Chrysostom and the Charismatics

My inner ecumenist's super-ego occasionally does battle with my triumphalist id when it comes to evangelical and charismatic Christians, especially in their on-going "discovery" of, e.g., patristic sources, iconography, medieval thought, and other matters. It is hard not to consider such attempts in a condescending manner sometimes, and such people as Johnny-Come-Lately types; harder still not to be horrified by such repugnant concepts as the "prosperity gospel." But resist such ungenerous thoughts and impulses, if they afflict you, to give this interesting book a hearing: John Chrysostom and African Charismatic Theology in Conversation: Salvation, Deliverance, and the Prosperity Gospel by Samantha L. Miller (Fortress Academic Press, 2021), 170pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This book puts John Chrysostom in conversation with deliverance ministries and the prosperity gospel in modern African charismatic Christianity. Samantha Miller argues that Chrysostom had a cosmology not unlike that present in the charismatic Christianity of the global south, where the world is populated by spirits able to affect the material world. Additionally, Chrysostom had plenty to say about suffering, demons, and prosperity. Through this conversation, issues of personal moral responsibility and salvation rise to the surface, and it is through these issues that modern Western and African Christians—theologians, pastors, missionaries, and laity—can perhaps have a conversation that gets past the question of a spirit-inhabited world and talk together about the saving work of Christ for the benefit of all the church.

By this same author, and on a similar topic, is another book published last year:  Chrysostom's Devil: Demons, the Will, and Virtue in Patristic Soteriology (IVP Academic, 2020), 216pp. About this book the publisher tells us:

For many Christians today, the notion that demons should play a role in our faith―or that they even exist―may seem dubious. But that was certainly not the case for John Chrysostom, the "golden-tongued" early church preacher and theologian who became the bishop of Constantinople near the end of the fourth century. Indeed, references to demons and the devil permeate his rhetoric. But to what end? In this volume in IVP Academic's New Explorations in Theology series, Samantha Miller examines Chrysostom's theology and world, both of which were imbued with discussions about demons. For Chrysostom, she contends, such references were employed in order to encourage Christians to be virtuous, to prepare them for the struggle of the Christian life, and ultimately to enable them to exercise their will as they worked out their salvation. Understanding the role of demons in Chrysostom's soteriology gives us insight into what it means to be human and what it means to follow Christ in a world fraught with temptation and danger. In that regard, Chrysostom's golden words continue to demonstrate relevance to Christians in today's world.

Demons, Psychology, and Chrysostom

The lunatic fringe in both Catholicism and whatever this thing called American evangelicalism is, have both been active in the last few days, flinging around in absurd and irresponsible manner the language of both angels and demons in a desperate and risible attempt to claim that the removal of the manifestly worst president in American history was somehow the result of supernatural forces which they claimed to "rebuke" and "exorcise." 

No real churchman of any intelligence or seriousness would go within a thousand miles of such antics, including John Chrysostom, subject of a new study: Samantha L. Miller, Chrysostom's Devil: Demons, the Will, and Virtue in Patristic Soteriology (IVP Academic, 2020), 216pp. About this new book the publisher tells us this: 

For many Christians today, the notion that demons should play a role in our faith―or that they even exist―may seem dubious. But that was certainly not the case for John Chrysostom, the "golden-tongued" early church preacher and theologian who became the bishop of Constantinople near the end of the fourth century. Indeed, references to demons and the devil permeate his rhetoric. But to what end? In this volume in IVP Academic's New Explorations in Theology series, Samantha Miller examines Chrysostom's theology and world, both of which were imbued with discussions about demons. For Chrysostom, she contends, such references were employed in order to encourage Christians to be virtuous, to prepare them for the struggle of the Christian life, and ultimately to enable them to exercise their will as they worked out their salvation. Understanding the role of demons in Chrysostom's soteriology gives us insight into what it means to be human and what it means to follow Christ in a world fraught with temptation and danger. In that regard, Chrysostom's golden words continue to demonstrate relevance to Christians in today's world.

City of Demons

The University of California Press has put into my hands a new book City of Demons: Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity, written by Dayna S. Kalleres and published last fall. Comprising 392 pages, with helpful maps at the outset of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Milan, this book, the publisher tells us, looks at an overlooked area in the burgeoning studies on episcopal roles and authority in antiquity:

Although it would appear in studies of late antique ecclesiastical authority and power that scholars have covered everything, an important aspect of the urban bishop has long been neglected: his role as demonologist and exorcist. When the emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the realm, bishops and priests everywhere struggled  to “Christianize” the urban spaces still dominated by Greco-Roman monuments and festivals. During this period of upheaval, when congregants seemingly attended everything but their own “orthodox” church, many ecclesiastical leaders began simultaneously to promote aggressive and insidious depictions of the demonic. In City of Demons, Dayna S. Kalleres investigates this developing discourse and the church-sponsored rituals that went along with it, showing how shifting ecclesiastical demonologies and evolving practices of exorcism profoundly shaped Christian life in the fourth century.

The first section treats of St. John Chrysostom and Antioch, while the second treats Cyril of Jerusalem; and the third Ambrose of Milan.

Russian Tales of Demonic Possession

It was, if I recall, Gabriele Amorth who noted the two most common tricks of the evil one are to convince us he does not exist, or else to over-sensationalize his existence to the part of paranoia. I think of both traps, but especially our propensity for the latter, whenever titles about the demonic come along. I think, thanks to Hollywood, we have become accustomed to writing off such talk as at one with spinning heads, nuclear-green vomit, and little girls in raspy voices saying vulgar things. Nonetheless, Christianity has always taken the reality of evil seriously, and I have yet to find any way of accounting for much of human history if you foolishly disallow such an explanation. A new book offers us translations of old Russian tales of demonic possession: Marcia A. Morris,  Russian Tales of Demonic Possession: Translations of Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia (Lexington Books, 2014), 154pp.
 

About this book we are told:

Russian Tales of Demonic Possession: Translations of Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia is a translation from the Russian of two stories of demonic possession, of innocence lost and regained. The original versions of both tales date back to the seventeenth century, but the feats of suffering and triumph described in them are timeless. Aleksei Remizov, one of Russia’s premiere modernists, recognized the relevance of the late-medieval material for his own mid-twentieth-century readers and rewrote both tales, publishing them in 1951 under the title The Demoniacs. The volume offers a new translation of the original Tale of Savva Grudtsyn as well as first-ever translations of The Tale of The Demoniac Solomonia and Remizov’s Demoniacs.Russian Tales of Demonic Possession opens with an introduction that interprets and contextualizes both the late-medieval and the twentieth-century tales. By providing new critical interpretations of all four tales as well as a short discussion of the history of demons in Russia, this introduction makes an eerily exotic world accessible to today’s English-speaking audiences.
Savva Grudtsyn and Solomonia, the protagonists of the two tales, are young people poised on the threshold of adulthood. When demons suddenly appear to confront and overmaster them, each of them teeters on the brink of despair in a world filled with chaos and temptation. The Tale of Savva Grudtsyn and The Tale of the Demoniac Solomonia propel us forcibly into the realm of good and evil and pose hard questions: Why does evil afflict us? How does it manifest itself? How can it be overcome? Aleksey Remizov’s modernist re-castings of the two stories offer compelling evidence that these same questions are very much with us today and are still in need of answers.

Demonic Possession

If the number of recent movies is anything to go by, interest in demonic activity and the rite of exorcism is high today. Along comes a new book from the prodigious publisher Brepols, treating this topic in the second and third centuries: A. Nicolotti, Esorcismo cristiano e possessione diabolica tra II e III secolo (Brepols, 2011, 808 p., 1 colour ill.).

About this book the publisher tells us:

Il libro contiene un’approfondita analisi della pratica dell’esorcismo e del trattamento della possessione diabolica nell’antichità cristiana. Vengono riprodotte, criticamente esaminate, tradotte e commentate tutte le occorrenze scritte esistenti – più di duecento, in sette lingue – in cui compare qualche menzione o anche solo qualche allusione al tema. La provenienza dei testi è varia: autori cristiani, autori pagani che descrivono gli usi dei cristiani, scritti giudeocristiani, gnostici, apocrifi, ordinamenti ecclesiastici, etc. L’arco cronologico preso in considerazione va dall’inizio del II secolo (Elcasaiti) alla metà del III (Cornelio di Roma). La parte analitica è preceduta da un’antologia dei testi antecedenti giudaici (Antico Testamento, Qumran e Giuseppe Flavio) e protocristiani (Nuovo Testamento), e delle testimonianze pagane coeve (Luciano di Samosata e Filostrato). Una lunga introduzione indaga in generale sui presupposti teologici dell’esorcismo, sui modelli biblici, sulle sue implicazioni apologetiche e propagandistiche, sulla sua funzione nell’ambito del conflitto interreligioso, sulla terminologia adoperata, sui formulari e le pratiche attestate, sulle caratteristiche, prerogative e qualità morali dell’esorcista, sul progressivo stabilirsi dell’esorcistato come ordine sacro e sull’istituzione del rito dell’esorcismo dei catecumeni. La bibliografia scientifica utilizzata supera i 1000 titoli. Al termine del libro è a disposizione un riassunto in lingua inglese.