audiobook Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Harvard Historical Studies) by Scott Sowerby in History

Description

What if you were to discover that you were not entirely you; but rather one half of a whole; that you had; in other words; a divine double? In the second and third centuries CE; this idea gripped the religious imagination of the Eastern Mediterranean; providing a distinctive understanding of the self that has survived in various forms throughout the centuries; down to the present. Our Divine Double traces the rise of this ancient idea that each person has a divine counterpart; twin; or alter-ego; and the eventual eclipse of this idea with the rise of Christian conciliar orthodoxy.Charles Stang marshals an array of ancient sources: from early Christianity; especially texts associated with the apostle Thomas “the twin”; from Manichaeism; a missionary religion based on the teachings of the “apostle of light” that had spread from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean; and from Neoplatonism; a name given to the renaissance of Platonism associated with the third-century philosopher Plotinus. Each of these traditions offers an understanding of the self as an irreducible unity-in-duality. To encounter one’s divine double is to embark on a path of deification that closes the gap between image and archetype; human and divine.While the figure of the divine double receded from the history of Christianity with the rise of conciliar orthodoxy; it survives in two important discourses from late antiquity: theodicy; or the problem of evil; and Christology; the exploration of how the Incarnate Christ is both human and divine.