Symbolism and the Christian Imagination

By Herbert Musurillo, S.J.

Symbolism and the Christian Imagination is a fascinating exploration of the Christian imagination from the Apostolic age to the high Medieval period. Employing a plethora of examples and figures, patristic and classicist scholar Herbert Musurillo, S.J., develops a highly detailed and deftly balanced to the genesis and terminus of Christian art and literature. In the words of its author, the book demonstrates how “the Christian tradition was fed in different ways from different, and sometimes opposing, sources; and how it grew strong with the intuitive awareness, so beautifully expressed by Augustine, that all truth is the Lord’s no matter what the source.”

“The Christian imagination…is concerned precisely with the tension, the polarity, which arises between visible, sensuous reality and the hidden things which have been revealed to us, between the phenomena of time and the substance of things hoped for.” – Herbert Musurillo, S.J.

Herbert Musurillo (1917–1974) was a Roman Catholic priest of the Society of Jesus, an authority on the Church Fathers, and a professor of classics at Fordham University. He received doctorates from Oxford University and Fordham. Musurillo’s writings include the popular Fathers of the Primitive Church and Acts of the Pagan Martyrs.

Paperback: 238pp.

ISBN: 978-1950970285