Inner Truth

Charles Stang is a Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. His research and teaching focus on the history of Christianity in the context of the ancient Mediterranean world, especially Eastern varieties of Christianity. His most recent book, Our Divine Double, was published in 2016 by Harvard University Press, the book posits: “What if you were to discover that you were not entirely you, but rather one half of a whole, that you had, in other words, a divine double? In the second and third centuries CE, this idea gripped the religious imagination of the Eastern Mediterranean, providing a distinctive understanding of the self that has survived in various forms throughout the centuries, down to the present. Our Divine Double traces the rise of this ancient idea that each person has a divine counterpart, twin, or alter-ego, and the eventual eclipse of this idea with the rise of Christian conciliar orthodoxy.”