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21 results

Page 1 of 2

  • 13 - Leo the Great

  • from Part II
  • Edited by Philip L. Reynolds, Emory University, Atlanta
  • Book:
    Great Christian Jurists and Legal Collections in the First Millennium
    Published online:
    21 June 2019
    Print publication:
    27 June 2019, pp 283-296

  • Summary

    Leo’s theology of justice informed his administration and the development of an ecclesiastical regime based on equity. Humanity had inherited the sin of Adam and received the punishment of death. Because the original sin had been voluntary, justice had been served through equitable principles. Likewise, the Incarnation of Christ redeemed humanity through the same human substance by which the “universal captivity” of the human race had come about. The same human nature that had sinned in Adam was restored in Christ, whose intermingling of the human and the divine healed the fallen human race. Christ’s perfect justice paid the debt that humanity owed because of original sin. This equitable process preserved human dignity by acknowledging that individuals were flawed but rational decision-makers. It transformed humanity into the divine in two ways: the payment of Adam’s debt restored immortality to human beings, and the internal logic of the narrative of redemption reflected divine rationality. Restored in Christ according to this plan for redemption, human beings approached perfection when the rationality of justice unfolded in the context of equity and human freedom.

  • Chapter 7 - Reflections

  • Susan Wessel, Catholic University of America, Washington DC
  • Book:
    Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity
    Published online:
    05 May 2016
    Print publication:
    09 June 2016, pp 200-204

  • Summary

    The early Christian elite negotiated the tension between feeling emotions deeply and the Stoic ideal of emotional tranquility. They shared a certain anxiety about our emotional fluctuation and its role in the Christian life. The reasons for the tension lay only partly in the intellectual difficulty involved in combining Judeo-Christian commitments with pagan philosophy. Equanimity held the promise of composure in the midst of suffering. It spoke to the virtue of steadfastness and to the practicalities at stake in ministering to the afflicted. Emotional engagement lay at the opposite end of the spectrum. Its logical consequence was compassion fatigue, a reality that none of the early Christians dismissed lightly. The tension receded with Gregory the Great and with Maximus the Confessor. They incorporated and revised the work of their predecessors to confirm that feeling compassion for suffering human beings was rooted in the theology of the Incarnation. Compassion was the place where the divine capacity for healing met the human experience of suffering. It brought balance to the cosmos rather than to the emotions. Like the Incarnation, it made suffering meaningful and redemptive. Imitating Christ’s suffering on the cross and his compassionate ministry transformed Christians into something resembling the divine.

  • Chapter 3 - Disgust

  • Susan Wessel, Catholic University of America, Washington DC
  • Book:
    Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity
    Published online:
    05 May 2016
    Print publication:
    09 June 2016, pp 65-97

  • Summary

    Philosophers and ethicists have argued that disgust reflects our concerns and fears regarding the boundaries of the body. It is rooted in a false understanding of the body as impervious to its environment and invulnerable to death and decay. The fear is that making contact with someone deemed unsavory might contaminate the body and compromise the imaginary sense of the self as immortal. Chapter 3 examines such ideas among the early Christians. John Chrysostom, for example, recognized that disgust could be an impediment to performing the acts of charity and compassion that his homilies advocated. He addressed the problem by exploring the many ways in which the Christians listening to his homilies were similarly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life. He provided training in virtue that attended to the realities of the destitute and to the nuances of human behavior. His homilies nurtured authentic emotional connections between the poor and those who were expected to help them. Jerome was also aware of the challenge that disgust posed for cultivating Christian virtue. In the context of his debate with followers of Pelagius, he explored the connection between disdain for human suffering and the implausible quest for moral perfection.

  • Chapter 2 - Suffering

  • Susan Wessel, Catholic University of America, Washington DC
  • Book:
    Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity
    Published online:
    05 May 2016
    Print publication:
    09 June 2016, pp 32-64

  • Summary

    Lepers were among the wretched outcasts of the early Christian world. They continued to be marginalized despite the fact that Jesus had healed lepers during his ministry, restoring them to a privileged place in the eschatological hierarchy. Chapter 2 examines the literary imagery and rhetorical techniques that Gregory Nazianzen used to persuade his listeners that the lepers were valued members of the Christian community. They were the perfect embodiment of our dual nature of body and soul, and their suffering was a graphic representation of our own potential for death and decay. Because they had suffered like Christ, they had earned their membership in the body of Christ. As such a member, the lepers’ suffering impacted the welfare of the community. The same people who had turned away from the lepers in disgust were to use their capacity for compassion to feel what the lepers felt and to suffer what they had suffered. Gregory of Nyssa relied on medical science to convince his listeners that leprosy was a pathological disease that afflicted those whose humoral mixture made them susceptible. It was a particular kind of physiological response to infection. Their sickness was neither a crime nor a moral condemnation.

  • Chapter 1 - The setting

  • Susan Wessel, Catholic University of America, Washington DC
  • Book:
    Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity
    Published online:
    05 May 2016
    Print publication:
    09 June 2016, pp 1-31

  • Summary

    Early Christians acknowledged a tension between feeling compassion deeply, and attaining emotional tranquility according to the ideals of ascetic practice. The tension resided in combining two rather different world-views. The Gospels had recorded instances of Jesus’ feeling profound compassion when he performed healings in his ministry. Yet the pagan Stoics were wary of such emotional displays because they thought the wise man might be damaged emotionally if he were to sympathize with human suffering. Reconciling these ideas in a Christian framework proved difficult. Chapter 1 introduces the early Christians studied here in the context of this challenge. Among those who addressed the philosophical tension, Nemesius of Emesa at the end of the fourth century confirmed that emotions were the components of a living creature and that life could not be sustained without them. Because they defined the human experience they were necessary for our moral integrity. Such early Christians as the Cappadocians, Augustine, Leo the Great, Gregory the Great, and Maximus the Confessor were equally committed to articulating the role that our emotions play in the life of Christian perfection. Each according to his particular concerns and preoccupations struggled with, and articulated the necessity of, feeling compassion for human suffering.

  • Chapter 5 - Charity

  • Susan Wessel, Catholic University of America, Washington DC
  • Book:
    Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity
    Published online:
    05 May 2016
    Print publication:
    09 June 2016, pp 130-171

  • Summary

    Huns, Goths, Vandals, and Lombards were among the migrating peoples who transformed the geo-political landscape of the late Roman world. In the sermons and letters of the time, early Christians alluded to the general anxiety, as well as to the practical problems resulting from social dislocation and familial disruption. Chapter 5 considers how such Italian bishops as Leo the Great in Rome and Peter Chrysologus in the north in the mid-fifth century, and Gregory the Great in the Rome of the late-sixth century, developed a theology of charity to address the mounting pastoral concerns. Leo and Peter, for example, addressed the emotional life of everyday Christians by making affective charity the universal expression of the Christian life. Compassionate giving was no longer seen as an unusual response to extreme suffering, but as the appropriate response to the vicissitudes of human experience. It no longer applied merely to the destitute, but to healing every sort of emotional and material need. This democratization of charity was further explored in the theology of charity, in the pastoral care, and in the charitable works of Gregory the Great, who, like Leo, served as bishop of Rome during a time of social and political uncertainty.

  • Chapter 6 - Love

  • Susan Wessel, Catholic University of America, Washington DC
  • Book:
    Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity
    Published online:
    05 May 2016
    Print publication:
    09 June 2016, pp 172-199

  • Summary

    Maximus the Confessor, like Gregory the Great, incorporated the range of human experiences into his conception of charity. For Maximus, as for Gregory, the ideal of a universal charity never compromised the particular suffering of the individual. Each believed that real people are, and should be, the beneficiaries of our ethical obligations. Chapter 6 argues that Maximus explored these ideas in the context of ascetic renewal and christological transformation. His experiences in the monastery taught him that feeling compassion in the light of suffering depends on acknowledging moral differences. It involves the realization that our varied dispositions and opinions, what he called the ‘gnōmē’, shape both our spiritual and existential reality. By embracing moral differentiation Maximus imagines an affective compassion rooted in experience, which he then elevates to the heights of divine contemplation. As he said in The Church’s Mystagogy, we experience and cure human suffering according to our varied dispositions that we may become like God. It is not necessary that we lose sight of our own interests to enter into the suffering of another. Compassion is not an act of pure altruism, but an imitation of the divine capacity to experience the suffering that each person feels individually.

  • Chapter 4 - Feelings

  • Susan Wessel, Catholic University of America, Washington DC
  • Book:
    Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity
    Published online:
    05 May 2016
    Print publication:
    09 June 2016, pp 98-129

  • Summary

    Augustine experienced the role the emotions play in the processes of life and death when he learned how to love individuals in the context of a loving God. Chapter 4 examines the trajectory of Augustine’s views on affective engagement with human suffering, including his early years as a Manichean; the time spent after his conversion with friends in philosophical contemplation at Cassiciacum; his autobiographical reflections in the Confessions; and the intellectual synthesis he articulated in the City of God. Following this path, Augustine concluded that the Stoic ideal of the tranquil wise man, which he had cherished in his youth, challenged his deepening commitment to affective piety. He engaged with, criticized, and borrowed from this Stoic ideal as he came to realign his loves with God. Feeling grief in the context of loss was now consistent with Christian virtue. Yet he never forgot the importance of retaining emotional balance in his encounters with human suffering. For Augustine, feeling another person’s pain was like remembering his own. There was a welcome distance between the sympathy he felt and the lived experience of suffering. He had learned how to love compassionately while keeping himself aligned with the interests of God.

Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity
  • Susan Wessel
  • Published online:
    05 May 2016
    Print publication:
    09 June 2016
  • This book examines how the early Christian elite articulated and cultivated the affective dimensions of compassion in a Roman world that promoted emotional tranquillity as the path to human flourishing. Drawing upon a wide range of early Christians from both east and west, Wessel situates each author in the broader cultural and intellectual context. The reader is introduced to the diverse conditions in which Christians felt and were urged to feel compassion in exemplary ways, and in which warnings were sounded against the possibilities for distortion and exploitation. Wessel argues that the early Christians developed literary methods and rhetorical techniques to bring about appropriate emotional responses to human suffering. Their success in this regard marks the beginning of affective compassion as a Christian virtue. Comparison with early modern and contemporary philosophers and ethicists further demonstrates the intrinsic worth of the early Christian understanding of compassion.

  • The suffering of Christ, humanity and the lepers in Gregory Nazianzen

  • Susan Wessel
  • Journal:
    Scottish Journal of Theology / Volume 68 / Issue 4 / November 2015
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    15 October 2015, pp. 381-397
    Print publication:
    November 2015

  • Gregory Nazianzen spoke of a suffering Christ ‘who became weak for us’ in the context of an oration, On Love of the Poor, which dealt at length with the extreme suffering the lepers had endured. The outcasts of the ancient world, lepers figured prominently in Jesus’ ministry as recorded in the Gospels. By juxtaposing their human suffering with divine weakness, Gregory implied that Christ had suffered with the lepers. The comparison not only gave meaning to the human experience of suffering, it also explored the extent of Christ's suffering in the divine economy. There was no affliction too grotesque for Christ to have assumed.

    Throughout his life, Gregory developed a notion of collective suffering which is relevant to understanding the magnitude of the suffering of Christ. It made the limitless suffering of humanity seem manageable and contained. It normalised the overwhelming sense of misery by expanding individual suffering into the suffering of the group, the suffering of the group into the suffering of neighbours and finally the suffering of neighbours into the collective suffering of the body of Christ. Christ then experienced the fullness of the human condition as the head of this body.

    The lepers served a purpose in this vision of collective suffering. By making the lepers a synecdoche for all human suffering, Gregory allowed Christ to assume their misery without his listeners having to imagine Christ suffering every aspect of their physical and emotional distress. This transference of collective suffering to the body of Christ worked in the following way: the individual suffering of the leper flowed into the collective suffering of the group, which connected with, and was incorporated into, the collective suffering of the Christian body. The result was a relationship of mutual imitation between Christ and humanity. It implied that human beings suffered with Christ, and that Christ suffered with human beings.

    By integrating literary techniques and contexts into theological analysis, this article examines the various ways in which Gregory construed the suffering of Christ.

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