Contesting the Three-Principle Systems of the Refutation of All Heresies David Litwa(Boston College)

Contesting the Three-Principle Systems of the Refutation of All Heresies (Elenchos)

David Litwa (Boston College)

Since the 1960s, scholars have been accustomed to categorize several groups of the Sondergut in the Refutation of All Heresies as “three-principle systems.” These groups include the Naassenes, Peratai, Simonians, Sethians, Doketai, and Monoimus. The purpose of this paper is to show how this classification generally reinscribes the heresiological tendencies of the author of the Refutation. I offer a fresh reading of these Sondergut sources with an eye to their variety and the specifics of their theology. In the end, although scholars can fruitfully speak of “principles” when referring to the theology of these groups, the principles were not always or even frequently triadic.

Series of Talks 2022-2023 of the Research Project The Platonisms of the Late Antiquity : Principles (Archai)

The intellectual life of late antiquity is characterized by a strong concern with principles (archai): principles of reality, principles of the world, principles of knowledge. Regardless of how one groups intellectuals in late antiquity—into pagans and Christians, philosophers and theologians—they all speak about principles explicitly or implicitly and some of them actively seek to establish what the principles are (e.g., Plotinus, Porphyry, Origen, Damascius, Gnostics, Hermeticists, theurgists). They clearly deem the project of principles to be crucial for establishing how reality is structured, what the place of humans in the world is, what powers affect our lives, how free are we, how we can attain knowledge, and how we can attain happiness or salvation. The search for principles (understood as metaphysical or theological) is then an important issue both of itself and also for shaping ethics. The series of talks in the academic year 2022-2023 of the research project The Platonisms of the Late Antiquity will explore this topic of principles in its broad application in the intellectual world of late antiquity and will examine questions such as how principles account for reality, how principles explain the interaction between the divine and the human world, and how human happiness and salvation is possible given the structure of reality.

Projet pluriannuel de recherches dirigé par Luciana Gabriela Soares Santoprete (CNRS - LEM), Anna Van den Kerchove (IPT), George Karamanolis (Université de Vienne), Éric Crégheur (Université Laval) et Dylan Burns (Université d'Amsterdam).

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