Frédéric CHAPOT – Hermogène: fragments d’une pensée dualiste
Frédéric CHAPOT – Hermogène: fragments d’une pensée dualiste

Summary/Abstract: Known primarily through the heresiological writings, Hermogenes goes down in history as a dualist, almost a ditheist, who claimed the doctrine of two coexisting and ingenerated principles: God and the matter. Cleared up the commonplaces and the heresiological strategies of our sources, the analysis of the fragments and of the testimonies about Hermogenes shows that his doctrine was the expression of a specific ontological dualism: far from being an innovative thinker, Hermogenes refused the emerging doctrine of the “creatio ex nihilo” and affirmed the traditional view of the creation as the result of the demiurgic act of God who fashioned and ordered the preexistent matter. According Hermogenes, this dualism did not undermine monotheism, because God and the matter are unequal regarding their essence. It was on the basis of this axiom that he elaborated a theological system characterized by a sophisticate interlacement of anthropological, Christological and soteriological implications.

• Details
• Contents