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2 results

Divine Inspiration in Byzantium
  • Notions of Authenticity in Art and Theology
  • Karin Krause
  • Published online:
    16 July 2022
    Print publication:
    09 June 2022
  • In this volume, Karin Krause examines conceptions of divine inspiration and authenticity in the religious literature and visual arts of Byzantium. During antiquity and the medieval era, “inspiration” encompassed a range of ideas regarding the divine contribution to the creation of holy texts, icons, and other material objects by human beings. Krause traces the origins of the notion of divine inspiration in the Jewish and polytheistic cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and their reception in Byzantine religious culture. Exploring how conceptions of authenticity are employed in Eastern Orthodox Christianity to claim religious authority, she analyzes texts in a range of genres, as well as images in different media, including manuscript illumination, icons, and mosaics. Her interdisciplinary study demonstrates the pivotal role that claims to the divine inspiration of religious literature and art played in the construction of Byzantine cultural identity.

  • Chapter 12 - Maimonides and the Problem(s) of Evil

  • from Part V - Human Finitude
  • Edited by Daniel Frank, Purdue University, Indiana, Aaron Segal, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • Book:
    Maimonides' <I>Guide of the Perplexed</I>
    Published online:
    18 June 2021
    Print publication:
    01 July 2021, pp 223-244

  • Summary

    One of the distinctive features of Maimonides’ approach to the problem of evil is that he treats the problem not only from a metaphysical viewpoint, but from a psychological one as well. He blends philosophical, biblical, talmudic, and midrashic insight with psychological acumen, just as he does in his writings and communications to beleaguered communities and individuals. In the area of theodicy, then, he tackles two sorts of issue: (1) How God could allow any evil; how, in particular, God could allow the righteous to suffer and the wicked to prosper and (2) How human beings should experience and cope with suffering and death, and behave in its presence. For example, they need to ask themselves whether their personal situations affect how they assess the amount of evil in the world, whether what they regard as evils are truly evils or instead just contrary to their interests, whether they are blaming God for evils they caused out of their own free will, and what they can do to better their condition. Maimonides sometimes commutes between the psychological and philosophical dimensions of the problem.