Gregory Nazianzen's doctrine of the Trinity has had a most unusual reception in modern times. Since the Council of Chalcedon in 451 Gregory has been honored with the title “the Theologian” for his definitive teaching on the Trinity in the late-fourth century. His influence was then strongly felt in the christological developments that continued through the eighth century, and his stature in Greek Christian tradition is comparable only to that of Augustine in the West, although his influence is felt there as well. Yet despite his acknowledged ecumenical significance, Gregory's theological achievement has often eluded modern patristic scholars and systematic theologians. Even the most recent wave of specialized work on Gregory and the current synoptic studies of patristic doctrine have tended to overlook major aspects of his work. One of the most acute points of confusion in current scholarship—and a matter of no little significance for Nicene theology—is Gregory's doctrine of divine causality and the monarchy of God the Father within the Trinity. The recent debate over this topic, I would suggest, reflects the extent to which Gregory's doctrine has yet to be assimilated in contemporary historical and systematic theology. In this article I will seek to clarify Gregory's doctrine of divine causality in light of its current reception and to give some indication of its wider significance.

Lactantius, in his shrill polemical pamphlet De mortibus persecutorum, made the following observation while attacking his principal adversary, the emperor Galerius: “There was no mild punishment with him, not islands, not mines, not prisons; but fire, the cross, and wild beasts were daily and ready at hand.” More than a sign of the times, it is also a measure of his fury that Galerius could make exile, hard labor, and imprisonment seem to be lenient sentences. While one must resist succumbing immediately to credulity, one also must admit that even such hyperbole may have a kernel of truth in it. Lactantius probably assumed—as did many others—that the myriad adjustments to the complex relations between the church and the empire, which were in the process of being engineered by Constantine and his associates, would eliminate the need to inflict such punishments on Christians for religious reasons.

One of the more intriguing developments in Protestant theology over the past several decades has been the increasing interest in recovering a doctrine of theosis (or deification) for the contemporary church.1 In nearly every branch of the Protestant tree, theologians are making a case for theosis as integral to their theological tradition. There are proposed projects for Lutheran,2 Wesleyan,3 Reformed,4 and distinctively Evangelical5 accounts of theosis, all of which attempt to ground theosis within the overarching model of salvation that their given backgrounds affirm. In light of this, it is not surprising that Jonathan Edwards is touted as a key resource. More surprising is how little is written on Edwards’s doctrine of theosis as such. Instead, the focal point has been on themes in Edwards’s thought that allow for ecumenical bridge-building.6

In their recovery and interpretation of the evidence for women's religious involvement in antiquity, feminist historians of religion employ terms like “image,” “reflection,” and “symbol” as constants in their vocabulary. This terminology indicates the importance feminist scholars attach to the ways in which women's activities are presented and the ways in which they are interpreted. Interpretation becomes the more difficult as one approaches the religions of the ancient Mediterranean world, not only because of the relative paucity and elusive nature of the evidence for women's participation in these religions, but also because the two great bodies of canon in the West—the literary artifacts of the Greco-Roman world and the canon of biblical literature—reflect a dual process of “canonization.” Certain cultural constructs and dominant metaphors have become embodied in the text themselves, while a tradition of “canonized conventions” has been modeled by these metaphors to “evaluate a priori what we see.” The interaction of conceptualization, representation, and interpretation of appearance, moreover, is such that there cannot be an “innocent eye.” Nelson Goodman observes: “The eye always comes ancient to its work. …Not only how but what it sees is regulated by need and perspective. …It does not so much mirror as take and make.” Moreover, the use of the term “image” itself reflects a process by which a particular representation is shaped and subsequently held up as the way in which something is conceptually “seen” or meant to be “seen,” and which is not necessarily or even possibly a “true” reflection.

The remarks which follow are aimed at revealing the magic power which Confucius saw, quite correctly, as the very essence of human virtue. And it is finally by way of the magical that we can also arrive at the best vantage point for seeing the holiness in human existence which Confucius saw as central. In the twentieth century, this central role of the holy in Confucius' teaching has been largely ignored because we have failed to grasp the existential point of that teaching.

Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples fell under the suspicious attention of the Sorbonne in 1514 when he was implicated in the defense of Johannes Reuchlin before that body. Under the assiduous promotion of its Syndic, Natalis Beda, suspicion was soon transformed into an overt attack on Lefèvre's orthodoxy. In 1520 a turning point was reached. Whereas, before, he had been attacked because of deviations arising chiefly out of his own individual approach to the Bible, in this new stage he was to be charged with Lutheranism. It is the purpose of this article to examine these later charges, the grounds alleged in justifying them, and how they came to be preferred. It will be necessary at the same time to examine, or rather reexamine, the words of Lefèvre which evoked them.

When we deal with religious phenomena, we are not always fortunate enough to find explanatory texts. That is particularly true of the mystery religions and thus should be expected when we look at the materials concerning Isis, Sarapis and Demeter at Antioch of Syria. But in this instance we are faced with special problems. First, the texts are so meager that we are forced to turn to the artifacts in order to grasp at all the influence of these religions within the third largest city of the ancient world. Second, and more important, the effort to collate all the artifacts is at present impossible. The reports of the excavations in Antioch from 1932–39 were only published in a shortened preliminary form. For that we must be thankful, but it does mean that exact locations and dates of certain finds are quite difficult to obtain. Furthermore, the collections of materials primarily are divided between the McCormick Art Museum at Princeton University, the Louvre in Paris, and the local museum in Antakya, Turkey. Separate pieces, however, are scattered over the world. The materials at Princeton and Paris are accessible, but those at Antakya are limited in most instances to the ones on display. The major difficulty in retrieving the excavated materials comes not from bureaucratic obstinacy in Turkey. I received significant assistance from both Selhattin Asim, cultural director of the Hatay region, and Nizamettin Bati, director of the museum, during two visits to Antakya in 1976 and 1977. The major problem lies in the fact that the serial numbers recorded in Antakya bear no resemblance to those published in the preliminary reports. Literally hundreds of artifacts are housed in the Antakya museum which have not been studied in any thorough way. If this serial number conundrum could be broken, much more light could be shed on conditions in Antioch. For now, only preliminary studies of available pieces can be offered. Within such studies, arguments from silence are quite questionable. The task in this article is to discuss the texts and artifacts known to me in order to correct some inaccuracies of interpretation and to add color to the picture of Hellenistic religion in Antioch of Syria.

So Aṇṭāḷ begins her poem Tiruppāvai, portraying in thirty verses one episode in the life of Krishna and his cowherd lovers, but one highly significant for the Śrī Vaiṣṇavas of South India. In this poem, they believe, is embedded the essence of the Upanishads, and through it the Lord Vishnu will bathe his devotees with grace and unending delight. The purpose of this study is to consider what Śrī Vaiṣṇavas believe the essential teaching of the Upanishads to be and how it is found in the text. To do so we will focus on the theme of bathing as it is portrayed in the poem itself, in the traditional account of the poet's life, and in the earliest complete commentary on the poem.

The Milḥemet Ḥobah (Obligatory War), a collection of polemical treatises published at Constantinople in 1710, contains a tract entitled “Disputation of Rabbi David Kimhi” (Wikuaḥ ha-Ra-DaḲ). The ascription of this work to Kimhi has been a subject of some discussion. J. D. Eisenstein, who published the text in his anthology, Oẓar Wikuḥim, and Salo Baron have apparently accepted it as genuine without reservations. Suler in his article in the Encyclopedia Judaica considered it to be basically the work of Kimhi with interpolations. On the other hand, A. Geiger and L. Finkelstein have completely rejected the possibility of Kimhi's authorship. None of these authorities has brought support for his conclusions.

During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, as the Principate slowly developed, certain qualities and attributes of the emperor tend to become personified or regarded as permanent elements in the character of the ruler: it may be Clementia, or Indulgentia, or Munificentia, it may be the Greek Philanthropia or Euergesia. In this way they tend to acquire a special meaning, or rather a complex of special meanings. Two such words are Providentia and Aeternitas, and the object of the present study is to review some of the evidence (it would be difficult to collect all) and elucidate the significance which the word Providentia or the word Aeternitas might convey to a citizen of the Empire in the second century.

In 1907, His Holiness, Pope Leo XIII appointed a Commission to revise and re-edit the text of St. Jerome's Latin version of the Bible, known as the Vulgate and accepted by the Roman Church as its standard text of Holy Scripture. The undertaking was assigned, most appropriately, to the Benedictine Order, which from the days of Cassiodorus to those of Mabillon and from Mabillon to the present time has a record of scholarly achievement that for depth and continuity no other organization, sacred or secular, can match. Far-reaching plans were formulated, and a veritable laboratory of textual research was established at the Benedictine monastery of St. Anselm on the Aventine. The methods employed for listing and assorting the manuscripts and for securing collations and photographs are described in two reports, entitled “The Revision of the Vulgate,” published at St. Anselm's in 1909 and 1911. The present writer had the pleasure of visiting the monastery in 1912, under the guidance of the learned Abbot, now Cardinal, Gasquet. An imposing amount of material had already at that time been collected, but the stupendous character of the undertaking hardly promised definite results, certainly not a final and authoritative text, within the limits of the present generation. And yet Dom Quentin, to whom the task of editing the text was assigned in 1907, has succeeded after nearly fifteen years of unremitting toil, in presenting a new survey of the history of the text of the Vulgate and a precise method for determining its original form.

A wife's right to divorce her husband does not exist in Jewish law, or so claims virtually every textbook on Jewish law. Over the years scholars have, of course, noted exceptions to this absolute assertion. In Jewish marriage contracts from Elephantine, for example, women have a right to divorce equal to that of men. Another example is the Gospel of Mark's logion on divorce, which apparently implies that either a woman or a man can initiate divorce procedures. Josephus, moreover, relates that Salome, King Herod's sister, sent her husband a bill of divorce. Mainstream scholarship has too often brushed aside these pieces of evidence as nonrepresentative actions or misunderstandings on the part of a transmitter. The Elephantine community was thus remote and had lost contact with the center of Jewish life many years earlier, living a pagan existence and following the legal practices of its neighbors. Mark was a non-Jewish author describing the actions of Palestinian Jews in light of more familiar Roman legal practices. Salome's actions contradicted Jewish law and succeeded only because of her Roman citizenship.

In his groundbreaking study of the literary ramifications of the experience of western imperialism for both conquerors and the conquered, Edward Said remarks:

Appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies in interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and what the past was, but uncertainty about whether the past really is past.

In this article I aim to address two questions that might initially appear independent, but are really connected. One is about twentieth century thought, the other is about Paul. Seneca will act as a mediator between the two.

The rise of asceticism and its impact on Roman society in the fourth century have increasingly attracted the notice of scholars. Recent studies, such as Peter Brown's The Body and Society, have called attention to the transformation of civic and social values brought by the spread of ascetic piety. What is less frequently noted, however, is the degree of Christian resistance to asceticism which emerged in the late fourth century. The ascetic enthusiasm of men such as Jerome and Ambrose was not representative of that “silent majority” of Christians who married, raised children, and remained committed to civic and social life. It may even have been the case, as this study will suggest, that the majority was not as silent as it would appear. One need only recall the controversies surrounding Helvidius, Jovinian, and Vigilantius to be reminded that asceticism encountered vocal opposition in the West during the late fourth century.

“In art, as well as in poetry, the representation of these wild states of enthusiasm was apparently due to the imagination alone, for in prose literature we have very little evidence, in historic times, of women actually holding revels in the open air. Such a practice would have been alien to the spirit of seclusion which pervaded the life of womankind in Greece. … The festivals of the Thyiads were mainly confined to Parnassus.” Thus Sandys in the introduction to his justly admired edition of the Bacchae. Diodorus, on the other hand, tells us (4.3) that “In many Greek states congregations (βακχεῖα) of women assemble every second year, and the unmarried girls are allowed to carry the thyrsus and share the transports of the elders (συνενθουσιάζειν).” And since Sandys' day inscriptional evidence from various parts of the Greek world has confirmed Diodorus' statement. We know now that such biennial festivals (τριετηρíδες) existed at Thebes, Opus, Melos, Pergamum, Priene, Rhodes; and they are attested for Alea in Arcadia by Pausanias, for Mitylene by Aelian, for Crete by Firmicus Maternus. Their character may have varied a good deal from place to place, but we can hardly doubt that they normally included women's ὄργια of the ecstatic or quasi-ecstatic type described by Diodorus, and that these often, if not always, involved nocturnal ὀρειβασíα or mountain dancing.

Modern criticism of the book of Acts began with a hyper-Cartesian decision to doubt everything simultaneously. The author was not to be trusted as a reliable reporter on any issue of significance—the character and fate of the believers in Jerusalem, the status and role of Peter, the teaching of Paul, and so on. Recently, a former student of Krister Stendahl, A. T. Kraabel, has proposed that we should extend our skepticism to yet another area of Acts, to wit, the presence of Gentiles in all of the synagogues visited by Paul on his missionary journeys.

The early Roman Empire provides little evidence for the personal religious feelings of its inhabitants; only a few texts reflect what we would call individual testimony of personal religious experience. The works of second-century authors which in fact display such religious feelings often offend modern sensibilities. Commentators have described Aelius Aristides' Orationes sacrae, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as neurotic or pathological. In a recent book, for example, Charles A. Behr introduced a discussion of Aristides with the deprecatory comment: “peculiar and unpleasant though his personality may seem to us today.” The same offense, moreover, is ascribed to all three men, namely, an inordinate fixation on bodily pain and suffering. Interpreting these authors' textual emphasis on pain as merely a reflection of the pathology of aberrant individuals of the early empire is an unfair simplification of the texts. Such a reading prevents the recognition that their emphasis on pain and suffering reflects a widespread cultural concern of the period that used representations of bodily pain and suffering to construct a new subjectivity of the human person.