Affirming Divine Providence and Limiting the Powers of Saints: the Byzantine Debate about the Term of Life (6th-11th Centuries)
Journal: Scrinium
Year: 2018

Abstract One of the chief characteristics of Byzantine culture in the early Middle Age was the willingness to engage in sometimes fierce debates. The best known of these debates, the controversy about the veneration of images, has been studied by many scholars and is now well known. The same cannot be said about another contentious issue, the question of whether the time of one’s death was fixed from eternity or whether it could be changed. In the late 1970s Leendert Gerrit Westerink and Giusepp