Throughout history, messianic ideas of impending redemption have inspired people to turn against unjust and oppressive orders. Yet the very same ideas have been accused of paving the way for the utopian and sometimes violent ideologies of modernity. This book explores the double-edged legacy of Jewish and Christian theologies of history. What is the impact of this legacy on modern philosophies of history and the political ideologies they have engendered? Tracing a line from ancient Jewish prophetism to Joachim of Fiore, (...) German Romanticism and contemporary radical thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, the author engages in a politico-philosophical debate that attempts to strike a balance between utopian arrogance and resigned loss of vision. (shrink)

"Divination and Human Nature" casts a new perspective on the rich tradition of ancient divination--the reading of divine signs in oracles, omens, and dreams. Popular attitudes during classical antiquity saw these readings as signs from the gods while modern scholars have treated such beliefs as primitive superstitions. In this book, Peter Struck reveals instead that such phenomena provoked an entirely different accounting from the ancient philosophers. These philosophers produced subtle studies into what was an odd but observable fact--that (...) humans could sometimes have uncanny insights--and their work signifies an early chapter in the cognitive history of intuition. Examining the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists, Struck demonstrates that they all observed how, setting aside the charlatans and swindlers, some people had premonitions defying the typical bounds of rationality. Given the wide differences among these ancient thinkers, Struck notes that they converged on seeing this surplus insight as an artifact of human nature, projections produced under specific conditions by our physiology. For the philosophers, such unexplained insights invited a speculative search for an alternative and more naturalistic system of cognition. Recovering a lost piece of an ancient tradition, "Divination and Human Nature" illustrates how philosophers of the classical era interpreted the phenomena of divination as a practice closer to intuition and instinct than magic. (shrink)

Introduction : "The idea of divine providence in Orosius, Augustine, and Dante" -- "Destined lands and chosen fathers: Virgil, Livy, and the Bible" -- "Orosius defends the Roman Empire" -- "Augustine's theology of history" -- "Dante's monarchia with and against Augustine" -- "Dante's Commedia and the ascent to incarnational history" -- Conclusion : "The hand of God".

This essay argues that the motifs of divine vengeance present in the Histories reflect a conscious, considered theory of divine action. This theory is defined by Herodotus’ empirical methodology and his lack of poetic revelation or other claimed insight into the nature and motivations of divinity. For Herodotus, divinity possesses a basically regulatory role in the cosmos, ensuring that history follows certain consistent patterns. One such pattern is vengeance, by which a large-scale balance of reciprocity is maintained in human events (...) through human and divine acts of repayment. This theory underlies Herodotus’ historical project, reinforcing his general skepticism about human knowledge and power and making possible his universalizing approach to historical narrative. (shrink)

Takes an original approach to reading Augustine's theory of divine illumination and shows how the theory was transformed and reinterpreted in medieval ...

A history of divining rods Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 1-3 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9565-x Authors Martina Kölbl-Ebert, Jura-Museum, Burgstrasse 19, 85072 Eichstätt, Germany Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Are actions that are morally good, morally goosd because God makes them so? Or does God urge humans to do them because they are morally good anyway? What is, in general, the relationship between divine commands and ethical duties? It is not an uncommon belief among theists that morality depends entirely on the will or commands of God: all moral facts consist exclusively in facts about his will or commands. Thus, not only is an action right because it is commanded (...) by God, but its conformity to his commands is what alone makes it right. An action is right solely because he commands it, and solely in virtue of his doing so. This view has come to be known as the „divine command theory of morality". This paper is devoted to a brief reconstruction of claims and controversies surrounding the theory, beginning with Plato's Euthyphro, which is the historical initiator of the debate and to a reconstruction of the various lines of argument that have been set forth to defend the theory. (shrink)

Are actions that are morally good, morally goosd because God makes them so? Or does God urge humans to do them because they are morally good anyway? What is, in general, the relationship between divine commands and ethical duties? It is not an uncommon belief among theists that morality depends entirely on the will or commands of God: all moral facts consist exclusively in facts about his will or commands. Thus, not only is an action right because it is commanded (...) by God, but its conformity to his commands is what alone makes it right. An action is right solely because he commands it, and solely in virtue of his doing so. This view has come to be known as the „divine command theory of morality". This paper is devoted to a brief reconstruction of claims and controversies surrounding the theory, beginning with Plato's Euthyphro, which is the historical initiator of the debate and to a reconstruction of the various lines of argument that have been set forth to defend the theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of KnowledgeSteven P. MarroneLydia Schumacher. Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge. Challenges in Contemporary Theology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Pp. xiii + 250. Cloth, $119.95.Lydia Schumacher has written an ambitious book. Among the many things she tries to accomplish in the volume, three stand out to this reviewer. First of all, she proposes to reexamine (...) Augustine’s theory of knowledge. She argues that Augustine’s philosophy is grounded in theology. For his theory of knowledge this means, by Schumacher’s reading, that the aim of cognition is to enable the human being to regain its original status as “image of God,” which latter state is manifested in knowing God and making God known. It is the mental, and by extension ethical, process of becoming God’s image that Schumacher says we should, in the Augustinian context, take the phrase ‘divine illumination’ to signify. For Augustine, Schumacher insists, this process is an entirely internal phenomenon constituted by a self-correcting series of intellectual reflections on the part of the mind. In holding to this view, Schumacher emphatically rejects the understanding, common in scholarship, that “divine illumination” for Augustine had to do with mental reference to what she labels an “extrinsic” standard such as the eternal ideas in God’s mind. [End Page 293]Second, Schumacher argues that the Augustinian project, epitomized in his theory of knowledge, was carried out by most of the thinkers of the Latin Middle Ages, particularly by Anselm and Thomas Aquinas. These latter two individuals are therefore divine illumi-nationists of the first order. What historians often designate as an Augustinian current, evident in the high Middle Ages among scholastics from the Franciscan Order, represented instead a deviation, a turn to an entirely novel theological-philosophical project. Here, mind’s work was conceived of as “the immediate and totalized knowledge of an individual essence.” And for this, recourse to an extrinsic standard filled the bill. Consequently, high-medieval Franciscans were the actual propounders of the theory of knowledge Schumacher tells us has wrongly been associated with divine illumination. Moreover, this Franciscan current of thought, once severed from its original theological underpinnings, provided the historical inspiration for modern philosophy, thereby acting as a kind of catalyst for the modernist philosophical problems—as Schumacher receives them—of rationalism and fideism, skepticism as well.Third, Schumacher sounds the call for a contemporary return to the authentic Augustinian project. By starting philosophy, as she claims Augustine did, with theological assumptions, she wants to fashion a “faith-based concept of knowledge” and with it, most importantly, to escape the modernist dilemma of the incompatibility of faith and reason. Grounding philosophy in theology—Christian theology, she maintains—will restore a lost integrity to our procedures of thinking, ultimately redeeming philosophy itself.How much of this program has Schumacher managed to achieve? Since this reviewer is marked out as the key spokesperson for the interpretation of both divine illumination and the history of medieval thought against which Schumacher inveighs, perhaps he should not be the one to answer the question. Still, the reader forewarned, I lay out my opinion. With regard to her first goal, Schumacher makes good on her promise to render Augustine as a theologian bent on working from his assumptions to designate a process whereby philosophy and mankind can be simultaneously restored. She is not so convincing in her attempt to equate this program with divine illumination. For Schumacher, the process of divine illumination is correlative to the idea of God as source of the mind’s power to act. Yet Augustine often plainly associates what he describes as illumination with turning to God and conceding his ideas an important role in the mental processes of judgment and concept formation. It is hard to see how one can honestly exclude this extrinsic element of what Augustine intended.Regarding her second goal, Schumacher does an excellent job of reminding us how Augustinian were almost all medieval scholastics, Thomas included, and warning us not to take the high-scholastic recourse to Aristotle as a sign of opposition to Augustinian modes of thought... (shrink)

In the late English Renaissance, writers as varied as Shakespeare, Hooker, Bacon, and Hobbes problematically engaged the traditional idea of order and helped define a new, secular one. In this intellectual history, Collins treats the idea of order as a dynamic concept which incorporates changing views of self, society, and the relationship between private and public during these years. He sees this as a process of meaning redefinition that simultaneously heightens and comes to terms with the dissolution of the old (...) idea of order; the self-consciously articulated concept of the representative sovereign state replaces the vision of the divine cosmos as the medium for identity and social order. Collins draws on a wide range of political, literary, and other contemporary writings to chart this process--now associated with secularization --providing a provocative analysis of social and intellectual change. (shrink)

Originally published in 1938, this book presents the content of six lectures delivered by the author at the University of Cambridge during the Lent term of 1936, as part of the Hulsean Lectures series. The text discusses the history of Christian doctrine from the close of the eighteenth century onwards, reviewing the main interpretations of Christ within theological thought. Concise, yet ambitious in scope, this book will be of value to anyone with an interest in theology, philosophy and the history (...) of Christianity. (shrink)

Søren Kierkegaard 's account of faith in Philosophical Fragments claims that the historical Incarnation is necessary for faith, but that historical evidence for the Incarnation is neither necessary nor sufficient for faith. It has been argued that the defence of these two claims gives rise to a faith /history problem for Kierkegaard and that it is incoherent to defend an account of faith which affirms both the necessity of the historical Incarnation and rejects the necessity and sufficiency of the historical (...) evidence for the Incarnation. I argue that this problem can be solved by applying Eleonore Stump's account of divine–human union. I argue that the Incarnation is necessary because it allows us to enjoy a kind of mutual empathy with Christ which is the basis of divine–human union and that the historical evidence is neither necessary nor sufficient since faith is grounded in a second-person experience of Christ. I claim that this solves the faith /history problem and offers a way of defending Kierkegaard 's account of faith as coherent. (shrink)

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. In Divine Machines, Justin Smith offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. He shows how these (...) wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines.Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, Divine Machines takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here Smith reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. He casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, Smith provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era. (shrink)

Open theists argue that God's relationship to time, as conceived in classical theism, is erroneous. They explain that it is contradictory for an atemporal being to act in a temporal universe, including experiencing its temporal successions. Contrary to the atemporalists, redemptive history has shown that God interacts with humans in time. This relational nature of God nullifies the classical notion of God as timelessly eternal. Therefore, it lacks a philosophical and theological basis. Because God is in time, He does not (...) know all future contingencies and, therefore, changes. This study examines open theism's appropriation of the A and B theories of time to the divine-human relationship. The study argues that divine temporality does not solve the tension of divine-human relationships, especially in relation to the future. Further, historical divine temporality does not negate the fact of divine atemporality. It mainly stems from God's choice to create temporal creatures and His relationship with them. Furthermore, if it is not logically and metaphysically contradictory for an omnipresent being to act in space, then it follows that an atemporal being can act in time. Whether time is understood from the metric or psychological point of view, it does not transcend God, and therefore, the limitation it places on human creatures with respect to the future does not apply to God. Lastly, although a few philosophers reject the notion of eternity as timelessly eternal, the doctrine has a philosophical and theological basis in the Scripture. (shrink)

Chez Paul Tillich, le concept de Dieu s’oppose au modèle « interventionniste » du théisme traditionnel en Occident. Cet article se propose de déterminer si, et en quel sens, d’après Tillich, on peut dire que Dieu agit pour influencer le cours des événements historiques. On soutient que son concept de « pouvoir Spirituel » fournit une réponse à cette question. Pour clarifier cette thèse, on explore les concepts d’esprit, de pouvoir, de sens, de vocation, de kairos et de renoncement au (...) pouvoir. Selon Tillich, la vocation de groupes sociaux déterminés est animée d’un pouvoir divin conférant tout ensemble un don et une tâche. Pour les chrétiens, la vocation de Jésus le Christ, qui consiste à proclamer la venue du Royaume de Dieu comme le sens ultime de l’histoire, constitue le critère permettant de juger les vocations concrètes. Dieu agit en offrant un sens, qui doit être choisi et réalisé. (shrink)

Dariusz Łukasiewicz has investigated in depth the “Argument from Chance” which argues that the data revealing chance in the world are incompatible with Divine Providence. Łukasiewicz agrees that these data undermine the traditional model of Providence—a fine-grained model in which every single detail is controlled by God—but maintains that they are not incompatible with a coarse-grained model—in which God leaves to chance many aspects of history (including some horrendous evils). Furthermore, Łukasiewicz provides independent reasons to prefer this coarse-grained model. Even (...) though I agree that a maximally fine-grained model is undermined by the scientific data, I argue that this is no sufficient reason to adopt a model as coarse-grained as Łukasiewicz’s. I propose a model of intermediate level of fine-grainedness which could avoid the drawbacks of both extremes, and seems to me to provide a more traditional approach to the problem of evil. (shrink)

There’s been a recent surge of interest among analytic philosophers of religion in divine ineffability. However, divine ineffability is part of a traditional conception of God that has been widely rejected among analytic philosophers of religion for the past few decades. One of the main reasons that the traditional conception of God has been rejected is because it allegedly makes God too remote, unknowable, and impersonal. In this paper, I present an account of divine ineffability that directly addresses this concern (...) by arguing that the deepest knowledge of God’s nature that we can attain is personal, rather than propositional. On this view, it is precisely because knowledge of God’s nature is personal that it cannot be linguistically expressed and communicated. (shrink)

This paper presents a broad-ranging critique of the traditional strong doctrine of divine simplicity which is attributed to Augustine and Aquinas. After showing two important arguments in favor of the doctrine to be unsuccessful, it argues that the doctrine itself, in this strong version, is problematic in three main ways. First, the doctrine involves extensive category mistakes. Second, it is difficult to reconcile with truths about God that are universally acknowledged, such as that God knows contingent truths and performs actions (...) which he is not necessitated by his nature to perform. Finally, it is difficult to reconcile with personal attributes of God which are important both for the Bible and for religious practice, such as the claims that God is responsive to human beings and that he loves them. This article contends that while there is a sense in which it is true that God is simple, the traditional strong doctrine of divine simplicity, attributed to Augustine and Aquinas, is a mistake from which theology needs to be liberated. (shrink)

I explain the doctrine of divine simplicity, and reject what is now the standard way to explicate it in analytic philosophy. I show that divine simplicity imperils the claim that God is free, and argue against a popular proposal for dealing with the problem.

_Divine Love and Wisdom_ has been called the most profound work of the Enlightenment scientist and seer Emanuel Swedenborg. It demonstrates how God’s love, wisdom, and humanity are reflected in creation and in ourselves, and suggests that the act of Creation is not a mystery of the past, but a miracle ongoing in every instant of the present. Like a blueprint of things unseen, _Divine Love and Wisdom_ makes visible the hidden design of the universe, as well as the qualities (...) of its Architect. Its vivid depiction of the spiritual mechanism of the world has impressed thinkers such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry James Sr. _Divine Providence_ is one of Emanuel Swedenborg's major works. It provides a coherent and satisfying solution to what has been called “the problem of evil”: How are God’s goodness and power reconcilable with evil’s presences in the larger world and in the human mind and heart? By tackling an array of issues that commonly undermine belief in God, including war, suffering, and inequality—and by revealing the wise and loving laws that lie hidden behind these seemingly senseless phenomena—_Divine Providence _aims to restore our faith in the meaningfulness of the world. Despite its universal focus, _Divine Providence_ is also a highly practical book on the personal level, demonstrating how we can put aside negative attitudes and behaviors and grow into positive thought and action. This volume, which contains both works, also has an introduction by Gregory R. Johnson that puts these ideas in the context of the history of philosophy. The New Century Edition of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg is a modern-language, scholarly translation of Swedenborg’s theological works. The series’ easy-to-read style retains the dignity, variety, clarity, and gender-inclusive language of Swedenborg’s original Latin, bringing his thought to life. Introductions and annotations by eminent, international scholars place Swedenborg’s writings in their historical context and illuminate obscure references within the text, enabling readers to understand and trace Swedenborg’s influence as never before. (shrink)

_Divine Love and Wisdom_ has been called the most profound work of the Enlightenment scientist and seer Emanuel Swedenborg. It demonstrates how God’s love, wisdom, and humanity are reflected in creation and in ourselves, and suggests that the act of Creation is not a mystery of the past, but a miracle ongoing in every instant of the present. Like a blueprint of things unseen, _Divine Love and Wisdom_ makes visible the hidden design of the universe, as well as the qualities (...) of its Architect. Its vivid depiction of the spiritual mechanism of the world has impressed thinkers such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry James Sr. This volume contains an introduction by Gregory R. Johnson that puts the work in the context of the history of philosophy. The New Century Edition of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg is a modern-language, scholarly translation of Swedenborg’s theological works. The series’ easy-to-read style retains the dignity, variety, clarity, and gender-inclusive language of Swedenborg’s original Latin, bringing his thought to life. Introductions and annotations by eminent, international scholars place Swedenborg’s writings in their historical context and illuminate obscure references within the text, enabling readers to understand and trace Swedenborg’s influence as never before. (shrink)

When Darwin's theory of natural selection threatened to put Paley's Designer out of a job, one response was to reemploy God as the author of the evolutionary process itself. This idea requires an account of how God might be understood to act in biological history. I approach this question in two stages: first, by considering God's action as creator of the world as a whole, and second, by exploring the idea of particular divine action in the course of evolution. As (...) creator ex nihilo God acts directly in every event as its sustaining ground. Because God structures the world as a lawful order of natural causes, God also acts indirectly by means of creatures. More controversially, God might act directly within the world to affect the course of events; this action need not take the form of a miraculous intervention, if the natural order includes the right sort of indeterministic chance. In each of these ways God's purposes can shape evolutionary processes. (shrink)

By studying history, we understand that religion in different ages is influenced by the culture of people. This reality signals the probability of that religion is made by people and it is the product of man in history. This probability indeed ignores the divinity of religion and presents it only as a human product. But is there only one probability for human influence? We should survey the relation between the human and divine in religion to clarify this question. By surveying (...) this relation, we understand that there is a fundamental discontinuity between the divine and human realms. Different objects could cause this discontinuity, but the most fundamental object is the power that causes the excellence and mastery of divine and fundamental discontinuity. If the power only is regarded, the probability ofhumanity of religion increases. But other objects may be regarded. If wisdom has an important place in the discontinuity, there is a probability for the influence of the human. It is wise divine variation of religion that correlates the eternal variation of the human. (shrink)

In the Qur’an, human distinctiveness was first questioned by angels. These established denizens of the cosmos could not understand why God would create a seemingly pernicious human when immaculate devotees of God such as themselves existed. In other words, the angels asked the age-old question: what makes humans so special and different? Fast forward to our present age and this question is made relevant again in light of the encroaching arrival of an artificial superintelligence (ASI). Up to this point in (...) history, humans have exceeded other creatures in various respects; now a possibility has arisen that another entity, namely ASI, will exceed humans at least on the level of intelligence and power. In relation to the age of angels, pre-modern Sunni exegesis construed human distinctiveness along the axes of reproductive knowledge and stewardship. Both brittle, distinguishing markers will disappear in the age of the ASI. Conversely, a more resilient and creative Islamic response can be derived from Ibn al-ʿArabī’s (d. 1240) views on God and the imago Dei. Inspired by the Akbarian perspective, this paper construes human distinctiveness in relation to a capacity to expansively respond to God’s love to be recognized, a response that relies on (a) imitating divine virtues that operate in counterintuitive and illogical ways, and (b) exhibiting fragility and lack rather than exceptionalism. ASI, while responding already in part to God’s love, needs to make strides towards these traits before it can answer divine love as commensurately as humans can. (shrink)

Divine providence plays a significant role in John Schellenberg’s formulation of the divine hiddenness argument. Although Schellenberg does not openly mention the providence of God, his refutation of this attribute supports his denial of God’s existence, a denial which is the aim of Schellenberg’s hiddenness argument. In this article, I show that Schellenberg’s implicit refutation of providence presupposes two assumptions, the more comprehensive of which consists in saying that there is no good end of history and no commitment to the (...) good is required on the part of the prospective believer. I argue that the assumptions at stake are inconsistent with Schellenberg’s view of God as the omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly loving creator of all things, a view which Schellenberg uses as a starting point for his hiddenness argument. (shrink)