Monks are Discussing Women in the Work of John Moschus "Leimon Pneumatikos"
Monks are Discussing Women in the Work of John Moschus "Leimon Pneumatikos"

Summary/Abstract: The article is dedicated to the naming of the woman in popular work from the early Byzantine epoch. The work of John Moschus "Leimon Pneumatikos" and in its Slavonic translation is attested in the so called Sinai patericon. Presented is the position that the monkhood, which is at the same time source and addressee of the text, is a specific group capable of producing ideologically significant messages, and the interpretations of the woman and the woman’s life, made by its representatives, should be important and obligatory models. Adopted is the concept of P. Burdijo, defining the act of naming as a beginning of the process of symbolic conception, which ends with the entry of the social identity in the biological nature of the individual. The author makes an attempt to systematize the naming of the woman in the medieval Christian work and its translation, which is viewed as a means of transference of specific ideological messages. Presented is the concept of the presence of two types of naming – implicitly and explicitly connotated – which for their part are united in subgroups. In conclusion the suggested is the interpretation that the presented types of naming illustrate the Christian vision of woman’s life in its trinity – as a possibility to choose, as a positive and negative realization, but in a subordinate position towards the man as an institution.

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