Ricerc@Sapienza

His specialization and his publications focus upon the history of Christianity in the first centuries and upon the history of Christian theological thought. In particular, he has worked upon: the genesis and development of early Christology vis-à-vis the origins of Gnosticism; the historical dialectic between heresy and orthodoxy in early Christianity; the history of Biblical exegesis; the relationship between theologies and anthropologies inspired by the Bible and Platonism; the history, theology and biblical hermeneutics of Gnosticism; the genesis of the first speculative theology at Alexandria, from Clement to Origen; the history of Patristic Trinitarian theology, especially that of Origen, the Cappadocians, Marius Victorinus, and Augustine; the investigation of the historical genesis and systematic nature of the thought of Augustine; the question of political theology from classical antiquity, through the Patristic age (Lactantius, Eusebius, Augustine, Ambrose), to contemporary thought (Schmitt, Peterson, Metz); the study of Patristic Wirkungsgeschichte, especially that of Augustinian and Origenist ideas, from the Middle Ages to German Romanticism; the theological and metaphysical thought of John Scotus Eriugena, in its relationship with Patristic auctoritates; Machiavelli and Christianity, in particular: the pivotal, polemic role played by Machiavelli’s interpretation of Augustine’s De civitate Dei, and the very close relationships of the last Machiavelli with the curia of Clement VII, especially with Jacopo Sadoleto, then with Erasmus and against Luther, within the confessional and military conflicts of the years 1525-1527; the history of Jansenism and the thought of Arnauld, Pascal and Malebranche; the history of Christian mysticism, from Valentinian Gnosticism to Michel de Certeau; the origins and significance of the doctrine of development enunciated by John Henry Newman; the relationship between liberal theology and dialectic theology in Barth and Bultmann; the methodology that is specific to the history of Christianity, as it relates to the history of religions; the response of contemporary thought (especially that of Bultmann, Ricoeur, Derrida) to the theology and history of Christianity; and the relationship obtaining between Christianity, secularization, democracy, and the creation of a lay society.