![]() ![]() In explanation, the ‘not-”I”’ could be said to be our divine double that serves to bring us back to the Good, the One, or God depending on the flavour of your beliefs. This all makes sense if you’ve read the book. A state captured by Henry Corbin’s phrase unus-ambo. ![]() The urgency enters when we realise that ‘the “I” we are accustomed to recognise is at best incomplete (and worse, is a form of false consciousness),’ and that ‘we are on the move between the “I” we thought we were to a new I that includes the not-”I”’. ![]() For the ancients, he argues, ‘the “powers” by which we are lived are not so much beneath as above us: they are divine,’ and this ‘power is simultaneously and paradoxically “I” and not-“I”’. In the end Stang quotes WH Auden: ‘“We are lived by powers we pretend to understand”’, and suggests modern readers (like me, I guess) may assume this to mean we ‘are lived by our unconscious’. The argument seems to me to hold water, although I’m not really qualified to judge because my ignorance forces me to rely on his paraphrasing of ancient texts which may or may not be contentious. He signposts his arguments well, he repeats himself where necessary, and he writes clearly both when dealing with technical subjects and when introducing varied sources (of which he displays easy mastery). It is an academic exploration of a fascinating but arcane and niche topic, tracing the idea of the divine double - or daimon, or genius - through Plato, the apocrypha (especially the Gospel of Thomas), and the writings of Mani and Plotinus. Associate Professor of Early Christian Thought, Harvard Divinity School.Don’t judge this book by its dreadful cover. Convener Charles Stangįaculty Associate (on leave fall 2014). It is precisely this understanding of selfhood as a fraught relationship between unity and duality, this ancient “dividualism,” that Charles Stang aims to discern and describe. In other words, these sources imagine that the individual and his divine double will form a tense relationship of unity and duality. There is nevertheless a curious consistency: the individual who encounters his divine double comes to recognize that he is not, strictly speaking, an individual at all, but rather one half of a pair, a “dividual” (to borrow a term from the contemporary philosopher Simon Critchley). This encounter is imagined and narrated very differently in the various sources. According to these sources, to encounter one’s divine double is to be fundamentally reoriented both to oneself and to the divine. Through an array of ancient sources-Christian and otherwise, philosophical and religious, surviving often in fragments and in at least five languages-runs this single thread: the notion that each individual has a divine counterpart or alter-ego whom one may meet. We do not know the exact origin of this figure, but like ink that bleeds through the page, we find him seeping through the religious literature of late antiquity in all its diversity. In the second and third centuries of the Common Era, we witness the sudden appearance of a peculiar figure in the religious imagination of the Eastern Mediterranean: the divine twin or double.
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