Megasthenes was the first Greek ambassador known to have been sent to the court of a Mauryan ruler. He wrote an Indica based on his travels and experiences in India, which survives in fragmentary form in the work of later authors. This was the first work to provide a Greek audience with first-hand knowledge of the Indian interior and Mauryan court. Traditionally, Megasthenes’ Indica has been excavated for information to reconstruct knowledge of Mauryan India, Seleucid-Mauryan relations or other aspects of (...) this period and the personalities involved, either by focusing on individual fragments or collating fragments thematically. In contrast, instead of treating Megasthenes’ work as a mine for information, I evaluate the remaining fragments chronologically, and according to the type and range of information derived from Megasthenes. The aim is to better understand the thematic differences and chronological changes in the way later authors consulted and used the Indica, and therefore, why certain parts of the Indica, and information about Megasthenes himself, have survived. (shrink)

Classical theism has long affirmed impassibility to be both a philosophically sound and scripturally warranted attribute of God. An affirmation of this attribute of divine apatheia is found in the works of theologians and philosophers of classical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. However, over the last century, there has been a significant shift away from this tradition of divine impassibility. Divine impassibility has been challenged from many quarters, especially from Protestant Christianity, as a doctrine foreign to the scriptures of Abrahamic monotheism (...) and philosophically incompatible with a scriptural conception of God as personal, reactive, and relational. Many of the critics of divine impassibility suggest that there is a dilemma for these monotheists: that God may be impassible and yet unable to engage in personal, pathic, or relational ways with creation as the scriptures of the Judaism, Christianity, and Islam suggest, or that God may indeed express some pathos and reactivity but may no longer be understood to be impassible. In this work, I argue that this dilemma is a false one and that a third way, or via media, is possible. In support of the proposal I offer, I provide a critical analysis of impassibilist and passibilist arguments on historical, philosophical, and theological grounds. I demonstrate that strong affirmations of either position are indeed untenable, and in their places I propose a model of divine interaction based on an energetic kenoticism. In the via media offered below, I argue that we may yet retain a robust notion of divine impassibility in the essence or ousia of God, while allowing for a fuller account of divine pathos, reactivity, and interaction with creation via the kenotic and self-limiting divine energies. In this way, we may retain many of the classical commitments regarding the nature of God and yet provide more room to speak to these scriptural accounts of God’s interaction in the cosmos. (shrink)