Im vorliegenden Band sind Eve-Marie Beckers Arbeiten zur Person des Paulus und zu seiner literarischen Tatigkeit zusammengestellt. Besonderes Interesse gilt dabei dem Philipperbrief und seiner Rezeptions- und Wirkungsgeschichte bis zu Ernst Lohmeyer. Die Beitrage stehen im Zusammenhang der Kommentierung des Briefs fur die Serie: „Meyers Kritisch-Exegetischer Kommentar (KEK)“. Der Kommentar soll die wirkmachtige Auslegung von Ernst Lohmeyer (1928/1930) ersetzen. Vier der insgesamt sechzehn Aufsatze, die im vorliegenden Band zusammengestellt sind, wurden bisher nicht oder nicht auf Deutsch oder Englisch veroffentlicht, die ubrigen zwolf Aufsatze sind zwischen 2005 und 2018 erschienen.

Der Philipperbrief des Paulus

This book argues that Augustine assimilated the Stoic theory of perception into his theories of motivation, affectivity, therapy for the passions and moral progress Using his sermons to elucidate his treatises, Sarah Catherine Byers demonstrates how Augustine enriched Stoic cognitivism with Platonism to develop a fuller and coherent theory of action That theory underlies his account of moral development, including his account of the mind's reception of grace By analyzing Augustine's engagement with Cicero, Seneca, Plotinus, Ambrose, Jerome, Origen and Philo of Alexandria, Byers sheds new light on a major thinker of the early Christian world whose work is of critical importance for understanding key and recurring themes in Western philosophy

Perception, Sensibility, and Moral Motivation in Augustine: A Stoic-Platonic Synthesis

This study is an investigation of the function of emotion in the social formation of the believers in the Pauline churches. In his letters, Paul speaks often of his own emotions, and also promotes certain emotions while banishing others; all this surely indicates that emotion has an important role to play within the believing community. However, in New Testament studies, the study of emotion is still at an embryonic stage. This thesis, which represents the first thesis-length treatment of emotion in the Pauline letter corpus, attempts to take the discussion forward. It argues that for Paul, emotions are integral to the proper formation and stabilizing of Christian identity and community, because they encode structures of belief and influence patterns of sociality.

Chapter 1 reviews the nascent scholarship on emotion in Paul’s letters and the wider New Testament, and also surveys the state of play of emotions research in the sciences and social sciences. In chapter 2, we examine emotion in Stoicism, the dominant philosophical influence of the day, focusing particularly on joy and grief—the two emotions that we take up and investigate exegetically in chapters 3 and 4, which concern, respectively, joy in Philippians, and grief in 1 Thessalonians. Finally, in chapter 5, we enlist the sociological notion of the “emotional regime” to explore how authorized emotions are constructed and reinforced in the Pauline communities. I conclude by offering an account of emotion in Paul, contrasting it with Stoic thinking.

Taking its cue from current emotions research, which highlights the cognitive and social dimensions of emotion, this thesis proposes that as Paul sees it, right patterns of feeling stem from, and indeed embody, right patterns of belief, and that the social display of sanctioned emotions upbuilds the communal life of the believers. Furthermore, such right emotions, by squaring felt experience with held beliefs, and demarcating social boundaries between Christians and others, have powerful integrating and differentiating functions that profoundly influence identity and belonging. These conclusions have potentially far-reaching implications for our overall understanding of the social formation of the early believers, not least in terms of how a hitherto neglected aspect of that socialization—Paul’s emphasis on the affective dimensions of personal and communal life—is brought into active conversation with the theological realities that were believed to shape all of human existence and the practices that undergirded and sustained these beliefs.

Paul’s Emotional Regime: The Social Function of Emotion in Philippians and 1 Thessalonians

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The Stoics and the practical: a Roman reply to Aristotle

This paper explores the potential for psychic conflict within Seneca's moral psychology. Some scholars have taken Seneca's explicit claim in De Ira that the soul is unitary to preclude any kind of simultaneous psychic conflict, while other interpreters have suggested that Seneca views all cases of anger as instances of akrasia. I argue that Seneca's account of anger provides the resources for accommodating some types of simultaneous psychic conflict; however, he denies the possibility of psychic conflict between two action-generating impulses, thus rejecting the phenomena of genuine akrasia and enkrateia. Although superficially counterintuitive, Seneca's cognitivist account of anger, according to which anger is complex and requires assent to the propositions that ‘I have been wronged’ and ‘I ought to seek revenge’, renders his denial of akrasia and enkrateia more plausible.

The Possibility of Psychic Conflict in Seneca's De Ira

The concept of πρoπαeιαι or "pre-emotions" is known not only to the Roman Stoics and Christian exegetes but also to Philo of Alexandria. Philo also supplies the term πρoπαeια at QGen 1.79. As Philo cannot have derived what he knows from Seneca (despite his visit to Rome in 39), nor from Cicero, who also mentions the point, he must have found it in older Stoic writings. The πρoπαeια concept, rich in implications for the voluntariness and phenomenology of the passions proper, is thus confirmed for the Hellenistic period. It is not to be expected that Philo's handling of this or any concept will necessarily conform to the usage of his Stoic sources. His evidence is nonetheless of great value where it coincides with that of other witnesses. In QGen 4.73 the emphasis falls upon involuntariness and the mechanisms of impression and assent as in Epictetus fr. 9. The πρoπαeια saves the virtuous person's insusceptibility to emotion exactly as it does for the Stoic spokesman in Gellius NA 19.1; this point is of some interest in view of the Christological use of this concept in Origen and Didymus. QGen 1.55 and 3.56 indicate that the occurrence of the πρoπαeιαι is dependent upon uncertainty, and further, that for Philo, as for Seneca in Ira 2.3.4, a thought not acted upon can count as a πρoπαeια. In QGen 4.15-17 and 1.79, Philo indicates that hope and perhaps laughter may be related to joy as πρoπαeια to παoς; these assertions are not paralleled in extant Stoic texts. Further, in QGen 2.57, he names "biting and contraction" as the eυπαeια corresponding to grief, supplying a helpful parallel for Cic. Tusc . 3.83 and Plut. Virt. Mor. 449a. The topic may well have been discussed by Posidonius, as suggested by Cooper and others, but Posidonius' attested innovations are rather different in character from the points which have caught the attention of Philo. Taking together the indirect evidence of Philo, Seneca, and Cicero, we may reasonably infer that the πρoπαeια concept belonged already to an earlier period of Stoicism.

Margaret Graver

Papers

Philo of Alexandria and the Origins of the Stoic Πρoπαειαι