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Project at the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters (Oslo) in the academic year 2002/03 directed by Prof. Jostein Børtnes and Prof. Tomas Hägg (University of Bergen).

The project will study the development of a specific anthropology and aesthetics within Christian Orthodox theology with emphasis on the Cappadocian Church Fathers (4th cent. AD), in particular Gregory of Nazianzus, and their impact on subsequent Byzantine theologians, such as Dionysios the Areopagite (ca. AD 500) and Maximus the Confessor (7th cent. AD).

Cappadocian anthropology represented something new: it was based on the mystery of the Incarnation and on the theology of the Trinity as it was formulated by the Cappadocians. A central concern will be the role of the Cappadocians for Byzantine aesthetics and the theology of the icon, an aspect of Orthodox tradition that sets it apart form Judaism and Islam as well as Western theology.

The Orthodox doctrine of the deification of man has left deep traces in the anthropology of all Orthodox peoples, not least in Russia; for instance, in the novels of Dostoevsky and Pasternak this idea still determines the representation of the characters.By studying key texts of these leading Greek theoreticians, the project sets out to illuminate the relationship between anthropology and aesthetics in the early Orthodox tradition.

Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University in New York. He was formerly Reader in Patristic and Byzantine Theology at the University of Leeds, England. He is the author of 13 books on New Testament, Patristic, and Byzantine Christian thought including : The Transfiguration of Christ in Scripture and Tradition (1987); St. Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy (1994); Standing in God's Holy Fire: The Byzantine Spiritual Tradition (2001);
St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography (2001), and most recently : The Book of Mystical Chapters (Texts from the Early Monastic Teachers) (2002). He will concentrate his research around the Poetic Opus of St. Gregory, and will especially be drawing together material on the nature of the understanding of Beauty active in this period as a common point of reference between Christian Fathers and Hellenistic Sophists.
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Professor emeritus of Classical Philology at the University of Oslo. He was formerly associate professor of Ancient History at the University of Bergen. The subject of his PhD-thesis (Uppsala University) was ancient historiography (Gedanke und Tat. Zur Erzählungstechnik bei Herodot, Thukydides, Xenophon und Arrian, 1965). His publications also include The Way to Chaeronea. Foreign Policy, Decision Making and Political Influence in Demosthenes' Speeches (1983) and articles on St Cyprian and Eusebius of Caesarea. Currently, his main research interest is the Christianization of the Late Roman empire in the west, from Constantine to Gregory the Great. In the autumn of 2002 he will concentrate his research on a study on leadership and rhetoric from Demosthenes to St Cyprian.
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Dean E. Walker Professor of Church History and Professor of World Mission/Evangelism at Emmanuel School of Religion, Johnson City, TN, USA. He held a Lehrauftrag at the University of Tübingen in the early 1970s. He has written a commentary on Gregory of Nazianzus's Theological Orations (1990), served as an associate editor (with Michael McHugh, editor Everett Ferguson) for the Encyclopedia of Early Christianity (1990, 2nd ed. 1997) and co-editor (with Abraham Malherbe and James Thompson) of The Early Church in Its Context (1997). His contribution to the project will be an examination of the bond between aesthetics and theology in the work of Gregory the Theologian.
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Lecturer of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Latvia. His field of study includes Plato, Aristotle, the Neoplatonic tradition, and the Cappadocian Church Fathers, particularly Gregory of Nazianzus. He is involved in the project of translating Plato's dialogues into Latvian ("Theaetetus", forthcoming 2002), and works upon translation and commentary on Plotinus' "Enneads" (selection) and Gregory of Nazianzus' "Five Theological Orations". His research within the project will be related to the study of the Platonic background of Gregory Nazianzus' thought and Gregory's contribution to the Cappadocian doctrine of the Trinity.

Assistant Professor of Greek and Latin at The Catholic University of America. He is currently preparing a book on rhetoric and the self in Michael Psellos' literary work as well as an edition of Psellos' corpus of letters for the Teubner series. Recent articles include "The 'Usual Miracle' and an Unusual Image: Psellos and the Icons of Blachernai", Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik 51 (2001) and "Michael Psellos' Rhetorical Gender", Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 24 (2000). He will work on literary aesthetics and presentations of the self in the letters of Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil the Great, Julian, and Synesius.
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Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Early Christian Studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC., formerly Associate Professor of History at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is author of Ascetics, Authority, and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian (1978), Pachomius: the Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt (1985; updated in paperback with new preface 1999), Basil of Caesarea (1994; paperback edition 1998), Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity (ed., with Tomas Hägg, 2000), and The Early Christian Centuries (paperback 2002). In Oslo, he will work on "Human Nature and its Material Setting in Basil of Caesarea's Sermons on the Creation", as part of a proposed book with Robin Darling Young.
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Professor of Church History at the University of Lund. From 1999-2002 he was Nordic Visiting Professor of patristics at the Universities of Bergen and Oslo. He is Praeses of Collegium Patristicum Lundense and Vice-President of the International Association of Patristic Studies. He is the author of The Letters of St. Antony (1990, 1995) and Athanasios av Alexandria: Antonios' liv (trans. and comm., with Tomas Hägg, 1991) and the general editor of the ten volume series Svenskt Patristiskt Bibliotek (vols. I-III 1999-2001, vols. IV- ). Within the project he will work on Platonic philosophy and the concept of Athens in the Cappadocian Fathers as well as translations into Swedish of selections of their writings.
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Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor. Other publications: "Did St Maximus the Confessor have a Concept of Participation?" (Studia Patristica 2001), "The Ethical Consequences of the Christian Conception of Nature as created by God" (St Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 2001). He will work on the concept of divine activity (energeia) in cosmology and soteriology in the Cappadocian Fathers and St Maximus the Confessor.
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Professor of Russian Literature at the University of Bergen. He was formerly University Lecturer in Slavonic Studies and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. He is the author of Visions of Glory: Studies in Early Russian Hagiography (1988) and Polyfoni og karneval (1993), and co-editor (with Ingunn Lunde) of Cultural Discontinuity and Reconstruction: the Byzanto-Slav Heritage and the Creation of a Russian National Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1997). He will concentrate his research around the rhetoric of Gregory of Nazianzus and on his concept of the divine image.
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Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Bergen. His books include Narrative Technique in Ancient Greek Romances (diss. Uppsala, 1971), Photios als Vermittler antiker Literatur (1975), The Novel in Antiquity (1983), Athanasios av Alexandria: Antonios' liv (trans. and comm., with Samuel Rubenson, 1991) and Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity (ed., with Philip Rousseau, 2000). His work within the project will focus on Hellenism in Gregory of Nazianzus, with special reference to his speeches on Basil and members of his own family. In collaboration with Jostein Børtnes and Samuel Rubenson, he will also translate these funeral speeches for publication with commentaries in Swedish and Norwegian.
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Professor of Patristic and Byzantine Studies at the Department of Theology, University of Durham. He was formerly Professor of Cultural History at Godsmiths’ College, University of London, and earlier taught at Oxford. His research interests include St John Damascene, St Maximus the Confessor and other Greek Fathers, iconoclasm and the theology of icons, and Orthodox theology in the modern world. He is the author of The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: from Plato to Denys (1981), Discerning the Mystery: an Essay on the Nature of Theology (1983), Denys the Areopagite (1989), Maximus the Confessor (1996), and most recently St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (2002). Within the Oslo project he will be working on the influence of St Gregory Nazianzus and Dionysios the Areopagite on Byzantine Aesthetics, especially St Maximos the Confessor.
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