Leontius of Byzantium

A new book by Brian Daley, or even a new paperback edition of one of his books that has been in print previously, is a Red Letter Day. So it is a real pleasure to let you know you have to part with far fewer of your kopeks to be able to afford Leontius of Byzantium: Complete Works, ed. Brian E. Daley, SJ (Oxford UP, October 2021), 640pp. About this book the publisher tells us this: 

Leontius of Byzantium (485-543) was a Byzantine monk and theologian who provided a breakthrough of terminology in the 6th-century Christological controversy over the mode of union of Christ's human nature with his divinity. He did so through his introduction of Aristotelian logical categories and Neoplatonic psychology into Christian speculative theology. His work initiated the later intellectual development of Christian theology throughout medieval culture. Brian E. Daley provides translation and commentary on the six theological works associated with the name of Leontius of Byzantium. The critical text and facing-page translation help make these works more accessible than ever before and provide a reliable textual apparatus for future scholarship of this key writing.

Leontius of Byzantium

A new book by the eminent and widely respected patrologist and historian Brian Daley is always a welcome and important event. Oxford University Press informs me that early next month they are bringing out Daley's Leontius of Byzantium: Complete Works (OUP, 2017), 608pp.

About this book we are told:

Leontius of Byzantium (485-543) Byzantine monk and theologian who provided a breakthrough of terminology in the 6th-century Christological controversy over the mode of union of Christ's human nature with his divinity. He did so through his introduction of Aristotelian logical categories and Neoplatonic psychology into Christian speculative theology. His work initiated the later intellectual development of Christian theology throughout medieval culture. Brian E. Daley provides translation and commentary on the six theological works associated with the name of Leontius of Byzantium. The critical text and facing-page translation help make these works more accessible than ever before and provide a reliable textual apparatus for furture scholarship of this key writing.

The Press also gives us the table of contents:

 INTRODUCTION
I. The Author and his Times
II. The Works
A. The Six Treatises
B. The Florilegia
III. Leontius the Theologian
IV. The Manuscripts
V. The Scholia
VI. Earlier Editions
VII. This Edition
VIII. Select Bibliography
Key to the apparatus of Leontius's Florilegia
Abbreviations
TEXT AND TRANSLATION
1. Contra Nestorianos et Eutychianos
Appendix I (Scholion)
Appendix II (Scholion)
2. Epilyseis (= Solutiones Argumentorum Severi)
3. Epapor=emata (= Triginta Capita contra Severum)
4. Contra Aphthartodocetas
5. Deprenhensio et Triumphus super Nestorianos
6. Adversus Fraudes Apollinaristarum
7. Fragmenta Incerta
Appendix III (Excerpta Leontina)
Appendix IV (Tabular comparison of extracts in Leontius s florilegia with those in other ancient and medieval florilegia)

Personhood in Leontius of Byzantium

Holy Cross Orthodox Press in Brookline recently sent me a copy of Stelios Ramfos, Yearning for the One: Chapters in the Inner Life of the Greeks, trans. Norman Russell (2011), 352pp.

About this book the publisher tells us: 

In this searching investigation, Stelios Ramfos explores the roots of the modern debate on the person and concludes that the preoccupation of the Byzantine Greeks with eternity inhibited them from developing a fruitful sense of interiority. He argues that, nevertheless, a figure such as Leontius of Byzantium can suggest a way forward if Byzantine theological thinking is re-visited in the light of insights derived from the Western philosophical tradition.

In his "blurb" for the book, Aristotle Papanikolaou rightly links Ramfos's book with the wider preoccupation with theological anthropology today, especially (thanks to John Zizioulas in particular) the Cappadocians:

One of the most important and ecumenically influential contributions of Orthodox theology in the last century to broader discussions on the Trinity, Christology, theological anthropology, and ecclesiology has been the retrieval of a relational understanding of personhood, in which the person is constituted as an event of irreducible uniqueness and ecstatic freedom in relations of communion. Stelios Ramfos, however, convincingly demonstrates that for a contemporary theological anthropology, there exists a depth and richness to the Byzantine tradition well beyond the Cappadocian Fathers. . . . Through his masterful translation, Norman Russell again makes available to the English-speaking world an engaging and provocative book by a Greek intellectual. Ramfos expands our knowledge of the Byzantine tradition and contemporary Orthodox theology; he also enriches the current debate, theological and philosophical, on the nature of personhood. --(Aristotle Papanikolaou, Fordham University)