Congratulations, constant companion and perennial party member Alexander Schmid, on completing the PhD on Dante!
Select Academic Articles:
Dante and Video Game Adaptations: An Analysis of Dantean Elements in Dante’s Inferno, Devil May Cry, Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII: https://penn.manifoldapp.org/read/dante-and-video-game-adaptations-an-analysis-of-dantean-elements-in-dante-s-inferno-devil-may-cry-and-final-fantasy-vii-and-final-fantasy-viii/section/0150d052-744b-44a6-a86f-ec527f703d722)
Contrapasso, Violence, and Madness in Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Westworld: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/13/5/1093)
Popularizing Paradiso: On the Difficulties of Podcasting Dante’s Most Academic Canticle: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/13/1/13
And belated congrats to Patrick Holleman, friend via the internet and fantastic interlocutor, on fulfilling the dream of releasing Quartet!
video (7 min in)
I count myself fortunate to know people like these and look forward with great hopes for their future endeavors, always hoping in particular that they will still allow for continued participation in the amateur researches and intellectual adventures of our humble Video Game Academy.
As I’ve been reading the likes of Kingsnorth and the Pope on AI and thinking about the transformations it will bring, considering how to go about contributing to the somewhat overheated discourse with the help of Jason when he gets a chance to write his philosophical essay, deferred for the moment, I find myself wanting to insist naively on the promise of the underlying technology, which after all is even now permitting this very recording and communication of the simple thought, and which has facilitated finding so much else of interest for me over the years, including wonderful connections with friends and dialogue partners near and far.
I didn’t get around to participating in the latest round of essays from Prof Noctis, but I did find the topic of the meta-discourse surrounding Aeris/Aerith and Tifa in FFVII and what it says about the audience to be a potentially fruitful, if fraught, one. While I gave his call for papers for the upcoming Psychgeist volume on FFXV a pass due to not having played the game, the fact that he’s editing it is inspiring, and makes me wonder if certain other PhD’s herein mentioned might want to do the same for other FF games I have played. (Full disclosure: I’m finally getting around to wringing out this post from my dormant tabs mainly so as to procrastinate psuedo-productively a little longer on writing my own contribution to the volume on Chrono Trigger, which is due in a week or so!)
Naive optimism and good feelings are all right, of course, for some, but realistically I know that the critics of AI, social media, and big tech writ large have ample arguments as well as the tide of public sentiment on their side. I also have to remember the damaging examples closer to home for me personally, such as the smear campaign waged against the Well-Red Mage and subsequent distractions and dispiritings he’s endured. Unfortunately, this sort of difficulty is not unique to the medium (for all that it is its overriding message); viz. the parlous state of academia offline, too, as chronicled and fought-‘gainst by our in-house Quixote, Professor Kozlowski.
Just to wrap up with a final more citation of the more uplifting sort, though, I enclose an exchange over youtube comments on one of the recent videos on jrpgs and religion from Resonant Arc, which sent me down a little rabbit hole of my own trying to find out more about the person on the other end of the chat. It appears this hian is a kindred spirit, aspiring like us to one day go from podcaster to professional scholar, or critic to poet.
hian: Gnosticism is such a rabbit hole because, on one hand not many scholars like the term anymore precisely because there were no “gnostics” in the sense that there was never a group of people with a shared gnostic perspective. However, on the other side, serious scholarship is largely in agreement that the first Christian movements were more “gnostic” than they were orthodox because when you look at the development of the gospels, you see a clear evolution of the early traditions that were not trinitarian and far more wound up in middle-Platonism, evolving into what people think of as Christianity today.
Moreover, one could even argue that the gnostic view is a far more sober appreciation of the Abrahamic faith’s evolution given that:
1.) Yahwism did not begin until 9th century BCE, supplanting the Canaanite primary worship of El Elyon, and;
2.) That the Judean religious national identity likely wasn’t formed until the Hellenistic period in contact with Greek philosophy per the fact that there’s literally no archeologic evidence to suggest the early semites lived according to the laws of the old testament—something further evidenced by archeological research in Elephantine.
In those terms, given that the modern conception of the god of Abraham is a combination of El, Plato’s divine, and Yahweh, and that the three versions of these faiths are controlled by clergy whose allegiance is to secterian dogma rather than the historical truths of their own developments, the parallels to the gnostic view are very clear.
Also, in the context of jrpgs, it’s important not to forget the influence of their native religions—in particular Buddhism and Taoism, the latter which while brought up in the video wasn’t connected to the genre in terms of the thing that I think matters the most:
The likeliest reason the gnostic motifs happen so often in jrpgs is because they’re essentially (to the Japanese) an exotic refornulation of a set of beliefs already ubiquitous in their culture; namely that of Enlightenment and the escape from the shackles of the material realm.
In this sense, gnosticism in jrpgs becomes more or less common Asian philosophy dressed up in western fantasy and historical iconography.
me: Fantastic comment, could you say more about sources/suggestions for further reading on some of these claims? I appreciated that in the episode they mention Paul, Pascal, Augustine, Origen and John Chrysostom, but it sounds like you have more recent authors in mind 🙂
hian: @wschantz2
On early Yahwism and Israelite religion, there’s:
Mark S. Smith’s “The Early History of God”, William G. Dever’s “Did God Have a Wife?”, Thomas Römer’s “The Invention of God”, and Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s “God: An Anatomy”.
On Hellenistic influence on the Hebrew Bible, there’s:
Martin Hengel’s “Judaism and Hellenism”, John J. Collins’ “Between Athens and Jerusalem”, Russell Gmirkin’s “Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus”, and Philippe Wajdenbaum’s “Argonauts of the Desert”.
On Greek philosophy and early Christianity, there’s:
Henry Chadwick’s “Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition”, Jaroslav Pelikan’s “The Christian Tradition”, John Dillon’s “The Middle Platonists”, and Larry Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ”
On the topic of Elephantine, anything by Russell Gmirkin, Philippe Wajdenbaum, Thomas L. Thompson, and Niels Peter Lemche is interesting(for while still controversial, it’s making headway in the field and more parsimonious with our general understanding of history that doesn’t rely on religious presuppositions).
Of course, you cannot not mention Bart Ehrman, though he gives more general accounts of scholarly consensus on the formation of Christianity with very little focus on, or appreciation of the classical period and its influence on early Judaism and Christianity. He’s more concerned with addressing very naive religious literalism and misconceptions about biblical scholarship in general.
me: @hian thanks! I haven’t read much in the secondary sources on all this beyond Karen Armstrong, Dallas Willard, NT Wright, and CS Lewis… Avowedly somewhere between naive literalism and grounded in religious presuppositions myself but I appreciate the new wing of the library you’ve just unlocked! If I can offer just one relatively lesser known but remarkable book in return: Johannes Sloek’s Devotional Language. He’s a Kierkegaard scholar, so like Cornel West says somewhere, writing after everyone’s favorite theologian, but his approach is delightfully idiosyncratic and wide-ranging
hian: @wschantz2 I see. I’m mostly interested in those who do historical, archeologic and linguistic studies on ancient religions from an academic point of view, so you might find those particular books a bit dry or boring if your primary interest is in the theological or philosphical lenses on religion, but I do appreciate the recommendation.
Karen Armstrong is another favorite of mine, which I cannot believe I forgot. I knew there was someone.😢
Fascinating food for thought, or at least training material for the almighty algorithm.
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