Divine Powers in Late Antiquity

ISBN: 9780198767206 出版年：2017 页码：301 Oxford University Press

Are powers the essence of divinity or are they distinct from divine essence? Are they divine hypostases or are they divine attributes? Are they modes of divine activity? How do they manifest? In which way can they be apprehended? Is there a multiplicity of gods whose powers fill the cosmos or is there only one God from whom all power(s) derive(s) and whose power(s) permeate(s) everything? These are questions that become central to philosophical and theological debates in Late Antiquity (comprised as the period between the 2nd and 6th centuries). Platonists, on one hand, postulate a complex hierarchy of gods, whose powers express the unlimited power of the ineffable One. Christians, on the other, proclaim the existence of only one God, one divine power or one “Lord of all powers”. This subtle but core controversy has not so far sufficiently attracted the scholars’ interest. The proposed book aims at starting to fill the gap in the existing research literature by proposing a collection of original essays on the different ways in which the notion of divine power is understood in each of the two aforementioned groups.