“The Wisdom of Creation in Psalm 104,”

The paper examines the way creation is described in Psalm 104 and how this text is related to the Creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2.

Masters Thesis, 2015

My primary purpose in this thesis is to come to understand Evagrius' teaching regarding the wisdom of creation. But before we come to see that, we will first need to understand who he was and how his life influenced his theology of wisdom. In the First Part of this thesis, we will try to understand who Evagrius was by first focusing on his life, his works, and their modern reception. In Chapter One of this First Part we will focus on recounting the life of Evagrius, taking as our primary sources the Vita Copta and the Historia Lausiaca, both of them written by Palladius. In Chapter Two we will turn our attention to the modern reception of Evagrius' patrimony and the different schools of thought that have formed around his teachings. In presenting an overview of the modern status quaestionis, we will rely primarily on the work of Fr.'s Gabriel Bunge, Izsák Baán, Jeremy Driscoll, and Luke Dysinger, all of them Benedictine monks, as well as on the work of Augustine Casiday. These scholars together represent the 'Benedictine school' of interpretation, that is, a particular hermeneutic that seeks to understand Evagrius in an orthodox light and thus to receive his patrimony as an organic whole, coming as it does from the scriptural and monastic milieu of Cappadocia and the Egyptian desert. We will examine in the Second Part of our thesis the role of the wisdom of creation in the theology of Evagrius and how it draws the mind towards God. If we wish to come to knowledge about something, the first and most fundamental question that must be answered is, “what is it?” But, the first step in understanding the nature of a thing is to seek for its causes, for these are the principles of its being. Once one has the cause, then they know why it is and, to some extent, what it is. Therefore, in trying to understand what wisdom is and how it operates in the theology of Evagrius, we will focus primarily on its various causes. In the First Chapter of this Second Part, we will discuss the final cause of wisdom, that is its ultimate purpose or final goal. In the Second Chapter of this part we will discuss the content of created wisdom, namely its material and formal aspects. Finally, in the Third Chapter we will discuss the divine author and agent cause of created wisdom, that is, the Word and Wisdom itself.

Religions, 2016

Oxford Handbook of the Bible and Wisdom, 2021

Now published in Oxford Handbooks Online & in hardcopy print.

2015

Journal for The Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 2011

Psalm 1 is usually called a “Wisdom Psalm” as if it were a common and acknowledged genre. Reflecting on such a denomination will therefore serve as a test case since a detailed analysis of that psalm points to many different elements that can be characterized as sapiential. However the analysis of these elements, forms, themes and images such as the tree, the way and the law when considered in their wider context and traditions shows that they may not be reduced to the literary corpus of biblical so-called wisdom books. They infuse other corpora such as legal in the book of Deuteronomy and narrative or even mythological in the book of Genesis. Moreover they are interestingly well known in other ancient literatures such as the Mesopotamian “tree of life” makes clear. It is therefore the aim of this paper to reflect on the nature of wisdom in the ancient Near East and to bring to light not so much the question of genre and codification, which seems inappropriate, but that of traditions as related to different domains of knowledge, institutions, art and manufacture. Reflecting on the nature of wisdom clearly leads to a renewed definition in terms of cultural and intellectual traditions rather than literary codification.