On Difficulties in the Church Fathers
Subtitle: The Ambigua
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2014
Language: eng; grc
Number of pages: 400
ISBN-13: 9780674730830
Subjects: Pseudo-dionysius, the areopagite; Gregory, of nazianzus, saint; Theology, doctrinal, history; Byzantine empire, religion
Description: " The Ambigua (or “Book of Difficulties”) is Maximos’s greatest philosophical and doctrinal work, in which his daring originality, prodigious talent for speculative thinking, and analytical acumen are on lavish display. In the Ambigua, a broad range of theological topics—cosmology, anthropology, the philosophy of mind and language, allegory, asceticism, and metaphysics—are transformed in a synthesis of Aristotelian logic, Platonic metaphysics, Stoic psychology, and the arithmetical philosophy of a revived Pythagoreanism. The result is a labyrinthine map of the mind’s journey to God that figured prominently in the Neoplatonic revival of the Komnenian Renaissance and the Hesychast Controversies of the Late Byzantine period. This remarkable work has never before been available in a critically based edition or English translation."--