Content area
Full Text
Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou Guiding to a Blessed End: Andrew of Caesarea & His Apocalypse Commentary in the Ancient Church Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014 Pp. 350. $69.95.
Following the appearance of English translations of the two early Byzantine commentaries on the Apocalypse of John, that of Oecumenios, translated by John N. Suggit (CUA Press, 2006), and her own translation of that of Andrew of Caesarea (CUA Press, 2011), Constantinou offers a study to place Andrew's commentary in its various historical and theological contexts. She considers the importance of Andrew's work in securing the canonicity of the Apocalypse for the Byzantine Orthodox Church. She compares Andrew's work with Oecumenios's, to which it explicitly and implicitly responds. She provides analysis of Andrew's exegesis and theology, highlighting his persistent efforts to read the text as a prophecy of personal eschatology, with rewards and punishments, rather than as a prediction of imminent end times. The genre of this study approaches pie exponere, strangely straddling the boundary between Byzantine history and devotional literature. As history it is marred by the peculiar assumptions that there was always an Orthodoxy (from which many deviated), and that the standard for interpreting Andrew...