Eternal Battle Research Articles

Abysmal jurisprudence: On the genesis of John Finnis’s practical guide to statesmen

John Finnis’s central role in Brexit was only the latest intervention in a long life of practical action that recommends a closer examination of the genesis of his distinctive philosophy. He always insisted that it was intended ‘primarily to assist the practical reflections of those concerned to act, whether as judges or as statesmen or as citizens.’ In this article, I argue that Finnis crafted his philosophy as a practical guide for conservative actors in the disenchanted Cold War world of the 1960–70s. My first aim is to excavate the theoretical foundations of his Thomist theory of natural law. While his turn to practical rather than speculative reason is well known, few if any appreciate how Finnis radically refounded Thomist natural law on an implicit theory of history. By accepting that the world was historically contingent and changing, he needed to show how we could know the timeless truth of practical reasonableness and the basic goods. In the final chapter of Natural Law and Natural Rights, Finnis introduced an ‘abysmal’ philosophy of history that explained how a spoudaios (wise man) could reason his way out of the historical contingency of the human world to access the timeless moral truths that transcended it. My second aim is to show how Finnis used his Thomist theory of natural law as a practical guide for action in our contingent world. He followed Eric Voegelin in describing humanity as two ‘hostile camps’ – the ‘transcendental’ Christians and their secular allies versus the ‘immanentist’ liberals, communists, and fascists all committed to ‘consequentialist’ ideologies. In this eternal battle of good versus evil, Finnis saw his philosophy as a practical guide for this ‘creative minority’ of transcendentalists for collective action against the heretical faith of immanentist movements aiming to perfect mankind and build heavens on earth.

Understanding Ice Cream

What is the root cause of political polarization? In this philosophical short story, Professor Gault is having a rough day. His graduate-level class on the growing polarization in politics is just as heated and polarized as the subject they're discussing. He thinks his students are the bugs trapped in the web of rhetoric, instead of being the spider. In a daze after class, a strange woman strikes up a conversation with him and presents an alternate theory. Perhaps, she argues, the underlying foundation of our time is narcissism. Maybe politics is just fertile ground for those who want to feel like gods in a fantasy world of their own creation, where only they can fight the eternal battle of good versus evil. Perhaps polarization isn't genuine, but merely the result of narcissists attempting to wage epic battles to avoid realizing that, outside of the world they've imagined, they don't really matter.

“Eternal Battle” with Compromises and Constraints: Revitalisation of Medieval Architecture

In the interests of the Catholic Church and German merchants, from the 13th to the 14th century, the territories of the present-day Latvia and Estonia, then called Livonia, were Christianized with the methods of the Crusades and included in the international economic processes. The feudal states of the German Order and bishops were established to keep the lands of the conquered Baltic tribes in obedience. Their main task was to guarantee the security of the west-east trade routes and to develop the economy in their own interests. To protect their borders and roads, the German Order, bishops and their vassals built dozens of fortresses, most of which are now in ruins. The Dobele Castle is a fortress built in the 14th century for the administration of a larger area, consisting of a small convent-type castle and a large courtyard fortified with protective walls to station troops and deploy weapons. As a result of the Livonian Wars, the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia was established in 1562, and the Dobele Castle became the property of the Duke. In the second half of the 16th century, one of the first Lutheran chapels in the Baltics was built in one wing of the medieval fortress, and the Landtag meetings were held there regularly. At the turn of the 16th-17th centuries, the dukes' residential building was erected adjoining the medieval castle. However, since the 1730s, both the castle and the chapel had been abandoned and, by the 21st century, were in ruins. Respecting the public desire to change the emotional semantics of the castle ruins in the city centre, and in cooperation with the Dobele municipality, the architect Pēteris Blūms since 2008 has been looking for an optimal solution for the conservation of the ruins and revitalization of the chapel. The intensive construction and conservation stage began in 2018 and concluded in 2021 with the revitalization of the chapel and its adaptation to multifunctional applications. Under the leadership of the experienced architect Pēteris Blūms, many technical and technological solutions were developed for considerate treatment of the historical walls and their visual appearance, as well as for the provision of service and comfort that meets modern requirements.

Sexuality and Objectification in Dastan Narratives: Women as Objects of Desire in Hoshruba, the Land and the Tilism (Book 1)


 
 
 The writers of dastan narratives reflect their age-old contextual desire(s) in fictional experiences. The never-ending popularity of these ideologically romantic tales is significant in the history of Urdu language and literature. Metonymically, the dastan, Tilism-e-Hoshruba, encompasses the much celebrated theme of Dastan-e-Amir Hamza—an eternal battle between virtue and vice—in its narrative discourse, but the quickness of the fantasized actions makes this dastan phantasmagorically more thrilling. Despite being enormous source(s) of narrative pleasure in the Subcontinent, these classical discursive practices prove to be an explicit reflection of the textual and sexual politics traditionally perpetuated in the Indo-Islamic patriarchal structures. The rendition of female characters, for instance, in the narrative discourse of Hoshruba, depends on the patriarchal modes of production and re- presentation pre-existing in classical cultural contexts. Presented as alluring objects of the ideological syntax, many of the women in these fictional texts customarily remain victim to the patriarchal narrative gaze. The narrators of dastan employ an evocatively figurative language in sensationalizing the graphic description of the female characters in Hoshruba. From seductions to submissions, all of their acts are pre-eminently destined to serve the phallogocentric desires of their authors, audience and chivalrous heroes. This paper, therefore, is the critical study of the patterns of desire(s) with reference to sexuality and the culture of objectification in Dastan Hoshruba, the Land and the Tilism, Book 1.1 By intersecting romance and sexuality, it also aims at exploring the narrative units of desire that objectify the sexuality of female characters through the mechanics of fantasy and gaze.
 
 

„HERETYKOM BYŁ BARZO SRÓG, […] TAK IŻ GO MŁOTEM HERETYKÓW ZWALI”: ŚWIĘCI JAKO INSPIRATORZY WALKI Z HETERODOKSJĄ I STRAŻNICY JEDNOŚCI KOŚCIOŁA (NA PRZYKŁADZIE ŻYWOTÓW ŚWIĘTYCH PIOTRA SKARGI)

The article examines Żywoty świętych (The Lives of Saints) by Piotr Skarga and the protagonists’ fight against those whom the author calls the “new heretics”. Written in Polish and rich in persuasive artistic devices that influence the reader’s imagination, Skarga’s book turned out to be an extremely effective tool of re-Catholicization in the Counter-Reformation era. The author vividly describes the stories of God’s chosen ones, showing them as active agents in the eternal battle with Satan, in the text embodied by the “dissenters”. By the power of parenesis and allegoresis, even figures as distant as Moses or the Desert Fathers prefigure Skarga’s model of a saint: the Soldier of Christ who protects the unity of the Church.

The Opposition between Good and Evil in the Story of Jamshid

The good-evil opposition is amongst the most pivotal themes of Shahnameh. Belief in two evil and good forces has found its way from the heart of the ancient Iranian myths into Shahnameh making this epical work the arena of the battle between the good and evil forces. In this eternal battle which is as old as the mankind history, the symbols of good rise up against the manifestations of evil and each of them try overcoming the other. Kingship of Jamshid can be divided into two different sections. In the first period, he invents a lot of things based on his enjoyment of the divine glory and gives rise to a golden period for the Iranians through his services. In this period, the good forces have domination over the evil forces and Jamshid symbolizes the good. His interventions are in line with endowing comfort and tranquility to Urmazd’s creatures. In the second period, Jam thinks of himself as the God and starts exercising ingratitude, untruthfulness and insanity and becomes the symbol of evildoing and loses the divine glory and sets the ground for his own wastage and this makes the Iranians resort to Zahhak.

Literary and Historical Sources
 in the Poem «The Celliot» by Yakov Polonsky

Yakov Polonsky’s poem «The Celliot», as it was thought in Soviet times, was rejected by Nikolay Nekrasov due to its content that was far from the Eastern
 question, although Nekrasov also mentioned its volume as the reason for refusal. Polonsky did not agree to reduce it. However, «The Celliot» was a critical
 response to the aggravation of the Balkan conflict. Polonsky, in order to retouch
 the meaning, formally relies on the tradition of the Byronic poem, which is
 manifested in the characters’ system, the chronotopos, motives of alienation and
 tragic love. In this case, however, the Byronic poem is interpreted in the mirror
 of the tradition of Russian romantic poem, moreover, in a form of a parody.
 The main characters of the poem are celliot Cyril and klepht Despot
 Stefan, who in comparison with each other acquire comic features manifested in
 their appearance, habits, the way of thinking, attitude towards women. Their
 desire to get on Mount Athos, which was the ideal of purity, a refuge and a spiritual
 haven in life, unites them. However, seclusion, according to Polonsky, does
 not bring Cyril closer to salvation, he finds it outside Athos. The pirate island,
 combining both heaven and hell at the same time, becomes a place of spiritual
 growth for the heroes: rejection of religious fanaticism and transition to serving
 the homeland. In his work Polonsky builds a non-trivial concept where the
 world of holiness, ascesis and the sinful world are interchanged. Simple klephts are the spokesmen of the eternal battle of the forces of good and evil, trying to bring its end closer. Criticism of Athos and support of the Slavs’ armed struggle became the main factors that hampered the publication of «The Celliot».

“A Good and Noble Nature”: Naturalism, Populism, and Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column

“A Good and Noble Nature”Naturalism, Populism, and Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column Andrew Carlyle Urban (bio) At the heart of American literary naturalism lies a paradox. On the one hand, the literary naturalists of the late nineteenth century were among those most influenced by the philosophical naturalism that had come to define the spirit of their age. This philosophical naturalism conceived of the world as “a mechanistic reality that functions in terms of causality” and that consists of “matter in motion subject to physical laws” (Lehan, “Naturalism” 15). Nature, in this view, is a closed, deterministic system of matter encompassing the whole of reality without remainder. Any observable phenomena therefore must be explicable in terms of material causes immanent to the order of nature. Human nature is not exempt from this enclosure within the natural order, and so human behavior too is construed as an effect of material (predominantly biological and environmental) causes. Philosophical naturalism thus amounts to a denial of transcendence, of anything— whether it be God, the soul, free will, or morality— having its origin outside of nature’s network of material causes and effects. It thereby issues a “bleak challenge to any theory that posits the uniqueness of human nature and human endeavor” (Link, “Defining” 72). Its interrogation of human freedom and moral agency call into question humanity’s sense of its own distinctiveness, its tendency to set itself apart from nature and to exempt itself from its laws. Humanity is not appreciably different from any other animal species because it is wholly enclosed within nature’s mechanistic order.1 On the other hand, as irrevocably committed as the American literary naturalists were to a deterministic worldview, they could not but look upon its implications with horror. As Charles Child Walcutt has argued, they saw that the philosophical naturalism to which they were committed is unable to “satisfy man’s doubts or answer his emotional needs,” nor can [End Page 137] it satisfy his longing for “wonder and passion and fear” (10). These doubts, needs, and longings had been satisfied, Walcutt attests, by the “medieval idea of man” as “a fallen creature in a dualistic universe,” a creature “pointed towards the eternal, towards salvation and God” and “torn in the eternal battle between good and evil”— an idea “which lived on, indeed, through the nineteenth century” (4). American naturalist authors such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London wrote in an attempt to grapple with the challenge posed to this view of human nature by philosophical naturalism. Hence a “belief in free will and ethical responsibility, in a universe of rewards and punishments, in a world dominated by purpose and meaning, hovers like a ghost over almost every variety of naturalism in fiction” (Walcutt 18). American literary naturalism, then, is less an unequivocal endorsement of the materialistic and deterministic spirit of the late nineteenth century than an attempt to salvage some sense of moral freedom and transcendent value in the face of its dehumanizing implications.2 This essay reads the 1889 novel Caesar’s Column, written by the Populist politician Ignatius Donnelly, as a significant instance of this paradox of American literary naturalism. Critics have most often read Caesar’s Column as a work of utopian literature (Balasopoulos; Pfaelzer; Axelrad; Saxton), as an apocalyptic dystopia (Pfaelzer; Ueda; Saxton; Jaher), or as a Populist tract (Brass; Pfaelzer; Baker). Most recently, Alex J. Beringer has seen the novel as an expression of “the conspiratorial imagination” (35). But Donnelly’s novel has yet to be studied as a naturalist work. Like more widely known works of American literary naturalism, Caesar’s Column addresses itself to the conflict between philosophical naturalism and human freedom and value— but it does so earlier and more explicitly. In addition, Donnelly’s involvement in Populist politics will help us to see the seldom recognized affinities between American literary naturalism and the Populist movement. As both a Populist politician and a naturalist author, Donnelly is a uniquely positioned figure whose work can help us reach a deeper understanding of the kinship between the literary and political reactions to the historical transformations American society was undergoing at the end of the nineteenth...

The eternal battle to combat global warming: (thio)urea as a CO2wet scrubbing agent

(Thio)Urea scaffolds are best known for their importance as intermediates in organic synthesis. In this work, a mechanistic study of the reaction between urea (U), (2-hydroxyethyl)urea (U-EtOH) and thiourea (tU)/NaH in DMSO with CO2 was carried out. While both U/tU reacted with CO2 via a 1 : 2 mechanism through the formation of the keto (thio)carbamide-carboxylate adducts (k-U/tU-CO2- Na+), U-EtOH gave mixed CO2-adducts composed of organic carbonate and carbamide-carboxylate moieties (Na+-CO2-U-Et-OCO2- Na+). Moreover, we recorded for the first time, a new type of bond, namely sodium carbamimidothiocarbonate (e-tU-SCO2- Na+), upon bubbling CO2 in the DMSO solution of tU due to the persistence of the enol form (e-tU) and the better nucleophilicity of sulfur over nitrogen focal points. The reaction mechanisms were proven by 1D and 2D nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and ex situ attenuated total reflectance-Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopies. The stability of these bonds was studied following the changes in 1H-NMR as a function of temperature, which indicated the reversibility of these reactions. Furthermore, the proposed mechanisms were explored theoretically via density functional theory (DFT) calculations by analyzing the energetics of the anticipated products.

Sexuality and Objectification in Dastan Narratives: Women as Objects of Desire in Hoshruba, the Land and the Tilism (Book 1)


 
 
 The writers of dastan narratives reflect their age-old contextual desire(s) in fictional experiences. The never-ending popularity of these ideologically romantic tales is significant in the history of Urdu language and literature. Metonymically, the dastan, Tilism-e-Hoshruba, encompasses the much celebrated theme of Dastan-e-Amir Hamza—an eternal battle between virtue and vice—in its narrative discourse, but the quickness of the fantasized actions makes this dastan phantasmagorically more thrilling. Despite being enormous source(s) of narrative pleasure in the Subcontinent, these classical discursive practices prove to be an explicit reflection of the textual and sexual politics traditionally perpetuated in the Indo-Islamic patriarchal structures. The rendition of female characters, for instance, in the narrative discourse of Hoshruba, depends on the patriarchal modes of production and re- presentation pre-existing in classical cultural contexts. Presented as alluring objects of the ideological syntax, many of the women in these fictional texts customarily remain victim to the patriarchal narrative gaze. The narrators of dastan employ an evocatively figurative language in sensationalizing the graphic description of the female characters in Hoshruba. From seductions to submissions, all of their acts are pre-eminently destined to serve the phallogocentric desires of their authors, audience and chivalrous heroes. This paper, therefore, is the critical study of the patterns of desire(s) with reference to sexuality and the culture of objectification in Dastan Hoshruba, the Land and the Tilism, Book 1.1 By intersecting romance and sexuality, it also aims at exploring the narrative units of desire that objectify the sexuality of female characters through the mechanics of fantasy and gaze.
 
 

Lenin and Nietzsche in the Althusserian Perspective: Philosophy as Eternal Battle

The article is devoted to the identification of some intersection points in the philosophical ideas of F. Nietzsche and V. Lenin. The analysis of Lenin’s views, given by Louis Althusser in a number of his works, can serve as the methodological basis for such a comparison. In this perspective, Lenin’s understanding of philosophy is characterized by the fact that philosophy is treated not only as a theory but, above all, as a practice of struggle for domination. Lenin and Nietzsche share the dynamic view of the universe, the idea of the leading role of contradictions and struggle in the world’s being. Philosophy appears as an expression of some hidden impulses, which are ultimately reducible to the will to power. Therefore, for both thinkers knowledge appears not as the result of pure and objective cognition, but as a product of the struggle of power instincts, and knowledge itself is a necessary element of any power order.

Introduction: Literary Journalism as a Discipline

The editors of this issue of Brazilian Research Journalism welcome that debate, firmly believing that nothing new emerges without dialogue, from outside and inside the discipline. After all, literary and journalistic studies are not haunted by their many, at times antagonistic, schools of critical thought. On the contrary, both are made richer by them. As the Brazilian adage goes: “In the struggle of the sea against the cliff, none suffers but the shellfish.” And yet, the shellfish not only survives that eternal battle; it also thrives and prospers. This volume thus hopes that any debate that it generates will ultimately serve literary journalism studies in establishing itself as a discipline unique to itself, but always open and willing to foster a dialogue with other fields of knowledge.

Leadership and human Abbas bin Ali role (peace be upon him) In the eternal battle tuff year 61 AH An analytical study

Alawite family Immaculate has suffered early seventh decade AH serious repercussions came as a result of its commitment to the principles of the Islamic religion, as those family felt led grandson of the Prophet Mustafa (peace be upon him and his family and him) Imam Hussein bin Ali bin Abi Talib (peace be upon him) that Islam as a religion and principles and the values ​​of its large importance in the details of the lives of Muslims began Anharomam negative hiring him by the leaders of Tbaa graduate Centers did not give it right, so Hussein's determination to combat these trends, including made available to him and his family from potential despite its simplicity, but it took way until the end, Hussein was a leader of that family, and his brother Imam Abbas ibn Ali (peace be upon him) associate him and holding a banner and committed to its principles and sacrificing Braanh and what has the strength, courage and Osama was the way one results and one murder in the end share everyone's courage details filled with noble principles, witnessed the land of Karbala in ten days reflected the the meanings of the tournament in clearer images, but Abbas, who was a leader and a wonderful human being was his receipts and tours in the fields of the right and the courage and selflessness and fulfillment we left off in the following lines recalling the tournament with great reverence and pride.

Nie zmieniając poglądów. Przedstawianie okrucieństwa i zła w filmach Andrzeja Wajdy

NOT CHANGING LOOKS. PRESENTATION OF CRUELTY AND EVIL IN THE FILMS OF ANDRZEJ WAJDAAmong Andrzej Wajda’s legacy, the image of the totalitarian regime and its repercussions for people, countries, and humanity holds a significant place. Films of Andrzej Wajda, who was a liaison officer in the anti-Hitler Polish underground, are a kind of chronicle of the survivors of twentieth century. The article is dedicated to study the various forms of evil and its effects on real people. The study is applicable for our time because the world again deals with the recidivism of evil which the Soviet government spread in its own country and beyond its own borders. In the USRR, the perception of Andrzej Wajda’s films was dependent on the political play in action: when the relations between two countries were friendly, he received awards, however after the Solidarity was established, no one ever mentioned Wajda. The epic work Danton, about the French revolution, made in France during times difficult for Poland because of the martial law imposed on Poland, reveals the effects of revolution that paradoxically destroyed its most dedicated revolutionists, including Danton. Wajda’s refusal to American producers to direct a motion picture based on a screen play of Aleksander Slozenicyn had se-rious reasons, primarily commitment to his homeland. He made up for the missed opportunity to show Stalin’s evil empire when he shot the film Katyń. This word echoes deep tragedy in the heart of every Pole and the director succeeded in portraying the cruelty of mechanism of punishment in totalitarian USRR. The second most important aspect was the discovery of the lies of this regime, which tried to place the responsibility for the execution of Polish officers on the Nazis. After a premiere of Katyń in Ukraine, Andrzej Wajda was awarded the medal of Jaroslaw Madry. The article also includes the theme of influence of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels on Andrzej Wajda’s work — the director not only used Dostoyevsky’s work for his filmmaking and staging, but as well he was inspired by Dostoyevsky’s deep analysis of dangerous social phenomena and the courage in discovering the evil. In Wajda’s films, which belongs to the so-called “cinema of moral unrest”, the tragic fate of a talented journalist Jerzy Michalowski, the hero of film Bez znieczulenia who personalizes the characteristics of a professional and a good man, simply horrifies. In his last film Powidoki, the director masterfully shows circles of hell survived by avant-garde artist Wladyslaw Strzeminski, the lecturer of Fine Arts Academy. All the films mentioned above are deemed necessary warning for future generations, they cannot put up with the aggression — on a political and private levels. Wajda’s lessons are universal, timeless, and everla-sting, like an eternal battle of good against evil.

Continuing Without Closure: Analysing Irresolution in the Old Norse Hildr Legend

The article introduces Old Norse material into the ongoing critical discussion about resistance to closure in medieval literature, a discussion traditionally dominated by Old French and Middle English texts. The failure of narrative accounts of the Old Norse Hildr legend to resolve is embodied by the tableaux of the eternal battle at the legend’s climax, an impasse which nevertheless functions as a closural device and unites the retellings of the legend around the theme of battle. The open nature of the impasse, however, encouraged medieval authors to work on constructing narrative closure within their own accounts of the legend, not only by writing new endings but also new beginnings for the battle, elaborating on the motivations behind it. Such a strategy confirms that in Old Norse texts, as in wider medieval literature, concepts of closure involved more than merely the ending of a narrative but embraced its broader structure and invites further comparison with other medieval European texts. Finally, in taking as its starting point not a text but a legend, the article aims to explore how issues of openness versus closure can be usefully applied to a narrative unconfined by a single text but represented rather in a nexus of texts with little in common besides a brief overlap in subject matter. The article argues for the necessity of the legendary perspective, in spite of its methodological challenges, in order to distinguish between closure on a textual and closure on a narrative level.

The Eternal Battle between Microbes and Humans

The Eternal Battle between Microbes and Humans

ВСЕМОГУЩЕЕ БЕССИЛИЕ ДОНА РУМАТЫ: О СПЕЦИФИКЕ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИИ ДОНКИХОТОВСКОЙ СИТУАЦИИ В РОМАНЕ А. И Б. СТРУГАЦКИХ «ТРУДНО БЫТЬ БОГОМ»

The article analyzes the specificity of a quixotic situation in the novel by A. and B. Strugatsky “Hard to Be a God”. The quixotic position of the protagonist of the novel Don Rumata, a pretender, rebel, stranger and an odd man, passing the test of humanity, is revealed as dramatically insoluble. True quixotism is not a struggle for the mankind, but a battle for a man, an eternal battle against evil in the soul of a man himself, which continues as long as a man exists, and a man remains a man only as long as this struggle is going on.

Cartografias da memória

Ondjaki carrega a pena sob o peso de memórias íntimas, vividas e inventadas no tempo e espaço do “antigamente”. Nessas memórias, escapam retratos de uma Luanda em sua eterna busca identitária. Num tom irônico mescla a crítica ácida e o deboche pueril, mas sua escrita permite, sobretudo, sonhar a Angola do futuro, através de uma literatura utópica e geoficcional. A escrita da ironia em Ondjaki desvela múltiplos desdobramentos do eu e do outro. O eu nas revelações e percepções do narrador sobre esta cidade e o outro a própria cidade “multiperspectivada”. Luanda é geográfica, cultural, ancestral, cordão umbilical e, também, lugar inventado. Este artigo tenciona discorrer sobre as múltiplas faces que a cidade de Luanda apresenta, a partir do olhar do narrador de Ondjaki, percorrendo para isso suas cartografias da memória.

Angels, Demons and the New World. Edited by Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. xii + 318 pp.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Angels, Demons and New World . Edited by Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden . New York : Cambridge University Press , 2013. xii + 318 pp.Book Reviews and NotesReligion--a central motivator of Spain's imperial project in early modern period--has long been a source of fascination for scholars of Latin American colonial history. sixteenth-century evangelization projects to flowering of Baroque Catholicism in seventeenth to changing role of church in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, numerous scholars have addressed topics such as institutional church, popular religiosity, and Catholic cosmology in Latin America. This excellent edited volume focuses primarily on latter theme; specifically, role of beings in colonial Spanish American mentalities.The role of devil in New World has been ably explored elsewhere by editors of this book, Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden, as well as by a number of contributors. In this project, they build upon and expand upon their earlier studies of Spanish American demonology to include angels, a fitting addition to scholarship on Spanish Catholicism, with its Manichean, dualistic tradition of eternal battle between good and evil. They take up question of reasons for persistence of belief of angels and demons in post-Reformation period. Noting that Europe's Patristic and medieval heritage had produced religious cultures marked by an immense appetite for contact with supernatural (1), they address ways that demons and angels were conceptualized and represented by theologians and laity, and explore impact and long-term repercussions of Reformation and Renaissance as well as the relationship, interaction and evolution of 'elite' and 'popular' mentalities (4).The book is divided into three sections, From Old World to New, Indigenous Responses, and World of Baroque. These sections thus trace evolution of Spanish religious culture from late fifteenth century to early eighteenth. The first section's three essays examine intellectual histories of angelology and demonology in Europe, and creative ways these theories were advanced and received in their New World settings. Andrew Keitt addresses early modern European discourses on superstition, medical humanism, and preternatural philosophy, concluding that theologians' interest in educating laity on folly of superstition, and developments of medical humanism, illustrate some of nuances of early modern Spanish intellectual life and should not be taken as evidence of an incipient scientific rationalism. Kenneth Mills, meanwhile, complicates histories of devil in Spain and its colonies by examining writings of two Hieronymite friars who traveled together to Peru at turn of seventeenth century, emphasizing interactions between Spain and New World, and rejecting a more teleological model of religious diffusion from Spain. Fernando Cervantes, for his part, also emphasizes negotiations that took place among different groups, but focuses on central place of angels in sixteenth-century evangelization projects, thus highlighting interactions between European and indigenous ways of perceiving liturgy. …

The Book of the Order of Chivalry by Ramón Llull (review)

Reviewed by: The Book of the Order of Chivalry by Ramón Llull Susan Brooks Ramón Llull, The Book of the Order of Chivalry, trans. Noel Fallows (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press 2013) 102 pp., ill. The Majorcan Ramón Llull was a complex and seminal figure of the Middle Ages. Born into wealth and prestige in 1232, he embarked on a conventional path of marriage and family, but while still young veered into more bohemian territory by falling in with troubadours, most of whom he later condemned as wastrels and worse. A man of extremes, he underwent a religious conversion experience at about the age of thirty and subsequently entered a life of poverty and service. He took it as a personal mission to foster the mastery of languages as a tool for spiritual education and learned Arabic as well as Latin and his native Catalan. However much Llull may have later devalued it, the imprint of his early poetic experience marked him and he became an accomplished writer. Highly prolific, he produced more than two hundred works on various topics, including a slim volume entitled The Book of the Order of Chivalry. Noel Fallows has recently translated a new scholarly edition of this work. Completed by Llull around the year 1276, The Book of the Order of Chivalry set out to prescribe a perfect mode of knighthood as a cornerstone upholding the feudal social system and supporting the efforts of the Crusades, the second of which had recently run aground due to the death of its main motivating figure St. Louis and a decreasing willingness of the European aristocracy to commit resources to the risky endeavor of retaking the Holy Land. Llull himself felt that all chivalric orders should be united as one force to defend Christianity across the territories of the medieval world, a concept later to be proven untenable, as the fate of the Templars showed, since that degree of concentrated power in the hands of an armed order could prove as much a threat to established internal power structures as outward enemies. The model of knighthood he promoted was more mythic than realistic, with Fallows comparing Llull’s mystical elevation of the symbolism of weaponry and panoply to the Psycho-machia, the fifth-century allegorical poem about the eternal battle of Virtue and Vice. The sword in particular was said by Llull to hold special significance due to its cruciform shape, an idea strange when contemplated in relation to the peace-loving exhortations of Christ, but fitting snugly in with images of Christian soldiers and reminiscent of the veneration accorded to swords in antique cultures that worshipped sky gods associated with the sun. As Llull says, bespeaking almost a divine right of nobility, “God has honored the knight.” But one might well ask, which god? Organized knighthood originated in Rome, which through its adoption of Christianity as a state religion infused the faith with its own martial spirit. Llull’s imagined knights are meant to be a kind of cosmic police force, maintaining the social order by defending the official religion but also by keeping everyone in the place accorded to them in the tripartite ideology of the medieval caste system: sovereigns, warriors and workers. (This is of course solely a masculine function in Llull’s archaic worldview. He relegates women via a few dismissive words to non-entity status. There is no room for feminine values in a trenchant hierarchy based on ancient and rigid social sorting categories inherited from a distant Indo-European age.) The structure of the Book is especially interesting in the context of its era. It dedicates the text with a prayer, followed by a dreamy prologue almost like courtly scenes of fountains and walled gardens from Le Roman de la Rose [End Page 274] which references what C. S. Lewis called “the discarded image,” the cosmology of the ancient world based on the visible planetary bodies. Llull uses that as his organizing principle for the bulk of the text—as there were seven celestial objects, including the sun and moon, he divides his work into seven sections covering such topics as the origins of chivalry, knights’ duties...