Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity

When it first appeared in 2008, I read with great interest Susan Wessel's fascinating and important study, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome. Among other things, it sheds important light on Leo's role in the Council of Chalcedon, including its famous controverted 28th canon about patriarchal jurisdictions and so-called Roman pre-eminence. Wessel's considerable achievement was to show that Leo--pace later Eastern fears--was not engaged in a campaign of self-aggrandizement at the expense of the East. In fact, both Rome and Constantinople misunderstood the motives and actions of each other when, in fact, it seems they were both concerned about maintaining ecclesial affairs in their own spheres "decently and in good order," without trying to one-up each other.

Now we have another book from Wessel, published just this summer: Passion and Compassion in Early Christianity (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 290pp.

The publisher, who has made this book available both in print and in a Kindle format, tells us the following about the book:

This book examines how the early Christian elite articulated and cultivated the affective dimensions of compassion in a Roman world that promoted emotional tranquillity as the path to human flourishing. Drawing upon a wide range of early Christians from both east and west, Wessel situates each author in the broader cultural and intellectual context. The reader is introduced to the diverse conditions in which Christians felt and were urged to feel compassion in exemplary ways, and in which warnings were sounded against the possibilities for distortion and exploitation. Wessel argues that the early Christians developed literary methods and rhetorical techniques to bring about appropriate emotional responses to human suffering. Their success in this regard marks the beginning of affective compassion as a Christian virtue. Comparison with early modern and contemporary philosophers and ethicists further demonstrates the intrinsic worth of the early Christian understanding of compassion.

We are also given the table of contents here and an excerpt here.

St. Mark of Alexandria

Francis Dvornik's 1948 study The Idea Of Apostolicity In Byzantium And The Legend Of Apostle Andrew was one of the most important to help us understand the process by which the early Church gradually shifted the argument from the "principle of accommodation" to the importance of "apostolicity" when arguing over the pre-eminence of patriarchal sees. More recently, Susan Wessel's fascinating and very important study has shown in great and convincing detail how this process was really accomplished in the fifth century under Pope Leo I: Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome.

Now another recent publication has examined the role of the apostle Mark in shaping the Church of Alexandria: Thomas C. Oden, The African Memory of Mark: Reassessing Early Church Tradition (IVP, 2011, 279pp).


About this book, the publisher tells us:

We often regard the author of the Gospel of Mark as an obscure figure about whom we know little. Many would be surprised to learn how much fuller a picture of Mark exists within widespread African tradition, tradition that holds that Mark himself was from North Africa, that he founded the church in Alexandria, that he was an eyewitness to the Last Supper and Pentecost, that he was related not only to Barnabas but to Peter as well and accompanied him on many of his travels. In this provocative reassessment of early church tradition, Thomas C. Oden begins with the palette of New Testament evidence and adds to it the range of colors from traditional African sources, including synaxaries (compilations of short biographies of saints to be read on feast days), archaeological sites, non-Western historical documents and ancient churches. The result is a fresh and illuminating portrait of Mark, one that is deeply rooted in African memory and seldom viewed appreciatively in the West.

One of the "blurbers" draws out the Coptic implications:

"The African Memory of Mark honors the way the Coptic Church has been the faithful, preeminent carrier of the Markan tradition in the church, and does that by weaving the different genres of sources into a narrative whole. Oden is not unaware of standard depictions of Mark and the Gospel that bears his name in which the African note is rather marginal--where it is acknowledged at all--but he challenges established scholarship by marshaling the evidence and refocusing it on the continuity of the Coptic memory of Mark. Whether or not the reader agrees with the argument of the book, Oden has raised the bar of scrutiny and challenged many of the unstated assumptions of conventional scholarship. From critic and fan alike, Oden deserves credit." (Lamin Sanneh, D. Willis James Professor of Missions & World Christianity, Yale University )