Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church. Volume 4: The Spiritual Life. Edited by WENDY MAYER, PAULINE ALLEN, and LAURENCE CROSS.

Abstract

The 21 papers in this volume, the proceedings of the 2005 Australian Catholic University conference on prayer and spirituality in the early church, form the shortest to date (in number of pages) of what is now a well-established series (cf. JTS, ns 51 [2000], pp. 428–9 and 56 [2005], p. 316). Despite the title and subtitle there is no noticeable thematic unity to the collection, though four papers are first-century historical studies, including Ian J. Elmer's exposé of the divisions within the early Christian community which lie behind Luke's account of the argument between the Hebrews and the Hellenists (Acts 6) and Philip Esler's ‘Understanding the Death of Jesus in its Ancient Context: Perpetrator and Victim Perspectives’, which takes issue with scholars who are inclined to minimize the threat which Jesus posed to the Judaean religious establishment. While some of the papers contain mostly familiar material, others represent original research of various sorts. Among the most thought-provoking are Damien Casey's brief study of Maximus the Confessor's cosmology and soteriology, which puts in a new way the familiar criticism that Christian Neoplatonism stresses the world's origins and destiny in metaphysical unity rather than celebrating plurality or difference, and Philip Rousseau's longer essay on anger in Evagrius and Cassian, which, by comparing them with Aristotle and some of his modern interpreters, penetrates well beyond the point usually reached by introductory accounts of the theme of the passions and their elimination. As in previous volumes in the series, the study of Augustine is well represented by seven papers on a range of general and specific themes in his work.