Gnosticism from Thought to Religion

Following the discussion of the various forms of dualism, a discussion of the tension between God’s justice and his goodness is in order. Among the rabbis and the Church Fathers, justice and goodness are two essential attributes of God. Among different gnostic sects, however, the Just God is considered to be lower than the Good God. The centrality of justice in Abrahamic monotheism is replaced among dualists by the temptation of antinomianism, in particular the rejection of the Old Testament Law, the Torah. The Gnostic Carpocrates and his son Epiphanes (who wrote a treatise on “Justice”), as well as the Elchasaites (the Jewish-Christian sect in which Mani grew up) reflect such antinomian patterns, newly expressed among the Manichaeans.

The article traces the formation of Eastern Christian anthropology as a new religious and philosophical tradition within the Early Byzantine culture. The notion “Patristics” is reasoned as a corpus of ideas of the Church Fathers, both Eastern and Western. The term “Eastern Patristics” means the works by Greek-Byzantine Church Fathers, who in the theological disputes with the Western Church Fathers elaborated the Christian creed. Based on an analysis of the texts of Greek-Byzantine Church Fathers, the most important provisions of Eastern Patristics are deduced and discussed, which determined the specificity of Christian anthropology. In this context, different approaches of the Eastern Fathers to the explanation of the Old Testament thesis on the creation of man in God’s image and likeness and the justification of the duality of human essence are shown. Particular attention is paid to considering the idea of deification as overcoming the human dualism and the entire created universe, the doctrine of the Divine Logoi as God’s energies, and the potential elimination of the antinomianism of the earthly and Divine worlds. The article reflects the anthropological ideas of the pre-Nicene Church Father Irenaeus, the non-canonical early Christian work The Shepherd of Hermas, and the teachings on the man of the classical Eastern Patristics period by Athanasius of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor.

Gnostic studies in the XXeth century have been influenced by Hans Jonas’ The Gnostic Religion and his existentialist approach of Gnostic movements, until the discovery of the Coptic Nag Hammadi texts, in 1945, gave access to a series of documents coming from the Gnostics themselves. Progressively, the panorama of Gnostic sects and movements deeply changed, calling into question the notion of “dualism” used by the Church Fathers when refuting their Gnostic opponents. If Plotinus criticizes the Gnostic contempt of the world and their life without ethics, the recently commented texts from Nag Hammadi attest the use of the Platonic demiurge understood in the frame of the biblical version of the creation. The beauty of the world is not absent from Gnostic texts. The role of the Gnostic demiurge in documents like the Apocryphon of John or the Valentinian Tripartite Tractate, for example, shows that access to salvation is possible in a philosophical and theological system that is monistic. The heresiological category of “dualism” has too often hindered the study of the Gnostics which does not correspond to what the new documentation brings out.

Honey and bees have been a long-standing didactic metaphor of chastity in Western civilization, employed by various writers across the centuries. This article delineates the changing interpretations of honey and bees in the early medieval period with a focus on how they were attached to chastity. It argues that the metaphor was gradually redeveloped and reinterpreted from the early church to the early medieval period; it also pinpoints an evolution toward a more specific usage of the metaphor within the contexts of monasticism, demonstrating how honey and bees depart from being a misconceived metaphor of passive sexual abstinence to denote active pursuit of divine wisdom in a continuous line of Christian works by Church Fathers and early medieval monastics. The article first explores how honey and bees were connected to chastity in the writings of various church fathers, then surveys how the connection continued in the works of several monastic writers.

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The Cumaean Sibyl as the Revelation-bearer in the Shepherd of Hermas D. P. O'Brien And it was revealed to me, brothers, while I was sleeping, by a most beautiful young man speaking to me, "The old lady, from whom you have received the book, who do you think she is?" I replied, "The Sibyl." "You are wrong," he said, "she is not." "Then, who is she?" I asked. He replied, "She is the Church." Shepherd of Hermas, Vis II.iv.1 The above dialogue includes the first explicit reference to the pagan Sibyl figure in any extant Christian work (circaC.E. 148). She is mentioned only once in the whole of the Shepherd and even then, as we see here, is seemingly dealt short shrift. Yet, it was the beginning of a trend. Many Apologists in succeeding generations made extensive use of the pagan Sibyl as the authoress of Christian prophecies.1 Typically, the Christianized Sibyl in these later works is a voice rather than a figure. It is the content of her "prophecies" which the Church Fathers stress more than her character.2 The exception to the idea that the Sibyl is a voice rather than a figure in Christian literature is the Shepherd of Hermas. It is generally conceded that even though the appellation "Sibyl" is used only once, there are [End Page 473] several allusions to the Cumaean Sibyl in the preceding passages.3 Thus, Martin Dibelius, expressing the consensus of many scholars, does not grant that the Shepherd makes use of any of her prophecies, rather, Hermas has employed the Sibyl-figure (Sibyllengestalt) only as a model; what she conveyed has nothing to do with the Sibylline verses; only her exterior is Sibyl-demeanored (sibyllenartig)—and Hermas himself indicates this clearly enough in Vis. II.iv.1.4 Naturally, with such a position being assumed by many scholars, there has been no genuine attempt as yet to explore Hermas' theological agenda for using the Sibyl figure and whether indeed she plays a more significant role than hitherto considered. This article is an attempt to investigate the role of the Cumaean Sibyl as the revelation-bearer in the Shepherd. In so doing, I will attempt to refute Dibelius' position stated above and demonstrate that the intention of the Shepherd is to authenticate, through the use of the figure and the voice of the pagan Sibyl, the then novel, theological conception of creation, creatio ex nihilo, the idea that God created matter from absolutely nothing. We shall see that the Shepherd's adoption of creatio ex nihilo implies a discrete a quo and a discrete ad quem of that which is created, namely, the world and all that is in it. The transitoriness of the age then provides the foil for the Shepherd's depiction of the Church as pre-existent which, again by implication, will transcend the coming destruction of the world. In this way, the Shepherd provides ecclesiological remedia for the general lack of expectancy for the Parousia, for the attendant, ever-approaching tribulation, and for the pressing problem of his congregation's openness to the teaching of the Gnostic false prophets. I. Creation in the Shepherd The question of whether the author of the Shepherd actually intended to depict the creation view ex nihilo is a debated issue. Several scholars deny this possibility and suggest that it was the later apologists, Tatian, Theophilus or Irenaeus, who were to become the first Christian endorsers [End Page 474] of the creatio ex nihilo concept.5 Other scholars seem quite convinced of the Shepherd's deliberate intention, yet are emphatic that Hermas merely depends upon earlier Jewish and Christian literature as possible allusions.6 Both camps, however, have given scarcely anything more than a cursory explanation for the Shepherd's respective use of creatio ex nihilo type of language and certainly no modern-day scholar credits the author of the Shepherd with any theological development in the area of cosmological thought.7 Yet, it is my position that this creatio ex nihilo concept forms the hypothetical basis for the modus ponens of Hermas' proof that the world is destructible. It is also the presupposition for...

The term “Hindu” derives from Persian expressions coined in the 4th century bce to define the traditions found east of the Indus River. Thus, a common start to the archaeological examination of Hinduism are the prehistoric cults found in various regions of the Indian subcontinent. Some elements associated with traditions from the urban Indus civilization of the 3rd millennium bce have been connected to later Hindu iconography and ideals, but these links remain tenuous. By the mid-2nd millennium bce, the introduction of new Vedic ideologies, so called because the earliest references are found in the texts of the Vedas, ushered in significant transformations in ritual and spiritual life, but left little material trace. However, migrating groups associated with these traditions have been traced genetically and linguistically to the Western Steppes of Central Asia. Over the next two thousand years, Vedic traditions became more elaborate and heterogeneous, merging with popular customs, and generating heterodox schools of thought that challenged both the spiritual and social order of Brahmanical Hinduism, which also took form during this time. The early centuries of the Common Era were witness to additional transformations and adaptations, and it is after this period that various forms of temple architecture, sculpture, and the epigraphic record become a wider body of evidence for study in both South and Southeast Asia. During the 1st millennium ce, Hinduism took on more familiar contours, partly driven by the rise in extant religious, philosophical, and secular literature. Alongside this textual record, a wealth of architectural and art historical sources became available; studies of these sources increasingly look to continuities from earlier eras that are documented archaeologically. Nevertheless, much of this body of knowledge derives from institutional and elite contexts; household-level details remain slim and much contemporary interpretation of past daily worship continues to be inferred from the ethnographic record. During the modern period, Hinduism came to acquire its formal definition as a world religion, and with this came the attempt to delineate Hindu identity for first colonial, and then national ends, often in tandem with the Orientalist archaeologies of the early and mid-20th century. Though the definition of modern Hinduism may be more clearly circumscribed, it is certainly no less varied. Modernity continues to impact the understanding of Hinduism in many ways. Technologies such as DNA analysis have been applied to the study of early societies, with the goal of understanding ancient migrations and the composition of different regional populations. While our understanding of past human movement has increased considerably because of these studies, genetics do not serve as a proxy of culture. DNA evidence can provide some details about the movement and interaction of different populations in the past, but categories like race, language, and culture are as incommensurable as they are artificial, and they should be understood as such. Instead of a match for the textual or genetic record, the archaeology of Hinduism should be considered the material study of a broad amalgam of dynamic beliefs and practices that date back into the eras of earliest prehistory and continue to transform and evolve around the world.

During the fifth century of our common era the Latin church fathers struggled to explain how we humans are saved and why it seems that not all humans are saved. Most of these attempts pivoted on the writings of Augustine of Hippo. The fathers either borrowed from Augustine's thought, adapted it, or reacted to it. Beginning with the generation of theologians who thrived at the end of Augustine's life and just following his death, there arose a tendency in the western church to moderate his more extreme positions concerning grace and predestination by realigning them with accepted church tradition. This tradition includes those Christian doctrines which were held and promoted most widely by theologians—up to, but not including, Augustine himself—whom the early church accepted as orthodox.

The first few centuries of the Common Era saw great theological fluidity in emerging Christian doctrine. A figure looming large in many early controversies is Marcion of Pontus. Not considered truly gnostic by modern scholars, Marcion fueled the ire of early Church Fathers—Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and others—by spreading his apparently biblically-based, ditheistic theology of a superior Unknown Good God and an inferior Just Creator God. Additionally, Marcion’s gospel, generally considered a version of canonical Luke, witnesses the three Jesus sayings in Luke 9:57–62 (cf. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 4,23,9–11; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 3,4,25). This article examines these sayings—in light of both ancient and modern commentary—as representing a collective theological way or ὁδός to ideate Marcion’s Unknown Good God. Today Marcion’s voice is faint, but in ancient Christianity it was exceedingly strong. This article attempts to find a hint of its former strength.

Traditionally, anthropomorphic sculptures from the necropolis of the ancient city of Gorgippia are flattened half-shapes without detailed face and body contours, merely trunks and heads. In the Northern Black Sea region such monuments are characteristic of the IV–II centuries BC, but some date back to the first centuries of the Common Era. There is a reason to believe that they were used for ceremonial purposes rather than as markers of particular burial grounds or gravestones in the conventional meaning. Faceless half-shapes in Greek necropolises are associated with rites of the worship of Persephone, who dies (as represented by faceless sculptures) and then resurrects (by sculptures with painted faces) as seasons change. They could be used like special posts – ‘cippi’ – for marking sacred places within necropolises with libations and sacrifices in honor of gods with chthonic properties. Such incarnations are observed in Persephone (Kore), Demeter, Aphrodite, Artemis and their male counterparts – Dionysus, Hercules, Hermes, Eros. Epitaphs and carved scenes related to traditions of the funeral ritual on the anthropomorphic objects turned them into tombstones dedicated to specific deceased individuals.

Functional neurological disorder (FND) and placebo effects have a longstanding, interwoven and controversial history that date back to the origins of both entities. Recent research has demonstated a shared neurobiology between brain regions/networks implicated in FND and placebo effects. This offers a potential therapeutic mechanism to help explain anecdotal case reports and expert opinion suggesting high placebo responsiveness. However, to date there has been very limited empiric evidence supporting that placebo effects provide meaningful benefits to patients with FND. In this chapter, we critically evaluate whether placebo effects may be helpful or harmful in application to the FND patient population. We offer a balanced review that blends optimism from mechanistic insights with ethical concerns regarding deception and vulnerabilities unique to FND. We attempt to create a foundation and action plan for much-needed future research in this field.KeywordsFunctional movement disorderFunctional neurological disorderPlaceboNoceboExpectation