Oikonomia

The essays in this volume investigate themes related to the place of law in Byzantine ideology and society. Was this a society which was meant to be governed by law? For answers, these essays look to the intent of the legislators; the attitudes toward the law; the relationship between law, religion, literature, and art.

This book poses an eloquent challenge to the common conception of the hermeneutical tradition as a purely modern German specialty. Kathy Eden traces a continuous tradition of interpretation from Republican Rome to Reformation Europe, arguing that the historical grounding of modern hermeneutics is in the ancient tradition of rhetoric.

A pronoia was a type of conditional grant from the emperor, often to soldiers, of various properties and privileges. In large measure the institution of pronoia characterized social and economic relations in later Byzantium, and its study is the study of later Byzantium. Filling the need for a comprehensive study of the institution, this book examines the origin, evolution and characteristics of pronoia, focusing particularly on the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But the book is much more than a study of a single institution. With a broad chronological scope extending from the mid-tenth to the mid-fifteenth century, it incorporates the latest understanding of Byzantine agrarian relations, taxation, administration and the economy, as it deals with relations between the emperor, monastic and lay landholders, including soldiers and peasants. Particular attention is paid to the relation between the pronoia and Western European, Slavic and Middle Eastern institutions, especially the Ottoman timar.

This book explores the origins of western biopolitics in ancient Greek political thought. Ojakangas’s argues that the conception of politics as the regulation of the quantity and quality of population in the name of the security and happiness of the state and its inhabitants is as old as the western political thought itself: the politico-philosophical categories of classical thought, particularly those of Plato and Aristotle, were already biopolitical categories. In their books on politics, Plato and Aristotle do not only deal with all the central topics of biopolitics from the political point of view, but for them these topics are the very keystone of politics and the art of government. Yet although the Western understanding of politics was already biopolitical in classical Greece, the book does not argue that the history of biopolitics would constitute a continuum from antiquity to the twentieth century. Instead Ojakangas argues that the birth of Christianity entailed a crisis of the classical biopolitical rationality, as the majority of classical biopolitical themes concerning the government of men and populations faded away or were outright rejected. It was not until the renaissance of the classical culture and literature – including the translation of Plato’s and Aristotles political works into Latin – that biopolitics became topical again in the West. The book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the field of social and political studies, social and political theory, moral and political philosophy, IR theory, intellectual history, classical studies.

"Originally published in Italian under the title Il Regno e la Gloria."

If the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity , as Karl Rahner said, then what difference does it make for how we read the Bible? This book takes up the discussion that has dominated the last several decades of Trinitarian theology - that of Rahner's Rule - and brings it into dialogue with the longer history of the doctrine, particularly with the history of interpretation of scripture. The history of Trinitarianism is the history of complex interpretive moves, a long conversation in which the Christian church has sought to learn how to ask the right questions of scripture. Surveying recent theological projects and learning from their successes and failures, The Image of the Immanent Trinity argues that the eternally perfect fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit is truly present for our salvation in Christ who, as the image of the invisible God, secures God's presence in the economy of salvation as the image of the immanent Trinity.

This book traces one exegetical, interpretative principal, divine accommodation, in Jewish and Christian thought from the first to the nineteenth century. The focus is upon major figures and the place of accommodation in their work. Divine accommodation, the idea that divine revelation had to be attuned to the human condition, is a vital interpretive device in the history of both Judaism and Christianity. Accommodation is present not only in the language, style, and tone of Scripture but in all of human history. This is the first systematic study of the concept of accommodation, and shows how both religions employed the same interpretative tool for different purposes and to different ends.