In the Christian world during the late fourth through the sixth centuries various strains of monastic life developed, from extreme eremitic isolation to the communal discipline of the cenobia. These different types of monastic life continued to evolve through the Middle Ages. Though most specialists are aware of the multiplicity of patterns of monastic life which are found within both the Latin and the Byzantine spheres, they have been less concerned with what informs these traditional patterns.1This paper attempts to isolate some differences in modes of monastic life in the eastern empire during the Komnenian period and then to explain those differences in terms of the founders' distinct conceptions of salvation.2 The analysis compares two founders—John II Komnenos and Neophytos—and the monastic life led in their respective institutions—the Pantocrator monastery in Constantinople and the Enkleistra in the provincial milieu of Byzantine Cyprus. These two monasteries have been selected not only because they represent extreme examples of their types, but also because rich artistic and literary documentation survives from both.

Just as God condemns and curses the Roman Antichrist,

so without any doubt at all he also curses the new Caesaropapacy … in which governmental officials station themselves in God's temple and puff themselves up against God and the church … as they compose and promulgate new decrees contrary to what Christ has ordained for his ministry, and then decide to subject [Christ's ministers] to the punishment of exile and condemnation.

In 1856 Ralph Waldo Emerson stated boldly that the English “cannot interpret the German mind.” 1Although German higher criticism did not “merely attack the Scriptures” but rather “studied them in a new spirit,” it was to be censured, feared, ignored, or misunderstood in the early decades of the nineteenth century in England.2 Such was not the case in the country which gave birth to the school of which David Friedrich Strauss is perhaps the most notorious and most distinguished representative. Eduard Zeller asserted that, in his own country, Strauss's work “had … a decided effect upon the philosophy and the general culture of our own day.”3

What happened to the social gospel impulse after World War I? Recent historians have demonstrated that many reformers did not bid farewell to reform in the 1920s.1 In the case of Protestant social liberalism, however, the precise relationship between postwar social action and the prewar social gospel movement requires further clarification. Was the former merely a continuation of the latter? Such a question is currently difficult to answer since few major studies of the social gospel bridge both historical periods. Indeed, the death or retirement by 1918 of so many early leaders of the social gospel movement, particularly Washington Gladden, Josiah Strong, and Walter Rauschenbusch, leaves the impression that an era had come to a close.

An enormous change in the academic study of religion has occurred in the United States during the last half-century as the center of the enterprise has moved from the church-supported college and the seminary to the secular university and the graduate school. Some of this change has been caused by the rise of state-supported higher education, some by the secularizing trend that has shaped all modern American universities, both public and private. The change clearly has resulted in a discipline (if the term may be loosely used) in which not only has the number of practicing religion scholars greatly multiplied, but the scholarship itself also has grown in academic stature, becoming less eulogistic, more critical, and more methodologically congruent with other humanities disciplines.1