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Cyril J. O'Regan | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1952 (age 71–72) |
| Citizenship | Irish |
| Occupation | theologian |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | The heterodox Hegel: Trinitarian ontotheology and Gnostic narrative (1989) |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Theology |
| Sub-discipline | gnosticism |
| Institutions | |
| Website | https://theology.nd.edu/people/cyril-oregan/ |
Cyril J. O'Regan (born 1952) is an Irish theologian writer with particular expertise in mystical theology.
O'Regan studied at University College Dublin gaining a BA and MA. He studied at Yale University earning an MA,MLitt and PhD. [1] He was appointed Catherine F. Huisking Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.
He specialises in systematic theology and historical theology,with a specific interest in continental philosophy,religious literature,mystical theology and post-modern thought.
He is best known for his multi-volume gnosticism series. This series began with Gnostic Return in Modernity and continued in Gnostic Apocalypse:Jacob Boehme's Haunted Narrative. Discussing a project attempted in the nineteenth century by a leader of the Tübingen school of theology,Ferdinand Christian Baur,O'Regan attempts to identify a gnostic structure or "grammar" that can be traced through sources and authors as diverse as Valentinianism and William Blake. By identifying this grammar,he hoped to find a way to distinguish works of gnosticism from other types with superficial resemblances,such as writings in Neoplatonism. As a Christian theologian,he also hopes to equip theologians to avoid gnosticism,which he sees as an alternative contrary to genuine Christian faith yet,by its nature,one that is present in every era. This project is in some ways similar to that of Eric Voegelin,who in his Science,Politics and Gnosticism (1968) attempted to identify some core features of gnosticism that he viewed as dangerous,though the two thinkers disagree about how to define gnosticism and why it should be rejected. [2] [3]
Upon the completion of the von Balthasar series with the second Anatomy of Misremembering volume,O'Regan will focus his attention on two further volumes in his gnosticism series. The next volume,the third in the series,will focus on German Idealism (chiefly,G. W. F. Hegel,F. W. J. Schelling,and Johann Gottlieb Fichte),with a later,fourth volume covering German and English Romanticism (chiefly,William Blake,Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (Novalis). In advocating for new ways of recognizing gnosticism,O'Regan draws on categories such as metalepsis that he developed in his earlier work,The Heterodox Hegel. O'Regan has also written widely in monographs and reviews on the concept of the apocalyptic.
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O'Regan strives at "showing how Boehme's discourse is Valentinian" [4] : 213 and "Philadelphian Society and William Law in England,Pietism in Germany,Louis Claude de St. Martin in France,and Swedenborg in Sweden,and the theosophy societies of the twentieth century" had "repeat Boehme's discourse in a very determinate way" [4] : 214
O'Regan states that "The redemptive activity of Christ in Luther obviously presupposes a fallen humanity,which in turn points back to creatureliness and createdness." [4] : 268
O'Regan in Gnostic Apocalypse asserts his "conversation with not only with David Walsh and the Voegelin school of interpretation,but also with the radically different kind of genealogy of Michel Foucault". [4] : 21
O'Regan countered the Gnostic response to the problem of evil in Gnostic Apocalypse:Jacob Boehme's Haunted Narrative.[ citation needed ]
O'Regan remarks,
it is faith, not knowledge, we are talking about. Job does not gain a rational explanation of why there is so much suffering in the world, of why the innocent are suffering. He does not achieve such a point of view, no more than Fr. Paneloux in The Plague by Albert Camus. No explanation is granted whereby the agonizing paradox of suffering and the existence of the good and just God is “resolved.” Faith will mean saying no to history while not saying not to God who relates to us in history. In short, the book of Job provides no theodicy. https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/job-and-the-problem-of-evil-versus-the-tribunal-of-history/
He has discussed Slavoj Zizek [5]
I admit the complexity of my analysis, but plead that it corresponds to the complexity of the subject matter—that is, Boehme’s visionary or apocalypse discourse. But even if this is granted me, I still have some explaining to do. Why deploy a sophisticated conceptual apparatus of general constructs such as Valentinian narrative grammar, rule-governed deformation of classical Valentinian genres, metalepsis, and Valentinian enlisting of non-Valentinian narrative discourse, and more specific constructs such as apocalyptic inscription, apocalyptic distention, narrative deconstitution of negative theology, and aporetics of representation on such a relatively arcane discursive specimen as Jacob Boehme. Even if we listen seriously to Boehme’s commentators, hear what genealogists such as Baur, Staudenmaier, and Walsh have to say, and recall what Hegel said about the importance of a speculative thinker who with Bacon and Descartes contributes to the formation of specifically modern philosophical discourse, deployment of this conceptual apparatus looks like serious overkill. The style of interpretation in operation seems to amount to taking a machine gun to swat a fly. Although accurate characterization is a true good, Why hard-pedal in the way I do the following conclusions? [4] : 212
I'm Irish; I always think words can do better than pictures, and of course I am a scandal to the modern age. [6]
Gnosis is the common Greek noun for knowledge. The term was used among various Hellenistic religions and philosophies in the Greco-Roman world. It is best known for its implication within Gnosticism, where it signifies a spiritual knowledge or insight into humanity's real nature as divine, leading to the deliverance of the divine spark within humanity from the constraints of earthly existence.
Eric Voegelin was a German-American political philosopher. He was born in Cologne, and educated in political science at the University of Vienna, where he became an associate professor of political science in the law faculty. In 1938, he and his wife fled from the Nazi forces which had entered Vienna. They emigrated to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944. He spent most of his academic career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.
Jakob Böhme was a German philosopher, Christian mystic, and Lutheran Protestant theologian. He was considered an original thinker by many of his contemporaries within the Lutheran tradition, and his first book, commonly known as Aurora, caused a great scandal. In contemporary English, his name may be spelled Jacob Boehme ; in seventeenth-century England it was also spelled Behmen, approximating the contemporary English pronunciation of the German Böhme.
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre is a Scottish-American philosopher who has contributed to moral and political philosophy as well as history of philosophy and theology. MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981) is one of the most important works of Anglophone moral and political philosophy in the 20th century. He is senior research fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics (CASEP) at London Metropolitan University, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and permanent senior distinguished research fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. During his lengthy academic career, he also taught at Brandeis University, Duke University, Vanderbilt University, and Boston University.
Hans Urs von Balthasar was a Swiss theologian and Catholic priest who is considered an important Catholic theologian of the 20th century. Pope John Paul II announced his choice of Balthasar to become a cardinal, but he died shortly before the consistory. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said in his funeral oration for Balthasar that "he is right in what he teaches of the faith" and that he "points the way to the sources of living water".
The Sethians were one of the main currents of Gnosticism during the 2nd and 3rd century CE, along with Valentinianism and Basilideanism. According to John D. Turner, it originated in the 2nd century CE as a fusion of two distinct Hellenistic Judaic philosophies and was influenced by Christianity and Middle Platonism. However, the exact origin of Sethianism is not properly understood.
The Coptic Apocalypse of Paul is a Gnostic apocalyptic writing. It is the second of five treatises in Codex V of the Nag Hammadi library texts, taking up pages 17–24 of the codex's 85 pages. The text describes a Gnostic cosmogony and interpretation of Pauline epistles via its portrayal of Paul the Apostle as an apocalyptic hero. The content of the text can be divided into three parts: an epiphany scene, a scene of judgment and punishment, and a heavenly journey in which Paul ultimately ascends to the tenth level of heaven. The basis of the ascent narrative is Paul's own writing in 2 Corinthians 12. The ideas presented in the text are consistent with Valentinianism.
The Gospel of the Truth is one of the Gnostic texts from the New Testament apocrypha found in the Nag Hammadi codices ("NHC"). It exists in two Coptic translations, a Subakhmimic rendition surviving almost in full in the first Nag Hammadi codex and a Sahidic in fragments in the twelfth codex.
The Epistle of the Apostles is a work of New Testament apocrypha. Despite its name, it is more a gospel or an apocalypse than an epistle. The work takes the form of an open letter purportedly from the remaining eleven apostles describing key events of the life of Jesus, followed by a dialogue between the resurrected Jesus and the apostles where Jesus reveals apocalyptic secrets of reality and the future. It is 51 chapters long. The epistle was likely written in the 2nd century CE in Koine Greek, but was lost for many centuries. A partial Coptic language manuscript was discovered in 1895, a more complete Ethiopic language manuscript was published in 1913, and a full Coptic-Ethiopic-German edition was published in 1919.
Esoteric Christianity is an approach to Christianity which features "secret traditions" that require an initiation to learn or understand. The term esoteric was coined in the 17th century and derives from the Greek ἐσωτερικός.
Gnosticism refers to a collection of religious groups originating in Jewish religiosity in Alexandria in the first few centuries AD. Neoplatonism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century, based on the teachings of Plato and some of his early followers. While Gnosticism was influenced by Middle Platonism, neoplatonists from the third century onward rejected Gnosticism. Nevertheless, Alexander J. Mazur argues that many neoplatonic concepts and ideas are ultimately derived from Sethian Gnosticism during the third century in Lower Egypt, and that Plotinus himself may have been a Gnostic before nominally distancing himself from the movement.
Gnosticism in modern times includes a variety of contemporary religious movements, stemming from Gnostic ideas and systems from ancient Roman society. Gnosticism is an ancient name for a variety of religious ideas and systems, originating in Jewish-Christian milieux in the first and second century CE.
Death of God theology refers to a range of ideas by various theologians and philosophers that try to account for the rise of secularity and abandonment of traditional beliefs in God. They posit that God has either ceased to exist or in some way accounted for such a belief.
Within the Christian tradition, bridal theology, also referred to as mystical marriage, is the New Testament portrayal of communion with Jesus as a marriage, and God's reign as a wedding banquet. This tradition in turn traces back to the Hebrew Bible, especially allegorical interpretations of the erotic Song of Songs.
Against Heresies, sometimes referred to by its Latin title Adversus Haereses, is a work of Christian theology written in Greek about the year 180 by Irenaeus, the bishop of Lugdunum.
Theopoetics in its modern context is an interdisciplinary field of study that combines elements of poetic analysis, process theology, narrative theology, and postmodern philosophy. Originally developed by Stanley Hopper and David Leroy Miller in the 1960s and furthered significantly by Amos Wilder with his 1976 text, Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination.
Dermot Moran is an Irish philosopher specialising in phenomenology and in medieval philosophy, and he is also active in the dialogue between analytic and continental philosophy. He is currently the inaugural holder of the Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy at Boston College. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a founding editor of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.
Fred Reinhard Dallmayr is an American philosopher and political theorist. He is Packey J. Dee Professor Emeritus in Political Science with a joint appointment in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame (US). He holds a Doctor of Law from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and a PhD in political science from Duke University. He is the author of some 40 books and the editor of 20 other books. He has served as president of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (SACP); an advisory member of the scientific committee of RESET – Dialogue on Civilizations (Rome); the executive co-chair of World Public Forum – Dialogue of Civilizations (Vienna), and a member of the supervisory board of the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute (Berlin).
Vittorio Hösle is an Italian-born German philosopher. He has authored works including Hegels System (1987), Moral und Politik, and Der philosophische Dialog (2006).
William Franke is an American academic and philosopher, professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. A main exposition of his philosophical thinking is A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014), a book which dwells on the limits of language in order to open thought to the inconceivable. On this basis, the discourses of myth, mysticism, metaphysics, and the arts take on new and previously unsuspected types of meaning. This book is the object of a Syndicate Forum and of a collective volume of essays by diverse hands in the series “Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion”: Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy. Franke's apophatic philosophy is based on his two-volume On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts (2007), which reconstructs in the margins of philosophy a counter-tradition to the thought and culture of the Logos. Franke extends this philosophy in an intercultural direction, entering the field of comparative philosophy, with Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions Without Borders. In On the Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking, Franke argues for application of apophatic thinking in a variety of fields and across disciplines, from humanities to cognitive science, as key to reaching peaceful mutual understanding in a multicultural world riven by racial and gender conflict, religious antagonisms, and national and regional rivalries.
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