Temporal Regimes in Kenmu nitchū gyōji (Daily Observances of the Kenmu Era), with annotated translation

This article examines time recording and time practices in Kenmu nitchū gyōji, a medieval document describing daily and monthly routine at the court of Emperor Go-Daigo in the beginning of the fourteenth century. By probing into the text’s chronographic and chronopolitical features, it is shown that Kenmu nitchū gyōji is strongly concerned with temporality, providing an ideal in which court regularities are meant to repeat identically according to a minutely regulated sequential progression. These peculiar temporal characteristics exhibit the text’s political function: by way of a chronological and at the same time cyclical structure, the image of a divine order is provided, thus legitimizing imperial rule.

Проявления скрытого сакрального порядка в творчестве Достоевского

The Manifestation of Divine Order in Dostoevsky’s Work: On Dual Reality in Crime and Punishment and Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque Poetics. At the plot level of the novel, the core drive of promoting the development of incidents and fates of characters is a continued rising spiritual movement: a process of spiritual resurgence of man experiencing death and resurrection. This article discusses the development process of this divine order, which run through the plots and echoed in all details.

When the Canaanite Conquest Met the Enlightenment: How Christian Apologists of the English Enlightenment Harmonized the Biblical Canaanite Conquest with the Moral Values of the Eighteenth Century

This article examines British and American Christian apologists’ reinterpretation of the biblical account of the Canaanite conquest in response to concerns about natural rights and ethical behavior that emerged from the English Enlightenment. Because of Enlightenment-era assumptions about universal rights, a new debate emerged in Britain and America in the eighteenth century about whether the divine order for the biblical Israelites to slaughter the Canaanites was morally right. The article argues that intellectually minded Christians’ appropriation of Enlightenment values to reframe their interpretation of the biblical narrative (often in response to skeptical attacks from writers classified as deists) demonstrates that in the English-speaking world, Enlightenment rationalism and Christian orthodoxy frequently reinforced each other and were not opposing forces. Though many orthodox Christians repudiated traditional Calvinist interpretations of the biblical Canaanite conquest, they defended the authority of the biblical narrative by drawing on Enlightenment-era assumptions about natural rights to provide justifications for what some skeptics considered morally objectionable divine orders in the Bible. By doing so, they set the framework for the continued synthesis of natural rights and rationality with a biblically centered Protestantism in the early nineteenth-century English-speaking world and especially in the United States.

Revelation and Cognitive Science

Cognitive science tells us that human minds are not equally receptive to any and all sorts of ideas or information. Instead, they can be characterized as having special subsystems that preferentially attend to, and process, some kinds of information over others. Furthermore, as finite information processors, human minds naturally and automatically fill in informational gaps to make coherent meaning from what they experience. In so far as divine revelation is an act of communication, and that the divine communicator knows how human minds are active in any act of communication, it follows that divine revelation will take advantage of human cognitive systems in particular and effective ways. One way in which it would do so is in establishing some general predilections towards humans’ receptivity to the idea that there are divine realities. As cognitive science of religion has shown, humans may find certain aspects of divinity and divine order relatively easy to understand and receive from interaction with the natural world. This general revelation, however, is inchoate and incomplete. Room is left for additional revelation to augment understandings of divine truths. This additional revelation, however, would also be interpreted through ordinary human cognitive faculties, whether its medium is private mystical experiences, reading Scripture, or observing the actions and teachings of Jesus first hand. Drawing upon C. S. Lewis’s treatment of miracles, the chapter considers Jesus’ miracles as instances of divine revelation that can be made more explicable through the lenses of cognitive science.

Rhetorical Economy in Augustine's Theology

Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) studied and taught rhetoric for nearly two decades until, at the age of thirty-one, he left his position as professor of rhetoric in Milan to embark upon his new life as a Christian. But this was not a clean break. Previous scholarship has done much to show us that Augustine integrated rhetorical ideas about texts and speeches into his thought on homiletics, the formation of arguments, and scriptural interpretation. Over the past few decades a new movement among scholars has begun to show that Augustine also carried rhetorical concepts into areas of his thought that were beyond the typical purview of the rhetorical handbooks. This study contributes to this new movement by providing a detailed examination of Augustine’s use of the rhetorical concept of economy in his theologies of creation, history, and evil, in order to gain insights into these fundamental aspects of his thought. Ultimately, this book finds that Augustine used rhetorical economy as the logic by which he explained a multitude of tensions within, and answered various challenges to, these three areas of his thought as well as others with which they intersect—including his understandings of providence, divine activity, and divine order.

Epilogue

The Epilogue integrates the arguments made throughout the book in order to consider several conclusions and possibilities regarding Augustine’s use of rhetorical economy. It begins by examining the brief period of time between Augustine’s conversion to Christianity and his incorporation of rhetorical economy into his understanding of divine order. Then, by means of a comparison between rhetorical economy and Stoic cosmology, it suggests that Augustine included rhetorical economy in his concept of order because it provided a logical framework which could handle several of his theological commitments without any necessary adjustments to its logic, other than reassigning the model from the arena of speaker and speech to that of God and history. Finally, it concludes the work by considering both possible effects of this study upon future research and Augustine’s understanding of God’s work in arranging all that exists.

Atomism in the Aeneid

This book examines the role of philosophical metaphor and allegory in the Aeneid, focusing on tendentious allusions to Lucretian atomism. It argues that Virgil, drawing upon a popular strain of anti-atomist and anti-Epicurean arguments in Greek philosophy, deploys atomic imagery as a symbol of cosmic and political disorder. The first chapter of this study investigates the development of metaphors and analogies in philosophical texts ranging from Aristotle to Cicero that equate atomism with cosmological caprice and instability. The following three chapters track how Virgil applies this interpretation of Epicurean physics to the Aeneid, in which chaotic atomic imagery is associated with various challenges to the poem’s dominant narrative of divine order and Roman power. For Aeneas, the specter of atomic disorder arises at moments of distress and hesitation, while the association of various non-Trojan characters with atomism characterizes them as agents of violent disorder needing to be contained or vanquished. The final chapter summarizes findings, showing how Virgilian allusion to Lucretian physics often conflates poetic, political, and cosmological narratives, blurring the boundaries between their respective modes of discourse and revealing a general preference for hierarchical, teleological models of order.