THOU ART is an interdisciplinary and christological aesthetics that theorizes an integral relation among Christ, representation, and the formation of human subjectivity. Through a critical poetics it addresses the space of difference between a theological discourse on the creation of human being in the image of God—understood as creation in Christ, Word (logos) incarnate—and a philosophical discourse on the constitution of human subjectivity.

The second book of Samuel was a neglected work in the theological, exegetical, and liturgical traditions of the Western church from the Patristic era through the Protestant Reformation. The theological developments and articulations of the early church focused on the books of Genesis, John, and the great Pauline corpus;1 for example, 1 Corinthians was central to the fourth-century trinitarian debates2 and Romans to the soteriological discussions of the entire western tradition.3 Similarly, the book of Psalms had an enormous impact on the liturgical life of the church as well as its christological statements.4 One need only cast an eye back to Augustine's numerous commentaries on the book of Genesis to understand the profound depth with which certain books of the Christian Scriptures were interpreted in the early and medieval church.5

During the seven years that I worked at the Institute of Oriental Studies (Leningrad Branch, 1965–1972) I was happy to be associated with an outstanding senior colleague, a wonderful scholar, and an even more wonderful person Igor Mikhailovich Diakonoff, a world famous scholar in many areas of history, philology, and linguistics. In this essay it is not his professional activity that interests me but rather his moral attitude as expressed in his short meditation on ethics.

This single, mutilated leaf from a papyrus codex consists of twelve lines of text written in a nearly upright biblical uncial. The practiced scribal hand has consistent spacing of letters and serifs adorning τ, χ, κ, and η. A dieresis is written above iota in line 4, and an apostrophe marks the end of Iωακειμ (line 7), which may indicate that the name lacked an ordinary Greek declension. Joseph van Haelst originally dated the hand to the beginning of the fourth century, and its similarities to P.Oxy. 1250 and 4804 confirm a fourth century dating.1

At a meeting in Leningrad in December 1948, Soviet astronomers affirmed the need to fight against the “reactionary-idealistic” theory of a “primeval atom.” Support for this theory, later dubbed the “Big Bang” by one of its fiercest critics, would, the Soviets claimed, help clericalism.1 While such anxieties might seem astonishing today, they may have seemed plausible in the 1940s, especially since the theory had first been proposed by a Catholic priest, Father Georges Lemaître. Furthermore, while Lemaître himself was careful to avoid drawing theological inferences, the association of his theory with the religious doctrine of Creation, especially by Pope Pius XII in 1951, helped to motivate the search for alternative approaches such as the “steady-state” theory.2 In recent years, by contrast, the perception has been growing that the Big Bang theory has ceased to be offensive to atheist sensibilities. It is claimed that the Big Bang can now be accommodated safely within a self-sufficient system of natural causes, possibly by embedding the universe within an infinitely larger and eternal “multiverse.” Indeed, just a few months ago, the media reported with enthusiasm the assertions made by Stephen Hawking in his latest book, that contemporary physics has solved the mysteries of the Big Bang making recourse to God obsolete.3