Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity by Sara Ritchey

AbstractThe notion of a “World of Images” located somewhere between the immaterial and the material world was a mainstay of eschatological speculation in late medieval Islam. As has been recognised before, the concept was launched by al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191). However, its more properly philosophical underpinnings, in particular the notion of “suspended” images – images which somehow have an objective, rather than just a mental or subjective, status – merit further clarification, which this article attempts to provide. Since the concept of “suspended forms”, while applied to eschatological matters in the last treatise of the Philosophy of Illumination, makes its first appearance in a discussion of mirror vision, I examine in some detail Avicenna's understanding of mirror vision as presented in the Shifāʾ, to which al-Suhrawardī reacts. I then undertake a detailed reconstructive analysis of two paragraphs of the Philosophy of Illumination, paying particular attention to the question of the ontological status of “suspended” or “self-subsistent” images as well as to the idea that mirrors serve, not as loci in which images inhere, but as loci at which they become manifest (singular maẓhar).

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Hell Disarmed? The Function of Hell in Reformation Spirituality

Numen ◽

10.1163/156852709x405044 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 56 (2-3) ◽

pp. 366-384 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Tarald Rasmussen

Keyword(s):

The Other ◽

Protestant Reformation ◽

Late Medieval ◽

Ars Moriendi ◽

Religious Importance ◽

The One ◽

The Right ◽

The Relationship ◽

Medieval Christianity

In Late Medieval Christianity, the concept of hell was closely connected to the sacrament of penance. Hell could be avoided through the right use of penance. And the cleansing sufferings in purgatory could to a certain extent replace the eternal sufferings in hell. The Protestant Reformation rejected purgatory, and returned to a traditional dualistic view of the relationship between heaven and hell. At the same time, hell seems to lose some of its religious importance in early Protestant spirituality. This change is illustrated through a comparison of two central texts belonging more or less to the same genre: on the one hand the famous Late Medieval illustrated Ars moriendi and on the other Luther's Sermon von der Bereitung zum Sterben from 1519.

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What Is Charity? William Langland’s Answers with Some Diachronic Questions

Religions ◽

10.3390/rel10080458 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 10 (8) ◽

pp. 458

Author(s):

David Aers

Keyword(s):

Fourteenth Century ◽

Piers Plowman ◽

Late Medieval ◽

The Reformation ◽

History Of ◽

The Subject ◽

Medieval Christianity ◽

Ethics And Politics

Charity turns out to be the virtue which is both the root and the fruit of salvation in Langland’s Piers Plowman, a late fourteenth-century poem, the greatest theological poem in English. It takes time, suffering and error upon error for Wille, the central protagonist in Piers Plowman, to grasp Charity. Wille is both a figure of the poet and a power of the soul, voluntas, the subject of charity. Langland’s poem offers a profound and beautiful exploration of Charity and the impediments to Charity, one in which individual and collective life is inextricably bound together. This exploration is characteristic of late medieval Christianity. As such it is also an illuminating work in helping one identify and understand what happened to this virtue in the Reformation. Only through diachronic studies which engage seriously with medieval writing and culture can we hope to develop an adequate grasp of the outcomes of the Reformation in theology, ethics and politics, and, I should add, the remakings of what we understand by “person” in these outcomes. Although this essay concentrates on one long and extremely complex medieval work, it actually belongs to a diachronic inquiry. This will only be explicit in some observations on Calvin when I consider Langland’s treatment of Christ’s crucifixion and in some concluding suggestions about the history of this virtue.

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