Browsing by Subject "Anthropology"

The following thesis addresses an issue in ways of knowing that is both commonand destructive in the contemporary American context. Specifically, the issue of misunderstood anthropologies is posited to be an unnecessary destructive force against American churches already in decline. This damage is caused by wooden and polarizing theological and evolutionary anthropologies that underlie the basis of how many define themselves. This project endeavors to show that theological and evolutionary anthropologies are not necessarily adversarial. To this end, the theological anthropology of Gregory of Nyssa as described in On the Making of Man (de Hominis Opificio) and the evolutionary anthropology as described by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man are defined and compared. These seminal yet still authoritative works are shown to be making different statements about humanity’s coming into being, more so than confrontational ones. The lack of mutual exclusivity between these two anthropologies is heightened by a number of interesting points of connection between them, such as reason being the definitive characteristics of humanity as well as the notion that humanity is continually becoming a more good creature. These ideas will serve to remove barriers of belief for many, all the while providing for a more holistic view of the origins of humanity and thus humanity’s place in the world.

This dissertation examines the development of ideas about human nature and perfection in late East Syriac Christian thought through the writings of Bābai the Great (c. 551-628). It argues that Bābai develops an East Syrian approach to transformative participation in God that allows his theology to be seen as a localized analogue to deification. In terms of intellectual history, I also show how Bābai’s writings consistently use other late ancient sciences to construct his theological anthropology, especially Greek medicine and philosophy transmitted into Syriac through the work of an active translation movement. Bābai wrote at a significant stage in the development of Christian theology, practices, and institutions in the Sasanian Empire. As a monastic and ecclesial leader, he played a central role in this process during his lifetime and through the influence of his writings on later generations. For this reason, Bābai’s writings demonstrate important developments in dyophysite or Antiochene theological anthropology and reflect currents in the vibrant intellectual atmosphere of late ancient Mesopotamia.

First, I show how Bābai’s formal Christological theory of two hypostases (qnōmē) in a union of person (parṣōpā) allows him to develop a dyophysite version of the exchange of properties. The human nature of Jesus receives everything of divinity except nature. But Bābai applies this exchange asymmetrically, likely due to his opponents who appeared to endanger the transcendence of God. Second, I trace how Bābai’s dyophysite emphasis on preserving the order of nature licenses his use of medical knowledge for theology. Bābai uses late ancient biology to analyze the delayed ensoulment of Christ in the womb while defending his Christological theory. In doing so, he argues for the near non-separability of body and soul. Moreover, his use of biology indicates that Bābai is one of the earliest instances of East Syrian medicalization in theology, a development usually placed later in the 7th century. Third, Bābai’s conflicts with competing ascetic groups claiming perfection in this life allowed him to develop a dialectic of preparatory natural perfection leading to superadded eschatological perfection. By re-reading the work of Evagrius of Pontus against his opponents, Bābai outlines the ascetic and sacramental path of progress in this life and the gift of spiritual perfection in the next. Finally, I argue that Bābai’s idea of the resurrection reflects his ideas about the transformation that human nature undergoes in participation in God. His understanding of the resurrection body preserves specific lineaments of human form while also indicating their healing and suffusion with divine light. In discussing the resurrection body, Bābai also offers an idiosyncratic argument that the wounds of Christ in Jn 20.20 were a temporary but real miracle. In sum, Bābai reflects a significant development of earlier traditions of East Syrian towards a robust theology of human perfection in which human nature is transformed by participation in God.

The second French colonial empire (1830-1962) challenged soldiers, scholars, and administrators to understand societies radically different from their own so as to govern them better. Overlooking the contributions of many of these colonial officials, most historians have located the genesis of the French social theory used to understand these differences in the hallowed halls of Parisian universities and research institutes. This dissertation instead argues that colonial experience and study drove metropolitan theory. Through a contextualized examination of the published and unpublished writings and correspondence of key thinkers who bridged the notional metropolitan-colonial divide, this dissertation reveals intellectual networks that produced knowledge of societies in North and West Africa and contemplated the nature of colonial rule. From General Louis Faidherbe in the 1840s to politician Jacques Soustelle and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1950s, a succession of soldiers and administrators engaged in dialogue with their symbiotic colonial sources to translate indigenous ideas for a metropolitan audience and humanize French rule in Africa. Developing ideas in part from a reading of native African written and oral sources, these particular colonial thinkers conceived of social structure and race in civilizational terms, placing peoples along a temporally-anchored developmental continuum that promised advancement along a unique pathway if nurtured by a properly adapted program of Western intervention. This perspective differed significantly from the theories proposed by social scientists such as Emile Durkheim, who described "primitivity" as a stage in a unilinear process of social evolution. French African political and social structures incorporated elements of this intellectual direction by the mid-twentieth century, culminating in the attempt by Jacques Soustelle to govern Algeria with the assistance of ethnological institutions. At the same time, Pierre Bourdieu built on French ethnological ideas in an empirically grounded and personally contingent alternative to the dominant structuralist sociological and anthropological perspective in France.

Approached as an interdisciplinary study, this dissertation considers colonial knowledge from a number of different angles. First, it is a history of French African ethnology viewed through a biographical and microhistorical lens. Thus, it reintroduces the variance in the methods and interpretations employed by individual scholars and administrators that was a very real part of both scientific investigation and colonial rule. Race, civilization, and progress were not absolutes; definitions and sometimes applications of these terms varied according to local and personal socio-cultural context. This study also considers the evolution of French social theory from a novel perspective, that of the amateur fieldworker in the colonies. Far from passive recipients of metropolitan thought, these men (and sometimes women) actively shaped metropolitan ideas on basic social structure and interaction as they emerged. In the French science de l'homme, intellectual innovation came not always from academics in stuffy rooms, but instead from direct interaction and dialogue with the subjects of study themselves.