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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.
O'Regan was awarded the Ratzinger Prize in 2024,alongside Japanese sculptor Etsuro Sotoo. [2]
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. [3] [4]
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" [5] : 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" [5] : 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." [5] : 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". [5] : 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 [6]
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? [5] : 212
I'm Irish; I always think words can do better than pictures, and of course I am a scandal to the modern age. [7]
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 Ludwig Maximilian 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.
Nicholas Paul Wolterstorff is an American philosopher and theologian. He is currently Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. A prolific writer with wide-ranging philosophical and theological interests, he has written books on aesthetics, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and philosophy of education. In Faith and Rationality, Wolterstorff, Alvin Plantinga, and William Alston developed and expanded upon a view of religious epistemology that has come to be known as Reformed epistemology. He also helped to establish the journal Faith and Philosophy and the Society of Christian Philosophers.
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Hans Urs von Balthasar was a Swiss theologian and Catholic priest who is considered one of the most important Catholic theologians of the 20th century. With Joseph Ratzinger and Henri de Lubac, he founded the theological journal Communio. Over the course of his life, he authored 85 books, over 500 articles and essays, and almost 100 translations. He is known for his 15-volume trilogy on beauty, goodness (Theo-Drama), and truth (Theo-Logic).
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.
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Maurice Blondel was a French philosopher, whose most influential works, notably L'Action, aimed at establishing the correct relationship between autonomous philosophical reasoning and Christian belief.
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.
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.
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Brian Edward Daley, S.J. is an American Catholic priest, Jesuit, and theologian. He is currently the Catherine F. Huisking Professor of Theology (Emeritus) at the University of Notre Dame and was the recipient of a Ratzinger Prize for Theology in 2012.
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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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