Man in Metanoiacal Dialogue with God: The Biblical and Hesychastic Message of the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete

By Krzysztof Leśniewski

This work is a theological analysis and interpretation of the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete. The hermeneutic method used in the monograph consists in a comprehensive examination of key Greek concepts and phrases occurring in the analysed hymn in various contexts in which they occur, and on this basis creating a theological-existential synthesis. This method is based on the search for the spiritual and existential meaning of the most important terms and thus refers to the essential assumptions of patristic allegorical exegesis. The hermeneutic analysis of the content of the Great Canon in conjunction with the contextual analysis of the vocabulary used in it was considered the most appropriate, since it is the work of St Andrew of Crete can be compared to a poetic carpet woven from phrases from the Old and New Testament, which are combined with existential confessions and spiritual indications, expressed in Eastern Orthodox hesychastic terms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht
• Release date: Nov 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9783647573496

Krzysztof Leśniewski

Prof. Dr. Habil. Krzysztof Leśniewski (1960) is a Polish theologian. Since 1996, an employee of the Faculty of Theology in the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, and since 2008 the head of the Chair of Orthodox Theology at the same university. He is a member of the European Society for Ecumenical Research „Societas Oecumenica", the International Ecumenical Fellowship, Societas Scientiarum Internationalis „Fides et Ratio”. The main areas of his research: theological anthropology, spirituality of the Christian East, hesychastic diagnosis and therapy, and thanatology. He is author of four books (translated also into French, Spanish, and Lithuanian) and more than one hundred articles and chapters on Orthodox theology and spirituality.

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