Creativity as a Practical Manifestation of Freedom (Historical and Theoretical Context)

The study concerns the consideration of creativity in the light of the main philosophical studies of this concept. The activity of the creative process practically proves the presence of freedom in human existence. Views on creativity reflect the attitude of a particular thinker to the question of the opposition of freedom and predestination in general. The polemical moments concerning creativity are considered and the ways of their decision are offered. In particular, two opposing views on the work of Plato and Aristotle are studied, where human talent presupposes divine inspiration (Plato) or, accordingly, only personal efforts. Nikolai Berdyaev tries to resolve the controversy between Aristotle and Plato by combining their views. He endows man with divine properties and thus indicates the source of creativity in the middle of man himself. Philip Hefner gives the individual the status of “co-creator” and puts forward the theory that man is called to improve and complete God’s creation. The study also focuses on the content and purpose of creativity. Creativity for the sake of creativity itself, which Albert Camus wrote about, was criticized by M. Berdyaev, and he offered his vision of this issue: creativity for the sake of a universal goal. Camus’ views were generally shared by A. Bergson. In connection with this last controversy, the actualization of Hryhoriy Skovoroda’s doctrine of “related work” is proposed and the expediency of this actualization is argued. Our domestic philosopher originally balances the pessimism of Camus’s work and Berdyaev’s enterprising approach. Skovoroda supports his conclusions with accurate practical examples. Reasoned conclusions about the need to update the teachings of G. Skovoroda on creativity and «related work» are given.

Inspiration and Revelation of the Qur’an and Its Relation to the Bible

The Qur’an often compares its own inspiration and revelation with previous scriptures to its audience. However, the Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity had manifold understandings of the inspiration and revelation of scripture. The rabbinic tradition posits various degrees of inspiration behind canonical scriptures: the Torah was dictated by God to Moses, while other prophets had lesser degrees of divine inspiration. Many Christian churches typically held a dual authorship concept, where the human author wrote under the inspiration of a divine author. Many Muslim traditions held various understandings of the agency, or lack thereof, of Muḥammad in the utterances of the Qur’an. Nonetheless, the Qur’an claims that its own inspiration is no different from some biblical books. Since the rabbinic and Christian views differ, it is imperative to understand the Qur’anic concept of itself on inspiration and revelation (waḥy and tanzīl), especially since it compares itself with other scriptures. Additionally, it is argued that the Qur’an’s self-referentiality as a “kitāb” that descends does not necessarily denote a “book” (neither heavenly nor earthly), but an order or commandment, which is more loyal to the root definition.

Composing and Improvising

Creativity is often associated with great composers or performers of the past who have been ascribed some kind of "creative mystique." In order to attain better explanatory power, the psychological perspective usually begins by defining musical creativity not by divine inspiration but rather as a generative process, that is, the act of generating new musical material or new renderings of pre-existing music. Musical generativity is best understood as a component of basic musicianship, rather than part of a specialized skill set. Despite creativity being of great interest to scholars for a very long time, only recently has scientific study of creativity borne some useful insights for musicians. This chapter shows how broader principles of human creativity, revealed by research across many domains, are also specifically applicable to music. It also explains the specific processes of composing and improvising music, showing that both require musicians to investment time and energy to build these creative skills to an expert level. Finally, this chapter encourages nurturing the naturally creative behaviors of childhood and facilitating in young musicians a exploratory mindset as a basic part of their musicianship.

"Strangers Still More Strange": The Meaning of Rivers Bedeviled

Steamboats transformed rivers in 19th-century United States, providing what many people considered a kind of mastery over nature. In literature from the period, while most writers marveled at or exulted in that perceived mastery, some questioned the origins of the reputed conquest. Did it result from human ingenuity? divine inspiration? a deal with the devil? Amid all the fog, smoke, and various other vapors associated with the steamboat, vivid stories, compelling dramas, and comic searches for meaning took shape, and no literary work captured the tension informing, uncertainty surrounding, and ramifications emerging from this instance of technological innovation as powerfully as The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). Herman Melville’s last novel, The Confidence-Man explores the author’s notion that “Books of fiction” can perhaps give readers more truth, “more reality, than real life can show.” Literature, for Melville, was an opportunity to reconsider the nature of things and our means of understanding that nature. In The Confidence-Man, he presented readers with a different view of the Mississippi River and the curious vessels working its waters. The novel imagined The Devil himself to be on board the steamboat, imperiling the soul of America.

TRANSLATING THE POET: ALEXANDER POPE'S ENGAGEMENT WITH THE HOMERIC BIOGRAPHICAL TRADITION IN HIS TRANSLATIONS OF THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY

This article explores Alexander Pope's experience as a translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey, particularly his engagement with Homer as a poet and his biographical tradition. The study focuses on how Homer features in Pope's correspondence as he worked on the translations, how the Greek poet is described in the prefatory essay by Thomas Parnell and Pope's own notes to the text, and finally how his physical presence materializes in the illustrations within Pope's translations. The article suggests that, by engaging with the biography of Homer, Pope explores issues such as poetic authority and divine inspiration, promotes his own translations against European competitors, and ultimately establishes himself as a translator and as a poet. Throughout the process, Homer appears as a presence that forces Pope constantly to challenge himself, until he feels he can stand a comparison with the greatest poet ever.

Is Eliphaz a false prophet? The vision in Job 4.12-21

The night vision recounted by Job’s friend Eliphaz in Job 4.12-21 has received an extraordinary amount of scholarly attention. Among other difficulties, the core of the vision’s message (4.17) – typically interpreted as stating that humans cannot be just in God’s sight – appears to contradict Eliphaz’s statements elsewhere (e.g., 4.6-7). The relationship between 4.17 and the metaphors for death with which the vision ends has also occasioned considerable debate. In this paper, it is argued that Eliphaz’s words can be viewed as a response to Job’s speech in Chapter 3, particularly his description of the sleep of death in 3.11-19. The poet portrays Eliphaz as having perceived Job’s words as a challenge to God’s justice and has him—after implying divine inspiration for his message with the use of an extraordinary set of oracular tropes in vv. 12-16—offer in vv. 17-21 a rebuke and warning evocative of those used by biblical prophets to call sinners to repentance. As the prologue indicates, however, Job’s suffering is not due to sin but instead to his superlative goodness; Eliphaz’s words are therefore profoundly misguided and can have no salutary effect. In essence, I propose that the poet is presenting Eliphaz as an example of what Deut. 18.20 calls a ‘presumptuous prophet’, that is, one who wrongly claims that he is speaking on behalf of God. His remarks serve only to distance Job further from both the ‘friends’ and God, as Job’s sharper tone in Chapters 6-7 makes clear. This reading can help explain some of the more puzzling elements in these verses and also maintains the traditional attribution of the vision to Eliphaz (instead of to Job himself, as a growing number of scholars have proposed).

Authors(With an Excursus on Symeon Metaphrastes)

The chapter introduces two sets of questions pertaining to (a) the social profile of Byzantine authors, and (b) the conception and value of authorship in Byzantium. It thus first surveys the prevalent patterns in the biographies of the c. 1600 eponymous known Greek authors from Byzantium. It then discusses the cultural as well as spiritual capital of authorship in Byzantium: notions such as those of divine inspiration and author-saints, and “practices” such pseudonymity (the false ascription of texts) and anonymity (the loss or absence of authorial signatures). The chapter concludes with an exploration of the reception of Symeon Metaphrastes (perhaps the most important author of the middle Byzantine period) as an author by later generations of readers.

Sosipatra as a Teacher

Upon losing her husband, Sosipatra moved to Pergamum and opened her own philosophy school. This chapter explores what her school might have been like from its structure, student body, and curriculum. For a late ancient philosophy school in the Platonist tradition, students lived near or with their teacher, following prescribed study of Aristotle and Plato, and discussing these works. Their main goal was to live with and learn from one teacher. Such teachers were often considered holy as well as gifted teachers who inspired devotion as much as desire for intellectual stimulation in their followers. Sosipatra certainly fits this description as her educational pedigree and virtuosity signal some sort of divine inspiration as the source of her knowledge and wisdom. Eunapius’s estimation of Sosipatra’s superiority as a teacher indicates that he wished his readers to think of her as a leading light in the Iamblichean lineage when it came to teaching on standard Platonic topics.

Daemonic

The term daemonic—often substantivized in German as the daemonic (das Dämonische) since its use by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the early 19th century—is a literary topos associated with divine inspiration and the idea of genius, with the nexus between character and fate and, in more orthodox Christian manifestations, with moral transgression and evil. Although strictly modern literary uses of the term have become prominent only since Goethe, its origins lie in the classical idea of the δαíμων, transliterated into English as daimon or daemon, as an intermediary between the earthly and the divine. This notion can be found in pre-Socratic thinkers such as Empedocles and Heraclitus, in Plato, and in various Stoic and Neo-Platonic sources. One influential aspect of Plato’s presentation of the daemonic is found in Socrates’s daimonion: a divine sign, voice, or hint that dissuades Socrates from taking certain actions at crucial moments in his life. Another is the notion that every soul contains an element of divinity—known as its daimon—that leads it toward heavenly truth. Already in Roman thought, this idea of an external voice or sign begins to be associated with an internal genius that belongs to the individual. In Christian thinking of the European romantic period, the daemonic in general and the Socratic daimonion in particular are associated with notions such as non-rational divine inspiration (for example, in Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder) and with divine providence (for example, in Joseph Priestley). At the same time, the daemonic is also often interpreted as evil or Satanic—that is: as demonic—by European authors writing in a Christian context. In Russia in particular, during a period spanning from the mid-19th century until the early 20th century, there is a rich vein of novels, including works by Gogol and Dostoevsky, that deal with this more strictly Christian sense of the demonic, especially the notion that the author/narrator may be a heretical figure who supplants the primacy of God’s creation. But the main focus of this article is the more richly ambivalent notion of the daemonic, which explicitly combines both the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian heritages of the term. This topos is most prominently mobilized by two literary exponents during the 19th century: Goethe, especially in his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Notebooks and in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Both Goethe’s and Coleridge’s treatments of the term, alongside its classical and Judeo-Christian heritages, exerted an influence upon literary theory of the 20th century, leading important theorists such as Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Hans Blumenberg, Angus Fletcher, and Harold Bloom to associate the daemonic with questions concerning the novel, myth, irony, allegory, and literary influence.

THE IMAGE OF WISDOM ON THE HOLY GATES

The tradition of depicting the personification of divine inspiration, which has been well studied in relation to facial images in manuscripts and wall paintings, has not hitherto been a focus of attention among researchers on the Royal Gates. It was presumed to have been sparsely distributed among the visual programs of iconostasis doors and considered to have been preserved only in two examples from the 15th century, the left gate leaf (in The Central Andrey Rublev Museum of Ancient Russian Culture and Art) and a fragment of the right gate from the collection of V.A. Prokhorov (in The State Russian Museum). However, it can be traced in other works of the 16th–17th centuries, particularly on Royal doors and on fragments of them. While miniatures depicting personifications of Wisdom are known in Byzantine art, the custom of decorating the gates of the altar gates with such figures is not seen in Byzantine monuments. On the other hand, it became established in Russia. The surviving works manifest great variety in the types of Wisdom on gates from the 15th to the 17th centuries, of which there are analogues in miniatures and frescoes. In addition to a type of “active conversation” is also known a variant of the image of Sophia behind the Evangelist, with Sophia sometimes whispering a text in the Evangelist’s ear. Differences appear in the inscriptions above the figures (“Wisdom”, “Holy Spirit”), in clothing, and in the shape of haloes. This article attempts to systematize the iconography of the Royal gates with respect to the personification of divine inspiration.