Name Of God Research Articles

Curse and Modernity: A Brief Introduction

Curse and Modernity:A Brief Introduction Elisabeth Strowick (bio) In recent years, the curse has attracted attention particularly in discussions relating to legal philosophy and the philosophy of religion. As, for instance, Giorgio Agamben has shown, curse and oath make reference to the sphere of the sacred, which in no way precedes language, but rather denotes the link between law, religion, and language.1 Rather than framing the curse in religious or legal philosophy, this MLN special issue is interested in profiling it as a mode of representation in modernity. The appeal of the curse in modern literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis may be surprising. Why the interest in the curse specifically in such discourses that concur that God is dead? What is modernity’s affinity to the curse? Formulated as a thesis: the curse assumes an importance for modernity specifically as a mode of representation. It is by way of the curse as a medium/performative act that modernity first enters the scene at all. The almost complete absence of the curse — itself undoubtedly a linguistic force — within the context of John Austin’s speech act theory is noteworthy. Austin mentions the curse at best parenthetically: as an articulation of emotion (“swearing”2), which falls outside of the [End Page 571] categories of the locutionary, illocutionary, or perlocutionary, as well as in his final lecture, where he ascribes “cursing” to the group of “behabitives”: “[…] behabitives […] are a very miscellaneous group, and have to do with attitudes and social behavior.”3 They “include the notion of reaction to other people’s behavior and fortunes and of attitudes and expressions of attitudes to someone else’s […] conduct.”4 Björn Quiring criticizes Austin’s fencing in of the curse as a mode of reaction to the “behavior of another”5 — a critique that the articles of this special issue formulate as well. Although conspicuously absent in the sense of being explicitly addressed, the curse — it might be argued — is structurally inherent in Austin’s speech act theory. Agamben might serve as an indicator here, insofar as his linguistic-philosophical characterization of oath and curse repeats Austin’s normative orientation of the performative. For Agamben, oath and curse are an expression of the binding force of language; in this respect, the force of the curse is of the same origin as that of the oath. If what is articulated in the oath is the binding force of logos, whose seal is the name of God, the curse therefore results from the false oath, is an expression of the cleaving of the binding force of the word for which the oath stands.6 When transferred to the idiom of Austin’s speech act theory, the binding force of language would have to be seen in the orientation of the performative act toward convention. Austin describes the conditions of the success of a performative utterance as follows: “(A.1) There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further, (A.2.) the particular persons and circumstances in a given cause must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked. (B.1.) The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly and (B.2) completely.”7 The normative commitment of the performative to convention can be understood as an oath structure. The bond to convention guarantees the success of the speech act, which in turn, affirms convention. The curse would therefore find its place in a break with convention: “Now if we sin against any one (or more) of these […] rules, our [End Page 572] performative utterance will be (in one way or another) unhappy.”8 Does the unhappy performative articulate the curse structure of the performative? And would it then consequently be impossible to classify the curse within a specific category of speech acts — categories that, as Shoshana Felman has shown,9 are continuously subverted by Austin’s own text performance? Would the curse instead mark the very moment of failure that beleaguers Austin’s theory so unceasingly and, indeed, is ultimately a constitutive condition of the performative? Is Austin’s speech act...

Responsibility, Foreignness, Intimacy: Embodying Ethical Subjectivity in Emmanuel Levinas, Edmond Jabès, and Rosmarie Waldrop

Responsibility, Foreignness, Intimacy:Embodying Ethical Subjectivity in Emmanuel Levinas, Edmond Jabès, and Rosmarie Waldrop Teresa Villa-Ignacio “Le traducteur est endetté, il s’apparaîtcomme traducteur dans la situation de ladette; et sa tâche c’est de rendre, de rendre cequi doit avoir été donné.”1 I. Responsibility as Infinite Translation In his reading of Walter Benjamin’s influential essay, “The Task of the Translator,” Jacques Derrida foregrounds the obligation, responsibility, and debt implied by the task (tâche, Aufgabe) of Benjamin’s title (Psyché 211-14). That is, the translator, indebted to the translatable text, can only render this debt by giving over (rendre, Aufgeben) or, to use a concept shared by Edmond Jabès and Rosmarie Waldrop, by actualizing, in the language of the translation, the virtuality of the original text. Furthermore – and here Derrida’s reading joins Benjamin’s – this virtuality of the original text can only be actualized in the language of [End Page 1295] translation. However, this task is impossible, “insolvable”: the translator can never ab-solve herself of her obligation, or dis-solve her debt to that which she translates (211). Even so, she remains responsible for the survival of the work through the task of translation, a task that can never be completed, a task that, once undertaken, itself only renders the impossibility of completing that task. Yet the indebtedness of the translator makes possible an economy of ever-renewable and ever-regenerative returns to, or re-turnings of, the translatable text. Lavish Absence, Rosmarie Waldrop’s memoir of her “translationship” and friendship with Edmond Jabès, directly addresses and even performs this relationship of indebtedness of translator to translatee and to translatable text. After having translated, over a twenty-year period, the vast majority of Jabès’ poetic texts, Waldrop testifies in this memoir to her continuing obligation to the life, work, and memory of Jabès even after his death, as if the decades she had spent giving his texts over in/to English were still not enough to absolve her translator’s debt to him. Three times in this memoir, Waldrop cites a particularly charged Jabésian sentence, translating, retranslating, explicating and re-explicating it: this sentence and her repeated returns to it thematize and perform the indebtedness of the translator to translatable text. In the original French, as it appears in Jabès’ Elya (1969), the fifth book of Le Livre des questions, the sentence reads: “Jamais le livre, dans son actualité, ne se livre.” Waldrop’s translation, published in 1973, reads: “The book never actually surrenders.” Her amended translation in Lavish Absence (2002) reads: “The book in its actual state never surrenders.” It is worth citing Waldrop’s explication of this sentence at length: I have claimed that this “livre” refers to the metaphorical book of the universe, of infinite potential, the Name of God that contains all language, the ‘book’ that all writing ‘reads’ and ‘translates.’ Hence dans son actualité is crucial, is the actual state of this book – the ‘actual’ state of potential. This is an amazing statement. I still am not sure I understand it. Is it that potential does not surrender to actualization? To its actualization in the book? If we allow the pun on livre its play: it does not ‘book’ itself? Or is it sheer paradox: the ‘actuality’ of potentiality? Or is this the one unquestioned certainty of The Book of Questions: infinite potential exists? In which case this affirmation of possibility is so much taken for granted that it appears in a subordinate clause. (137–138) It is not a failing on Waldrop’s part that after thirty years, a stable interpretation, let alone translation, of this sentence, continues to elude her; in effect, the articulation of this elusiveness is perhaps the [End Page 1296] closest she comes to fulfilling her debt as translator. In the “sur-render” of her translation we also hear the render-ing, the rendre of Derrida’s translator, who both gives and abandons (Psyché 212): accordingly, in this passage Waldrop both attempts to exhaust the significance of “the book in its actuality” (my own - perhaps too literal - translation) and abandons the...

The Invention of God by Thomas Römer

Reviewed by: The Invention of God by Thomas Römer Pieter W. van der Horst The Invention of God By Thomas Römer. Translated by Raymond Geuss. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. xii + 303 pp. Ever since 1990, when my colleagues and I at Utrecht University started working on the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (1999), I have had a great interest in the origins of monotheism and of Israel’s belief in the one and only God. The book reviewed here is concerned with precisely that topic. [End Page 106] Originally published in French as L’invention de Dieu (2014), the French origin of the book still betrays itself in the unusually high number of references to French publications as compared to other books in this field of study. The book itself considers how the original storm and warrior god of a nomadic desert tribe to the south of ancient Palestine became Israel’s one and only God, the creator of Heaven and Earth. This fascinating theme has certainly delivered a fascinating book. At every page Römer displays his mastery of a wide range of ancient sources and scholarly literature. In what follows I give a succinct overview of the book’s contents, but I am afraid I will be unable to do justice to its richness. In a lengthy introduction, problems that the ancient evidence poses to the scholar are described as Römer argues that the way the final editors of the Bible presented matters often look different than historians’ perspectives. Römer steers a middle course between maximalist and minimalist positions, and though he is occasionally inclined to follow a more minimalist approach, he never shows sympathy for the extreme historical skepticism of the so-called Copenhagen School. Chapter 1 deals with God’s name, YHWH, its origin and meaning, and the avoidance of its pronunciation. Here Römer could have benefited from the recent study by F. Shaw, The Earliest Non-Mystical Jewish Use of Iaô (2015), but that book was published too late to be taken into account in this work. Chapter 2 offers a discussion of the geographic origin of YHWH and argues that there can be little doubt that originally he was a tribal god of one of the nomadic groups in the south (Teiman, Edom, Seir, Midian), such as the Sashu and Hapiru/’apiru, who worshipped him as a war god and a storm god. In fact, many traces of these functions are still visible in the Hebrew Bible. In chapter 3 Römer unravels the biblical stories of Moses and the identity of the Midianites and the role the latter may have played in the spread of the cult of YHWH: “Moses was perhaps the leader of a group ‘apiru’ who, when they had left Egypt, encountered YHWH in Midian and passed on the knowledge of him to other tribes in the south.” Chapter 4 raises the question of how YHWH became the God of Israel. Again, the possibly pivotal role of the southern nomadic Sashu and Hapiru is highlighted. The much-debated meaning of the name Israel and the various names of God in the Bible are discussed (El Olam, El-Roï, El Shadday, El Elyon, etc.). As the tutelary deity of Saul and David, who introduced him into Jerusalem, YHWH rose to a high position at the beginning of the first millennium. YHWH’s complicated move to Jerusalem is the subject of chapter [End Page 107] 5, where Römer argues that “the older sanctuary there was first of all that of a sun god and that YHWH was added as an associate god,” so YHWH was not immediately the principal god there. The cult of YHWH in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, the subject of chapter 6, was of quite a different nature than that in Judah. He was worshipped in the Northern Kingdom of Israel in several temples and at several “high places,” often in the form of a bull (or, identified with the Canaanite god Ba’al [Lord]), but nevertheless to his worshippers he was no one other than YHWH, quite contrary to the opinion of the...

Chinese Voices in the Rites Controversy: Travelling Books, Community Networks, Intercultural Arguments by Nicolas Standaert

Reviewed by: Chinese Voices in the Rites Controversy: Travelling Books, Community Networks, Intercultural Arguments by Nicolas Standaert Claudia von Collani (bio) Nicolas Standaert. Chinese Voices in the Rites Controversy: Travelling Books, Community Networks, Intercultural Arguments. Bibliotheca Instituti Historici SI 75. Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2012. 476 pp. Hardcover €60.00, isbn 978-88-7041-375-5. The so-called Chinese Rites Controversy constitutes a field not yet really explored. The reasons are manifold: a forbidden subject until 1939, the lack of access to archives and sources, and so on. Therefore, at the beginning of the twenty-first century we still have no monograph on the subject. The aim of a comprehensive monograph can be achieved only by many small steps, and Standaert’s book is such an important step. It consists of many small puzzles, for example, the names of many Chinese Christians. He describes a situation which did not too often occur in the history of missions outside of Europe, namely the involvement of the people who were to be missionized. After the debates inside the Society of Jesus in the time shortly after Matteo Ricci’s death, the two legations to Rome by the Dominican Juan Bautista Morales and Martino Martini, and with decisions from the Holy Office first in 1645 and later in 1656, the missionaries in China had obtained two different models of how to deal with the Rites (veneration of Confucius and the ancestors). The first model judged the rites as being idolatrous while the second viewed them as signs of respect and as an important part of the Confucian state philosophy. The Mandate of the Vicar Apostolic Charles Maigrot (1655-1730) of Fujian of 1693, however, brought the question to a new level, namely to that of the European public. His questions to Rome concerned not only the Confucian Rites, but also the terminology, namely whether tian 天, shangdi 上帝, and other names could also be permitted as names for God or if only tianzhu 天主, Lord of Heaven, was appropriate. Maigrot forbade all but tianzhu. The Mandate was brought to Rome secretly and started a long discussion within the Holy Office. A papal legate was sent to China, arriving there in springtime 1705, and was invited to the Court in Beijing. In the meantime, when the Jesuits in Europe came to know about the newly started controversy, they initiated counteractions. Old manuscripts were printed and presented (most of them in 1700) to the European learned public, which took great interest in the debate, to such an extent that the Curia forbade the publication of printed materials without their explicit permission. In this debate the Jesuits started a new line of defense, namely Chinese themselves should be asked their opinion about the meaning of their own Rites. The question of the Rites touched the very heart of Confucianism. If attending the Rites were forbidden for Christians, then Christianity would fall into the category of heterodoxy and become a suspicious sect, which was unacceptable for righteous people or men with official functions (the so-called Mandarins). A prohibition would be an obstacle for many Chinese to embrace Christianity, many people and theologians thinking their souls would be eternally lost. [End Page 370] This strategy started in Beijing under the guidance of the vice-provincial of the Jesuits in China, Antoine Thomas (1644-1709). With the help of Chinese Jesuits, he organized the collecting of signatures and expertise of Chinese. The most important collection of documents came from the Imperial Court itself. The Jesuits there used their networks with Chinese courtiers, scholars, and members of the Imperial family to conduct “interviews” about their opinions. The first and highest Confucian scholar, however, was the Kangxi 康熙 emperor himself, who was given an official petition in the Manchu language on November 30, 1700, where he was asked to provide the meaning of the Rites, terms, and the tablets jing tian 敬天. His answer in Manchu was translated into Chinese and published in the so-called Beijing Gazette. A Latin translation of the document was sent to Pope Clement XI in Rome. Later, the imperial declaration was printed in Manchu, Chinese, and Latin, together with the text of the ten interviews and a...

God Is an Artificer: A Response to Edward Feser

God Is an Artificer:A Response to Edward Feser Simon Francis Gaine, O.P. Professor Feser’s contribution to the philosophical conversation he presents is particularly congenial to any theologian working in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, where Aristotelian notions of causality and teleology serve extensively, and so it is from the perspective of Aquinas’s theology that I am going to reply to one of Professor Feser’s points about the theological implications of his philosophical position. Taking an Aristotelian rather than Paleyite position, Professor Feser emphasizes the difference between organisms and artifacts. His problem with Paleyism is that natural objects are treated as artifacts, as without substantial form and intrinsic teleology, and with their teleology imposed on them from without, such that any forms are merely accidental. Having confused natural objects with artifacts, Paleyism approaches God through the wrong sort of teleology, extrinsic rather than intrinsic. But where his Aristotelianism leads Feser in regard to God is an example of a seemingly apophatic, rather than analogical, theology: God cannot be called an “artificer.” Feser says, “Natural objects are not a kind of artifact, and hence God’s relationship to them is not that of an artificer.”1 I reply, however, that the Christian theologian has reason to speak by way of analogy of the Trinitarian God as an artificer and creatures as divine artifacts, and that theological reflection on this analogy can suggest to Professor Feser reasons, [End Page 495] even philosophical reasons, to modify, or rather clarify, his seemingly apophatic conclusion. I suggest that we ordinarily think of an artificer as one who devises and produces some object, doing so through his skill or art. The artificer is a skilled or wise craftsman, and the artifact is the product of this art of his. And when the Christian theologian as such looks to the authority of the Scriptures, he finds the Creator God portrayed in just this kind of way. The Letter to the Hebrews 11:10 names God as a “τεχνίτης”—in this case, the artificer of the city for which Abraham hoped. But God is portrayed in the Bible not only as eschatological artificer, but as the protological artificer of creation, for example, in the opening chapters of Genesis, where in 2:7 God forms a man of dust from the ground, and so on. Scripture, moreover, speaks not only of God creating by his word—John 1:3 says that through the Word was everything made that was made—but speaks also in this connection of divine wisdom. “By wisdom the Lord founded the earth,” says Proverbs 3:19. Then in 8:30, “Wisdom” is presented as a figure alongside God at the creation, putting things together, harmonizing them, so to speak. Then in the Wisdom of Solomon 7:22, Wisdom is named a “τεχνίτης,” where the author confesses: “Wisdom, the artificer of all things, taught me.” And in 8:5–6, we find: “What is richer than Wisdom who effects all things? And if understanding is effective, who more than she is artificer of what exists?” So, at least for those theologians for whom the Wisdom of Solomon is canonical Scripture, Catholics and others, there is biblical authority for reflecting theologically on the Creator in terms of wise artifice. Not that these passages have been without their difficulties in interpretation. For example, it is not easy to see on which side of the Creator-creature divide the biblical figure of Wisdom belongs. When the early Church was full of debate over whether the Word of God was true God or perfect creature, where God’s Word and Wisdom were both identified with God the Son on the basis of 1 Corinthians 1:24 and other texts, varied positions were adopted on the Old Testament passages concerning Wisdom. The triumph of Christian orthodoxy in the wider debate is, of course, represented by the Creed of Nicaea, where the Son is confessed in relation to the Father as “true God from true God, begotten not made.” This placed God’s Word and Wisdom firmly on the divine side of the Creator-creature divide, and by use of the familiar distinction between the natural begetting of...

The Inscription of Parvomai (Bulgaria)

A rock inscribed with ancient, strange characters in the locality of Parvomai on the peak Elez, in the area of the villages of Bukovo and Voden near Mount Dragoyna, Northeastern Rodopi region (Bulgaria) was brought to the attention of the archaeologists by Paun Tashev. The inscription attracted our attention and pushed us to exercise our skills for providing its deciphering. The similarities between the name or the words in the inscription with a Slavic god name or surviving words still present in modern Slavic languages indicate, in both the cases, that tribes or peoples speaking Slavic languages were present in Northeastern Rodopi region in the Bronze Age, i.e. well before the VII century A.D. generally accepted period of the arrival of the Slavs in Eastern Europe.

Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God: From the Beginnings to the Seventeenth Century, written by Robert J. Wilkinson

Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God: From the Beginnings to the Seventeenth Century, written by Robert J. Wilkinson

The securalism of the Consitution and the President of the Albanian Republic

The 88/3 article of the republic of Albania constitution where is mentioned the sentence: “God help me”, or left at the willpower of the president of the republic, which represents the state unity, contradicts with the 18 and 10 article of the constitution, and also with the 14th article of European Convention oo Human Rights. The 18th article of our convention and the 14th article of ECHR are articles dhe talk about the discrimination, but in the contrary, the 88th article contradicts those articles, furthermore, affects the state form securalism, with the sentence specified at the constitution “God help me”. We are talking about the notion of legal rate in space and on time. This constitutional rate should be removed because it discriminates the atheist, or individuals, groups, who don’t trust in GOD. The convention of the Republic of Kosova don’t have this definitions of god name. Albania has a homogenous different composition being a state in transition. This provision discriminates directly on indirectly groups or individuals, national of foreign. The removal of this sentence will make the Albanian Constitution safer and better for the future, and also, will protect better the groups of individuals from the discrimination, “If you think or not in god, or like a presentation of the name GOD”. The time and space reason, dictates the removal of this constitutional rate or its amendment, whether in Albania we have different religious beliefs like Catholic Faith, Orthodox Faith, Muslim Faith, atheist or heather, and also, when the democratic internal transition is accompanied with the external influences like the religious radicalism (part of global developments of a society, specially required for the state of rights).

The Computational Sublime in Nick Montfort's ‘Round’ and ‘All the Names of God’

What if the post-literary also meant that which operates in a literary space (almost) devoid of language as we know it: for instance, a space in which language simply frames the literary or poetic rather than ‘containing’ it? What if the countertextual also meant the (en)countering of literary text with non-textual elements, such as mathematical concepts, or with texts that we would not normally think of as literary, such as computer code? This article addresses these issues in relation to Nick Montfort's #!, a 2014 print collection of poems that presents readers with the output of computer programs as well as the programs themselves, which are designed to operate on principles of text generation regulated by specific constraints. More specifically, it focuses on two works in the collection, ‘Round’ and ‘All the Names of God’, which are read in relation to the notions of the ‘computational sublime’ and the ‘event’.

GBS and the Impossibilist

GBS and the Impossibilist

Ruth A.Meyers, Missional Worship, Worshipful Mission: Gathering as God's People Going Out in God's Name. (Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies). Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2014, Xiv + 242 pp.

International Review of MissionVolume 104, Issue 2 p. 422-426 Book Review Ruth A. Meyers, Missional Worship, Worshipful Mission: Gathering as God's People Going Out in God's Name. (Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies). Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2014, Xiv + 242 pp. Myungsil Kim, Myungsil KimSearch for more papers by this author Myungsil Kim, Myungsil KimSearch for more papers by this author First published: 25 January 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/irom.12114Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume104, Issue2November 2015Pages 422-426 RelatedInformation

Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence. By Daniel Colucciello Barber. Pp. vii, 220, Edinburgh University Press, 2014, $31.20.

<i>Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence</i>. By Daniel Colucciello Barber. Pp. vii, 220, Edinburgh University Press, 2014, $31.20.

The Documents in Sokolowski’s Lois sacrées des cités grecques (LSCG)

This list of the documents found in Lois sacrees des cites grecques attempts to classify them in terms of the categories formulated in Harris, “Towards a Typology” (2015). 1. Attica. Athens. Calendar (probably subdivision of the polis) – early fifth century BCE (IG I3 234) The inscription is damaged, but contains the names of months (line 3: Thargelion; line 16: Gamelion), the names of gods, and animals to be sacrificed. The authority cannot be identified, but the non-standard sequence of mo...

Excommunication in Jewish Babylonia: ComparingBavli Mo‘ed Qaṭan14b–17b and the Aramaic Bowl Spells in a Sasanian Context

According to rabbinic literature of late antiquity, a Jew could be excommunicated or banished from the community for around twenty-four spiritual and social violations. The Talmuds’ list of sins that necessitated the separation of a transgressor includes, for instance, profaning the name of God, selling forbidden meat, insulting one's master, and obstructing justice. Once condemned, the sinner was physically isolated from other people and prohibited from the same actions that a mourner was, such as cutting one's hair or wearing phylacteries. After the sinner repented or a certain amount of time passed, the ban was then lifted, typically by the master who had initiated it. Indeed, the master-disciple relationship is often at the center of banning and cursing in rabbinic literature. Although the rabbinic concept of excommunication draws from earlier biblical and Second Temple precedents, such as the book of Ezra, it is in many ways a late antique innovation featuring prominently in Babylonia. The reason that bans and excommunication emerge as a salient feature of Jewish society in this period is related to the rabbis’ historical contexts within Roman Palestine and Sasanian Babylonia. As I show in this article, exegesis and history both played a role in the formation of the talmudic laws of banishment.

Book Review: Missional Worship, Worshipful Mission: Gathering as God's People, Going out in God's Name, Worship and Culture: Foreign Country or Homeland?

Book Review: Missional Worship, Worshipful Mission: Gathering as God's People, Going out in God's Name, Worship and Culture: Foreign Country or Homeland?

Zbawczy wymiar teokalii w Koranie a ikonoklazm islamu

Bóg jako podmiot zbawiający ujawnia się w Koranie poprzez swoje imiona. W imionach Boga konkretyzuje się Jego piękno. Tajemnica Boga objawiona w Koranie zgodnie z wiarą islamu może być rozumiana w kategoriach teokalii (ﺃﻷﺳْﻤَﺎﺀُ ﺍﻠﺤُﺴْﻨﻰ ʼal-ʼasmāʼu l-ḥusnà). Bóg jest poznawany i dotykalny przez człowieka w konkretnych imionach. Zgodnie z nauką islamu Koran został objawiony prorokowi Muḥammadowi w języku arabskim. On usłyszał pierwsze z tych objawień w jaskini Hira przez głos, który mu nakazał: „Głos! w imię twego Pana, który stworzył! […] Głos! Twój Pan jest najszlachetniejszy!” (S. XCVI, 1–5). Zbawienie w Koranie jest uważane za pragnienie oglądania oblicza Bożego (S. II, 272; VI, 52; XIII, 22; XVIII, 28; XXX, 38.39; XCII, 20). Wszyscy zbawieni ludzie upadną na swoje oblicza przed obliczem majestatu Bożego i będą głosić chwałę oblicza Boskiego (S. II, 255). Różaniec muzułmański (ﺳُﺒْﺤَﺔ subḥatun; ﻣِﺴْﺒَﺤَﺔ misbaḥatun; ﺗﺴْﺒِﻴﺢٌ tasbīḥun) jest tu, na ziemi, konkretyzacją ontycznego piękna Boga. Wskazując na piękne imiona Boga, muzułmanin dotyka oblicza Bożego (ﻭَﺟْﻪُ ﷲِ wağhu l-lāhi) – widzi obraz Boga. Różaniec muzułmański występuje w formie zastępczej w odniesieniu do obrazu. Islam jest religią anikoniczną, ponieważ Koran nie zawiera bezpośredniego zakazu tworzenia wizerunków Boga i istot ludzkich. Koran zakazuje tworzenia bożków, idoli (S. XXI, 52 nn; XXXIV, 13). Twórca islamu wykluczył myśl o „wizerunkach Boga” (ﺻُﻮَﺭُ ﷲِ ṣuwaru l-lāhi), ponieważ taki sposób wyobrażania Boga w niebiosach byłby Jego tworzeniem przez ludzki byt. Bóg jest całkowicie suwerenny. Mówienie o Bogu jako „kształtowanym” lub „oglądanym” (ﻣَﻨْﻈﻮﺭٌ manẕūrun) byłoby sugestią, że jest On „tworzony” (ﻣُﺼَﻮﱠﺭٌ muṣawwarun) przez ludzkie wyobrażenie. Jest to zgodne z wyznawaniem absolutnego monoteizmu. Określenie a-ikoniczny (anikoniczny) w odniesieniu do islamu jest bliższe prawdy niż termin ikonoklazm islamu.

Из древнерусской ономастики: Симарьглъ/Семарьглъ и хинова

The author suggests new etymologies for two well-known Old Russian proper names. The god name of Simarĭglŭ/Semarĭglŭ is loaned from East Iranic (Scytho-Sarmatian) of the Alanic Caucasian period and corresponds to Ossetic xī/xe ‘oneself’ and maræg ‘murderer; killing’, xemaræg ‘suicide (person)’ and the Russian participle suffix -l-. The motive of god’s suicide is extended in mythology, including the Nart epic. The ethnonym Khinova mentioned in “The Tale of Igor’s campaign“ is of Baltic origin and comes from IE *skū-n- ‘asylum, shelter; shield, etc.’ and the suffix -ava/-uva, very frequent in the Baltic ethnonymics.

Abraham Abulafia's Mystical Theology of the Divine Name and its Philosophical Revision in Walter Benjamin

The thirteenth century kabbalist Abraham Abulafia held Hebrew to be the divine language, designed by God as an ontological aspect of reality. Through meditating on and deconstructing names into their letters, one could then engage in the process of reunifying reality into the primordial Name of God, the Tetragrammaton. This paper offers an original analysis, aligning Abulafia with Walter Benjamin's writings on language wherein the world speaks itself phenomenally to human beings, who must take an active role in translating this silent speech. Here the human, as name-giver, is finalizer of reality; by translating base phenomena into named entities humanity elevates them into a new realm, beyond the merely real into the true. This epistemic-soteriological theory speaks to common speculative questions about language and the world, offering a new way of understanding how human beings can come to know the world as-it-is, and as-it-should-be; a way that is philosophical, yet based firmly in Medieval Jewish theology.

Santayana and His "Hero"

The philosophy of George Santayana is best considered as a complement to that of Spinoza, to whom Santayana once referred as his “hero.” Like Spinoza, Santayana refused to accept any God steeped in revelation or mythology, yet he appreciated Spinoza’s wisdom in reclaiming the name of God non-anthropomorphically. For Santayana, God symbolizes a single “omnificent” natural power that transcends human understanding. Santayana went beyond his hero by striving to love not merely the real but also the ideal. We should view people and things in their greatest possible beauty, and love them with depth and passion.

A Trinitarian approach to spirituality: Exploring the possibilities

Spirituality and ultimacy are inextricably linked. Underlying the plurality of spiritualities are myriad ways to construe the identity of the transcendent. In a Christian sense, the notion of the divine with a Trinitarian identification is central. The article examines the implications of such a naming of God for spirituality. Attention is paid to the relationship between doctrinal theology and spirituality as well as to scholarly reflection already undertaken on a so-called Trinitarian spirituality. The article suggests guidelines for future work and emphasises that an adequate account should be given of how Trinitarian theology is undertaken as symbolising and hermeneutical endeavour. Some unique features of this spirituality are profiled, and it is argued that a Trinitarian imagining of the divine may generate perspectives not possible in an unqualified monotheistic approach.