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Early Greek Theology: God as Nature and Natural Gods

Jan N. Bremmer and Andrew Erskine

in The Gods of Ancient Greece: Identities and Transformations

The study examines the place of gods in Early Greek philosophy, with attention paid to breaks and continuity with the inherited beliefs from the Homeric age. Beyond the well-known rejection of ... More

The study examines the place of gods in Early Greek philosophy, with attention paid to breaks and continuity with the inherited beliefs from the Homeric age. Beyond the well-known rejection of anthropomorphism by Xenophanes, the author examines the growing tension between various conceptions of the gods as abstract powers and principles and the older notion of divine beings as persons of power. Against earlier work, the author sees little evidence of monotheism, but rather the first rise of the classical pagan theological scheme of world-governing cosmic God and plurality of lesser divine beings.Less

Īśvara

Arvind Sharma

in Classical Hindu Thought: An Introduction

The one ultimate reality can be visualized either in personal or impersonal terms. However, the chronological order of priority of Brahman (neuter) and Brahman (masculine) cannot be determined with ... More

The one ultimate reality can be visualized either in personal or impersonal terms. However, the chronological order of priority of Brahman (neuter) and Brahman (masculine) cannot be determined with certainty. In fact, it is quite possible that the Hindus did not consciously distinguish between the two, and that may be why we find monotheism and monism ‘often mixed up with each other’ in the Brāhmanic period. This chapter discusses monotheism as represented by the concept of Īśvara. The qualified Brahman, if personified, becomes the God or Īśvara. Like it, God also may be represented as the cosmic parallel to the finite individual self, the distinction between them being entirely one of adjuncts.Less

Freud’s Spinoza/Freud’s Illusions

Victoria Kahn

in The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts

This chapter explores Freud’s relation to the Renaissance and argues that Freud was drawn into debates about political theology by the events of the second World War. It analyzes the influence of ... More

This chapter explores Freud’s relation to the Renaissance and argues that Freud was drawn into debates about political theology by the events of the second World War. It analyzes the influence of Spinoza on Freud’s early work on Leonardo and Michelangelo, explores Freud’s critique of religion in The Future of an Illusion, and argues that Moses and Monotheism is Freud’s “theological-political treatise.”Less

Introduction: Incarnation and Incarnational Thinking

Shaul Magid

in Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism

The Introduction sets out the basic argument regarding the development of Hasidism outside the Christian gaze. It also deals extensively with the question of comparison, in particular the use of ... More

The Introduction sets out the basic argument regarding the development of Hasidism outside the Christian gaze. It also deals extensively with the question of comparison, in particular the use of nomenclature in the discussion of two disparate traditions. That is, that by using terms like “incarnation” that are not used by Hasidim nor commonly used to describe their doctrines, we can sometimes gain new insight on what Hasidism may be up to. The Introduction further sets out a trajectory of Israelite/Jewish monotheism that is far more complex and messy than we normally think about when we think about Jewish monotheism. That is, it tries to create a more fluid interchange between Judaism and Christianity (both emerging from Ancient Israelite Religion) in their formative periods that is then used to explicate later Hasidic texts.Less

Thought Fossils: Psychoanalytic Approaches

Steven Weitzman

in The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age

This chapter examines the use of psychoanalysis to investigate the origin of the Jews. Psychoanalysis is described as a theory of the mind, a therapeutic practice, or a set of techniques used to ... More

This chapter examines the use of psychoanalysis to investigate the origin of the Jews. Psychoanalysis is described as a theory of the mind, a therapeutic practice, or a set of techniques used to diagnose and treat mental illness, not a way of exploring questions of ethnogenesis. The chapter considers whether a psychohistorical approach as practiced today can yield important insights about Jewish origins by focusing on the method articulated by Sigmund Freud in his book Moses and Monotheism. More specifically, it discusses a kind of “paleopsychology” that could take the search for the origin of the Jews beyond the documentary sources and beyond the material ruins into a prehistory preserved only as “thought fossils” buried deep in the most primal parts of the human mind. It also analyzes Freud's account of the origin of the Jews based on psychoanalysis and the credibility of his psychohistory of the Jews.Less

The Caliphate

Andrew Marsham

in The Oxford World History of Empire: Volume Two: The History of Empires

The first Muslim empire—the Caliphate—began with the conquests of the mid-seventh century CE and fragmented in the mid-tenth century. This chapter outlines the Caliphate’s political and economic ... More

The first Muslim empire—the Caliphate—began with the conquests of the mid-seventh century CE and fragmented in the mid-tenth century. This chapter outlines the Caliphate’s political and economic history, its organizational structures, and forms of coercive and ideological power. During a long eighth century, the Mediterranean and the Middle East were transformed by the formation of new elites, by a new transregional coinage economy, by the rapid expansion of new cities and settlements, and by an agrarian revolution. The religion that became Islam was crucial in uniting the conquerors of the empire, and then as the idiom for the expression of the conquered peoples’ political ambitions. Eventual widespread conversion among the conquered populations meant that as the Caliphate collapsed, it left behind Muslim successor states, as well as new linguistic and ethnic identities—notably the Arabic and New Persian linguae francae, and a transregional “Arab” ethnicity.Less

Heine and Freud: Deferred Action and the Concept of History

Willi Goetschel

in Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion

Freud’s Moses and Monotheism engages in a critical examination of the function of deferred action for the construction of narratives of tradition. This paper explores how Freud’s study illustrates ... More

Freud’s Moses and Monotheism engages in a critical examination of the function of deferred action for the construction of narratives of tradition. This paper explores how Freud’s study illustrates its line of critical inquiry by simultaneously acting out its central contention by the way Freud deals with the carefully controlled presence of Heine, a key source for Freud’s conflicted study of Moses and Jewish tradition.Less

A Leap of Faith into Moses: Freud’s Invitation to Evenly Suspended Attention

Yael Segalovitz

in Freud and Monotheism: Moses and the Violent Origins of Religion

This chapter argues that Moses and Monotheism invites its readers to approach it in a state of “evenly-suspended attention,” the mindset that Freud recommends his colleagues practice in the ... More

This chapter argues that Moses and Monotheism invites its readers to approach it in a state of “evenly-suspended attention,” the mindset that Freud recommends his colleagues practice in the therapeutic scene. This method of reading is contrasted with the prominent one in the discipline of literature, namely, close reading. Developed by the Anglo-American New Critics around the time of Moses’ publication, close reading depends on what Freud terms “deliberate attention.” This chapter further demonstrates that reading Moses in a state of evenly-suspended attention is understood by Freud to require an act of faith in one’s unconscious or internal alterity. It concludes with a call for a reevaluation of what a Freudian or psychoanalytic reading is typically understood to mean in the humanities. That is, while Freud is conventionally thought of as the optimal close reader, Moses suggests otherwise.Less

Immunization and Violence

in Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics

Chapter 5 explores philosophy's task as what Michel Foucault called an ontology of actuality, according to which the present becomes the basis for identifying the difference between the essential and ... More

Chapter 5 explores philosophy's task as what Michel Foucault called an ontology of actuality, according to which the present becomes the basis for identifying the difference between the essential and the contingent, between the superficial effects and deep-rooted dynamics that propel events, transform lives, and mark existence. The chapter advances two main theses. The first is that the immunitary dispositif has spread to all sectors and languages of our lives, to the point that it has become the coagulating point of contemporary existence. The second thesis is that the idea of immunity, which is needed for protecting life, if carried past a certain threshold, winds up negating life. Immunity encages life such that not only is our freedom but also the very meaning of our individual and collective existence lost.Less

Inventions of the Symbolic: Lacan’s Reading of Freud

Tracy McNulty

in Wrestling with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life

This chapter examines two claims: that the analytic experience constitutes a “passage”—a transformation of the subject's position with respect to the fantasy—only on the condition that the subject ... More

This chapter examines two claims: that the analytic experience constitutes a “passage”—a transformation of the subject's position with respect to the fantasy—only on the condition that the subject traverse the field of the symbolic; and that it is the unconscious that founds the symbolic function, and not the norms, ideals, or prohibitions that regulate social coexistence. According to Jacques Lacan, to go through a psychoanalysis marks a passage, on the condition that the analysis of the unconscious as founding the function of the symbolic be completely admissible. The chapter first considers the importance of the Oedipus complex in Sigmund Freud's work, which can be understood as a representation—but also as a repression—of the problematic of castration. It then looks at transference as an “invention of the symbolic” that is latent in Freud's work before offering a reading of Freud's Moses and Monotheism. It also explores the concept of the “subject supposed to know” and concludes by discussing Mosaic law in relation to the symbolic.Less

Practicing “Intertextuality”: Ernst Cassirer and Hermann Cohen on Myth and Monotheism

Almut Sh. Bruckstein

in The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer

This chapter examines the influence of Hermann Cohen on Ernst Cassirer's work on myth and monotheism. It suggests that Cohen's reading of Jewish literature was a formative influence on Cassirer's ... More

This chapter examines the influence of Hermann Cohen on Ernst Cassirer's work on myth and monotheism. It suggests that Cohen's reading of Jewish literature was a formative influence on Cassirer's analysis of myth, and shows Cassirer's indebtedness to Cohen's critical idealist method and his prophetic humanism. The chapter also investigates how Cassirer carried critical idealism beyond Kantian philosophy in order to save its political and philosophical potency at a time when abstract, liberal idealism had most definitely lost its power.Less

Introduction

A. David Napier

in Making Things Better: A Workbook on Ritual, Cultural Values, and Environmental Behavior

Where global priorities have suppressed the veracity of experiential differences, the field of religious studies has returned repeatedly to acknowledge them. Though many contemporary anthropologists ... More

Where global priorities have suppressed the veracity of experiential differences, the field of religious studies has returned repeatedly to acknowledge them. Though many contemporary anthropologists are uneasy with the fact that ritually generated embodied practices may not always be accessible across cultures or to the lived experience of the ethnographer, religious studies is more happy to consider such differences. For its part, anthropology has moved in the direction of narrative—focusing on those lived experiences of others that are amenable to description. However, this was not always the case. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropologists were uncompromising in their descriptions of other ways of thinking—especially those considered incommensurable with Cartesian, monotheistic modes of understanding.Less

H.D.’s Incidents

C.D. Blanton

in Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism

When Ezra Pound renamed Hilda Doolittle in 1912, as “H.D., Imagiste,” he established both the terms of her critical reputation and imagism’s central orthodoxy. But H.D.’s wartime trilogy is troubled ... More

When Ezra Pound renamed Hilda Doolittle in 1912, as “H.D., Imagiste,” he established both the terms of her critical reputation and imagism’s central orthodoxy. But H.D.’s wartime trilogy is troubled by a countervailing force, a cumulative effect of lexical displacement and distortion that leaves no image intact. This chapter traces the trilogy’s counterpoetics to Vienna in 1933, and to a textual logic arooted in H.D.’s late encounter with Freudian psychoanalysis. H.D.’s late style, it demonstrates, emerges in cryptic dialogue with a figure it cannot name: the Moses of Freud’s controversial last work, Moses and Monotheism, distinguished above all by the theological ban on graven images. The trilogy thus encodes a silent or unconscious poetics beneath a manifest imagism, keyed to the historical crisis of reason embodied in Freud and pitched at the negated epic’s conceptual limit, postulating a poetry formed in silence.Less

Biological Diversity

Bryan G. Norton

in Toward Unity among Environmentalists

As a philosopher who has written on the subject of endangered species policy, I am asked from time to time to join a panel discussion on “the value of biological diversity.” Consider a ... More

As a philosopher who has written on the subject of endangered species policy, I am asked from time to time to join a panel discussion on “the value of biological diversity.” Consider a representative example: At the National Forum on Biodiversity, a 1986 conference organized by the Smithsonian Institution and the National Academy of Sciences, I shared the platform with three resource economists and one ecologist. Everyone on the platform agreed that biological diversity has great value; the discussion focused on the question, can that value be quantified in dollar terms? I quickly perceived that I was in the middle of a polarized situation. The economists were there to demonstrate the efficacy of their methods for representing the value of wild species as dollars; the ecologist scoffed at these attempts as irrelevant at best and, at worst, as a symptom of moral depravity. Hovering in the background of discussions like this are celebrated examples such as that of the snaildarter and the Tellico Dam. In that case, the Supreme Court halted work on an almost-completed dam because it would have flooded the only known habitat of the snaildarter, a three-inch member of the perch family. The politically tortured case of the tiny snaildarter illustrates the dilemma environmentalists face in defending biological resources. Environmentalists initially opposed the Tennesee Valley Authority’s plans to dam one of the last free-flowing stretches of the Little Tennessee River because it would destroy white-water canoeing, flood natural ecological systems, and destroy anthropologically important Indian burial sites. Environmentalists made little headway, initially, as the bureaucratic processes ground forward and construction of the dam was begun. Then, in early 1976, in a dramatic development, biologists discovered a hitherto unknown species, the snaildarter, living in the waters upstream from the dam. Since the snaildarter spawned in shallow, fast-moving waters, the dam threatened to wipe out a distinctive form of life. Environmental economists, anxious to use their quantificational tools, saw the Tellico Dam as a case in which assigning a dollar value to a threatened species might tip the scales in an aggregation of costs and benefits of proposed projects. Less

Moralists and Aggregators: The Case of Muir and Pinchot

Bryan G. Norton

in Toward Unity among Environmentalists

Gifford Pinchot first met John Muir in 1896, while on a trip through the West to study possible sites for new forest preserves. Pinchot was much impressed by Muir, twenty-seven years his senior, ... More

Gifford Pinchot first met John Muir in 1896, while on a trip through the West to study possible sites for new forest preserves. Pinchot was much impressed by Muir, twenty-seven years his senior, and recalled the meeting fifty years later in his autobiography. He described Muir as “cordial, and a most fascinating talker, I took to him at once.” Muir, in his writings of this period, was explicitly complimentary of Pinchot’s efforts at sustainable forestry. At the Grand Canyon, Muir and Pinchot struck off on their own and “spent an unforgettable day on the rim of the prodigious chasm, letting it soak in.” They came across a tarantula and Muir wouldn’t let Pinchot kill it: “He said it had as much right there as we did.” Within a year, however, Muir had complained bitterly and publicly about Pinchot’s decision to allow grazing in the national forest reserves. This rift between the Moralist (Muir) and the Aggregator (Pinchot) shaped the two wings of the environmental movement, and its original configuration owes much to attitudes developed in the early life and work of each man. Muir entered the University of Wisconsin in 1861, the year the Civil War broke out. Although he was almost twenty-three, his last formal schooling had been interrupted at the age of eleven, when his family emigrated from Scotland. His father, Daniel, a religious zealot, had no use for any book but the Bible. The elder Muir, who joined ever more extreme sects in search of one sufficiently pure and exacting, chose eighty acres of virgin land and put his eldest son John to work clearing it. Days were spent cutting trees and grubbing out roots, and nights were given over to memorizing Scripture. Daniel Muir planted only corn and wheat for cash crops, and the farmland was worn out in only eight years. Choosing a new and larger plot, the family moved and repeated the process. Again, the hardest work fell to John as his father spent all of his time studying the Bible and preaching to anyone who would listen. Less

Nigerian Preachers (2006–2008)

Michael Nwankpa

in The Boko Haram Reader: From Nigerian Preachers to the Islamic State

This chapter provides a historical background to Boko Haram’s insurgency by discussing its theological rationale and argument. Particularly, it focuses on the last three years before Boko Haram ... More

This chapter provides a historical background to Boko Haram’s insurgency by discussing its theological rationale and argument. Particularly, it focuses on the last three years before Boko Haram transformed into a full-blown insurgent group in 2009 and draws attention to the extensive religious debates between the leadership of Boko Haram and the religious scholars and establishment in northern Nigeria. The chapter also presents the socio-political events and conditions within and without Nigeria that may have contributed to the emergence of Boko Haram and inspired Boko Haram’s Jihad. In this chapter, Muhammad Yusuf, the charismatic founder of Boko Haram and his deputy and current leader, Abubakar Shekau goes to extensive length in establishing the group’s creed, religious ideology and raison d’etre.Less

Initial Desiderata on Metatheology

Jonathan L. Kvanvig

in Depicting Deity: A Metatheological Approach

In this chapter, we develop desiderata to be used in rating each approach. We look for what can be gleaned from each starting point, and assess each competitor in terms of what is generated by other ... More

In this chapter, we develop desiderata to be used in rating each approach. We look for what can be gleaned from each starting point, and assess each competitor in terms of what is generated by other competitors. We will thus approach the issue of desiderata on a metatheology, not in search of some simple algorithm to decide between competing metatheologies, but rather in search of something more like rules of thumb to rely on when starting our inquiry. These rules of thumb will favor views that are monotheistic and on which God is a person, but remain open on the issue of whether God is embodied.Less

Creator Theology and the Shared Ground

Jonathan L. Kvanvig

in Depicting Deity: A Metatheological Approach

The focus of this chapter is Creator Theology’s implications regarding the issues of monotheism, personhood, and embodiment. The plan is to use these primary elements as stage-setting, showing that ... More

The focus of this chapter is Creator Theology’s implications regarding the issues of monotheism, personhood, and embodiment. The plan is to use these primary elements as stage-setting, showing that Creator Theology has impressive advantages primarily over Perfect Being Theology on these matters, but also over Worship-Worthiness Theology. I take up each of these issues in turn, focusing on monotheism in §2, personhood in §3, and embodiment in §4. The conclusion aimed at is that Creator Theology is superior to its competitors, though in a way that is subject to important qualifications that leave room for alternative approaches to claim that the advantages are not decisive.Less