Christian Miracle Research Articles

Miracles and Divination from Giulio Aleni’s Perspective

The growth of local Chinese Christian communities in the seventeenth century highlighted the importance of directly addressing the issue of miracles. For Giulio Aleni (1582–1649), the most respected Catholic missionary to China after Matteo Ricci, this issue presented two interrelated agendas: to criticize divination and to preach Christian miracles. Aleni’s empirical approach to refute divination as a feeble observational science seemed to contradict his belief in miracles. Focusing on how Aleni negotiated the tension between empirical inquiry and the ineffable and interpretive qualities of acts of faith, this study shows that Aleni’s robust empiricism can be justified and forms the basis for cross-cultural hermeneutics based on a two-tier theory of the truth.

Мотив чуда в романах Ф. М. Достоевского, И. С. Шмелева и А. Ф. Лосева

The paper explores the motif of miracle in Russian literature through a comparative analysis of the novels “Crime and Punishment” by F. M. Dostoevsky, “The Woman Thinker” by A. F. Losev and “The Heavenly Ways” by I. S. Shmelev. The specificity of the research lies in its focus on the authors’ religious worldview, as they belonged to different eras and held different religious, philosophical and aesthetic positions. The research demonstrates that they share an understanding of the motif of miracle based on the dialectics of faith, which forms a dialectical model of personality in their works. The aim of the research is to identify the distinctive features of the functioning of the motif of the Christian miracle in the selected works of Russian literature from the 19th and 20th centuries. The scientific novelty lies in revealing the dialogical nature of the motif of miracle expressed in the encounter between man and God and its world-constructing function determined by the situation of faith and lack of faith that shapes corresponding worlds within the literary works. It is argued that the motif of the Christian miracle is an invariant of the motif of encounter and is realised through the plot of doubt, which involves the choice between faith and lack of faith. The miracle is defined by the situation of dialogue between the protagonist and God. The protagonist’s attainment of faith is considered a miracle and is associated with his spiritual rebirth.

The Christian miracle by agnostic Fauré: what the “Requiem” is keeping silence about

The relevance of the article. Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem is one of the most performed works of this genre in contemporary music practice. It is addressed in concert performances, scientific research and conducting classes. However, it still remains semi-closed for understanding, because the composer’s attitude to death in this work reaches unexpectedly extreme emotions — he declares almost the desirability of death.
 The purpose is to substantiate the own performing concept of the Requiem by Gabriel Fauré on the basis of contextual, textual and comparative analysis of the musical material, as well as biographical and psychological analysis of the composer’s personality.
 The methodology. The research was carried out using an integrated approach, in the structure of which the contextual analysis allowed to establish the creative intentions of G. Fauré to write such a Requiem, the textual analysis helped to determine the specifics of certain structures and semantic content of the work, the comparative analysis — to compare the concepts of different versions of the Requiem of Fauré, the method of intonation analysis — to dive into the sign system of the work.
 The results. The author proposed her own performance concept of the work, which takes into account the composer’s religious and philosophical guidelines, as well as his psychological characteristics against the background of the events of the Franco-Prussian War.
 The scientific novelty. For the first time, the study provides a detailed analysis of the semantic content of the work, deciphering the principles of the composer’s creative method in working on the funeral text.
 The practical significance. The materials of the article can be useful in the practical activities of conductors, soloists and choristers, as well as in the educational process of training conductors, choirmasters and vocalists.
 Conclusions. It has been determined that Gabriel Fauré’s interpretation of the canonical text (with the changes corresponding to the Parisian rite) is based not so much on his personal drama of losing his parents, as it was previously believed, but on his attitude to death, formed by the events of the Franco-Prussian War.
 It has been determined that the main idea of the Requiem is a great feeling of love and compassion for a man who is forced to fight for his life, killing his own kind and who deserves peace. In this, Fauré seems to depart from the concept of the Catholic Requiem with its traditional “pedagogical intimidation” with pictures of the Last Judgment, and approaches the concept of the Orthodox funeral service with its repentance and hope for God’s mercy.

A Ballad and a Movie: Scandinavian TSB B21 and Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring

A Ballad and a Movie: Scandinavian TSB B21 and Ingmar Bergman's <i>The Virgin Spring</i>

Another True Cross: Psellos, Heraklios, and the Cross of the Archangel Michael at Sykeon

This paper reads Psellos’ Oration to the Archangel Michael as a pointed political piece couched as a pious sermon about Christian miracles. It argues that, under the narrative of the theft of the “holy cross” from the shrine at Sykeon, Psellos veils a reference to a contemporary event, namely, the rebellion of Roussel of Bailleul against Michael VII. The aim of the oration is to restore credibility to the monastic community after their misplaced support of the Norman rebel. The allusion is constructed rhetorically through an elaborate etiology for the monastery, combining the dedication to the Archangel with the True Cross through the agency of Emperor Heraklios. This unexpected reference to the precious relic has so far gone unnoticed.

«Легендовий стиль» на прикладі «Просторого житія Костянтина (Кирила) Філософа»

The subject of the study is the “legendary style” of one of the most iconic hagiographic text of the IX century “The Comprehensive Life of Constantine (Cyril) the Philosopher”. This Pannonian legend belongs to the texts of Cyril-Methodius cycle and has the description of the re-finding and transportation Saint Clement’s relics by Constantine the Philosopher from Korsun (Chersonesus) to Rome. This episode is an important part of the process of legalizing the translation of the Divine Books to the so-called Church-Slavonic language. The phrase “legendary style” was borrowed from I. Franko’s work “Saint Clement in Korsun” (Lviv, 1902–1905) and has not been explained as a term yet. The purpose and the novelty of our research is to find out how “legendary style” was formed, which techniques were needed to create this concept. The relevance of this study is due to the analyzing sources for the legend as a genre (it was formed on the base of the hagiographical texts such as Jacobus da Varagine’s "The Golden Legend", XIII century). Ideological description of historical events ("tendentious historicity"), disclosure of holiness and using the category of the miraculous were clarified as the technique of “legendary style”, using the cultural-historical method, elements of comparative, structural and phenomenological analysis. Holiness, called by J. Le Goff “the most important value of Christian society”, is a predetermined aspect in “The Comprehensive Life of Constantine (Cyril) the Philosopher” and it connected the saint’s life with the events of the New Testament. The category of the miraculous is considered from the point of mythological view: miracles regulated the universe, restored harmony and established true rules and laws. According to A. Losev, the true Christian miracle occurred when the real person dialectically synthesized with his/her inner ideal at a certain moment. “Tendentious historicity” is observed in the episode about saint relics of Pope Clement I. There are variations in the very process of re-finding the holy remains: locations, heroes and time in some stories are not the same in different texts from the so-called Cyril-Methodius cycle. It gives reasons to consider these texts ideologically involved. It is advisable to include other hagiographic texts to confirm or refute, expand or narrow the “legendary style” as a term in further research.

Попытка преображения мира в драматургии немецкого экспрессионизма

The article regards one of the key ideas of German expressionism drama, which was to aspire for spiritual renewal of man and the whole society by reviving the unique unspoiled nature of people. The plays under the analysis prove the transformation takes on the features of an artificial model, a Christian miracle or utopia. Resultively, it was expressionist playwrights who saw the spiritual rebirth of humanity as a vague dream and unattainable ideal.

The bodily threat of miracles: Security, sacramentality, and the Egyptian politics of public order

ABSTRACTThis article examines the political and public culture of Coptic Christian miracles through the circulation and reproduction of images and the mimetic entanglements of artifacts and objects. To understand the threat posed by one case of a woman's oil‐exuding hand, this study points to how semiotic orders of security and sacramentality intersect in the regulation of bodily miracles. It explores Coptic Orthodox Church and Egyptian state efforts to contain the activity of images and transform the public nature of truthful witness and divine testimony. In doing so, it suggests how the material structure of saintly imagination introduces bodily and visual challenges to an authoritarian politics of public order.

Representing Wonder in Medieval Miracle Narratives

In a certain sense, Christian miracle narratives can be considered as early precursors of the modern fantastic. Many of the motifs referred to in nineteenth-century fantastic tales and novels are already to be found in medieval miracula and mirabilia: strange natural phenomena, werewolves and revenants, the battle between good and evil. Obvious parallels can also be found on the level of structural configuration, such as the reproduction of certain narrative patterns in the French novella.1 While the fantastic has been more or less defined as a distinctive genre, its main medieval precursor, the merveilleux chretien, is a more heterogeneous phenomenon. It seems appropriate to consider it as a flexible set of patterns and themes, appearing in different sorts of texts and in different pragmatic contexts, such as hagiographies, sermons and miracle collections. Miracles can be functionalized as an argument for Christian belief, as a proof of the sanctity and the virtue of a person or a relic, or as a didactic means in order to impress and to convince an audience of a theological message. Thus, miracle stories do not constitute a genre, but rather a set of textual elements,

Richard Price, miracles and the origins of Bayesian decision theory

Following a brief overview of the contributions that Richard Price (1723 to 1791) made to the history of economic thought and related subjects, this paper examines the earliest known contribution to Bayesian decision theory: the reply that Price made to David Hume's skeptical argument against Christian miracles. Contrary to conventional presentations, this paper demonstrates that essential issues in the debate with Hume need to be properly situated within the broader philosophical and theological debates of those times. Price's primary application of Bayes's theorem to Hume's argument against miracles is also shown to be distinct from the conventional Bayesian approach to the interpretation of testimony. The ‘rational intuition’ used to motivate Price's prior distribution is compared with modern intuitionism and substantive differences are identified.

The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe (review)

Reviewed by: The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe Darin Hayton The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision of the Universe. By Samuel Y. Edgerton. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009. 224 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Samuel Edgerton’s latest book refines and extends his argument about the importance of linear perspective for nothing less than the rise of modern science, the discovery of the New World, and the successful mission to the moon in 1969. He first emphasized the importance of linear perspective for the development of modern science more than thirty years ago in his The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (Basic Books, 1975), echoing a thesis that had been articulated by other art historians, including Erwin Panofsky and William Ivins. Although Edgerton himself has refined his thesis in books and articles over the past three decades, his most recent book was motivated by a “concern that the subject of perspective in the arts has fallen victim to a new wave of art criticism that no longer considers it a positive idea” (p. xiv). Edgerton argues that Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated linear perspective within the deeply religious context of early fifteenth-century Florence. Brunelleschi’s early paintings had a profound impact on his contemporaries, most notably Leon Battista Alberti, who codified Brunelleschi’s innovations. Through his use of the window metaphor, Alberti began to shift the meaning of perspective from its religious and spiritual context into a secular and moral one. Finally, Edgerton claims that linear perspective encouraged a secularized understanding of space that laid the foundations for the Scientific Revolution. This new understanding of space was most evident in Galileo Galilei’s use of the telescope to observe the moon and depict its topography. Looking again at Giotto de Bondone’s Assisi and his Arena Chapel frescoes, Edgerton argues that these need to be understood not as precursors to later perspective paintings or attempts to represent real life but as devotional tools. These frescoes were efforts to memorialize and extend the impact of the Christian miracle plays. Giotto’s frescoes were objects for reflection and meditation. Rather than find an artistic connection between Giotto and fifteenth-century Florentine artists, Edgerton argues for an intellectual source in medieval thinkers, especially Roger Bacon and Peter of Limoges, who understood both geometry and the medieval science of optics as important tools in the Christian hopes of recovering the Holy Land and converting infidels. Bacon’s work, especially De multiplicatione specierum, was widely discussed in early fifteenth-century Florence. The most influential religious leader, [End Page 383] the Dominican priest Antonino Pierozzi, was deeply influenced by Bacon’s arguments about the applicability of perspective for encouraging proper worship. His sermons on the nature of sin and salvation are replete with optical metaphors and analogies. According to Edgerton, Brunelleschi’s efforts to develop linear perspective only make sense within this religious context and the moralized theories of vision that were pervasive in Florence at the time. Brunelleschi drilled a hole through the center of his first perspective painting and instructed his audience to look through it at the painting’s reflection in a mirror to provide a visual confirmation of Paul the Apostle’s claim about spiritual vision in 1 Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.” Edgerton analyzes works by Masaccio, Donatello, and Fra Angelico to show how Brunelleschi’s rules of perspective quickly spread through the Florentine artists. In 1435 Alberti codified Brunelleschi’s rules in his own De pictura. Alberti simplified the mathematics by replacing Brunelleschi’s mirror with a gridded window. The artist looked through the window and copied the contents of each square of the grid onto his canvas. Edgerton argues that this shift away from the mirror began the process of secularizing perspective. No longer did the artist or the viewer of the final painting look at a mirror image of the world but viewed the real world disciplined by the rules of geometry and perspective. Alberti’s window had not...

Miraculous Images in Renaissance Florence

The article examines sacred images depicting Christian miracles, or miraculous images, from Florence, Italy and its environs, and the cults attached to such images during the Renaissance. Therefore, the author is largely concerned with the veneration of highly sacred Christian images and icons. The construction of shrines for images deemed miraculous based on their sacredness within Florence is explained. Many of the miraculous images discusses contain depictions of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary.

The Virtues of Balm in Late Medieval Literature

This article argues that balm, or balsam, was, by the late medieval period, believed to be a panacea, capable of healing wounds and illnesses, and also preventing putrefaction. Natural history and pharmacological texts on balm from the ancient and late antique periods emphasized specific qualities of balm, especially its heat; these were condensed and repeated in medieval encyclopedias. The rarity and cost of balsam, from antiquity through the medieval period, and the high rate of counterfeiting also demonstrate its high demand and significance in medicine and religious ritual. Travel writing and itineraria from the early and central medieval periods added a new layer to ideas about the capabilities of balsam: that it originated from a Christian miracle and was a particularly Christian plant.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Interpreting Magic and Divination in the Ancient Near East and Magic and Divination in Ancient Israel

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Interpreting Magic and Divination in the Ancient Near East and Magic and Divination in Ancient Israel

A wondrous God: Miracles in contemporary Africa

Events or occurrences perceived as miracles are a feature of all religious traditions, although not to the same degree. The perception of a miracle is closely connected to ideas that are extant concerning the relations between the material world and the invisible world. Recent decades appear — at least from fragmentary evidence — to have seen an increase in the number of occurrences perceived as miracles in Africa, in Christian, Muslim and indigenous traditions. These can be of political as well as religious significance. This article discusses recent miracles among African Christians in particular, for two reasons: first, because their type of religiosity appears to be particularly susceptible to belief in miracles. Second, because there is more information available about Christian miracles than about other types.

Crosses, Caves, andMatachinis: Divergent Appropriations of Catholic Discourse in Northwestern New Spain

… Christianity became wholeheartedly an element of indigenous culture. The Christian miracle was a given integrated into daily life as it was into the landscape, space and time of thepueblo.Recent ethnohistorical trends point to a renewed interest in the complex interplay of beliefs and ritual practices that gave rise to multiple expressions of religiosity in different temporal and spatial settings of colonial America. Religion provides a rich thematic matrix for exploring the boundaries ofalteritébetween Amerindian and European actors and figures centrally, as well, in the internal development of different cultural and ethnic identities. Cosmology, understood as those systems of belief that bind individuals to their communities and to the wider universe, informs different peoples' concepts of time and their sense of history. The Maya of Yucatán, for example, integrated both linear and cyclical notions of time into their cosmic order in ways that rendered sensible their rhythms of accommodation and resistance to foreign domination. Moreover, cultural constructions of the past rely heavily on myths that fuse spiritual beliefs with ethnic claims to the land, as observed in the intricate connections between syncretic religion and the survival of ethnic polities in colonial Oaxaca. Ethnic rationalizations of space, it has been argued, underwrote particular aesthetic and cognitive approaches to spatial and temporal “mapping” which, in turn, brought a religious dimension to the notion of territoriality.

Jesus' Healings of Women: Conformity and Nonconformity To Dominant Cultural Values as Clues for Historical Reconstruction

The six synoptic miracles involving females are studied with attention to gender, classification of miracle narratives, presence of conforming and counter-cultural behavior, issues of orality and textuality, and comparison to the early Christian miracle lists. Those women's stories with strong counter-cultural elements are also those that have strong oral story dynamics. The story of the woman with the hemorrhage and the story of the Syrophoenician woman and Jesus certainly derive from oral tradition, probably transmitted primarily by and among women, and may go back to Jesus. The far greater overlap of synoptic miracles involving males with the written miracle lists suggests that the male stories have been more influenced by textual transmission than the synoptic women's stories. The transmission history of the women's stories may be significantly different from that of the men's stories, maintaining a higher counter-cultural emphasis because of less interaction with textuality.

Miracles and method

Argumentation in the eighteenth‐century miracles controversy exhibits a controlling concern for procedural considerations. Of particular concern to Deist and Orthodox opponents is the most reasonable method for critically evaluating miracle accounts, an issue that elicits extensive argumentation on each side. Rival methods were seen as crucial to efforts to attack or defend the Christian miracles, while choices regarding method were shaped by sharply opposed rational commitments and rhetorical goals. Moreover, the success of argumentative cases was tied to positions concerning method.

The Woman who Touched Jesus' Garment: Socio-Rhetorical Analysis of the Synoptic Accounts

During the last thirty years significant advances have been made in the study of early Christian miracle stories. The story of the woman who touched Jesus' garment has been especially well analyzed by Heinz Joachim Held and Gerd Theissen, and recently Manfred Hutter has brought additional information to bear on the Matthean version. It is my goal to look at each version of the story from the perspective of ‘comparative social-rhetorical’ analysis and interpretation. The rhetorical observations are informed especially by Kenneth Burke's chapter entitled ‘Lexicon Rhetoricae’ in Counterstatement and by Robert Alter's The Art of Biblical Narrative. The comparative and social observations are stimulated by various interpreters' use of Hellenistic-Roman data as well as Jewish data for analysis of New Testament literature.

Comparative Miracles by Robert D. Smith

102 BOOK REVIEWS English of those phrases that everyone said had to be left in Latin. The rendering of the first part of the important text, q. 81, a. 1, is a good example. The Latin goes " Et ideo alia via procedendum est, dicendo quod omnes homines qui nascuntur ex Adam possunt considerari ut unu/1' homo, in quantum conveniunt in natura quam a primo parente accipiunt; secundum quod in civilibus omnes qui sunt unius communitatw reputantur quasi unum corpus, et tota communitas quasi unus homo. O'Brien translates: "Another approach, therefore, should be made. It is this. All who are born of Adam can be considered as one man by reason of sharing the one nature inherited from the first parent, even as in political matters all belonging to one community are reckoned to be like one body, and the whole community like one person." By dropping the dicendo quod completely and substituting, It is thw, O'Brien makes clean English out of Latin. The in quantum was always rendered ina.ymuch as; O'Brien's by reason of is better; so also is his even as for secundum quod, which used to be rendered according to which. Finally, person for homo is a creative touch, probably inspired by the use of the term " moral person " in our literature today. The rest of the translation is like that. If the other volumes in this series stay to current problems and to the new work being done in scripture, if they are as deft in the handling of the Latin and as thorough with the historical data, if in a word they use Father O'Brien's text as a kind of working model, then we shall have in the Gilby-O'Brien Summa the chief instrument for the handing on of the solid doctrine of St. Thomas to our generation. It shall prove as nothing else can prove the resilience and youth of Thomism to skeptical and critical men. A final word of praise to McGraw-Hill Book Company: their taste has been impeccable. Dominican House of Studies Washington, D. C. THOMAS R. HEATH, 0. P. Comparative Miracles. By RoBERT D. SMITH. St. Louis, B. Herder Book Co., 1965. pp. 184. $5.95. Are Christian miracles unique, or is there, in fact, no gulf between Christian miracles and the prodigies of other faiths? The author, operating within the sphere of comparative religion, attempts an answer to this question by comparing the prodigies of history to see if any pre-eminence need be granted to the Christian miracles. Hence he does not attempt to prove the possibility of miracles, nor that God exists from the fact of miracles, but rather undertakes an historical survey of sigm meant to signify the favor of some ' superhuman ' intervention. BOOK REVIEWS 103 In order to pass judgment upon these signs, or better, prodigies, the author begins with the principle that any prodigy can be valid as long as it is worked in the light of some truth. This openminded approach must be tempered, however, by the inclusion of a number of critical measures which assist in judging both the historical veracity of the accounts of the prodigies and the ' superhumannesss ' of the event. With competence, the author uses these measures, such as the instantaneity of a cure, the visibility of a mystical event relative to cures, the doctor's diagnosis, evidence of an organic disease, and a cure surpassing the medical science of the time. With such stringent demands upon the prodigies of history by the author, very few come out as complete signs, that is, as signs of a superhuman intervention beyond any reasonable doubt. These few are the miracles of Christ. The work is divided into three broad categories, the first being those signs contained under the general title of ' mystical ' phenomena, the second being cures, and the third, wonder-workers themselves. The conclusion of the investigation of mystical phenomena, such as ecstasy, occultists' tricks, visions, stigmata, inedia, levitation, bilocation, and the like, is that they all leave room for reasonable doubt and therefore do not constitute a complete sign. After examining pagan cures, Christian-Science cures, the cures of other more...