This article addresses the question as to why Maximus the Confessor was first recognized as an official martyr and saint in the imperial Byzantine Church only in the tenth century, although his theology had been accepted by the Sixth Ecumenical Council and his followers began to practice and propagate his cult shortly after his death in 662. The argument begins with a brief description of Maximus’ early veneration and then examines the Sixth Ecumenical Council’s failure to rehabilitate him by detailing (...) the reasons why this was impossible in 681 and also thereafter. Clearly, in the seventh and eighth centuries the cult of Maximus had its centre outside the empire in parts of Palestinian monasticism. During the iconoclastic era, as in the seventh century, Maximus’ name stood once again for opposition to imperial religious policy, for he was held up by those venerating icons as the witness of Tradition to their use. Although during this time iconophile monastic circles in the capital probably fostered his cult as well, his veneration continued to find no official recognition in the ninth century because of on-going division within the church of Constantinople. Only after a great distance in time to the events of the seventh century could official recognition in Byzantium come to Maximus, since the conflicts of that earlier era were no longer relevant. In this context, the ‘Holy Confessor Maximus’ underwent a process of acceptance by the Byzantines who anchored his biography in Constantinople. As a result, the actual circumstances of the monothelete controversy have ultimately been obscured. (shrink)

This essay examines Orosius’s historical-theological perspectives on the basis of the theologumenon of the Pax Augusta. First, it studies the method of Orosius’s chronography and his understanding of salvific oikonomia. Then the Author analyzes the Imperium Romanum and its fulfillment in the Imperium Christianium. A third section treats the synchronism of the Incarnation of the Logos in the Pax Augusta. Finally, the essay demonstrates how Erik Peterson detached Augustus’s theology as political theology from its late ancient context, and contrasts it (...) with the emerging imperial church of National Socialism and Peterson’s denunciation of it. (shrink)

The paper studies a simply typed term system Mω providing a primitive recursive concept of parallelism in the sense of Plotkin. The system aims at defining and computing partial continuous functionals. Some connections between denotational and operational semantics → for Mω are investigated. It is shown that → is correct with respect to the denotational semantics. Conversely, → is complete in the sense that if a program denotes some number k, then it is reducible to the numeral nk. Restricting to (...) the primitive recursive kernel Rω of Mω, it is shown that → is strongly normalising with uniquely determined normal forms. The twist is the design of fixed point style conversion rules for constants accounting for parallelly bounded parallel search such that correctness and strong normalisation hold. Thereupon, minor alternations to → bring about that every reduction sequence for a program of Rω terminates either in a numeral nk if the program denotes k, or in the term 0 if the program denotes the “undefined” object. Thus, Rω can be considered a primitive recursive version of Plotkin's PA+·. (shrink)

It is easy to prove in ZF− that a relation R satisfies the maximal condition if and only if its transitive hull R* does; equivalently: R is well-founded if and only if R* is. We will show in the following that, if the maximal condition is replaced by the chain condition, as is often the case in Algebra, the resulting statement is not provable in ZF− anymore . More precisely, we will prove that this statement is equivalent in ZF− to (...) the countable axiom of choice ACω. Moreover, applying this result we will prove that the axiom of dependent choices, restricted to partial orders as used in Algebra, already implies the general form for arbitrary relations as formulated first by Teichmüller and, independently, some time later by Bernays and Tarski. (shrink)