Johan Leemans

KU Leuven | ku leuven · Research unit for History of Church and Theology

After a secular career as sophistès and some time as a priest in the community of his native city Pelusium, Isidorus became a monk in the Nitrian desert, not too far from Pelusium. A corpus of c. 2,000 (mostly short) letters is his sole legacy. In this contribution I study 12 letters Isidorus wrote to Strategius, a monk living in a monastery with w...

The history of Christianity shows that time and again people die for their beliefs. In the present paper we examine how, despite this horrible reality, Christians always have been (and still are) fascinated by martyrdom. In images and rituals, theological reflection and literature, historical research and popular cult, the role and the significance...

Can writings of the church fathers related to the field of social ethics be of value to contemporary discussions on the topic? In addressing this question, the authors of this book discuss the exciting challenges that scholars of both early Christianity and contemporary Catholic social thought face regarding the interaction of historical sources an...

This article offers a close reading of the Homily on the Lord's Ascension by Diadochus of Photice. Within an overall monastic and spiritual oeuvre, this homily at first seems an isolated Fremdkörper. The presence of spiritual and monastic themes, such as divinization through a synergy of grace and free will and the ideal of humility, link it to Dia...

The sentence ‘For at that time the group around Maximian was enjoying imperial power’, the only chronological indicator in Gregory of Nyssa's In Theodorum, may be identified on literary grounds as a scribal interpolation. When this is recognized, the Passio Theodori (BHG 1761) becomes the oldest evidence for the dating of Theodore's martyrdom.

The writings and sermons of the Cappadocian Fathers were deeply indebted to the inheritance of the classical rhetoric of the Second Sophistic. This contribution studies the use of this rhetoric in Gregory's panegyrics on martyrs: the Homily on Theodore the Recruit, the First (Ia and Ib) and Second Homilies on the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste and the Fi...

This article studies the metaphor of the agonothetes (president of the games) as it is applied on God or Christ. First I sketch how the original historical background of the games in Greek, Hellenistic and Roman times, together with the vocabulary developed within the philosophical genre of the diatribe, brought about the agonistic language of the...

This book presents fresh, lively translations of fourteen such homilies, the majority for the first time in English. The homilies were delivered in some of the main cities of the Greek East of the later Roman Empire, by well-known figures such as Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom, as well as the equally gifted preachers Asteri...

La chronologie precise des ecrits de Gregoire de Nysse est difficile a etablir en raison du manque de references a des evenements datables. L'A. propose une date alternative - a celle etablie par Danielou - au Premier Encomium sur les quarante martyrs de Sebaste de Gregoire, deux homelies, la premiere (Ia) d'un 9 mars, la seconde (Ib) d'un 10 mars....

Focusing on the role of the martyr as example, this article analyses the process of religious and spiritual education which took place in the context of the martyr cult in Cappadoda and Pontus in ca. 350‐400 AD. The message that the martyr embodied in an examplary way Christian values and hence was worthy of imitation, was conveyed in a double way:...

13 studies on Greek-speaking preachers and audiences in a period from the beginning of the second century A.D. to the beginning of the tenth century cover themes including the identity of Greek-speaking preachers, the circumstances of delivery, the different genres of homiletic, the adaptation of the tropes of Classical rhetoric by Christian preach...

L'article presente une bibliographie sur Athanase d'Alexandrie,. Les travaux ont ete publies entre 1985 et 1998 et concernent la biographie d'Athanase, ses ecrits, ses oeuvres ascetiques, ses lettres et sa theologie.

In this volume, Khaled Anatolios presents a comprehensive study of Saint Athanasius, one of the most influential figures in the development of Christian doctrine. He analyzes the coherence of Athanasius' theology by relating the various aspects of his doctrine - God, creation, theological anthropology, Christology and redemption, and the life of gr...

L'edition critique de l'oeuvre Epistula ad episcopos Aegypti et Libyae (EpEpisc) a ete publiee en 1996. Cette lettre d'Athanase d'Alexandrie ne constitue pas seulement un document important pour l'Eglise egyptienne du 4e siecle, date de sa composition, mais egalement une source pour le texte Thalia d'Arius qui eclaire la premiere etape de la contro...

L'A. discute les emprunts qu'Athanase d'Alexandrie a operes sur le Livre de la Sagesse. Personne, en effet, avant notre A. n'avait tente de recherche sur le lien entre ce Pere de l'Eglise orientale et les Livres sapientiels. Il s'agit par la de montrer la place croissante qu'occupe le Livre de la Sagesse dans la patristique. Il s'agit aussi de dete...