This article examines how Gregory of Nazianzus (Gregory the Theologian, ca. 330-390) constructs an image of the priest using political metaphor and vocabulary from previous traditions. The author chooses a specific text from ancient political thought that was close to his own understanding of Christian tradition (Plato’s Republic). In turn, the biblical material he uses comprises fragments that are highly political in nature (for example, criticism of the rulers of Israel by the prophets). Combining these texts first of all leads (...) to their transformation, and secondly allows him to piece together an image of the priest as ruler of the Church. The combination of these two traditions makes it possible to describe both the historical and contemporary legitimization of this image – one novel for Late Antiquity – and to define the main characteristics of its ethos. (shrink)

The article considers three episcopal assemblies held in Gaul, which the manuscript tradition has not preserved, all involved in doctrinal debates on grace and free will. The first two, the council of Arles and the synod of Lyon, took place in the second half of the fifth century and concerned the affair of the presbyter Lucidus. The third is the Council of Valence that met just before the Second Council of Orange (529), that is, the council that marks the “resolution” (...) of the conflict and also the only documented. With the idea that the history of the councils occupies important points in the reconstruction of the debate on grace and free will, even in the case of councils whose acts have not been transmitted, the article seeks to enhance these three events by reconsidering indirect sources. The episcopal meetings of Arles, Lyon, and Valence are, indeed, an integral part of the doctrinal work on grace and free will, which for about a century interested monastic and ecclesiastical circles in Gaul. Moreover, the recovery of their history restores well the complexity of the cultural, religious and political climate in which they took place. (shrink)

The letter from Arius to Alexander of Alexandria, also known as «Arius’ profession of faith», has been transmitted in its original language, Greek, by Athanasius (De Synodis) and Epiphanius (Panarion). Also, Hilary of Poitiers quotes a Latin translation of the letter twice (De Trinitate IV and VI). The comparative study of the two Greek versions and the Latin translation reveals small textual variants, which points to the independence of the three testimonies. The textual variant (κτιστὴν, instead of κριτὴν) is the (...) most interesting; it comes from a Greek version that has not been preserved. However, our work has been able to reconstruct this lost textual variant using an ancient and forgotten conjecture of Erich Klostermann. (shrink)

This article studies an illuminated manuscript of St. Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos: Vat. lat. 451 (Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana). The manuscript was commissioned by the bishop Giovanni Capogallo, when he was in Lombardy in close contact with the court of the duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti. The article examines the cultural milieu of Pavia in the early 15th century, highlighting the role of the Order of the Hermits of Saint Augustine in the monastery of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro. (...) The two incipit pages ff. 1r and 239r, illuminated by Michelino da Besozzo, are an example of the International Gothic style and this article analyses not only their stylistic aspect, but also their allegorical meaning, as an interesting case of decoration of a patristic text. (shrink)

Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries adopted Late Antique aesthetics, characterized by brilliance, dazzle and colors, to create a new form of imagination, where the corpses of the martyrs and their physical remains became shining bodies. Relics became a spiritual body, whose μετάληψις often produced roses or violets. Therefore there was a strict association in Late Antique Christianity among roses, relics and the colour red.

In the first part of this paper, published in issue 1 of Augustinianum 63 (2023), 9-45, we examined the question of whether Irenaeus of Lyons depended on the Exposition of Logia about the Lord of Papias of Hierapolis. In this second and final part we focus on the way Irenaeus used information which, since the first decades of the second century, had been attributed to presbyters of Asia and then in particular on the way he identifies the succession of presbyters (...) with that of bishops (primarily in Rome). He links the latter with Christian origins but also profoundly alters the function traditionally attributed to the presbyters themselves, within a system he devised in order to respond to urgent problems, in a context quite different from the era in which the traditions to which he appeals were born. (shrink)

Among Basil’s homiliae morales, a prominent place is occupied by the 15 sermons on the Psalter that have been preserved. The present study, as part of the editorial project of these homilies on behalf of the Sources Chrétiennes, seeks to shed light on a phenomenon that may have affected the texts of the Cappadocian, similar to what happened with some of Augustine’s Enarrationes. In fact, the collation of some ancient witnesses of the Basilian homilies, ignored by Garnier and thus by (...) the vulgata edition reprinted in PG 29, seems to suggest an early oral circulation of the discourse, identifiable through some textual traces, such as anacolutes, omissions of articles or explanatory parts, stylistically inelegant sentence structures, scriptural quotations not standardized according to the most widely used textual form, etc. The considerable contamination of the manuscript tradition makes it impossible to sketch a stemma that would allow the precise positioning of the individual codices reviewed. Nevertheless, the textual data collected by Bas., hom. in ps. 32, 33, 44 and 48, and presented here only in small part, have revealed the existence of two recensions: Ω1 and Ω2, where Ω2 represents the revised and corrected text after the death of Cappadoce, while the few surviving testimonies of Ω1, which represent a textus rudior, without stylistic revision and circulated without the author’s control, somehow hint at an echo, perhaps distant but in our opinion undeniable, of the oral language, i.e., of the original character of the works of this genre. (shrink)

Poem 10 of Paulinus of Nola is fundamental for understanding both his political thought and his mystical life. The reason for the disagreement between Paulinus and Ausonius is not, as has always been believed, the poet’s conversion to Christianity, but rather his attempt to transfer the secessus in villam from the sphere of Neoplatonism to that of Christianity. Paulinus thus claims a place in the history of ancient political thought, in overturning the classical concept of civis and giving new meaning (...) to aeternitas imperii, a fundamental concept of Roman imperial ideology. (shrink)

In this note we present the recent critical edition (with commentary and translation) of Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 1 published by the Fuentes Patrísticas collection at number 37. We present its distinctive features and its assets as a very useful tool for studies on Irenaeus and gnosticism. We hope, it will complement for interested scholars the previous edition of SCh 263-264.

The subjects of this research are the doctrine of providence, the criticism of fate, and the concept of divine makrothymia in the Greek letters of Isidore of Pelusium. These letters offer neither comprehensive theories nor compelling arguments but relevant, though miscellaneous, information which may help in tracing Isidore’s intellectual profile. More specifically, this study explores the interaction of Isidore with his sources, and unearths substantial new evidence of the direct influence on him of the works of Chrysostom and Pseudo-Chrysostom.

The article discusses the meaning of chaos in the series of four elements introduced by Irenaeus in haer. 1, 30, 1 to characterize the system of the so-called “Ophites”. Contrary to the explanation that renders this Gnostic system dualistic, it is argued here that, in reality, the “Ophites” of Irenaeus anticipates what we find in other Gnostic families (Naassenes, On the Origin of the World, The Hypostasis of the Archonts) and continues the Orphic tradition that appeared in the Theogony of (...) Jerome and Hellanicus, in which the eternal chaos had been domesticated with the Jewish monotheism of Genesis, and, according to which, this chaos would come to be something like a “hollow”, not eternal, which precedes the material world, shelters it and then favors the appearance of the corporeal. Its status as a Principle should always be understood in a derivative sense, with no obstacle to monism: the Primordial Light (Lumen primum), the only absolute principle, provokes the appearance of the region of the shadow (chaos), but it does so indirectly through the intermediate veil (Spiritus Sanctus). Nothing justifies speaking, therefore, of the “Ophite” system as an ontologically dualistic system. (shrink)

This paper, based on some historical sources of the IV and the V century, aims to examine the existence of a fundamentalist Christian community, separated from the Catholics, in Sardinia, between 362 AD and the last decades of the IV century. After his years of exile, the bishop Lucifer returned to his diocese and made the Church of Rome community of Cagliari the symbol of the firm resistance by the intransigent anti-Arians to the conciliatory politics of the rest of the (...) Church towards Arianism. Nevertheless, this separation cannot be recognized as a schism from the Church; it was a voluntary isolation encouraged by Lucifer and perpetuated by his successors. (shrink)

The interaction between rhetoric and preaching is evident in St. Augustine in his sermons ad populum or sermons to his congregation. He expresses himself with care with the aim of achieving true spiritual progress in his hearers. Their reactions encourage him to make an attentive use of the rhetoric resources his authoritative experience has given him, and to exploit any possible means of raise his level of discourse. Signs of agreement from his congregation indicate an ongoing relationship with them. At (...) any rate Augustine, in his preaching, is happy to make the best possible use of his rhetorical powers and leave the rest to God. The formation of a long-standing congregation requires him to go beyond customary limits so as to become a notable model of a Christian orator. (shrink)

The present contribution is the first half of a two-part study. It deals with a group of so-called «presbyters» (presbyteroi) to whom Irenaeus of Lyons refers as sources in his exstant works. He introduces them as pupils of John, «the disciple of the Lord», whose teaching they were deemed to transmit orally. This is an ideal image of a generation of believers in Jesus intermediate between Jesus’s direct disciples and the believers of further generations who would have no personal connection (...) to Jesus nor to those who had been with him. For one specific saying, Irenaeus mentions as his sources the presbyters as well as Papias of Hierapolis, who had written a work including sayings of Jesus with their interpretation. Papias also claimed that he had received such sayings through «the presbyters», so we have to determine whether Irenaeus knew the presbyter’s traditions only through Papias’s work or also independently from it. Finally, the article compares Irenaeus’s appeal to the presbyters with some passages where Clement of Alexandria referred to presbyters’ teachings in a similar way ten to twenty years after Irenaeus in a different milieu. The second part of this study will examine how Irenaeus used the notion of presbyters in order to support the process that led to establishing a «monepiscopate» in the Roman Church. (shrink)

One of the matters on which the layman Januarius questioned Augustine was on differences regarding the celebration of the foot washing in various churches. Augustine, unwilling to accept the assumptions of his questioner’s ecclesiology, defends the practice – in all its variety – as a useful means of communication of the gospel. The exchange allows us to see aspects of Augustine’s view of both liturgy and catechesis using a very precise screen. This, in turn, reminds modern scholarship of just how (...) little we know about the north African liturgy. (shrink)

This article deals with Mariology as we can deduce it from the works of writers who lived in the region of Aquileia in the 4th and 5th centuries. The first part of the study discusses the Gospel commentary by Fortunatianus and the works of Chromatius, bishops of Aquileia. The second part of the article considers texts excerpted from works on the same subject by Victorinus of Pettau, Rufinus of Concordia and Jerome of Stridon. The prevailent titles used of Mary are (...) «Virgin» and «Mother of God». The article concludes with a comparison among significative texts excerpted from works of Chromatius and that of Rufinus. (shrink)

After a short presentation on the figure and work of Novatian to give context to the evidence, this article examines the sources on the episcopal consecration of Novatian as a rival to Cornelius, the bishop of Rome. We learn of this from Photius’ Bibliothecae codices 182 and 280, which preserves fragments of the lost works against the Novatians of Eulogius, Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria, which draw in turn on the lost Acta Nouatiani. This study proposes to identify Tibur (Tivoli) as (...) the episcopal see of one of the three prelates who consecrated Novatian, thus allowing us to include in the episcopal succession of that Church two more names (one certain, the other fictitious, perhaps referring to one of Novatian’s entourage) for the middle of the third century. This is unique for an Italian see outside the city of Rome. (shrink)

This contribution aims to investigate how Chrysostom’s rhetoric, which is highly pedagogical, is built on the interweaving of visualization and dramatization in order to actualize and materialize what is invisible. The analysis is based in particular on his panegyrical production, which reveal how he constructs a rhetoric of images grounded in the synaesthetic relationship between sight, hearing, touch, and smell. It focuses on the notions of phantasia and enargeia, and insists on a parallelism between the cult of relics and devotion (...) to images which makes it possible to read Chrysostom’s panegyrics, which were proclaimed on pilgrimage at local martyria, with others by him produced for use on the much longer pilgrimages to the Holy Land. The distinctive features of both are visual. (shrink)

Athanasius of Alexandria (about 300-373) commented on the book of Psalms, as Jerome stated in 393. This exegesis has not been preserved directly, but it appeared from the sixth century in the Greek catena, and in an unusual form. The commentary, which includes all the Psalms, is divided into 22 centuries, each century being a series of hundred passages. In all there are 2,161 passages, numbered with great precision in a 10th century Constantinopolitan manuscript, the Vaticanus Gracus 754. This division (...) can be dated back to the sixth century, because the text in this form is confirmed by four oriental versions and by a Byzantine anthology from the end of the 11th century. (shrink)