Although Meister Eckhart himself might have been puzzled by the term, he is traditionally known as a mystic. The designation surely does apply, in the sense that Eckhart sought and recommended a kind of union between the soul and God. But as soon as one proceeds to analyze the precise nature of that union, difficulties abound. In recent literature it has become clear that the Christian mystical tradition has employed various distinct concepts of union with God, and scholars have inquired what sort of union one or another mystic sought. This effort has been made, for example, in studies of John Tauler and The Cloud of Unknowing. In examining these and other mystics, particularly those of the Western medieval tradition, scholars have asked whether they viewed union with God as a momentary experience or as an ongoing way of life, and whether they saw this union as continuous and compatible with ordinary religious experience and knowledge or as discontinuous and incompatible. The present article will attempt to answer such questions in regard to Meister Eckhart, in hopes of clarifying an aspect of his thought which, though fundamental, is most commonly approached only tangentially in the literature.

What has Paul to do with Quintilian? For a host of scholars this question would answer itself, rhetorically. A stock device, the rhetorical question has long been favored in argument. Even Paul is no exception. “Where is the wise man?” he asks. “Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1 Cor 1:20). Paul would appear to be dismissing everything his contemporary, Quintilian, stood for. Yet one point remains. As Cicero once wrote of Plato, “it was when making fun of orators that he himself seemed to be the consummate orator.” The following, a rhetorical study of the letter to Philemon, will suggest that Paul too employed basic tactics of persuasion taught and widely practiced in his day.

The French scholar P. Veyne has recently classified a number of phenomena, which clearly prove that the person of the Roman emperor occupied a predominant position in the minds of the average Roman and Greek. He shows that the imperial ideology both reflected certain sentiments current among the people, and contributed toward the shaping of those sentiments.

In the Preface to the Retractationes, Augustine suggests: “Perhaps whoever will read my works in the order in which they were written will discover how I made progress while writing them.” The present essay is an attempt to carry out this suggestion of Augustine, with particular attention to his ideas on society, from the earliest Dialogues of 386 up to the time, shortly after 400 A.D., when the Donatist controversy introduces a new period in Augustine's thought.

In 1936 Henry Lucks could write of Athenagoras' treatise On the Resurrection of the Dead that “it is rather singular that there is no questioning of the authorship of this work, and no hesitancy evident in attributing it to Athenagoras.” On the other hand, in 1950 P. Keseling made the following statement after speaking of Athenagoras' Legatio:

Demselben Verfasser weist eine von der Hand des Erzbischof Arethas selbst herrühende (so Stählin bei Harnack, Lit. 2 1, 317, 4) Eintragung in dem massgebenden Codex Paris, graecus 451 v J. 914 einen Λόγος περὶ ἀναστάεως τῶν νεκρῶν (Oratio de resurrectione mortuorum), also eine Schrift über die Auferstehung der Toten zu, die jedoch, sonst nirgends bezeugt und aus inneren Gründen nicht unverdächtig, hier ausser Betracht geblieben ist.

The purpose of this paper is to develop the reasons for believing that Athenagoras could not have written the treatise De resurrectione.

Is Origen of Alexandria the inventor of the eschatological doctrine of apokatastasis— of the eventual return of all creatures to the Good, that is, God, and thus universal salvation? Certainly, he is one of its chief supporters in all of history, and he is, as far as we know, the first to have maintained it in a complete and coherent way, so that all of his philosophy of history, protology, and anthropology is oriented toward this telos.1 There are, however, significant antecedents to his mature and articulate theorization, at least some of which he surely knew very well, and there is even a possible parallel. For this conception did not appear ex nihilo, but in a cultural context rich in suggestions and premises, and in a philosophical framework of lively discussions concerning fate, free will, theodicy, and the eternal destiny of rational creatures.

Among the many popular descriptions of New England Transcendentalism which ran current in its own day, the most usual and least malicious were those which stressed its ethereality. Transcendentalism means “a little beyond,” said Emerson's friend with a wave of her hand. A meeting of the Club was like going to heaven in a swing, according to one earth-bound observer. And for many Bostonians “the model Transcendentalist,” as O. B. Frothingham pointed out, was not Emerson or Parker but Cyrus Bartol, minister of the West Church. For Bartol appeared to fit the public preconception. “He seems a man who lives above the clouds,” Frothingham remarked, “— not always above them, either.”

Theology, as many Puritans saw it, was a combination of sound doctrine, practical exhortation, and precise method. The Marrow of Sacred Divinity by William Ames, a great favorite in many seventeenth-century Puritan homes, owed much of its reputation to a blend of these ingredients of doctrine, practical divinity, and method. Although Puritan theologians wrote few systematic theologies except for creeds and catechisms, the Marrow is one example of theology from a scholarly Puritan perspective. The writings of Ames with their Congregational theories were most at home in Congregational New England, perhaps, but Puritans in England also read and studied Ames. William Ames, 1576–1633, was born in East Anglia and educated at Christ's College, Cambridge; but he lived for over twenty years in the Netherlands as a religious exile. Like his life, his theology combines English nonconformity and Continental Calvinism.

When I wandered into the “vast ocean of the Talmud” a decade or so ago, unaware of the warning within the same texts that Gentiles who undertake the study of Jewish sacred literature should be put to death, I finally found what I had been seeking for years. Here at last was a glimpse of God's personality–His likes and dislikes, His idiosyncracies, His religious observances. To my delight, I also dis-covered in the tractate 'Abodah Zarah the answer to another mystery. What does God do all day?

This study presents and analyzes evidence for the social location and organization of Jewish groups in the environs of Rome, specifically from the port city of Ostia. Scholars have generally recognized that the presence of a thriving Jewish community in Rome, as elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, is a crucial element to understanding developments in the Christian movement throughout the first centuries CE. Such discussions have become more common in recent studies. Still, one will look long and hard in New Testament and early Christian studies to find direct discussion of the primary data for the Jewish communities of metropolitan Rome.

In order to establish a negative answer to this question, one would simply have to show either that pragmatism itself is not tenable, or else that it can afford theology no adequate support. To establish the affirmative, however, it would be necessary to show in the first place that pragmatism is in itself tenable, and in the second place that it is compatible with and gives some real support to theology. But for the would-be theological pragmatist himself neither of these positions can be readily accepted as established without the other. On the one hand he cannot say that pragmatism supports theology unless it is itself tenable, for, if untenable, so far from being the philosophical basis of theology, it cannot be a real basis for anything. On the other hand the person who finds religion essential cannot, on pragmatic principles, accept pragmatism, if it is not at least compatible with the fundamentals of religion and theology—unless, indeed, he needs pragmatism more than he needs religion. While beginning, then, by inquiring whether pragmatism is tenable or not, it must be recognized that a final affirmative answer cannot be given until we have considered the question of the bearing of pragmatism upon the essential affirmations of religious faith.

The fifth-century mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome represent the oldest surviving program of mosaic decoration in a Christian church. Its political context includes the steady drain of political authority and power to the Eastern empire from the early fourth century forward, the proscription of paganism at the end of the fourth century, and the massively disruptive Sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 CE. In the vacuum of political power in the West, the papacy under Sixtus III made a strong claim for a new basis of Roman power—the religious primacy of the city of Peter and Paul under papal leadership. The building and decoration of Santa Maria Maggiore played an important role in the consolidation and public announcement of papal power.

One hundred and ninety-one years ago, in 1808, Johann Leonhard Hug's Introduction to the New Testament carried statements that, in part, may strike textual critics as being far ahead of their time. Hug laments the loss of all the original manuscripts of the New Testament writings “so important to the church” and wonders: “How shall we explain this singular fact?” Next, he observes that Paul and others employed secretaries, but Hug views the closing salutation, written in the author's own hand, as “sufficient to give them the value of originals.” Then, referring to the further role that scribes and correctors must have played after such a Christian writing had been dictated by its author, he says:

Let us now suppose, as it is very natural to do, that the same librarius [copyist] who was employed to make this copy, made copies likewise for opulent individuals and other churches—and there was no original at all, or there were perhaps ten or more [originals] of which none could claim superiority.

The Middle Bronze I period, ca. 2150–1900 B.C., has been regarded until recently as something of a “Dark Age” in the history of Palestine. That this period has yielded so slowly and stubbornly to the probings of the archaeologist now appears to have been due to its basic character: it represents a largely non-urban, transitional culture which (taken together with “EB IV”) spans the interlude of several centuries between the great urban eras of the Early Bronze and the Middle Bronze Ages. Semi-nomads and transitory settlers leave frustratingly few traces for the archaeologist. Nevertheless, intensive research in recent years enables us finally to draw a provisional picture of the material culture of MB I in Palestine (see the sketch in Section B).

The reputation of Jonathan Edwards, impressive though it is, rests upon only a fragmentary representation of the range or profundity of his thinking. Harassed by events and controversies, he was forced repeatedly to put aside his real work and to expend his energies in turning out sermons, defenses of the Great Awakening, or theological polemics. Only two of his published books (and those the shortest), The Nature of True Virtue and The End for which God Created the World, were not ad hoc productions. Even The Freedom of the Will is primarily a dispute, aimed at silencing the enemy rather than expounding a philosophy. He died with his Summa still a mass of notes in a bundle of home-made folios, the handwriting barely legible. The conventional estimate that Edwards was America's greatest metaphysical genius is a tribute to his youthful Notes on the Mind — which were a crude forecast of the system at which he labored for the rest of his days — and to a few incidental flashes that illumine his forensic argumentations. The American mind is immeasurably the poorer that he was not permitted to bring into order his accumulated meditations.

Immortality is one of the language symbols engendered by a class of experiences to which we refer as the varieties of religious experience. This term is perhaps no longer the technically best one but it has the advantage of a great precedent, especially here at Harvard. Hence, its use will be convenient to secure, I hope, a common and immediate understanding about the subject-matter of inquiry.

The field of Christian ethics has been the location of a debate over the past decades between roughly delineated parties representing an allegiance to the use of formal prescriptive principles on the one hand, and those representing the cause of the more existential response to a particular situation on the other hand. The debate has taken place in Europe and the United States, it has taken place in Catholicism and in Protestantism. In European Protestant literature Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics, particularly Volume II/2, Bonhoeffer's Ethics, and Niels Søe's Kristelig Etik, have represented what has been called a “contextual” approach. More traditional Lutheran theologians who stress the importance of ethics under the law have a larger place for traditional ethical principles. Werner Elert and Walter Künneth would be representative of this group. In Catholic literature there was a movement in the early years after World War II that came to be called “situational morality.” A critic has typified it in the following terms, “The ultimate differences between this new morality and traditional morality come down then to this: In an objective system of ethics the moral judgment is submitted to an extrinsic norm, an ontological norm founded on the principles of being. In situational ethics the moral judgment is measured only by the subjective, immanent light of the individual in question.” In contrast to the situational emphasis is the whole tradition of natural law ethics and moral theology as this developed in Roman Catholicism. It should be noted that some of the recent Catholic ethics continues to be influenced by a situational approach, though not in the extreme way of earlier materials.

Though often remembered for something he never said, Tertullian did contribute a few bold lines to his own caricature. Take for instance the famous, “Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?” It has come to symbolize Tertullian's wholesale rejection of philosophy. In fact, his indebtedness to the matter and methods of his classical heritage is profound. Today, by the same token, his ability to coin a striking phrase is earning for Tertullian yet another reputation he does not deserve. In the first book of De cultu feminarum, a withering attack on female fashions, Tertullian invokes the curse of Eve by means of a cruel and impressive metaphor: “Tu es diaboli ianua,” he writes; “You are the devil's gateway.” At once provocative of timely indignation and attractive as a foil, this single utterance is alone responsible for perhaps as much popular notoriety as Tertullian has ever been afforded. The following is offered in the hope that a more extensive examination of his attitude toward women may serve both to correct such misconceptions as have been drawn from the famous “gateway passage,” and also to clarify some of the ambiguities inherent in the Frauenfragen for early Christians.

During the 1960s, a consensus slowly emerged in New Testament scholarship, especially in Germany, that the canonical letter of Paul to the Philippians is likely to be a compilation of fragments of originally separate letters. The case for this partition hypothesis was built almost exclusively on internal evidence, which centered around the abrupt shift in tone and topic at Phil 3:2: βλἐπετε τοὺς κύνας, βλἐπετε τοὺς κακοὺς ἐργάτας βλἐπετε τὴν κατατομήν (“Look out for the dogs, look out for the workers of evil, look out for the incision!”). This section of the letter, which runs from Phil 3:2 to Phil 4:1, is marked by a tone of polemic and personal apologia absent from the rest of the epistle. Some of the most persuasive partitioned of the letter, whom we may call the “fragmentarians,” have identified this section as a letter fragment, sometimes called a Kampfbrief and sometimes a testament, which is now found in Philippians 3.