Gaetano Lettieri

Gaetano LETTIERI, born at Rome on 2 September 1961, is full professor of the History of Christianity (M-STO/07) in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy in the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. In January 2012, he was elected president of the CUSCC (Consulta universitaria degli storici del cristianesimo e delle chiese: University Council of Historians of Christianity and Churches). From 2007 to 2011, he was president of the didactic area of courses for the three-year degree and master’s degree in Historico-Religious Studies and Sciences of the “Sapienza”. As of 2011, he has been president of the course of study for the master’s degree in Writing and Publication set up with the Department of History, Cultures, and Religions. As of 2001, he has
continuously taught the history of theological doctrine for the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. As of 1997, he has been guest professor in predogmatic
Christology for the Faculty of Theology of the Pontifical University of the Lateran in Rome. As of 2010, he has also been guest professor in the History of Christian thought at the Pontificia Università Antonianum in Rome and in History of Patristic Theology at the Institum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome. In November 2012, he has been guest professor for the Universität Freiburg/Université de Fribourg (CH); in January-February 2014, he has been Directeur d’études invité for the École pratique des hautes études – Section des sciences religieuses of the Sorbonne in Paris.
His specialization and his publications focus upon the history of Christianity in the first centuries and upon the history of Christian theological thought. To be precise, 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 hermenutics 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 contemporary thought (Schmitt, Peterson, Metz); the study of Patristic Wirkungsgeschichte, especially that of Augustinian and Origenist ideas, from the Middle Ages through German Romanticism; the history of Jansenism and the thought of Arnauld, Pascal and Malebranche; the history of Christian mysticism; the origins and significance of the doctrine of development enunciated by 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 Ricoeur, Derrida, and Nancy) to the theology and history of Christianity; and the relationship obtaining between Christianity, secularization, democracy, and the creation of a lay society.