Dionysus, Christ, and the Death of God, Volume 1

GIUSEPPE FORNARI is Professor of History of Philosophy at Bergamo University, Italy.

• Contents Preface: The Black Sun of Europe Gnosiological Introduction: A Disregarded Philosophical Tradition Mystery Cults and Tragedy 1. The Labyrinth of Mythology 2. Orphism and the Eleusinian Mysteries 3. In the Heart of the Labyrinth: Euripides’s Cretans and Its Philosophical Meaning 4. Sacrificial and Erotic Metamorphoses in the Bacchae 5. The Hieros Gamos of Wet and Dry 6. Sapiential Reflections in the Bacchae 7. The Power and Failure of Divine Mediation 8. The Birth of Tragedy, the End of Classical Greece Intermezzo: The Toys of Dionysus; Comparison of Civilizations in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods 9. Judaism and Christianity in the Greco-Roman World 10. The Comparative Question between Judaism and Christianity Notes Bibliography Index

Fornari’s brilliant analysis of the “mediatory” forces in humanity, covering a wide range of philosophical and classical texts, provides the reader with a key to understanding the way in which human cultures take shape and develop and, at the same time, leads to the “dark” origins of the European crisis. Fornari’s book is unique in today’s academic world—giving powerful insights into the fragile structures of Western civilization and, even more important, illuminating the very essence of these structures arising again and again (in history as well as in the political present), namely the fact that only inhumanity can lead to humanity. — Gilbert Weiss-Lanthaler, Psychotherapist, University of Salzburg, Austria, and coeditor of A Friendship That Lasted a Lifetime: The Correspondence between Alfred Schütz and Eric Voegelin