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M J Edwards, Hierarchie und Ritual: Zur philosophischen Spiritualität in der Spätantike. Edited by Chiara O. Tommasi, Luciana Gabriela Soares Santoprete, and Helmut Seng, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 71, Issue 1, April 2020, Pages 345–347, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flz147
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Extract
This is another excellent miscellany from the Bibliotheca Chaldaica, which now boasts seven volumes. As ever, it is not possible to discover a common interest, or a concerted attempt to address a single problem, but it is possible to note connections between individual papers, some of which seem to have been purposely juxtaposed. Fabio Guidem (‘Gerarchie visibili’) discovers that the three elements of imperial ceremony are the valorization of light and precious stones, the hierarchical isolation of the emperor, and the assimilation of political to religious ritual. Andrew Timotin (‘Hiérarchies théologiques, hiérarchies physiques’) detects a progressive tendency in commentary on the Timaeus, from Xenocrates to Chalcidius, to conflate its taxonomy of living creatures with the demonology of the Symposium, and thus to superimpose a theological on a physical hierarchy. Chiara Tommasi (‘Mithras between Isis and Osiris’) derives her title from Plutarch but devotes her article to the Roman transfiguration of Mithras, which, in her view, enables Apuleius to make the priest Mithras an instrument in the ‘solarisation’ of his narrative in The Golden Ass. Anna Van den Kerchose (‘Dieu, monde et l’humain’) observes that the threefold division of reality in the Hermetica admits of many subordinate gradations, and that the place of the human soul in relation to God and the world is determined by its own readiness to engage in abstinence and contemplation. The role of prayer, of magisterial guidance, and of scriptural tradition in the soul’s ascent is examined by Giulia Sfameni Gasparro (‘Tra scrittura e rituale’), with special reference to the Hermetic treatises in the Nag Hammadi corpus. Jean Daniel Dubois’s review of the serial baptisms in the Zostrianus (‘La ritualité de l’ascension de l’âme’) yields parallels with other texts from Nag Hammadi, particularly the Gospel of the Egyptians and the Apocalypse of Adam. The response of Plotinus to such Gnostic experiments, according to Luciana Santoprete (‘L’Intellect, les intelligibles et l’ignorance’) was the composition of Enneads V.5 to prove that there cannot be an ignorance anterior to knowledge in the intelligible domain. Plotinus himself aspired to transcend the intelligible by henôsis or one-ing, a mystical state of which Fabienne Jourdain (‘Une mystique de Numenius’) finds no anticipation in the most distinguished of his middle Platonic predecessors.
