The Monastic Letters of Saint Athanasius the Great


Book Description

Fairacres Publications 120 Scholars have often concentrated on the theological writings of St Athanasius (c. 296-373 AD) and on his influence as a religious leader, so that his contribution to the monastic life has not received due recognition. In these six letters addressed to monks, Athanasius is revealed as a wise spiritual guide and loving pastor, determined that the monks should receive sound teaching, so as to avoid the pitfalls of heresies current at that time. As Leslie Barnard notes in his Introduction, ‘The permanent significance of these letters lies in their wisdom, moderation and balance.’







The Letters of St. Antony


Book Description

This book revolutionizes our understanding of the life and thought of the great anchorite father of the Egyptian desert. It is a signal contribution to our knowledge of Egyptian Christianity in the third and fourth centuries.—Birger Pearson, Institute for Antiquity and Christianity Samuel Rubenson, by means of a fresh analysis of the letters of St. Antony, exposes the distortion of the picture of early Christian monks as unlettered and primitive. Rubenson describes the desert monasteries as centers of theological reflection in Egypt, showing how they combined the speculative philosophy of the Greeks and the biblical tradition. Included in this volume is a new translation of the letters themselves, which are shown to be authentic and an important source for the study of the desert fathers and the early monastic tradition. The later image of Antony is demonstrated to be influenced by church politics of the latter part of the fourth century. Samuel Rubenson is Associate Professor at Lund University, Lund, Sweden.




The Life of Saint Antony


Book Description

The most important document of early monasticism, written in 357, this is a biography of the recognized founder and father of monasticism. +




Athanasius


Book Description

Athanasius, one of the most influential church fathers in history, records in his Life of Antony of Egypt the story of another extremely influential figure of early Christianity. Albert Haase's paraphrase of this important work gives us access to a masterwork of spiritual formation, that we too might know God as richly as Athanasius did.




Life of St. Anthony of Egypt


Book Description

The biographic text of St. Anthony is presented complete in this edition for the reader's absorption and contemplation. First published in the 4th century A.D., Anthony the Great's biography was authored by Christian Saint Athanasius of Alexandria. Since its release, the book has helped spread the beliefs, practices and arduous faith of Anthony the Great. A significant progenitor of the monastic tradition, Saint Anthony lived an ascetic lifestyle in the arid lands of Egypt. Although not the earliest of religious figures committed to this tradition, through actions and preaching Anthony helped popularise and spread principles that would contribute heavily to the establishment of Christian monasteries in Europe and beyond. One event in St. Anthony's life was his encounter with the supernatural in the remote Egyptian desert. This occurrence, where the otherworldly presence tried to tempt him from his spartan philosophy of living, is much recreated in Western art and literature.




Monastic Visions


Book Description

The book reproduces the cleaned paintings for the first time. It also describes and analyzes their amalgam of Coptic (Egyptian Christian), Byzantine, and Arab styles and motifs as well as the religious culture to which they belong. In 1996, funded by the United States Agency for International Development and at the request of the Monastery of St. Antony, the Antiquities Development Project of the American Research Center in Egypt began the conservation of the paintings in the church. The paintings revealed by the conservators are of extremely high quality, both stylistically and conceptually. While rooted in the Christian tradition of Egypt, they also reveal explicit connections with Byzantine and Islamic art of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some newly discovered paintings can even be dated back to the sixth or seventh century.




The Life of Antony


Book Description

Instrumental in the conversion of many, including Augustine, The Life of Antony provided the model for subsequent saints' life and constituted, in the words of patristics scholar Johannes Quasten, 'the most important document of early monasticism.'




TIME


Book Description

Fairacres Publications 208 This book brings together essays by two outstanding Orthodox theologians to examine the paradox of time in relation to the eternity of God: Dumitru Stăniloae’s, ‘Eternity and Time’, a talk given to the Sisters of the Love of God in 1971, was expanded in the first volume of his Teologia dogmatica ortodoxa (3 vols., Bucharest, 1978). The preface to the 1994 English translation of that work, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, written by Kallistos Ware, was based on his essay, ‘Time: Prison or Path to Freedom?’, which was first published in 1989 by SLG Press. These reflections, brought together for the first time here, remain at the forefront of modern theology. Stăniloae illuminates time as a journey on which we may grow in response to the love that God offers us, a journey towards sharing in the eternity of the perfect, interpersonal communion of the Trinity. God, in His Incarnation, shares the journey with us in Christ, so that time enters into eternity, and eternity is brought into time. At every moment we are free to choose between responding to His love or rejecting it. Ware’s essay explains that it is the vocation of time to be open to eternity; time is fulfilled when God’s eternity breaks into the temporal sequence, as happened supremely at Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, as happens also at every Eucharist. Our faith is the true rationale of time: mutual love after the image of the Trinity.




Pearls of Life: A Life-Belt for the Spirit


Book Description

In 1996 Bishop Martin Lönnebo (1930–2023), recently retired after fifteen years as Lutheran Bishop of Linköping in Sweden, was exploring the Aegean when his boat was overtaken by a storm and he and his fellow-passengers had to take refuge on a tiny island with a single guest house. While the storm blew itself out Bishop Martin set about designing what he described as a ‘prayer ribbon’ that could summarize the message of the Christian faith. The result was a bracelet known as Frälsarkransen. The word means ‘life-belt’—hence the sub-title for this short book, which provides an introduction to Bishop Martin’s thinking behind the beads, and suggestions for using them for prayer and contemplation.




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