Readers of Russia Insider will be familiar with the excellent articles by Johnson, which often present a completely different understanding of Orthodox history, especially as regard Russia. He is one of our favorite revisionists.
He has a new book out which he says he has been working on for years. Understanding or explaining it is somewhat beyond our pay grade, so we'll just give you the description from Amazon:
The Ontology of Death: Patristic Philosophy against Nominalism
"This work is about ultimate reality and its relationship to Logos and the Trinity. Nominalism is the fundamental metaphysic of the modern world that claims only individual things exist. It posits that universal concepts such as "genre" or "species" are based, not on reality, but on the needs of mankind.
The battle between Realism and Nominalism represents the most basic dichotomy between objective reality and arbitrary convention. Nominalism posits a world without meaning; it denies universal beings and thus, universal truths. Realism holds that universal objects are part of a created order based on Logos and contains the basic archetypes of all created things.
In defending church doctrine, the patristic writers of the ancient and medieval Orthodox church needed to defend the idea of eternal archetypes in Logos, or the faith was a dead letter. This book sees the fathers as philosophers as much as theologians, and represents a topic that has yet to be granted extensive treatment in English."
Enjoy.
You can follow Dr. Johnson's work on Patreon.