As a historian – and I do consider myself one – I tend to look for two distinct features in the data I peruse: Patterns and limits. Both of these excite my interest like few other topics, and both of these may only be adequately identified and gauged and ascertained once vast amounts of data,…
Måned: oktober 2025
Porphyry’s revealing tribute to Plotinus
Have you ever read Porphyry’s beautiful tribute to his Master and Guru, the wonderful Plotinus; the Platonic Philosopher-Mystic of whom the famous ancient literary critic Longinus admiringly said «set the principles of Pythagoras and of Plato in a clearer light than anyone before him» (and who may have been a close friend of Origen)? You…
On my thesis research into the thought of St. Augustine of Hippo
As I am going through my master’s thesis, four years after its completion, in order to make some minor corrections, and recalling the for me momentous, and at times almost ecstatic experience the process of composing it was, I would reiterate that some of the most striking discoveries I made when doing the research on…
Creation out of Nothing as Ineffable Emanations from a Divine «No-Thing»
Is this (please see below) one of the greatest descriptions of the mysterious process of continual “Creation” by way of an ongoing process of Emanation ever composed by a Christian? I would say it is. I have been reading and analyzing John Scotus Eriugena’s magnum opus, the dialogue that is his Periphyseon, on and off…
The enigmatic Huqoq Mosaic – whom does it really depict?
Discovered in the ruins of an ancient synagogue in Galilee in 2012/2013, this stunning scene, part of a series of unusually well-preserved mosaics adorning the floors of a synagogue dated to the 400s A.D., has been surmised to depict a meeting between Alexander the Great and the High Priest of Jerusalem, many centuries before, but…
How the «Hebrew» Alphabet is actually a version of the Aramaic alphabet, and not the ancient «Hebrew» one
Regarding the topics of the true origins and purposes and messages of the collection of texts now commonly styled the Old Testament or the Tanakh, categories which include the so-called Five Books of Moses, I would assert that we cannot even begin to arrive at a viable conclusion until we have familiarized ourselves with and…
Edmund Schilvold: Skribent, fotograf, filosof, friluftsentusiast 