"Like Paul, [anti-Christian] Porphyry defines belief, truth, love & hope as the four elements of godliness. Origen is to the Christian Church what Plotinus is to the pagan church. [Remember:] Origen & Plotinus were [both] students of Ammonius Saccas..." - Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology (Stanford, 2009), p. 79 - written when Taubes was twenty-three, &… Continue reading Taubes on Origen & Plotinus
Author: David Lloyd Dusenbury
David Lloyd Dusenbury is a philosopher, historian of ideas, Times Literary Supplement contributor and senior fellow at Budapest's Danube Institute. The author of I Judge No One and The Innocence of Pontius Pilate (published by Hurst and Oxford University Press), he is also Chair for Jewish-Christian Relations at the University of Antwerp.
“The flowers of religious history are strange flowers”
Beginning to read Guy Stroumsa's magnificent new opus, The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise & Fall of a Scholarly Myth (Oxford 2021), during my Jerusalem quarantine: on "Orientalism" & the history of religion as a culture-shaping, 19th-century concerns. "The flowers of religious history are strange flowers", says Ernest Renan in one of the book's… Continue reading “The flowers of religious history are strange flowers”
“To fill the central emptiness …”
"Unless I read the evidence wrongly, the political and philosophic history of the West during the past 150 years can be understood as a series of attempts - more or less conscious, more or less systematic, more or less violent - to fill the central emptiness left by the erosion of theology." - George Steiner,… Continue reading “To fill the central emptiness …”
Out now: The Innocence of Pontius Pilate
Courtesy of C. Hurst & Co.
World-class self-deprecation
World-class self-deprecation: "I was, alas, am an excellent mediocrity." - Jean d'Ormesson
“Technologically barren”
"Metaphysical questions & beliefs are technologically barren." - Leszek Kolakowski, Warsaw 1966
Unbeatable first line
Unbeatable first line: "This little book is a concise summary of a nonexistent treatise." - Leszek Kolawowski, The Presence of Myth (Chicago, 1989), p. ix
“Legitimately classed as philosophers”
In case we've forgotten: "There is no doubt that Christian writers prior to the fourth century can be legitimately classed as philosophers... Thinkers such as Justin Martyr & Origen... operated as independent teachers & may... plausibly be compared to contemporaneous philosophers." Johannes Zachhuber, The Rise of Christian Theology & the End of Ancient Metaphysics (Oxford,… Continue reading “Legitimately classed as philosophers”
Julia Kristeva: “The most shameful of chastisements”
Julia Kristeva holds that the fact that Jesus was “condemned as a rebel, even as a criminal, subjected to crucifixion, the most shameful of chastisements”, is the root of so many European ethical intuitions and cultural forms that “we no longer even think of referring [them] back to Jesus”. - - J. Kristeva, This Incredible… Continue reading Julia Kristeva: “The most shameful of chastisements”
Wild tradition, no. 1 : Nonnus of Panopolis
A Sunday morning reminder : Nonnus of Panopolis composed a forty-eight-book Bacchus epic (Dionysiaca), & - get this - a brilliant versification of the Gospel of John (Metabolḕ toû katà Iōánnēn Euaggelíou). My only point being: Tradition is wilder than we think.
D. L. Dusenbury 