Books by Thomas Arentzen
What is the role of gender in Eastern Christianity? In this volume, Orthodox experts of different... more What is the role of gender in Eastern Christianity? In this volume, Orthodox experts of different disciplines and cultural backgrounds tackle this complex question. They engage critically with gender issues within their own tradition. Rather than simply accepting pervasive assumptions and practices, the authors challenge readers to reconsider historically or theologically justified views by offering nuanced insights into the tradition. The first part of the book explores normative positions in Orthodox texts and contexts. From examinations of Scripture and hagiography to re-evaluations of monastic, patriarchal, and legal sources, it sheds new light on gender issues in Orthodox Christianity. The second part considers how gendered expectations shape individuals' participation in Orthodox liturgical life and how ecclesial contexts inflect gender theologically. The chapters reflect diverse Orthodox voices brought together to foster new understandings of the ways gender shapes Orthodox religious lives and beliefs. Rethinking what has been inherited from tradition, the authors proffer new perspectives on what it means to be a man or woman within Orthodoxy in the twenty-first century.
Orthodox Tradition and Human Sexuality, Sep 2022
Sex is a difficult issue for contemporary Christians, but the past decade has witnessed a newfoun... more Sex is a difficult issue for contemporary Christians, but the past decade has witnessed a newfound openness regarding the topic among Eastern Orthodox Christians. Both the theological trajectory and the historical circumstances of the Orthodox Church differ radically from those of other Christian denominations that have already developed robust and creative reflections on sexuality and sexual diversity. Within its unique history, theology, and tradition, Orthodox Christianity holds rich resources for engaging challenging questions of sexuality in new and responsive ways. What is at stake in questions of sexuality in the Orthodox tradition? What sources and theological convictions can uniquely shape Orthodox understandings of sexuality? This volume aims to create an agora for discussing sex, and not least the sexualities that are often thought of as untraditional in Orthodox contexts.
Through fifteen distinct chapters, written by leading scholars and theologians, this book offers a developed treatment of sexuality in the Orthodox Christian world by approaching the subject from scriptural, patristic, theological, historical, and sociological perspectives. Chapters devoted to practical and pastoral insights, as well as reflections on specific cultural contexts, engage the human realities of sexual diversity and Christian life. From re-thinking scripture to developing theologies of sex, from eschatological views of eros to re-evaluations of the Orthodox responses to science, this book offers new thinking on pressing, present-day issues and initiates conversations about homosexuality and sexual diversity within Orthodox Christianity.
This coauthored monograph examines the many ways Byzantines lived with their trees. It takes seri... more This coauthored monograph examines the many ways Byzantines lived with their trees. It takes seriously theological and hagiographic tree engagement as expressions of that culture’s deep involvement—and even fascination—with the arboreal. These pages tap into the current attention paid to plants in a wide range of scholarship, an attention that involves the philosophy of plant life as well as scientific discoveries of how communicative trees may be, and how they defend themselves. Considering writings on and images of trees from Late Antiquity and medieval Byzantium sympathetically, the book argues for an arboreal imagination at the root of human aspirations to know and draw close to the divine.
Wisdom on the Move explores the complexity and flexibility of wisdom traditions in Late Antiquity... more Wisdom on the Move explores the complexity and flexibility of wisdom traditions in Late Antiquity and beyond. This book studies how sayings, maxims and expressions of spiritual insight travelled across linguistic and cultural borders, between different religions and milieus, and how this multicultural process reshaped these sayings and anecdotes. Wisdom on the Move takes the reader on a journey through late antique religious traditions, from manuscript fragments and folios via the monastic cradle of Egypt, across linguistic and cultural barriers, through Jewish and Biblical wisdom, monastic sayings, and Muslim interpretations. Particular attention is paid to the monastic Apophthegmata Patrum, arguably the most important genre of wisdom literature in the early Christian world.
This book explores how the Virgin Mary's life is told in hymns, sermons, icons, art, and other me... more This book explores how the Virgin Mary's life is told in hymns, sermons, icons, art, and other media in the Byzantine Empire before AD 1204. A group of international specialists examines material and textual evidence from both Byzantine and Muslim-ruled territories that was intended for a variety of settings and audiences and seeks to explain why Byzantine artisans and writers chose to tell stories about Mary, the Mother of God, in such different ways. Sometimes the variation reflected the theological or narrative purposes of story-tellers; sometimes it expressed their personal spiritual preoccupations. Above all, the variety of aspects that this holy figure assumed in Byzantium reveals her paradoxical theological position as meeting-place and mediator between the divine and created realms. Narrative, whether 'historical', theological, or purely literary, thus played a fundamental role in the development of the Marian cult from Late Antiquity onward.
288pp 978-0-8122-4907-1 £52.00 HB Few interpreters demonstrate such refined poetic sensibilities ... more 288pp 978-0-8122-4907-1 £52.00 HB Few interpreters demonstrate such refined poetic sensibilities as Thomas Arentzen does in his reading of Romanos's songs. His engaging-at times, daring-analysis exposes the paradox of portraying Mary as both an erotic virgin and an exemplar for connecting to Christ.
Articles, Essays, and Chapters by Thomas Arentzen
Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies, 2021
This article explores the more-than-human characterization of the Theotokos in the famous Akathis... more This article explores the more-than-human characterization of the Theotokos in the famous Akathistos Hymn. The Mother of God emerged as an intercessional figure in the Christian imagination during late antiquity, but the formative period of mariology is still partly uncharted territory to modern scholarship. Reflecting on its rich landscape imagery and chora language, the article argues that the Akathistos minimizes the human traits of the Theotokos, rendering her more as a spatial phenomenon. In the hymn, we may glimpse traces of Marian ideas less developed during subsequent periods, ideas which gesture toward what we may call a "dark mariology." The Logos incarnates into more than human flesh, and the womb has a close affinity with the landscape. The Akathistos evokes the vision of a wider nonhuman participation in the incarnation rooted in the natural landscape of the Theotokos.
SANG, 2021
As the father of Lutheran hymns in the Norwegian Nynorsk language,
Elias Blix (1836-1902) looms i... more As the father of Lutheran hymns in the Norwegian Nynorsk language,
Elias Blix (1836-1902) looms in the Scandinavian country’s song
culture, and his compositions remain popular, both inside and outside
the church. Blix lent significant space to the more-than-human
in his poetry, expressing the Christian gospel in the changing of seasons
or the budding of plants. This article explores a baptismal hymn
from a new-materialist perspective. It demonstrates how the poet
cast the initiation rite as a dynamic, erotic dance between the two
elements of water and spirit/breath/air. With what one might call an
ecocentric sensibility, Blix adumbrated a Christian understanding
that decenters the human, as baptismal transformation unfolds with
the agency of the elements.
Studia Patristica. Vol. CIV – Papers presented at the Eighteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2019: Volume 1: Introduction; Historica, pp 127–137, 2021
Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2020
Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language, 2020
The article explores the Norwegian ‘national ballad’ Draumkvæde (the Dream Song) in Maren Ramskei... more The article explores the Norwegian ‘national ballad’ Draumkvæde (the Dream Song) in Maren Ramskeid’s version. This work has traditionally been interpreted as a folklore adaptation of medieval visionary literature such as the Vision of Tundale, related to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The ballad, however, lacks demons and devils and infernal torture – it is even almost completely devoid of human beings. Instead it tells of a corporeal encounter with an imagined natural landscape. This dreamscape of the song is intimately intertwined with the local terrain of the singer. Maren Ramskeid engaged her own landscape in Telemark, the article argues, to decentre the canonized Christian text and the cultivated Christian building. Speaking an oral outdoor theology, she destabilized the heaven–hell dualism and envisioned a mythological landscape where nature turns dangerously and painfully on those who do not abide by its unwritten norms, but where all are eventually saved by a final judgement in a place called Broksvalin.
Signum: katolsk orientering om kyrka, kultur och samhälle, 2020
Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift, 2020
It is often claimed that in Christian tradition trees and plants are reduced to passive material ... more It is often claimed that in Christian tradition trees and plants are reduced to passive material created for human exploitation, that the only important living creatures are Adam and Eve. But could such a view have less to do with Christianity as a religion and more to do with Cartesian notions in Western modernity? Earlier Christians undoubtedly exhibited a fascination with trees that exceeded a mere interest in the wood of the Cross or typologies thereof. According to literature produced by pre-modern Christians, they interacted actively with the arboreal realm, and trees interacted with them. The same body of literature suggests a sense of affinity between human beings and wooden beings. Exploring diverse texts about trees from the first Christian millennium, the article demonstrates that many Christians ascribed agency to plants. Trees could behave and communicate in various ways, those studied here were pious and acted with devotion in relation to the holy.
Scandinavian Journal of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 2019
Wisdom on the Move: Late Antique Traditions in Multicultural Conversation. Essays in Honor of Samuel Rubenson, 2020
Wisdom on the Move explores the complexity and flexibility of wisdom traditions in Late Antiquity... more Wisdom on the Move explores the complexity and flexibility of wisdom traditions in Late Antiquity and beyond. This book studies how sayings, maxims and expressions of spiritual insight travelled across linguistic and cultural borders, between different religions and milieus, and how this multicultural process reshaped these sayings and anecdotes. Wisdom on the Move takes the reader on a journey through late antique religious traditions, from manuscript fragments and folios via the monastic cradle of Egypt, across linguistic and cultural barriers, through Jewish and Biblical wisdom, monastic sayings, and Muslim interpretations. Particular attention is paid to the monastic Apophthegmata Patrum, arguably the most important genre of wisdom literature in the early Christian world.
The Garb of Being: Embodiment and Other Pursuits of Holiness in Late Ancient Christianity, 2020
The Reception of the Virgin in Byzantium: Marian Narratives in Texts and Images (eds. Arentzen & Cunningham), 2019
I quote the English translation of the Homily on the Annunciation from Cunningham's work, with mi... more I quote the English translation of the Homily on the Annunciation from Cunningham's work, with minor adjustments; I also follow her numbering and give the page number from the edition in parentheses. I use the edition of D. Fecioru , ' Un nou gen de predică în omiletica ortodoxă ' ,
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Books by Thomas Arentzen
Through fifteen distinct chapters, written by leading scholars and theologians, this book offers a developed treatment of sexuality in the Orthodox Christian world by approaching the subject from scriptural, patristic, theological, historical, and sociological perspectives. Chapters devoted to practical and pastoral insights, as well as reflections on specific cultural contexts, engage the human realities of sexual diversity and Christian life. From re-thinking scripture to developing theologies of sex, from eschatological views of eros to re-evaluations of the Orthodox responses to science, this book offers new thinking on pressing, present-day issues and initiates conversations about homosexuality and sexual diversity within Orthodox Christianity.
Articles, Essays, and Chapters by Thomas Arentzen
Elias Blix (1836-1902) looms in the Scandinavian country’s song
culture, and his compositions remain popular, both inside and outside
the church. Blix lent significant space to the more-than-human
in his poetry, expressing the Christian gospel in the changing of seasons
or the budding of plants. This article explores a baptismal hymn
from a new-materialist perspective. It demonstrates how the poet
cast the initiation rite as a dynamic, erotic dance between the two
elements of water and spirit/breath/air. With what one might call an
ecocentric sensibility, Blix adumbrated a Christian understanding
that decenters the human, as baptismal transformation unfolds with
the agency of the elements.
Through fifteen distinct chapters, written by leading scholars and theologians, this book offers a developed treatment of sexuality in the Orthodox Christian world by approaching the subject from scriptural, patristic, theological, historical, and sociological perspectives. Chapters devoted to practical and pastoral insights, as well as reflections on specific cultural contexts, engage the human realities of sexual diversity and Christian life. From re-thinking scripture to developing theologies of sex, from eschatological views of eros to re-evaluations of the Orthodox responses to science, this book offers new thinking on pressing, present-day issues and initiates conversations about homosexuality and sexual diversity within Orthodox Christianity.
Elias Blix (1836-1902) looms in the Scandinavian country’s song
culture, and his compositions remain popular, both inside and outside
the church. Blix lent significant space to the more-than-human
in his poetry, expressing the Christian gospel in the changing of seasons
or the budding of plants. This article explores a baptismal hymn
from a new-materialist perspective. It demonstrates how the poet
cast the initiation rite as a dynamic, erotic dance between the two
elements of water and spirit/breath/air. With what one might call an
ecocentric sensibility, Blix adumbrated a Christian understanding
that decenters the human, as baptismal transformation unfolds with
the agency of the elements.
My paper:
Mary as «scala caelestis» in Eighth and Ninth Century Italy
The ‘crypt’ of the abbot Epiphanius (824-42) in the monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno (Isernia, central Italy), in the former Langobardia Minor, displays what is usually recognized as the most important painted cycle in the early medieval southern Italy. The present paper concentrates on an image of the Virgin depicted in the vault of the apse. She sits on a throne, holding a book where is written «beatam me dicent,» a quotation from the Magnificat hymn (Luke 1,46-55) – the words with which Mary, after the Annunciation, addressed her cousin Elizabeth. The throne, the crown, and five archangels paraded in the lower section of the vault as celestial guardians, make her appear as the Queen of Heaven ruling with her Son, who is depicted on a throne above her in the vault. The painted cycle of the crypt has been analysed by generations of art historians, among whom Pietro Toesca (1904) was the first to trace a connection between its contents and the writings of the Gaulish author Ambrosius Autpertus († 784), a monk, briefly abbot, and a renowned theologian active at San Vincenzo al Volturno in the second half of the eighth century. Toesca explained the scene of the Virgin in the vault with a passage of Autpertus’ Sermo de adsumptione sanctae Mariae, where Mary, after her transitus is presented as «super angelos elevatam cum Christo regnare», as «reginam caelorum» with Him as «regem … angelorum». Autpertus quotes the Magnificat in the same context, celebrating the humility of Mary that made her the «scala caelestis,» i.e. the ladder to Heaven from which God descended to Earth – thus adopting a new metaphor for describing her role in the history of Salvation. In the West, before Autpertus, the word scala is to be found indeed in a great number of western Church Fathers. But in Ambrose, in his contemporary Zeno of Verona and in Jerome, ladder appears with reference to the Cross; in Jerome and Zeno with reference to the concordance of the two Testaments; in Augustine, Jerome, Cassiodorus, Caesarius of Arles, Isidore and Bede with reference to Jacob’s ladder. As for Bede, in another passage, when recalling the teaching of Benedict of Nursia, he says that the rungs in Jacob’s ladder are made of humility, since humility is the way to spiritual perfection in the monastic mentality. Benedict of Nursia had in fact written in his monastic Rule that the ladder represents our terrestrial life, and only by having a humble heart can the ladder be raised by God to Heaven. It appears then that the early Western monastic interpretation of Jacob’s ladder as a ‘ladder of humility’ that represents the difficult ascent to God, in the doctrinal landscape of Autpertus overlapped with the Byzantine metaphor of Mary as ‘ladder to Heaven,’ a metaphor widespread by the Akathistos and by the early eighth-c. Byzantine homiletic production. But historians of theology has not investigated the origins of Autpertus’ phraseology, notwithstanding the fact his above-mentioned homily is the earliest extant original homily in Latin for the feast of the Dormitio celebrated on the 15th of August.
In the array of epithets and metaphors developed by the eastern tradition on Mary, she is called «joy of all generations» in the famous hymn Akathistos (IX, 17), which was known and sung also in the West by Greek-speaking communities. The main iconophile writers of the early eighth century connected the Magnificat to the moment of the transitus in their homilies on the Dormitio. Among them, Andrew of Crete declared the Magnificat as the most suitable praise for Mary. John of Damascus observed that Mary truly predicted that she would be called blessed by all generations, not from the moment of her death but from the moment of the conception of Christ, and that death has not made her blessed, but she has made death glorious, destroying its horror and showing death to be a joy. Germanos of Constantinople asked the Virgin to guide the steps of his mind with her ready hand on the ladder to Heaven, she who rightly said that all generations of men and women would call her blessed. Although the modalities of transmission of early iconophile homilies to the West have not been investigated, it remains the case that Autpertus adopts the same phrasing, metaphors, epithets to describe Mary, her Assumption into Heaven, her role in the history of Salvation. These homilies need to be seen as the missing link between Eastern Mariology and Autpertus, who is generally acknowledged as the first Western medieval Mariologist. This paper is aimed at illustrating how the literary image of Mary taken up to Heaven developed by early iconophile authors in the East has been received a few decades later in the West by Autpertus, and how this literary image was eventually translated in visual imagery in Autpertus’ monastery in the years 824-42, pre-dating the earliest examples of the image of the Dormitio/Koimesis in which Mary is shown on her death bed surrounded by the Apostles. This will be accomplished not through a mechanical comparison of the painted image to earlier theological writings, but by trying to reconstruct the modalities of circulation of theological concepts between East and West in the period of the ‘image struggle’, their influence on the religious mentality, and their ‘translation’ into visual imagery.