1st Edition

The Fathers and Beyond Church Fathers between Ancient and Medieval Thought

By Marcia L. Colish Copyright 2008
    348 Pages
    by Routledge

    348 Pages
    by Routledge

    The papers in this second selection of articles by Professor Colish focus on thinkers of the patristic age, and relate to her three monographic studies in this area published over the last two decades. At the same time these papers look beyond the patristic period, both backward to these authors' appropriation of the classical and Christian traditions, and forward to their function as authorities in later medieval intellectual history, from the Carolingian Renaissance to Anselm of Canterbury, the scholastics, and Dante. Themes which these papers address include the transmission and use of Platonism and Stoicism, logic and linguistic theory, and the ethics of lying, moral indifference, and the salvation of the virtuous pagan.

    Contents: Introduction; The Neoplatonic tradition: the contribution of Marius Victorinus; St Augustine's rhetoric of silence revisited; The Stoic hypothetical syllogisms and their transmission in the Latin West through the early Middle Ages; Cosmetic theology: the transformation of a Stoic theme; Cicero, Ambrose, and Stoic ethics: transmission or transformation?; Classicism and catechesis in the patriarch treatises of Ambrose of Milan; Ambrose of Milan on chastity; Why the Portiana? Reflections on the Milanese basilica crisis of 386; Carolingian debates over nihil and tenebrae: a study in theological method; Mathematics, the Monad, and John the Scot's conception of nihil; John the Scot's Christology and soteriology in relation to his Greek sources; 11th-century grammar in the thought of St Anselm; St Anselm's philosophy of language reconsidered; The Stoic theory of verbal signification and the problem of lies and false statements from antiquity to St Anselm; Rethinking lying in the 12th century; Sanz 'nfamia e sanza lodo: moral neutrality from Alan of Lille to Dante; The virtuous pagan: Dante and the Christian tradition; Index.

    Biography

    Marcia L. Colish, Yale University, USA.

    ’... Colish's erudition was for me a source of all sorts of information and insights.’ The Catholic Historical Review