Cyril J. O'Regan, an Irish-born Roman Catholic intellectual, is the Catherine F. Huisking Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame

University of Notre Dame

The University of Notre Dame du Lac is a Catholic research university located in Notre Dame, an unincorporated community north of the city of South Bend, in St. Joseph County, Indiana, United States...

. He is best known for his multi-volume gnosticism

Gnosticism

Gnosticism is a scholarly term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual practices common to early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism , and Neoplatonism.A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis...

 series, including Gnostic Return in Modernity and Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme's Haunted Narrative. Rehabilitating a project attempted in the nineteenth century by a leader of the Tübingen school of theology, Ferdinand Christian Baur

Ferdinand Christian Baur

Ferdinand Christian Baur was a German theologian and leader of the Tübingen school of theology...

, O'Regan attempts to identify a gnostic structure or "grammar" that can be traced through sources and authors as diverse as Valentinianism and William Blake

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

. By identifying this grammar, he hoped to find a way to distinguish works of gnosticism from other types with superficial resemblances, such as writings in Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism , is the modern term for a school of religious and mystical philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century AD, based on the teachings of Plato and earlier Platonists, with its earliest contributor believed to be Plotinus, and his teacher Ammonius Saccas...

. As a Christian theologian, he also hopes to equip theologians to avoid gnosticism, which he sees as an alternative contrary to genuine Christian faith yet, by its nature, one that is present in every era. This project is in some ways similar to that of Eric Voegelin

Eric Voegelin

Eric Voegelin, born Erich Hermann Wilhelm Vögelin, was a German-born American political philosopher. He was born in Cologne, then Imperial Germany, and educated in political science at the University of Vienna. He became a teacher and then an associate professor of political science at the...

, who in his Science, Politics and Gnosticism attempted to identify some core features of gnosticism that he viewed as dangerous, though the two thinkers disagree about how to define gnosticism and why it should be rejected.

In advocating for new ways of recognizing gnosticism, O'Regan draws on categories such as metalepsis

Metalepsis

Metalepsis is a figure of speech in which one thing is referred to by something else which is only remotely associated with it. Often the association works through a different figure of speech, or through a chain of cause and effect. Often metalepsis refers to the combination of several figures...

that he developed in his earlier work, The Heterodox Hegel. O'Regan has also written widely, in monographs and reviews, on the concept of the apocalyptic.