Christian Devotion Research Articles

The Reception of Christian Devotional Art

This issue developed out of a session held at the College Art Association's 1995 annual meeting in San Antonio. Like many art historians, by 1995 I had long been interested in reception. My concern with the reception of Christian devotional art was initially stimulated in the early 1980s by reading Roman Catholic art theory of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, in response to Protestant aniconism, provided a compelling defense of the usefulness of religious art. At the heart of Roman Catholic apologies for sacred art was a belief in the indelible power of visual imagery and a concomitant concern with channeling and exploiting viewer responses in the service of the “true” faith.1 Together with post-Tridentine art theory, the work of such postmodern theorists as Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss heightened my concern with reception as a corrective to an undue stress on production and intentionality.2 Thus, given the theoretical framework within which Christian art was justified in the early modern era—my own period of specialization—a methodological shift in favor of the audience's role seemed particularly warranted and beneficial. It has also been fruitful for the study of modern art—as, for example, Michael Fried and Wolfgang Kemp have demonstrated in a secular context. Several articles in this issue, however, treat the reception of modern art in a religious context.3

The Reception of Christian Devotional Art: The Renaissance to the Present

The Reception of Christian Devotional Art: The Renaissance to the Present

The making of a crusade: the Genoese anti-Muslim attacks in Spain, 1146–1148

This paper reviews the series of military attacks the city of Genoa launched against several Spanish Muslim port cities before and during the Second Crusade. It shows that the attacks themselves were militarily successful and that in the years following the attacks, the leaders of the city carefully incorporated these victories into their city's physical fabric and political identity. The Genoese celebrated their victories against the Spanish Muslims in their churches, on their city walls, and in their civic histories. The motive behind this multi-media programme was to demonstrate the Christian devotion of the Genoese to the rest of Latin Christendom, especially the rulers from whom the commune of Genoa sought political acknowledgement and legitimation. It was an important goal of the Genoese who financed and executed these campaigns to be perceived by the rest of the Latin West as good Christians. This paper argues that modern historians of Genoa have always interpreted these attacks as a failure because they have assumed that the motives for Genoese behaviour in the Middle Ages were directed exclusively outwards, towards economic growth and commercial expansion.

Les images miraculeuses du diocèse de Mexico au milieu du XVIIIe siècle

Abstract Since W. Christian investigated the way in which miraculous sanctuaries in modern Spain became rooted in a specific historical and geographical context, it appears interesting to wonder how Spanish Catholicism found itself new references in its mission territories. Finally it becomes obvious that, in mid-eighteenth century, Mexico, clearly differed from Spain, the images of Christ being far more widespread than those of saints and even competing with those of the Virgin. Above all, it appears that Mexican devotion was more closely controlled by the clergy at a time when, contrary to a widespread opinion, very little Christian devotion was taking over pre-Hispanic creeds.

'Transfigured to His Likeness': Sensible Transcendentalism in Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market'

Announcing their primacy, Christina Rossetti's fairy tales anchor her first two collections of poetry. 'Goblin Market' and 'The Prince's Progress' begin and title the volumes of 1862 and 1866, and 'Maiden-Song' follows directly on 'The Prince's Progress' in 1866; these three poems inaugurate, in their original order, the 1875 and 1890 'new and enlarged' editions of her poems. Their positioning at the beginnings of sequences that conclude with 'Devotional Pieces' suggests that these texts, for all their priority, belong to the more secularized band of Rossetti's poetic spectrum. Indeed, in her concordance The Bible and the Poetry of Christina Rossetti, Nilda Jiménez finds no scriptural echoes in any of these poems, an absence truly remarkable given the ubiquity of scriptural resonance in Rossetti's work. Her brother William Michael speculated that removal of Biblical references and diction from Christina Rossetti's poems would reduce her pages 'to something approaching a vacuum': 'the Bible was so much her rule of life and faith that it had almost become a part of herself, and she uttered herself accordingly' (Preface, Golden Treasury Poems, xii). Despite the appearance of a biblical vacuum in her fairy tales, however, they do in truth call up Scripture and speak Rossetti's Christian devotion through and through, but in ways, it may be, inapparent to our usual apprehensions of religious utterance. The alleged 'godlessness' of 'Goblin Market' in particular recommends that fairy tale to Germaine Greer, who otherwise dismisses much of Rossetti's verse as pious nonsense (x, vii, xxii); but even Jerome McGann, who contra Greer sensitively confirms the Christian 'machinery' of the poem, locates its metaphorical operations on 'secular grounds' (237–8, 247, 251).

Handbook for William: a Carolingian woman's counsel for her son

One of the few surviving texts written by a woman of the Middle Ages, Dhuoda's Libermanualis was available in only two faulty Latin manuscripts until a third, superior one was discovered in the 1950s. This English translation by Carol Neel, based on the 1975 critical edition and French translation by Pierre Rich, will bring the work to a wider audience. Handbook for William expresses Dhuoda's maternal feelings, religious fervor, and learning. In instructing her children how they might flourish in God's eyes, as well as humanity's, Dhuoda reveals the authority of Carolingian women in aristocratic households. She dwells on family relations, social order, the connection between religious and military responsibility, and, always, the central place of Christian devotion in a noble life. In her introduction Carol Neel discusses the sociopolitical, literary, and theological background of Handbook for William.

Kierkegaard's Concept of the Aesthetic: A Semantic Leap from Baumgarten

In Describing Kierkegaard as 'the Christian in love with aesthetics,' Thomas Mann indulged in a contradiction in terms. How could a Christian, a true Christian in Kierkegaard's fullest sense of a person radically engaged in a life of religious resignation, suffering, guilt, repentance, and faith, be enamoured of aesthetics, a branch of philosophy focused upon beauty and the beautiful, especially as they become manifest in poetry and the fine arts? It is not to be denied that aesthetics, the aesthetic, and the aesthete persist as central categories in Kierkegaard's philosophical-theological vocabulary throughout his career as an author—in both his pseudonymous and his non-pseudonymous published works, as well as his private journals and papers. But it would be wrong to suppose that Kierkegaard ever reconciled fully his aesthetic preoccupations with his Christian faith and devotion. On the one hand, Kierkegaard's initial turn toward aesthetics represented a turn away from Christianity. It is generally accepted that he took up his pursuit of aesthetic interests in the mid-1830s in reaction against his strict ethical and religious upbringing by his father. The young Kierkegaard then indulged for a time in an aesthetic view of life before achieving clarity regarding the implications of that view.2 During that period he was attracted to such quintessentially aesthetic figures as Faust, Don Juan, and Ahasuerus, whom he considered as representatives of a negative stance toward Chris tianity. Intellectually, he orbited away from his earlier theological studies, and toward independent scrutiny of scientific scholarship, beginning with the aesthetic-literary—a development that accounts for his (evidently aban doned) sketch dated 1842 or 1843 for a series of lectures on poetics and aesthetics.3

Book Review: One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism

Book Review: One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism

One God, One Lord. Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism by L.W. Hurtado, S.C.M., 1988, Pp. xiv + 178. p/b. £8.50.

One God, One Lord. Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism by L.W. Hurtado, S.C.M., 1988, Pp. xiv + 178. p/b. £8.50.

History and Ideology in Ancient Israel by Giovanni Garbini. SCM Press. London, 1988. Pp. xvi + 222. £10.50.

Book Review in this Articles:HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY IN ANCIENT ISRAEL by Giovanni GarbiniTOWARD A THEOLOGY OF INCULTURATION by Aylward ShorterTHE ROOTS OF CHRISTIAN FREEDOM. THE THEOLOGY OF JOHN A.T. ROBINSON by A. KeeTHE MAKING OF THE MODERN CHURCH: CHRISTIANITY IN ENGLAND SINCE 1800 by B.G. WorrallPAUL AND HIS THEOLOGY, A Brief Sketch by Joseph A. Fitzmyer S.J.THE PAULINE CHURCHES: A Sociohistorical Study of Institutionalization in the Pauline and Deutero‐Pauline Writings, by Margaret Y. MacDonaldONE GOD, ONE LORD. Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism by L.W. Hurtado

One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism

The classic and ground-breaking work in Christology, with extensive new introduction, evaluating the most recent developments in current scholarship.

"Tender Pioneer": Emily Dickinson's Poems on the Life of Christ

MILY Dickinson's poems on the life of Jesus Christ, written from early to late in her canon, reflect a poetic concern spanning her entire creative life. When read together as a group allowing each to illuminate the others, these meditations on Jesus' birth, life, Crucifixion, and Resurrection form something like a nineteenth-century American Gospel.1 By recreating the Gospels, often with wit and American colloquial language, Dickinson assumes the role of that warbling, typic Teller her supposed person observes the Bible needs to captivate readers.2 As little 'John,' her persona in one of many poems addressed to Jesus, she stresses the Gospels' contemporary relevance and makes them freshly available to her Sweet countrymen (497, 44I). But while spoken New Englandly (285) and in her unique voice, the deep structure of her Gospel poems places them in the poetic tradition of Christian devotion, a tradition extending from the Dream of the Rood and Pearl poets, through the medieval lyricists, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, and Hopkins, to Eliot and Auden in our own day. The salient feature uniting Christian poets in a single identifiable poetic mode is their reverential attention to the life of Jesus Christ and their

Classical tragedy in the history of early opera in Rome

The earliest operas are few, and their history is a history of particulars: of the interests of individual Renaissance humanists; of the ways in which certain musicians sang; of the development of Italian poetry for music; and of the theatrical traditions within which the new genre was accepted and propagated. Recent music history has tended to stress the sixteenth-century antecedents for these aspects of opera, without forgetting, however, that the common inspiration forDafne, Anima e CorpoandEuridice– as well as for some earlier Florentine intermedi – was the desire to emulate the effects of the music of the ancient Greeks and Romans. In Florence this was realised at the granducal court with the help of its satellite circles of educated nobles. In Rome, knowledge of the ancients was the province of professional scholars, the priests and religious who taught in the seminaries and colleges, and for whom Seneca and Terence would have been more familiar fare than Tasso and Guarini. Thus after Cavalieri staged hisRappresentatione di Anima et di Corpounder the auspices of the Oratorians, it is not surprising that the next Roman musical drama is a carnival school play given by boys and composed by their professor. In Rome, furthermore, the princes and prelates of the Church exercised their tastes for fine literature with transformations of Pindar and Horace designed to inspire Christian devotion.

The Nygren Corpus: Annotations to the Major Works of Anders Nygren of Lund

The published works of Anders Nygren -for 50 years or more one of Europe's leading theologians and undoubtedly Scandinavia's best known theologian in the twentieth century-form an impressive literary corpus of some 370 items. Among them are some seventeen monographs and collections of essays published in book form, representing the core of Nygren's works, and therefore indispensable to the analysis of his thought. Many of these works are unavailable except in the Swedish language, and most are now out of print as well. The purpose of the present essay is to provide a quick overview of these seventeen books, with annotations designed to help the reader orient himself to the major contributions in Nygren's works and the leading ideas in Nygren's thought. The approach is reportorial rather than analytical or critical. No attempt is made to enter into the debate among Nygren's interpreters, and only in one or two instances do we relate to the secondary literature, now increasing both in volume and quality. The essay is organized around the following four periods in Nygren's career: the early period, marked by extensive philosophical and methodological endeavors; the period of mature theological scholarship, marked by historical-critical motif research and biblical theology; the period of his episcopacy, marked by a turn toward more churchly theological concerns; and his retirement, marked by a return to philosophical and methodological interests. Thor Hall, Ph.D., Duke University, is Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He is the author of A Framework for Faith (1970), Anders Nygren in the series Makers of the Modern Theological Mind (1978), A Theology of Christian Devotion (1969), The Future Shape of Preaching (1971), Whatever Happened to the Gospel (1973), and Systematic Theology Today, Part I1(1978b). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Sun, 19 Jun 2016 06:50:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Book Review: A Reader's Guide to Religious Literature, Seekers after Mature Faith: A Historical Introduction to the Classics of Christian Devotion

Book Review: A Reader's Guide to Religious Literature, Seekers after Mature Faith: A Historical Introduction to the Classics of Christian Devotion

Francis Bacon on the Nature of Man (review)

398 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Roman literature and traditions. Augustine had the welcome responsibility of giving to them a Christian interpretation of Roman culture and of history in general. This gave him the opportunity of using Cicero, Plato, Sallust, and the rest to justify the ways of God to Romans in terms of their own traditions and beliefs. He composed The City o] God. The story of this achievement is one of the finest parts of Brown's biography. He describes in detail how Augustine labored with this elite community of Roman refugees not as a bishop but as a philosopher. The City o] God is preoccupied less with the heavenly city than with a realistic critique of Roman history and institutions, and with a reasonable explanation of their downfall. The Pax Romana was a fraudl A true realm of peace and justice is being established in both time and eternity on genuine foundations. His work on this theme gave Augustine the chief satisfaction of his life. Augustine's career and philosophy were not only masterpieces of Christian devotion and reflection, they were the materials of a classic, heroic tragedy. The tension that dominated him he understood very well as an agone, a heroic "wrestling," to use Peter Brown's term. When in the last weeks of his life he saw the Vandals burning his churches, torturing his priests, and coming steadily closer to Hippo with their scorched-earth policy he broke down into "constant and deep" weeping (as his friend and first biographer, Possidins, reports ). He understood theoretically and felt poignantly the essential tragedy of his life and doctrine. He made no attempt to palliate or disguise the stark tragedy of his faith and love. And he sought no comfort amid the ruin of his life-work. Broken-hearted, he bowed before the predestined doom and accepted it not as a martyrdom at the hands of men but as the normal destiny of a resident allen in the City of Earth. The biography closes with a few of Augustine's eloquent expressions of this insight: "Look now at the city, Jerusalem, of which these most glorious things were spoken. On earth it is destroyed. It has fallen to the ground before its enemies; it is now not what it once was. It has delineated an image: this shadow has passed its mea.ning on to somewhere else." [p. 318] "The centuries of past history would have rolled by like empty jars, if Christ had not been foretold by means of them." [p. 318] "In its collective origin, from the evidence of this life itself, a life so full of so many and such various evils that it can hardly be called living, we must conclude that the whole human race is being punished." [p. 328] "The extraordinary and surface effects of the light itself, in sun, and moon, and stars, ia the dark shades of a glade, in the colors and scents of flowers, in the sheer diversity and abundance of chirruping, painted birds... And there is the grandeur of the spectacle of the sea itself, as it slips on and off its many colors like robes, and now is all shades of green, now purple, now sky-blue... And all these are mere consolations for us, for us unhappy punished men: they are not the rewards of the blessed. What can these be like, then, if such things here are so many, so great, and of such quality." [p. 329] "These things are yours, O God. They are good, because You created them. None of our evil is in them. The evil is ours if we love them At the expense of Yourself--these things that reflect Your design." [p. 326] H~a~aT W. SC~r Claremont, Cali]ornia Francis Bacon on the Nature o] Man. By Karl R. Wallace. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Ill. Press, 1967. Pp. 200. $5.75) Considered in its own terms, Karl R. Wallace's book has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It appears to be a careful and faithful representation of Bacon's faculty psychology, which by no means is an easy task. In addition, Wallace has compared this...

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:SYMBOLS OF WORSHIP — OLD AND NEW: Outward and Visible, by Basil MinchinSYMBOLS OF WORSHIP — OLD AND NEW: Christian Worship, an introductory Outline, by T. S. GarrettSYMBOLS OF WORSHIP — OLD AND NEW: Poiesis, theologische Untersuchung der Kunst, by Hans‐Eckehard BahrSELF‐ANALYSIS IN THE CHURCH: Macht die Gemeinde stark by Waldemar WilkenSELF‐ANALYSIS IN THE CHURCH: The City Church — Death or Renewal by Walter KloetzliSELF‐ANALYSIS IN THE CHURCH: Situation actuelle de l'Eglise by A.‐C. RenardANABAPTISTS: Hutterite Studies, by Robert Friedmann. Edited by Harold SANABAPTISTS: Even unto Death, by John C. WengerANABAPTISTS: Berufen zur Verkündigung, by Max MeyerCHRISTIAN UNITY — CONCILIAR OR CATHOLIC?: One Great Ground of Hope: Christian Missions and Christian Unity, by Henry P. van DusenCHRISTIAN UNITY — CONCILIAR OR CATHOLIC?: La Rencontre des Églises, by Jacques LeclerqCHRISTIAN DEVOTION: The Sense of the Presence of God by John BaillieCHRISTIAN DEVOTION: Christian Devotion by John BaillieCOLOUR OR CULTURE?: Principle and Practice in Race Relations by J. C. G. KotzéAFRICAN SOUNDINGS: “Whither Africa” by G. McLeod BryanAFRICAN SOUNDINGS: “Bantu Prophets in South Africa” by Bengt G. M. SundklerAFRICAN SOUNDINGS: “African Music and the Church in Africa” by Henry WemanASIA, KNOWN AND UNKNOWN: The Church in communist China, by Francis Price JonesASIA, KNOWN AND UNKNOWN: Servants of God in People's China, by Katharine HockinASIA, KNOWN AND UNKNOWN: The Christians in Korea, by Samuel Hugh MoffettASIA, KNOWN AND UNKNOWN: Judson of Burma, by B. PearnASIA, KNOWN AND UNKNOWN: On Asia's Rim, by Andrew T. RoyNEW ISSUES CONCERNING THE FAMILY: The Changing Pattern of Family in India. Edited by P. D. Devanandan and M. M. ThomasNEW ISSUES CONCERNING THE FAMILY: Human Reproduction. A study of some emergent problems and questions in the light of the Christian FaithNEW ISSUES CONCERNING THE FAMILY: Sterilization. An Ethical Enquiry

Mysticism

Journal Article Mysticism Get access The Fellowship of the Saints. An Anthology of Christian Devotional Literature. Compiled by Thomas S. Kepler. New York and Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1948. 800 pages. Price $7.50. PAUL E. JOHNSON PAUL E. JOHNSON Boston University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume XVII, Issue 2, April 1949, Pages 153-a–153, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/XVII.2.153-a Published: 01 April 1949

Book Review: The Fellowship of the Saints: An Anthology of Christian Devotional Literature

Book Review: The Fellowship of the Saints: An Anthology of Christian Devotional Literature

The Trinity and Christian Devotion. Charles W. Lowry

Previous articleNext article No AccessCritical ReviewsThe Trinity and Christian Devotion. Charles W. Lowry Paul LehmannPaul Lehmann Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 27, Number 2Apr., 1947 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/483571 Views: 5Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.