Prayer and the Transformation of the Self in Early Christian Mystagogy

This book is the second in a series on the mystagogy of the Church

Fathers produced by the Netherlands Centre for Patristic Research. The

first volume, Seeing through the Eyes of Faith: New Approaches to the

Mystagogy of the Church Fathers (LAHR, 11), initiated the

study of the Church Fathers as mystagogues, since this approach does

more justice to the Fathers’ own intention in writing a work or a sermon

than does regarding them as theologians avant la lettre. Early

Christian writers did not primarily seek to offer rational reflection on

the faith as an objective in its own right, but their works were rather

aimed at an existential transformation in their audience.
The

present volume focuses on how the Church Fathers conceived prayer as an

aspect of such a process of progressive transformation, and as a means

to achieve an awareness of God as Mystery, with whom one could,

paradoxically, communicate in prayer. In the essays collected here many

aspects and dimensions of the mystagogy of early Christian prayer are

examined: different kinds of prayer, their antecedents and their

development over time; their historical, theoretical, and ritual

contexts and meanings; and their noetic, imaginative, and physical

strategies.