Buch, Englisch, Band Volume 1, 82 Seiten
Reihe: ESWTR Studies in Religion
A Reassessment of a Key Metaphor in the Spiritual Teachings of the 'Macarian Homilies' in the Light of Early Syriac Christian Tradition
Buch, Englisch, Band Volume 1, 82 Seiten
Reihe: ESWTR Studies in Religion
ISBN: 978-90-429-4113-7
Verlag: Peeters Publishers
with hovering wings within early Syriac sacramental liturgies,
proto-monastic rites of initiation, hymnody and teaching on prayer and
spiritual states of inspiration and contemplation. The author traces
these influences into the Greek writings of the Fourth Century
Mesopotamian ascetic teacher and writer of the 'Macarian Homilies’.
Macarian pneumatology was known to have influenced the Cappadocian
brothers, Basil and Gregory, in the period leading up to the addition of
the clause on the Holy Spirit to the Nicene Creed. By demonstrating a
cultural and religious dialogue between the Cappadocians and Macarian
and Syriac teaching on the Holy Spirit, Julie Hopkins challenges the
current scholarship which claims that the Cappadocian appropriation of
the “wings of the Spirit” metaphor derived from the Platonic “wings of
the soul”. In her study, the agency and functions of the Syriac feminine
Holy Spirit were appropriated by Gregory of Nyssa in his mystical
writings as a powerful verbal ikon, even though the gender was lost in
translation.