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An Illuminating Comparison: Augustine and Ambrose on the Theology of Death

David Albert Jones

in Approaching the End: A Theological Exploration of Death and Dying

The argument of Augustine in De civitate Dei is strikingly similar to that of Ambrose in De bono mortis. However, while Ambrose treats death as something good in itself, Augustine sees it as bad in ... More

The argument of Augustine in De civitate Dei is strikingly similar to that of Ambrose in De bono mortis. However, while Ambrose treats death as something good in itself, Augustine sees it as bad in itself. Their contrasting attitudes have practical effects on how they regard virginity, marriage, and mortification; on how each reads the letters of Paul; and on their discussions of suicide and martyrdom. Furthermore, it leads to a noticeable shift in the Christian treatment of fear of death, grief, and the care of the dead (that is, prayers said for those who have died).Less

Conclusion

JIMMY YU

in Sanctity and Self-Inflicted Violence in Chinese Religions, 1500-1700

This chapter is the conclusion of the book. It summarizes each chapter of the book and argues for a more nuanced understanding of Chinese religions.

Why Rose of Lima?

Frank Graziano

in Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima

A discussion of why among the many candidates Rose of Lima received high honors as first saint of the New World and patron of the Americas. The reasons discussed include Rose’s penitential ... More

A discussion of why among the many candidates Rose of Lima received high honors as first saint of the New World and patron of the Americas. The reasons discussed include Rose’s penitential asceticism, support of religious and civil authorities, effective hagiography, Criollismo, advocacy by the Dominicans and Queen Mariana of Austria, and massive public devotion. Also discussed are the popularization of mysticism by Fray Luis de Granada and others, the Inquisition’s response, and the religious ideals of Counter-Reformation Spain.Less

Vicarious Atonement

Frank Graziano

in Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima

Discusses how Rose of Lima, on the model of Christ, offered herself as a sacrificial victim to expiate the sins of natives, Spaniards, and Creoles in the New World. Rose of Lima’s patronage is ... More

Discusses how Rose of Lima, on the model of Christ, offered herself as a sacrificial victim to expiate the sins of natives, Spaniards, and Creoles in the New World. Rose of Lima’s patronage is explored in its relations to the Madonna of Mercy and other antecedents.Less

The Pilgrim's Progress

David George Mullan

in Scottish Puritanism, 1590-1638

Puritanism made the notion of pilgrimage central to piety—the Christian could not expect an easy road to perfection in this world, but rather a difficult passage to the blessed estate. The journey ... More

Puritanism made the notion of pilgrimage central to piety—the Christian could not expect an easy road to perfection in this world, but rather a difficult passage to the blessed estate. The journey included mortification—putting to death the old Adam and his sinful predilections; suffering—including persecution for maintaining the truth of the gospel; and of course death, which both repelled and sometimes attracted those weary of this sinful world. Self‐examination was a crucial element in any progress one might make toward heaven, and this might entail the keeping of diaries, as did both clergy and laity. Presbyterianism recoiled from the notion of the gathered church, and yet this piety also pushed many Puritans in a sectarian direction, though Separatism and Independency never attained the same appeal in Scotland as in England.Less

The Value of Lightness

Simona Giordano

in Understanding Eating Disorders: Conceptual and Ethical Issues in the Treatment of Anorexia and Bulimia Nervosa

Lightness and fasting are often associated with positive feelings and with beauty. Arts, music, and literature testify the value that is attached to lightness in Western culture. Lightness and food ... More

Lightness and fasting are often associated with positive feelings and with beauty. Arts, music, and literature testify the value that is attached to lightness in Western culture. Lightness and food restriction are also thought to be morally valuable, as an instrument to asceticism and spirituality. This chapter discusses the body-mind split and its repercussions on the value of lightness. It traces the origins of this split in ancient Greece, and looks at how such metaphysics of the human person spreads in the Latin world and in Western religion and philosophy. It shows that food restriction becomes valuable in the light of this metaphysics and of the ethics that follow from it. Food restriction corporealizes self-government, self-discipline, willpower and control, all of which are praised within such an ideology. The body is corrupted and corruptible, and needs to be controlled and transcended. Lightness and slenderness are the emblem of the person’s self-control and discipline. Concomitant denigration of fat reflects the low conception of the body, which is found in all eras in Western culture. Lightness and thinness are normative, moral ideals that reflect the body/mind juxtaposition and the idea that the body is inferior to the spirit or mind.Less

Neurotic Saint and Invalid King

Alfred P. Smyth

in King Alfred the Great

This chapter examines the contribution to knowledge about the private life and personality of King Alfred made by the author of Life, which is in conflict with much of what is known about Alfred from ... More

This chapter examines the contribution to knowledge about the private life and personality of King Alfred made by the author of Life, which is in conflict with much of what is known about Alfred from contemporary sources. It notes that in the words of Galbraith, Asser's king is presented as ‘a neurotic invalid’ obsessed with his own painful and mysterious medical condition. It notes that the author of Alfred's Life first introduces the topic of King Alfred's poor health in a garbled account of the king's childhood. It further notes that according to the author of Alfred's Life, the king did not suddenly become an invalid at nineteen, and in a confused narrative, tells that the young and saintly Alfred prayed to God ‘for some illness which he would be able to tolerate’ and thereby, through mortification of the flesh help the prince ‘abstain from carnal desire’.Less

From Pompeii to Marienbad: Classical Sculptures in Postwar European Modernist Cinema

Steven Jacobs and Lisa Colpaert

in Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema

The statue is a significant motif in many key films of the European modernist cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Famous examples are Les Statues meurent aussi (Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953), ... More

The statue is a significant motif in many key films of the European modernist cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Famous examples are Les Statues meurent aussi (Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953), Viaggio in Italia (Roberto Rossellini, 1953), L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962), Méditerranée ( Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1963), Le Mépris ( Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), Il Gattopardo (Luchino Visconti, 1963), Une Femme mariée ( Jean-Luc Godard, 1964), Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964), and Vaghe stelle dell’orsa (Luchino Visconti, 1965). Focusing on Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1953) and Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad, 1961) as cases in point, this chapter not only traces the fascination for sculpture in modernist cinema but also explains it by examining the ways in which statues are presented as tokens of death, time, history, myth, memory, the human body, and strategies of doubling – important topics for many of the leading modernist directors working in the 1950s and 1960s.Less

Edwards's Spirituality

Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott

in The Theology of Jonathan Edwards

Edwards's spirituality may be described in terms of three distinct themes: discipline, enjoyment, and consummation. His “Diary” and “Resolutions” reveal that Edwards insisted on rigorous practices ... More

Edwards's spirituality may be described in terms of three distinct themes: discipline, enjoyment, and consummation. His “Diary” and “Resolutions” reveal that Edwards insisted on rigorous practices and careful self-examination, ultimately looking to mortify sinful desires. The spiritual life was a disciplined life. At the same time, discipline in no way limited enjoyment or happiness. On the contrary, a holy life that is combined with the experience of beauty is a happy life. Such happiness consists in “holy affections,” the thesis of his famous Religious Affections. Edwards further insisted that a disciplined and happy spirituality looked beyond this life to an eventual consummation in heaven, a “holy and happy society” consisting of the Trinity, angels, and saints. In this heavenly state, the saints will forever advance into a closer relationship with God and with one another.Less

Scene 1 Into the Hollow

Simon Palfrey

in Poor Tom: Living "King Lear"

This section looks at Edgar’s first two scenes, first when he is tricked by his brother Edmond, then when he goes into internal exile disguised as a mad beggar. It considers the implications of ... More

This section looks at Edgar’s first two scenes, first when he is tricked by his brother Edmond, then when he goes into internal exile disguised as a mad beggar. It considers the implications of Edgar’s self-mortification. The principle of the role is an emptiness open to experimenting abuse—an emptiness that can take on many other forms, or can be open to all kinds of constructions, but which will not finally be filled. The “happy hollow” in which Edgar reports himself hiding encapsulates this mutating, nascent potential, at once inside and outside time and society. The section goes on to consider Edgar in relation to certain salient archetypes or models: Agamben’s “state of exception”; Scarry’s phenomenology of torture; Christ; artistic pseudomorphosis, or fraudulent imitation. All these things are suggestive, but none can quite claim his radical existential susceptibility.Less

Book for the Hour of Recreation

in Book for the Hour of Recreation

This chapter explains María de San José Salazar's Book for the Hour of Recreation in detail, in which María discusses her intention of telling the life of the holy Mother and the greatness of Carmel ... More

This chapter explains María de San José Salazar's Book for the Hour of Recreation in detail, in which María discusses her intention of telling the life of the holy Mother and the greatness of Carmel with a mixture of a variety of matters. Many things that she includes here seem irrelevant and serve only to make the work long winded, such as the quarrels between the nuns and other extraneous conversations. In this regard, María declares that her chief intent is to portray the nuns' friendly conversation and way of life: their humility, simplicity, and mortification; their continual prayer practices; their contempt for fine dress and their selflessness; along with their happy and holy diversions.Less

Transformation through Prayer

Ulrich L. Lehner

in The Inner Life of Catholic Reform: From the Council of Trent to the Enlightenment

The different approaches to prayer, which early modern Catholics engaged with, proved contentious. This chapter introduces the reader to a number of different prayer practices, which influenced ... More

The different approaches to prayer, which early modern Catholics engaged with, proved contentious. This chapter introduces the reader to a number of different prayer practices, which influenced personal self-transformation. Crucial was especially the forming of personal affects and passions through religious imagination and prayer. Under the label of mental prayer, Catholics learned methods of focusing their attention on God, while pious sighs or arrow prayers were more spontaneous prayers imploring divine help. The discussion about prayer was also influenced by the early modern focus on Purgatory and asceticism.Less

The Humbled Self

George Pattison

in A Phenomenology of the Devout Life: A Philosophy of Christian Life, Part I

The devout self comes to devotion as one who has already fallen short of the Christian ideal and now wants to do better, but it is made clear that perfection will not be achieved in this life and the ... More

The devout self comes to devotion as one who has already fallen short of the Christian ideal and now wants to do better, but it is made clear that perfection will not be achieved in this life and the soul will fall many times. The devout life is thus from the beginning a life of repentance or, more radically, mortification. The self is pictured as engaged in a holy war with itself in which, in the end, it must accept defeat by God. In this defeat it learns humility, widely acclaimed as the most important Christian virtue. However, humility means something different from the modest self-regard of Aristotelian ethics and, as de Sales makes clear, means welcoming abjection. The great model for humility is Christ himself, both as regards the circumstances of his life and death and in the humility of incarnation itself.Less