Abstract
Portuguese spiritualist philosophy encapsulates a strong influence from the mystic thinking of Eastern religions and the Gnostic thinking posited during classical Greece. This presence of Gnosticism gets characterised by an anthropological dualism in which the body is conceived as the prison of the soul and, through an ontological and cosmological divide, the perceivable world emerges as both an apparent and a malign reality. In the times of Galecia and Lusitania, this Gnostic influence derived from the context of dialogue with the patristic and of apologetics against schools of thought bound up with Manichaeism and Origenism. In the period of al-Andalus and the founding of the nation of Portugal, Gnosticism expressed itself through the presence of Neo-Platonism in the Islamic and Hebrew cultures and in their debates about whether the world began as a result of creation or emanation. Contemporary thinking has been resuming these same debates, returning to the Manichaean themes of division in the Being and the opposition between spirit and matter. We thus witness a resumption of the notion of the duality of creation of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, designed to conciliate the Platonic theory about the pre-existence of souls with the Judeo-Christian theory creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing). We correspondingly encounter the negation of the historical character of divine revelation and the mysteries around the resurrection of the body. We may thus identify the cosmological thesis as to the cyclical movement of egressus and regressus as a means of returning to the Origen of the fallen divine reality.
Translated title of the contribution | Gnosticism overcoming in Leonardo Coimbra's creation theory |
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Original language | Portuguese |
Pages (from-to) | 507-530 |
Number of pages | 24 |
Journal | Cauriensia |
Volume | 11 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2016 |
Keywords
- Gnosticism
- Portuguese philosophy
- Manichaeism
- Origenism
- Leonardo Coimbra