International Network for Byzantine Philosophy

  A fascinating excerpt from John Panteleimon Manoussakis, The Ethics of Time: A Phenomenology and Hermeneutics of Change (Bloomsbury Press, 2017). The antinomic unity of heaven and hell was first introduced by Origen in one of his early writings, the Exhortation to Martyrdom , and was further developed in his refutation of Celsus. In the Exhortation to Martyrdom we meet the idea of the self ’s division (διαίρεσις) and separation (χωρισμός) from itself, or at least from a part of itself. Already at this nascent stage, this theory is invoking the scriptural passage of 1 Cor. 3:10–15. Later in the same work the idea of the coincidence of salvation and condemnation is articulated with the aid of a double metaphor: that of the word of God as a sword that cuts through the self ’s interiority (based on Heb. 4:12), and that of God as a purifying fi re (attested in a number of scriptural passages). These two metaphors are then combined in order to support the theory that, at the end of ...

An intriguing excerpt from Professor Torstein Theodor Tollefsen’s introduction to his monograph, St Theodore the Studite’s Defence of the Icons: Theology and Philosophy in Ninth-Century Byzantium (Oxford University Press, 2018). From Theodore the Studite’s polemics there emerges a philosophy of images, a doctrine that demonstrates the theological relevance of images in Christianity. The icons are memorials of events of salvation history. On a deeper level the contemplation of images together with the hearing of the word of God facilitate access to the realities of faith, and both contemplation and hearing open to theological understanding and personal experience. Icons, it is claimed, witness to eternal truth and give access to this truth. As we shall see, this was a controversial issue in Theodore’s times. In fact, it seems to the present author that Theodore’s philosophy of images is worked out as a justification of the possibility for the believer of encountering the prototype of t...