Search Results (3)

The academic discussion of charisma takes two major voices as the point of departure: Max Weber and St. Paul. In both areas, sociology and religion, charisma is seen as a quality of persons. My argument is that entire cultures can be suffused by this force, and that social life, education, and modes of expression can be bearers and transmitters of charismatic force. I approach the argument conceptually, drawing on a remarkable passage in Goethe’s autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit. What Goethe calls “the demonic” is charisma conceived as a force that can penetrate, unpredictably, either natural phenomena or persons. To these I add institution, cultures, and structures of government. The charisma of larger structures, like personal charisma, has a life-cycle, charisma in its cultural structuring being as unstable as in its personal embodiment. The idea opens cultural transformations to analysis. Clifford Geertz has provided a model. The sea-changes that transformed western European culture from the twelfth to the thirteenth century show us the end of a life-cycle of charismatic culture, and the transition to intellectual or textual culture. Charisma moved out of the realm of the lived and expressed social forms and into art and artifice, rationalizing philosophy, theology, liturgy and other forms of Christian discourse (sermons). Three voices from the later thirteenth century observe this development closely—the loss of charisma as a political–social–cultural force—and lament the loss. Full article

Tales of Times Now Past (Konjaku Monogatarishū 今昔物語集) is a Japanese setsuwa (anecdotes) collection dating from the early twelfth century. Originally contained in 31 volumes, it includes more than one thousand systematically arranged tales from India, China, and Japan. Despite the fact that Daoism was rejected by the Japanese imperial court as an organized religion, Daoist philosophies and practical systems found their ways into Japan, having a significant and profound influence over Japanese esoteric cosmology and folk beliefs. This article takes the Lord of Mount Tai (CN: Taishan Fujun; JP: Taizan Fukun 泰山府君) as the focus and examines two pertinent stories in Tales of Times Now Past. By placing the texts in a broader historical, religious, and comparative Japan–China perspective, I examine the reshaping of Daoist elements and traditional Chinese philosophical principles in these two stories and thus demonstrate how the Daoist fragments transmitted to Japan were transformed into an integral part of the orthodox structure by the time of the late Heian period in the pursuit of a more organized form of government. Full article

This article aims to supplement our understanding of later developments within European universities, that is, Scholastic thought, by attending to how certain pre-Scholastics, namely, Peter Abelard and other twelfth-century philosophers, thought about artifacts and social constructions more generally. It focuses on the treatment of artifacts that can be cobbled together out of Abelard’s Dialectica. The article argues that Abelard attempts to sharply distinguish the world of things from the world of human-made objects. This is most apparent in his treatment of creation and human acts of making. Yet there are places in his thought where we see some hesitancy. Many of Abelard’s peers seem to have drawn on the reasons why Abelard hesitates, and they blur the line between human-made objects such as houses and substances such as rocks and humans. Others seem to go further than Abelard—perhaps inspired by some of the thoughts that Abelard also entertains about social constructions such as days and speeches—and assert that even houses are merely convenient fictions. Full article