The Fathers received from the first Christians an experience that for them was irrefutable: whoever receives the word of the Gospel and believes in Jesus, is born a Christian in baptism. But we then become Christians to the extent that the gift of the Spirit, whom we have received, manifests His power to transfigure both us as persons and the world. The dogmatic articulations of the first three Councils matured over three centuries of experience and testimony, sealed by the blood of the martyrs, the “seed of the Church.” The same Fathers who helped to elaborate the Church’s dogmas in the great Councils, also described the Christian life that corresponds to these dogmas in very concrete terms. Hence the Patristic texts that accompany the itinerary of this book: St. Athanasius’ The Life of St. Anthony, St. Basil’s Treatise on the Holy Spirit, Gregory of Nyssa’s Homilies on the Beatitudes, and St. John Cassian’s writings on the virtues and vices, in search of the correspondence between dogma and the Christian life. This is a volume that can help us to rediscover, in a Christian anthropology, the much hoped-for and necessary unity between theology and spirituality.

Anthropology, Councils, Divinization, Dogma, Mother of God, Nicaea I, Saint Antony, Saint Basil, Holy Spirit, Theology