Ammonius Saccas instructs Plotinus towards a synthesis of ancient Greek philosophy. A brief introduction to the historical Plotinus is offered. The Hypostases: The One or Supreme Reality, the Divine Mind, Nous, and the Universal Soul, Logos, are discussed in the context of Plato's eternal ideas, Beauty, Truth and Good. / An examination of the dialogue Plotinus has with art and beauty is offered. The relationship between Plato's divine intelligibles and art is discussed in context of the treatise On Beauty. The intelligible beauty of ideas, cosmos, nature and art are examined in context of the treatise On Intellectual Beauty. Plotinian theory of art is summarized. / Plotinus advances an "iconic" dialectic that serves his theological theory of art. The more important critical issues that arise from his description of the realm of art are addressed. Plotinian mysticism, and the subject of matter and form, identity and difference, is discussed. The opposing ways of the "picture" and the "word" are briefly summarized. / The appearance of theos is an event of hierophany . The meaning of art points towards the object of our ultimate concern. A Plotinian studio program for the painter concludes the thesis.

My interest in studying neurodegenerative models of illness lies primarily in the need to define human personhood over the progressive and often irreversible experience of dementia. Here, I analyze, challenge, and ultimately move beyond purely functional theories of personhood, which are necessarily exclusive in their reduction of the human person to a mere demonstration of capacity (for rationality, self-consciousness, suffering, or otherwise) that is inversely proportional to neuropathology. Bringing to the fore important contributions from both secular philosophical thought and the Abrahamic faith traditions, I argue that functional perspectives neglect the psychosocial, spiritual, and biographical dimensions of personhood, which must be described in reference to both historical and concurrent life experiences. Accounting for these features requires the promotion of social environments that are ideal for the maintenance or preservation of this sense of "person" and calls for the treatment of patients with dementia based on personhood and inherent dignity. / My thesis, as an analysis of this debate in the interdisciplinary field of bioethics, brings together philosophy, medicine, law, and the Abrahamic faith traditions to establish guidelines toward a more integrative definition of personhood in the context of the evolving and interactive experiences of degenerative dementia.

Hindu religious culture has a rich and long-standing performance tradition containing many genres and regional types that contribute significantly to an understanding of the living vitality of the religion. Because the field of religious studies has focused on texts, the assumption exists that these are primary, and performances based on them are mere enactments and therefore derivative. This thesis will challenge this common assumption by arguing that performances themselves can be constitutive events in which religious worldviews, social histories, and group and personal identities are created or re-negotiated. In this work, I examine the history of performance cultures (understood both as genres and the groups that develop and perform them) in the Telugu-speaking regions of South India from the sixteenth century to the present in order to elucidate the cross-fertilization among various performance spheres over time. / My specific focus is on the figure of Satyabhama (lit. True Woman or Woman of Truth), the favourite wife of the god Kṛṣṇa. Satyabhama represents a range of emotions, which makes her character popular with dramatists and other artists in the Telugu-speaking regions of South India where poets composed hundreds of performance-texts about her, and several caste groups have enacted her character through narrative drama. / The dissertation is composed of four substantive parts - text, context, memory, and mimesis. The first part explores the figure of Satyabhama in the Mahabharata and in three Sanskrit Puraṇic texts. The second examines the courtly traditions of poetry and village performances in the Telugu language, where Satyabhama is innovatively portrayed through aesthetic categories. The third is based on ethnographic work with women of the contemporary kalavantula (devadasi) community and looks at the ways in which they identify with Satyabhama and other female aesthetic archetypes (nayikas). The final section is based on fieldwork with the smarta Brahmin male community in Kuchipudi village, where men continue to perform mimetic representations of Satyabhama through a performative modality known as stri-veṣam ("guise of a woman").

My dissertation is focused on a cycle of Saraha's Adamantine Songs and their relationship to the Great Seal. Belonging to a genre known as 'Adamantine Songs'---Vajra Giti in Sanskrit, or rDo rje 'i gLu in Tibetan---their titles are: "A Body Treasury called the Immortal Adamantine Song"; "A Speech Treasury called the Manjughosa Adamantine Song" and "A Mind Treasury called the Unborn Adamantine Song". The dissertation is divided into two parts: the first is the contextualization of a Great Seal (Sanskrit: mahamudra; Tibetan: phyag rgya chenpo) root text by the adept Saraha; and the second is a critical edition of the Tibetan text along with the first full translation of the text into English. The critical edition of the Tibetan is based on versions of the poems drawn from five different Tibetan sources---four scriptural (the sDe dge, Co ne, sNar thang and 'Peking' bsTan 'gyurs) and one literary (Mipham Rinpoche's 19th century collection 'phags yul grub dbang dam pa rnams kyi zab mo'i do ha rnams las kho la byung mu tig phreng ba or "Pearl Garland of the Profound Dohas of the Noble Great Siddhas of India"). / The first chapters of the dissertation explore the contexts of this song cycle, its author and traditions that relate to it, in particular the Karma Kagyu (karma bka' brgyud) school of Tibetan Buddhism. The first chapter is a discussion of the author, Saraha, the tales of whose many 'lives' pervade Tibetan Buddhist traditions to this day. Chapter 2 explores the broader context of South Asian siddha traditions, while Chapters 3 and 4 provide an analysis of the Great Seal both as it emerges through Saraba's work and as it exists as a living tradition in the Tibetan Buddhist context. As mentioned above, particular emphasis is given to the Karma Kagyu school. Finally, Chapter 5 provides an introduction to Tibetan poetics and the Sanskrit traditions that influence it.

Emil Ludwig Fackenheim became a Rabbi even as the Holocaust was claiming the lives of six million Jews. Further study, first in Scotland and then in Canada, brought him to an impressive academic career in philosophy, to which he committed much of his life and writings. Yet he was also driven to try to respond theologically to the Shoa, so as to offer Judaism a genuine alternative to the nineteenth century tradition of liberal Judaism which had not been able to withstand or fight against National Socialism when Hitler came to political power. By going behind that failed nineteenth century tradition, primarily in dialogue with the thought of Rosenzweig and Buber, Fackenheim thought, by the middle of the sixth decade of the twentieth century, that he had rediscovered a solid core for post-Auschwitz Jewish faith: one rooted in a recovery of supernatural revelation, of God's presence in, and the messianic goal of, history. The Six Day War of June 1967 threw his careful reconstruction of Jewish faith into disarray, however. Facing a second Holocaust in one lifetime; and with an acute awareness that once again the Jewish people stood alone, Fackenheim raised questions about God and history and the Messianic which utterly destroyed his reconstruction. Even as he struggled with the crisis, however, he began to discern that hope had become a commandment. He began a process of even more profound reconstruction (or "destructive recovery") of the faith that radically reshaped the possibility of hope for Jewish faith in a post-Shoa world. And Christian theologians in dialogue with him find it necessary to embark on a destructive recovery of hope for the Christian tradition as an authentically Christian response to Auschwitz. Emerging from that dialogue is a fresh appreciation of the self-critical tradition of the theology of the cross.

Roman Catholicism and Srivaiṣṇavism are two religious traditions in which mediation, primarily through the use of images, plays a central role in soteriology. A comparison of various modes of mediation between these two traditions will highlight a dialectic of presence and absence, inherent in mediation, and will examine the various ways of interpreting and dealing with this dialectic in their respective theologies. Three general categories of mediation are identified through which this comparison will take place: God, saint, and priest. / Images of the full presence of God, namely the eucharistic host in Roman Catholicism and the arcavatara in Srivaiṣṇavism, mediate this full presence either through the transformation of substance (as in Roman Catholicism) or through the appearance of materiality and limited form (in Srivaiṣṇavism). Saints and alvars can also be regarded as images or mediatory modes; the saint embodies and mediates Christ's presence, becoming "as if" Christ. This presence is manifested not only in the saint's life but in his or her relics as well. The alvar is regarded as an aṁsa or partial incarnation, thus manifesting a part of God, most notably His ornaments, weapons and companions. / A specific comparison of Mary and Aṇṭaḷ/Sri will further highlight the dialectic of presence and absence in addition to pointing out their unique status within their respective traditions. A comparison of priests and acaryas will show mediation in living images. Priests become "as if" Christ through their ordination, and are seen to embody him particularly in specific ritual acts. The acarya functions in much the same way as Aṇṭaḷ/Sri, mediating between God and the believer as an aṁsa or partial incarnation. / Different theological conceptions of God and incarnation result in the different understandings of mediation and the different ways that the two traditions deal with the dialectic of presence and absence. Images in both traditions also bring to light an "as if" conception in the mind of the believer; saints and priests function "as if" Christ and the various images in Srivaiṣṇaavism appear "as if" material or "as if" human, thus allowing them to mediate the divine presence to the community.

The study of patristic quotations of the Greek New Testament has proven valuable in the field of textual criticism as a means of locating variant readings both chronologically and geographically, facilitating the reconstruction of the development of the different textual groups. This thesis will document the Pauline citations, adaptations and allusions of Didymus of Alexandria, and then determine their textual affinities, along the lines of earlier studies in this field. Using the methodology developed by B. Ehrman, including both a statistical analysis and a method of group profiling, this study concludes that the text of Paul in Didymus clearly belongs to the Alexandrian group. An appendix giving suggestions for corrections and additions to the critical apparatuses of both the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland text and the 4th edition of the United Bible Societies text of the Greek New Testament has also been provided.

In order to work toward right relationships among humanity and all other things, what is required is an ethical theory that concerns itself with interests that include but are not limited to the human. James M. Gustafson's theocentric ethics, which centres value on God, can accomplish this in the religious sphere. Gustafson's ethical theory also has the potential to work within nontheistic secularism as a way of construing all things as interrelated and interdependent. Underlying Gustafson's theology and value theory is a commonsense ontology, which appreciates evidences from the sciences, affective orientation, and resembles certain webs of beliefs held by many outside religious communities. In order to illustrate the transition to secular Gustafsonian ethical theory, functional surrogates of theology found in secular philosophy, and particularly in the work of Mary Midgley, are identified. Gustafson's ethical theory is used to identify certain obligations and restrictions with regard to environmental ethics.

This thesis is a study of the Saundarya Lahari, a Sanskrit poem associated with the Srividya Sakta Tantric tradition. It traces the movement of meaning between textual, ritual, and cultural spaces in order to understand the performed possibilities of the text. The Goddess as Sakti (power) both grants enjoyment and is the principle of that enjoyment: beauty, love, and worldly powers. These powers follow the movements of the text: its scanning of the Goddess from shining head to toe; the twinned movements of publicity (exoterism) and secrecy (esoterism); and the gestures and utterances of ritual performance. First the text is located among classical Sanskrit aesthetics, then as a devotional song (stotra), and finally as a manual for occult practice (prayoga). Situated in these contexts, the multivalence of the text comes to the foreground; mapping the tensions between these meanings is the starting point for the development of a Tantric hermeneutic.

This dissertation sets out to determine the social function of paraenesis ("moral exhortation") within Valentinian Christianity. In order to explicate this social function, this study places the discussion within the context of ancient rhetorical practices of ethical admonition; i.e., how did paraenetic discursive practices act as rhetorical devices for affecting social formation? In order to establish the function of paraenesis, it is necessary to engage both literary and social aspects of the paraenetic genre. The latter is most challenging, given the methodological difficulties inherent in moving from textual context to socio-historical reconstruction of the situation behind a text. To address this problem, a method is adapted from sociology (interactionism) and social psychology (positioning theory) in order to critically gauge the social idealization of the sources. Special attention is given to the paraenetic contours of the Gospel of Truth (NHC I,3) and the Interpretation of Knowledge (NHC XI,1). / This dissertation is structured into five chapters. The first chapter will frame the discussion within current developments in the study of Gnosticism, where there has been a growing appreciation for social and ethical aspects of the Nag Hammadi tractates. A delimitation of the source base for this study will also be offered. Chapter 2 will offer a comprehensive overview of scholarly discussions of paraenesis over the past century. A functional definition, with an attendant typology of paraenetic material will be offered in closing. Chapter 3 directly engages the literary aspects of paraenesis within Valentinianism, placing the discussion within the context of moral exhortation in the Greco-Roman world, and, more specifically, early Christianity. This chapter will establish the presence of paraenesis within the Valentinian sources. Chapter 4 will then address the social function of paraenesis in two examples of Valentinian paraenesis, highlighting the rhetorical and discursive voice of each text. The final chapter will summarize the findings of the dissertation and raise implications of this study for the field of early Christian studies.