Personal Holiness Research Articles

Visualizing the Literary Image of Muscovite Royal Wives: Grand Princess Evdokiia in the Skazanie vmale in the Chronicles of Ivan IV’s Reign

Visualizing the Literary Image of Muscovite Royal WivesGrand Princess Evdokiia in the Skazanie vmale in the Chronicles of Ivan IV’s Reign Isolde Thyrêt (bio) The Muscovite chroniclers at the court of Russia’s first tsar, Ivan the Terrible, displayed a vivid interest in the wives and mothers of the tsar’s ancestors. Desiring to elevate the new tsar’s prestige by conceiving the power of the Muscovite sovereign in spiritual terms, the compilers of chronicles during this period also reinterpreted the role of the wives and the mother of their ruler by valuing them no longer merely for their kinship ties but by portraying them as vehicles of the divine grace with which God endowed the future ruler during his conception.1 The focus on the positive impact of the spiritual potential of royal women on the Russian realm culminated in the creation of the vita of the Kievan grand princess Ol´ga at the end of the 1550s, which was included in the Stepennaia kniga (Book of Degrees, hereafter SK), an unillustrated chronicle that was composed in Moscow around 1560.2 The renewed interest [End Page 83] in St. Ol´ga, who was considered responsible for the conversion of the Kievan realm to Eastern Orthodoxy, seems to have been closely connected with the contemporary preoccupation with the religious definition of the first Russian tsar’s power, as I. V. Kurukin points out.3 This Russian royal woman saint was also held up as a symbol of a strong Russian Orthodox state and as a model for the Russian tsars’ wives.4 Whereas the literary efforts of the bookmen at Ivan IV’s court to define the role of Muscovite royal women are fairly well known, the influence of contemporary artists on the articulation of this role has not yet been explored. While few depictions of St. Ol´ga survive from the reign of Ivan IV, another female ancestor of the first Muscovite tsar, Evdokiia, daughter of the Suzdal´ prince Dmitrii Konstantinovich (d. 1383) and wife of the Muscovite grand prince Dmitrii Ivanovich Donskoi (1350–89), commands a rich literary and visual source base that was created during this period.5 A tale about this grand princess, the so-called Brief Tale about the Blessed Grand Princess Evdokiia (the Nun Evfrosiniia), Wife of the Praiseworthy Grand Prince Dmitrii Ivanovich Donskoi, commonly referred to as Skazanie vmale, is found for the first time in the SK. An abbreviated version of this tale was later included in the Litsevoi letopisnyi svod (Illustrated Chronicle Compilation, hereafter LLS), which was composed sometime between 1568 and 1576.6 [End Page 84] A study of Evdokiia’s literary image in the tale found in the SK and her subsequent literary and visual portrayal in the LLS’s version suggests that in the 1560s and 1570s, the chroniclers at Ivan IV’s court consciously elevated Evdokiia to the status of a royal woman saint who followed in St. Ol´ga’s footsteps. The literary image of this Muscovite grand princess in the SK’s version focused on her role as a pious and divinely blessed royal widow, who visibly intervened in the affairs of her realm. In contrast, the text of the later LLS’s version significantly toned down the public aspects of Evdokiia’s religious activities during her widowhood and instead stressed her personal and private spiritual qualities that justified her elevation to sainthood. The designers of the illustrations accompanying the LLS’s version of the Skazanie vmale, however, retained the public aspects of Evdokiia’s pious activities. As a result of their visual interpretation of the Skazanie vmale, by the later 16th century Grand Princess Evdokiia acquired the reputation of a powerful royal woman saint, who excelled both through her personal holiness and her commitment to assuring the continuing well-being of her realm. While the conceptualization of the role of the rulers’ wives in the Muscovite state had been ongoing since the early 16th century, the artists involved in the illustrations of the LLS seem to have played a vital role in the development of the image of Muscovite royal women in the later part of Ivan IV’s reign. Evdokiia...

Nicodemus and Sculptors: Self-Reflexivity in Works by Adam Kraft and Tilman Riemenschneider

Self-portraits integrated within narrative scenes by Adam Kraft and Tilman Riemenschneider show a pious identification between the sculptor and the holy person Nicodemus, an association based on the notion that Nicodemus had carved a crucifix. This dual referencing was expanded in the Middle Ages, when artists developed strategies for self-fashioning that were in keeping with the provisions of their commissions and their own concept of self. By presenting themselves as commentator and interlocutor, Kraft and Riemenschneider negotiated their places within the various discourses in which their sculpture participated.

Sanctity phenomenon of St. Feodosiy Pecherskyi in context of holy persons life

In the article of Natalia Kovalchuk «Sanctity phenomenon of St. Feodosiy Pecherskyi in context of holy persons life» the spiritual way of St. Feodosiy Pecherksyi as a search of time, which bring him closer to the sanctity and search of his personal dimension as a holy place are regarded. Through the analysis of food and cloth, which connect St. Feodosiy with world, his life is researched. Spiritual way of St. Feodosiy Pecherskyi brings him closer to the sanctity.

From abolitionists to fundamentalists: the transformation of the Wesleyan Methodists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

This article analyzes the cultural trajectory of a small, but influential denomination that formed in 1843. Wesleyan Methodism first emerged as an abolitionist protest against the Methodist compromise with slavery. The new church drew in members who championed a range of antebellum social reforms, including abolitionism, pacifism, women's rights, and temperance. By the early twentieth century, Wesleyans would become closely identified with fundamentalism, waging war against modernism, championing personal holiness, and maintaining a militant brand of protestant orthodoxy. This article places Wesleyans within a larger religious and cultural context of the Civil War era and the late nineteenth-century disenchantment of the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras. It also traces the reasons for the Wesleyans shifting focus away from social reform and toward matters of personal holiness.

Duchowość diakonów stałych w perspektywie powszechnego powołania do świętości w Kościele

The article considers the spirituality of permanent deacons in the context of the universal call to holiness. This spirituality has its source in the sacramental grace of the diaconate and is of great help to them in fulfilling their dedication to the service of the Kingdom of God and the Church after the example of Christ the Servant and in pursuit of personal holiness. The Second Vatican Council reminds us that all the faithful are called to holiness through baptism. Holiness finds an even greater motivation for deacons by virtue of the sacrament of order that they have received. The documents of the Magisterium, and in particular the Directory for the Ministry and Life of Permanent Deacons published by the Congregation for the Clergy, point out the means that deacons are to use in the continual deepening of their spiritual lives. Among the more important of these are: the faithful fulfilment of one’s diaconal duties, attention to the sacramental life, regular spiritual direction, attention to personal prayer and the Liturgy of the Hours, the observance of spiritual recollection and the practice of various forms of marian devotion. All permanent deacons should learn that time given to prayer and to the various forms of diaconal piety constitutes the most important and the most valuable of all one’s daily duties, since it helps to avoid any dualism between spirituality and the various diaconal tasks.

Gregory Nazianzen's trinitarian teaching based on his Twentieth Theological Oration

Gregory of Nazianzus, the Theologian, is one of the most important fathers and saints of the Christianity, because of his theological thought and his intense poetical style in his work. He is thought as a writer of a unique beauty and brilliance in his writings. In his era, the teachings of Eunomius and Macedonius were a great threat for the Church. The apprehension of the divine nature, being pure spirit, is impossible for a materially based consciousness, and the only hope for human beings to have knowledge of God, therefore, is founded upon their ability to transcend material limitation, when the soul is invited back by God to its true spiritual nature and destiny ( τέλος ) in communion with God. This economy of salvation, described as a purification and ascent, determines from the outset the radically ‘economic’ nature of theology for Gregory. Gregory insists on explaining how the Holy Spirit exists, underlining that the way of the existence of every person of the Holy Trinity is unique for each of Them. The word ἴδιον (idion: specific) is used to show the relationship between the persons of the Triune God, and not their common nature. For this reason the names Father, Son and Holy Spirit are referred to their relationship, and not to οὐσία (ousia: essence). Also these names (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) do not show the actions of the Holy Persons, because they are common. Otherwise there would be the danger to the Son of not being God. He would be only a creature. For the first time, Gregory uses the unity of the persons of the Holy Trinity as a pattern of the unity of the two natures of incarnated Word, Christ. He uses this type of pattern, because Gregory saw the danger of the heretical teaching of Apollinarius. The latter supports that the human nature of Christ is absorbed by the divine one. Also, there is another heretical danger in thinking the recruitment of human nature by the divine one as superficial, false, not real. So the Christ would not be real Human and God and He could not save the human race. It is clear that Gregory’s trinitarian doctrine originates in a primary and profound soteriological imperative. Sources ATHANASIUS OF ALEXANDRIA, Against the Heathen , PG 25, 3Α-93D. ATHANASIUS OF ALEXANDRIA, On the Incarnation of the Word , PG 25, 96A-197D. ATHANASIUS OF ALEXANDRIA, Four Discourses Against the Arians , PG 26, 12A–468D. GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS, Oration 20, On Theology, and the Appointment of Bishops , SC 270, 5-11 (=PG 35, 1065Α-1081Α). GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS, Epistle 102, Against Apollinarius; The Second Letter to Cledonius, SC 208, (=PG 37, 180A-190). GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS, Oration 38, 7, On the Theophany, or Birthday of Christ , PG 36, 313-321. Bibliography ALTANER, B., Patrology , English transl. Hilda C. Graef, Edimburgh, 1960. ARTEMI, Eirini, “The religious policy of Byzantine Emperors from First to the Fourth Ecumenical Councils”, Ecclesiastic Faros, 76 (2005), 121-163. BEELEY, C. A., Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008. BRIAN, E., DALEY, S.J., Gregory of Nazianzus , Τ he early church fathers , ed. Carol Harrison, University of Durham, publ. The Taylor & Francis e-Library, London, 2006. CONSTANTELOS, D. J., Understanding the Greek Orthodox Church , Massachusetts, 2005 4 DANIELOU, J., Platonisme et Theologie mystique , Paris, 1944. DANIELOU, J., La Trinite et le mystere de l’existence , Bruges, 1968. DUCHESNE, L., Early History of the Christian Church , t. III, London, 1924. GWATKIN, H., Studies of Arianism chiefly referring to the character and chronology of the reaction which followed the Council of Nicea , Cambridge, 1900 2 . HAHN, F., The Titles of Jesus in Christology: Their History in Early Christianity , trans. from the German by H. Knight and C. Ogg, New York, 1969. FEIDAS, Vlasios, Ecclesiastic History, I, Athens, 1992. MCGUCKIN, J. A. St. Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, New York, 2001. PAPADOPOULOS, Stylianos, Patrologia II, Athens, 1990, p. 499. SKOUTERIS, Konstantinos, The meaning of the terms “theology”, “theologize”, “theologian” in Greek Fathers’ teaching and in ecclesiastic writers to Cappadocians, Athens, 1989. WILLIAMS, S. FRIELL, G., Theodosius: The Empire at Bay , Yale University Press, 1995.

You Don't Have to Go Home, but You Can't Stay Here

could not have been unknown to them” (p. 113). In her final chapter, “Deer Island and the Banishment of Indians,” Goodman continues to trace this paradox between Puritan laws and lawmaking. The removal of Native Americans to Deer Island during King Philip’s War 387 BAILEY / You Don’t Have to Go Home, but You Can’t Stay Here sees Puritans banishing a group of people from their jurisdiction while moving them to a body of land within their jurisdiction, effecting “a banishment that was unlike any other” (p. 117). Of course, the relationship of Native Americans to English law—be it royal law, equity law, canon law or common law—was decidedly different than that of any of the book’s earlier examples. But the Indians’ banishment changes that relationship. “Indeed,” asserts Goodman, “through their banishment to Deer Island the Indians gained recognition for the first time as persons within the terms of the English common law” (p. 119). Thus, the removal to Deer Island allowed Native Americans into the world of the Puritans in a way that not even conversion to Puritanism had done. By assigning Indians a specific home, New Englanders made certain they were not a part of their own English community. Goodman then wraps up her treatment of banishment by focusing briefly on the intersections of common law and the rhetoric of social exclusion in North America in the years following the Puritans, keeping her attention on the nonreligious grounds and justifications for the various evolutionary forms of banishment. Goodman’s study certainly contributes greatly to the ways in which scholars of history, literature, and religion ought both to think about and to approach the subject of banishment in colonial New England. Her reliance on and use of the theories of authors such as Michel Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Edward Said, Carl Schmitt, Jacques Lacan, Clifford Geertz, David Delaney, and Giorgio Agamben among others, effectively links Banished and its subject to a much larger body of scholarship. Goodman, though, does not only rely on such theoretical scholars. She also makes able use of historians such as Anne Marie Plane, Jean O’Brien, Michael Zuckerman, and John Demos in making her appeal for a focus on the legal conceptions of banishment. One wonders, though, how some more recent historical works might have tempered even further her move away from the religious conceptions of such punishments. Though they both likely became available much too late in the writing process, one wonders how John Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (2012) and Linford Fisher’s The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (2012) might interact with Goodman’s conclusions about Roger Williams and his concerns for the proper relationship between church and state; or about the ways in which Native Americans potentially used their newfound Puritanism, or at least Christianity, to fashion a place for themselves in English society. On a more substantial level, recent scholarship by Michael Winship certainly provides an alternative reading of sorts to questions of banishment in early New England. Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (2002) stresses the connections between the religious, the political, and the legal in the “antinomian controversy,” though little is made of hospitality as the linchpin of the event and the subsequent penalty REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / SEPTEMBER 2013 388 suffered by Hutchinson. This is not to say that Goodman is incorrect, but one wonders how she does not at least interact briefly with the contentions of Winship’s important study. If any one volume kept coming to mind all the way through my reading of Banished, though, it was Adrian Chastain Weimer’s Martyrs’ Mirror: Persecution and Holiness in Early New England (2011). In general, Weimer deals with the same period of time in early New England. With the exception of Thomas Morton, she also deals with many of the same historical subjects. Weimer, however, connects their martyrdom and their respective formations of colonial identities primarily to religious concerns and the quest for personal holiness. The shared heritage of martyrdom helped shape early New England as their home. In the end, I do not know that any of these volumes necessarily preclude the importance of the legal aspects on which Goodman concentrates, but they certainly complicate the dialogue such legal conceptions had with other primarily religious conceptions. Read alongside this body of literature, Nan Goodman’s much-needed legal study paints a clearer portrait of Puritan communities in early New England, which was home to a remarkably diverse group of peoples—whether they all liked it or not. Richard A. Bailey is an associate professor at Canisius College and the author of Race and Redemption in Puritan New England (2011).

Peace and Reconciliation: The Gospel of Jesus Christ Has Teeth

Kobe Bryant, Gary Condit, Jimmy the Greek, and Rush Limbaugh, Michael Jackson, Barak Obama, Casey Anthony are all victims of a “conflict-ridden orientation” that prays on human imperfection, broken hearts, feeble minds, and bruised spirits. Paul seems to have been on the money when he said “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but spiritual wickedness in high places.” To put it in a vernacular we can all comprehend, Paul was saying that the problem is systemic. In other words, he’s talking about a system, a prevailing structurally dysfunctional order that is somehow unrelenting when it senses human ruin. And like a shark, this conflict-ridden structural adversary that Jesus called the world, launches its insatiable appetite upon human souls, especially those humbled by unfortunate circumstances and bad choices. So, like a fatal disease, the aftermath produces death. Such a consequence could perhaps be seen in the guilt leveling orientation that drove Judas to suicide, a physical death, and Peter’s guilt appears to have brought him to a kind of social death at least until Jesus sought him out and replaced the old model that fostered guilt with one that offered peace and reconciliation. We live in an inimical world, hostile, blood thirty, interested only in perpetuating hostility by disguising itself behind a creed of personal responsibility, personal holiness and personal prosperity.

The holiness of the Church: an analysis of Wesleyan-Pentecostal thought

This article examines early Pentecostal discussions of holiness in relation to theindividual as well as the Church. It then moves to later discussions in the Wesleyan-Pentecostal trajectory. As a result of these examinations, it is maintained that the holiness of the Church is directly related to, if not dependent upon, personal holiness. Finally, in agreement with Daniel Castelo, it is concluded that holiness is embodied as well as anticipated in the life of the Pentecostal community.

Reliques modernes: Cultes et usages chrétiens des corps saints des Réformes aux révolutions (review)

Reviewed by: Reliques modernes: Cultes et usages chrétiens des corps saints des Réformes aux révolutions Lee Palmer Wandel Reliques modernes: Cultes et usages chrétiens des corps saints des Réformes aux révolutions. Edited by Philippe Boutry, Pierre Antoine Fabre, and Dominique Julia. 2 vols. [Collection “En temps & lieux,” 7.] (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales. 2009. Vol. 1: Pp. 429, Vol. 2: 431–903. Vol. 1: € 28,50 paperback, vol. 2: € 29,50 paperback. Vol. 1: ISBN 978-2-713-22174-3, vol. 2: ISBN 978-2-713-22188-0.) As the title suggests, this book engages with two, normally quite discrete areas of inquiry. It is a brilliant engagement with the question of “modernity” and the abiding close association between it and “secularization,” as Max Weber most influentially defined it. It engages obliquely with that thesis through an extraordinary collection of articles, taking up relics; offering a close, richly documented study; and suggesting the complexity—devotional, cultural, political, ecclesiastical, and colonial—of the bones of holy persons. Piece by piece, these articles reveal a multilayered relationship between matter and spirit, bones and devotional identity. The two volumes are divided into six parts: I.“Lieux et corps saints: le temps des polémiques,” II.“Le pouvoir et le sacré,” III.“Le sacré dans la guerre,” IV.“Inventaires et inventions de lieux,” V. “Un espace en expansion,” and VI. “Reliques et reliquaires: une archéologie du sacré.” Some interrogate a single text, as in the case of the first article, “Le Traité des reliques de Jean Calvin (1543): Texte et contextes” (Pierre Antoine Fabre and Mickaël Wilmart). A number offer a layered study [End Page 333] of a single site, such as Fabre’s “Le grande reliquaire de la chapelle du Crucifix: Recherches sur le culte des reliques dans l’eglise San Ignazio, XVIe–XIXe siècles.” Most situate specific relics within communities that the articles carefully delineate. The titles of the six parts suggest something of the conceptual and geographic breadth of the volume. The first section takes up both critiques and apologies—Calvin’s Treatise on Relics, the Council of Trent’s decrees on relics (Dominique Julia), the restoration of relics in nineteenth-century France (Philippe Boutry), documentation of a relic (Alain Cantillon), and Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire critique des reliques (Nicole Courtine)—placing them within complexly conceptualized “contexts.” These contexts include the textual tradition of inventories that framed relics in certain terms and provoked polemics by those who abhorred the reification, not the relic itself; or the individual histories of authors and the dialectic between text and experience, devotion and polemic. The second section takes up “power” in precisely articulated specific instantiations: the girdle of the Virgin in Prato (Mario Rosa); the translation of relics from Roman catacombs to sites in France in the seventeenth century (Françoise le Hénand); King Philip II’s complex relationship to relics he gathered in the Escorial (Guy Lazure); and the hand of St. Stephen, king of Hungary, and its life within Hungarian national history (Andràs Zempléni). The third section takes up relics in three discrete historical instances of violence: the “temps des troubles de Religion” (Denis Crouzet), the French Revolution (Stéphane Baciocchi and Dominique Julia), and the Soviet Revolution (Bernard Marchadier). These articles document not the wholesale exhumation and expulsion of relics, but far more complex pictures of absences and remains. The next two sections take up the issue of space. The fourth part focuses on the places of relics—in addition to Fabre’s study of San Ignazio, Pierre Cordoba’s situating of relics and Catherine Maire’s excellent explication (with graphs and maps) of Adrien Baillet’s Topographie des saints. The fifth part focuses on vignettes of relics in worlds new to Europe, including Ines G. Županov’s history of São Tomé de Meliapor, as relic, site, and locus of encounter; Leandro Karnal’s complex consideration of relics and their multiple roles in the efforts to translate Christianity to Portuguese America; and Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Estoile’s delineation of the dialectic between Jesuits and the Tupinamba in “Le partage...

‘I call the people.’ Church bells in fourteenth-century Catalunya

Bells were an inescapable part of fourteenth-century urban life. They signalled the hours of the day and times for prayers; they warned of tempests and enemy armies; they heralded masses, funerals, and deaths. The pealing of bells brought men, women, and children together, choreographing communal behaviour in time and space. Bells echoed the vox Domini, calling out the deaths of holy men and women, celebrating the working of miracles. The ubiquitous presence of bells reflected the omnipresence of God in the medieval world. Their echoes transformed private moments into collective experiences, elevating the mundane into the miraculous. Scholars have rarely examined the religious aspects of bells, looking instead at their more practical side, especially their utilisation as markers of time and the allegedly concurrent rise of mercantile culture. This article approaches bells from the viewpoints of those men and women who heard them and wanted them rung. Focusing on sources from Christian clerics, we see that medieval men rang the bells with clear, but many possible, purposes in mind. By marking time and prayers, Christian church bells helped to create and facilitate communities within dioceses, spurring and choreographing their actions. During funerals, bells broadcast private moments, giving them communal significance. The transformative, creative function of bells is clearest in their role in miracles. In Manresa, the vision experienced by a few became a community affair when the church bells gathered the people; the bells transformed an ordinary day into one where the people, as a community, received divine favour. Finally, with the deaths of holy persons, the tolling of bells transformed private, even anonymous deaths, into moments of wonder as God’s hand touched the world. The pealing of bells defined Christian communities in the Mediterranean and, at the same time as rulers and elites throughout the region were seeking to control minority groups, those same groups were seeking to exercise control over the sounds within their own communities. Through the pealing of bells, churchmen across Catalunya sought to direct the thoughts and prayers of their listeners. When the Christian clerics of Catalunya rang their churches’ bells, they had specific aims in mind, yet, as the evidence demonstrates, the pealing of the bells never meant just one thing. This article demonstrates that there is much more to understanding medieval bells than knowing ‘for whom the bell tolls’; we have to look at the listeners as much as the ringers in order to understand their cultural significance in medieval Europe. This article is a first step in how such a study could be begun.

Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China (review)

Reviewed by: Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China Philip Clart (bio) Robert Ford Campany. Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. xviii, 300 pp. Hardcover $48.00, ISBN 978-0-8248-3333-6. Robert Campany is indisputably the foremost current expert on the hagiographic literature of early medieval China, having published numerous articles and a complete annotated translation of Ge Hong’s 葛洪 (283–343) Traditions of Divine Transcendents (Shenxian zhuan 神仙傳).1 In the present volume, he utilizes his profound knowledge of this literature to engage in a close reading of hagiographic texts and a sophisticated exploration of the methodological and theoretical issues involved in their reading. He limits his temporal focus to the period between the beginning of the Han dynasty (220 b.c.e.) and shortly after the death of Ge Hong (ca. 350 c.e.), and his thematic focus to the socially constructed nature of notions of transcendence or xian-hood. Much ink has been spilled about the pursuit of immortality or transcendence (the latter term preferred by Campany), including by Campany himself; thus, he makes a decisive shift in the present work by not emphasizing the intrinsic justifications and elaborations of techniques and cosmologies conducive to reaching the goal of xian-hood, but instead focusing on the extrinsic aspects of the social role(s) of the transcendent or the seeker after transcendence. The main text sources for this endeavor are the hagiographic collections Campany knows so well. Since they are usually not autobiographical, hagiographic accounts present third-party views of holy persons; by its nature, hagiography gives primary access not to the self-understanding of seekers after transcendence, but to outsiders’ views of these figures. There are two kinds of outsiders involved: first, of course, the author(s) of the hagiographic account, but second, the persons depicted in the account as interacting with the holy person. The role of the author is potentially problematic, as it could be argued that the image of transcendence-seekers in the Shenxian zhuan was created by Ge Hong himself in the service of an intrinsically religious agenda of his own and thus does not represent a widely shared cultural imaginaire. In that case, depictions of the social interactions of xian or xian-to-be would not provide us with reliable information on the social contexts of such persons. However, Campany reiterates his longstanding argument that writers such as Ge Hong saw themselves as compilers and transmitters, not as literary creators; their stories were gleaned from various sources regarded as trustworthy and, therefore, are collective representations. [End Page 163] Campany proves this point by means of cases where we can find corroborating evidence for the hagiographic accounts in other sources, including sources not sympathetic to the spiritual agenda of transcendence. Chapter 1 contains a detailed and sophisticated justification of hagiographies as sources of social and cultural history, which partly draws on studies of saints’ stories beyond China, as well as on theoretical works on the relationship of experience, memory, and narrative. The points made here are of cross-cultural relevance and should help Campany achieve one of the goals he set for this book, namely, that the wider study of religion and culture, which sometimes relegates sinological scholarship to the hyperspecialized margins, may finally begin to admit the premodern China case to its dossier. Both the broader study of religion and the more specialized study of premodern China stand only to gain thereby. (p. xv) In an exemplary effort at methodological transparency, chapter 1 also contains a very useful list of definitions of key concepts central to Campany’s project, among them imaginaire, asceticism, narrative, (cultural) repertoire, and collective memory (pp. 28–38). Chapter 2 proceeds to assemble from the sources the cultural repertoire “of features that constituted the role of xian and of adepts seeking to become xian” (p. xvii). Campany insists that this repertoire is structured both by intrinsic and by extrinsic rationales; the latter delineate this social role by “likening or contrasting it . . . to other roles in Chinese culture” (p. xvii). In chapter 3, the author successfully applies this approach to one element in the...

Finger of a saint, thumb of a priest: medieval relics in the Diocese of Turku, and the archaeology of lived bodies

The relics of Turku Cathedral are remains belonging to the bodies of holy persons, different from ours, even today, although the cathedral is the see for the archbishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, and relics are not on public display. Among the relics of the cathedral, there is a fragment of a radius, which according to its authentica, belongs to St Henry. Relics and reliquaries were in the core of medieval piety, and the cult of saints had infused throughout the society. Due to their central position in culture, relics offer glimpses at a range of material, social and cultural phenomena related to medieval embodiment.The Department of Archaeology at the University of Turku began to study the finger relic of St Eric and other items in the assemblage of Turku Cathedral in 2007. Relics and reliquaries are being opened and documented and organic as well as inorganic samples are being taken for a range of scientific analyses. So far the project has concentrated on building a chronological chart of individual artefacts. The majority of the relics date to the fourteenth century, although much more recent datings have also been obtained. The challenge of the project is not to stop when a better understanding of materials, their origins and age has been accomplished, but to use the results as a steppingstone into a study of the practices of medieval relic veneration. Medieval bodies and those material processes which authenticate relics, or distinguish saints’ bodies from other human remains, are thus at the heart of this article discussing embodiment.

Power, Gender, and the Classification of a Kashmir Saiva 'Mystic'

The hermeneutic of suspicion Grace Jantzen applies to the gendered construction of Christian 'mysticism' is a useful lens for understanding the religious authority attributed to Lalleśwarī of Kashmir. In the hagiographies and hagiographical scholarship about Lalleśwarī, three strands run parallel to Jantzen's genealogy: the exclusion of women from the institutions of religious authority, the coding of religious authority as masculine, and the association of women with the erotic. The two narratives intersect in the 20th century, when Lalleśwarī's claim to spiritual authority through her experience of 'the void' of Śiva-consciousnessiscementedthroughappealtowestern(particularlyJamesian) discourse on mysticism as an ineffable subjective state of union. At each juncture, however, the evidence of Lalleśwarī's vaakhs pushes against her interpreters' assumptions to suggest something of her own authorising strategies. A seventeenth-century Persian chronicle, The Secrets of the Pious, tells of the meet- ing of a famous Sufi teacher, Shāh Hamadān, with an unnamed wise woman (yoginī). Having transcended the world's scruples about external appearance, the yoginī sat naked by the roadside to dispense wisdom to passersby. When Hamadān came to town, however, she exclaimed, 'I have seen a man!' and ran to hide at the grocer's shop. The grocer shooed her away, and she proceeded to the baker's house. The baker, too, was less than welcoming; but before he knew it, she had jumped into the hot oven for cover. Miraculously, she then emerged fully clothed in garments of gold and went out to converse with the saint. 1 This yoginī would later be identi- fied as the Kashmiri poet-saint Lalleśwarī, also known as Lalla or Lal Ded, who lived in Kashmir in the fourteenth century. 2 Kashmiris tell this story about her so fre- quently that it is encapsulated in a famous proverb: 'She came to the grocer's but arrived at the baker's'. Although this tale, as part of Hamadān's hagiography, is designed to assert his superiority over other holy persons, Lalleśwarī is also revered as a great mystic in her own right. 3

Development of Eastern Christian Iconography

In Orthodox Christianity icons play a central role in the Liturgy, which they complete and explain. In front of these images, the faithful enter a process of communication with the holy person depicted. That is possible because icons convey the spiritual energies of the archetype of the holy person or of the sacred event they represent. Icon-painters follow Hermeneias — Grammar books — containing canonical indications to help them in their work. These books also give attention to the material elements from which the icons are made; since they are a part of God’s creation, they also need to be treated with reverence. The history of Eastern Christian iconography will be presented as an alternation of moments when an ‘abstract’ style of painting was employed with moments when a more naturalistic/realistic approach was at work.

The Anointing of the Airwaves: Charismatic Televangelism’s Impact on the Church and Community in urban India

The Indian Government’s open policy on satellite television is attracting a plethora of American-based charismatic television ministries in India. This study, albeit based on preliminary findings from a limited study of church and Hindu community leaders, shows that Charismatic pastors are more positive about Charismatic televangelism than non-Charismatic pastors. Both groups, however, have strong reservations on issues like fundraising, dress code and western dancing. The high-caste Hindus revealed during the research that they were resistant to any form of Christian evangelism including televangelism. Besides caste, class, language and gender, televangelism faces cultural barriers in reaching Indians. The prosperity, success and healing doctrines of Charismatic teaching seem to appeal to Hindus from the middle to lower level economic classes. Concerns have been expressed, however, by Christian leaders that these Hindus who are attracted to Charismatic televangelism may be espousing a form of Christianity (loosely termed “popular Christianity”) that focuses on personal fulfillment rather than personal holiness and accountability within the life of the Christian community.

Francis Xavier: Figure of Exile and Holiness*

Francis Xavier was one of the great Christian figures of the 16th century. The aim of this article is to delineate some of the important, and sometimes underemphasised, influences on his life in order to help shed light on the motivation which inspired his activities. It sets him first within a brief account of his family background, university education and life-changing friendship with Ignatius Loyola, which is described as generating ‘the undying archetype of the twin, with Loyola at the centre of the universe and Xavier at its periphery, complementing each other as perfectly as the point and the circle’. Against the background of ‘ever-present’ Islam, it then addresses Xavier's experiences with the corrupt and rather secularised Portuguese colonial environment in India and East Asia, and the royal ecclesiastical patronage exercised under the Padroado system, which led him to the role of a ‘counter-figure’ an exile or castaway, lançado or degregado. Japanese culture and religion and Xavier's fascination with China are two further areas explored. Permeating this account is the question of the nature of Xavier's spiritual life and personal holiness, within which his adventurous voyages may ultimately be seen as an immense pilgrimage and as the sign of a sanctity that was augmented rather than diminished by the obscurity of his death.

Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale, and: Il tempo dei santi tra Oriente e Occidente: Liturgia e agiografia dal tardo antico al concilio di Trento (review)

Reviewed by: Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale, and: Il tempo dei santi tra Oriente e Occidente: Liturgia e agiografia dal tardo antico al concilio di Trento E. Ann Matter Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale. By Anna Benvenuti, Sofia Boesch Gajano, Simon Ditchfield, Roberto Rusconi, Francesco Scorza Barcellona, and Gabriella Zarri. [Sacro/Santo, 9.] (Rome: Viella. 2005. Pp. 427. €28.00 paperback.) Il tempo dei santi tra Oriente e Occidente: Liturgia e agiografia dal tardo antico al concilio di Trento. Edited by Anna Benvenuti and Marcello Garzaniti. [Atti del IV Convegno di studio dell'Associazione italiana per lo studio della santità, dei culti e dell'agiografia. Firenze, 26-28 ottobre 2000.] (Rome: Viella. 2005. Pp. viii, 501. €39.00 paperback.) No academic culture is more welcoming to the study of sanctity and holy people in Christian history than that of Italy, where even some secular universities have faculty chairs dedicated to hagiography, and where faculty in general departments of history can make careers based on the study of saints and sainthood. Anna Benvenuti, the force behind these two volumes, a professor of medieval history at the University of Florence, has long been an expert on the role of holy people in medieval Italy, just as her colleague at Florence, Gabriella Zarri, has blazed a trail for the study of different forms of Christian sanctity in the early modern period. Sofia Boesch Gajano and Roberto Rusconi, who teach, respectively, medieval history and the history of Christianity at the Università di Roma Tre, are also well known for their work on Christian saints and the role of sanctity in Christian culture, especially in medieval Italy. The first volume under review here, Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale (The History of Sanctity in Western Christianity) brings this remarkable quartet together with Francesco Scorza Barcellona, who teaches the history of Christianity at the Università di Roma Tor Vergata, and Simon Ditchfield, who teaches modern history at the University of York in England, to offer a detailed and thoughtful overview of changing ideas of holiness and the roles of those we call the saints in Christian history from the beginning of the Christian cultus to the pontificate of John Paul II. The material is divided chronologically, and to some inevitable extent, by theme. Francesco Scorza Barcellona begins with a chapter entitled "Origins," that brings the discussion up to the beginning of the fourth century. This chapter [End Page 105] starts with the idea of martyrdom in Second Temple Judaism and earliest Christianity, and traces the development of the Christian holy person through the beginnings of church hierarchy, the rise of the ascetic communities, and the development of sacred biography, pilgrimage, cults, and iconography specifically associated with saints. The second and third chapters cover the Middle Ages. In the second chapter, Sofia Boesch Gajano considers the "structuralization" of Christian hagiography after the development of Christian political states, from the fourth to the twelfth centuries, as seen in monastic reforms, the role of the Papacy, holiness associated with visionary activity, and the rise of new forms of sanctity associated with holy war. Anna Benvenuti then takes over for a chapter on her specialty, late medieval urban life, in which she develops themes of local patronage as opposed to the centralized authority of Rome, new forms of religiosity among the laity, the rise of the Mendicants, and the development of a formal system of canonization. The fourth and fifth chapters focus on Renaissance and early modern Christianity. Gabriella Zarri takes the story to the late sixteenth century, through the Council of Trent, focusing on the christianization of society and the rise of Christian Humanism, the development of formal hagiographical literature, the rise of Marian cults, and the role of political prophecy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including the "Sante Vive" of Renaissance courts, and culminating in the figure of Girolamo Savonarola. In the fifth chapter, "The World of the Reform and the Counter-Reform," Simon Ditchfield considers how ideas of Christian sanctity were formed by confessional identity (considering briefly, and for the only time in this volume, Christian sanctity in a Protestant context). Ditchfield's essay focuses on the development of saintly cults, the Congregation of...

‘THEY KNOW HIM BY HIS VOICE’: NEWMAN ON THE IMAGINATION, CHRISTOLOGY, AND THE THEOLOGY OF RELIGIONS

Newman's gift to Catholic theology is the gift of ‘wisdom’: an ability to discern the shape of the whole, not by way of ‘generalized laws or metaphysical conjectures’ but through the ‘concrete’ and ‘living’ soil of the religious imagination. Newman's elemental trust in the religious sensibilities of non‐Christians and the revelatory roots of ‘natural religion’ proceeds from his view of the religious imagination as the experiential, pre‐verbal, and pre‐conceptual realm of contact between God and human persons always and everywhere. Above all Newman recognizes the salvific character of a life of personal holiness. In this respect the life of Christ exemplifies continuity and not radical interruption with countless human beings outside our usual ken who quietly lead lives of sacramental holiness. Bringing Newman into dialogue with contemporary theologians such as Jacques Dupuis, Roger Haight, Terrence Merrigan, and Thomas Merton, the author proposes four lessons for a theology of religions cast ‘under the light of Wisdom’.

ANDREW W. KEITT. Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain. (The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World.) Boston: Brill. 2005. Pp. viii, 229. $142

In Madrid during the 1630s and 1640s, the Inquisition prosecuted a number of men and women for pretending to be holy persons. Those who were prosecuted typically claimed to receive divine visions and to live ascetically. They led informal prayer groups and religious processions, and served as spiritual advisers to people around them. In this engaging and elegantly written book, Andrew W. Keitt examines the uncomfortable social, theological, and legal tensions that the Inquisition's prosecutions stirred up, tensions that were general to early modern Europe. Behind the Inquisition's determination to prosecute feigned sanctity lay the events of the Protestant Reformation and the reforms instituted at the Council of Trent. Trent reaffirmed the importance of outward piety and ritual, of saints, and of the miraculous against Protestant skepticism. Because sacred ritual and the supernatural were deemed so essential to Catholic identity, the church became preoccupied with defining and regulating them. Holiness increasingly required official certification. In deciding who was a legitimate holy person and who was not, inquisitors were forced to address questions, often with deep roots in the Middle Ages, that took on particular urgency in the period of the Reformation and Counter Reformation. What, for example, was the relationship between outer manifestations of sanctity and inner piety? How could one tell if a vision was from God or from the devil, or if it was a hallucination caused by illness?