On Compassion, Healing, Suffering, and the Purpose of the Emotional Life

by Susan Wessel

Publisher:

Bloomsbury Academic

, 2020

Reading Augustine presents concise, personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religion scholars.

Augustine of Hippo knew that this fallen world is a place of sadness and suffering. In such a world, he determined that compassion is the most suitable and virtuous response. Its transformative powers could be accessed through the mind and its memories, through the healing of the Incarnation, and through the discernment of Christians who are forced to navigate through a corrupt and deceptive world.

Susan Wessel considers Augustine's theology of compassion by examining his personal experience of loss and his reflections concerning individual and corporate suffering in the context of the human condition and salvation.

Features

Engaging and concise introduction to Augustine's ideas about passion, compassion and the emotions in relation to religion
Considers the various points of contact between Augustine's opinions and early modern and contemporary views of compassion and the emotions
Offers new insight into the development of affective compassion as a Christian virtue

Contents

Abbreviations
1. Provocation
2. Sadness
3. Suffering
4. Remembering
5. Healing
6. Accommodation
Bibliography

Praise for On Compassion, Healing, Suffering, and the Purpose of the Emotional Life

This is an attractive book that is potentially appealing to a wide audience … Wessel eloquently communicates the innovativeness of Augustine's emotional teaching, and how it arose out of both personal experience and philosophical reflection.

Contributes well to this distinguished series.

Susan Wessel masterfully shows how Augustine of Hippo built a moral psychology on the notion that passions and emotions play an active and unifying role in the human soul once they have received the light of scriptural truth, the purifying powers of love, and the healing guidance of compassion. It is an important and remarkable work, in which readers of Augustine, scholars of theology, anthropologists, and psychologists will witness Augustine's 'Churchification' of ancient spirituality.

Susan Wessel has developed a new approach to the Mentalitaetsgeschichte of late antiquity, observing an emerging concept of the self – with passions and emotions – and its impact on Christian ethics and morality. Her studies on Gregory of Nyssa, Nemesius of Emesa, John Chrysostom and Jerome, Leo and Gregory the Great, and Maximos the Confessor are now finally complemented with this long-awaited – and strongly recommended – volume on the most influential thinker of them all: Augustine of Hippo.

This volume gives valuable insight into how Augustine of Hippo, following the tradition of preachers of the early church, used rhetoric to reframe the way his people perceived the ubiquitous suffering of their neighbours in a way that elicited acts, as well as emotions, of compassion. Such a book will be as valuable for practitioners of the arts of caring as for historians.

It gives a deeper insight into some of the basic themes of his thinking, such as compassion, healing, suffering, and emotional life. The text is well-structured and covers a wide range of primary and secondary references.

Product Details

• Title: On Compassion, Healing, Suffering, and the Purpose of the Emotional Life
• Author: Susan Wessel
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Print Publication Date: 2020
• Logos Release Date: 2024
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9781501344541, 9781501344527, 1501344528, 1501344544
• Resource ID: LLS:9781501344541
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-04-11T23:33:28Z

About Susan Wessel

Susan Wessel (BA, Smith College; JD, MTS, Harvard University; STM, Union Theological Seminary in New York; PhD, Columbia University) is Assistant Professor of Church History and Historical Theology. She was a Mellon Post-Doctoral Teaching and Research Fellow in the Classics Department at Cornell University (2000-1) and a Mary Seeger O’Boyle Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University (2001-2), where she taught as a Visiting Lecturer (2003). She is the author of Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome and Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy: The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic. Leo the Great was a major figure of the late Roman world whose life and work were profoundly interwoven with the political crisis of his day. As the western empire gradually succumbed to the advancing barbarian kingdoms, Leo understood that the papacy needed to expand its authority in order for the church to survive the demise of the political system. Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome argues that his achievement was to transform the church not only in the practical level of administrative organization, but in the more fluid realm of thought and idea. The secular Rome that was crumbling was replaced with a Christian, universal Rome that he fashioned by infusing his theology with humanitarian ideals. Cyril of Alexandria and the Nestorian Controversy: The Making of a Saint and of a Heretic examines the historical and cultural processes by which Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, was elevated to canonical status, while his opponent, Nestorius, the bishop of Constantinople, was made into a heretic. The human drama between Cyril and Nestorius gradually gave rise to a religious controversy that unfolded during the next 250 years, producing a lasting schism in the Eastern churches. In contrast to previous scholarship, Cyril of Alexandria concludes that Cyril’s success in being elevated to canonical status was due in part to his strategy in identifying himself with the orthodoxy of the former bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, in his victory over Arianism, in borrowing Athanasius’ interpretative methods, and in skillfully using the rhetorical tropes and figures of classical antiquity.