Peter Olivi set out a scheme of prophecy chronology from Adam to Abraham to the destruction of Jerusalem. The accuracy of this is not the point, but rather the claim that the end of the temple was a decisive redemptive-historical event. “Ab Adam usque ad primam primissionem factam Abrahe, Genesis XII, sunt precise duo milia anni. Ab illa autem promissione usque ad mortem Vespasiani imperatoris sub quo destructum est templum, sunt iterum duo milia anni . . . a prima... Read more
A number of readers have suggested that I was wrongly critical of Athanasius’s claim that without God’s sustenance creation tends toward nothing; I said that this implied that creation has some tendency “independent” of God. The readers point out that Athanasius’s claim is exactly that creation has no independence and would simply not exist at all without God’s continuing sustaining power. That is perhaps right. As one reader pointed out, the word “tend” is what left me suspicious. If God... Read more
Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream develops a mythological monistic materialist ontology in which multiplicity develops from an original “polyp” but where nothing ever becomes really distinct from the whole or from anything else. There is no freedom, no real otherness, no real possibility of love. D’Alembert describes this ontology while masturbating in front of his lover; it’s a perfect image of his cosmos – fruitless distribution of seed. In Diderot’s evolutionary scheme, the cosmos gradually grows toward self-consciousness, and this is perhaps... Read more
Athanasius repeatedly says that created things, having come from nothing, have an inherent tedency to move toward nothing again. They have to be sustained by God to remain in existence. No problem with the conclusion that God keeps things in existence. But the notion that things tend toward nothing seems to imply that they have some principle or telos, some “nature,” that is not given by God, something that pulls against God unless he pulls back. But how could that... Read more
Peter Olivi is one of a number of medieval exegetes who placed enormous significance on the fall of Jerusalem. In part, this was driven by anti-Jewish polemics; they argued that prophecies foretold that the Messiah would come and the temple sacrifice would be ended – since the temple sacrifice has ended, the Messiah must have come. Olivi’s preterism, though, is partly driven by Joachimite interests, and also by an effort to work out whether the Jews could have known the... Read more
Anatolios makes the striking observation that Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” is even more transcendent than Plato’s form of the good. For Plato, being is self-communicative, and his most exalted realities (the form of the good, the forms) are participatable. Not Aristotle’s UM, which just thinks thinking in total self-absorption, while everything else that exists is moved by desire for him/it. Read more
Henry Chadwick notes that the “alienation of Egypt and much of Syria from the Chalcedonian government was a serious political matter, and gravely weakened those key provinces before the Moslem invasions.” Read more
Were the ecumenical councils infallible? Many in the early church clearly didn’t consider them so. The most vigorous, and vicious, arguments over Arius took place between Nicea and First Constantinople, and the Monophysite controversy continued for a century and more after Chalcedon had condemned Eutyches (as well as Nestorius). Nestorianism took root in Syria, and from there spread to Persia, China, India, and in Kurdistan up to the First World War. Copts and Ethiopians never accepted Chalcedon. Winners in the... Read more
Henry Chadwick notes that Julian the Apostate tried to gain Jewish support by proposing to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem: “although Julian had little but contempt for Judaism, he was well aware that a proposal to restore sacrificies in a rebuilt temple at Jerusalem would touch the Christians at a tender spot. The plan for rebuilding the temple was apparently coupled with a political, quasi-Zionist proposal for the creation of a territorial area in Palestine administered by the Jewish patriarch.... Read more
Much of the theology instruction in the high middle ages took the form of commentary on established texts, most importantly the Four Books of the Sentences by Peter the Lombard. Lombard’s triumph, though, was contested. As Deeana Klepper points out in her book on Nicolas of Lyra, one of the main opponents was the Oxford Franciscan Robert Grosseteste, whose disciples also insisted that theology should be taught from the Bible, not from a theologian. (more…) Read more
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