Revelation in the Visual Arts

2021 ◽  
pp. 621-640
Author(s):  
Ralf van Bühren
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Christian Understanding ◽  
The Individual

This chapter deals with visual artworks as media of divine revelation. Readers gain insight into how Christianity as a religion of revelation has used images since the third century to transmit knowledge of God and his action in history. Early Christian pictures rate among the oldest communication media of revelation. Placed intentionally above the altar, the apse mosaics of late antique churches served anagogical purposes leading beyond the pictorial work to transcendent realities. The perception of images in the Middle Ages could represent the beginning of anagogical ascent towards the divine, engaging the viewer’s imagination. In Renaissance and baroque art occurred a rhetorical shift. Gazes and pointing gestures of the figures draw the viewer’s attention to the stage-like performance of the divine in a perspectival or visionary space. The issue frequently became controversial in contemporary history because the concord between artistic self-expression and the Judaeo-Christian understanding of revelation was no longer a given. At present, the individual responses to divine revelation continue.

The Origins and Development of Municipal Military Service in the Leonese and Castilian Reconquest, 800–1250

Traditio ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 91-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
James F. Powers
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Military Institutions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Middle Ages

In modern society, enmeshed with confrontations involving the individual, military service and the state, historians are often inclined to make comparisons with the distant past which offer relief from the pressures of contemporary history. Regarding military service, the Middle Ages are occasionally suggested as an age when combat was sporadic, when only the small feudal aristocracy encountered a martial obligation, and when the remainder of society could concentrate on the other burdens of life, free of the paraphernalia of war, hot or cold. As with many romantic generalizations concerning the period, the comparative bliss of the medieval non-combatant is open to question. Many would note, however, that the feudal classes did possess a monopoly on warfare for several centuries in parts of Continental Europe, and would tend to place all discussion of military institutions within a feudal context.

The Comparative Study of “Scholasticism” in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Rabbis and East Syrians

AJS Review ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam H. Becker
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Great Distance ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Transmission Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of

Now is an appropriate time to reconsider the historiographical benefit that a comparative study of the East Syrian (“Nestorian”) schools and the Babylonian rabbinic academies may offer. This is attributable both to the recent, rapid increase in scholarship on Jewish–Christian relations in the Roman Empire and late antiquity more broadly, and to the return by some scholars of rabbinic Judaism to the issues of a scholarly exchange of the late 1970s and early 1980s about the nature of rabbinic academic institutionalization. Furthermore, over the past twenty years, scholars of classics, Greek and Roman history, and late antiquity have significantly added to the bibliography on the transmission of knowledge—in lay person's terms, education—in the Greco-Roman and early Christian worlds. Schools continue to be an intense topic of conversation, and my own recent work on the School of Nisibis and the East Syrian schools in general suggests that the transformations and innovations of late antiquity also occurred in the Sasanian Empire, at a great distance from the centers of classical learning, such as Athens, Alexandria, and Antioch. The recently reexamined East Syrian sources may help push the conversation about rabbinic academic institutionalization forward. However, the significance of this issue is not simply attributable to its bearing on the social and institutional history of rabbinic institutions. Such inquiry may also reflect on how we understand the Babylonian Talmud and on the difficult redaction history of its constituent parts. Furthermore, I hope that the discussion offered herein will contribute to the ongoing analysis of the late antique creation and formalization of cultures of learning, which were transmitted, in turn, into the Eastern (i.e., Islamic and “Oriental” Christian and Jewish) and Western Middle Ages within their corresponding communities.

The Printed Illustration of Medieval Architecture in Pre-Enlightenment Europe

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 119-170
Author(s):  
Francesco Russo
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Medieval Architecture ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Mechanical Reproduction ◽  
Late Renaissance ◽  
The Middle Ages

The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of readers a series of significant examples of texts printed prior to 1700 and illustrated with images of medieval architecture in continental Europe. British illustrations of buildings and ruins from the Middle Ages have received relevant attention from modern scholarly writers, but studies of analogous continental examples are lacking. Illustrations of medieval architecture have been little considered in most studies of the Early Modern period, as compared with those of their sixteenth-to eighteenth-century counterparts. In addition, the few studies that do exist of the interest in medieval buildings and illustration of them, prior to the ‘age of mechanical reproduction’, have generally been restricted to monographs on individual antiquarians or else have focused on Enlightenment, Romantic and Positivist criticism, and have tended to concentrate on medieval revivalism. Furthermore, with the exception of a few studies on the perception of the Romanesque, the most frequently investigated category has been the Gothic. Hence, despite the existence of some crucial works, the perspectives adopted in research into Early Modern attitudes to medieval architecture have inevitably been limited. We still lack any comprehensive overview of the architecture of the Middle Ages as a whole (that is, including the Late Antique / Early Christian era), or any studies showing genuine interest in the late Renaissance and Baroque roots of subsequent antiquarian medievalism. This article, therefore, attempts to begin to fill such a lacuna by studying the architectural aspect of those pre-Enlightenment illustrations of medieval antiquities that appeared in continental Europe, and by considering scholars’ awareness of the entire medieval millennium.

scholarly journals Writing Demetrias: Ascetic Logic in Ancient Christianity

2000 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 719-748 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew S. Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Male Authority ◽  
Ancient Christianity ◽  
Christian Men ◽  
The Church

In his influential discussion of early Christian ascetic renunciation, Peter Brown announced that “Christian men used women ‘to think with’ in order to verbalize their own nagging concern with the stance that the Church should take with the world.” Brown's statement encapsulates the particular difficulties facing students of the history of women in the early Christian period. The most basic difficulty is that we possess very few texts by women from this period until well into the Middle Ages. We can point to the diary of the third-century martyr Perpetua, the complex and recondite Vergilian and Homeric centos (“stitch-verses”) of the aristocrat Proba and the empress Eudocia, and perhaps one or two other arguable examples. With a dearth of women's own voices, can historians be expected to reconstruct women's lives? This paucity of “first-person” texts is coupled with a more serious theoretical difficulty facing historians of all periods whose main “evidence” consists of literary and rhetorically informed texts. Scholars are much less confident today in our ability to peel back layers of male rhetoric and find the “real” woman concealed underneath. Brown's comment underscores this rhetorical skepticism by asking whether these texts are even “about” women at all. Others following Brown's lead have understood texts that are ostensibly to or about women as concerned primarily with issues of male authority and identity. In Brown's words, women were good “to think with,” but the subject of that “thought” was inevitably male. Despite these technical and theoretical difficulties, however, I do not think we are witnessing the final and absolute erasure of women from ancient Christian history.

scholarly journals Prostor i funkcije sakristije u ranokršćanskom razdoblju na primjeru zadarskoga episkopalnog sklopa

Ars Adriatica ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Ana Mišković
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The West ◽  
Additional Function ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Byzantine Architecture ◽  
East End ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Church

The sacristy is an ancillary but also a necessary liturgical space in every religious complex. Judging from late-antique and early-medieval written records, a chamber adjacent to the façade or the east end (frequently one of the pastophoria) of the main congregational church had the function of a sacristy. In the regions practising the Western rite, the sacristy was located next to the church façade. It housed liturgical vessels, ecclesiastical objects, liturgical vestments for the clergy and books. The sacristy was the place where priests were robed for the eucharistic celebration and from which they emerged in the solemn procession marking the beginning of the service. In the West, the sacristy was not the place where the gifts of the congregation were accepted; instead, they brought them to the church’s chancel screen. on the other hand, in the east, the additional function of the sacristy was that of the place where gifts were presented (prothesis). Therefore, the congregation had access to it so that they could deposit their offerings which the clergy then carried to the altar. In any case, in the West and east alike, there was no separate room set aside exclusively for the offerings of the congregation. In fact, it cannot be said that the prothesis and diaconicon – the chambers flanking the presbytery – had the function of a sacristy at this point because they appeared in Byzantine architecture only in the early middle ages. Constantinopolitan sources confirm that a liturgical reform took place between the first three decades of the eighth century, that is, the office of Patriarch Germanus i, and the mid-tenth century reign of emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus: the previously unified liturgical function of the sacristy split into two. Therefore, the application of the terms prothesis and diaconicon to the chambers (pastophoria) flanking the main apse in early Christian architecture should be discarded.  Focusing on the example of the chamber situated next to the façade of the early Christian Cathedral in the episcopal complex at Zadar, it can be noted that its architecture and function were that of a sacristy, especially if one compares it to liturgical documents from Rome (Ordines romani). This chamber and its location are interpreted on the basis of the historical records of local chroniclers who mention a custom of offerings – the so-called Varina – during the office of Bishop Felix, and all of this, taken together, suggests that in the earliest Christian times the Church of Zadar practised a romanstyle Westernrite.

scholarly journals The specificity of early Christian ideas about divine providence in the context of ancient philosophy (from the 1st to the 3rd centuries)

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 302-321
Author(s):  
Hegumen Anthony Kamenchuk ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Property ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The World ◽  
Christian Understanding ◽  
Key Features ◽  
The Individual

This article outlines the key features of the Christian understanding of divine providence in comparison with the philosophical trends of Antiquity from the 1st to the 3rd centuries (before Neoplatonism). The author identifies three paradigms of understanding divine providence in the ancient pagan philosophy of this period (atheistic, pantheistic and deistic) and in this context defines the Christian paradigm as “dialogical panentheism”. According to the author, Christianity at its core offers a worldview, which is uncharacteristic for paganism: the cosmos is focused on the implementation of a dialogue between man and God and the achievement of existential intimacy between the Creator and creation. It is also noted that Christianity, in contrast to ancient thought, placed an emphasis on the fact that the fundamental property of the higher Deity is His openness in relation to the Other, and not just self-contemplating or self-contained calmness. This, in turn, determines two other aspects in the Christian doctrine of providence: the all-pervading participation of God in the life of the world and His concern for the individual and those who are flawed. The author also says that the Orthodox understanding of providence is a harmonious middle between the extremes of pantheism and deism.

scholarly journals Resurrections before the Resurrection in the Imaginaire of Late Antiquity

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 711-738
Author(s):  
Danuta Renu Shanzer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
De Anima ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Human Desire ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Christian Message ◽  
Urban Legend

This paper is a study of transformations and mutations of a natural human desire, to be buried in one grave with one’s beloved. Most partners don’t die simultaneously, and burial-practices needed to provide flexibility for the dead and for the living. At the same time, religions had Views about the grave and the afterlife, and about the survival of the individual. Judaism and especially Christianity featured an astonishing doctrine, the Resurrection of the Flesh. Starting from Roman antiquity and in its epitaphic practices, the paper analyzes an intriguing early 4th C. Gallic poem, the Carmen de Laudibus Domini and its account of how the corpse of a dead woman was momentarily reanimated to greet her husband’s corpse. The poem reworks the resurrection of Lazarus with a little help from Juvencus. But a crucial (and unrecognized) source is (perhaps indirectly) Tertullian’s De Anima. These texts somehow generated a Late Antique urban legend about the mini-Resurrections of lovers’ bodies than can be traced into the central Middle Ages and beyond. It proved astonishingly lively and adaptable—to mariages blancs, to homosocial monastic situations, and to grave robbery, to name a few. This deeply sentimental legend needed to elbow aside darker phenomena, charnel (and also erotic) horrors from the pagan past, including zombies, vampires, and revenants, in order to preach its Christian message and help lovers who had been separated by death. Such resurrections were a down-payments on The Resurrection.

scholarly journals O cruzamento entre o Sagrado e o Profano na temática do Amor Cortês * The intersection between the Sacred and the Profane in the theme of Courtly Love

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 442
Author(s):  
LIGIA CRISTINA CARVALHO
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Courtly Love ◽  
The Self ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Opposite Sex ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

<p><strong>Resumo</strong>: Por ter sido elaborado dentro de uma sociedade religiosa cristã medieval, que tem a Bíblia como paradigma e a Igreja como norteadora espiritual e comportamental, pelo menos desde o século V, o amor cortês caracteriza-se pela tensão dos contrários que marca tão singularmente o perfil histórico e cultural da Idade Média. Para Santo Agostinho, o amor eleva o indivíduo à verdade, ao conhecimento unitivo de Deus. Em conformidade com a ideia de Santo Agostinho, o amor cortês era tido como fonte de todo o bem. Entretanto, na literatura cortês, não era o conhecimento de uma verdade transcendente que se consegue com o amor, mas um enobrecimento do próprio ser em sua realidade terrena e, além disto, este amor não se dirige a Deus, mas ao próximo de sexo oposto. Dito isto, neste artigo discutiremos o cruzamento entre o sagrado e o profano na temática do amor cortês.</p><p><strong>Palavras-chave</strong>: Idade Média Central – Literatura cavaleiresca – Amor cortês.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstract</strong>: Because of drawning into a medieval Christian religious society, which has the Bible as a paradigm and the Church as a spiritual and behavioral guiding, at least since the fifth century, courtly love is characterized by the tension of opposites that mark the historical and cultural profile of the Middle Ages so singularly. For St. Augustine, love elevates the individual to the truth, to the unitive knowledge of God. In accordance with the idea of St. Augustine, courtly love was taken as the source of all good. However, in courtly literature, the knowledge of a transcendent truth was not achieved by love, but an ennoblement of the self in its earthly reality and, moreover, this love is not addressed to God but to others of the opposite sex. Said that, this article will discuss the intersection between the sacred and the profane in the theme of courtly love.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: Central Middle Ages – Chivalric literature – Courteous love.</p>

Scepticism, Renaissance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard H. Popkin
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Strong Recommendation ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Sextus Empiricus ◽  
Weak Recommendation ◽  
Knowledge Claims

Ancient Greek scepticism was revived during the Renaissance, and played an important role in the religious and philosophical controversies of the time. There is little evidence that ancient scepticism was known directly during the Middle Ages, or that its perplexing questions played any significant role in medieval thought. It was indirectly known from the writings of Augustine; some manuscripts of the texts of Cicero and Sextus Empiricus were available; and occasionally vague reference to some sceptical details appears in medieval discussions. However, the interests of scholastic philosophers were, by and large, far removed from the questions about the sources, reliability and certainty of knowledge claims that concerned the ancient sceptics. With the humanistic revival of interest in ancient literature there came a rediscovery of scepticism as presented in the writings of Cicero, Sextus Empiricus and Diogenes Laertius. Cicero’s Academics (Academica) was read from the fourteenth century on; Life of Pyrrho by Diogenes Laertius was rediscovered in the early fifteenth century; and Greek manuscripts of the writings of Sextus were brought from Constantinople into Italy in the mid-fifteenth century. These treasuries of sceptical argumentation were used in many ways in the Renaissance. At first they were seen largely as sources of information about the ancient world, but gradually more attention was paid to the actual arguments they contained. Some saw these arguments as a basis for rejecting Aristotelian philosophy, as well as other ancient dogmatic claims about nature and humanity. Others used them as ammunition in the great religious controversies between Catholics and Protestants. A full-fledged scepticism about knowledge claims was developed in the second part of the sixteenth century, through the work of Sanches and Montaigne. Montaigne was particularly inspired by the first published Latin translations of the writings of Sextus Empiricus. Scepticism in all its forms was closely associated with fideism. If it is impossible to acquire knowledge of anything through the senses and reason, then it is impossible to acquire knowledge of God in these ways, and one can argue that religious truth must be accepted on the basis of faith in divine revelation. The weak recommendation of ancient sceptics to suspend belief while accepting local customs as the guide for conduct was thus turned into a strong recommendation to adopt Christian beliefs. Only later did epistemological scepticism become associated with scepticism about religious beliefs themselves. Renaissance scepticism in its various guises was a major intellectual force in the transition from scholasticism to modern thought.

Early Christian Reception of the Prophets

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald E. Heine
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
The Third ◽  
Christian Understanding ◽  
Vision Of God ◽  
Hebrew Prophets ◽  
The Way

The Hebrew prophets were essential to the early Christian understanding of the identity of Jesus. This chapter first examines the use of the Hebrew prophets in the reading practices in the second-century worship assemblies of the Christians in relation to those of the early synagogue. This provides an understanding of an early Christian appropriation of the prophets that was not apologetic. It then turns to the third century to show the concern for unity between the Hebrew prophets and the Christian Gospel. Finally, it compares the way four major Christian exegetes of the third and fourth centuries, traditionally separated into the opposing hermeneutical camps of Alexandria and Antioch, interpreted Isaiah’s vision of God, to argue that differing theological positions had come to influence the interpretation of Scripture more than differing hermeneutical procedures.

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