Search Results (5)

This study aims to analyze, through religious hymns in the German-speaking area from the early 18th century, the influence that the Pietist theological movement, starting from Philipp Jacob Spener’s Pia Desideria, had on the centralization of the self in the Protestant religious world, through the introduction of personal feelings of love towards God. On the one hand, the origins of Pietism can already be traced back to the late 16th century in areas affected by the radical reforms of the Anabaptists. On the other hand, it is from the late 17th century and throughout the 18th century that this theological and spiritual movement destabilized orthodox Lutheranism in some symbolic cities of Protestant Germany, such as Frankfurt am Main, Halle, and the Duchy of Westphalia, up to Moravia. The extensive publication of hymnals and musical compendia for the use of individuals, lay groups (collegia pietatis), faith communities, and churches denotes a fervor and a desire to preach their way of “practicing” spirituality, which greatly contrasts with both orthodox Lutheranism and the prevailing rationalism in the religious and philosophical sphere in Germany of the mid-18th century. For the first time since the Reformation, Lutheranism saw the use, in the theology of the preached and sung Word, of personal feelings and emotions that connect the individual with God, who is made an object of individual as well as collective worship. This was one of the most significant accusations that came from the University of Wittenberg against Pietism, namely the shift of theological and spiritual focus from the centrality of God to the centrality of the self, which manifests its faith through the most intimate emotions and feelings. Through the analysis of some examples taken from hymnographic and theological production, centered on the individual feelings of the believer, this article focuses on how this influenced the religious revival movements that would pervade England and the United States of America for more than two centuries (from the First Great Awakening in the late 18th century to the Pentecostal movements of the 20th century), with a spotlight on Italian hymnody during the Risorgimento. Full article

The Byzantine hymnography was considered a “stumbling stone” of the Jewish–Orthodox Christian dialogue because of the harsh anti-Jewish elements kept in the modern liturgical texts without any revision. This article analyses the often-mentioned texts of the Triodion—the liturgical period before Pascha—using a quantitative approach. The starting point of this research states that we must keep in mind the broader view on the state of the hymnography without labelling the entire Byzantine hymnography as anti-Jewish by looking at some concrete stanzas from Holy Week services. The results demonstrate that we can speak only about very few hymnographical texts containing anti-Jewish elements compared to the entire Triodion. This approach helps us in the Jewish–Christian debates to focus on what exactly are we speaking about, and what precisely those texts are saying. After a short analysis of the content of selected hymns, I propose three concrete categories of hymns that could be more easily approached by either excluding them or transforming them through translation into modern languages. Full article

The article examines a selection of hymns of potentially Byzantine origin in the eighth-to-tenth-century manuscripts of the New Tropologion, which was the hymnal of the Anastasis cathedral of Jerusalem and in churches that followed its rite. Such adoption in the rite of Jerusalem represented a Byzantine influence before the wave of liturgical Byzantinisation that started in the late ninth and tenth centuries. For the first time, three versions of the New Tropologion are studied together: the Greek original and the Syriac and Georgian translations. The Greek Tropologion Sinai MS NE MΓ 56+5 is the primary material, compared with Sinai MS Syriac 48 and several Georgian New Iadgari manuscripts from Sinai. The study identifies one certain Byzantine element in the New Tropologion: parts of the feast of St. John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople, and several probable Byzantine elements: the interpolation of the second ode in three canons by Kosmas of Jerusalem and one by John, and parts of the stichera series Aἱ ἀγγελικαὶ προπορεύεσθε δυνάμεις attributed to Romanos the Melodist. By contrast, the interpolated ode 1 in Kosmas’ canon for Great Saturday seems to be of Palestinian origin, and therefore not a Byzantine loan, contrary to traditional views. The article shows that there is considerable variation between the different versions of the New Tropologion. Full article

Some Christian texts, and especially hagiographic and hymnographic ones, record a miraculous phenomenon at the violent deaths of several martyrs: from the beheaded bodies, milk flows instead of blood. After a superficial reading of the biographical passages in the synaxaria and iambic stichoi recorded in the Menaia, we can identify at least ten such cases, among which we find well-known saints, such as Apostle Paul and St. Katherine. This article attempts to revisit this unwonted topos of Christian literature, and to list its occurrences in the liturgical texts of the Orthodox Church and Acta Sanctorum. Full article

The kata stichon hymns are a peculiar genre of hymnography occurring as part of nocturnal prayer in early sources for the Byzantine Liturgy of the Hours. The use of these hymns in traditions on the Byzantine periphery remains in need of study. In this paper, the authors identify kata stichon hymns translated into Church Slavonic found in early East Slavic Horologia as well as in later Slavonic collections of private prayer used in Russia up to the 17th century. The authors also identify hymns with no known Greek analogs, as well as hymns reflecting the kata stichon genre composed in Church Slavonic. The liturgical function of these hymns is studied and hypotheses are proposed for their origin and continued popularity in Russian nocturnal worship and private cell prayer. Full article