Spiritual Son Research Articles

新神学者シメオン (949頃-1022年) と一般信者の霊的父子関係

Symeon the New Theologian is one of the most famous mystics of the Eastern Church, but he was also a renowned spiritual father in the post-Iconoclasm era. In his days laymen sought their own spiritual fathers among monks because they believed that monks had more powers to save their souls than priests did. When spiritual fathers visited their spiritual sons, many people—their families, relatives, friends, and neighbors—used to surround them and to confess their sins to them. There was a spiritual family which had a spiritual father at the center.Symeon supported the role of monks as spiritual fathers of laymen and insisted that a spiritual father should be charismatic, not official. He venerated his late spiritual father, Symeon the Stouditis, who was not a priest, as a new saint, namely, a contemporary saint. His belief provoked a counterattack by the official spiritual fathers. Symeon was exiled by the ecclesiastics of the Church of St. Sophia. But his powerful lay spiritual sons and Nikitas Stithatos, his spiritual successor, eventually succeeded in restoring his honor. Symeon's belief in a charismatic father was handed down to the Byzantine society through his hagiography written by Nikitas.The Byzantine society in the post-Iconoclasm era was a sort of the religious community, where people formed bonds around new saints. In this society even the Byzantine emperors needed a relationship with a new saitnt.

Ambrose: De officiis. Volume 1: Introduction, Text, and Translation. Volume 2: Commentary. Pp. 982 (numbered continuously). Edited by Ivor J. Davidson. (Oxford Early Christian Studies.) Oxford University Press, 2001. isbn 0 19 827023 2 (Vol. 1), 827024 0 (Vol. 2), and 924578 9 (set). £120

One of the most influential books of antiquity was Cicero's De officiis, which used to be read by virtually every educated person until the middle of the nineteenth century and is today read by hardly anyone. Written in the aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar, it was concerned to provide a moral guide amidst the chaos then afflicting the Roman Republic. Over four centuries later St Ambrose wrote a work with the same title, whose structure was largely based upon that of Cicero's treatise. Cicero wrote his work purportedly for his son Marcus; Ambrose for his spiritual sons, i.e. the clergy in Milan. Surprisingly, Ambrose's work did not have the influence in the Middle Ages one might have expected it to have had, partly because it was overshadowed by the Liber regulae pastoralis of Pope Gregory the Great, but it has always been recognized as a highly important work and one of unique interest because of its link with its famous literary predecessor. Not that Ambrose was anxious to acknowledge any debt to Cicero, to whom he refers almost derisively simply as quidam saecularium doctor (De virginibus 3.25). But that is partly the point. It would not—for this reviewer at least—be too much to speak of the fascination of Ambrose's work as one which supremely bears out the comment of R. G. Collingwood on the Latin Fathers: When we find many of the Fathers like Jerome, Ambrose and even Augustine speaking of pagan learning and literature with contempt and hostility it is necessary to remind ourselves that this contempt arises not from lack of education or a barbarous indifference towards knowledge as such, but from the vigour with which these men were pursuing a new ideal of knowledge, working in the teeth of opposition for a reorientation of the entire structure of human thought. (R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History [Oxford, 1963], p. 51, italics added)

Marcel Boulin, refondateur du Musée Dauphinois

Marcel Boulin, the new founder of the Musée Dauphinois. If one agrees that anthropological muséums — and more especially regional museums which explore a territory in all its aspects and present it from a pluridisciplinary point of view -have a structuring function in the history of anthropology, then Marcel Boulin (1919-83) certainly has a central place in the museums of the region of the Alps of Dauphiné. Owing to his very short stay in Grenoble (1966-69), to his very few publications due to very unfortunate circumstances in his life, and to his modesty, the rôle he played in the revival of the Musée Dauphinois has been forgotten. Before him, this museum had only collections, but no human resources, no budget and only inappropriate buildings. (It is Marcel Boulin who directed both the moving of the museum to the convent of Sainte-Marie-d'en-Haut and the retrospective inventory of its collections). Marcel Boulin, a former worker of «the ATP », was the spiritual son of Marcel Maget and Georges Henri Rivière to whom he often made reference. Of the former he had the rigorous methods -he was himself a remarkable researcher from 1943 to 1955 and worked within the framework of the surveys initiated by the MNATP (fieldwork for the inventory and study of regional furniture, domestic objects, and crafts metallurgy in the Alps and in his native region of Saint-Etienne. Of the latter he had inherited the sober elegant and efficacious museographic expression based on the beauty of the masterpiece as well as on the suggestive power of the ordinary object. Boulin is a founder in that he has given strong new bases to the museum and enabled his successors to make it into an innovative institution in matters of temporary exhibitions and scenography and the head of the exemplary national cultural heritage network that is today the Conservatoire du Patrimoine of the département of Isère.

The Scene of Instruction Mörike’s Reception of Goethe in “Besuch in Urach”

Although Morike has long been considered Goethe’s successor in lyric poetry — a “spiritual son” who acknowledged his debt to the precursor openly — a comparison of Morike’s “Besuch in Urach” with Goethe’s “Ilmenau” reveals the successor’s attempt to repress rather than imitate the “father.” The present analysis employs Harold Bloom’s reception theory to argue that Morike’s defense against Goethe forms the origin of his creative impulse.

Freud and the "White Hotel".

I suppose that since Freud in my book talked about the original white hotel as the place where everyone has stayed I could say that I started to write the White Hotel in the womb, and I think the book does have all of my life experience there in some form or other. But I really began to write it about six years ago. I was reading the letters of Jung and Freud, both of them fascinat? ing people, and was particularly struck by the moment when their relationship, already under strain, broke off. There was a famous occasion in May 1912 when Freud travelled from Vienna to Lake Constance one weekend to visit a sick colleague, Binswanger, who had cancer; Jung, of course, was living just near Constance at Z?rich and he thought that as Freud had come such a long way it would not be far to come the extra few miles to see him for a few hours at Z?rich?while Freud thought that, as he was going all that way and he was much the older man, surely Jung could take the train journey on the branch line into Constance to see him for a few hours at Binswanger's clinic. As a result neither of them met, and it seemed to me, perhaps in my ignorance, a classic illustration of the tug between father and son: Jung was a sort of spiritual son of Freud and that marked symbolically the end of the relationship. I wrote a poem about it.

Sir Egerton Brydges on Lord Byron

ONE of the curiosities of literature is the fervent defense of Lord Byron's morality by the very circumspect Sir Egerton Brydges.' Byron's death in I824 was the excuse for the elderly antiquarian to write profusely about his misunderstood hero. Within little more than a year Brydges had written two books on Byron and included a defense of the poet's patriotism in still a third book. By I83 I Brydges had made Byron a central figure in two poems. Finally, in I834, the old man sat down to write his autobiography, and the loving manner in which he introduces and defends Byron shows that he has adopted the youthful poet as his spiritual son. The reasons for this strange partnership are not hard to find when the evidence is examined more closely. I shall attempt, first of all, to show how Brydges defended Byron, and then to analyze the motives behind the defense. The first bond of sympathy began when the young nobleman's verses were ridiculed by the Scotch reviewers. Brydges believed in aristocracy and had done prodigious research on the British peerage. Like Byron he had received rebuffs at the hand of the despised "new" peers, and so it was with intense interest and delight that he noticed the young lord's poetical retorts in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers as well as his later acclaim on the publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. The strange hero worship reached a climax on Byron's death. The spark set off Brydges' smoldering desire to become the poet's public champion, and a rapid succession of writings about Byron came from the garrulous Sir Egerton. In less than three months after Byron's death in Greece on April 19, I824, Brydges had finished his Letters on the Character and Poetical Genius of Lord Byron, which attracted very little attention at the time,2 although it is probably, as Professor Chew calls it, the

Bakunin's Confession

In 1849 Bakunin was arrested and tried by the Saxon authorities for his participation in the uprising of Dresden; in 1850 he was sentenced to death. The sentence, however, was not executed because the Saxon authorities agreed to surrender him to the Austrians who sought him for his participation in the Czech revolt of 1848. Again he was tried, and in 1851 sentenced to death. This time the sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life. The commutation was a formality for it had been decided in advance on the day of the sentence he would be transported to the Russian border and handed over to the Russian authorities. In Russia, Bakunin had already been sentenced in absentia to loss of the privileges of nobility and to hard labor for life in Siberia when, in 1844, he refused to obey an order to return to Russia. Hence, in 1851, Bakunin was not tried by the Russian authorities but was simply imprisoned in the Peter-Paul fortress, in execution of the earlier sentence. In the fortress, at first, nothing happened; Bakunin waited in vain for his deportation to Siberia. After two months the door of his cell opened, and he received a call from Count Orlov, aide-de-camp to the Tsar and chief of the Third Section. The caller informed Bakunin he was sent by the Tsar personally, and was ordered to invite him to write a confession of his sins to the Tsar. Tell him, the Tsar had ordered, that he shall write to me like a spiritual son to his spiritual father. Bakunin accepted the invitation; the result is the Confession.'