Love – Ancient Perspectives

Kari Grødum is the director of the University of Agder's Metochi Study Centre in Greece. She has edited a number of books in connection with the Metochi Study Centre.

Henny Fiskå Hägg is Associate Professor of religion at the University of Agder, Norway. Her research interests include spirituality, theology and society of the Early Church, especially that of the Greek Orthodox tradition. Among her publications are Language and Negativity: Apophaticism in Theology and Literature (ed.) (2000), Clement of Alexandria and the Beginnings of Christian Apophaticism (2006) and “Silence and the Mind in Religious Practice” (2012).

Torstein Theodor Tollefsen is Professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo, Norway. His main interests are in ancient and late antique philosophy, Aristotle, Neoplatonism, and early Christian thought. He has published several articles on early Christian thought, especially on St Maximus the Confessor. He has published three books on Oxford University Press: The Christocentric Cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor (2008), Activity and Participation in Late Antique and Early Christian Thought (2012), and St Theodore the Studite’s Defence of the Icons: Theology and Philosophy in Ninth-Century Byzantium (2018).

John Kaufman is Associate Professor of church history at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, Oslo. His primary research interest is in early Christian theology, in particular the second century. He wrote his dissertation on the doctrine of deification in Irenaeus. In addition to his dissertation, his article “Historical relativism and the essence of Christianity”, published in Studia Theologica (2016), is relevant to the topic of his chapter in this volume.