Romania took hold of my heart in 2015 and since then has consumed my mind and soul. As with any genuine commitment, my relationship with this beautiful, complex country has grown and deepened over time as I have learned of its many tragedies, as well as its many triumphs. I have surrendered myself to Romania. [...] As I continue my Romanian journey, I marvel over the resiliency and fortitude of the people. I am fortunate to have developed close relationships, familial in many ways, with many Romanians. And I am eternally grateful to have been granted a Fulbright and honored to become part of this amazing community.
Talk by Fulbright Scholar Eduard Iricinschi at Princeton University
On April 18, Fulbright Scholar Eduard Iricinschi delivered a talk titled “When Gnosis Was a World Religion: Henri-Charles Puech and Gilles Quispel at Ascona” at Princeton University. Dr. Iricinschi’s talk represented the outcome of the research he pursued as a Fulbright scholar in the Department of Religion at Princeton University, on “Spiritual Scholarship and the Study of Religion as Personal Self-Improvement in the Twentieth-Century History of Religion” between November 2023 and April 2024.
The event is best described in Dr. Iricinschi’s own words:
“The talk explored the scholarly cross-pollination between the experiential definition of ‘gnosis,’ as it was promoted at the Eranos meetings in Ascona, under the auspices of Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, and the discovery, publication, and analysis of two major corpora of late antique Egyptian religious literature, the Medinet Madi Manichaean codices and the Nag Hammadi library. The title of my talk alluded to Gilles Quispel ‘s 1951 volume Gnosis als Weltreligion; with it, I sought to uncover the personal and social soteriological aspects modern scholars ascribed to late antique religious literature during and immediately after WWII.
I received my doctoral degree in the Department of Religion at Princeton University in 2009. Almost fifteen years after that, it was an honor and delight for me to present the results of my postdoctoral work in front of my former professors at Princeton University: Elaine Pagels, Martha Himmelfarb, and Stephen Teiser.”