Mirrors of the Divine

Mirrors of the Divine examines four early Christian authors--Tertullian of Carthage, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine of Hippo--and analyzes their writings on vision and knowledge of God to show how they envisioned one's relationship to the world and how they imagined the unknown. Emily R. Cain explores how contradictory theories of sight shaped their cosmologies, theologies, subjectivities, genders, and discursive worlds, and shows that early Christian arguments about the phenomenon of visual perception are deeply intertwined with broader debates about identity, agency, and epistemology.