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In philosophy of religion the term of Immanence is mostly applied to GOD in contrast to the divine Transcendence. This relation, as we will see here, it is not far from the truth since one cannot be without the other, however they are not to be put in contrast, but in conjunction. The one-sided insistence on the immanence of God, to the exclusion of His transcendence, leads to Pantheism, just as the one-sided insistence upon His transcendence, to the exclusion of His immanence, leads to Deism. These two can be separated, but the consequences are great for human knowledge and society; it is the two taken together that result in, and are necessary to Theism. But from the least complicated idea that even the name of God is a manifestation of His immanence contrasting with Deus absconditus, whose existence and name cannot be known or thought, theology and religion in general need to regard immanence of God as crucial for the acts of worship. What are the philosophical background for Christian theology to imply the immanence characteristic for God’s existence related to His creation? – This is the main question the present work tries to answer as an overview.
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Hands language as a means of expression in rhetoric and fine arts, the rules of which were presented mainly by the Roman authors Cicero and Quintilian, continued to stir interest over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and strongly influenced artists and their iconographic reference points. English physician and rhetorician John Bulwer (1606–1656) devoted a few of his significant works to studying of the human gesture system, offering over 120 chirograms (types) of particular meanings. Spanish mathematician Juan Caramuel (1606–1682) studied the rhetorical wealth of chirologia, defining it as a major means of human communication. Hand gestures with fingers locked together is traditionally deemed to be a Christian prayer gesture, where palms are pressed together with fingers straight pointing up. In fact, the locked together fingers, known as early as the Antiquity, unlike the prayer gesture that emerged as late as the late medieval period, designated something else: a moment of deep sadness and suffering reflecting the strong tension of the mind. French artist Georges de La Tour uses this gesture as a basis for reflection on the vanity of worldly goods. Thus the position of the hands played the role of both a plastic device and an iconographic symbol.
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The use of term σύμβολον in Clement’s writings is problematic because of differences between common doctrine of symbol and symbolism expressed by Clement almost theoretically, and particular examples of symbolism and allegoric exegesis, where Clement’s wording and underlying conceptions are strongly dependent on the relevant contexts. In order to bring the most instances of σύμβολον in a system we propose some classifications. Firstly, according to their function, we distinguish ‘protective,’ ‘anagogic,’ and ‘manifestative’ symbols; secondly, according to the contexts in which they predominantly appear, such as the Pythagorean tradition, Greek Mysteries, Egyptian religion and hieroglyphic script, and extracts from the Greek grammarians; finally, in the context of Biblical exegesis, where one can distinguish instances of typology, morally instructive allegory and symbolism per se. In the latter case the nature of symbol is constituted by Divine Logos who “signifies the invisible link between earth and heaven.” Such a reading clarifies the ontological importance of symbolism for Clement’s metaphysics and philosophy, and helps to explain some difficulties in Clement’s writings actual for Western theology.
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The music of Polish composers of the Romanticism is still quite a forgotten and undiscovered area. One of the examples of that issue are the works of Joseph Poniatowski (1816–1873), a composer who spent a significant part of his life abroad. His work concentrates mainly on the opera music, which was largely dictated by the environment from which he descended and in which he stayed. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to one of the composer’s forgotten works – Mass in F major, and also to presently selected topics related to this work.
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The paper reconstructs the place and role of solar and lunar optical phenomena in the sacral picture of the universe by the Eastern Slavic society during the pre-Mongol period. The written and folk interpretation of halo traditions, solar and lunar shine is analyzed. The views on atmospheric diffraction phenomena as weather signs and omens of political changes are also investigated. The people of Old Rus’ believed that simple halos defined weather changes. At the same time, complex halos predicted victory or political crises and signified holiness of the deceased person. The common mind connected the sacred solar and lunar halos with the figure of prince and (in the Christian era) saint pretenders. The folklore also associated the phenomenon of halo with the special solar and lunar sacred activities. The literary presentations of complex halos could reflect the biblical semantics of light and glow as heavenly fire and evidence of the glory of God.
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In the contemporary Polish Catholic discourse one can notice increased presence of figure of Satan and Biblical topos of his fight with God. The figure appears not only in strictly religious texts but also in discussion on up to date phenomenon of social life, such as abortion, in-vitro fertilization, homosexual partnerships and others. The article is trying to answer the question about functions of this topos. The answer is being searched with usage of sociological findings on the role of language in religion and the role of religion in social life – both issues are discussed in the first chapter. The second chapter, based on fragments from catholic press, presents ways of language construction of analyzed figure. The third chapter focuses on four functions of the topos. The first one is to support religious vision of the world; the second is to strengthen so called nomos, which is the conjunction of rules on which the society is based; the next two functions have rhetorical, persuasive character. The Biblical topos is a kind of a rhetorical formula, which enables in an easy and simple way to explain and to judge the reality but at the same time it gives a very schematic and simplified picture.
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The present article outlines the problem of terrorism in “The Sewers of Paradise” by Jorge Diaz. Moving it to the current times, the play uses the Biblical myth of Cain and Abel, however, with a completely changed original meaning. The world presented in the play is full of absurd situations highlighting an individual’s incomprehension of the events that shape today’s socio‑political scene. Díaz questions the ethics of the current world, emphasizing the following problems: the religious intolerance, authority abuse, opportunist manipulation, xenophobia, discrimination of women, conformism and solitude of the individual lost in a cruel and hostile universe. Generally, the work investigates the concept of terrorism and shows its complexity. The model of the “triangle of violence” by Johan Galtung is used here. Diaz presents the phenomenon of aggression in terms of structural, cultural and direct violence.
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Chociaż chrześcijaństwo nie jest „religią księgi” w potocznym rozumieniu tego określenia, to jednak księga Pisma Świętego stanowi jej oparcie, program i kryterium weryfikujące. Dlatego też w ciągu wieków zawsze starannie dbano o to, by tekst biblijny był odpowiednio przechowywany i przekazywany. W tym artykule zwracamy uwagę na to, w jaki sposób poszukiwano optymalnego tekstu Biblii na uniwersytecie w Paryżu w XIII wieku. Powstanie uniwersytetów i nadanie naukowego charakteru teologii sprawiło, że powstał problem przygotowania odpowiedniego tekstu biblijnego, jednakowego dla wszystkich i łatwo dostępnego. Potrzeba akademicka szybko wpłynęła więc na popularyzację tekstu biblijnego oraz na potrzebę jego skorygowania. Proces opracowania nie był łatwy, ale mimo powstających trudności dość szybko z nim się uporano. Wypracowano tekst, który w końcu zarówno zadowalał uczonych, jak i spełniał kryteria tradycji eklezjalnej. Przy okazji pojawiło się wiele ważnych refleksji teoretycznych, które wpłynęły na pogłębione rozumienie natury tekstu biblijnego oraz na sposoby jego interpretacji. Z tych doświadczeń korzystano w kolejnych wiekach, a wiele wniosków, które wyprowadzono w XIII wieku, zachowuje swoją aktualność do dnia dzisiejszego. Although Christianity is not “a religion of the book” in the common understanding of this expression, however the Bible constitutes its support, programme and verifying criterion. That is why over the centuries the text of the Bible was always scrupulously enshrined and transferred. This article focuses on the subject of how the optimal text of the Bible was searched for at the University of Paris in 13th century. The advent of universities and a new character of theology as a scientific study created a need for a proper text of the Bible, the same for everyone and easily available. Thus the academic necessity rapidly increased the popularity of the biblical text but also prompted the need of its correction. The study was a difficult task, but the problems were soon overcome. The final version of the text satisfied the scholars and met the criteria of the ecclesiastical tradition. Concurrently a lot of significant theoretical reflections emerged which affected the profound understanding of the nature of the biblical text and the ways of its interpretation. These achievements appeared to be valuable in centuries to come and the numerous conclusions drawn in 13th century remain relevant even today.
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Our research follows the demonic perspective on Avestiția′s activity and life. Considered today as a demonic character, she is highlighted by an activity defined almost exclusively against the killing of a pregnant woman or a baby, through appearances that cause fright (the disease called samcă) and the disfigurement of the "touched" by the demon. Because her history is unknown, the recent popular tradition has made one, Avestiția being the sister of Saint Sisoe, a murderer of children, and hence the generation of his witchcraft activity, which is why she is punished by her brother and by Archangel Michael. Newer theories claim a Semite origin (Lamashtu and Lilith), but we come with another, a totemic one, generated by the demon's descriptions. Thus, by systematizing the researched elements, we affirm that, starting from a totem (of the bear), dethroned by the masculine cults of Dacia, deity turns into a demon and encounters the demonological semite elements, prior to Christianity in our country. Subsequent intervention of Christianity "corrects" the history of the character, turning her into a legend, when Sisoe and Archangel Michael appear. This final formula is known by Romanian ethnologists. Christian syncretism almost immediately generates the incantations of samcă and the "Book of Avestiția," a charm that reveals the name and the real history of the demon, which aroused the attention of Christian syncretism when attempting to kill baby Jesus, defrauded by Michael. Sacred folk literature describes her as an extremely dangerous being, Satan's right wing.
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N. Steinhardt proves in his homiletic discourse a real predisposition for dramatization. The Christian "tragedy" is staged and, at the same time, commented by an exceptional playwright and director. Argumentative discourse is a “mise en scene” and thus adheres to a determined social theatricality (of roles and actors). We identify the predilection for theatricality in the impeccable rhetoric, in the syntax of the sentence - the mixture of concise, elliptical sentences with astonishingly long utterances that presuppose a certain rhythm of utterance, the preference for interjection and exclamation, for the free indirect style. All this reveals a permanent concern of N. Steinhardt for the effect. Concentrated and unitary, Steinhardt's essay relies, sometimes, on the "shock" of the listener, on an aesthetic of the paradox and, apparently, of the sensational. Finally, we are witnessing, together with Steinhardt, a dramatic change in the homily paradigm. Sermons such as the ”Living Water”, the ”Hananian Woman”, the ”Tragedy of Judas”, the ”Holy Prophet Elijah”, ”Reflections on Death”, the ”Lord came to save and scandalize us”, the ”Holy Wrath” amply proves the directorial pleasure of the learned monk.
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The purpose of this article is to highlight connections between elements related to space, time and dream, using interdisciplinarity. Thus, we will illustrate the notions illustrated above in fine art, in a branch of rock music - gothic and black metal, and literature. As for the dream, we addressed the religious and psychoanalytic dimension, along with famous paintings and established songs, belonging to the dark wave style and, of course, Fantasy literature for children. The concepts of space and time create extremely interesting polemics, theories, hypotheses in the disciplines of exact sciences, providing research material, reproduction of reality within the disciplines that belong to the artistic branch. I also associated the concepts with the term "imaginary", as an opening to the opportunity to project worlds or even travel, through the dream, to them and, with the help of the hypnotic power of music, to place ourselves, at least mentally, in a safe space and unaltered by the aggression of the outside world.
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Both ancient and modern apocrypha have already been widely dis-cussed in various fields of academic research, for example in religious, biblical or literary studies. Although such analyses say much about the historical and religious background of apocryphal writings and enable us to discover the depth of the symbolic resources used in such texts, they do not fully reveal the cultural impact of the canon. That is why a broader cultural analysis of both the canon and the apocrypha should be based on different methods of research, such as those that are offered by cultural semiotics. From the standpoint of Lotmanian semiotics modern apocrypha may be viewed as examples of the working of culture. They can be regarded as e.g. creative translation of the canon, tools of cultural autocommunication, memory devices, and meaning-generating mechanisms which dynamize the semiosphere. Semiotic analysis underlines the cultural impact of the canon not only as a set of sacred writings but also as a kind of a “cultural code”. The canon as a paradigmatic cultural text (in Aleida Assmann’s sense) is a powerful meaning-generating mechanism in which a huge number of texts intertextually relate to one another. In such relations hypertexts point out the symbolic (often archaic) nucleus of culture (thus they illustrate the statics of the semiosphere), at the same time describing and/or provoking some cultural changes (due to which they correspond with the dynamic nature of the semiosphere).
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The focus of this research is finding and analytical, semiotic-symbolic, theopoetic, and comparative analysis of cosmological and cosmogonic ideas of the origin of the world and human. The field of that analysis includes the ancient cos- mological protology presented in Plato’s Dialogues, the bibliocentric understanding of Genesis in the Six Days of St. Basil the Great and the romantic articulation of the meaning of existence. The romantic pessimistic conception of life, presented through the causes found in the universal principles of creation, is shown primar- ily in Njegoš’s song Luča mikrokozma. The primary goal of the research is to find a poetic-philosophical form of the deepest past of existence, and try to sense a causal sequence in existential development, the latter consequence of which is a pessimis- tic insight into the transience of this determination determined by the inability to know what vibrates outside lethal limitations of being. At the same time, this paper does not focus only on reviewing the historical development of thought about be- ing, but the result of the theopoetically oriented segment of research is reflected in revealing the summarization and transformation of ancient, biblical and romantic cosmological representations in Njegoš’s poetry. Hence, in individual subchapters related to Njegoš’s cosmopoiesis, his philosophical ideas on the source and cause of primordial origin, as well as on the primordial abode of God and being, and its cessa- tion whose cause is the first sin, are presented. In the last segments of the research, the artistic-philosophical concept of the renewal of the primordial embrace with the Creator through song is presented. The research concluded with the presentation of the idea of poetic action as a process of cognition of the primordial origin, and emphasizing that every theopoetically oriented writing represents a new possibility for merging with a transcendental melody. This introduced a new methodology for analyzing texts on metaphysical topics and laid the foundation for future research on the same or similar topics.
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The subject of the present study is the Paulicians. With their native homeland in Anatolia and different Christian doctrine, the Paulicians were a purely underground movement, influential in the 7th-12th centuries. Perceived as heretical by Orthodox Christianity, they were forced to act secretly. However, they were influential in Byzantium and the Orthodox Church when they were strong. Orthodox and Armenians were responsible for their disappearance in Anatolia, which led to the emergence of different doctrines and movements in the following centuries and their spread in the Balkans. Constantinos, the Paulicians’ first leader, was pronounced a didaskalos in 655. In the first half of the 9th century, divided into two, the movement lost its power in Anatolia. Constantinos and later leaders identified themselves as Christians. The Paulician doctrine accepts some texts from the New Testament, but they interpret the Scriptures, Jesus Christ, and rituals such as baptism and evharistiya differently from Orthodox Christians. Although often associated with dualist doctrines, neither their form of organization nor their orders and prohibitions are similar to the dualist ones. Their association with Christianity is based on more detailed data; however, they have different ideas about central issues, such as the Trinity and the position of Jesus Christ as God. The Paulicians adopted a significant number of New Testament texts, especially the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul. Thus they adopted a new interpretation of Christianity, which, combined with their belief that deviated from the primary religious admissions, led to a negative perception. Due to their different interpretations, they were declared heretical by the Armenian Church in the east and the Orthodox Church, and the Catholic Church in the west. As a result, they were persecuted and forced to migrate or go underground; thus, the inauthentic information about them increased. Since there are no Paulicians living today, there is no way to study the subject in its own reality.
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Malo je izvora koji govore o bračnoj seksualnosti s toliko podrobnosti kao rasprave o moralnoj teologiji, zbirke slučajeva savjesti, priručnici za ispovijed itd. Stoga ću krenuti od takvih crkvenih dokumenata, posebno inzistirajući na onim njihovim propisima koji su nam danas najčudniji. Zatim ću pokušati saznati u kojoj nas mjeri ta literatura informira o seksualnom životu parova u prošlosti. U središtu kršćanskog morala jest vrlo snažno nepovjerenje prema tjelesnim užicima, jer oni drže duh u zarobljeništvu tijela, sprječavajući ga da se uzdigne prema Bogu. Treba jesti kako bi se živjelo, ali i izbjegavati odavanje užicima ustiju. Isto tako, dužni smo sjediniti se sa suprotnim spolom kako bismo imali djecu, ali se ne smijemo vezati za spolne užitke. Seksualnost nam je dana samo da bismo se reproducirali. Zlouporaba je njezino korištenje u druge svrhe, primjerice za zadovoljstvo.
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1. La nouvelle exposition du Musée juif d’Etat „Millenium judaicum bohemicum“ (Libretiste: Doc. dr. Vladimir Sadek, Architecte: arch. Bohumil Ulrich, Graphique: Jaroslav Béza) 2. Conférences d’automne 1967 du Musée juif d’Etat
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The Hieroglyphic History, written by Dimitrie Cantemir in 1705, is considered the first Romanian (historical) novel. Beyond the veil of allegory, the exotic topos and animal-related fantasy, the historical events between 1685 and 1705 are revealed through characteristic deciphering, representing valuable data for a historian. The work, first published in 1883, then in 1927 and 1957, in a few nonscientific editions, was finally republished in 1965 in a scientific edition elaborated by P.P. Panaitescu and Ion Verdeș. This 1965 edition is of very high historical value, but it also has a number of lacunae, especially in the field of theology. The editors don't reference certain biblical quotes, they hint at certain psychological ideas when mentioning quotes that are clearly derived from the Bible, they ignore the biblical source, which was the very foundation of Cantemir’s maxims, they overlook the study of certain toponyms with biblical origins (Euphrates, Tarshish, Babylon etc.) and don’t realize that some of his ideas have biblical origins. Furthermore, they don’t distinguish certain elements of Christian iconography from their biblical counterparts, leading to confusion (according to the editors, Saint Veronica’s Veil is attributed to Magdalene!). To edit the text correctly, it is necessary to have a thorough knowledge of biblical sources and familiarity with Romanian and European biblical traditions.
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