Oberseminar: Die Bibel bei den Kirchenvätern
28.04.2026, 10-16 Uhr
Raum: US-C-101 (Campus Unteres Schloss)
10.00 Uhr s.t.:
Dr. Samuel Pomeroy (Knoxville,TN): Origen, Political Theology, and the Afterlife of Deuteronomy 32
12.15 Uhr:
Mittagessen im FoodCourt at your own expense (Grabenstraße 11, 57072 Siegen)
14.00 Uhr s.t.:
Dr. Giovanni Hermanin de Reichenfeld (Aarhus/DK): Orige.net: Digital Exploration of Biblical Exegesisand Scriptural Networks in Origen of Alexandria
Abstracts
Dr. Giovanni Hermanin de Reichenfeld: Orige.net: Digital Exploration of Biblical Exegesis and Scriptural Networks in Origen of Alexandria
This presentation introduces Orige.net, an open-access digital platform that applies network analysis to the study of biblical quotation culture in the works of Origen of Alexandria. Moving beyond traditional hermeneutical approaches, it advances a quotation-centred methodology that examines how clusters of scriptural citations function as units of theological knowledge production in early Christian exegesis. After outlining the theoretical foundations of quotation culture and its relevance to patristic biblical interpretations, the presentation assesses the structure, technical implementation, and research potential of Orige.net. The platform visualisesrelationships between passages in Origen’s corpus, biblical quotations, and doctrinal themes, enabling the identification of recurring patterns and central scriptural nodes. By reconstructing Origen’s intertextual and mnemonic engagement with Scripture, Orige.net offers a novel tool for Origenian studies and demonstrates the broader value of network analysis for the study of quotation, intertextuality, and knowledge production in antiquity.
Dr. Samuel Pomeroy: Origen, Political Theology, and the Afterlife of Deuteronomy 32
This paper traces the transformation of a biblical exegetical tradition—the claim in Deuteronomy 32 that God “set the bounds of the nations according to the number of the angels of God”—into a durable framework for thinking about political order in Europe from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. Beginning with Origen’s doctrine of angelic “princes” assigned to nations, the essay argues that the patristic interpretation of distributed spiritual governance supplied a metaphysical grammar for territorial plurality: peoples, languages, and kingdoms were imagined as ordered by supra-human intelligences, while Israel alone was reserved as God’s direct portion. Far from disappearing after antiquity, this scheme was repeatedly reconfigured. Renaissance Christian Kabbalists such as Reuchlin and Francesco Giorgio integrated the tradition into a hermetic numerology of seventy-two angelic governors linked to Babel and the division of languages. Savonarola and Pico absorbed it into Dionysian hierarchies ordered toward human salvation. Reformation polemic turned the doctrine into a confessional fault line: Protestant theologians rejected “popish” claims about tutelary angels of kingdoms, even as figures like Luther and Milton retained or reformulated the idea of angelic presidency over peoples. In Catholic thought, Bossuet invoked the angelic society as the model of immutable political order. Early modern political theorists such as Campanella and Bodin preserved the spatial logic of angelic distribution while severing it from a salvation-historical framework, thereby grounding the limits of sovereignty in cosmographic rather than eschatological necessity. By the eighteenth century, Warburton could historicize the doctrine as an Egyptian inheritance and a stage in the evolution of theocracy—evidence that what had once structured metaphysics had become an object of intellectual history.
Rather than treating angelology as marginal speculation, this paper argues that the doctrine of nation-angels functioned as a persistent conceptual bridge between theology, ethnography, and political theory. Medieval angelology sought to unify cosmos and polity under a hierarchical regime of divine administration (Ghislain Casasl, La dépolitisation du monde: Angélologie médiévale et modernité, Paris: Vrin / Éditions de l’EHESS, 2022). Yet the strand of that tradition concerned with angelic “princes” of peoples, "kingdoms" and territories followed a different trajectory. It supplied early modern Europe with a metaphysical template for territorial plurality and limited sovereignty — a template that endured even as early modern natural philosophy displaced hierarchical cosmology.