– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) Yet, as Richard Smith perceptively noticed, Harold Bloom is today the only author of both essays and fiction who consciously identifies…
Tag: gnosticism_and_manichaeism
Ioan Culianu on nihilism
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) If nihilism is the state that ensues from the “unbuilding” of transcendence and the attitude that pursues transcendence in order to…
Ioan Culianu on Cathars
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) As far as reversed biblical exegesis is concerned, the two religions of the Cathars continue to activate new possibilities inherent in…
Ioan Culianu on Philo
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) Philo’s influence on early Christian Logos theories was overwhelming. Did he influence gnostic mythology as well? From our perspective, the question…
Ioan Culianu on inverse exegesis
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) If the starting point of gnostic myth is the exegesis of the Book of Genesis, it is not an innocent exegesis.…
Ioan Culianu on trees and games
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) We see how, from a seed, Gnosis grows into a tree that starts to split into branches; some branches remain virtual,…
Ioan Culianu on gnostic myth
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) In principle there could be no serious objection to a Platonist who would assert that the god of Genesis is actually…
Ioan Culianu on misprision
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) Without endless hesitations as to possible solutions, which form as many building bricks of gnostic myth, we would not have the…
Ioan Culianu on the scholars of Gnosticism
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) Not unlike XVIIth-century science, research on Gnosticism in the first half of our century (with the partial exception of Hans Jonas’s…
Ioan Culianu: from intro to The Tree of Gnosis
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) Then what is gnostic mythology? Scholars of Gnosticism have a background in biblical philology and theology yet hardly know how anthropologists…