Religion Past and Present
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Subject: Religious Studies
Edited by: Hans Dieter Betz, Don S. Browning†, Bernd Janowski and Eberhard Jüngel
Religion Past and Present (RPP) Online is the online version of the updated English translation of the 4th edition of the definitive encyclopedia of religion worldwide: the peerless Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (RGG). This great resource, now at last available in English and Online, Religion Past and Present Online continues the tradition of deep knowledge and authority relied upon by generations of scholars in religious, theological, and biblical studies. Including the latest developments in research, Religion Past and Present Online encompasses a vast range of subjects connected with religion.
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Religion Past and Present (RPP) Online is the online version of the updated English translation of the 4th edition of the definitive encyclopedia of religion worldwide: the peerless Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (RGG). This great resource, now at last available in English and Online, Religion Past and Present Online continues the tradition of deep knowledge and authority relied upon by generations of scholars in religious, theological, and biblical studies. Including the latest developments in research, Religion Past and Present Online encompasses a vast range of subjects connected with religion.
Subscriptions: see brill.com
Iamblichus
(436 words)
[German Version] (c. 240/245, Chalkis – c. 325, Apamea), a neo-Platonist, initially a student of the Aristotelian Anatolios, then of Porphyry, presumably taught in Apamea. Iamblichus had great influence on the intellectual climate of paganism in Late Antiquity. The Syrian branch of Neo-Platonism that he founded was characterized by its metaphysical interpretation and justification of Greek and oriental polytheism. With Iamblichus, Neo-Platonism became a philosophical religion in competition with C…
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Religion Past and Present
Iaşi
(222 words)
[German Version] Iaşi, a city in eastern Romania. Together with Suceava (Polish: Suczawa), Iaşi was intermittently the seat of the dukes and metropolitans of Moldavia from the 15th century onward, and became their permanent seat at the end of the 16th century. In 1642 a synod met in Iaşi which passed the so-called
Confessio Orthodoxa (Articles of Faith: II) of P. Mogila. Iaşi stood under Greek (Phanariot) and partly under Russian influence until the 19th century. The transition to the Romanian-national cultural language was effected in Iaşi around …
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Religion Past and Present
Ibas of Edessa
(187 words)
[German Version] Ibas followed Rabbūlā in 435 as bishop and distinguished himself as the translator of the works of Antiochene theologians (Antiochene theology) from the Greek into Syriac. Ibas sought in vain to suppress the growing influence of the extreme Cyrillians. In 449, he was deposed at the so-called Robber Synod in Ephesus (Ephesus, Councils of); two years later, however, he was rehabilitated in Chalcedon, and from then on he held the Edessene see until his death in 457. In 433, Ibas wrot…
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Religion Past and Present
Ibero-America
(147 words)
[German Version] Ibero-America designates the areas of America colonized by the Iberian peoples – Portuguese and Spaniards – and stamped with their ideological and institutional heritage. The strong influence of the Iberian cultural heritage comes to expression in the preservation of the Spanish language in the areas colonized by Spain and of the Portuguese language in Brazil, colonized by the Portuguese, as well as in the Iberian form of Catholicism that dominated until the 19th century. Only the…
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Religion Past and Present
Ibiapina, Padre
(177 words)
[German Version] (José António Pereira; Aug 5, 1806, Sobral, Brazil – Feb 19, 1883, Paraíba, Brazil). From 1834 to 1837 Ibiapina was a representative of the people. He was ordained priest at age 47 and then became vicar-general of the diocese of Olinda, Brazil, for two years. From 1855 on, he traveled for 28 years, mostly on foot, through the present-day federal states of Pianí, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba and Pernambuco. As “apostle of the Northeast” he embodied the authorities in one person as pastoral counselor, judge, engineer ¶ and organizer. He brought people together to…
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Religion Past and Present
Ibn al-ʿAssāl
(210 words)
[German Version] Ibn al-ʿAssāl, family. Three brothers from the influential family of Aulād al-ʿAssāl played an important role in the Arabic literary renaissance of the Coptic Church in the 13th century.
1. Aṣ-Ṣafī Abū l Faḍāʾil ibn al-ʿAssāl (died c. 1265). Of aṣ-Ṣafī's works, the following deserve mention: liturgical homilies in rhymed prose (
sağʿ), an apologetic treatment of the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and especially his
Nomocanon, a compendium of canon law.
2. Al-Asʿad Abū l Farağ Hibatallāh ibn al-ʿAssāl. Among other works, Al-Asʿad prepared …
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Religion Past and Present
Ibn aṭ-Ṭaiyib
(152 words)
[German Version] (died 1043 in Baghdad). The East Syrian Nestorian (Nestorianism) scholar Abū l-Farağ ʿAbdallāh ibn aṭ-Ṭaiyib was not only a trained physician but also a philosopher, theologian, and exegete. Of his Arabic writings, the following deserve particular mention: a compendium of canon law (
Fiqh an-naṣrānīya), a translation of the
Diatessaron (from Syriac), essays on the doctrine of the Trinity, a commentary on Genesis belonging to his major work
Firdaus an-naṣrānīya [The Paradise of Christendom], and a commentary on the
Eisagoge by the Neo-Platonic scholar Porphyry. Ste…
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Religion Past and Present
Ibn Daud, Abraham
(291 words)
[German Version] (ben David; acronym Rabad I; c. 1110, Córdoba – 1180, Toledo), historian, philosopher, and scholar. Ibn Daud was one of the leading personalities of the Jewish community in 12th-century Spain. He acquired an extensive knowledge of philosophy, medicine, and astronomy in his native town of Córdoba, and was also familiar with the Qurʾān and the New Testament. His main historical work,
Sefer ha-Kabbalah (ET:
The Book of Tradition, 1967), was on the one hand a polemical tractate against the Karaites, who rejected rabbinic tradition; Ibn Daud according…
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Religion Past and Present
Ibn Ezra, Abraham ben Meir
(113 words)
[German Version] (1089, Toledo – 1164, Rome). Ibn Ezra spent a number of years in Córdoba. Following the Almohad conquest, he was forced to leave Andalusia and lived in Italy, France, and England. As an itinerant poet, grammarian, Bible commentator, astronomer, and mathematician, he played a decisive role in the spreading of the prosody and poetic art of the Spanish school of Hebrew poetry. His Hebrew translations and writings familiarized the Jews of Christian Europe with Jewish-Arabic texts and the Arabic linguistic literature of the Middle Ages. Wout J. van Bekkum Bibliography W. Ba…
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Religion Past and Present
Ibn Ezra, Moses ben Jakob
(133 words)
[German Version] (Abu Harūn; 1055, Granada – c.1135). Ibn Ezra wrote a large number of ¶ religious and secular poems that followed the conventional structure of medieval Arabic and Hebrew verse compositions. He is regarded as the first Jewish poet in Andalusia to have authored a book of homonymous poems in analogy to the Arabic style. His Judeo-Arabic prose writings on Hebrew verse earned him an important place as a theorist, critic, and literary historian. His
Kitāb al-Muḥāḍara wa al-Muḍākara [Book of conversation and discussion] is the most comprehensive work on Hebrew p…
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Religion Past and Present
Ibn Gabirol, Salomo ben Yehuda
(272 words)
[German Version] (Abū ʿAğūb Sulaimān ibn Yaḥyā ibn Gabirūl, Lat. Avicebron; c. 1021, Malaga – c. 1058, Valencia). Ibn Gabirol initially lived in Saragossa, where he enjoyed the patronage of Yequtiel Ibn Hassan Ibn Kabrūn and of other wealthy benefactors. He later moved to Valencia. He is known both as the author of secular and liturgical Hebrew poetry and as a Jewish Neo-Platonist (Neo-Platonism: III). Christian Scholastics knew him by the name Avicebron. His philosophical work
Meqor Chayyim [The source of life] expounds the theory of creation based on the relationship b…
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Religion Past and Present
Ibn Ḫaldūn
(166 words)
[German Version] (ʿAbdarraḥmān ibn Muḥammad; May 7, 1332, Tunis – Mar 19, 1406, Cairo), Arab historian. After a varied career in the courts of Fez, Granada and Bougie, Ibn Ḫaldūn arrived in Egypt, taught law in Cairo at the Azhar mosque and other academies ¶ and repeatedly officiated as a judge. His chief work is
al-Muqaddima [Introduction], which precedes his universal history compiled from older sources, a theory of civilization and analysis of the origin and collapse of dominion, presented, primarily, using the example of the Moroccan-Andalusian …
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Religion Past and Present
Ibn Tamim, Dunash
(113 words)
[German Version] (Abū Sahl Dūnash al-Shafaldij; Adonim; Qairawan, North Africa, c. 890 – c. 955). Ibn Tamim was known as a Hebrew grammarian and lexicographer. He studied under the philosopher and physician Israeli. His Judeo-Arabic commentary on the
Book of Creation may have been influenced by Saadia Gaon in Babylonia. From quotations by many other grammarians it becomes clear that Ibn Tamim wrote a comparative lexicographic study of Hebrew and Arabic, sometimes including Aramaic words as well. Unfortunately, Ibn Tamim's lexicon is not extant. Wout J. van Bekkum Bibliography P. Fen…
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Religion Past and Present
Ibn Tibbon
(303 words)
[German Version] Ibn Tibbon, family. The Tibbonids, the family of Ibn Tibbon, were a prominent dynasty of translators of Arabic and Judeo-Arabic works by Jewish authors into Hebrew.
1 The first translator is the physician Judah ben Saul Ibn Tibbon (1120–1190), who was born in Granada in Muslim Spain. He was driven out of Spain by the Almohades invasion and settled in Lunel around 1150.
2 His son Samuel ben Judah Ibn Tibbon (birth unknown – c. 1232) translated M. Maimonides, notably his
Guide of the Perplexed in 1204, as well as Galen, Aristotle, and a Romance of Alexander the Gre…
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Religion Past and Present
Ibn Ṭufail, Abū Bakr
(316 words)
[German Version] (c. 1105, Wādī Āš, Spain – 1185, Marrakech), physician and Islamic philosopher. Ibn Ṭufail supported Averroes and became known as the author of the novel
Ḥaiy ibn Yaqẓān [The living, son of the wakeful one]. In this novel, Ibn Ṭufail describes the path to recognition of a person named Ḥaiy, who grew up alone on a solitary island from his birth. Ḥaiy deciphers his environment step by step, grasps the laws of logic and of physics, gains insight into the cosmic order, and recognizes the necessity of a creator.…
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Religion Past and Present
Ibn Verga, Solomon
(318 words)
[German Version] After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Ibn Verga first settled in Lisbon, where he lived for a few years as a Marrano before leaving Portugal in 1506. He apparently died in Flanders around 1530. In the 1520s, he wrote
Shevet Yehudah [The scepter of Judah] (1554), one of the most popular historical works in the early modern period, based on the
Sefer
Yosippon and A. Ibn Daud's
Sefer Ha-Kabbalah.
Shevet Yehudah, supplemented by Ibn Verga's son Joseph and first published in 1554, describes the history of the persecutions of Jews since the destructio…
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Religion Past and Present
Ibsen, Henrik
(559 words)
[German Version] (Mar 20, 1828, Skien, Norway – May 23, 1906, Oslo). Along with J.A. Strindberg, Ibsen founded modern drama. Ibsen, whose father went bankrupt, broke with his family early on. Already during his apprenticeship as a pharmacist, he turned to the theater. After political-revolutionary beginnings (
Catilina, 1848) and contact with socialist movements, Ibsen wrote romantic nationalistic dramas (
Lady Inger of Oestraat [
Fru Inger til Østeraad, 1855]) for the theater in Bergen, where he was artistic director (1851–1857). After failures as director of t…
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Religion Past and Present
Iceland
(930 words)
[German Version] is a volcanic island in the North Atlantic with an area of 103,000 km2 (23% used for agriculture, 1% is forest). The population (319,756 in 2008) is a homogeneous mix of Norwegian and Celtic influence. After isolated and brief settlements by Irish monks, the island was settled by Norwegian settlers (mostly directly from Norway, with a minority from Norwegian settlements in Scotland and Ireland together with their Celtic slaves). In 930 these settlers founded a parliament, the Althing, with legislative and judiciary…
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Religion Past and Present
I Ching
(650 words)
[German Version] (
Yi Jing), the “Book of Changes,” also known as
Zhou Yi, the “Changes [according to the usage of the dynasty] of Zhou”; its oldest portions (possibly 9th cent. bce) were set out in writing by scholars of the Western Zhou dynasty on the basis of older priestly practices of divination, manticism, and oracle consultation. The book runs through a cycle of 26=64 diagrams (
gua) encompassing the entirety of all world states and changes. The base 2 number indicates that every event in the world is either to be interpreted as changing or as unchanging…
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Religion Past and Present
Iconoclasm
(459 words)
[German Version] (“the breaking of images”)
I The iconoclastic incidents that took place in the Byzantine state between 726 and 843 must be interpreted against the background of a highly differentiated Christian veneration of images (VI) which was capable of profoundly disturbing the power-political balance between the image of Christ and that of the emperor. The event marking the beginning of the first, imperially decreed iconoclastic phase in 726 was the removal, by Leo III, of the image of Christ fr…
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Religion Past and Present
Iconoclastic Controversy/Iconoclasts
(8 words)
[German Version] Veneration of images
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Religion Past and Present
Iconography
(6,550 words)
[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Archaeology – III. Iconography and the Bible – IV. Christian Iconography – V. Jewish Iconography – VI. Islamic Iconography – VII. Buddhist Iconography – VIII. Hindu Iconography
I. Religious Studies
Iconography (Gk εἰκονογραϕία/
eikonographía) originally meant the description of images (Arist.
Poet. XV; Strabo XV 1.19), but nowadays is used to refer to the methodical study of images. Where scholars distinguish between
iconography,
iconology , and
iconics (Ger.
Ikonik),
iconography denotes the description of the object, …
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Religion Past and Present
Iconology
(391 words)
[German Version] The term “iconology” is derived from Greek εἰκονολογία/
eikonología, to “speak in images.” It originally referred to a corpus of iconographical elements (allegories, symbols, attributes, emblems, etc.) for use in artists' workshops and was thus roughly equivalent to a “science of symbols” – as prominently documented in the enormously successful illustrated compendium
Iconologia by Cesare Ripa (1593). Nowadays, however, the term designates a method of art history that was introduced by the cultural scientist Aby Warburg around 1900 …
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Religion Past and Present
Iconostasis
(424 words)
[German Version] (Gk εἰκονοστάσις/
eikonostásis) refers to a barrier that separates the altar (III, 1.c) from the central section of the sanctuary. The development of Orthodox worship (II, 7) and its interpretation exerted essential influence on its structure and iconographic program. The early phase in the development of the iconostasis remains hypothetical in many respects. The ¶ period beginning in the 9th century with the victory of icon renerators (Veneration of images: VI) is marked by the appearance of sacred and liturgical forms that were inte…
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Religion Past and Present
Icons
(1,605 words)
[German Version] I. Terminology – II. Technique and Material – III. Theological Basis – IV. History
I. Terminology The word
icon, from Gk εἰκών/
eikṓn (“image, likeness”), is usually associated with egg-tempera paintings on a primed wood panel, used in the cult of the Eastern Orthodox churches (i.e. the churches that have accepted the Council of Chalcedon, but also a few pre-Chalcedonian churches such as the Coptic [Copts] and ¶ Ethiopian Orthodox Churches). Pictures are called icons only if they authentically represent a kind of sacramen…
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Religion Past and Present
Idea
(849 words)
[German Version] Idea, in Greek ἰδέα/
idéa or εἶδος/
eídos, “form”; in pre-philosophical usage this means particularly the form of a human being (e.g. Plato
Prot. 315e; Hom.
Il. III 39; V 787; X 316). This also explains philosophical usage: since it is by their form that people are recognized, the idea can be generally that which makes something understandable. To perceive something that makes it what it is means the same as to perceive its idea.
Plato uses this expression very early, using “idea” to distinguish between understanding an object and the object's actual existence. Thus
Socrate…
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Religion Past and Present
Ideal
(1,690 words)
[German Version] I. Philosophy – II. Ethics
I. Philosophy The term
ideal derives from Lat.
idealis, idealiter, first used by Martianus Capella (
ad ideam pertinens); from the 13th century on, it was used in two senses: (1) as existing in the Platonic “idea” or “archetypally” in the divine spirit (
esse exemplariter), and (2) as existing only as a model in the mind (
esse in intellectu). Systematically, the ideal lies between the poles of ideas and empirical reality. The ideal differs from the universality of ideas inasmuch as it individualizes an idea in a sin…
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Religion Past and Present
Ideal City
(508 words)
[German Version] The concept of the ideal city is of modern provenience and controversial. The entire history of modern city founding is indebted to the early “ideal” patterns (Hippodamian checker-board pattern, radial geometric pattern) of urban layouts. The ancient sources compiled by Frontinus and Vitruvius yield the entire repertoire of inner forms (city entrance, streets, city square/forum) that still dominated the theory of city planning (
embellissement) in 18th-century France, from where it continued to influence modern city planning (Berlin city plann…
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Religion Past and Present
Idealism
(1,891 words)
[German Version] I. Forms of Idealism – II. German Idealism The term
Idealism is used as a category in classifying philosophical theories and systems. Its opposite is materialism. A philosophical theory is Idealistic if it seeks to defend at least one of the following theses: (1) there are mental processes (Ideas) that are not reducible to material entities; (2) the objects of the physical world exist only in the mode of subjective ideas; (3) the objects of the physical world are accessible epistemically …
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Religion Past and Present
Identity
(2,915 words)
[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Philosophy – III. Dogmatics – IV. Ethics – V. Practical Theology
I. Religious Studies Identity is not in the classical repertoire of religious studies and the sociology of religion. But the central problem of social identity, formulated as a question, makes its religious significance obvious: “Where do we come from?” is answered by creation (I) myths that refer to an original identity; “Who are we?” and “Where are we going?” are answered by religious promises and conc…
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Religion Past and Present
Identity Philosophy
(9 words)
[German Version] Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph …
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Religion Past and Present
Ideological Criticism
(257 words)
[German Version] In critical/Western Marxism, ideological criticism is the criticism of ideas and discourses that obscure or misrepresent the true, emancipatory interests of social agents. If thought and social being do not coincide, as K. Marx argued, ideas may serve the dominant order and legitimate and sustain relations of domination. Ideological criticism thereby encompasses an epistemology for testing true and false knowledge and a critical theory of human freedom in society. Central to Weste…
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Religion Past and Present
Ideology
(2,041 words)
[German Version] I. Philosophy – II. Sociology of Knowledge
I. Philosophy
1. The meaning of the word
ideology cannot be separated from its historical use (a) as an epistemological term denoting a general theory of perceptions, ideas, and notions (ideo-logy), and (b) as a politico-philosophical term denoting a general critique of knowledge, an analysis intended to clear up false or distorted forms and objects of cognition (Ideological criticism). Although the origin of these two sides of
ideology is usually traced to F. Bacon, Francis's discussion of “idols,” its theor…
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Religion Past and Present
Idolatry
(755 words)
[German Version] I. Old Testament – II. New Testament
I. Old Testament The rejection of other gods (see also God, Representations and Symbols of) is, according to the Old Testament witness, a chief characteristic of Yahwism. Biblical Hebrew, however, has no word corresponding to the English “idols.” The…
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Religion Past and Present
“I” (Ego)
(415 words)
[German Version] The “I” or ego did not become a central concept of philosophy until the modern era. According to R. Descartes, the term denotes a substantial thinking being (
res cogitans) with immediate and indubitable knowledge of its own existence, on the basis of which it can be made the foundation of philosophy and all branches of knowledge. Since this certainty is attained without any knowledge of material bodies, it follows that the substance of the mind (
…
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Religion Past and Present
“I” (Ego) Psychology
(385 words)
[German Version] In S. Freud's understanding, the ego, along with the id and the super-ego, represents one of the three entities in the psychic system (
Das Ich und das Es, 1923; ET:
The Ego and the Id, 1927). Its origin is not yet sufficiently explained in Freud's writings. Increased observation of the healthy personality (Personality/Personality psychology) and the influence of social factors (impact of A. Adler's individual …
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Religion Past and Present
Iglesia ni Cristo
(260 words)
[German Version] (INC; Church of Christ) is an indigenous Philippine evangelical church, which was founded in 1914 by Felix Y. Manalo (1886–1963), who served as its executive minister for 49 years till his death. Born a Catholic, Man…
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Religion Past and Present
Iglesia y Sociedad en América Latina
(174 words)
[German Version] (ISAL; also: Movimiento de ISAL; Commission for Church and Society in Latin America). The ISAL arose in 1955 in Latin America in the context of Protestant intellectual youth organizations that were critical of capitalism; it was decisively influenced by notions stemming from dependency theory and by Richard Shaull's revol…
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Religion Past and Present
Ignatian Epistles
(1,090 words)
[German Version] I. Ignatius of Antioch – II. Transmission and authenticity – III. Themes
I. Ignatius of Antioch According to Eusebius of Caesarea (
Hist. eccl. III 36) Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, second in succession to Peter (the Disciple), was sent from Syria to Rome to die as a Martyr. On his journey he wrote seven letters to give thanks to the Christian communities that supported him and to exhort them to maintain unity, avoiding heretical tendencies (namely Judaism and Docetism). From Smyrna he wrote to the Ephesians (
Eph.), the Magnesians (
Magn.), the Trallians (
Trall.), and t…
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Religion Past and Present
Ignatius of Constantinople
(165 words)
[German Version] (d. Oct 23, 877). The son of Emperor Michael I Rangabe, after whose deposition (813) he was forced to become a monk, was elevated uncanonically (without vote of a synod) to the patriarchate by Empress Theodora II in 847. After her fall in 858, he had to resign in favor of Photius. Pope Nicholas I did not recognize his resignation. In the context of the
rapprochement with the West of Emperor Basileios I, which resulted in the deposition of Photius, Ignatius was reappointed as patriarch in 867; in a conflict with Rome over ecclesiastical jurisdic…
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Religion Past and Present
Ignatius of Loyola
(1,653 words)
[German Version] (Iñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola; 1491, Loyola – Jul 31, 1556, Rome) founded the Society of Jesus (Jesuits).
I …
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Religion Past and Present
Ignorance
(349 words)
[German Version] Since knowledge and volition are indispensable for moral behavior, ignorance of the facts, in its various forms, represents a factor that influences moral decision. As a component of the respective understanding of responsibility and as a precondition for any definition of guilt and meriting punishment, consideration of ignorance plays at least an implicit role in any ¶ ethics. Its explicit treatment and central posi…
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Religion Past and Present