Keywords: Hus; husiti; Moldova;
The husite movement is connected, as the name convey, to Jan Hus`s peronality, the most important reformer of the Western Church in the XVth century. His activity and work anticipated the lutherane Reformation a century before. The paper talks about the mision of Hus`s missionaries in Moldavia.
More...Keywords: anthropology; world-open; openness to God; transcendental experience; athematic knowledge; eccentricity
The project of an Christian anthropology. Based on the reality of the secular society that will push religion into subjectivity and on the growing numbers of people who are not in contact with religion and its truth we need a common ground for a dialogue between believers and non-believers. This ground is the anthropology and the investigation of subject. The German theologians Wolfhart Pannenberg and Karl Rahner propose a Christian anthropology that will link the truth of reason with the truth of Christianity. Investigating the human person with anthropological methods they show that the human person is destined to some higher purposes than simply existing.
More...Keywords: philosophy; faith; St. John Chrysostom; Heidegger; Truth; communion; death
Faith and philosophy of life at St. John Chrysostom and Martin Heidegger. The access to authenticity in Heidegger's philosophy begins with being-toward-death. And by death, God shut the door of corruption and opened the gate of human collaboration to his own creation. St. John Chrysostom tells us that we cannot face death but only if we take Jesus Christ as an ally, so we can say that Heidegger's philosophy has a Christian basis. Thus, being a silent explanation with Christianity, philosophy of Heidegger, may return a clear solution of world output, need for renaissance. Until man decides free to follow Christ, he should get out of this world’s spell, and a good guide is Heidegger. The struggle with the passions and unfortunately that belong to the world is less than world output. He reveals including how to the world’s spell extends through speech. Analyzing St. John’s discourse we discover its authenticity, the fact that is bears responsibility and full care, and especially the art of returning care to his listeners, surrending them of world’s concerns. From the study we observed a shift towards individual salvation of the Church (love available to individual) and forgetting its mission to bring people to the brotherly love and fellowship (individual available to love).
More...Keywords: Faust`s myth; the biblical snake; Renaissance; theology of God`s death; legend of Faust; christian antropology
Faust is without any doubt the most used mythical figure in modern literature – in fact, the only myth, we may say, in which the contemporary man willfully admits his image. Indeed, the appearance of this myth during Renaissance announces and prefigurates a new orientation – without precedent in human history – the Western societies which progressively adopt an anthropological pattern founded on a materialist vision of the world and of the human being, the overturning of the values which are opposite to the theocentric Christian pattern. Agreeing with the material sciences, considered an indisputable unique source of the truth and therefore abusively rated at a metaphysical level, modern humanity repeats at a collective scale the pact of Faust, who sells his immortal soul in order to dominate the nature through magical powers and to possess, due to his satanic allegiance, all the worldly goods. This pact with the material world – which sets the man in the universe of perishable things, is, at the same time, a pact with death – is, at its turn, a modern and collective reproduction of Adam’s fall. The biblical serpent – forced to crawl on the earth – represents, in fact, a lower intelligence (sneakiness – a form of animal intelligence which has as purpose the material benefits and advantages), which disputing God’s will assigns to itself, in an abusive manner, a metaphysical authority, attributing the supremacy of the sensual man in front of the spiritual existence. Hence, we can notice here a idolatry of the flesh and of the matter which, after it has become the „universal” model for modern societies, confers to the primordial sin, as to the Faustian sin, the collective and global dimension of an up-side-down religious phenomenon (“the theology of God’s death”, as Mircea Eliade calls it), which brings about a confirmation of the relative biblical prophecies of the event, at the end of time, of the Antichrist – in other words, a collective model which has as goal world domination, which is visibly opposed to the Christian anthropologic pattern.
More...Keywords: person; Saint John Chrysostomos; personality; christianity; antiquity; holly fathers
As any other great personality and as a Church Father, he does not allow his whole personality to be depicted in a few sentences, no matter how much they would strive to compose a synthesis. With the passing of the time, his stature but increases. There is no other Father that left a vaster literary heritage. As it regards Saint John Chrysostom’ work, we may say that he leaves posterity a great work, unequalled both in size and in contents, comprising 18 volumes in Migne edition (vol. 47-64), comparable only with that of Origen or of Blessed Augustine. In his exegesis, he first tries to find the literal sense and is not afraid to make, whenever the case, grammatical or linguistic considerations to explain a difficult passage, but this signifies nothing else but a preparation to infer the typical sense or the moral teaching of the text. The only aim that he always wants to gain is a utility for his auditory. As a preacher, Saint John Chrysostom was considered the first. The word was his vocation and his ardent desire and the purest grandeur. His contemporary already enjoyed saying: And out of his mouth did words as sweet as honey come out. All Christian centuries confirmed this eulogy. He was called Homer of the orators. He was both a great orator and a great Shepard of souls. Saint John Chrysostom redounded rectory as a deacon, a priest and a bishop. Rectory principles are well traced by his master hand in his treaty On Rectory. His attitudes, teachings, interpretations, guidings, explanations are still valid today. Saint John Chrysostom remains the most known among the Greek Fathers and one of the most fascinating figures of Christian Antiquity. We remember him with vivid veneration, we call him in all the Liturgies and we want him our protector.
More...Keywords: Holy Liturgy; Church; Mission; Communion; Eucharist; Salvation; Pastoral Work; Philanthropy; Secularization; Globalization; Postmodernity
Missionary updates within the Holy Liturgy. This study intends to be a review of the main elements which compose a genuine symphony between the Church’s mission and the celebration of the Holy Liturgy. The Holy Liturgy, far from its message becoming out-ofdate or its content being reduced in „aggiornate” (up to date) versions, remains the same mystical participation in the Last Supper, in the sacrifice and ressurection of our Lord. Its message is even more actual in the spiritual void of the postmodernism. Consequently it is due for the Church’s mission to develop with pithiness a side of the liturgical ministration, able to fill this void and it ought to do it.
More...Keywords: Saint Basil; Eucharistic text; Anaphora; Liturgy; Authorship; Evolution of the Liturgy; Comparative Liturgy; Thesaurus Linguae Graecae; Caesarea
Liturgical theology in modernity: Proving the paternity of a liturgical text with the support of Thesaurus Linguae Graecae data base. The Anaphora of St. Basil de Great is one of the most important liturgical texts of Christianity, not only because of his spreading in all liturgical traditions which makes this Liturgy be known in four different versions, but also because of his beauty and his deep theological content. In many ways, the Anaphora of St. Basil the Great is a key to understanding the development of the liturgical texts, because the study of all manuscripts of this liturgy can show the anaphora changes and developments that took place among Christians until the fourth century. While it could not be called an "archetypical" example of early Christian liturgy in all places, the Anaphora of St. Basil the Great is paradigmatical for the liturgies that eventually did gain exclusive prominence among the Eastern Orthodox churches. The Basilian anaphoras are well-represented by ample textual evidence, which may be grouped precisely into four geographical regions: Egypt, Syria, Armenia, and Byzantium. So, one can distinguish four different versions of the anaphora of St. Basil: The Byzantine version, the Egyptian version, the Syriac version and the Armenian version. The existence of the four versions has allowed the modern comparative liturgy to prove their basilian authorship by computer using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae data base in order to find common passages and expressions between Basil works and the Liturgies ascribed to St. Basil. The results are amazing: the terminology and the vocabulary are the same, and the overall conclusion is that this great bishop is not the author of a new Eucharistic text, but the re-worker of the existing one in Caesarea of his time. He improved this Liturgy with biblical texts and dogmatic additions in order to safeguard the Orthodox faith in his metropolis.
More...Keywords: apocaliptic; texte apocrife bizantino-slave; misionarism calvin; predica funebra; Biserica Ortodoxa Româna; Transilvania; Ioan Zoba; Judecata de Apoi; Alba Iulia; Sicriul de aur
Practice of the funeral speech entered the Romanian environment somewhere around the second half of the XVIth century, as a consequence of the attempts to attract the Orthodox Church from Transylvania to Protestant reform, especially to Calvinism For the second half of the XVIth century and until the second half of the following one, funeral speech had apocalyptic connotations, plastic visions on the tortures of hell being the preferred theme, and death only a consequence of sin. Despite the fact that they do not frame within official doctrine of the Orthodox Church, these funeral speeches sent the message that salvation of soul is possible also after death, by acts of benevolence performed by survivers who, giving alms for the dead, save them from inferno and also assure themselves their own redemption. At the end of the XVIIth century funeral speech is „confiscated” by protopope Ioan Zoba from Vint, who printed two collections of sermons, in 1683 and 1689. In his sermons, composed according to an Occidental-scholastic pattern, death is a manifestation of divine love and christian pedagogy, which brings to an end the falling into sin. That is why, salvation is not possible without performing good deeds, prayers, fast, attendance of religious services, pious donations, even if all these are to be made through intermediaries, whose attention is drawn on the fact that there is not time for saddness, but they must hurry in giving alms instead of death people. Funeral sermons from the period of dialogue of Orthodoxy with Calvinism enjoyed a real success, demonstrated by the frequent and their long handwritten reproduction, until late in the XIXth century. In a society where the divine service was almost the only educational source, their acculturative role and that of formator of Christian conscience was one of major importance, by far exceeding the practical one, of farewell said to the one departed definitely from amongst the community. As well, in a world in which printed book is still very rare and almost exclusively dedicated to religious ritual, generalization of the habit of preaching at the funeral represented a progress beyond doubt, as in the Oriental Church such an honour was reserved only to the most important characters from the political or ecclesiastical environment. From this perspective, even if the message of the Romanian funeral sermon was already one obsolete in Occident, in the Transylvanian rural environment it represented a giant step towards authentic Christian living, towards modernity in the long run. Even today within clerical environments it is said that priests from Transylvania are much more experimented orators than those from the rest of the Romanian territory.
More...Keywords: Stephen the Great; portraits; icons; votive paintings; miniature; embroidery
This study examines some of the portraits of Stephen the Great, found in votive frescoes painted on churches and in miniatures and embroideries. We will show that the images of the voivode highlights his political importance, his greatness and his personal pride, but also his religious attitude. All this can be read not only in the annals and the chronicles of those times, but also in the frescoes, miniatures and embroideries of the era, which are accurate documents, bearing a strong imprint of religious and political affairs of the Moldavian society of that time. Portraits of the founders are also the first free and original Romanian artistic events of the local painters. Certainly the manner in which they have painted the founders is similar to frescoes and icons, but they have not forgotten to pictorially convey the uniqueness of each one.
More...Keywords: Romania; communism; the Burning Bush; orthodoxy; repression;
The article is the outcome of the research conducted in the Archives of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives. The author focused his analysis on a famous religious Eastern Orthodox group in the history of the Romanian Gulag: “Rugul Aprins” (the Burning Bush). Thus and other tragical judicial sagas prove that the Romanian orthodox Church suffered the persecutions of the Romanian Communist Stat in the same ways as the other religious cults and denominations, in the post World War II Romania.
More...Keywords: Communism; resistance; dissidence;
The present article is an analysis of Romanian society transition from communism to democracy, which pinpoints the mechanisms of the options and historical behavior of political, cultural and civic elites in Romania, Romanian communities and religious institutions.
More...This paper looks into the relationship between the visual embedded in a narrative technique (text) and the textual embedded in a visual technique. In doing so, I am illustrating the inter-play between text and imagery integrated not only within the same artwork, but also within the context of a spatial – service unity, thereby suggesting a conscious relation between an artist and a priest-preacher in a church or a monastery. My thesis is that complementarity and interdependency between text and image can exist even beyond the boundaries of a sin-gle artwork. As an entry point to this discussion, and building up on previous work1, I am using the Tenth Homily “On Future Judgement” and other homilies by Nektarios Terpos2 to-gether with scenes of the Last Judgement from Myzeqe region, central Albania, where Nektarios Terpos engaged in his homiletic activity and where copies of his book circulated.
More...Keywords: Last Judgment; Christ-Judge; end of the world; religious books, hymnography;
The Last Judgment is the confrontation of the history and the man with the justice of God, at the end of the ages, when the whole world will be brought under the supreme authority of God. The expectation of Christ’s return as Judge of the living and the dead is part of the Christian Creed: all the people will stand before Him to give account of their deeds. The Savior Christ will do the Last Judgment, thing that is not independent of the fact that He is the prototype of man, since the man is the image of Christ, but through Christ was accomplished and the human rebirth. The existence of dogmatic ideas, including those eschatological in embodiment hymnographic of religious books of the Church from the earliest centuries, shows that orientation to the future world and the resurrection hope was a living phenomenon which animated the life of the first Christian communities. Christian’s express desire to unite heaven and earth to live the angelic life even now, shows that Eschaton was, is and will be always conceived as a reality that is not foreign to the present life.
More...Keywords: Scientific activity; Institute of Archaeology of Iasi; 2017
Scientific activity of the Institute of Archaeologz of Iasi in 2017
More...Keywords: Orthodox Church; Transylvania; Vasile Moga; Andrei Şaguna; Emanuil Gojdu; intellectual formation;
Philanthropy is an attribute of the Church since the apostolic period, its philanthropic work varying throughout history depending on the political evolution, social, cultural and religious transformations of society, but especially on the charism of the church servants, from all hierarchical levels, and members of the laity. Public and private charitable foundations, as institutionalized expression of philanthropy and Christian charity appeared in medieval Europe, but went through a crisis during the Reformation, experiencing a revitalization in the late eighteenth century and a remarkable flourishing in the nineteenth century. The first philanthropic foundations appeared in the Transylvanian Orthodox Church in the first half of the 19th century. Until the Great Union of 1918, most Romanian charitable foundations were created, patronized and administered by the two Romanian Churches, all Romanian philanthropists being more or less connected to parishes, dioceses and metropolises. This study presents the development of Orthodox foundations and the great Orthodox philanthropists in Transylvania, listing the funds and charitable foundations that functioned within the Archdiocese of Transylvania until 1918.
More...Keywords: Patristic Homily; Christian Faith; Actuality; Sermon; Versions;
The great preachers of our Church – the ones of ancient times: Saint Athanasius the Great,Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostom and the ones of the second millennium: Saint Gregory Palamas and Elias Miniatis – are real models for the Christians preachers today. They lived their lives according to the truth transmitted in their homilies. The uniqueness of the revealed truth forced them to live the truth they were preaching. Their sermon stemmed from their spiritual connection with their listeners and from the openness they showed towards them. Their sermons reveal their feelings in relation to their listeners, making their hearts beat in the same rhythm. The listeners, in their turn, regarded these Hierarchs as good fathers, in the image and likeness of the Good Shepherd (John X, 11) and considered them Teachers of the Church
More...Keywords: Romania; Europe; elites; 20th century; post WWII;
Sursa elitelor în România contemporană se află în dinamica sistemului comunist (instaurare, consolidare ca regim de ocupaţie, declin şi prăbuşire) chiar şi la 20 de ani de la căderea regimului comunist, în decembrie 1989. În acest sens, constituirea şi propagarea elitelor a căpătat un caracter dualist: elitele de ocupaţie au avut ca şi contrapondere tipuri de elite ale rezistenţei anticomuniste. Comunismul s-a instaurat ca sistem şi ca regim politic în România pe calea ocupaţiei militare şi politice a ţării, neavând nici o legătură cu tradiţiile culturale şi politice ale acestui spaţiu. Profilul elitelor de ocupaţie este dat de două tipologii: consilierii militari şi consilierii politici (comisarii politici). Pe cale de consecinţă, direcţia integrării în spiritualitatea europeană a fost asumată în spaţiul românesc de elitele rezistenţei. Problema modernităţii româneşti este că vizibilitate externă au avut în special elitele care au promovat reformarea sistemului comunist şi nu respingeai acestuia (vezi fenomenul dizidenţei civice).
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