Christianity today is deeply conflicted and torn apart by conflicts that originated in the Post-Nicene era through Augustine, but were resurrected by Luther, and fully realized in Post-Reformation times by Hobbes. While Hobbes is the evil genius posthumously presiding over the post 9/11 world, he merely exploited flaws in Christian anthropology and political theory originating in Augustine’s City of God. While freedom to Hobbes ultimately means nothing more than the mad dream of escaping from the Dionysian furies that haunt reason and bubble under the Western tradition, he artfully uses scripture, particularly the Old Testament, to justify his evil project of destroying the city, denying the soul and dealing a death blow to Jesus’ gospel. In this, Hobbes but follows in Augustine’s steps. It was the so-called Doctor of Grace who moved the West towards cynical political theology and corrupt clericalism. By his novel doctrine of original sin and belief that civic life could never be better than punishment for unrequited human depravity, Augustine justifies war, rationalizes slavery and valorizes ecclesiastical and political tyranny. Rather than trying to support communities that follow the loving spirit of the Gospel, his priority is to defend dire dogma and uphold centralizing Roman hegemony. As a result, Africa was lost to Islam and fascism would get theological support for its murderous mandates. I turn to Eric Voegelin for a less linear and non-dogmatic account of how the tradition can be understood. Voegelin’s closely argued insights into the order of reality and meaning of history may be the means by which the tradition can be saved. His philosophy of consciousness is the best response to the perennial desire to unite the Hobbesian militant state with a Manichean City of God. He protects Christianity from the constant Satanic temptation to turn the spirit of the Gospel into a literal law that condemns and kills.

This paper deals with the issue of how the images of heaven and hell are presented in Byzantine and in Japanese Buddhist art. Given the differences and similarities between the languages of art, canons and civilizational codes, we will primarily consider form, style and thematic-motific connection – but only to the extent to which such comparisons can be considered as possible and methodologically correct: as the most attractive sign of the feeling of life, which dramatically warns, invokes, redeems or conceives the tragedy of historical experience, but also as a sign of the state of mind and consciousness of different social communities.

The aim of this paper is to analyse certain aspects of the Christian tradition, namely, the doctrines of apophasis (also known as negative theology) and theosis (deification). These are surveyed together because they often complement one another in Christian thought. Although the later Byzantine fathers, of the hesychast tradition, solved the theological questions of apophaticism and deification, the problematic was already articulated in early Christianity through conceptualising the vision of God. The contention of this paper is that although the Alexandrine and Antochene traditions appropriated two diverse ways of understandings of the doctrine of vision of God, the two theological methods were in fact interrelated. In short, whereas for the Alexandrians the vision and knowledge of God stressed the ascent of the human being to God (apophasis), and the Antiochenes were more interested in the divine condescension (kataphasis), both traditions had the same practical goal, union by grace with God or theosis. Both paradigms, too, reveal the paradoxical or antinomical nature of Christian God-transcendent and immanent at the same time. After exploring some of the general characteristics of the Alexandrian and Antiochene though, this paper will address the particularities of the two interpretive strands.