Search Results (38)

The concept of sacred harmony implies a set of relations between human beings and the natural order that include a divine or transcendental aspect. These types of correspondences as they relate to music are found among many of the ancient civilizations. In the West, the principles of sacred harmony emerged in ancient Greece with Pythagoras and Plato, such that the implicit connections between philosophical thought and musical experience laid the groundwork for ideas of sacred harmony and the practices of tonal music that have shaped the development of Western music for centuries. In ancient India, the unity between human beings and the universe was understood through the concept of Brahman, the highest metaphysical truth that encompassed all reality. The spirituality of Indian classical music was based upon the tonal centricity of the sacred syllable of OM, the concept of Nāda-Brahman, Yoga philosophy, and divine aesthetic principles (rasa) embedded in the musical notes and scales handed down by generations of musicians and Gurus. This essay first outlines the basic foundational elements of sacred harmony with examples from ancient Greece and India, followed by particular challenges in the twentieth century imposed by Neo-Marxist thought, Gnosticism, and theosophy, and finally by a return to sacred harmony in the 1960s as reflected in popular music as well as in the proliferation of chant and music from India, each of which has attracted admirers seeking spiritual transformation via a musically ordered universe. Full article

This essay conducts a comparative analysis of the literary use of kabbalistic motives in the two seemingly very distant authors: Jacques Derrida and Philip K. Dick. It shows how the Lurianic “fable,” conceived in the Derridean terms as a literary récit, shapes their understanding of time as an open-ended game whose outcome remains unknown. It thus wants to prove that Derrida’s essay Given Time, based on the little prose by Charles Baudelaire called “The False Coin,” and the penultimate book by Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion, tell the same story which is also a meta-story: a speculative meditation on the nature of temporality and story-telling, which involves the messianic “theology of risk.” In both cases we deal with what the essay terms as an “inverted Gnosticism”: while the traditional Gnostic doctrine envisions time as the factor of the world’s decay and imperfection, Derrida and Dick, inspired by the Lurianic kabbalah, see it as the chance of the world to verify itself, that is, to make itself real and true in the process of “unprejudiced becoming.” Full article

This article reinterprets the doctrine of iʿjāz al-Qurʾān (the inimitability of the Qurʾān) by shifting the question from what makes the Qurʾān miraculous to how it is miraculous. It argues that the Qurʾān’s primary miracle lies not merely in its content, i.e., its eloquence or correspondence with scientific truth, but in its method: the transformation of the very frameworks through which knowledge, reason, and revelation were understood. Using Muḥammad ʿĀbid al-Jābirī’s tripartite epistemology of bayān (expressive reasoning), burhān (demonstrative reasoning), and ʿirfān (reflective reasoning) together with Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons,” the article argues that the Qurʾān can be read as fusing and transcending these three systems, uniting Arabic eloquence, Greek rationalism, and Persian–gnostic spirituality into a single, holistic discourse. Through close analysis of key passages, such as Abraham’s dialectical reasoning in Sūrat al-Anbiyāʾ and the metaphysics of light in Āyat al-Nūr, the article shows how the Qurʾān integrates poetic language, rational argument, and mystical depth to create an epistemic design that addresses intellect, emotion, and spirit simultaneously. This synthesis allows the Qurʾān to be interpreted, within classical and later exegetical traditions, not only as a linguistic or theological miracle but as a paradigmatic reconfiguration of cognition: one that these traditions understood as teaching readers how to think, reflect, and awaken. Full article

This study examines the theological and liturgical significance of the biblical injunction to “sing a new song,” tracing its deployment across eras of Christian history as both a symbol of renewal and a tool of doctrinal contestation. Focusing on key moments of schism—the early Church’s response to Gnostic and Arian hymnody and Ambrose’s adoption of Eastern antiphonal singing, the article explores how musical form, meter, and performance practice became markers of orthodoxy and heresy long before Reformation-era musical reforms. Drawing on patristic commentary, heresiographical sources, and hymnological analysis, the study highlights how the popular style in various guises was alternately condemned and reclaimed. This suggests that Christian music has consistently evolved through interaction with popular and heterodox forms and that the “new song” in its exegetical form has functioned as a recurring strategy of theological self-definition. Ultimately, the paper argues that disputes over musical style mirror broader tensions between innovation and authority and that the history of hymnody offers a unique lens into the formation of Christian identity. Full article

This article examines how Internet technologies reconfigure human sensory experience and induce decorporation—the experiential dissociation of consciousness from the physical body. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s media theory and theological anthropology, the study demonstrates that digital immersion amplifies certain senses (vision, hearing) while anesthetizing others (touch, kinesthesia), disrupting the sensory balance essential to integrated human perception. This sensory reconfiguration, combined with prolonged physical stasis before screens, produces a dualistic self-experience wherein consciousness appears detached from bodily existence. The analysis identifies ideological support for this phenomenon in transhumanist philosophies that reconceptualize personhood as information rather than embodied reality. Against these neo-gnostic visions, the article proposes a techno-realist framework grounded in Christian theological anthropology that affirms both technology’s formative power and the irreducible significance of embodied existence, calling for technological asceticism and practices preserving psychosomatic unity. Full article

This paper explores Carl Schmitt’s concepts of the friend and the enemy through the lens of Katechon. Contemporary scholarship often treats Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction as an occasional decision driven by political contingency. This paper refutes such a purely political reading and instead argues Schmitt’s political enemies have a deeper theological origin—Gnosticism. The Gnostics, emerging from a mistaken rejection of theodicy, developed a cosmological dualism and apocalypticism that, in the 20th century, manifested politically in the forms of liberal universalism and social pluralism. To illuminate the theological depth of Schmitt’s thought, this paper investigates a recurring yet underexplored concept—Katechon, the restrainer who holds back the end times. By linking Katechon to Schmitt’s political projects—the nomos of the earth and the decisionist state—this paper reveals the theological foundation underlying his understanding of the political: enmity is not contingent but theologically predestined by human fallenness and God’s redemptive plan. However, Schmitt’s project of political theology ends in paradox: Katechon, meant to restrain chaos, turns into its opposite owing to its intrinsic logical flaw. Full article

This essay explores the philosophical core of Susan Taubes’ thought through her diasporic ontology—a philosophy of becoming that does not derive from statics but precedes and reconfigures them. Instead of treating exile as loss or as a deviation from origin, Taubes roots her thinking in displacement, challenging fixed identities, theological certainties, and static notions of belonging. Although overshadowed by her husband Jacob and, due to the fragmentation of her work and her tragic death, largely neglected—with the important exception of the work of Elliot R. Wolfson, who in recent years has contributed enormously to her discovery in the field of Jewish philosophy—Taubes’ writings offer a radical rethinking of Jewish thought as a diasporic identity grounded in hermeneutic openness. Through a close reading of her letters and novel Divorcing, this paper reveals how her diasporic thinking—also evident in her critical engagement with Heidegger—forms the basis for rejecting theological dogma, Zionist ideologies, and the reification of meaning, while opening space for a lived understanding of Judaism. Moreover, I show how, by accepting worldliness as brokenness, her post-apocalyptic hopelessness does not collapse into nihilism but instead clears the ground for radical openness, where meaning emerges not from redemption but from the refusal to close the interpretive horizon. More than a thinker to be studied, Taubes enables a change of perspective: through her lens, concepts like Heimat or identity lose their static authority and are re-seen from the standpoint of exile. Full article

One of the harder lessons offered by history is that only the first half of the revolution seems worth carrying out. This study examines how, contra Christianity, which spells out the fate of revolution in its entirety, Gnosticism stands as a symbol for revolution arrested and immortalized in its most radical phase. It shows that Gnosticism is a revolution that structurally renounces the prospect of phenomenal victory in exchange for the eternal preservation and constant renewal of its revolutionary energy. I do so by examining how, rejecting worldly victory, the critical spirit of Gnosticism seeks its minimal and sole embodiment in the individual (the individuated, the indivisible, the residue). I argue that, by building the court of radical inwardness as its theater for enacting what I call the “politics of world loss,” Gnosticism invents the noumenal as that impossible space for enacting the quintessentially phenomenal, i.e., the political. Full article

This study examines Eusebius of Emesa’s De arbitrio, voluntate Pauli et Domini passione (Homily I), a fourth-century homily rediscovered in the twentieth century, to elucidate its contribution to the theological debate on free will within early Christianity. While Eusebius, a bishop of the Antiochene school, has been historically overlooked, his homily offers a nuanced defence of human moral agency against the deterministic paradigms prevalent in late antiquity. Through a critical analysis of the text, focusing on key biblical episodes—the conversion of St Paul, the election of Jeremiah and Jacob, and the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart—this article demonstrates how Eusebius reconciles divine sovereignty with free will by prioritising literal exegesis and emphasising humanity’s God-given capacity for self-determination. The methodology combines close textual analysis with contextualisation within broader theological controversies, particularly addressing Stoic fatalism, Gnostic predestination, and Manichaean dualism. The results reveal that Eusebius’s arguments, though pastoral in intent, are philosophically rigorous, asserting that free will underpins moral responsibility and virtue, while Christ’s voluntary Passion exemplifies divine respect for human freedom. The study concludes that Eusebius’s homily not only refutes deterministic worldviews, but also affirms free will as a theological cornerstone, bridging scriptural interpretation and doctrinal orthodoxy. Full article

This article aims to examine how social media has changed the way human beings perceive themselves, exerting a tyrannical influence over personal image, leading people to aesthetic procedures and surgeries. It happens through the imitative dimension of human beings. Social media has created idealized world(s) where people see images of faces, bodies, and lives they perceive as perfect, leading them to question such aspects about themselves in comparison to the presented ideal(s). These idealized world(s) foster a contemporary Gnosticism, where people start seeing their own faces and bodies as flawed or inferior compared to these idealized images. This gives rise to a tyranny of social media over personal image, reshaping how individuals view themselves and pressuring them to conform to these idealized world(s). Theology has a mission to help people appreciate the beauty and goodness of real bodies and guide them toward the fruition of being bodily beings. Full article

Kant’s philosophy of history is one of the best examples to trace the remains of certain theological concepts that emerged during the Christian tradition, which are secularized in order to shape a philosophical history. This process of secularization involves hidden causes through the weakening of the doctrinal truths of Christianism. These threats come from two antithetical poles whose attempts to demolish the Christian faith have been noticeable since its beginnings: Gnosticism and Ebionism. This article seeks to trace the influence of both doctrines in Kant’s philosophy of history. Based on his reinterpretation of certain theological concepts, it offers an adequate frame to understand the backgrounds that sustain Kant’s hope when regarding history. His great hesitation between an ultimate, intra-historical consummation and an infinite aspiration never fulfilled on Earth can be explained well from the opposite Ebionite and Gnostic perspectives. In conclusion, the article proposes that the tension that inspires Kant’s philosophy of history emerges from an unstable synthesis between Gnosticism and Ebionism. Full article

Mandaeism is the only ancient Gnostic religion surviving to the present day from antiquity. ‘Gnosticism’ was a block of creative religious activity mostly responding to the early Christian teachings in unusual ways of cosmicizing Jesus, and presenting a challenge to the ancient church fathers in the first-to-third centuries CE. Mandaeism, by comparison, has roots from John the Baptist rather than Jesus, although it is also important to recognize that this baptizing movement emerged in part as a survival of a very old indigenous ethno-religious grouping from Mesopotamia, its followers eventually settling in Mesopotamia’s middle and southern regions. Indeed, much of the Mandaeans’ thought and practice, especially their rituals of water ablution, have deep origins going back to Sumer, Akkad and Babylonia, reflecting regionally wide influences from right across the Fertile Crescent. Mandaean culture and the Mandaic Aramaic language was of high report in the so-called Patristic period covered by this Special Issue, even in the Arabian Peninsula up until the rise of Islam (634 CE onward), and Mandaeans were honored as a third “People of the Book”—the Sabians (Ṣābeʾun; or ṣobba in modern Iraqi Arabic)—in the Qur’an (2:62; 5:69; 22:17); in the Muslim world, many Mandaic speakers switched language to colloquial Iraqi Arabic and (Arabicized) Persian. This article aims to raise some basic questions, relevant to Patristics, about aspects of relationships between Mandaeans and both early ‘mainstream’ Christians and the other large grouping, the Manichaeans. These questions first concern the common flight of the followers of John and Jesus just before the Roman siege and destruction of Jerusalem (66–70 CE) and the role of the woman Miriai; second, the extent to which John and his followers affected the direction of early Christianity, and the consequences this had for ‘Baptist’/Christian relationships into the Patristic period, with attention paid to Mandaean views of Jesus; third, the process of the formation of early Mandaeism as it combined Hellenistic-Palestinian and Mesopotamian elements; and fourth, the signs that the Mandaeans not only influenced Mesopotamian Christian baptismal sects but were crucial in the emergence Manichaeism (from the 230s CE in Persian-dominated Iraq). This article will finish by concentrating on Mandaean–Manichaean relations in the light of a little known and previously secret Mandaic text (Diwan Razia), best known as Mani or Sidra d-Mani within a larger collection of unnamed occult texts. On the basis of the Mandaeans’ texts, we maintain that both Jesus and Mani apparently left their fold in turn. Full article

With a few notable exceptions, the word “epinoia” has not been heard with a philosophical ear since the time of Epicurus and the Stoics. In addition to the scarce mentions it had received in philosophy, epinoia was strewn across the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes and, more so, across the canonical body of Christian theology, from Patristics—Origen, Cyril of Alexandria, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor—to the late Byzantine period. Straddling the divide between the authorities of the nascent Church and those they suspected of heresy, it made a spectacular appearance in Gnostic texts (The Apocryphon of John), cryptically embodying the reconciliation of knowledge and life. On the margins of the Christian tradition, first-century CE controversial religious figures such as Simon Magus associated epinoia with the great goddess and the womb of existence, even as, three centuries later, Eunomius of Cyzicus—the theological arch-enemy of the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil and Gregory—deplored it for its hollowness and pure conventionality. In this paper, I argue that epinoia is the figure of anarchic intelligence in theology and philosophy alike. The anarchy of epinoia is its note of defiance: the escape from power it plots is the most serious challenge to power, the royal road to liberation from the oppressive unity of Being, Mind, or Concept. Full article

This paper examines a comment by Priscillian (d. c. 385) in his Liber apologeticus that certain people erroneously applied to God the unusual Latin neologism, masculofemina. He contrasts their perspective with scriptural teaching about the Holy Spirit being poured out on both men and women. This raises two questions, namely, how Priscillian’s comment relates to accusations he faced of encouraging dangerous intimacy between men and women and the source of his information about their teaching. This paper argues that the central thrust of Priscillian’s teaching is around the notion that the spirit of prophecy was manifested in both sexes, but that he distinguished his teaching from that of Valentinian gnostics to defend his own orthodoxy. It argues that Priscillian acquired this teaching about God as masculofemina from the translation into Latin of the Aduersus haereses of Irenaeus of Lyons (d. c. 202). The term also occurs within the writing of Marius Victorinus (c. 359–61) in defense of Catholic Christianity. Priscillian drew on Irenaeus to defend the orthodoxy of his notion that the gift of prophecy was given to both men and women. Full article

The discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices (NHC) in 1945 rates as one of the two most profound occurrences for Biblical archaeology and interpretation during the last hundred years, along with the Dead Sea Scrolls (1946–1956). The codices allow us to document Christian monastic culture, gnostic Christianity and gnostic offshoots in the desert climate of Late Ancient Egypt. The recovery of the related Codex Tchacos (CT) brought further excitement for contemporary readers by 2006, it being sensational that narratives of “Judas the betrayer” and “doubting Thomas” were found in the whole collection of writings. The text named the [First] Apocalypse of James, significantly, was found to be in both NHC and CT in different Coptic versions (from near the sacred sites of Chenoboskion and El Minya), but yet another more fragmentary version in Greek had turned up much earlier among the huge cache of papyri found at Oxyrhynchus (also, like the other places, on the banks of the Nile). Given the opportunity for comparison, what distinguishes the three versions? Does comparative analysis better tell us what this ancient text is about? Does the strong presence of Gnostic Christian insights in the Coptic texts still imply a historical Jamesian community is being honoured? This paper concentrates on three comparable passages in the three versions that apparently contain historical memories of James and his followers. It works on the reasonable hypothesis that the Greek version of Oxyrhynchus Papyri (P.Oxy. 5533) (hereafter = PO) is prior and read with different purposes than the two Coptic translated versions of CT (CT 2.10–30) and NHC (NHC V,3. 24–44). When a critical approach, involving a socio-linguistic comparison, is applied, we will see that the three versions of the text were not directly related to each other, but that narratives about James the Just were available to desert monastics from the second century CE. The paper argues for a literal transmission of traditions from a Jewish Christian community around James into Egypt, that the textual figure of James in the Oxyrhynchus fragments points to a ‘mutual familiarity’ between PO and CT, while the NHC tradition of James has been further elaborated by processes of compilation and addition. Full article