with a view toward correcting the technocratic dominion over nature.

While Augustine seems to predate the articulation of the doctrine of the capital vices, in book II of his Confessions, Augustine provides a profound examination of the various vices as he examines himself after having stolen some fruit with some other youths when he was 16 years old. Presciently, Augustine manages to name or describe the sins that would come to be recognized as the capital vices, in addition to adding others as well.

This essay explores the antecedent mystical tradition of the Church in the era of the Fathers regarding divine darkness, not to be confused with the dark night of the soul. In particular, the rich mystical theology of Maximus the Confessor helps to illumine the darkness experienced by many believers. The first section of the essay will broadly survey the influences upon Maximus who helped him develop his theology of darkness and mystical ascent but will focus primarily on the thought of Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius the Areopagite. The second section will briefly explicate Maximus's understanding of progress in the knowledge of God by means of God's condescension and through natural and spiritual contemplation. The mystic thus ascends from the visible, through the invisible, to the divine as a movement toward the deification (θεώσις) of the soul in a sort of luminous darkness. Finally, the third section will locate Maximus's thought within the spiritual theology of the Church as lived by contemporary saints like St. Teresa of Calcutta, questioning whether what some people consider a " crisis of faith " might better be described as the " gift of darkness " in light of the theology of spiritual ascent.

This paper examines Maximus the Confessor’s thought concerning the pressing urgency of his day, namely, the threat posed by monothelitism and monenergism. What were the theological stakes, as he saw them, for orthodoxy that prompted such stark resistance to imperial attempts at a doctrinal compromise? The paper focuses first on the mode of union in the Incarnation and the manner of the assumption of the human nature, including a human will and a human operation. Maximus also manages to rescue orthodoxy’s fathers, especially Gregory Nazianzen, Cyril of Alexandria, and Dionysius and from his opponents’ interpretations of various aporiai. The second section considers Maximus’s presentation of the synthetic heterodoxy and its inevitable result, namely that one composite will in Jesus Christ—in isolating Christ from the Godhead on the one hand and from true humanity on the other—ultimately destroys all of theology. How can Christ save or divinize man if he is no longer like man? He cannot, says Maximus. Instead, Christ would become a sort of tertium quid, neither God nor man, in one movement unraveling Trinitarian theology, Christology, and soteriology. The concluding section briefly considers the immediate impact of Maximus from his martyrdom, including the matter of Constantinople III’s strange failure to mention Maximus in the conciliar text. Finally, this section explores Maximus in our own time, especially how the theology that developed in the seventh century through Maximus is a sort of answer to some of the difficulties of post-Enlightenment modernity.

Streszczenie
Niniejszy artykuł analizuje myśl Maksyma Wyznawcy dotyczącą palącego problemu jego czasów, a mianowicie zagrożenia stwarzanego przez monoteletyzm i monenergizm. Jakie było teologiczne ryzyko dla ortodoksji, i jak on je postrzegał, skoro stawił tak mocny opór wobec cesarskich prób doktrynalnego kompromisu? Autor w pierwszej części artykułu omawia zagadnienie sposobu zjednoczenia we wcieleniu i przybrania natury ludzkiej, w tym ludzkiej woli i ludzkiego działania. Maksym Wyznawca potrafi bronić prawowierności Ojców, zwłaszcza Grzegorza z Nazjanzu, Cyryla Aleksandryjskiego i Dionizego, także w kontekście interpretacji różnych ¢por…ai przez swoich przeciwników. W drugiej części artykułu przeanalizowano ujęcie heterodoksji w ogólności przez Maksyma i jego końcowy wniosek, a mianowicie, że postrzeganie zjednoczenia natur w Jezusie Chrystusie – pozbawiając Go natury Boskiej z jednej strony oraz prawdziwej natury ludzkiej z drugiej – ostatecznie zniszczy wszystko w teologii. Chrystus nie może zbawiać lub przebóstwiać człowieka, skoro sam nie jest już jak człowiek. Zamiast tego, Chrystus stał się swego rodzaju tertium quid, ani samym Bogiem, ani samym człowiekiem, jednym ruchem rozwikłując teologię trynitarną, chrystologię i soteriologię. W sekcji końcowej autor pokrótce rozważa bezpośrednie skutki wynikłe z męczeństwa Maksyma, w tym kwestię dziwnego braku wzmianek o nim w tekstach Soboru Konstantynopoliatńskiego III. Wreszcie, autor odnosi się do Maksyma w kontekście naszych czasów, podejmując zwłaszcza następujące zagadnienie: jak jego teologia, powstała w VII wieku, może być swego rodzaju odpowiedzią na niektóre trudności post-oświeceniowej nowoczesności.

The Seven Deadly Sins: Sayings of the Fathers of the Church is the inaugural volume in a new series from The Catholic University of America Press. This series will feature a wide range of scholars compiling material from the Fathers of the Church series to focus on a specific area of theology. ...

Sacred Scripture did not neatly list the seven deadly sins, so where did this tradition come from? Unsurprisingly, it can be traced back to the Church Fathers. But were there eight or seven? In a sense, the answer is “both.” The tradition of the capital sins has a rich development in the patristic era, not only in the presentation of the list of vices but in the preaching and teaching of the early shepherds of the Church. So how do the capital sins spawn other vices in the soul? How does one cultivate the virtues that heal the soul from those vices? How are gluttony and lust related? Is sadness really a vice? How is vainglory different from pride? What role does almsgiving have in soothing the passion of anger? The Fathers of the Church answer these questions and more in this volume.

The capital vices are the gateway drugs to countless sins. The path of the book descends through the vices, culminating with their queen ruler, pride. The words of the Fathers will assist the reader in being more realistic about the attacks upon the soul. The text should also be edifying and medicinal. Since each chapter begins with vice and ends with virtue, one’s path through the chapters represents a sort of ascent out of vice and into the freedom of the virtues. The text gives special attention throughout to the thought of Augustine of Hippo, Evagrius of Pontus, John Cassian, Gregory the Great, and Maximus the Confessor.

Course Description: This course aims to examine the sayings of the Fathers of the Church on the capital vices/evil thoughts and the virtues that heal the soul of those vices. The course will primarily use a collection of quotes of the Fathers that is in production with CUA Press. At the most basic level, the course is going to introduce a) the tradition of the thoughts or vices that spawn other vices in the soul, and b) the virtues that are means for healing. A key theme for us is going to be discovering how the Fathers themselves saw these spiritual treasures as insights for healing the human condition of sin and brokenness. Since a study on vice alone would be plain drudgery, we will also be focusing on virtue and its relation to human nature. Other key themes we will take up during our course is how the Fathers used the presence of Christ, whether in the suffering other or in the suffering self, as a means for inspiring moral change and conversion.

Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar pushed back in various ways against the tide of historical criticism in the twentieth century. On the one hand Rahner wished to distance theology from biblical revelation in his turn towards the subject. In so doing, he sought to preserve theology from the rising tide of skepticism resulting from contemporary exegesis. His philosophical system left little room for historical revelation because of a fixation on individual revelation. Balthasar, on the other hand, questioned whether the Rahnerian system strips Christianity of the need to bear witness to the world, and relativizes Christ’s Incarnation. Balthasar saw the indestructible unity of the form (gestalt) presented to humanity in the revelation of Old and New Testaments as an antidote to the fragmentation within biblical studies. Because of gestalt, Scripture is more than a mere sum of its parts. For Balthasar, the faith of the exegete is an irreplaceable requisite for accurate hermeneutics. Dispensing with the revelatory character of the Scriptures would also be unscientific; it is an unsuitable approach to a text that calls one to bear witness. Balthasar thus correctly called for a theological hermeneutic whereby the faithful exegete recognizes the unity of the scriptural account. Full paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/heyj.13041

An exegetical survey of the Johannine Corpus (Gospel, Epistles and Revelation) using historical and literary-rhetorical methods with the goal of equipping students with the necessary tools to exegete these Scriptures for use in preaching, teaching and in pastoral ministry