Revelation and the Veridicality of Narratives

On Christian doctrine, God is love; and the love of God is most manifest in Christ’s passion. The passion of Christ thus matters to philosophical theology’s examination of the divine attribute of love. But the passion of Christ is presented in a biblical story, and there are serious methodological questions about the way in which a biblical story can be used as evidence in philosophical theology. And these questions in turn raise deeper epistemological questions. How does any narrative transmit knowledge? And what counts as veridicality in a narrative? This paper deals with some of the questions for philosophical theology and then concentrates on the more general epistemological questions about narratively transmitted knowledge.

The Historiolae in Belarusian Incantations

The article deals with one of the most popular techniques in Belarusian magical medicine — the so-called historiolae, the essence of which is to recall precedent situations. This implies that the “disequilibrium of being, which has arisen in human life at the present moment (e.g. a disease), is restored according to a sacred pattern that took place in the past”. The texts declare connections between different levels of the worlds, past and present, but to the same extent between the microcosm and the macrocosm, erasing all distinctions between the real and the supernatural worlds. The present time of these charms prevents the transfer of the patient and the healer to ancient times of the myths. Instead, it is the sacred world that spreads around the requester. The most common form of such charms includes a narrative that relates certain events in Christian history, primarily describing the life of Christ or of one of the saints. A particular place among the narrative manifestations of historiolae is occupied by references to the Passion of Christ. These narratives, in turn, possess powerful life-affirming and healing potential. It is not the logical correspondence of a specific comparison in an incantation that is central, but the very desire to place the situation of treatment in an appropriate context. A number of texts from the author’s field records and archival materials are introduced here into scholarly circulation.

The Passion of Christ in the New World

The study of Passion imagery in the New World is located at the crossroads of artistic expressions, historical moments, and interests. It must consider issues of iconography, local devotion, agency, identity, and the materiality of artworks, but also connections to belief, piety, and the colonial context. The Passion of Christ encompasses the last moments in the life of Jesus: from his death sentence and the torments he suffered, to his execution through Crucifixion at Mount Golgotha. Although Passion imagery depicts moments narrated in the four canonical Gospels, artists also found inspiration in apocryphal texts, Spanish mystic literature, and European images that traveled in the form of engravings, which were sources abundantly used in Ibero-America. Spanish, Flemish, and Italian sources circulated in America, providing Passion images with particular characteristics. At the same time, local history was incorporated into the representation of these last moments of the life of Jesus, such as in cases of the Christ of Ixmiquilpan in colonial Mexico or the Christ of the Earthquakes, in Cusco, Peru. Generic Passion images became specific cult images due to their miracles, which were particularly important in the Americas as part of the evangelization process and the preservation of the colonial political order. The indigenous populations of America were in many occasions intertwined in these stories around images of Christ. Soon after the conquest, indigenous people also became manufacturers of these images. Passion imagery is found in the form of painting, sculpture, engraving, and architecture, becoming, in certain cases, Gesamtkunstwerk, or total works of art, since buildings and their interiors make use of many art forms under a unifying concept related to the Passion of Christ, such as sanctuaries dedicated to Jesus or architectural renditions of the Way of the Cross.

Empty Night: Kashubian “Home Liturgy” in the Context of Death

Based on ethnographic field research and thanatological literature, this article analyzes the continuing, but rapidly disappearing, Kashubian custom of bidding farewell to a deceased member of the local community known as “empty night”. Its essence is the night prayer vigil in the house of the deceased, performed by neighbors and relatives. The prayer consists mainly of singing religious songs on “the last things”—in particular about purgatory, human fragility, God’s mercy, and the Passion of Christ. The efforts of the orants are motivated by the concern for the salvation of the soul of the deceased, that is, the shortening and relieving the purgatorial punishment. The centuries-old tradition of “empty night” has been rapidly disappearing over the past 50 years as a result of both economic and social transformations, the gradual erosion of living faith, and the abandonment of the priority of salvation by younger Kashubians. The progressive medicalization of life and change of the approach to death play a crucial role in weakening the tradition of the ancestors. Thus the traditional “empty night” becomes a relic of “tamed death,” giving way to its tabooization and the illusion of “technological immortality”.

Dance Typologies

The opening chapter explores the relationship between medieval biblical interpretation and dance. The Vulgate was the urtext by which medieval authorities developed and justified their ideas concerning dance and its place in Christianity. Biblical glosses, as well as visual representations of the Bible, constructed the archetypes of sinful and holy dancers, thereby creating influential paradigms of Christian dancing bodies. Moreover, these exegetical strategies reveal particular political underpinnings of late medieval theology, including anti-Judaism, sacred kingship, and crusader ideology. The first section examines interpretations of Miriam and her dance of praise. The second section focuses on interpretations of the dancers around the golden calf and their idolatry. The third section explores interpretations of the dance of David, including its foreshadowing of the Passion of Christ and bolstering of the Crusades. The last section scrutinizes interpretations of the dance of Salome through the perspectives of sacrilege and misogyny.

“Dream of the Virgin” – “Sogno di Maria” in the Context of Italian Literary and Folk Texts about the Passion of Christ

The “Dream of the Virgin” is an apocryphon about the Passion of Christ, revealed to the Mother of God in a visionary dream. It circulated among many European nations in the form of a spiritual verse, a narrative, a prayer, or an incantation. Starting with the fundamental work of A. N. Veselovsky, this story has been an important subject of comparative research up to the present day. The oldest manuscripts with texts related to it are of Italian origin and date back to the 14th and 15th centuries. The article presents features of the Italian tradition of the apocryphon in texts preserved in these early manuscripts and in more recent folklore recordings. In Italy, the “Dream of the Virgin” existed in the context of various poetic texts about the Passion of Christ and the Lament of the Virgin Mary. The development of Italian volgare literature on the theme of the Passion is associated with the cult of the Passion of Christ, which was extremely widespread in the 13th and 14th centuries. Some details in the Italian texts suggest that the motif of the Virgin Mary’s dream about the Passion possibly originated in the tradition of the Holy Land related to the Mount of Olives and Gethsemane

Formy celownika, narzędnika i miejscownika liczby mnogiej rzeczowników w Sprawie chędogiej o męce Pana Chrystusowej i w Historyi Trzech Kroli (kodeks Wawrzyńca z Łaska, 1544)

Celem artykułu jest próba ustalenia spójności językowej, a także relacji chronologicznej oraz geograficznej zachodzących między dwoma tekstami wchodzącymi w skład kodeksu Wawrzyńca z Łaska (1544): Sprawą chędogą o męce Pana Chrystusowej i Historyją Trzech Kroli. Przedmiotem analizy są formy celownika, narzędnika i miejscownika liczby mnogiej rzeczowników; uwzględnia ona następujące aspekty rozkładu analizowanych końcówek: frekwencyjny, rodzajowy, tematyczny oraz leksemowy. Z analizy wynika, że badane apokryfy poświadczają stan językowy właściwy tekstom starszym (z przełomu XV i XVI wieku) lub charakterystyczny dla wczesnych druków krakowskich. Pewne cechy językowe poświadczone w apokryfach mają charakter północnopolski; ich nierównomierny rozkład tekstowy może jednak wskazywać na to, że nie pochodzą one od Wawrzyńca z Łaska. Forms of the dative, instrumental and locative case of plural nouns in Sprawa chędoga o męce Pana Chrystusowej and Historyja Trzech Kroli (Wawrzyniec of Łask’s Codex, 1544). Summary: The aim of the article is an attempt to establish linguistic coherence as well as chronological and geographical relation between two texts included in Wawrzyniec of Łask’s Codex (1544): Sprawa chędoga o męce Pana Chrystusowej (A Beautiful Tale of the Passion of Christ) and Historyja Trzech Kroli OSIEWICZ(The Story of the Three Kings). The analysis of plural nouns in the dative, instrumental and locative case includes a discussion of the following aspects of the distribution of the analyzed inflectional suffixes: frequency, gender, thematic and lexical aspects. The analysis shows that the apocrypha confirm the language state typical of older texts (from the turn of the 16th century) or characteristic of early Krakow prints. Certain linguistic features evidenced in the apocrypha are of Northern Polish origin. The uneven text distribution may indicate that the apocrypha do not come from Wawrzyniec of Łask. Keywords: language history, inflection, apocrypha, manuscript, source studies.

The Artist as Reformer

Lucas Cranach the Elder, a close friend of Martin Luther, not only produced the definitive visual record of the history of the Reformation but also became a major leader in the movement to transform Christianity. From 1518 onward, he designed art to advance the Reformation of the church across Germany and Europe. The Bible stood at the center of his media campaign. Cranach and his workshop designed the first Protestant Bible (1522) as well as subsequent imprints of Luther’s translations. He also developed innovative biblical propaganda (most importantly in the anti-papal Passion of Christ and Antichrist). Frequently in his immense oeuvre (including works designed for both Protestant and Catholic contexts) Cranach anchors the new biblicism in a humanist ideal of the authority of philology. A major accomplishment was his development of the portrait type of the professor of the Bible (preeminently Luther and Philipp Melanchthon) as an icon of the authority of humanist biblical philology for the Reformation.