Examines the mystic vision in the Grail Legend and the Divine Comedy in terms of history, theology and devotion and their affects upon later literature.

While the so-called "New perspective in Paul" has been in the focus of New Testament exegesis for more than 25 years now, ancient interpretations of Pauline texts and ideas have been neglected widely. The present volume aims to fill this gap. Its articles concentrate on three different foci of modern exegesis: interpretations of Paul's conversion, his ideas about the relation of "grace" and "works" and the fate of Israel. Several additional articles contrast these ancient perspectives with answers of modern exegesis.

This book uncovers the early Jewish, Scottish, and Stuart sources of "ancient" Cabalistic Freemasonry that flourished in Écossais lodges in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on architectural, technological, political, and religious documents, it provides real-world, historical grounding for the flights of visionary Temple building described in the rituals and symbolism of "high-degree" Masonry. The roots of mystical male bonding, accomplished through progressive initiation, are found in Stuart notions of intellectual and spiritual amicitia. Despite the expulsion of the Stuart dynasty in 1688 and the establishment of a rival "modern" system of Hanoverian-Whig Masonry in 1717, the influence of "ancient" Scottish-Stuart Masonry on Solomonic architecture, Hermetic masques, and Rosicrucian science was preserved in lodges maintained by Jacobite partisans and exiles in Britain, Europe, and the New World.

Crosses disciplinary boundaries to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience and the interplay of text and image in Romantic epistemology. The work of the groundbreaking writers and artists of German Romanticism -- including the writers Tieck, Brentano, and Eichendorff and the artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge -- followed from the philosophical arguments of the German Idealists, who placed emphasis on exploring the subjective space of the imagination. The Romantic perspective was a form of engagement with Idealist discourses, especially Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Fichte's Science of Knowledge. Through an aggressive, speculative reading of Kant, the Romantics abandoned the binary distinction between the palpable outer world and the ungraspable space of the mind's eye and were therefore compelled to develop new terms for understanding the distinction between "internal" and "external." In this light, Brad Prager urges a reassessment of some of Romanticism's major oppositional tropes, contending that binaries such as "self and other," "symbol and allegory," and "light and dark," should be understood as alternatives to Lessing's distinction between interior and exterior worlds. Prager thus crosses the boundaries between philosophy, literature, and art history to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience, examining the interplay of text and image in the formulation of Romantic epistemology. Brad Prager is Associate Professor of Germanat the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Echoes of Aquinas in Cusanus’s Vision of Man demonstrates the influence that the philosophical and theological anthropology of Saint Thomas Aquinas had on Nicholas of Cusa’s (Cusanus) view of human nature. Markus Führer demonstrates that Cusanus's view of the place of man in the universe is remarkably similar to the view of Aquinas. Führer thereby challenges the prevailing opinion that Cusanus was a Renaissance philosopher dedicated to the philosophy of man and that he was one of the founders of Renaissance humanism. A close examination of the texts of both Aquinas and Cusanus, when compared to some of the leading Renaissance writers, indicates that it is not entirely true that Cusanus was Renaissance in his analysis of the human condition. Because Cusanus’s copies of some of the works of Aquinas are still intact and his marginal comments in these manuscripts indicate not only that he read Aquinas carefully, but also actually reacted to texts in Aquinas, it is possible to conduct a study of Cusanus’s use of Aquinas based directly on the text of Aquinas. Führer also explores similarities by studying the formulae that both writers used in expressing their respective positions. This book, with its unique examination of the impact of Aquinas’s thought upon Cusanus, will appeal to students and scholars of late medieval theology and philosophy.

A fresh look at the Priestly narrative that places less weight on linguistic criteria alone in favor of narrative coherence Boorer explores the theology of an originally independent Priestly narrative (Pg), extending through Genesis–Numbers, as a whole. In this book she describes the structure of the Priestly narrative, in particular its coherent sequential and parallel patterns. Boorer argues that at every point in the narrative’s sequential and parallel structure, it reshapes past traditions, synthesizing these with contemporary and unique elements into future visions, in a way that is akin to the timelessness of liturgical texts. The book sheds new light on what this material might have sought to accomplish as a whole, and how it might have functioned for, its original audience. Solid arguments based on genre and themes, with regard to a once separate Priestly narrative (Pg) that concludes in Numbers 27* Thorough discussion of the overall interpretation of the Priestly narrative (Pg), by bringing together consideration of its structure and genre Clear illustration of how understanding the genre of the material and its hermeneutics of time is vital for interpreting Pg as a whole