Traditional Religious Symbols Research Articles

Illness, Aesthetics, and Body Politics: Forging the Third Republic in Émile Zola's 'La Faute de l'abbé Mouret'

This article examines the political role of illness in Émile Zola's La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (The Sin of Father Mouret, 1875) in articulating the difference between a religious and a secular body. Published in the early French Third Republic (1870–1940), this novel shows the Zolian body as the nexus upon which religious and republican discourses compete. Using Paul Ricœur’s theory on Christianity’s original sin, this article compares Mouret’s sickness with physical evil and illustrates how Zola redeploys the traditional religious symbols of the heart, the blood, and the Word to the secular realm. It will show that original sin is a Christian myth inscribed on the body, and that Zola’s reformulation of a core religious doctrine dismantles its supporting framework for the fledgling secular Third Republic. Through an exploration of Zola’s attempt to forge a republican self, this article offers a new perspective on the nature of the Zolian body which merits further study under the field of Medical Humanities. Through the construction of the religious body, the essay also contributes to the wider critical discussion on mythology in Zola’s work.

„KRYZYS MONARCHI PIASTOWSKIEJ” I PROBLEM TZW. REAKCJI POGAŃSKIEJ OKIEM ARCHEOLOGA

The turmoil of the 1030s in the Polish territory has so far attracted attention of historians. A detailed analysis of the information available in the written sources has strengthened a position in the result of which (in line with the reference to the events in question) the pagan backlash was to stem primarily from religious reasons. This interpretations suggests and provokes reception of Mieszko II’s domain as a completely Christian organisation. Consequently, at least officially it suggests that the pagan communities had been pushed to the margins of the society. Scholars have no doubts that these communities existed because they are regarded to have affected the events of the 1030s. Was it really the case? An analysis of archaeological sources, previously not used in the discussion of the pagan backlash, does not answer the questions so unambiguously. There is a strong indication that the followers of the old values did not have to flee from persecutions or the missionary ideology. It also looks like they did not have to fear financial exploitation for the benefit of the established church structures which could have easily operated parallel to venues referring to the traditional religious symbols. If we assume that it was the case, were the events of the 1030s in fact a pagan backlash? This question was at the basis of the considerations presented in this text.

When the Gods Fall: Varieties of Post-Secularization in a Small, Secularized State

AbstractLengthy debates over the process of secularization in the West have concluded. In many ways, secularization theorists appear to have “won” the debate: traditional measures of religious vitality reveal a decline in religion. Yet, recent events, especially those involving politics and national identity, have encouraged scholars and members of the public to reconsider the ways in which something like religion might endure and influence public life in secularized Western nations. This paper uses the “exceptional-typical” case of Iceland—a modern, Western, secularized country of comparatively small population size—to observe and conceptualize a variety of processes which are here collectively named “post-secularization.” Its findings suggest that processes which may appear as unrelated or opposing forces—the emergence of new religious movements, the transformation of traditional religious symbols into profane branding, far right nationalist movements—may be part of a single, post-secularization process. Secularization, having fissured the sacred, leaves religion a pliable cultural tool.

The aesthetics of the religious and the sacralization of “positivist” science – “idealism” (Adam Asnyk) and decadent religious poetry of early modernism (Stanisław Korab-Brzozowski)

Religious images and motives in nineteenth-century poetry (particularly in the period of dominant Positivism) became gradually aestheticized and lost much their original symbolic impact. This was partly due to the consequences of Kantian philosophy that introduce a dichotomy between phenomena and noumena. Positivism was merely interested in the relation between objects belonging to the phenomenal world. Critical theology (D.F. Strauss, Ernest Renan) started to analyze religious symbols and New Testament stories from the point of view of history and (compared) myth, applying positivist methodology to the “humanities”. Poets wishing to recapture the religious potential (the “Holy”) of traditional symbols and ritual had to recontextualize them. The “sacred” does not reside in the symbols themselves, but it is transferred to the relation established by the individual between his position in the world and a symbol or ritual. The religious moment results from experiencing this “unrepeatable” relation (its unrepeatability being the condition of contact with transcendence, relating the symbol as phenomenon with the noumenal sphere that is present as a trace – the individually experienced symbol points to its absence). In Polish late romantic poetry (e.g. Adam Asnyk) the individualization of the experience of transcendence is impeded by the patriotic connotations of religious symbols and rituals that presuppose the experience of belonging to a (“national”) community (a “relic” of Polish romantic messianism, c.f. the aftermath of the January Uprising). The modernist poet Stanisław Korab Brzozowski succeeded in developing a poetic method of recontextualizing traditional religious symbols that allowed to show the incompatibility between the phenomenal and the noumenal sphere as an inner experience of a subject (e.g. a wooden cross stretching its arms to an empty heaven) as a direct reaction to Renan´s relativization of the Christian “Heilsgeschichte”, unmediated by Polish romantic messianism).

Of Crosses, Winged Victories, and Eagles: Commemorative Contests between Official and Vernacular Voices in Interwar Romania

AbstractThis essay examines contests between local practices and central institutions over the meaning and cultural practices linked to the nation, focusing in particular on commemorations of the war dead after 1918. The analysis shows that the ability of the state to control how nationalism was celebrated through commemorations of the Great War was by no means determined or even successfully mediated from the center. In fact, local voices in rural settings often had their own rituals for mourning those that died in war and also for commemorating heroism in localized versions of what sacrifice for the nation and mourning heroes might have meant. In discussing vernacular-official contests over commemorating war heroes, this essay will present several important aspects: the relationship between traditional religious symbols and the new secular official symbols in representing nationalism; the relationship between rural and urban settings for understanding the unsuccessful attempts of the state to impose its version of war commemorations; and the relationship between the Romanian majority and other ethnic groups in these contests.

Religion and Power: The Appropriation of Da Vinci's The Last Supper in Viridiana and L'Ultima Cena

RELIGION AND POWER: THE APPROPRIATION OF DA VINCI’S THE LAST SUPPER IN VIRIDIANA AND L’ULTIMA CENA CATHERINE SUNDT THE Biblical episode of the Last Supper, as told in all four of the gospels, is one of the most well-known and referenced events in all of Christianity. The event takes place on Maundy Thursday, the night before Jesus was crucified, and thus tells the story of his final night as a man of flesh and blood. At this dinner, several important events happen: Jesus blesses the wine and the cup in the ceremony of the Eucharist, he claims that one of his 12 apostles will betray him, and he gives a final sermon or “farewell discourse.” Many artists have created their own visual representations of the dinner, but the most famous portrayal is Leonardo da Vinci ’s 15ft × 29ft mural L’Ultima Cena (referred to henceforth as The Last Supper), one of the most recognizable pieces of art in history. During the twentieth century, film became a popular medium for both artistic expression and social criticism. In the 60s and 70s, two films featured extended scenes that appropriated the well-known religious image of da Vinci’s mural in order to make a statement about religion , and did so in a way that would resonate with the traditionally Catholic countries of Cuba and Spain. Although the Catholic doctrine speaks of charity and mercy, the disadvantaged characters in the film receive only temporary kindness and then are quickly forgotten. By using traditional religious symbols to show that not all of God’s children receive the same treatment, the directors are able to undermine Catholicism and show its sometimes nefarious byproducts, such as fascism and marginalization. In 1961, Luis Buñuel’s film Viridiana told the story of a young woman who, about to take her vows as a nun, turns her late uncle’s 71 house into an “albergue,” or rooming house for the poor and homeless. The Last Supper scene features the vagrants that she is sheltering and shows the house descending into debauchery and destruction, instead of the peaceful, holy atmosphere that Viridiana was trying to maintain. Viridiana was considered blasphemous for its time for condemning the counterproductive nature of Christian charity, which, in Buñuel’s own words, “produce catástrofes, el estropicio de la casa por los mendigos, riñas entre estos, la posible violación de Viridiana” (quoted in Pérez 119). Buñuel further angered the church by framing the riotous events of the film within a religious context by using Handel’s Messiah and reenacting the poses of The Last Supper with homeless people, an act that has been classified as a “perverse appropriation” and “parodic rewriting ” (Gutiérrez-Albilla 1) of an important and recognizable Christian image. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea studied at the Centro Sperimentale film school in Rome in the 1950s, when it was “awash in the Neorealist influences of Roberto Rossellini and Luis Buñuel” (Britannica). So, it is fitting that his 1976 film La última cena would appropriate the same religious image as Viridiana. The film showed a pious sugar plantation owner in Cuba who holds a large banquet and attempts to teach his slaves about religion and the necessity of suffering for eternal happiness. While the slaves believe that they are being shown kindness, they are merely being placated, and the landowner does not give them the following day off of work as he promised to do, leading to a slave revolt. This film also makes anti-religious commentary through the actions of the count and the hypocritical ideologies that he preaches. In this paper, I will compare and contrast the two films’ messages about religion and how it was instrumental in dominating and exploiting the members of the lowest classes in both 20th-century Spain and late 18th-century Cuba. Several authors, such as Julián Daniel GutiérrezAlbilla and Anton Karl Kozlovic, have written about the religious symbolism in Viridiana or La última cena, and a few authors have even connected the films by speaking of Gutiérrez Alea’s admiration of Buñuel, the intertextuality of the two films, and their “common...

Theological Hermeneutics: Interpreting “The Lost Garden of Immediacy”

Contemporary hermeneutics has turned from the art of textual interpretation to the world – constitutive functions of language and symbolic representation. It is stressed that all understanding takes place within horizons constituted by history and language. Building on the ultimate religious foundations of divinely revealed truth, theological hermeneutics reflects upon theology as the site of a circular mediation of Scripture, tradition, and culture. The guiding question of this article is: can a theological hermeneutics retranslate philosophical sources into the language of theology? For these purposes we must at first situate the theological phenomenon of Verbum at the center of philosophical hermeneutics. Secondly, it is necessary to give a brief account of how symbols (all in general and some in particular) function in religious language. Also, we can see that in the face of the dawn of some traditional religious symbols, we can find new ones emerging from new strategies of theological hermeneutics in the face of new ontology. The analysis of symbolic nature of theological hermeneutics directs us to the question of analogy. Eventually the subject of investigations turns to be “validity” of analogical language in theological hermeneutics, which have some paradoxical consequences. On the other hand, it is clear that these paradoxes are not simply about formal matters. It is amazing that the basic symbol functioning in analogical language for expressing the proper language of God-talk (theology) is the language itself.

In Hoc Signo Vinces : Religious Symbolism in the Balkan Wars 1991–1995

Symbols—as important and very persuasive elements of contemporary national and political mythologies and their iconography—are particulary exposed during critical periods of certain nations' history. Although the role and influences of religious organizations and hierarchies before and during the last wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were quite different, all belligerent sides also employed religious symbols in their nationalistic/political mobilizations and military efforts. The ambition of this paper is to show the spectrum of (mis)uses of religious symbolism in these wars: Orthodox on Serbian side, Roman Catholic on Croatian, and Muslim on Bosniak' side. Comparative and sociohistorical analytical approaches can to some degree elucidate how traditional religious symbols were renewed and the new “traditionalized” during that time; how they were “nationalized” and “politicized” which elements of the religious heritage were most often applied; and how these symbols were exploited in military actions and politics of ethnic/religious cleansing.

Sandplay and Women's Spirituality

A pastoral psychotherapist with a relational orientation offers an introduction to sandplay and describes how this tactile, symbolic modality can provide opportunities for women to explore their spirituality in the therapeutic setting. The challenges and yearnings women face in confronting traditional religious symbols are discussed, with specific suggestions on how to set up a sandtray, how to attend to the sandplayer, how to interpret the scene, and how to understand client reluctance. A list of resources where therapists can obtain sandtrays and miniatures is included.

Ministry without a Future: A Pastoral Care Approach to Patients with Senile Dementia

Describes the nature of senile dementia and discusses how different ways of thinking, relating, and using traditional religious symbols are needed by the pastoral caregiver in order to offer effective pastoral care to these patients. Focuses on two specific cases to illustrate the author's clinical experiences with senile dementia patients.

Hidden Symbolism in Jan van Eyck'sAnnunciations

During the third and fourth decades of the fifteenth century, the new style of Flemish painting developed by Robert Campin and Hubert and Jan van Eyck created, for the first time in the history of art, the means to metaphorize adequately one of the central mysteries of Christianity: the miracle of the Incarnation, in which God took on human form. By disguising traditional religious symbols as the scrupulously observed objects of the artist's own world and time, by treating the very space and light of the pictures as symbols, these painters were able to create a world that was intimate and immediate and yet saturated with divine presence and sacred significance, a world in which the physical and spiritual interpenetrated, just as God and man coexist in the person of Jesus Christ. It is perhaps for this reason that the paintings of this period that deal with the subject of the Incarnation present the most innovative and complex interplay between naturalistically rendered detail and disguised symbolism, such as Campin's Nativity in Dijon, his Mérode Altarpiece,1 and Jan van Eyck's Annunciations in Washington and on the exterior of the Ghent Altarpiece. And it is especially in these two Annunciations, imbued as they are with what Panofsky has described as a “transfigured reality,” that the possibilities of this synthesis are most fully and effectively realized.

Which Way the Future? A Critique of Glock's "Images of God" and Fenn's "New Sociology of Religion"

Charles Y. Glock's article, Images of God and Man, in the March, 1972 issue of this journal, and Richard K. Fenn's article, Toward New Sociology of Religion, in the same issue, set forth stimulating and approaches to scientific inquiry into religious phenomena. sociology of religion for long time has been witness to considerable controversy over the question of how to define and understand religious behavior. These two articles contain in miniature some of these divergences. purpose of Fenn's article is to argue for position that social differentiation and cultural pluralism diminish the likelihood of pressures toward cultural uniformity. His polemic is directed especially toward those who would contend that religion functions as the mainstay of cultural integration. Automated technologies and highly differentiated division of labor militate against pressures toward cultural uniformity. Instead, they fragment the culture into discrete and pluralistic clusters of value, each with limited scope and influence. Given this situation, there is little chance that traditional religious symbols will provide the basis of integration for whole societies (pp. 18-21). Differentiation undermines once and for all the integrative power not only of traditional religious values and symbols, but of all other values and symbols as well. In this way, Fenn denies the possibility that any functional alternative to religion could furnish the basis of total societal integration. He sums up the fate of religious beliefs in modern society this way: The effects of pluralism and the mass media combine to reduce beliefs to opinions and matters of ultimate commitment to matters of personal preference. Pressures toward uniformity are therefore highly. anachronistic and unsuccessful (p. 21). What is the future of religion in such society? First of all, Fenn states that a point of no return has been reached in which religious change may occur quite