While the political aspect of the traditionalist quest for prescriptive Christianity has been central to the story from the start, this chapter examines, first, the complicated way that religious and political norms are intertwined in American history and dependent on whether the Christian community is in a position of power or not. Second, the chapter examines two aspects of Christian identity that are especially important in understanding contemporary American politics: (1) a global Christian identity that understands Christians as those persecuted by godless secular society, and (2) an antignostic identity that understands Christians as those who wage war against “gnosticism,” a term applicable to whatever conservative Christians are currently combatting in the political sphere.

The last fifty years have seen a considerable boom in the study of ancient book culture, reading and scribal habits. This chapter situates the present study in light of these scholarly developments and raises some critical questions concerning certain viewpoints that have been put forward regarding how to approach the Nag Hammadi codices given what is known about religious materiality in antiquity. In light of the latest scholarship on ancient literacy surveyed in this chapter, it is argued that the texts were most likely produced by and for the direct use of a small educated societal minority. The chapter also addresses some of the old and new scholarly paradigms and ideological setups in the scholarship on the texts: for example, the potential and limits of the trend called ‘New Philology’, as well as the problems attached to concepts like ‘heresy’ and ‘Gnosticism’ and their persistent connection with the Nag Hammadi collection.

This chapter analyses the find story that has been attached to the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, a topic of much scholarly debate of late. Some of the early scholars engaged with the elucidation of the texts have been accused of Orientalism, which has ultimately begun to affect the ways the texts’ ancient background and use have been interpreted. In this chapter the find story is revisited, and it is argued that accusations of earlier scholars’ Orientalism are exaggerated and, furthermore, a much less problematic aspect of the scholarship than contemporary romanticisation of the concept of ‘Gnosticism’.

This chapter shows the persistence of the imperial imagination in Baeck’s thought during the First World War, and his later critique of theological colonization during the Weimar Republic. When the Great War broke out, Baeck volunteered to serve as an army chaplain (Feldrabbiner), a position he held for almost the entire war period. Baeck’s sermons and writing from the front exemplify his view of the East as a space for colonization as well as his reading of the German military predicament as paralleling Jewish history. Baeck’s stature as a public intellectual rose during the Weimar Republic, but he also recognized a growing danger in the resurgence of the figure of second-century heretic Marcion, among others in the work of Adolf von Harnack, who called for a de-canonization of the Hebrew Bible. Baeck identified this tendency as central in the German theological and political imagination of the time. Against neo-Marcionite attempts to detach Christianity and Germany from Judaism and the Jews, Baeck offered a presentation of Judaism that stressed its place as the ethical foundation of Christianity. Only Judaism, Baeck insisted, could save Christianity from itself.

This essay explores the philosophical texts and ideas that exerted an influence on Sebald. His personal library was highly selective, containing the works of unconventional thinkers such as Elias Canetti, but omitting most of the major figures of German philosophy along with post-structuralist writers. Ludwig Wittgenstein, however, inspired Sebald’s early film scripts and his life provided biographical details in Austerlitz and Die Ausgewanderten. Sebald expressed an affinity for, and his literary style evidenced, the pre-rational assemblage of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ‘system of bricolage’, in the way that his works can resemble a scrapbook of clippings, personal recollections, visual images, etc. Although he detested Heidegger, phenomenology pervaded Sebald’s work. For example, the Liverpool Street Station episode in Austerlitz evidenced Bachelard’s ‘theatre of the past’, and he made use of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘pre-human gaze’ in his essay on Jan Peter Tripp. Sebald’s liking for the pre-rational extended to an interest in Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, superstition and other overlooked schools of thought and philosophy. Zoroastrianism, for example, influenced his early poetry. This essay concludes that Sebald’s deep interest in metaphysics is key for a full understanding of his critical and literary writings.

Discussion of the only Hermetic practitioners still known to us by name: Zosimos of Panopolis, Theosebeia, and Iamblichus of Chalcis. They shared a strong emphasis on the embodiment of spirit, in the contexts of alchemy and theurgy.

In this chapter, I explore the connections between Tertullian’s de Baptismo, the Acts of Paul, and the supposedly Cainite Gnostic text, the Gospel of Judas. Are Tertullian’s comments concerning both Thecla and Cainites accurate? First, in de Baptismo, Tertullian attacks a Cainite woman for using the example of Thecla as a model to justify women teaching in churches. Further, he criticizes the Cainite woman for denying the practice of baptism within some of the churches of North Africa. Second, the Gospel of Judas—a ‘so called’ Cainite text—seems to affirm the rite of baptism. Do Tertullian’s comments concerning Cainites betray an unfamiliarity with it? Third, in the Acts of Paul, the rite of baptism is affirmed generally, while specifically Thecla is commissioned to teach and even baptizes herself. Why Tertullian would cite the case of Thecla is not clear. How does one synthesize this seemingly contradictory evidence? This chapter focuses upon sorting out these inconsistencies. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates how some of the churches of North Africa were reading the Acts of Paul as a form of hagiography that was inspiring women in their faith while also impacting their understanding of Christian rituals and practices (i.e., baptism and missions).

Christian Platonism is a catch-all phrase. It recognizes that Plato and his successors, including the whole of ancient pagan thought, formed part of the complex background to the emergence of a new religion. Both pagans and Christians were mutually transformed by their prolonged encounter on many issues, but especially on the questions of creation, desire, and return. The chapter begins with Judaeo-Christian influence upon major features of the Platonic tradition and then articulates a hidden conversation that lies behind Christian thinking about the Trinity, the structure of reality, and the creation of the human being.

This chapter reads Cormac McCarthy’s fiction as a twentieth-century American variant of what may be called metaphysical inquiries by literary means. I argue that what is missing in the current scholarship is a proper reexamination of the resonance between McCarthy’s fiction and the deeply philosophical traditions into which it taps. I critically approach such a reexamination, first, by showing how exemplary readings have connected nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy to McCarthy’s oeuvre, and, second, by proposing a recontextualization of the author’s work to the past 200 years of Western philosophical thought. I do so by presenting a new approach to the epilogue of Cities of the Plain (1998), informed by McCarthy’s recently published non-fictional essays on the origin of language, or what the writer calls “The Kekulé Problem” (2017). This approach ultimately inquires into McCarthy’s concept of nature and his notion of being human.

This chapter offers a critical overview of all of McCarthy’s works with a special emphasis on the relationship of those works to events in his life. Born in 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island, McCarthy moved to Knoxville, Tennessee as a child when his father took a job as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority. He attended the University of Tennessee for a time (majoring in Liberal Arts), where he discovered his ambition to write. His early novels explore the environment around Knoxville and are portentous inquiries into the traumas related to historical change and the nature of evil. In later years, he moved west, and from 1992 onward his work is generally set in the American West. He continues with many of the same thematic concerns as he explores major philosophical and religious themes more deeply. Through his affiliation with the Santa Fe Institute, he developed an interest in scientific inquiry, and this has become a major preoccupation in his work, especially in later years.

Cormac McCarthy scholars have long noted the Gnostic themes evident in the author’s work. Like many of his literary influences, McCarthy’s novels focus on the problems of suffering, violence, and evil, but McCarthy displays a unique tendency to examine these matters in the context of the Gnostic worldview, examining the nature of the divine soul in the material world, humanity’s tenuous place within the indifferent cosmos, and questions regarding religious authority, all fundamental both to the Gnostic religious experience and to understanding McCarthy’s literary oeuvre. While critics have most often focused on Outer Dark, Suttree, and Blood Meridian in their analysis of McCarthy’s Gnostic themes and imagery, McCarthy’s general focus on problematic human authorities, and the problematic nature of authority in all human affairs, especially law and religion, appears in practically all of McCarthy’s novels, beginning with The Orchard Keeper. McCarthy’s portrayals of authority demonstrate his knowledge of original Gnostic texts and the influential scholarly works that first explained these texts to the wider world after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library.