Receptio Patristica – serie

This book traces the categorical construction and discursive employment of the Church Fathers across a variety of textual genres and contexts during the Carolingian era. This study shows that Carolingian intellectual culture was imbued with a distinctive sense of ‘progress toward the past,’ bolstered by texts associating the Church Fathers with the perceived harmony and continuity of the ancient Christian tradition across time and space. The new Christian ‘Roman’ empire that the Carolingians sought to create, reform, and ultimately perfect was fundamentally rooted in a certain idealized vision of ancient Christianity and the Church Fathers as a special type of timeless, transdiscursive authority.

This volume tells the story of the Arabic translations of the Church Fathers. By tracing the history of major translation centres, such as Palestine, Sinai, and Antioch, it describes how Middle Eastern Christians translated into Arabic, preserved, and engaged with their Patristic heritage. In addition to well-known authors, such as Gregory of Nazianzus, Ephrem the Syrian, and Dionysius the Areopagite, the volume presents a Patristic treatise written in Greek but preserved only in Arabic: the Noetic Paradise. Finally, by reconstructing a lost Arabic Dionysian paraphrase used by the Muslim theologian al-Ghazali, the volume explores Patristic influences on Islamic thought.