Imitation Of Christ Research Articles

The Indictment of Mark Powell

The Indictment of Mark Powell Denton Loving (bio) Inside St. John University's Abbey, in Collegeville, Minnesota, stands a particularly memorable statue of John the Baptist. This version of the saint is an emaciated, haunting form. Towering over visitors to the church, the bronze image is tall and thin and represents John during his time in the desert when he survived on a diet of locusts and wild honey. John's right hand extends forward as if in invitation to all who enter. Mark Powell and I spent a week in July 2010 as writing fellows at the Collegeville Institute, in association with St. John's. One evening, while exploring the abbey, I found Mark standing before this image of John the Baptist, their fingers stretched toward each other, touching tip to tip. Mark told me this statue felt to him like an indictment. I remember being surprised by his choice of words. I knew by Mark's countenance that the feeling had to do with his faith, but in my view, Mark already exemplified the kind of person I wanted to be. Foremost, he was more like Christ than most of the Christians I had encountered in my life. I knew this from my earliest conversations with Mark, although it took me a while to comprehend the difference between these two very different and sometimes opposing ideas. Eventually, I understood that to Mark, the starved form of John the Baptist manifested a number of difficult questions: "What have you done for your fellow man? What have you given up? Have you hungered with your brother?" These were not new questions. These are the questions Mark carries with him always. In an article Mark wrote for Yale Alumni Magazine, he addressed where he believed men like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Deitreich Bonhoeffer would find today's church. Mark answered: "I think they might find the church in the ghettos of major cities where Catholic workers and Quaker communities stand in solidarity with the poor, or among the rural poor of Appalachia where local activists literally risk their lives to end Mountain Top Removal mining, or amid the modern Tom Joads circulating between migrant camps as they move through the central valley of California. I am certain they would find the church in the [End Page 35] slums of Lagos or Sao Paulo, in the wastelands of Sudan and Chad. Whether or not they might find traditional 'Christians' wouldn't really be relevant: they would find people imitating Christ." It's this imitation of Christ that drives Mark as a person and as a writer. Mark's novels are undeniably bleak. His characters are weary and beaten down by the world. Emotionally, they are as hungry and emaciated as the statue of John the Baptist. But they are beautiful, too. They are beautiful in their weaknesses, in their battles, and in their own quests for salvation. Mark has often advised me that the greatest risk yields the greatest reward. I would dismiss advice like this from many people, but it's difficult to dismiss Mark when you see him live by these words and put his faith to action: When I first met Mark in 2006 at the Appalachian Writers Workshop, he was pursuing graduate studies at Yale Divinity School. I later learned he had given up a good job and a comfortable life in Charleston, South Carolina, in order to follow a calling to better understand his faith. In 2007 he traveled to Colombia with Christian Peacemaker Teams, where he volunteered in an accompaniment program where his simple presence as an American in a Colombian village potentially saved Colombian lives. And for the past three years, Mark has taught fiction writing to inmates at the Lawtey Correctional Institute in Raiford, Florida, where he jokes, there's no dropping the class—just parole. I list these examples of Mark's work to show he is a man engaged with the world, not detached from it. When he articulates what he believes Christianity to be about, it isn't a place that can be found, but rather a way that must be continuously followed. I have come to see Mark's...

Provision for the poor and the mission of the church: Ancient appeals and contemporary viability

Composed for the 2011 Prestige FOCUS Conference on Mission and Ethics at the University of Pretoria, this essay addressed the interrelationship between the New Testament conception of mission and one of the most significant moral topics in Scripture: the provision for the needy. In keeping with the investigative focus of the conference, the article began with an exegetical analysis of Matthew, Luke, the Pauline Epistles, James, and 1 John, demonstrating that generosity to the poor is an integral feature of these authors’ understanding of mission. The second half of the article investigated the rhetorical and theological strategies utilised by the aforementioned New Testament authors in motivating their readership to charitable action. Without aiming to be exhaustive, the article identified ten different strategies utilised by the New Testament texts in question: the authority of Jesus, the imitation of Christ, the theology of the cross, the imitation of the saints, equality, eschatological punishment, eschatological reward, earthly blessings, observing the Law, and love. The author not only described the ways in which these appeals functioned, but evaluated to what degrees and in which 21st century global Christian contexts these various appeals might be effective in motivating contemporary expressions of provision for the needy.

Calling: Langland, Gower, and Chaucer on Saint Paul

Calling embraces both summoning (or vocation) and naming, not only in Modern English but also in Middle English (by way of verb clepen) and in Latin vocare, as used, for instance, in Vulgate in 1 Corinthians 7:20, ultimate source for many of passages that Davis discusses: Unusquisque in qua vocatione vocatus est, in ea permaneat. Davis explores notion of calling in four late fourteenth-century texts (Piers Plowman, Vox Clamantis, House of Fame, and of Bath's Prologue and Tale), countering, along way, Weber's oversimplification of pre-Lutheran notions of calling, especially with regard to significance of activity in world and possibility of salvation for those in secular life. Instead of earthly names and estates being naturalized, fixed, and God-given, or alternatively, alien and anathema to God, God temporarily suffers imperfect human 'callings' at same time that he issues his own call. Thus, although human and divine 'callings' are not identical, they are also not necessarily distinguishable and in fact often coincide; as such, characters within these poems, and sometimes poems themselves, do not always disambiguate them (55). Davis's analysis expands to include discussion of vs. possession and precept vs. counsel, and it perhaps offers its richest insight into WB and PP, especially where she draws parallels between Wife and Langland's Will. Her discussion of VC centers on narrator's role in Book I. Taking issue with those who, conflating poet and narrator, blame Gower for disturbing allegorical depiction of revolting peasants as animals in vision in Book I, Davis emphasizes how the poem reframes its invective as self-scrutiny (80). Wisdom, exercising role similar to that of Conscience in PP C XXI, alerts narrator to call to redemption and does achieve his contrition, which is signaled by his kneeling. This call forces two related recognitions on part of narrator: first, that and storm are divine instruments and, second, that target of God's displeasure is narrator himself, who, despite having fled terrors of revolt, has internalized and carries it within: he is revolt. . . . In recognition of his own sinfulness, Gower's narrator evacuates cavities of his heart. This thorough cardiac examination enables him to hear, on or over wind, divine voice to which Wisdom has already alerted him. Once storm has subsided, . . . narrator kneels in thanks . . . . The narrator's contrition and prayers, which culminate in this act of kneeling, are turning point around which whole poem pivots. . . . His own crying to God and God's answering call produce an antiphonal that emerges from, rather than being antithetical to, tumult of other calls, which together constitute revolt (79-81). Elsewhere, Davis describes both narrator's loss of his own voice and Gower's well-known use of words of other poets as acts of kenosis, in imitation of Christ's setting aside of his divinity upon assuming human form, as described by Paul in Philippians 2:5-11 (85-88). She concludes by setting side by side ending of VC and close of Alain de Lille's Anticlaudianus (91-97), illustrating a commitment [in Gower's, Langland's, and Chaucer's work] . . . to imagine--although perpetually defer--the spiritual recoverability of imperfect life (97). This subtle and wide-ranging essay deserves to be read in full. [PN. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 32.2]

Eschatology, Liturgy, and Christology: Toward Recovering an Eschatological Imagination by Thomas P. Rausch

230 Antiphon 16.3 (2012) Thomas P. Rausch Eschatology, Liturgy, and Christology: Toward Recovering an Eschatological Imagination Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2012 161 pp. Paperback $19.95. The proposal in this book, as might be deduced from its title, is to integrate eschatology more fully into liturgy by attending to recent scholarship in Christology. Rausch is descriptive in most of the book, giving the reader an overview of recent scholars’ work, but ultimately this description is in the service of improving our eschatological imagination . “Throughout this book we have sought to recover the hope and expectation of the early Christians, particularly in their liturgical celebrations, for Christ’s coming in glory, bringing the fullness of the kingdom” (141). An introductory chapter on “The Eschatological Imagination” locates some of our difficulties. Rausch believes that the eschatological imagination of early Christians was much in evidence when they celebrated the Eucharist, but that this faded into the background in the Middle Ages when attention was shifted from eschaton to eschata, that is, from the glorious restoration of the whole creation to a individualistic concern with the last judgment and one’s personal salvation . The Second Vatican Council took significant steps, he thinks, toward renewing both Church and liturgy, and was largely successful in reclaiming a corporate sense for liturgy, but “it is less clear that it brought about a recovery of the vivid eschatological imagination that so characterized the primitive Church” (7). Why was it less successful in this? The postconciliar developments he mentions are religious indifference , a culturally shaped liturgy, the shift to the historical Jesus, and a revised Christology from below. Central to any consideration of eschatology need to be creation, time, and memory. This sets up the remaining chapters. Chapter two concerns the God of Israel, and the prophetic and apocalyptic foretelling of justice and cosmic restoration. Here are the origins of belief in the resurrection of the dead and final judgment. Chapter three places its emphasis on the imitation of Christ. Rausch asserts that for the early Church this meant eschatological divinization, but by the twelfth century imitatio Christi focused upon the earthly life of Christ, leaving the West with an individualistic approach, which was strengthened by the Reformation, and has only lately been challenged by the retrieval of the biblical notion of the kingdom of God. Here Rausch surveys Johannes Baptist Metz, Jon Sobrino, Elizabeth Johnson, Peter Phan, Roger Haight, and Terrence W. Tilley. Chapter four treats the resur- 231 Book Reviews rection as an eschatological event, where God’s power breaks into history and creates renewed relationships; contemporary thinkers have reacted against the individualism of modern thought and see the social dimension of the resurrection. Chapter five returns to Rausch’s thesis about the medieval loss of the eschatological imagination. He reviews the relevant terminology of soul, death, last judgment, hell, and purgatory, and, recognizing Jesus’ solidarity with all who have suffered throughout history, he observes a recovery of the social dimension , or liberation, in eschatology. Chapter six turns to how all this can be given expression in the liturgy. Eucharistic anamnesis integrates time and eternity, and calls the assembly to enter into the Paschal mystery, becoming Christ’s Body for the world. Alas, he says, our concept of “mystical body” shifted after Berengar, lessening the eschatological dynamism and the corporate character of Eucharistic faith. As a result, Catholics have narrowed Eucharist to individual Communion, and the current interest in exaggerated ritualism seems more nostalgic than genuinely liturgical. The question Rausch wishes his reader to ask is, “how can our liturgies call our people to a deeper sense of themselves as the Body of Christ and to their own share in his Paschal mystery?” (132). The modern liturgical movement has aided in the renewal of Eucharistic practice, but rarely has it recovered the inbreaking of the kingdom. So Rausch makes some recommendations in chapter seven. Though Christology has recovered the centrality of the kingdom, there is a risk that it may collapse into ethics and secular hope; and if the Church’s mission moves from Christocentric to regnocentric, it risks losing sight of what is unique to Christ and the Church. At times I had wished that...

“The Cruelest of All Mothers”: Marie de l'Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Discipleship

In 1631, Marie de l’Incarnation entered the Ursuline monastery in Tours, France, leaving behind her eleven-year-old son Claude to pursue the religious life. This article examines the role Marie’s abandonment of Claude played in the relationship between mother and son as reflected in Marie’s own writings and Claude’s biography of his mother. Marie and Claude understood the abandonment as a sacrifice wrought in imitation of Christ, in obedience to God and Gospel, and in empathy with Mary. A close reading of Marie’s own writings, however, reveals that Marie remained troubled by the suspicion that her decision had been deeply misguided. Dunn suggests that Marie’s unconventional decision to abandon her son was fostered by an insidious theological tradition of marginalizing and devaluing—even actively maligning—biological motherhood as incompatible with Christian discipleship.

LOUIS SCHWARTZ, Milton and Maternal Mortality.

IT would be misleading to think that the title is motivated by alliteration and that behind it rests some other unsuspected argument. Maternal mortality is indeed the subject matter of this somewhat repetitive book and its relevance to Milton is treated seriously and at considerable length. The first section (about one third of the monograph) is a historicist study of childbirth and obstetric practice in early modern England and the pain and anxieties that these generated. The other two parts are descriptive and relate the outlined childbed concerns to Milton’s selected early poems and to Paradise Lost. The first three chapters take us on a gruesome journey through seventeenth-century maternal mortality rates, the conditions and ignorance that caused them, and the religious rites and discourses surrounding procreation. It transpires, for example, that childbirth among the middle and upper classes was often seen as a spiritual trial of faith or a heroic self-sacrifice in imitation of Christ, so even an otherwise normal delivery could have been exacerbated by the labouring woman’s insistence on suffering or by the midwives and the female community involved in it. The information Schwartz compiles here from primary sources and a wide range of secondary literature may be of interest to early modern historians and scholars, or those with an expert knowledge of medicine and obstetrics. That Milton was closely engaged with these aspects of female existence is, however, less convincing despite his early ‘Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’ and the deaths of his two wives in or after labour. Indeed, it requires a certain amount of ingenuity and determination to extract an argument out of a few passages in Milton’s poetry and sustain it through a full-length monograph. Schwartz has no qualms claiming that ‘Childbed conditions, beliefs, and practices were important parts of the world that drove Milton to poetry, the world whose contours, obstacles, and crossings he had in mind whenever he set pen to paper or dictated to his amanuenses’ (20). If childbirth was one of the reasons why Milton wrote, then anything else could have been—illness, plague, death, or some such pervasive phenomenon, indeed any situation for which we find a set of conventional or startling images in his poems.

Jungian psychology and the spirit of Protestantism

While there has been much discussion of Freud's Jewish background and its subtle influences on his manner of thinking and his psychological theory, less has been written about the equally profound and indelible influence of Jung's Protestant Christian background on his psychological opus. This factor stands out especially in his various descriptions, personal and theoretical, of the individuation process. In many instances, they bear a remarkable resemblance to the Christian notion of ‘the imitation of Christ’ (imitatio Christi), with a strong Protestant accent on the solitary individual. As Jung interpreted this well known Christian notion of discipleship and introduced it into his psychological theory of development, he personalized it for himself and at the same time universalized it by interpreting it as an archetypal process. This essay is an initial exploration of the Protestant Christian background underlying several key concepts and attitudes in analytical psychology.

The Imitation of Christ in English Reformation Writing

This essay surveys scholarly treatments of the imitatio Christi theme in the printed literature of the English Reformation up to about 1640 and makes a case for the relevance of contemporary religious and devotional writing on this topic to the study of early modern English literature. While imitation has long been recognized by literary critics as a central feature of early modern English pedagogy and poetics, the devotional practice of imitating Christ’s life and Passion has been historically regarded as a minor element in English Protestant piety. However, recent trends in the study of early modern English literature and the historiography of the English Reformation suggest that it is time to reconsider the role of the imitatio Christi not only within English Protestant devotional culture, but within the broader culture of literary imitation as well.

DECEPTIVE LOVE: Kierkegaard on Mystification and Deceiving into the Truth

ABSTRACTThis article explains and assesses a particular method of loving others that is espoused by Søren Kierkegaard. In his later works, Kierkegaard advocates a kind of deceptive love whereby one mystifies or deceives another person for that other person's own good. The theological underpinning of this mode of love is found in the imitation of Christ. In other words, just as Jesus adopted an incognito, so also Christians should, at times, appear different or lowlier in order to help others by meeting them where they are. After explaining this form of love, I argue that there are considerable reasons not to follow Kierkegaard in his support of outright deception within personal relationships. I conclude with some brief reflections on whether the deceptive structure of Kierkegaard's own authorship is thereby condemned or whether it can be exonerated.

Spiritual Formation and St. Paul as Spiritual Director: Determining the Primary Aims

Dallas Willard makes the claim that spiritual formation “refers to the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner world of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself.”1 Can this claim be substantiated and stand up to close scrutiny, or is Dallas Willard selecting an idea of his own fancy and making this the cornerstone of his understanding of spiritual formation? How can this claim be tested and anchored? In this article we will seek to answer these questions by looking at the Apostle Paul in his function as spiritual director. Although it is patently anachronistic to speak of Paul as spiritual director, can we legitimately understand him in this role? We will propose a generative understanding of spiritual direction and then proceed to examine the Apostle Paul and his aims based on that generative understanding. We will also argue that at the core of Paul's functioning as a spiritual director lies a strong appeal to examine and imitate his life and character and to follow his ways. This appeal by Paul for others to imitate him is anchored in Paul's own imitation of Christ himself. Paul's call to imitation thus provides a window into discovering how Paul understood his role as spiritual director and also provides us the means to discern his goals in spiritual direction.

The Poetry of Prose: Readings in Russian Literature. Slavica Bergensia, 8 by Jostein Børtnes (review)

SEER, Vol. 88,No. 3, July 2010 Reviews Bortnes, Jostein. The Poetryof Prose:Readings in Russian Literature.Slavica Bergen sia, 8. Department of Foreign Languages, University of Bergen, Bergen, 2007. 211 pp. Index. Notes. Index. NOK 150: $27.00: ?14.00: 19.00. The eighth volume in the Slavica Bergensia series, published by theDepart ment of Foreign Languages at theUniversity of Bergen, comes with a tide that is,at best, uninformative and, at worst, misleading. The 'poetry' of prose is to be understood here as indicative of a quality ofwriting similar to that suggested by the vague Russian epithet in the expression khudozhestuennaia proza. Indeed, the adjective 'poetic', which may be read as synonymous with 'artistic', 'literary',or 'aesthetic', is much more in evidence in the volume than the noun 'poetry'.We read of'poetic image' (p. 104), 'poetic creation' (p. 116), 'poetic potential' (pp. 120, 157), 'poetic system' (pp. 127, 188), 'poetic universe' (p. 157), 'poetic code' (p. 160), 'poetic devices' (p. 168), 'poetic structure' (p. 173), 'poetic logic' (p. 183) and 'poetic juxtaposition' (p. 191),but only rarely of 'poetry' per se.We are informed on one occasion (p. 103) of the author's determination 'to read the novel in theway we read a poem, forward and backward simultaneously'. The process alluded tomay strike the reader as not so much a poetic way to read a novel as a novel way to read poetry! The book, then, isnot about thepoetry of prose, but rather, as we learn in thefirst paragraph of the Introduction, the essays it contains share a common theme thatmay be described as 'prose poetics'. As the sub tide declares, the book focuses on readings inRussian literature. There are ten chapters, six ofwhich offervariations on a common approach to Dostoevskii's major novels. These central chapters are flanked by two surveys,which precede them, on 'Medieval East Slavic Literature 988-1730' and 'Religion and Art in theRussian Novel', and twomore specific studies, which conclude the volume, on Turgenev and Evelyn Waugh. It will not escape the attentive reader that the last-named author isnot Russian but, as we are informed in the Introduction, the 'main concern here is not Russian literature,but Russian literary theory' (p. 13).All the chapters have appeared before as articles or essays. Acknowledgments are made to publishers and journals for all but one of thepieces in this collection of re-edited writings, the exception being a piece on Stavrogin and the symbolic structure ofDemons. This ispresumably an oversight, since 'The Last Delusion in an Infinite Series ofDelusions' appeared originally in 1983 in volume four ofDostoevskyStudies. The bias of the volume is towards theological or,more specifically, hagio graphical readings inwhich theprimary device is that of figurai interpretation ('a literary expression of the idea of Christian self-realisation in imitation of Christ', p. 11).The historical and thematic accounts offered in the first two chapters serve tomap out the terrain and themethodology for the remainder of the book. Thus, the symbolic structure of 'storyand projection', which is repeatedly referred to in the first chapter, is applied to major characters of nineteenth-century Russian literature in the next one: Bazarov's journey is 'a communication of the sacred' (p. 64), Raskol'nikov 'restorfes] his own 530 SEER, 88, 3, JULY 20I0 self in the image of the archetype [ofChrist]' (p. 68), and Tolstoi, through Nekhliudov, offers 'the possibility of a new communitas, a resacralisation of society' (p. 85). At the centre of the collection of essays are six chapters that focus exclusively on the laterworks ofDostoevskii: one on The Brothers Karamazov, two on The Idiot, one on Demons, with the remaining two ranging more broadly on the function of hagiography and on holy (and unholy) fools. The stimulus for several of the essays is a key idea or concept taken from an earlier critic that is first summarized and then extended or qualified in meaning by the author: Bakhtin, Auerbach and Girard are the threemost prominent sources in this respect. These exercises, all well informed by an extensive knowledge of text and context, possess the depth and dexterity to provide valuable insights for an undergraduate readership but, because theywere not originally conceived as...

Georges Bernanos. The Theological Source of His Art (review)

Reviewed by: Georges Bernanos. The Theological Source of His Art Stephen Schloesser Georges Bernanos. The Theological Source of His Art. By Michael R. Tobin. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2007. Pp. xiv, 217. US $80.00. ISBN 978-0-773-53232-8.) Although Georges Bernanos (1888–1948) was a bundle of contradictions, Michael Tobin, a professor of French literature, argues for a theological foundation unifying the writer’s life and vision. He locates the source in the Latin liturgy’s mingling of water and wine: “grant that we may be made partakers of his divinity [eius divinitatis esse consortes],” first invoked by Bernanos in Majorca (1934–38) and then throughout the 1940s (pp. 33, 46, 166, 179). The prayer encapsulates “Bernanos’s essential theology of divinization: the Christian is not called merely to imitate Christ, but to become Him by sharing in His divinity and so, by implication, in His Incarnation” (pp. 33–34; emphasis in original). A fundamental dialectic revolves around “abstraction,” Bernanos’s great enemy (pp. 20–21): incarnation, divinization, and re-Christianization [End Page 382] on the one hand; dis-Incarnation (neologism: désincarnation) and de-Christianization on the other (pp. 204–05; cf. 35–36) Tobin’s survey of Bernanos’s vast output is succinct yet profound. Novelistic characters are analyzed through the prism of “heroic corporeity” (p. 20). Father Donissan in Under the Sun of Satan (Paris, 1926) ends as “an incomplete Bernanosian hero” because he cannot accept his own body (p. 72). The bodily suffering of Chantal de Clergerie in Joy (Paris, 1929) is “the very suffering of God himself” and proclaims “the good news of divinized Pain” (pp. 85, 86). By contrast, the apostate hagiographer Father Cénabre in The Imposter (Paris, 1927) and Joy is “offended by his [own] corporality,” resists giving his saints bodies, and displays only crosses stripped of corpuses due to his “unconquerable horror of Our Lord’s Passion” (pp. 110, 111, 118). The nameless curate in The Diary of a Country Priest (Paris, 1936) completes Father Donissan’s unfinished journey. On the day he dies from stomach cancer, his diary entry reads: “I am at peace with myself, with this poor carcass” (p. 105). Two of Tobin’s most admirable working traits are careful attention to biographical-historical settings and intertextual linkages between Bernanos’s novels and nonfiction. These help Tobin stretch the envelope in analyzing the “apocalyptic vision of shadows and corruption” found in the posthumously published Un mauvais rêve (Paris, 1950) and “the great, largely unread masterpiece M. Ouine” (Paris, 1946; p. 106). Abandoned in 1936, Bernanos returned to finish it because the “disastrous events of 1940, which included the fall of France, freed him from [his] creative paralysis” (p. 151). The novel’s significance is illuminated by a nonfictional line from the apocalyptic 1939–40: The world was “recommencing the mystery of the Incarnation backwards [à rebours]” (pp. 156; cf. 47–48). The book’s shorter second section surveys the mostly antifascist essays written between 1940 and 1948, especially the disturbing “La France contre les robots” (Rio de Janeiro, 1946). Here Bernanos addressed Brazilian students in January 1945:“liberty” is precious because “he whom the liturgy invites to participate in God’s divinity—divinitatis consortes—could never renounce this sublime risk” (p. 179). The book concludes with a coda devoted to the work posthumously discovered at the bottom of a trunk, soon after scored by Francis Poulenc as the opera Dialogues of the Carmelites (1957). Here again intertextuality: Dialogues of the Carmelites “only become intelligible after one has pored over the several thousand pages of wartime and postwar journalistic prose” (pp. 186n1, 187). If Tobin’s thesis is correct, one obvious cause for the writer’s eventual eclipse in Catholic quarters is implicit in his theological vision: an “Alexandrian” emphasis on divinization downplays an “Antiochene” moral or exemplar aspect of Christology—the “imitation of Christ.” (Curiously, the compassion of Father Donissan, the incomplete hero, makes him “the most [End Page 383] Christological of all” Bernanos’s saints: incarnation or imitation? [p. 95].) After the war, an increasing number of Catholic intellectuals (like François Mauriac) gravitated to the Left. Bernanos considered them “imbéciles...

The use of scripture in the "imitation of Christ" by Thomas A Kempis

This essay investigates the use of Scripture in The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. It discusses some of the conditions during the time of its appearance, focussing on the Devotio Moderna as reform movement, the life of Thomas. It then discusses the Imitation and its use of Scripture in detail.

William J. Purkis . Crusading Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia c. 1095‐c. 1187 . Rochester, N.Y. : Boydell Press . 2008 . Pp. xi, 215. $90.00.

This book is a valuable contribution to crusades studies. Following Giles Constable and Jean Leclercq, William J. Purkis sees the crusades as an integral part of twelfth-century religious reform. In that framework, he emphasizes the importance of pilgrimage and the imitation of Christ and the apostolic life to the origins and early development of crusading. The first two chapters argue that Pope Urban II touched on the deepest devotional needs of his audience in his crusading appeal. The preachers and first historians of the crusade understood the crusaders as imitators of Christ and practitioners of the apostolic life, which also seems to have been the crusaders' self-perception. Imitatio Christi and vita apostolica were “two foundations of crusading spirituality” (p. 56). Chapter three looks at the first fifty years of crusaders' rule in the East. In that period, the connection between crusading to the East and ideals of apostolic life faded away, while ideas of Christo-mimesis continued to be central to crusading spirituality. Chapter four examines the Cistercian influence on crusading spirituality in the second and third quarters of the twelfth century. As a result of Cistercian preaching, the ideal of imitatio Christi was divorced from crusaders and reserved for those who committed their whole lives to following Christ, such as the Templars. Crusaders, in turn, were defined by the “duty to their bloodline” (p. 118). Their duty was to follow the crusading exemplum of their fathers. The last two chapters turn to Iberia. As a tribute to the potency of the imitatio Christi ideal, which itself was linked to the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, crusading was introduced to Iberia as an alternative route to Jerusalem. But this idea of iter per Hispaniam was soon supplanted by the invention of local crusading foundational legends and centers for penitential pilgrimage, such as the cult of St. James, the patron of the fight against the Muslims of Spain, at Compostela.

Asceticism in the Writings of Thomas Merton

IN HIS BOOK The Ascetic Self Gavin Flood offers a familiar view of asceticism as the restricting of the instinctual impulses of the body so as to come closer to the goal of human perfection. (1) While adhering to this view in a fundamental sense, Thomas Merton believed that the perfection sought was not an abstract ideal but rather an attempt to restore the original integrity and beauty of the self through the imitation of Although he accepted Western Christianity's traditional emphasis on the importance of asceticism, Merton's view of asceticism was also distinctively his own even from his earliest writings. Although, for example, Merton had actively embraced Christianity and Roman Catholicism as a young man in the 1930s, his earlier exposure to writers like William Blake and Aldous Huxley had a profound influence on his thinking about Christian spirituality. Merton came to Catholicism with a mind well furnished with reading in philosophy as well as in ancient and modern literature. The effect of this reading was to make him into a humanist and to make him wary of some of the most punishing and demeaning aspects of Christian asceticism. In particular, from his reading of Blake, about whom he wrote a master's thesis, Merton had absorbed a disdain for an asceticism that focused on the gravity of sexual sins. In the case of both Blake and Huxley, as is revealed in Merton's well-known autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), he came to see the primary importance of asceticism as a liberating of the self from fragmentation and dividedness. For Merton, the self had to be united in order to effectively give itself in love to others and to God. In Seasons of Celebration (1965), a book that contained essays stretching back a decade and a half, Thomas Merton noted that, although the Roman Catholic Church had in the second half of the twentieth century relaxed some of the fasting laws in Lent, the individual Catholic was obliged to practice acts of self-denial and charity in order to die to himself and then go on to live in the Spirit of the Risen Christ. (2) The emphasis upon death in ascetic theology stemmed from the earliest history of Christianity, as Owen Chadwick pointed out, during which, in the midst of the persecution of Christians, believers fully expected to give their lives in imitation of Christ and in the expectation that the world would soon be coming to an end. Thus, the virtues cultivated by the early Christians were those that led to these ends and that further led to contempt for the goods of this world. (3) In particular, Chadwick argued, the early monks, attempting to emulate the first Christians, did so by emphasizing otherworldliness and in particular gravitated toward an asceticism that disciplined the flesh and honored celibacy. (4) Merton, who was aware of Chadwick's writings, made much the same point in lecturing to monastic novices about early Christianity. Martyrdom and virginity, he observed, were considered by the early Christians to be the supreme forms of union with Christ involving the sacrifice of all that the world holds dear. (5) Merton pointed out that in the sixth century St. Benedict, the father of modern monasticism, moderated the ascetical excesses of the early monks transforming monasticism through a balanced life into a vocation that ordinary men could stand. (6) St. Benedict shifted the whole impact of asceticism to the interior --from the flesh to the will. His monks had plenty to eat and plenty of time to sleep. He reduced the choral offices of the Egyptians by about two thirds and sent the community out to work in the fields for seven or eight hours a day. Extraordinary mortifications were forbidden or discouraged. Virtue consisted in no attracting attention rather than in doing things that were conspicuous. The sacrifices that really mattered to him were those that were exacted in secrecy from the deepest veins of selfhood. …

Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry (review)

Reviewed by: Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry Diana Jefferies Kaeuper, Richard W., Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry (Middle Ages), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009; cloth; pp. 344; 1 illustration; R.R.P. US$59.95, £39.00; ISBN 9870812241679. Richard W. Kaeuper describes the subject of his book as an investigation into how chivalry could fit into a Christian framework (p. 5). He comes to his subject not by examining the clerical notions of knightly piety but by examining how the knights themselves came to justify their violent profession within Christianity. Although clerical responses to knightly violence are discussed in Chapter 1, Kaeuper acknowledges this is an area that has attracted much scholarly interest (p. 6). He also notes the church's pervasive influence in all aspects of medieval life, often stemming from beliefs about the afterlife. However, what interests Kaeuper is how knights interpreted these clerical responses and developed their own notions of knightly piety. The investigation into knightly piety begins in Chapter 2 when Kaeuper explores the religious ideas of two knights, Henry of Lancaster and Geoffroi de Charny. Both knights lived in the first half of the fourteenth century and fought on opposing sides during the Hundred Years War. And they had something else in common: both wrote chivalric treatises that examined the religious aspects of chivalry. Kaeuper demonstrates that Henry's treatise, Livre de seyntz medicines (The Book of Holy Remedies) presents a model knight whose piety is based in his desire to suffer in imitation of Christ. His suffering is not just about his love for Christ but is an attempt to cancel out many of his sins and place him in favour on the Day of Judgement. His knightly activities are offered as atonement for sin, a meritorious suffering (p. 41) that is pleasing to God. Charny's Livre de chevalerie contains the same themes as Henry's treatise but his emphasis is firmly on the chivalric life with religious overtones. To [End Page 225] Charny, the bodily sufferings endured by knights are an essential component of the prowess required to be a great knight. It is this suffering that links knightly activities to honour and makes these activities the highest form of human endeavour (p. 43). Although this perhaps seems to be a conventional view of how the knights saw their contribution to chivalry, the religious nature of chivalry is present because knightly prowess is a gift from God. Therefore the knight has a responsibility to use this gift in a righteous and appropriate manner. Kaeuper emphasizes that both treatises are the independent thoughts of two practising knights. They arrived at their own conclusions about the piety of knightly life despite the great clerical interest in the subject. Notions of heroic prowess, meritorious suffering and lay independence formed their response to clerical ideas of chivalry. Although it is possible to see clerical ideas about knighthood in their writings, Kaeuper argues that the two knights were highly selective in their use of them (p. 50). Having discussed specific knightly notions of the religious aspect of chivalry, Kaeuper moves on to look at what would have influenced the two knights' religious ideas. Chapter 3 examines the context of religious chivalry. Again, Kaeuper states that his purpose is not to investigate how clerical reforms influenced chivalry, already a well-researched subject. He is interested in another religious aspect of medieval life, that is the atmosphere of asceticism that created the necessary environment for chivalry. It was this asceticism that informed knightly ideas of meritorious suffering (p. 65). Yet, even though ideas of asceticism were directly related to clerical writings, Chapter 4 shows how the independent spirit of the knights informed their own religious ideas of chivalry. In Chapter 5, Kaeuper examines how these religious ideas were disseminated through chansons, romances, chronicles and crusade propaganda. Kaeuper ends this chapter with the assertion that the religious justification of the crusades came to justify all warfare fought in a good cause during the medieval period (p. 115). Chapters 6, 7, and 8 discuss how religious ideas of chivalry infiltrated the life of the knight. Chapter 6 examines the knight's identification with the suffering...

Lovesickness and the Therapy of Desire: Aquinas, cancionero Poetry, and Teresa of Avila's 'Muero porque no muero'

Modern readers of the poetry of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross are often struck by their use of the language of desire and of courtly love themes also found in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century cancioneros. In an article published over a decade and a half ago, Terence O’Reilly (1992) examined some of the most crucial similarities between cancionero and mystical poetry in the light of Alexander Parker’s earlier claims (1985) about the use of the language of religion and the moral value attributed to suffering within the courtly love tradition. As Parker had suggested, cancionero poetry tended to present human love in terms of ‘desire without fulfilment’, and even if this love might be linked to sexual desire, the focus was generally not on bodily pleasure but on desire (1985: 20–21). In explaining this emphasis on desire, Parker made the provocative claim that ‘fifteenth-century poets found satisfaction in posing as suffering martyrs of love’ (17). O’Reilly demonstrates that, in the context of Christian ideas about redemption and of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century emphasis on the imitation of Christ, the notion of suffering love was linked to merit and hope. He then turns to the theme of desire as ‘longing’ in John of the Cross, addressing the controversial question: ‘what kind of human love is mystical longing being compared to?’ (66). In this paper, I return to the question of desire, and discuss its function in relation to love. In contrast with Parker’s emphasis on the pain and anguish caused by unfulfilled desire and on the constraints of sensory experience as themes found both in mystical and non-mystical love poetry from sixteenthcentury Spain, I will look at the notion of wilful desire in cancionero poetry and in Teresa’s poem ‘Muero porque no muero’, against the background of Thomas

Icarian Romanticism – The Motif of Soaring and Falling in British Romantic Poetry

Man’s aspirations to grandeur, his dreams of soaring to god-like heights and his concomitant tendency to fall have caught the attention of artists and writers since time immemorial. As pointed out in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Icarus – like Phaeton in ancient mythology or Lucifer in the Judeo-Christian tradition – is, in contrast to the circumspect and prudent Daedalus, the reification of man’s inherent propensity for transgressive ambition and immoderation. Particularly at the beginning of the 17th century, when early modern man becomes more and more dissatisfied with his humble position and – as John Donne complains – strives to be ‘a Phoenix’, Icarus conjures up the image of a new way of life in which excess replaces the old Renaissance virtue of mediocritas. Not only does Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet call for the strict adherence to this virtue when he reminds the restless protagonists of the fact that ‘violent delights have violent ends;’ numerous emblems showing Icarus’s fall are meant to admonish the reader to stick to the golden mean. Even women, the most notorious of whom is the titular heroine of John Marston’s The Insatiable Countess (1613), are suddenly aware of being ‘mewed up like Cretan Daedalus’ and dream of being endowed with ‘waxen wings to fly to pleasure’. Giving expression to early modern man’s longing for excessive hedonism, but also classified as ‘easie and familiar’ by Francis Bacon, the parable of Icarus nevertheless served to illustrate a newly arisen contradiction in which individuals, at the threshold of modernity, saw themselves locked. On the one hand, Icarus’s trespass proved to be the matrix for countless phoenix-like ‘overreachers’, who, like Doctor Faustus, Don Juan, Tamburlane or Macbeth, aptly epitomized the time-honoured idea that man’s inclination to soar beyond the human condition, to break with the idea of life as an imitation of Christ was a severe and blasphemous attack on God’s chain of being; on the other hand, in spite of his self-inflicted failure, Icarus tended to be regarded as the personification of the ingenious individual who ought to be differentiated carefully from the anonymous masses. Thus, the 17th -century poet and translator George Sandys got to the very heart of the ambivalent image of Icarus when he, in the wake of Bacon, wrote: ‘Icarus falls aspiring. Yet more commendable then those who creepe on the earth like contemptible wormes’.

'Sinte Gregorius seet...'

The adherents of the Devotio Moderna regarded the Church Fathers as reliable guides in their search for true piety, which they defined as the imitation of Christ. This article discusses the role of one of the most important among them, Gregory the Great, and takes its point of departure from the surviving texts that were ascribed to him in the convent of Saint Agnes at Maaseik. The purpose is to study how these regular canonesses used Gregory in their education, how they appropriated his work and constructed him as a valuable helper in their search for spiritual perfection. The Maaseik collection contains both authentic and none- authentic work, such as the prayer Te adoro in crucem. Several manuscripts contain larger excerpts or dicta, amongst others in the Middle Dutch copy of Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen's De spiritualibus ascensionibus. In addition, the regular canonesses at Maaseik owned a complete Middle Dutch version of Gregory's Homiliae in Evangelia. As far as modem devouts like the sisters at Maaseik were concerned, Gregory's work was a part of the Divine Truth, like the other Church Fathers' texts. Therefore, they felt free to link quotations from his work to quotations from other Church Fathers, in order to reach a meaningful interpretation, which would help them in their search for spiritual perfection. They focused on specific texts such as the Moralia in Job and the Homiliae in evangelia or parts thereof, which, in their view, provided the best advice for imitation of Christ. They loved Gregory because of the practical orientation of his work. Furthermore, in many ways he suited their spirituality, for instance in his stress on performative aspects of piety. At the same time it is clear that they interpreted him in order to be able to follow his lead in their context of a cloistered convent, for instance by practicing active charity primarily among their fellow sisters. Furthermore they enhanced certain elements in his work, such as his representation of the Christ as food.

The Immortality of Soul in John Calvin's Psychopannychia and Thomas A Kempis' The Imitation of Christ

The Immortality of Soul in John Calvin's Psychopannychia and Thomas A Kempis' The Imitation of Christ