In the Beginning

2021 ◽  
pp. 178-202
Author(s):  
David Stephen Calonne
Keyword(s):  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Adam And Eve ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Feminist Interpretation ◽  
The Common ◽  
Medieval Text ◽  
Book Of Genesis ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Common Understanding

Crumb spent four years illustrating the book of Genesis and this chapter explores the ways Crumb attempts to faithfully reproduce the text of Genesis while at the same time including strongly subversive interpretations. As he declared: “I did not adapt it reverently. I respected the text insofar as I did not want to ridicule it. But I see the text as actually a quite primitive document.” The chapter shows how Crumb struggled with how to portray God, as well as Adam and Eve, trying out a variety of possibilities. Crumb rejects patriarchy and he depicts female characters in the Bible such as Rachel as strong, independent and capable women. The common understanding of Crumb as a misogynist is contradicted by the ways he emphasizes a feminist interpretation of the Bible. The chapter also shows how Crumb was influenced by Assyrian art in his depiction of scenes of warfare. Here again, Crumb implicitly critiques the celebration of war in the Bible and the celebration of aggressive masculinity. The chapter also explores the theme of the spiritual double which occurs in the scene depicting Jacob wrestling with the angel and the “dark night of the soul” as well as in Crumb’s illustrations to the medieval text Piers Plowman.

scholarly journals Creation accounts in Gen. 1 & 2: a feminist interpretation

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-33
Author(s):  
Ubong Ekpenyong Eyo
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Text ◽  
Male Gender ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Feminist Interpretation ◽  
Culturally Based ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Book Of Genesis ◽  
Holy Writ ◽  
King James Version

It is the view of most people who claim the authoritative nature of the Bible that, women assigned secondary status in relation to men is ordained and supported in the Bible. Many have quoted different texts of the holy writ to support their culturally-biased position on issue of gender equality. Most often views in respect to gender issues are culturally-based and interpreted rather than divinely-based and interpreted. There is therefore the need to look back at Jesus’ words, “But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.” (Matt 19:4; Mark 10:6 King James Version). The two accounts in the Book of Genesis by the Priestly and Yahwistic strands give a complimentary account of the creation of humankind (both male and female) in the image and likeness of God and their creation from a single stock אדם who was not a male gender. At a cursory reading of the creation accounts, one will tend to see האדם as the male gender, but looking at the Hebrew text more closely it will be noticed that the Hebrew words אישה and אישwere only introduced after the two genders have been separated. Note carefully that it was not איש that was asked to tend the garden, who named the animals, was given instruction of what to eat or what not to eat, who fell into a deep sleep or whose ribs was used in the creation of אישה but it was האדם . It was after the creation or ‘separation’ of אישה (woman – the female האדם) that the other part was called איש (man – the male האדם) (see vv 23 & 24 King James Version). It will therefore not be right to speak of the creation of אישה out of איש, because as at the time of the creation of the former, the later was not in existence as איש To view these creation accounts with the sense of gender superiority (either male over female or vice versa) is to read the texts using lenses which have been obscured and tainted by patriarchal, matriarchal or cultural biases.

scholarly journals Jung, Aquinas, and the Aurora Consurgens:  Establishing a Relationship with God

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Barrie Davis
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Similar Process ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Medieval Text ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The Trinity

<p>The reunion of a man with God is the subject of a medieval text which aggregates excerpts from the Bible and Arabic alchemical texts that had recently become available in Europe. The Aurora Consurgens personifies God as Wisdom, a spiritual being who not only formed the world in the beginning but is also a guide to men to return to God subsequent to their separation at the Fall. The union of feminine Wisdom and a man is aligned with pairs of opposites such as spirit and soul, and is also conflated with the union of a man and a woman. While the text is perhaps falsely ascribed to St. Thomas, it is consistent with his ideas so that it may be explicated using his writings on the Trinity, psychology, angels, and Greek philosophy. From there, correspondence is established with C. G. Jung‘s concept of archetypes, and the text is subsequently interpreted from the perspective of analytical psychology. It is identified how interaction of archetypes associated with the union of a man and a woman provide an explanation for the process of redemption given in the Aurora. A similar process of redemption is identified in other writings from the beginning of the Christian era up to the modern teachings of the Catholic Church.</p>

scholarly journals Jung, Aquinas, and the Aurora Consurgens:  Establishing a Relationship with God

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Barrie Davis
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Similar Process ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Relationship With God ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Medieval Text ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
The Trinity

<p>The reunion of a man with God is the subject of a medieval text which aggregates excerpts from the Bible and Arabic alchemical texts that had recently become available in Europe. The Aurora Consurgens personifies God as Wisdom, a spiritual being who not only formed the world in the beginning but is also a guide to men to return to God subsequent to their separation at the Fall. The union of feminine Wisdom and a man is aligned with pairs of opposites such as spirit and soul, and is also conflated with the union of a man and a woman. While the text is perhaps falsely ascribed to St. Thomas, it is consistent with his ideas so that it may be explicated using his writings on the Trinity, psychology, angels, and Greek philosophy. From there, correspondence is established with C. G. Jung‘s concept of archetypes, and the text is subsequently interpreted from the perspective of analytical psychology. It is identified how interaction of archetypes associated with the union of a man and a woman provide an explanation for the process of redemption given in the Aurora. A similar process of redemption is identified in other writings from the beginning of the Christian era up to the modern teachings of the Catholic Church.</p>

Adam and Eve

2019 ◽  
pp. 524-534
Author(s):  
Peter C. Bouteneff
Keyword(s):  
Early Christian ◽  
Adam And Eve ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Book Of Genesis

Adam and Eve, who barely appear in the Bible after they are introduced in the book of Genesis, serve a short but important list of functions within early Christian writing. They represent Christ and Mary, respectively, among other typological readings of the Paradise narrative. They also stand for all of humanity, partly by virtue of their location at the top of the human genealogy, and partly because their acts in the garden are commonly universalized to represent the sins of each and all. The understanding of their sin as resulting in an original guilt passed on through the generations is by no means a common one in early Christian writing. The question of their historical existence is not foreign to some of the ancient authors—nor does it really preoccupy any of them—but it does not receive a straightforward or consistent answer.

scholarly journals XXIII. On the degree of salubrity of the common air at sea, compared with that of the sea-shore, and that of places far removed from the sea

1780 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 354-377 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Earth ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Bodies Of Water

Sir, As you had recommended to me the examination of the air at sea by the nitrous test, I followed your advice in my return to the Continent in the beginning of November last: and I embraced that opportunity with the more eagerness, as I knew that you had given credit to the account of several consumptive people having recovered their health by going on sea voyages, after the common means for curing that distemper had failed. I was in hopes likewise to find in this inquiry, a confirmation of what you conjectured in you Anniversary Discourse in the year 1773, viz . that great bodies of water, such as seas and lakes, are conducive to the health of animals, by purifying and cleansing the air contaminated by their breathing in it: so that the salutary gales, by which this infected air is conveyed to the waters, and by them returned again to the land, though they do rise now and then to storms and hurricanes, must nevertheless induce us to trace and to reverse in them the ways of a beneficent Being, who, not fortuitously, but with design, not in wrath, but in mercy, thus shakes the waters and the air together, to bury in the deep those pestilential effluvia which the vegetables upon the face of the earth are insufficient to consume.

scholarly journals An Early European Critic of Hobbes’s De Corpore

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Clucas
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Common Understanding ◽  
Previous Scholarship ◽  
Philosophical Underpinning ◽  
Scholastic Tradition

The Animadversiones in Elementorum Philosophiae by a little known Flemish scholar G. Moranus, published in Brussels in 1655 was an early European response to Hobbes’s De Corpore. Although it is has been referred to by various Hobbes scholars, such as Noel Malcolm, Doug Jesseph, and Alexander Bird it has been little studied. Previous scholarship has tended to focus on the mathematical criticisms of André Tacquet which Moranus included in the form of a letter in his volume. Moranus’s philosophical objections to Hobbes’s natural philosophy offer a fascinating picture of the critical reception of Hobbes’s work by a religious writer trained in the late Scholastic tradition. Moranus’s opening criticism clearly shows that he is unhappy with Hobbes’s exclusion of the divine and the immaterial from natural philosophy. He asks what authority Hobbes has for breaking with the common understanding of philosophy, as defined by Cicero ‘the knowledge of things human and divine’. He also offers natural philosophical and theological criticisms of Hobbes for overlooking the generation of things involved in the Creation. He also attacks the natural philosophical underpinning of Hobbes’s civil philosophy. In this paper I look at a number of philosophical topics which Moranus criticised in Hobbes’s work, including his mechanical psychology, his theory of imaginary space, his use of the concept of accidents, his blurring of the distinction between the human being and the animal, and his theories of motion. Moranus’s criticisms, which are a mixture of philosophical and theological objections, gives us some clear indications of what made Hobbes’ natural philosophy controversial amongst his contemporaries, and sheds new light on the early continental reception of Hobbes’s work.

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