Heavenly Sustenance in Patristic Texts and Byzantine Iconography: Nourished by the Word

This book examines ideas of spiritual nourishment as maintained chiefly by Patristic theologians –those who lived in Byzantium. It shows how a particular type of Byzantine frescoes and icons illustrated the views of Patristic thinkers on the connections between the heavenly and the earthly worlds. The author explores the occurrence, and geographical distribution, of this new type of iconography that manifested itself in representations concerned with the human body, and argues that these were a reaction to docetist ideas. The volume also investigates the diffusion of saints’ cults and demonstrates that this took place on a North-South axis as their veneration began in Byzantium and gradually reached the northern part of Europe, and eventually the entirety of Christendom.

About the Author

Elena Ene D-Vasilescu is a Tutor and a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, UK. Her teaching and research focus on Patristics and Byzantine Studies. She is the editor of Devotion to St. Anne in Texts and Images (2018), and co-editor, with Mark Edwards, of Visions of God and Ideas on Deification in Patristics Thought (2016). She has also published other books and many articles; among the most recent of her articles there are “Generation (γενεά) in Gregory Nazianzen’s poem On the Son ” (2017); “Early Christianity about the notion of time and the redemption of the world” (2017), and “Late Developments in Meta-Byzantine Icon-Painting” (2017).