Charles M. Stang is Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at the Harvard Divinity School.
Our Divine Double is intellectually rich and historically detailed.
Stang asks readers to contemplate a theological and philosophical
‘road not taken,’ one that might challenge various Christian
orthodoxies of the self and the divine. The book is a triumph;
Stang has uncovered an unacknowledged but vital strain of thinking
about God and the cosmos that generated centuries of productive
thinking about the ‘I’ and the ‘Other.’
*Andrew Jacobs, Scripps College*
In this lively, insightful book, Stang tackles a major problem in
the history of ancient religion, and sheds much light on a
forgotten chapter in the archaeology of the person. Major
instances, such as Thomas, Jesus’s twin brother, and Mani’s
heavenly twin, are studied in the context of a Platonic tradition
going from Socrates’s daimon to Plotinus.
*Guy Stroumsa, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and University of
Oxford*
Stang breathes life into scholarship and provides a new
understanding of traditions about which we thought there was
nothing new to learn…There is something wild, infectious, even mad
in this book. Stang embraces cognitive and existential
impossibilities under the rubric of ‘our divine double,’ and yet,
through his careful and cadenced presentation of these paradoxes,
Stang tames the madness and leads his readers in; he offers us a
taste of bi-unity; he allows us to feel the touch of Plato’s
heaven-sent madness.
*Bryn Mawr Classical Review*
This work is a top-class piece of scholarship and Stang is to be
commended for his hands-on approach to primary materials—Coptic,
Syriac, and Middle Persian are just a few of the languages he
employed to bring this study to fruition…Our Divine Double can
truly be called an original contribution to scholarship and it is a
most captivating read.
*Reading Religion*
Stang’s book is compelling in its devotion to an ancient search for
a way to ‘our higher self’…Opening his own creative process in
formulating Our Divine Double has proven a distinctive and valuable
achievement, partly because it also lays open philological
disintegrations, and significant reorientations in the house of
intellect.
*Medieval Review*
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