The Deep-Sticking Boundary Stone Cosmology, Sublimity, and Knowledge in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones

This chapter argues for both a broad similarity and a crucial distinction between the ways in which Lucretius (De rerum natura) and Seneca (Naturales quaestiones) employ the category of the sublime in their natural scientific (including cosmological) writings. Both authors, as previous scholars such as Gian Biago Conte and Gareth Williams have observed, use the sublime as part and parcel of their didactic and consolatory projects. Moreover, in both authors the sublime first causes the pupil-reader to "take fright" in the face of nature and then builds him up to conquer nature with his own knowledge. Yet in Lucretius and Seneca the knowledge that allows such conquest is quite distinct: for the Epicurean, scientific knowledge is limited, while for the Stoic, it approaches omniscience

‘Cosmic Spiritualism among the Pythagoreans, Stoics, Jews, and Early Christians.’

This paper traces how the dualism of body and soul, cosmic and human, is bridged in philosophical and religious traditions through appeal to the notion of ‘breath’ (πνεῦμα). It pursues this project by way of a genealogy of pneumatic cosmology and anthropology, covering a wide range of sources, including the Pythagoreans of the fifth century BCE (in particular, Philolaus of Croton); the Stoics of the third and second centuries BCE (especially Posidonius); the Jews writing in Hellenistic Alexandria in the first century BCE (Philo); and the Christians of the first century CE (the gospel writers and Paul). Starting from the early Pythagoreans, ‘breath’ and ‘breathing’ function to draw analogies between cosmogony and anthropogony – a notion ultimately rejected by Plato in the Timaeus and Aristotle in his cosmological works, but taken up by the Posidonius (perhaps following the early Stoa) and expanded into a rich and challenging corporeal metaphysics. Similarly, the Post-Hellenistic philosopher and biblical exegete Philo of Alexandria, who was deeply influenced by both Platonist and Stoic physics, approaches the cosmogony and anthropogony described in Genesis (1:1–3 and 1:7) through Platonist-Stoic philosophy, in his attempt to provide a philosophically rigorous explanation for why Moses employed certain terms or phrases when writing his book of creation. Finally, the chapter sees a determined shift in the direction of rejecting pneumatic cosmology for a revised pneumatic anthropogony in the writings of the New Testament: by appeal to the ‘Holy Spirit’ or ‘Holy Breath’ (πνεῦμα ἅγιον), early Christians effectively adapted the Stoic metaphysics of ‘breath’, with its notions of divine intelligence and bonding, to the prophetic and ecclesiastical project of building a Christian community conceived of as the ‘body of Christ’. Hence, the spiritual cosmogony of the Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Philo is effectively subordinated to the spiritual anthropogony that facilitates the construction of the Christian kosmopolis, only fully realised in the form of New Jerusalem, the ‘bride’ which, in tandem with the Holy Spirit, calls to the anointed. At the end of the Christian worldview, the kosmos of Greek philosophy is supplanted by the pneumatic kosmopolis