Christian Roots Research Articles

The Christian roots of Europe

The Christian roots of Europe

Dual Anthropology as the Imago Dei in Edith Stein

Abstract This essay consists of two parts. The first part deals with the birth of a dual anthropology in Edith Stein’s thought, whereas the second part treats the teleological origin of this duality. In order to explain how she elaborated her dual anthropology two themes become intertwined in my investigation: the question of the feminine in western culture and the teleological question of the human being as an image of God. In my discussion of the first theme, I examine both the historical development of the feminist movement, maintaining that the birth of the feminist movement in the West has its roots in Christianity, as well as the theoretical reflection of Edith Stein on a dual anthropology, which becomes ultimately linked to a theological framework and, hence, to the idea of “image.” Here, we have to ask: What is the meaning of “image”? In what sense is the human being an image of God? Following the foregoing claim, I argue that Stein’s dual anthropology is very helpful in our time to clarify some questions that arise in connection with “gender theory”.

Pamięć jako budulec kształtujący tożsamość jednostki i wspólnoty – przypadek Edyty Stein

The article attempts to show how memory influenced the formation of the unique spiritual identity of Edith Stein, who was born and grew up in the religious tradition of Judaism, but as an adult became the member of the Catholic Church. What seems to be unusual in her religious self-perception is the fact that despite conversion, Edith permanently regarded herself as a Jew and firmly claimed that she constantly belonged to the Jewish community. Her mind-set was immensely influenced by the image of Jesus as a devout Jew portrayed in the New Testament, zealously practicing the sacred rites of Judaism, as well as her later analysis of the Christian and Jewish ways of worship. Her study exposed a deep bond linking Christianity with Judaism and by revealing this bond Edith Stein evoked the forgotten truth about the Jewish roots of Christianity which is deeply rooted in the faith of the Old Testament and draws a lot from the richness of its tradition. Undoubtedly, this important link reminded by Edith Stein, raised and developed later by the official teaching of the Catholic Church, was possible because she remembered the religious tradition in which she grew up and which she experienced in her childhood. Memory, therefore, became the constituent that shaped her own spiritual identity, but also contributed to the reinterpretation of the identity of the Christian community.

Béranger in Nineteenth-Century America

Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780–1857) was revered during his lifetime as the national poet of France. His championing of the Revolution and the people earned him significant impact in the United States; an antebellum American reviewer touted Béranger’s patriotism and his struggle for liberty as a model for an American national poetry. Translations of his songs were published in various formats at various prices by major publishers who also imported French-language editions. Translators struggled to bring his politically radical and sexually scandalous texts across linguistic and cultural borders to construct a Béranger who could be understood in the United States. Yet by refusing to translate Béranger, direct-language pioneer Lambert Sauveur subversively exposed his students to the Christian roots of socialism and a defense of the Paris Commune. By century’s end, Béranger’s influence had faded to mere inclusion in delicately suggestive anthologies, but his voice lived on to inspire leftists of the next century.

Spanish

The purpose of the article is to show that the foundations of a dualistic theology of Christian roots are found in the point of connection between platonic metaphysics, gnostic myths and exegesis. It highlights the way in which platonic metaphysics was developed in a completely different way than what is known as "Metaphysics of Exodus". It considers that myth -as an expressive vehicle of religious experience and having a polyvalent logic- was a decisive element for the transmission of gnostic tradition. Thus, the article concentrates on the gnostic understanding of "The Prologue of John", which focuses on the Christological function of Jesus, bearing in mind the difficulties involved in the indifference with which this tradition dealt with Incarnation. The tools for the exegesis are taken from Hellenic tradition as a form to clarify the gnostic intuition concerning the stages of the propagation of the divine, both before and after the Fall

Orphism in the Circle of Musagetes

Orphism was highly popular both among the artists and scholars at the turn of the nineteenth century. Recent research on the history of scholarhip on orphism has demonstrated that in the case of historians and philologists this popularity owed much to the contemporaneous discussions concerning the relationship of the church and the state which rised questions bearing on the roots of Christianity. In our article we consider ideas of the participants of the Moscow editing house Musaget publishing a special mystical series ‘Orpheus’. Because of the fact that scholars studying classical philology were among them makes one looks for a correspondence between the scholarly and artistic treatment of orphism. The emphasis on the liberating nature of orphism, which one finds in the writings of Andrey Belyj, is characteristic for a general tendency to oppose the teaching of orphics and the state religion.

“Corpus Christi, Corpus Delicti”: A New Narrative Contract: Władysław Pasikowski’s “Aftermath” (2012) and the Invalidation of the Category of the Polish Witness to the Holocaust

Władysław Pasikowski’s 2012 feature film Aftermath recapitulates and works through the existing resources in documentary cinema that deals with the Polish context of the Holocaust (Claude Lanzmann, Paweł Łoziński, Marian Marzyński, Agnieszka Arnold). It is also founded on the knowledge amassed in the wake of the countrywide debate about the 1941 Jedwabne massacre (2000–1). As such, it rejects the majority narrative of the Holocaust, one told under the banners of the Righteous Among the Nations (the paradigm of innocence), the Polish witness to the Holocaust (triggering an unjustified identification of the Jaspersian paradigm of unimputable, metaphysical guilt with unwarranted guilt), and the alleged collective Polish trauma of the Holocaust. Aftermath is analyzed as a treatise on antisemitism which problematizes and narrativizes phantasms that are central to this socio-cultural pathology, visualizing the mechanism whereby the phantasm of the Jew is constructed and imposed on actual individuals. It also touches upon the Christian roots and identitarian dimension of antisemitism, alongside its central figure: the Crucifixion. Antisemitism is a matter of religion as a doctrine but also religion as an institution. By displaying a plexus of discourses and practices, attitudes and behaviors, Pasikowski defends the great quantifier as a legitimate category to describe the Polish context of the Holocaust. He debunks the essential differentiation between pre-modern and modern antisemitism (including notions about the secondary nature of Polish antisemitism in relation to the German Nazi exterminatory projects targeted at the Jews). The film convincingly portrays antisemitism as dominating the experience and its representation to such an extent that antisemitic culture loses the ability to reflect on the human condition. Where a non-antisemite sees the irreducible strangeness that is inherent to individual existence, the antisemite sees a Jew, etc. The long duration of violence and exclusion has turned the phantasmic and alternative reality of antisemitism into reality tout court, as it produces a materiality of its own, up to and including the materiality of the atrocity (stolen property, looted corpses, etc.). The text offers an extensive discussion of the essential conflict between Aftermath and the system of Polish culture. The aesthetic is political. The juxtaposition of two genre films (the thriller and the Western) and a plebeian protagonist with a domain that is perceived as proper to the intelligentsia provoked widespread shock and rejection. Accusations of kitsch, exaggeration, improbability, and a colonial gaze enabled critics to sidestep, if not invalidate, the director’s argument. A study of the reception of Aftermath is a study of class distinction in action. Pasikowski’s film portrays antisemitism as a problem of an antisemitic culture and an antisemitic society. This entails a radical invalidation of the notion of antisemitism as an inter-group conflict, thus exposing the fiction and falsehood of such constructs as “dialogue” and “reconciliation.” Despite its pessimistic diagnosis, Aftermath raises the possibility of change and the emancipatory potential of self-empowerment. By considering the cultural and social implications of our knowledge about antisemitism and the Polish context of the Holocaust, the film reveala systemic challenge posed by the imperative to revise culture and reject its toxic models. From this perspective, a new narrative becomes possible as a critique of narratives.

Galona's review of victim labelling theory: A rejoinder.

In this article the author responds to a review by Galona (2018) of the historical-theological parts of victim labelling theory as elaborated previously in this journal and elsewhere (van Dijk, 2009). According to Galona, the term ‘victima/victim’ as a special name for Jesus Christ was not coined by Reformation theologians like Calvin, as asserted by van Dijk, but was for example already widely used by Roman poets. It also appeared in pre-Reformation theological writings for centuries. In his rejoinder, the author explains that Roman poets indeed sometimes used the term ‘victima’ for human beings but did so in a purely metaphorical sense. He agrees with Galona that the use of this label in its figural sense denoting Christ’s deep and innocent suffering emerged in theological writings pre-dating the Reformation. However, the label only ‘went viral’ around the time of the Reformation and has, from that time onwards, been the universal colloquial term for ordinary people victimised by crime across the Western world. In the second part of the article, the author elaborates on the theoretical and practical implications of the Christian roots of the ‘victima’ label. For centuries, victims of crime were expected to undergo their suffering meekly, in imitation of Christ. Ongoing secularisation has emancipated crime victims from the restraining ‘victima’ label, allowing them to freely speak up for themselves. Recent victim-friendly reforms of criminal justice have been driven by the need to find a new, victim-centred legitimacy in an increasingly secularised world.

Right-wing populist parties as defender of Christianity? The case of the Italian Northern League

Right-wing populist parties have recently seen remarkable electoral success in Europe. The exclusion of the political elite and certain ethnic, cultural, or religious groups from the people is described as their core characteristics. Some scholars argue that—within this logic of reasoning—right-wing populist parties increasingly refer to (supposedly) Christian roots and traditions, which are said to be endangered by the immigration of ‘aggressive’ Muslims. Thus, right-wing populists abuse the Christian religion and traditions in order to exclude certain sections of the population from the people or to deny them access to the ‘Christian Occident’. Taking the Italian Northern League as a case study, this paper examines whether and in which context this right-wing populist party refers to Christianity. Based on a content analysis that examines both quality and quantity of Christian-religious references, election programs, articles from the party’s website, and the party’s Twitter account are analysed. In conclusion, it can be stated that the Northern League actually refers to Christian traditions, dignitaries, and followers only in the context of a demarcation rhetoric towards others—especially towards Islam, although these references are used rather rarely. In addition, the Northern League seems to be the only relevant Italian party that uses Christian references at all.

Conscience historique et mémorielle du génocide. Jules Isaac et Jésus et Israël , rescapés de la Shoah (1940-1948)

Published in 1948, Jesus and Israel is Jules Isaac’s first book devoted to the Christian roots of antisemitism. Often interpreted through the retrospective prism of Jewish-Christian dialogue and the Second Vatican Council, this article rather links the book to its starting point: the Shoah. A work of history, Jesus and Israel is also the work of a survivor and a witness to persecution. Isaac’s scientific and commemorative approach is an early example of a link between historical consciousness and memory of the Shoah. Punctuated with analogies to Auschwitz, the book provoked a debate about the persistence of antisemitism in France, proving that the immediate post-war period was far from being a silent one in regard to genocide.

Readers’ thoughts on science and religion

Readers’ thoughts on science and religion

WELTKRIEGSPHILOSOPHIE AND SCHELER'S PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Purpose. The research is aimed at understanding the philosophical and journalistic heritage of M. Scheler during 1914-1919. "The philosophy of war" is regarded as the middle link between the phenomenological and anthropological stages of its philosophical evolution. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study is the philosophical legacy of Max Scheler, as well as the work of domestic and Western researchers devoted to this issue. Problems of Weltkriegsphilosophie become comprehensible based on the historical, logical and comparative principles of historical and philosophical analysis, which allowed to theoretically reconstruct the cultural and historical context, philosophical sources and ideological intentions of the German philosopher. Originality. For the first time in domestic historical and philosophical thought, it proved that the works by Max Scheler of the First World War played an outstanding role in the formation of philosophical anthropology as a separate philosophical trend. Conclusions. The basis of the Weltkriegsphilosophie by Max Scheler is the philosophical comprehension of the war in which the thinker tries to see the high sacral meaning, where the sacrifices that the nation brings to the altar of victory are not in vain: the nation is rallying this sacrifice, its readiness for it. According to Scheler, war is the most effective means of forming the so-called "love communities", to which he refers combat brotherhood, family and nation as a "collective personality", which recognizes itself through war. The philosopher is disappointed to some part with militaristic enthusiasm in his later military journalistic works and calls for a spiritual and moral renewal of Europe, fed from Christian roots. At the heart of this renewal should be the principle of personal solidarity, based on the Christian idea of love. However, Catholic universalism is an insufficient means for the formation of a "love community" and a new man who is co-creator of God that constitutes the main core of the philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler, which emerges in the 20s of the twentieth century. Based on this, the article affirms the existence in Sheler’s works of an intermediate stage between his phenomenology and philosophical anthropology – Weltkriegsphilosophie (philosophy of the World War).

Freedom, Compulsion, and ‘Esoteric Religion’: Mullā Ṣadrā’s exegesis on the phrase lā ikrāha fī al-dīn

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 43, 2, 2018 © The Maghreb Review 2018 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources FREEDOM, COMPULSION, AND ‘ESOTERIC RELIGION’: MULLĀ ṢADRĀ’S EXEGESIS ON THE PHRASE LĀ IKRĀHA FĪ AL-DĪN SAJJAD RIZVI* One of the mainstays of modernist Muslim discourse is the accommodation of a broadly liberal notion of religious freedom, the freedom to choose one’s religion and to leave one’s religion if necessary, including, of course, Islam.1 The universal declaration of human rights and various other liberal modern documents of a rights-based approach to ethics have bundled together a number of liberties as essential social goods to which the modernist Muslim intellectual has acquiesced, sometimes understanding and engaging in the debates and embracing the notions enthusiastically, and at other times seemingly oblivious to the contexts and quasi-religious concerns that arise out of the history of Christendom and the desire to defang religious violence and prejudice inherited since the early modern period.2 The twin incoherences of liberalism pose problems for such reconciliations of the Muslim with modernity and liberalism. First, the dissonance between the metaphysics and hermeneutics of liberalism that seeks to universalize their own principles and hence leave no space for dissent and its alternative reading that proposes modus vivendi that allow pluralistic conceptions of reality and the good to flourish makes it difficult to embrace liberalism unequivocally.3 Second, liberalism may be a force for the good in which violence is overcome and dethroned for peace, but it is often equally a colonial (and neo-colonial) * University of Exeter This paper was originally presented as a lecture at the Pontifical Institute for the Study of Arabic and Islam in Rome on 25 February 2016. I am grateful to Fathers Valentino Cottini and Christopher Clohessy for their generous hospitality and invitation, and to the participants for their incisive and useful contributions. 1 Although it is worth pointing out that the question of apostasy is more complicated than that despite some moratoria or casuistic thinking on this associated with intellectuals affiliated or loosely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood such as Tariq Ramadan – see http://religionresearch.org/closer/2005/03/31/tariq-ramadan-an-international-call-formoratorium -on-corporal-punishment-stoning-and-the-death-penalty-in-the-islamic-world/ accessed 23 October 2017. Ramadan specifically dealt with apostasy in his interview with Der Speigel in 2005 given here http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/spiegel-interview-withtariq -ramadan-they-live-in-a-bleak-devastated-universe-a-384900-2.html accessed 23 October 2017. The approach posited here juxtaposes the letter against the ‘spirit’ of the law and is an example of the purposive nature of the law (maqāṣid al-sharīʿa) approach that Ramadan and others propose for the modern articulation of ethics in Islam – see Tariq Ramadan, Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 2 For two important intellectual histories of human rights, one focused on the Christian roots, and the other on the Enlightenment legacies, see Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, and idem, The Last Utopia, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012, and Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008. 3 John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. FREEDOM, COMPULSION, AND ‘ESOTERIC RELIGION’ 155 enterprise that privileges a certain praxis of power and violence over others in hegemonic relationships.4 One need not be a Foucauldian or understand the cultural critique of Gramsci to see these tensions, incommensurabilities that seem to have passed the modernist’s attention. The aim of this paper is to set aside liberal and modernist discourses in favour of esotericism as method drawing upon the Safavid thinker Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1045/1636). But let us take first the critique of the former two approaches to hermeneutics. Three further problems plague our encounter with the liberal. The language of violence, religion and politics in our contemporary world is located within the bracketed set of three critical (and inter-connected) questions that affect and interrogate us. First, in our secular public spaces (leaving aside the niceties of...

La resurrección del pasado según Alexandre Herculano: una reformulación secular de la hermenéutica figural bíblica

As most scholars have recognized, Herculano’s literary and historiographical concept of «resurrection of the past» did not imply a «restorative» epistemological attitude, but of a «comprehensive» one, towards Portuguese Middle Ages. This paper argues that this attitude is intimately related to the Christian roots of the concept of «resurrection». Here it is asserted that Herculano’s «resurrection of the past» – synonyme of «historical understanding», in the author’s vocabulary – was a secular re-enactment of the figural hermeneutics that gave form to the Bible. First, I describe the romantic nature, and therefore Christian, of the concept of «resurrection of the past». Second, I analyze the structure of Herculano’s «historical understanding». Finally, I study the resemblances between this structure and that one of the biblical figural interpretation. This paper aims to encourage the discussion about the role of biblical thought in the birth of the modern historical conscience.

Theory and Practice in Nature Conservation – Where to Seek Sustainability?

AbstractContemporary nature conservation is the subject of serious disputes, with biocentrists emphasising the superiority of the good of nature, while anthropocentrists believe that conservation space should also take account of the good of humankind. The dispute concerns two very important values perceived differently, and not resolvable within any scientifi c framework. The authors postulate a return to the Christian roots of our civilisation. It was God who gave human beings the goods He had created, expecting them to be used in line with His plan. The man who lost God’s plan, destroys the life of nature as well as his own. The postulated solution is the proper shaping of conscience, to condition biodiversity conservation in line with the idea of sustainable development.

Earthquakes: Deconstructing Humanitarianism

In this paper I develop a deconstructive analysis of the relationship between humanitarian aid and state sovereignty. First, I sketch Derrida's analysis of the Christian roots of contemporary concepts of tolerance, forgiveness, and hospitality. Second, I trace the history and etymology of the word ‘humanitarian’ to reveal its Christian heritage; and argue that ‘humanitarian’ is bound to the violence of Christ's crucifixion, on the one hand, and to the sovereignty of God, on the other. Third, I set out three phases in the politics of contemporary humanitarian aid in relation to an increasing concern for humanitarian warfare. I conclude that international humanitarian aid and humanitarian warfare are bound together through an autoimmune logic that simultaneously challenges and shores up state sovereignty. State sovereignty creates ‘refugees’, which necessitates humanitarian aid organizations to step in and literally fill the space between state borders, a space that has become a kind of ‘no-man's land’ beyond citizenship. Police and military respond to refugee camps by patrolling them to shore up national borders and state sovereignty. Non-governmental humanitarian aid organizations, supposedly operating outside of nation states, become a necessary supplement to state sovereignty.

Wilken's "The Christian roots of religious freedom" (Book Review)

Wilken's "The Christian roots of religious freedom" (Book Review)

Similarities in iconographic art between rural churches from Transylvania in the 17th century and Caesarea of Cappadocia

The idea of the speech, goes round the importance of byzantine art inside Transylvanian orthodox culture, in the 17th century. The Göreme monastic Complex of Caesarea of Cappadocia has a considerable list of churches with relevant importance in Byzantine iconography. The popular character of this type of art developed on the walls of these architectural jewels manifests itself in the left-handed, but expressive and with such great spontaneity drawing: also with predilection for narration that lends many elements from the illustration of the Apocryphes, which were born from people’s inclination to very detailed stories. This byzantine style we have had for centuries and which is tight to our Christian roots, was cultivated in Wallachia and Moldova and Transylvania in the 14th and 15th centuries and the post-byzantine style in Wallachia in the 15th and 16th centuries. There are similarities between churches raised in the 17th century in Transylvania and the ones from Caesarea of Cappadocia. We refer mainly to the iconographic painting of the hunedorian churches

Nouvelle Biographie, Pulp Nonfiction, and National Crisis: The Year in France

Nouvelle Biographie, Pulp Nonfiction, and National CrisisThe Year in France Joanny Moulin (bio) By a stroke of fate, the summer of 2017 has seen the demise of two famous French biographers, Max Gallo (1931–2017) and Gonzague Saint Bris (1948–2017). Although they came from radically different social backgrounds, they both stood for a certain idea of biography as a popular literary genre characterized by conservative tendencies and a kitsch style of pop history. Max Gallo was the son of working-class Italian immigrants who had found in Nice, in southeast France, a shelter against Mussolini's fascism before his father took an active part in the French resistance. Having left school at the age of eleven to earn a living as a factory worker, then as a radio technician, Max went on educating himself as an autodidact. At the time of the Algerian War, in 1956, he was already leaving the Communist Party, and the next year he passed the agrégation to become a professor of history at Lycée Masséna. Then in 1968 he defended a PhD dissertation on Italian fascist propaganda that opened for him the door to a brief academic career as assistant lecturer at the University of Nice. Dabbling in politics and journalism, he became a socialist member of Parliament in 1981, the year when the socialist Union de la Gauche won the presidential election with François Mitterrand: Gallo acquired national notoriety as an official government spokesman. In 1992, he left the Socialist Party to found a center-left divergent current with Jean-Pierre Chevènement, whom he still supported in the 2002 election that saw the defeat of the Socialist Party and the extreme-right leader of the Front National reach the second round of the presidential election, a shocking first since World War II. In 2005, Gallo campaigned for the "No" in the referendum on the European Constitution that brought the build-up of political Europe to a halt. In 2007 he had completed his ideological metamorphosis, [End Page 588] and spoke publicly in favor of the right-wing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, adhering with naïve sincerity to the apology for the necessity of the debate on the question of identité nationale. In 2008, Gallo was elected to the Académie française. This thumbnail life sketch is helpful in understanding the ideological meaning of Gallo's literary commitment, based on the conviction Gallo captured in his La Croix article titled, "La France est dans une crise nationale de longue durée" [France is in an extended period of national crisis]. In an interview to the news magazine Le Point, which claims to be a French equivalent of Time magazine, he declared that, contrary to the US, France is a country where the people are not united by an "attachement religieux" (Gallo, "Il suffit"), going as far as to say that the French Revolution was "un antimodèle qui pèse encore aujourd'hui" [an antimodel that still weighs on us today], a bloody, unfortunate birth of the Nation that Gallo saw as forever exposing it to "l'irruption de la violence et des barbaries" [an eruption of violence and barbarism]. In a 2002 interview, given to the Catholic news magazine La Vie, which republished this text in July 2017 on the occasion of his death, Gallo declared, "La France a besoin de retrouver ses racines chrétiennes" [France needs to rediscover its Christian roots] ("Pourquoi je prie"). He went on to explain that such had been the meaning of his literary work over the years: "essayer de donner une image la plus complète possible de la diversité de notre histoire nationale" [to attempt to give the most complete image possible of the diversity of our national history]. His multivolume historical novels—Les Chrétiens following Bleu Blanc Rouge and Les patriotes, soon to be followed by Morts pour la France—read like prosopographies, or group biographies, of the most obvious great figures of French history. It is a return to a form of popular historiography, implicitly assuming, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, that "there is properly no history; only biography" (15), turning the page on a few decades...

The Monastic Architecture of the Order of the Poor Ladies — Later Called the ‘Poor Clares’ — in Central Italy between 13th and 14th Centuries

At the dawn of the 13th century the male monasticism was living a new era, marked by the advent of St. Francis and St. Dominic and characterized by a return to the poorest and humble roots of Christianity as well as by greater openness towards the believers, more than the closed dimension of the monastery. A new female religious movement, known as ‘the Poor Ladies’, was born in Central Italy in the same years, under the guidance of St. Clare of Assisi. The movement did not join any of the existing monastic rules at the beginning, even though it was strictly bound to the Franciscan experience and had total poverty as its highest and exclusive aspiration. The Church of Rome saw a possible critical issue in the movement and in its lack of control. It tried to regulate it at the Council of Lateran IV in 1215, especially with the Cardinal Bishop of Ostia Ugolino dei Segni (the future Pope Gregory IX), an essential figure for the history and evolution of the female monasticism who imposed the cloistered life on all female monastic orders. The analysis of the architecture of the so-called ‘PoorLadies’ is, therefore, fundamental in order to understand the consequences of this imposition. New liturgical spaces for females only, in fact, started to be created in both the existing convents and in the newly built ones with the aim of protecting the daily life of the nuns. The arrangement of the preexisting spaces in St. Damianoin Assisi — the cradle of the order of St. Clare — was purely random but led anyway to the creation of proper architectural models, later exported in other convents of the same order. The nuns’ choir in St. Damiano, infact, is located outside the ecclesiastical perimeter in order to preserve the cloistered dimension. However, this peculiar position of the choir made it quite difficult for the nuns to assist to the liturgical functions from the beginning, but the issue was solved only during the 14th century with the ‘migration’ of this liturgical space to a new position, after a series of different solutions.