Human Flourishing in Early Christian Theology

The study of human flourishing has grown dramatically in the past decades, emerging not only as a central topic in the social scientific fields of psychology and sociology but also as an interdisciplinary nexus. Human flourishing is now a topic for literary studies, for theology and religious studies, for history, and all of the humanities. This rapid growth expresses the availability of flourishing as a nearly universal object of interest, a basic and globally-shared human desire: Who does not want to flourish?

This advent of attention and scholarship has brought with it attention not only to what might be common in human flourishing but also what is regionally, culturally, and socially distinct. Human Flourishing in Early Christian Theology: Creation and Transfiguration in Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine of Hippo contributes to this broadening of perspective diachronically, bringing central constructs in the contemporary social scientific study of human flourishing into conversation with two key voices in early Christian theology, Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine of Hippo. Taking as points of departure topics such as health, emotion, virtue, community, and friendship, each chapter traces how each late-ancient theologian understood such phenomena within their vision of human nature and its telos.

This approach gives an introduction to the thought of both Gregory and Augustine and brings their writing into fresh perspective, even while these two theologians offer lenses for seeing contemporary flourishing work otherwise. This is, in this sense, a work of theological retrieval, of ressourcement, which explores the intersection of ancient and contemporary to produce new possibilities of understanding. The fundamental possibility advanced here is the determinative importance that conceptions of human nature play in conceptions of human flourishing, and that the distinctively Christian visions of human flourishing found in Gregory and Augustine unfold from their vision of the human being not only as created but as destined for transfiguration in the life of participation in God.