Enrico Beltramini – författare

The essential objective of this study is to unpack the complicity between historians and secularization theory in the study of late ancient and early medieval Christianity—and then suggest a way out. In this work of historiography of religion, Enrico Beltramini argues that religious history is inherently secular and produces distorted representations of the Christian past. He suggests moving from an epistemological to a hermeneutical approach so that the supernatural worldview of the Christian past can be addressed on its own terms. This work also engages Markus’s saeculum and replaces Markus’s secularized relationship between the Kingdom and the government of the civitas with the Augustinian association of the Kingdom and divine government.

Since its publication in 1964, The Unknown Christ of Hinduism has been singled out for praise as the quintessential example of Raimon Panikkar’s engagement with theology of religions. Controversies over the real meaning of the title and the author’s remark that Christ is unknown to Hindus and a fortiori to Christians have been waged among generations of scholars. Refusing to isolate Panikkar’s concerns with the Hindu-Christian dialogue from much larger theological and biblical debates occurring in the period before and during the Vatican Council II, this book suggests that the unknown Christ of Christianity is the plastic representation of an insufficient degree of universality of the Church. Rejecting traditional interpretations that identify a gulf between the first and the second edition of The Unknown, this book argues for a continuity in Raimon Panikkar’s thought.

This study explores the relationship between the sacred and the virtual, emphasizing the sacred as a divinely dependent, consecrated space activated through ritual, mediating between the profane and the holy.