Symposia: The Journal of the Department for the Study of Religion University of Toronto
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Nicola Denzey Lewis, Cosmology and Fate in Gnosticism and Graeco-Roman Antiquity: Under Pitiless Skies
No full textDeConick et al (eds), Practicing Gnosis: Ritual, Magic, Theurgy and Liturgy in Nag Hammadi, Manichaean and other Ancient Literature
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Internet Searchers, God Seekers, and Longing for the Unmediated
No full textIn this paper, I examine two unlikely voices alongside each other, the Web-based political activist Eli Pariser and the German-Jewish theologian Martin Buber, and explore their respective struggles with mediation. Pariser wishes to reduce the thickness of algorithmic personalizations of the Internet experience, and to thereby burst what he calls the "filter bubble," in order to maximize unmediated access to knowledge. Buber, on the other hand, turns to the concrete realm of embodied presence in order to penetrate beyond cerebral thinking and egocentric relations to the divine Unmediated (das Unmittelbare). I demonstrate that Pariser and Buber, despite their immense differences, both seek immediacy through (a) attempting to make the media themselves maximally visible, and (b) turning to the notion of "dialogue"
The Necessity and Necessary Overcoming of Revealed Religion in Hegel\u27s Phenomenology of Spirit
No full textAfter working out the conflicts within Spirit’s moral development, which ultimately leads to the conclusion of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in absolute knowing, it is curious that an entire section of the work is devoted to religion. This paper explores Hegel’s discussion of religion in order to establish its critical role in the work as a whole. The specific problem, as raised by Hyppolite in Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, is whether Hegel, by giving primacy to knowledge over faith and concept over religious representation, effectively reduces the significance of religion and “preserves religion only to negate its essential elements.” While religion is indeed both preserved and negated, it is crucial to add that the essential element as found only in revealed religion remains central to the work as a whole, in spite of the fact that the section on absolute knowing marks an overcoming of the limitation of revealed religion. It is within revealed religion that the unity of the universal essence and the particular existence of humanity is first represented, though this content is not yet known to be an act of consciousness itself since it is only within absolute knowing that the separation of knowledge from its truth is overcome. Consequently, it is essential to demonstrate that although religious consciousness is necessarily overcome in the development of self-consciousness toward absolute knowing, religion is nevertheless necessary as the moment in which the truth of self-consciousness is first revealed
