Emerging Christianity: what do we know and how?

This article, the second in a series, briefly describes the main problems connected with the reconstruction of emerging Christianity. First of all, it is the scarcity of historical sources. They speak almost exclusively about religious beliefs and leave aside all other aspects of life. Then, it is the clearly expressed interest of both ancient authors and modern researchers to present a “rightful” and ideal picture. As a result, emerges an idealized image of such a Christian community that a modern scholar would like to belong to. A possible methodological solution to this problem can be found in the model of religious studies suggested by the modern German scholar Gerd Theissen. Concerning the practical method, one can suggest an analysis of the polemics as reflected in the early Christian texts, mainly epistles.

Review on: Michael Psellos - christliche Philosophie in Byzanz: Mittelalterliche Philosophie im Verhältnis zu Antike und Spätantike. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2017. (Quellen und Studien zur Philosophie; Bd. 132). 216 S. ISBN: 978-3-11-052733-9

Выход монографии, полностью посвящённой богословским и философским взглядам Михаила Пселла, в любом случае событие экстраординарное, хотя бы потому, что последняя работа такого рода, монография Г. Карахалиоса «Антропология Михаила Пселла», опубликована в 1990 г.2 Но книга Дениса Вальтера ценна не только тем, что ещё раз берётся за поистине неподъёмный труд по описанию и систематизации богословско-философского наследия Михаила Пселла, но предлагает новый подход к изучению этой части его наследия. Данная рецензия посвящена рассказу не только о книге немецкого учёного, но и о том важном месте, которое она теперь занимает в пселловедении. The publication of a monograph entirely devoted to the theological and philosophical views of Michael Psellas is in any case an extraordinary event, if only because the last work of this kind, the monograph "Michael Psellas's Anthropology" by G. Karakhalios, was published in 19902 . But Denis Walter's book is valuable not only because it takes on the truly formidable task of describing and systematising the theological-philosophical legacy of Michael Psell, but also because it offers a new approach to the study of this part of his legacy. This review is devoted not only to the book of the German scholar, but also to the important place it now occupies in psellology.

Problematyka praw obywatelskich w świetle poglądów Roberta von Mohla

<p>The main object of the presented article is to prove that, according to Robert von Mohl’s views on the idea of civil rights, he should be classified as the exponent of moderate early German liberalism. The first section of the study drafts a background for its next two parts. It presents the socio-political circumstances of the German states from the beginning of the 19^th century to the developments of the Springtime of the Peoples. The analysis of the German scholar views on the citizenship’s idea in the context of the <em>Rechtsstaat</em> and basic rights notion is undertaken in the second part of the article. In the third part, it is proved, that von Mohl was a thinker who chose the path of the “golden mean”. Regarding the citizen’s position in state, on the one hand, he proposed a substantial catalogue of civil rights. On the other hand, he didn’t support the idea of universal political rights.</p>

Otto von Gierke and His Early Corporatism

This article presents the corporatism described in the works of Otto von Gierke. This German scholar, active at the turn of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, created an elaborate concept of social reconstruction based on historical, social and legal studies. In his works, central government and associations are in constant conflict. Both are dominant in certain eras, creating a cycle crucial to development of state and society. Gierke concluded that the next century would be an age of associations. Corporations, the sovereign and self-governed unions, would be fundamental to creation of a new federal state. His concept bore many similarities to the idea of civil society and, in fact, influenced many social activists and early pluralists all over Europe. The article presents Gierke’s ideas in the context of his life and intellectual formation. Moreover, it provides some information on reception of his ideas.

Imaginative Possibilities of Harry Gordon`s Poetry

The author of the article examines the lyrics of the poet and artist Harry Gordon through the category of intermediality, discovering the unique visual possibilities of his word when creating ekphrasises in the narrow sense of the word (�translations from the language of painting�) and works in the author`s artistic form � �daguerreotypes�. The use of the word as a pictorial tool to create artistic imagery by poet Harry Gordon is of scholarly interest. The study is based on the theory of intermediality. The category of �intermediality�, primarily known from the works of the German scholar Aage A. Hansen-Lowe, has been further developed by a number of scholars. Gordon�s landscapes appear as (framed) paintings; portraits are masterfully created; contour, colour, outline actively work along with the word. Literature does not belong to the expressive, but to the fine arts, which can display the contours of actual reality, but the share of representationalism in the poems and the optics of the artists of the word are undoubtedly different. Harry Gordon is a poet in poetry, a painter in painting. However, the intermediality and ekphrastic nature of his poetry is extremely interesting: the poet combines words, colours and outlines as a means of creating artistic imagery, he creates poems as �translations from the language of painting�, literary ekphrasis, works with a multiview lens. The art form, which Harry Gordon called the �daguerreotypes�, is often titled with visual motifs. Often these are images from the lyrical protagonist`s childhood, but a number of them belong to the present. They are mediators that take the protagonist back to the world of childhood, such as the alarm clock. Odessa and, more broadly, maritime motifs (�Dophinovka�, �Privoz�, �Bread Harbour�, �Liman�) are autobiographical. Gordon�s daguerreotypes are mostly images from his childhood, imprinted on the retina of the lyrical character. The lyrical protagonist is often an observer (sometimes the title even specifies the angle from which the observation is made: �At the window�), but often he is also the subject, sometimes observed by another lyrical character, or even an object mentioned but not in the picture. Often Gordon�s poetic pictures are filled with the gamut of experiences of the lyrical self, such as childhood fears, shame and embarrassment, lingering curiosity, excitement, a sense of freshness, longing, etc. With a clear predominance of visual motifs (and even endowing non-visible phenomena with the properties of the visual), Gordon�s �daguerreotype� depicts a picture with sound, smell, taste and tactile sensations. As a result of the study, it has been found that Gordon�s depiction is acquired by sound, olfactory, tactile, gustatory images, with the predominance of the visual, an exchange of signs is observed between the images generated by different senses.

Anti-Palamism in Hans-Georg Beck’s Earlier Works: The Russian Origins and Some Catholic Parallels. Part II

Ханс Георг Бек (1910-1999), крупнейший немецкий византинист ХХ в., прошёл путь от бенедиктинского монаха до мюнхенского профессора, создателя всеобъемлющей концепции истории Византии и византийской культуры. Вопросы истории Церкви и богословия занимали его с первых шагов научной деятельности. Будучи учеником крупнейшего историка схоластики Мартина Грабмана, Бек усвоил томистский взгляд на богословие и потому отрицал реальное различение в Боге сущности и энергий, раскрытое св. Григорием Паламой. Но если в своей первой статье «Борьба за томистское понимание богословия в Византии» (1935) Бек критикует паламизм «извне», с позиций неосхоластики, то в своей светской диссертации о Феодоре Метохите (1952) - уже «изнутри», пытаясь доказать несовместимость паламизма с халкидонитским православием. Помимо общих соображений о малой креативности византийского народного духа, Х. Г. Бек опирается в этом вопросе на идею В. С. Соловьёва (1853-1900) о том, что византийское монашество с ранних веков было заражено монофизитством. Именно поэтому, по мысли Бека, оно и допустило столь «странное» и «антропоморфистское» учение, как паламитский исихазм (эти два явления Бек чётко не разграничивал). Hans-Georg Beck (1910-1999), the most outstanding 20th-century German Byzantinist, has gone a long way from a Benedictine monk to professor in Munich, a creator of a comprehensive conception of Byzantine general and cultural history. The problems of ecclesiastical history and theology were in the center of his scientific activity from its first steps on. As a student of Martin Grabmann, a prominent historian of Western scholasticism, Beck appropriated the Thomist view of theology. That is why he denied the real distinction between essence and energies in God, which had been disclosed and analyzed by Gregory Palamas. If in his first 1935 article, The Struggle for the Thomist Concept of Theology in Byzantium, Beck criticized Palamism «from outside», i. e., from the neoscholastic viewpoint, it was later then, in his secular thesis of 1952, that the German scholar tried to censure the Palamite doctrine «from inside» by making the case of its incompatibility with the Chalcedonian Orthodoxy. Besides some general considerations about a putative barrenness of the Byzantine folk spirit (Volksgeist), in the question of Chalcedonian Orthodoxy and its survival in the Late Byzantium Beck leaned on Vladimir Solov’ev’s (1853-1900) idea of Byzantine monasticism as being infected from the early stage on with the Monophysitism. Making no clear-cut distinction between Hesychasm in general and Palamism as its most elaborated form, Beck saw in this Monophysite infection the very reason of the Palamite hesychasm being tolerated, accepted and officially stated by the Byzantine Orthodoxy, although it had been a very ‘strange’ and ‘anthropomorphite’ teaching.

Hermann von Soden, Alfred Schmidtke et les manuscrits de Bérat

Much light has been shed on the history of the manuscripts of Berat (now kept in Tirana) by Didier Lafleur in his recent catalogue of the NT manuscripts of Albania. However, an aspect of the story was left in the shadow: what is the source of von Soden's information about these manuscripts? The sparse data furnished by von Soden himself and an unpublished report by Harnack show that the German scholar made use of information collected in Albania by one of his collaborators, Alfred Schmidtke. Furthermore, the value of this information for the history of the Berat manuscripts is confirmed by the fact that it is somehow linked to a process of inventory done in September 1901 by a priest of the city.

The Invention of Jewish Christianity: From Early Christian Heresiology to John Toland’s Nazarenus

This chapter explains why Irish freethinker John Toland, in eighteenth-century London, began to reclassify groups long categorized as heresy as “Jewish Christianity.” More specifically, it argues that Toland invented an incarnational model of Jewish Christianity as the centerpiece of a freethinking reappropriation of Christian apologetic historiography. By the end of the nineteenth century, above all because of the influential work of the German scholar Ferdinand Christian Baur, the concept had become a given within the emerging field of historical-critical scholarship on early Christianity. The chapter then looks at Toland's reconstruction of early Christianity, published under the title Nazarenus in 1718. Toland composed Nazarenus not merely as an account of early Christianity, but as an account of true Christianity. The category “Jewish Christianity” was a by-product of Toland's attempt to divert the authorizing power of Jesus and the apostles from traditional orthodoxy to his own enlightened humanism.

Anti-Palamism in Hans-Georg Beck’s Earlier Works: The Russian Origins and Some Catholic Parallels. Part I

ХансГеорг Бек (1910-1999), крупнейший немецкий византинист ХХ в., прошёл путь от бенедиктинского монаха до мюнхенского профессора, создателя всеобъемлющей концепции истории Византии и византийской культуры. Вопросы истории Церкви и богословия занимали его с первых шагов научной деятельности. Будучи учеником крупнейшего историка схоластики Мартина Грабмана, Бек усвоил томистский взгляд на богословие и потому отрицал реальное различение в Боге сущности и энергий, раскрытое свт. Григорием Паламой. Но если в своей первой статье «Борьба за томистское понимание богословия в Византии» (1935) Бек критикует паламизм «извне», с позиций неосхоластики, то в своей светской диссертации о Феодоре Метохите (1952) - уже «изнутри», пытаясь доказать несовместимость паламизма с халкидонитским православием. Hans-Georg Beck (1910-1999), the most outstanding 20th-century German Byzantinist, has gone a long way from a Benedictine monk to professor in Munich, a creator of a comprehensive conception of Byzantine general and cultural history. The problems of ecclesiastical history and theology were in the center of his scientific activity from its first steps on. As a student of Martin Grabmann, a prominent historian of Western scholasticism, Beck appropriated the Thomist view of theology. That is why he denied the real distinction between essence and energies in God, which had been disclosed and analyzed by Gregory Palamas. If in his first 1935 article, The Struggle for the Thomist Concept of Theology in Byzantium, Beck criticized Palamism «from outside», i. e., from the neoscholastic viewpoint, it was later then, in his secular thesis of 1952, that the German scholar tried to censure the Palamite doctrine «from inside» by making the case of its incompatibility with the Chalcedonian Orthodoxy.

Hallucinations and Illusions by Edmund Parish: the unlikely genesis and curious fate of a forgotten masterpiece

In 1894, the German scholar Edmund Parish published his classic work Über die Trugwahrnehmung, with an expanded English edition called Hallucinations and Illusions appearing in 1897. Both versions won critical acclaim from celebrities such as Joseph Jastrow and William James, although, curiously, few others seemed to have noticed the book. After two more publications, Parish inexplicably stopped publishing. During the century that followed, it seemed as if neither he nor his work had ever existed. Now that scholars have finally started to appreciate the book, the present paper seeks to answer the questions of how it came into being, why it disappeared for so long, and who its mysterious author was.