Divine Powers in Late Antiquity PDF Download

Author: Irini-Fotini Viltanioti
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019876720X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
"This volume explores how some of the most prominent philosophers and theologians of late antiquity conceptualize the idea that the divine is powerful. The period under consideration spans roughly four centuries (from the first to the fifth CE), which are of particular interest because they 'witness' the successive development and mutual influence of two major strands in the history of Western thought: Neoplatonism on the one hand, and early Christian on the other."--Introduction, p. [1].

Author: Scott Noegel
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271046006
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
In the religious systems of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Mediterranean, gods and demigods were neither abstract nor distant, but communicated with mankind through signs and active intervention. Men and women were thus eager to interpret, appeal to, and even control the gods and their agents. In Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World, a distinguished array of scholars explores the many ways in which people in the ancient world sought to gain access to--or, in some cases, to bind or escape from--the divine powers of heaven and earth. Grounded in a variety of disciplines, including Assyriology, Classics, and early Islamic history, the fifteen essays in this volume cover a broad geographic area: Greece, Egypt, Syria-Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Persia. Topics include celestial divination in early Mesopotamia, the civic festivals of classical Athens, and Christian magical papyri from Coptic Egypt. Moving forward to Late Antiquity, we see how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each incorporated many aspects of ancient Near Eastern and Graeco-Roman religion into their own prayers, rituals, and conceptions. Even if they no longer conceived of the sun, moon, and the stars as eternal or divine, Christians, Jews, and Muslims often continued to study the movements of the heavens as a map on which divine power could be read. The reader already familiar with studies of ancient religion will find in Prayer, Magic, and the Stars both old friends and new faces. Contributors include Gideon Bohak, Nicola Denzey, Jacco Dieleman, Radcliffe Edmonds, Marvin Meyer, Michael G. Morony, Ian Moyer, Francesca Rochberg, Jonathan Z. Smith, Mark S. Smith, Peter Struck, Michael Swartz, and Kasia Szpakowska. Published as part of Penn State's Magic in History series, Prayer, Magic, and the Stars appears at a time of renewed interest in divination and occult practices in the ancient world. It will interest a wide audience in the field of comparative religion as well as students of the ancient world and late antiquity.

Author: Scott B. Noegel
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Explores how people living in the ancient and late antique world sought to gain access to, or in some cases to escape from, the divine powers of heaven and earth.

Author: Johan C. Thom
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161528095
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The treatise De mundo offers a cosmology in the Peripatetic tradition which subordinates what happens in the cosmos to the might of an omnipotent god. Thus the work is paradigmatic for the philosophical and religious concepts of the early imperial age, which offer points of contact with nascent Christianity.

Author: Kamil Cyprian Choda
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004411798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
The volume Gaining and Losing Imperial Favour in Late Antiquity studies fundamental dynamics of the political culture of the Later Roman Empire (4th and 5th centuries A.D.) by examining how people rose in and fell from the emperor’s favour.

Author: Stanimir Panayotov
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003818803
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
Including both traditional and underrepresented accounts and geographies of soul, body, gender, and sexuality in late antique history, philosophy, and theology, this volume offers substantial re-readings of these and related concepts through theories of dis/embodiment. Bringing together gender studies, late antique philosophy, patristics, history of asceticism, and history of Indian philosophy, this interdisciplinary volume examines the notions of dis/embodiment and im/materiality in late antique and early Christian culture and thought. The book’s geographical scope extends beyond the ancient Mediterranean, providing comparative perspectives from Late Antiquity in the Near East and South Asia. It offers critical interpretations of late antique scholarly objects of inquiry, exploring close readings of soul, body, gender, and sexuality in their historical context. These fascinating studies engage scholars from different fields and research traditions with one another, and reveal both change and continuity in the perception and social role of gender, sexuality, body, and soul in this period. Soul, Body, and Gender in Late Antiquity is a valuable resource for students and scholars of Classics, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as well as those working on late antique and early Christian history, philosophy, and theology.

Author: Crystal Addey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317148983
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Why did ancient philosophers consult oracles, write about them, and consider them to be an important part of philosophical thought and practice? This book explores the extensive links between oracles and philosophy in Late Antiquity, particularly focusing on the roles of oracles and other forms of divination in third and fourth century CE Neoplatonism. Examining some of the most significant debates between pagan philosophers and Christian intellectuals on the nature of oracles as a central yet contested element of religious tradition, Addey focuses particularly on Porphyry's Philosophy from Oracles and Iamblichus' De Mysteriis - two works which deal extensively with oracles and other forms of divination. This book argues for the significance of divination within Neoplatonism and offers a substantial reassessment of oracles and philosophical works and their relationship to one another. With a broad interdisciplinary approach, encompassing Classics, Ancient Philosophy, Theology, Religious Studies and Ancient History, Addey draws on recent anthropological and religious studies research which has challenged and re-evaluated the relationship between rationality and ritual.

Author: Maria Dzielska
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788323336792
Category : Byzantine Empire
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The papers collected in the present volume were originally delivered at the conference "Divine Men and Women in the History and Society of Late Hellenism", organised at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków on the 24th-25th June, 2010. The conference was a unique gathering of international scholars, who cherish thetradition of Hellenism in Late Antiquity and venerate its "divine" representatives (theioi andres), and who deeply identify with the moral values and philosophicalconcepts of those times and the Neoplatonic doctrine in general. The conference gathered many eminent scholars, who brought with them new perspectives on ancient sources, presenting divine men and women of Neoplatonic era, their multifaceted activities, and the entire range of their scientific pursuits and virtues.

Author: Peter Gemeinhardt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317145909
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
This book studies the complex attitude of late ancient Christians towards classical education. In recent years, the different theoretical positions that can be found among the Church Fathers have received particular attention: their statements ranged from enthusiastic assimilation to outright rejection, the latter sometimes masking implicit adoption. Shifting attention away from such explicit statements, this volume focuses on a series of lesser-known texts in order to study the impact of specific literary and social contexts on late ancient educational views and practices. By moving attention from statements to strategies this volume wishes to enrich our understanding of the creative engagement with classical ideals of education. The multi-faceted approach adopted here illuminates the close connection between specific educational purposes on the one hand, and the possibilities and limitations offered by specific genres and contexts on the other. Instead of seeing attitudes towards education in late antique texts as applications of theoretical positions, it reads them as complex negotiations between authorial intent, the limitations of genre, and the context of performance.

Author: Ildar H. Garipzanov
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198815018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Graphic Signs Of Authority in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages presents a cultural history of graphic signs and examines how they were employed to communicate secular and divine authority in the late antique Mediterranean and early medieval Europe. Visual materials such as the sign of the cross, christograms, monograms, and other such devices, are examined against the backdrop of the cultural, religious, and socio-political transition from the late Graeco-Roman world to that of medieval Europe. This monograph is a synthetic study of graphic visual evidence from a wide range of material media that have rarely been studied collectively, including various mass-produced items and unique objects of art, architectural monuments and epigraphic inscriptions, as well as manuscripts and charters. This study promises to provide a timely reference tool for historians, art historians, archaeologists, epigraphists, manuscript scholars, and numismatists.