Search Results (9)

This paper examines the iconography of the Mother of God holding a book in Early Christian and Medieval art, focusing on representations in which a book or scroll functions as an attribute of the Virgin Mary. Particular attention is given to scenes depicting Mary in relation to the Christ Child, Christ Pantocrator, and the Magnificat. The study explores the symbolic significance of the book and scroll through the textual tradition of the Church Fathers. Adopting the methodological approach to the iconographical structure developed by André Grabar, the paper centers on three interconnected case studies. First, it offers a close re-examination of a Marian scene on the ivory relief of the Werden casket (9th c.) of which the meaning is hard to understand. Second, it analyzes the depiction of the Mother of God in the vault of the crypt of Epiphanius at San Vincenzo al Volturno (9th c.), with particular emphasis on motifs that associate the image with the theme of Mary’s Triumph. Finally, it considers a fresco of Mary and Christ enthroned from the Egyptian monastery of Deir al-Suryan (10th c.), treating these works as semantically and conceptually related. Through this comparative analysis, the paper advances several interpretations of the Magnificat as articulated in Early Christian visual culture and developed in later periods with the contribution of the Byzantine theology. Given the well-established influence of Early Christian art on both the Carolingian Renaissance in the West and the Byzantine East, the shared iconographical details identified here—both formal and conceptual—are understood as deriving from a common visual tradition rooted in Antiquity. Full article

The mystical poetry of St. John of the Cross (born in 1542 in Spain and died in 1591), a collaborator of St. Teresa of Jesus in the reform of the Carmelite Order, reveals how the experience of God is indissolubly linked with compassion, and the practice of charity and hope. His life consistently reflects the virtues and attitudes celebrated in his poetry. This paper reinterprets three of his poems—Ascent of Mount Carmel, Of Falconry, and Spiritual Canticle—with a focus on the virtue and attitude of hope. It explores how hope is promoted and expressed through the lens of an ethics shaped by uncertainty and ambiguity, establishing a creative dialogue between classical and disruptive contemporary visions of Sanjuanist ethics. The text proposes an intersection of theology and ethics within a context of vulnerability, complexity, change, volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity. It also addresses cases of spiritual abuse that distort the mystical and monastic meanings of the “dark night” metaphor. The experience of John of the Cross during his imprisonment is examined in relation to criteria for spiritual growth, with the aim of preventing spiritual misguidance. The paper aims to open the conversation in relation to the problem of abuse and its relation of how the cross may be understood and―in consequence―to help prevent the spiritual abuse that can take place through spiritual guidance. Full article

To completely understand Dante’s work, we would need to perfectly comprehend the foundations on which it is built, as well as Dante’s own “constructs” and reinterpretations of earlier texts—the transformations of these texts and the whole ideological superstructure of the work built on them. The goal of this essay is to introduce, for the first time in English-language scholarship, a discussion of Pavol Koprda’s Slovak translation of Dante’s Paradise (2020), the result of extensive Slovak academic research on this topic, based on key sections in which Dante’s philosophical background is revealed, and focusing on an interpretation of the third canticle and a reconciliation of the intellectual debates of Dante’s time. Full article

In the present essay, we want to show how the Canticle of the Creatures, which we might call “The Canticle of Universal Brotherhood”, is much more than the Canticle of Brother Sun or of a single man. The author himself is much more than the exceptional case of a nature-friendly medieval saint who, therefore, continues to inspire the promoters of ecology and, especially after the papal encyclical Laudato Si’, constitutes the ecumenical matrix for the care of our common home. To this end, in this paper, we focus on two moments that, in the construction of the tutelary figure of Francis of Assisi, constitute a kind of diptych or portals which open and recapitulate the reconstructive intuition he bequeathed to us: (1) the vocational moment: Go and repair my house; and (2) the testamentary moment, in which the Founder, who never wanted to found anything, legates his manifesto for building the common home as a universal brotherhood, turning the “stones” into a canticle. Above all, we want to highlight the relevance of Franciscan spirituality, expressed particularly in the Canticle of the Creatures, and thus the Franciscan aesthetics for the modern ecology. Full article

The digital humanities are rapidly expanding access to scholarly and literary materials once largely confined to the university. No more: now, with free digital resources, like Giuseppe Mazzotta’s lecture series available for free through Open Yale Courses on YouTube, or Teodolinda Barolini’s 54-lecture long “The Dante Course”, also available for free through her Digital Dante website, academic discussions of difficult masterpieces are available to any person with enough bandwidth to handle it. I, too, made a brief foray into the digital humanities, and prior to turning to academic work, I provided a 42-lecture Dante-in-translation course which itself covered the entirety of Dante’s Comedy and sought to offer a less academic, and more accessible series of lectures on Dante than its more academic and more popular predecessors. Full article

In a scientifically understood world, making sense of natural being is a challenge. This is particularly acute when knowledge of nature impinges on human autonomy. I present two examples: The legitimacy of opposing abortion on account of “potential life”, and the legitimacy of mandatory vaccination during a pandemic. I then explore the concept of fraternity in the writings of St. Francis at the example of the Rule of 1221 and the Canticle of Creatures. In conclusion, I show how the concept of fraternity as applied in Franciscan life allows us to reconcile the relationship between natural being and human autonomy through relationships of mutual care. Full article

In the early postwar era, from 1945 to 1960, Americans confronted a dilemma that had never been faced before. In the new atomic age, which opened with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945, they now had to grapple with maintaining their faith in a peaceful and prosperous future while also controlling their fear of an apocalyptic future resulting from an atomic war. Americans’ subsequent search for reassurance translated into a dramatic increase in church membership and the rise of the evangelical movement. Yet, their fear of an atomic war with the Soviet Union and possible nuclear apocalypse did not abate. This article discusses how six post-apocalyptic science fiction novels dealt with this dilemma and presented their visions of the future; more important, it argues that these novels not only reflect the views of many Americans in the early Cold War era, but also provide relevant insights into the role of religion during these complex and controversial years to reframe the belief that an apocalypse was inevitable. Full article

This essay offers an example of a guiding thread in my own research on and teaching of Dante’s Commedia. Specifically, I will follow a strand that leads us from Dante’s encounter with the “bella scola” of classical poets in Inferno Canto 4, through a key scene in the Purgatorio where Dante and his guide Virgil meet the late classical poet Statius, to the remarkable six-canto suite in the Heaven of the Stars, sign of Gemini, in which Dante-poet has Dante-character undergo a series doctrinal tests on the theological virtues. His successful response to the challenges posed by the apostles Peter, James, and Paul doubly authorizes him as poet and as Christian teacher of the highest order. These unique experiences as Dante is successively introduced to and made part of a rising series of elite groups, highlights his double role as humble student and prospective teacher of others. Among the various aims of this essay is to give a sample of a way in which teachers of the Commedia may address the perennial pedagogical problem of how to account for the extraordinary spectacle of a first-person epic that at once expresses deep piety with profound “charitas” (spiritual love) and appears as the absolute height of a self-aggrandizement seemingly inconsistent with Christian humility. Another is to suggest one possible strategy for teaching the Comedy as a whole, and especially the final canticle, the Paradiso, which even Dante himself notoriously thinks is “not for everyone”. Full article

Undergraduate students in the United States of America are increasingly less religious, and this decline in religiosity is felt not only at secular colleges and universities, but also at those with a religious affiliation. This article seeks to answer the question of how one can effectively teach the Christian vision in Dante’s Commedia to undergraduates who have little or no religious formation. The methods I have used to teach freshmen in core Humanities courses have differed somewhat from the methods I have used to teach upperclassmen in Literature electives. For the freshmen, focusing on what I call “humanist theology” has been successful, allowing them to see that the Christianity found in Dante’s epic is not merely a list of rules, but a way of viewing human life that is consonant with their own experiences. Purgatorio is the most important canticle for this method, and the case of Virgil’s damnation is a vital topic. For upperclassmen, finding analogies to Christian Mystery in the fields of mathematics, the sciences, and creative writing has proven fruitful. The main conclusion of this study is that these techniques are useful in presenting Dante’s work to non-religious students without sacrificing the epic’s specifically Christian content. Full article