This book collects together papers presented at two multi-disciplinary gatherings which sought to examine concepts belonging to the semantic field of religious belief. The collection sets out from the observation that the relevant terms are ambiguous and equivocal, and indeed that this ambiguity persists in the scholarly literature in the humanities. It is therefore important to historicise these terms adequately and to clarify their development and transformation over time. This involves a sustained engagement with key discourses – logic, history of religion, epistemology, political history – of significant intellectual heterogeneity.
Platonism fundamentally informs classical and patristic Christian reflections as well as the thought of their medieval heirs. It carries with it a tension between ‘opinion’ and supra-rational certitude which is exploited by Christian thinkers up to and including scholastic theologians. These thinkers insist above all on the existential dimension of a certitude which seeks to establish a privileged link with the divine. It involves the attempt to harmonise the ritual and social aspects of religious practice with the individual urge towards transcendence, a quest which has been bequeathed to modernity and still largely defines the nature of contemporary Western social engagement with religion.
EAA 206: Paris, Institut d’études augustiniennes, 2020
ISBN: 978-2-85121-304-4
452 p., 165 x 250 mm
59€ TTC
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