A Gnostic Physics - Seminar
3 March 2026 | Bologna, via S. Vitale 114
On Tuesday, 3 March 2026, from 10.30 to 12.30 and from 14.00 to 16.00 (CET), at the Fondazione per le scienze religiose (via S. Vitale 114, Bologna), the seminar A Gnostic Physics. Eugonostos the Blessed (Nag Hammadi Codex III,, 3; V,1) will take place.
Dylan Burns, Assistant Professor of the History of Western Esotericism in Late Antiquity at the University of Amsterdam, will be the host.
He will also be Visiting Scholar at FSCIRE fot the next five weeks, offering a rare opportunity for sustained scholarly exchange.
The seminar will explore key primary sources in Coptic and Greek, focusing in particular on one of the texts preserved in the Nag Hammadi Codices, a collection of papyrus manuscripts discovered in 1945 in Egypt and dating to the 4th century.
Many of the writings contained in these codices are associate with currents of Gnosticism, as they attest to groups and authors who described themselves as "knowers" (from the Greek gnōstikoi) and who developed accounts a out te creation of the world by a lesser or malevolent craftsman, as well as a out the divine nature of human being.
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Dylan Burns is a specialist in Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and late ancient esotericism.
He studied at Reed College, Yale University, and at the University of Amsterdam, where he is currently Assistant Professor; he is also co-managing editor of the series Nag Hammadi and Manichean Studies (BRILL).
Among his book are Apocalypse of the Alien God: Platonism and the Exile of Sethian Gnosticism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), Did God Care? Providence, Dualism, and Will in Later Greek and Early Christian Philosophy (BRILL, 2020), and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Codices (BRILL, 2022).
