Hippolytus recast and a late antique Dies irae

The paper aims at casting some light on the intellectual and social context of an eschatological treatise transmitted under the name of Hippolytus (De consummatione mundi, CPG 1910) and a closely related metrical homily in Greek attributed to Ephrem of Syria and preserved in different versions (CPG 3946, 4012). The first of the two texts has long been known to be a reworking of a genuine work of Hippolytus on the subject (De Christo et Antichristo, CPG 1872) and its close relation to the Ephrem Graecus text has also been observed. In my paper I propose new clues as to the dating of these texts and explore in which way the eschatological vision of Hippolytus has been updated in the pseudepigraphon

How to Prove the Existence of a Supreme Being?

This essay undertakes the task of unravelling the history of the concept of the “Supreme Being” from the beginnings of Greek philosophy to the emergence of Christianity, with a special attention to a system of argumentation meant to demonstrate the existence - and eternity - of such a being. Referred to here as the “gradation argument”, it is related to the ontological proof, and thus our inquiry belongs to the discussion about the prehistory of the latter. The key authors in the development of the argument discussed are Xenophanes, Plato, Aristotle, and Cleanthes, but I devote a short excursus to the presence of the concept of the Supreme Deity in pseudo-Pythagorean and Middle Platonist authors, and to the epistemological aspect of the concept that connects it with the via eminentiae. Besides the historical inquiry, I examine the validity of the proof and propose a mathematical model that helps us to see its merits and limits