The dissertation examines the life narrative of Tsongkhapa Losang Dragpa (1357-1419), the influential founder of the Ganden school of Tibetan Buddhism, primarily through the lens of the bodhisattva path to enlightenment, a topic that animates much of Indian Buddhist literature a…
This dissertation identifies five tropes, or narratological motifs, in the hagiographic literature from Ireland, Anglo-Saxon England, and Francia from the early-medieval period that treat of saints, their bodies, and their embodied miracles. These tropes include the motif of hol…
The third and fourth century, known in church history as the Patristic Era, was a time when strong male leaders of the Christian Church shaped church doctrine so significantly that much of it is still applicable to todays Christians. During this male-dominated period of church h…
"Isaac of Nineveh's Ascetical Eschatology demonstrates that Isaac's eschatology is an original synthesis based on ideas garnered from a distinctively Syriac cultural milieu. Jason Scully investigates six sources relevant to the study of Isaac's Syriac source material and cultura…
"Isaac of Nineveh's Ascetical Eschatology demonstrates that Isaac's eschatology is an original synthesis based on ideas garnered from a distinctively Syriac cultural milieu. Jason Scully investigates six sources relevant to the study of Isaac's Syriac source material and cultura…
In Literary Studies, from the late 1970’s onwards there was increasing interest in and focus on, the importance of context in the study of literary works. New Historicism and materialist criticism became much more important. In The United States Stephen Greenblatt and others dev…
The cycle of Syriac madrāšê on the fourth-century ascetic, Abraham Qîdunāyâ, has suffered long neglect because scholars generally doubted its attribution to Ephrem the Syrian. Examination of the cycle's rhetoric and theological themes, however, proves beyond a reasonable doubt t…
This thesis provides an original theory of the function of asceticism and altered states of consciousness (ASCs) from a psychophysiological and cross cultural perspective, and specifically within the context of the living tradition of Ethiopian Orthodox Christian (EOC) hermitic …
My thesis is that Ephrem uses Mary's pregnancy in his Hymns on the Nativity both as a model for the ascetical life and as a way of explaining, theologically, what it means to be a Christian ascetic. For Ephrem, Mary is the first to have her body transformed through the union of …
Around 420 CE, Palladius wrote the Lausiac History , a collective biography recounting his travels amongst the desert communities of Egypt and Palestine. The text was written in response to a specific request from Lausus, who was the praepositus sacri cubiculi in the court of Em…
This dissertation contributes to the study of late antique demonology and the development of Christian monasticism in fourth century Egypt. In particular, I explore the relationship between the development of the Pachomian Koinonia and the belief its members held about demons. W…
Asceticism, anti-Jewish polemic, and an extensive use of Old Testament are three prominent feature of the Demonstrations of Aphrahat that can be brought together by an examination of the author's concept of divine Law. While many scholars have studied these areas in isolation, t…
The Greek-speaking ascetic, Hyperechius, has largely been forgotten. If it were not for the survival of his only extant work, Adhortatio ad Monachos (Adhort), found in PG 79:1471–1490 and the inclusion of a number of sayings of Hyperechius by the compilers of the Greek collectio…
Medievalist Mary Carruthers suggests that any historical work must choose to focus on the distinctiveness of a particular moment, or its continuity with what has gone before (Carruthers, 1990). In this dissertation my aim is to do a bit of both. For the past century, the Apophth…
Hesychia, Greek for quiet and stillness, is a method of controlling the body and focusing the mind's attention with silence and prayer in petition to Jesus Christ. It is an ancient Orthodox Christian ascetic practice that can provide an opportunity for peace and a transcendent s…