Ancient Views Research Articles

Правила и нормы поведения, связанные с рождением ребенка, в традиционной культуре башкир

Introduction. The article examines behavioral patterns of pregnant women, introduction of a newborn into the family and community within the framework of traditional Bashkir culture. The goal of the research is to delineate rules to be observed by a pregnant woman and her relatives in prenatal and postnatal periods. Methods. The research applies descriptive, comparative historical, and typological methods. Results. The work employs a comprehensive approach which includes analyses of scholarly papers in folklore studies, ethnography, collected field data, and available publications. The obtained results show that the category of age constitutes an essential part in the culture of communication. In traditional society, individual behavior and social contacts were largely determined by age. Each nation has its own perception of time, and traditional etiquette is closely related to such representations. In the traditional culture of Bashkirs, the health of mother and child was believed to be determined by whether certain prenatal and postnatal rituals, rules of conduct and etiquette established by transition ceremonies were observed. The first days of a child’s life witnessed quite a number of ceremonies connected to the ‘for-the-first time’ category; once the latter were duly observed, the status of the newborn was fixed, established, and corresponding rules of conduct defined. That was accompanied by the use of material, verbal and nonverbal means of influence on the baby. The numerous ceremonies performed since the first days were programmed to delineate somewhat required standards of behavior in the family and society. At each stage of the child’s way into adulthood he / she was patronized and mentored by a family or community member. Similar ties were established with those who took part in the shaving of prenatal hair, cutting of fetters, witnessed the emergence the first milk tooth, etc. So, subsequently in everyday life the child communicated with the latter as if those were close relatives. Such individuals had the right to instruct the child, deliver sermons, and ask for his / her help. In traditional culture, special significance was attached to the name-giving ceremony. Names were viewed as conductors of good and evil believed capable of determining an individual’s future. Once fixed right after the birth, the name performed protective, predictive, and informative functions. It was closely connected with moral and aesthetic qualities of the individual. Subsequent changes in status resulted in that the individual gradually lost his / her given name, and people around replaced it with terms of relationship. On the one hand, names performed a protective function, and on the other hand, proved a most vulnerable part of personality, which is attested to by the ban on pronouncing personal names as such. Conclusions. The examined research materials show that in traditional society the introduction of a newborn into family and society was based on ancient views, Moslem doctrine, and life-cycle representations of the Bashkirs. The first forty days of life were regulated by strict bans and instructions. Those were days of bidding farewell to signs of ‘otherness’: they buried the afterbirth, made an amulet of the umbilical cord, etc. During the period the new member of the community was being hominified’, i.e., the child acquired patrons, received a name, and was granted attributes of the external world.

The Body and Desire: Gregory of Nyssa's Ascetical Theology by Raphael A. Cadenhead

Reviewed by: The Body and Desire: Gregory of Nyssa's Ascetical Theology by Raphael A. Cadenhead Natalie Carnes Raphael A. Cadenhead The Body and Desire: Gregory of Nyssa's Ascetical Theology Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. xii + 267. $95.00. Cadenhead explains the need for his book on Gregory of Nyssa and desire by tracing a disciplinary lacuna. On one side are late ancient studies scholars. Over the years such scholars have developed sophisticated analyses of asceticism that yet remain mired in "often unchallenged Freudian and Foucauldian interpretations" of it, imposing on writers like Gregory anachronistic categories that overdetermine their accounts (1). Fixed on terms like fluidity, power, and normalcy, such scholars miss the theological convictions motivating the ascetics, Cadenhead claims. On the other side of the lacuna are patristic scholars, who are much more attentive to the theology of early Christians, but are much less interested in their asceticism. Cadenhead positions The Body and Desire as spanning this gap through a diachronic method of interpretation that takes seriously the developmental shifts in Gregory's theology. Such a hermeneutic strategy of charting thematic movement across time neatly mirrors his argument that Gregory understands asceticism itself to be structured by ascending stages. The Body and Desire is organized by an Introduction and three parts corresponding to three phases in Gregory's writing career, each of which is identified not only by a time period but also by a central theme. A helpful appendix lays out Cadenhead's dating and the chronology of Gregory's texts, so the reader can reference which texts each part encompasses. Part One, on the early phase of Gregory's writing (371–378), describes what Cadenhead calls Gregory's "integrationist ethic" over the course of three chapters. As he elaborates an account of the reciprocity of the virtues in Gregory that requires treating sexual desire as a species of desire as such, Cadenhead proposes to understand Gregory's theology of sexual desire, virginity, and marriage together with his theology of food, fasting, and gluttony. In this stage, sexual desire, like desire for food, is properly understood within Gregory's vision of moral transformation in which the appetite is oriented toward human need through the exercise of free will. The second part of the book, on the middle phase of Gregory's career (378–387), addresses gender, its overcoming, and its mixing, both ascetically and [End Page 665] eschatologically. Cadenhead focuses on two contexts for this period of Gregory's writing: the death of his siblings Basil and Macrina, and the Trinitarian and christological debates over Apollinarianism and Eunomianism. Through the three chapters of Part Two, Cadenhead tracks the development of the Part One themes of desire, celibacy, and pleasure through this middle phase of his writing; considers the conflicting lines of interpretation in Gregory's writings that lead him to an unresolved question about the permanence of sexual differentiation; and reflects on the development of his theology of desire through his engagement with the Apollinarian controversy as well as the transformation of activity and passivity, male and female through the Eunomian one. What emerges is a complex picture of sex and gender that is neither entirely assimilable to late ancient views nor wholly separable from them. Cadenhead shows, for example, that womanishness is associated with weakness and susceptibility to the passions that must (and as Macrina exemplifies, can) be overcome, but manly virility, too, poses an obstacle to moral advancement and must also be renounced. In a similarly ambivalent point, marital relations remain alloyed to sexual hierarchy for Gregory, and yet the divine life ascetics imitate and hope for is nonsubordinationist. Where many retrievals of Gregory gloss over the aspects of his thought less appealing to contemporary readers, Cadenhead shows in this part that such aspects remain important to understanding the movements and tensions of his theology. In the final, third part of the book, Cadenhead treats the late phase of Gregory's life (387–394) and the theme of spiritual maturation and erotic union with Christ. The shortest of the three parts, this two-chapter section returns to some of the themes of Part One. It traces the later iterations of Gregory's...

Divine Beneficence and Human Generosity in Second Temple Judaism: Reflections on John Barclay's Paul and the Gift

Divine Beneficence and Human Generosity in Second Temple Judaism:Reflections on John Barclay's Paul and the Gift Bradley C. Gregory In his recent landmark book, Paul and the Gift,1 John Barclay situates Paul's theology of grace within the ancient understanding of gift giving. In order to do this, he outlines six ways that gift giving or grace can be "perfected," understood in its "purest essence." A gift may be "perfected" in terms of superabundance (size, importance, permanence), its singularity (it is the defining characteristic of the giver), its priority (it comes before any initiative by the recipient), its incongruity (the recipient is unworthy of such a gift), its efficacy (it accomplishes the purpose for which it was given), and noncircularity (it is given without any expectation of return) (66–78). These different dimensions of gifts/grace provide a helpful schema for understanding how both ancient authors and their interpreters throughout history have understood what grace is and what it is not. For example, the different understandings of Paul found in Augustine and Luther largely stem from each of the latter's different conceptions of how grace is perfected. The upshot of this approach to grace for the study of Paul is twofold. First, in examining the anthropology and history of gift giving from antiquity to the present, Barclay shows that the "disinterested gift," one that is given with no expectation of return, is an almost exclusively modern, Western notion. In contrast, for the ancient person, gift giving always expected [End Page 183] some sort of reciprocal exchange because gift giving was always embedded in an interpersonal dynamic of creating and developing social ties (11–65). Thus, it is no surprise that, in the second part of the book, when Barclay explores how different Second Temple Jewish authors perfect divine grace, not a single one perfects noncircularity. In each of the five works, some sort of return is expected, even if it is "only" profound gratefulness to God. Second, by reading Second Temple works with these six different perfections in mind, Barclay shows convincingly that "grace is everywhere; but this does not mean that grace is everywhere the same" (319). For example, while Wisdom of Solomon and Philo do not perfect divine grace in terms of incongruity, the Qumran Hodayot and Pseudo-Philo do; yet all perfect grace in at least one way. In fact, each Second Temple Jewish author represents a different constellation of grace, perfecting it in different combinations of the six dimensions, and each perfection in different ways. In turning to Paul, then, it becomes quite clear that one cannot simply ask whether Paul agrees or disagrees with Second Temple Judaism on the topic of grace. Rather, the question is how his view of grace is situated among this diversity. On one hand, Paul is continuous with other ancient authors in not perfecting noncircularity. Like his contemporaries, he firmly believed that God's grace creates a new relational dynamic and demands a response from the recipients. On the other hand, Paul's view of divine grace as radically incongruous and centered on God's gift in Christ was largely discontinuous with ancient views of (human) gift giving, though in different ways in comparison to Judaism and Greco-Roman culture. Key to this aspect of Barclay's thesis is the claim that, for ancient authors, gift giving was routinely viewed as congruous in some way with the worth or status of the recipient, and then further, the question of how gift giving in early Judaism aligned with this broader Greco-Roman perspective. It is this aspect of Barclay's work that I would like to engage for this symposium. I hope the following discussion will help to supplement Barclay's treatment and to suggest some further ways that divine beneficence and human generosity are interrelated among some Second Temple Jewish authors.2 Social Worth and Well-Placed Gifts One aspect of gifts in the ancient world that Barclay rightfully highlights is that the status or worth of a potential recipient was generally a significant factor in the decision to give: "What distinguishes the sphere of gift [End Page 184] is not that it is 'unilateral,' but...

Greek Periods in the Book of Hebrews

Abstract It is typical for students of the book of Hebrews to comment on its long, complex sentences or “periods” as evidence of the author’s literary and rhetorical skills. This essay surveys ancient and modern views on the Greek period and finds that they are typically shorter, antithetical or “rounded” statements which may or may not coincide with a grammatical sentence. Example periods in Hebrews are then discussed along with observations on other, supporting literary features of the epistle in those places where the author occasionally employs a periodic style.

« Cette émotion appelée poésie »

For a long time the scope of “poetry” has been wrongly reduced to its purely emotional contents. Pierre Reverdy in his well-known conference “This emotion called poetry” draws on some of his already ancient views. He argues that the poetic emotion consists both of an affective as of a rational linking between the poet and the reader, and therefore also between the world and words. By means of metaphors (but not exclusively), the poetic emotion gives the strong evidence of human existence.

Virgo to Virago: Medea in the Silver Age

Virgo to Virago: Medea in the Silver Age

“Suiting Forms to Their Conceit”: Emotion and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Tragic Acting

When Horace wrote in Ars Poetica, “If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself” (“Si vis me flere dolendum est primum ipsi tibi”), he expressed the ancient world's view that, in order to emotionally affect his audience, an orator needed to feel the emotion himself. This idea was widely subscribed to in the eighteenth century. In the modern era Konstantin Stanislavsky engaged in a sustained investigation of emotion and acting, stressing that the actor needed to experience “real feeling” in order for the audience to experience authentic emotions also. As a theory of emotional transmission, it seems like common sense. Yet, when Denis Diderot witnessed in Baron d'Holbach's salon David Garrick's parlor trick of sticking his head out between two screens, and cycling through a range of passions with his face, the great philosophe wondered whether the actor felt anything at all even though his audience, including Baron Grimm, evidently did. “Can his soul have experienced all these feelings, and played this kind of scale in concert with his face?” Diderot asked, and then answered, “I don't believe it; nor do you.” By deciding in the negative, that Garrick could not have felt anything, Diderot reveals a common fallacy of the audience: the belief that what an audience feels reflects, and is a result of, what an actor feels. The problem for Diderot, which he addressed in the Paradox of Acting (1773), was how an actor such as Garrick managed to evoke emotions in his audience when he apparently felt nothing himself.

This 11,000-year-old statue unearthed in Siberia may reveal ancient views of taboos and demons

This 11,000-year-old statue unearthed in Siberia may reveal ancient views of taboos and demons

The economy of sacrifice and embodiment

This paper attempts to reconcile two different views of sacrifice. The first is transactional. It is as old as the ancient view that prayer and sacrifice are what we offer to the gods; in return they provide us with their benefits. It also appears in the biblical view that God not only returns good for good, but, in imposing misfortunes for our sins, exchanges evil for evil. The second view of sacrifice sees it as transcending any economy or system of exchange. Thus, when a parent sacrifices for a child—for example, when she spends sleepless nights to stay with a sick child—she does not think of an exchange. Neither does a soldier who sacrifices himself for his comrades. In this article, I try to reconcile these two views of sacrifice in terms of the embodiment that does not just place us, through our needs, in an economy, but also, in its uniqueness, opens up the possibility of our transcending every transactional arrangement.

PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THEOLOGICAL WHY-QUESTIONS IN THE HEBREW BIBLE

This article provides an introductory overview of a selection of philosophical perspectives on theological why-questions in the Hebrew Bible. Why-questions put to Yhwh in all the various sections of the canon are clarified philosophically via ancient views on causation, the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and the philosophy of language. Comparative philosophy of religion is also utilized to argue that while most theological why-questions in the Hebrew Bible are asked in the context of suffering, assumptions related to the deity differ from those of modern philosophical theologies.

Wisdom of the Body in Sport and Exercise Practices

Abstract Two alternative ancient views on medicine and health can be distinguished in western antiquity: first, that the knowledge of the doctor is sufficient, and second, that health is primarily a consequence of adapting one’s own life to the wisdom of the body. The body works according to its own laws, has its own “logic,” and speaks its own language. Therefore, listening to the body can be an important source of information for a healthy human life. The body is not merely an object for human manipulation and “the prison of the soul,” but a source of learning and knowledge. It seems that people rarely listen to their own bodies; however, the ancient wisdom of listening to the body is still present and cultivated in modern sports training. Good athletes and trainers are the ones who learn from the body and recognize its messages. In this article, we focus on four aspects of wisdom of the body, presented through four virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. The body teaches us temperance and justice; for example, when someone exaggerates too much, the body produces the feeling of pain. The body is a source of fortitude and persistence when rest and healing is needed. The body is a source of prudence or truth about oneself when we face the physical demands of sport. Therefore, through modern sports practices, the perennial wisdom of the body is still accessible to the modern man.

Neither Mereology nor Magic, but Teleology

AbstractContemporary theories of universals have two things in common: first, they are unable to account for necessary connections between universals that form a structure. Second, they leave teleology out of their accounts of instantiation. These facts are not unrelated; the reason why contemporary theories have such trouble is they neglect the ancient idea that universals are ends at which nature aims. If we want a working theory of universals, however, we must return to this idea. Despite its unpopularity among realists, teleology is not a disposable eccentricity, and its dismissal is not an improvement on ancient views.

Interpreting Pedagogical Acts: Acts 8.26–40 and Narrative Reflexivity as Pedagogy

This article foregrounds a fact so basic that it often goes unnoticed: stories frequently depict the acts of reading and/or interpreting stories; many narratives are themselves concerned with proper modes of narrative interpretation. I contend that such scenes work rhetorically to inculcate particular kinds of hermeneutical skills in their audiences, and thus can be read as pedagogical scenarios vis-à-vis implied readers. I begin the article by introducing the contemporary notion of narrative reflexivity and situating that concept within the broader literary sub-field of rhetorical narratology. Then, I turn to Acts 8.26–40 as a brief case study in order to demonstrate how narrative reflexivity can help us to think in fresh ways about the pedagogical force of ancient narratives. Specifically, I argue that this story in Acts reflexively commends the following hermeneutical principle for its readers: because reading is not synonymous with understanding, one ought to have an authoritative interpretive guide, and embrace a hermeneutic of hospitality towards the received narrative. Finally, I highlight several examples from ancient literature that demonstrate why my proposed reading coheres with ancient views about pedagogy and textual interpretation more broadly.

The Ancient Chinese Views of Family Education Recorded in Pre-Qin (before 221 BC) Confucian Classics

<p>The Pre-Qin family education is a long neglected but important research topic in understanding Chinese education and culture. Although Chinese traditional family education is mostly under the influence of Confucianism there is not sufficient discussion in the Pre-Qin period as there are only scattered records related to this topic in various Pre-Qin classics. In addition, most research outputs in the field are on “jiaxun” (family instruction) which normally refers to family seniors’ commandments to their juniors from a cultural perspective. However, “jiating jiaoyu” (family education) can be defined as a mutual learning process in which individuals are socialized in family settings from perspectives of education and sociology. Based on this definition, the paper aims at exploring the special roles and contributions of the early Pre-Qin Confucian classics to the development of family education in China in terms of principle, aim, pedagogy, and role expectation of family member. The result shows that the Yijing (Book of Changes) brings out the views of strict family management style, supreme status of the father and role differentiation in the Pre-Qin period. The Lunyu (Analects) emphasizes the value of learning the shi (Book of Songs) and the li (Book of Rites) while the book Mengzi proposes a couple of innovative views on the parent-child relationship, role models, mutual education, environmental influence, and moral and role expectations in family education. The practicability of impartiality in family education and effectiveness of direct instruction in education are areas that need special attention from researchers and education policy makers.</p>

THE UNFRIENDLY CORCYRAEANS

The prominence of the island city of Corcyra in Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War presents a puzzle. It appears in the opening of the work in a conflict with its mother city Corinth (1.24–31), after which representatives of both Corinth and Corcyra deliver speeches at Athens (1.32–44). Further conflict between the two cities follows, with Athens supporting Corcyra (1.45–55). Later on, Thucydides depicts two unusually graphic episodes ofstasisat Corcyra (3.70–85, 4.46–8). This prominence is surprising, given that the historian himself explicitly states that the initial set of events involving the island does not in fact represent the beginning of the war (1.66.1), and that the Corcyreanstasisis not the first in the war, and that, as has been often observed, it is not even particularly remarkable or influential in it. In what follows, I seek to clarify Thucydides’ use of the island first by exploring ancient views of Corcyra's ‘predecessor’, Homer's Phaeacia, and by arguing that perceptions of the mythical place mirror and reinforce beliefs about its successor Corcyra. An interpretation of Phaeacia as a representative of excess luxury, weakness and friendlessness requires an aggressive reading of Homer. As Rose and others have made clear, however, this position is defensible even if not all readers may choose to accede to it. A significant strand of ancient opinion seems to have adopted a similar attitude as well, perhaps projecting a fifth-century prejudice identified by Rusten back onto Corcyra's Homeric forerunner. In the second part of this paper, I argue that this background influences Thucydides’ presentation of Corcyra, and that the historian emphasizes the story of the island in order to illustrate a pattern of extravagant wealth followed by civic collapse that would have been readily recognizable to an ancient audience. The fact that Thucydides’ Corcyra-story traces all the stages of this process, from a nod to Homeric opulence through pre-war selfishness to wartime collapse, effectively explains his conspicuous use of the city.

Juridical-Legal Study of the Criminal Policy of Iran Regarding Prejudicial to Public Decency Crimes with an Approach to the Ancient Laws

Iranian legislator has never presented a criterion for detecting crimes prejudicial to public decency, but instead of defining prejudicial to public decency crimes, the legislator has only stated prejudicial to public decency crimes. Because main purpose of this study is identifying concept of public decency crimes in the criminal code of Iran and ancient laws, their proper application regarding the changes of new Islamic penal code of Iran and its effectiveness on the decision-making of judges, based on the nature, scope and commentaries, this research studies the type and examples of prejudicial to public decency cries in ancient laws and response to public decency crimes, we will analyze severity and violence of punishment for these crimes. Challenging questions may raise in this regard, such as what is the type and examples of chastity crimes from ancient law view, Imamieh jurisprudence view and legal system of Iran? And how is the approach and response of ancient laws to chastity crimes compared to religious principles and punishment system of Iran's legal system? This research studies the history of chastity crimes in the jurisprudence teachings and identifies crimes prejudicial to public decency in the ancient laws and basis for accepting these crimes in legal system of Iran.

Gift Histories

This is a review article on John M.G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015) that critically examines the methodological choice to study ‘perfections’ (as conceptualized by Kenneth Burke) of the gift, asking both about how this works to provide a taxonomy of ancient Mediterranean views, and how it fits the argument of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Concluding thoughts are offered about the implications of John Barclay’s reading of Paul, both in terms of Paul’s situation within his own time and in terms of contemporary theology.

In Search of Agamemnon: Early Travellers to Mycenae

In Search of Agamemnon: Early Travellers to Mycenae

Using Student Dreams to Teach Psychoanalytic Myth Theory

Teaching interpretive theory—and psychoanalytic theory in particular—to students of classical mythology can be difficult due to theory’s technical complexity and perceived obsolescence and irrelevance. Having students record their own dreams, which they then analyze and compare to mythic material, can, however, be an effective technique for both learning and testing Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic approaches to interpreting myth. Dream journaling can also help students better appreciate ancient views about dreams and their meanings and, more generally, can help foster a desirable esprit de corps within the class.

Пост-ритуальный остеологический комплекс из раскопок поселения эпохи бронзы Стрелецкое 1

The ritual activities of the life sphere, in contrast with burial rites, have a non-rich presentation in the archaeological source. Complex of osteological remains (11 left parts of sheep mandibles and one right part of goat mandible), connected with rites of calendar cycle, was reseached in excavation of the Bronze Age settlement Streletskoye 1 in Troitsk district of Chelyabinsk region. This rite perhaps was associated with the line of binar opposites, which was disposed in the base of ancient world view.