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Browsing Department of Humanities by Author "Hannan, Sean"
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Item Augustine's time of death in City of God 13(2019) Hannan, Sean"Only a living person can be a dying one," writes Augustine in De ciuitate dei 13.9. For Augustine, this strange fact offers us an occasion for reflection. If we are indeed racing toward the end on a cursus ad mortem, when do we pass the finish line? A living person is "in life" (in uita), while a dead one is post mortem. But as ciu. 13.11 asks: is anyone ever in morte, "in death?" This question must be asked alongside an earlier one, which had motivated Augustine's struggle in Confessiones 11.14.17 to make sense of time from the very beginning: quid est enim tempus? What is at stake here is whether or not there is such a thing as an instant of death: a moment when someone is no longer alive but not yet dead, a moment when they are "dying" (moriens) in the present tense. If we want to understand Augustine's question about the time of death in ciu. 13, then we have to frame it in terms of the interrogation of time proper in conf. 11.Item The camp of God: reimagining pilgrimage as migrancy in Augustine’s City of God 1(2021) Hannan, SeanFollowing the Sack of Rome in 410 CE, African Christians like Augustine welcomed migrants pouring onto their shores from Italy. This was part of a trend of catastrophic human displacement that anticipated—albeit in an inverted manner—the Mediterranean migrant crisis of the twenty-first century. It was in this context that Augustine wrote, in his City of God, of a civitas made up of peregrini—not merely ‘pilgrims,’ but ‘migrants’ or ‘refugees.’ The vision of community corresponding to Augustine’s sense of peregrinatio was thus not the city, but the camp: the civitas that plays host to the migrant. As Agamben has reminded us, the prevalence of camps, in addition to embodying violence against the encamped, tells us something about the regime of law conditioning even those who supposedly live ‘outside the walls.’ In light of Agamben’s insight, this article makes the case that Augustine’s political theology of peregrinatio and civitas is best understood in terms of migrancy and the refugee camp.Item Mysticism and materialism in the wake of German idealism(2022) Goggin, W. Ezekiel; Hannan, SeanThis book argues that the rediscovery of mystical theology in nineteenth-century Germany not only helped inspire idealism and romanticism, but also planted the seeds of their overcoming by way of critical materialism. Thanks in part to the Neoplatonic turn in the works of J. G. Fichte, as well as the enthusiasm of mining engineer Franz X. von Baader, mystical themes gained a critical currency, and mystical texts returned to circulation. This reawakening of the mystical tradition influenced romantic and idealist thinkers such as Novalis and Hegel, and also shaped later critical interventions by Marx, Benjamin, and Bataille. Rather than rehearsing well-known connections to Swedenborg or Böhme, this study goes back further to the works of Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Catherine of Siena, and Angela of Foligno. The book offers a new perspective on the reception of mystical self-interrogation in nineteenth-century German thought and will appeal to scholars of philosophy, history, theology, and religious studies.Item Nineveh overturned: Augustine and Chrysostom on the threat of Jonah(2020) Hannan, SeanBoth John Chrysostom and Augustine of Hippo find in the story of Jonah and the Ninevites an invitation to reflect upon the moral and political challenges undergone by cities facing the possibility of disaster. While Nineveh was threatened with destruction at the hands of the divine, cities like Constantinople and Rome were instead threatened with disaster of a natural or military kind, ranging from earthquakes to invasions. Regardless, both Chrysostom and Augustine thought the lessons of Jonah could be applied to contemporary crises. The two pastoral preachers did so in quite different ways, however. For Chrysostom, the repentance of the Ninevites in the face of a divine threat served as a model for his own congregation. For Augustine, however, the divine was incapable of uttering threats, and so Jonah’s prophecy had to come true: Nineveh had to be overturned. In order to make this case, Augustine reconfigured the meaning of the word “overturning” (euersio), so that he could make the case that the repentance of the Ninevites was driven not by their fear, but rather by the combined agency of divine grace and political coercion.Item On time, change, history, and conversion(2020) Hannan, SeanSean Hannan offers a new interpretation of Augustine of Hippo's approach to temporality by contrasting it with contemporary accounts of time drawn from philosophy, political theology, and popular science. Hannan argues that, rather than offering us a deceptively simple roadmap forward, Augustine asks us to face up to the question of time itself before we take on tasks like transforming ourselves and our world. Augustine discovered that the disorientation we feel in the face of change is a symptom of a deeper problem: namely, that we cannot truly comprehend time, even while it conditions every facet of our lives. This book puts Augustine into creative conversation with contemporary thinkers, from Pierre Hadot and Giorgio Agamben to Steven Pinker and Stephen Hawking, on questions such as the definition of time, the metaphysics of transformation, and the shape of history. The goal is to learn what Augustine can teach us about the nature of temporality and the possibility of change in this temporal world of ours.Item Pedagogical reflections on New Testament apocrypha: more noncanonical scriptures, volume 2(2023) Hannan, SeanIn this review article, the author makes the case for Tony Burke’s recent second volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures (Eerdmans, 2020) as a publication that can help historians and scholars of religion navigate the convoluted warrens of ancient Christian literature. Adopting a pedagogical lens, the author argues that this volume goes deeper than standard tomes like Marvin Meyer’s Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2007), offering its audience a more rigorously up-to-date picture of the state of Apocrypha research. The level of rigour and detail on display here might also make the volume more suitable for graduate or upper-level undergraduate courses. In order to support his presentation of the pedagogical value of Burke’s work, the author draws on specific examples rooted in several primary sources contained therein, from the Old Uyghur Adoration of the Magi to the Byzantine Life of Mary Magdalene.Item To see coming: Augustine and Heidegger on the arising and passing away of things(2012) Hannan, SeanFor both Augustine and Heidegger, the temporality of things leads to a formidable problem in the history of philosophy. If our understanding of ‘what is’ depends on the enduring presence of something, then what are we to make of the fact that the world appears to us as an ever-changing flux? If the universe is the sum of all things arising and passing away, then we should come to see those things as utterly temporal, without thereby ascribing to them a lesser ontological status. But how can we see the world ‘temporally?’ By sketching out these thinkers' treatment of this question alongside one another, we should be able to get a sense of what it means to view the world in a manner more adequate to its temporality.