Illness, Aesthetics, and Body Politics: Forging the Third Republic in Émile Zola's 'La Faute de l'abbé Mouret'

This article examines the political role of illness in Émile Zola’s La Faute de l’abbé Mouret (The Sin of Father Mouret) (1875) in articulating the difference between a religious and a secular body. Published in the early French Third Republic (1870–1940), this novel shows the Zolian body as the nexus upon which religious and republican discourses compete. Using Paul Ricœur’s theory on Christianity’s original sin, this article compares Mouret’s sickness with physical evil and illustrates how Zola redeploys the traditional religious symbols of the heart, the blood, and the Word to the secular realm. It will show that original sin is a Christian myth inscribed on the body, and that Zola’s reformulation of a core religious doctrine and its supporting framework can and must be dismantled for the fledgling secular Third Republic. The article shows an attempt by Zola to forge a republican self, and thereby offers a new perspective on the nature of the Zolian body which merits further study under the field of Medical Humanities. Through the construction of the religious body, the article also contributes to wider critical discussion on mythology in Zola’s work.

“Pilate Did Not Utter a Sentence”

The myth that Pilate never sentenced Jesus, and the myth that Judaean zealots crucified Jesus, both seem to be datable to texts written by Christians within a century of the crucifixion. The Christian myth of Pilate’s innocence is nearly as old as the Christian confession of Jesus’ death. This myth could be retraced, in an unbroken tradition, from the second century to the twenty-first. But in this chapter, the purpose is rather to introduce several early Christian sources of the vivid, convoluted Pilate-tradition in Europe. Many, but by no means all, of the forgeries that early Christians ascribed to ‘Pilate’ depict the Roman as innocent.

The End of Apocalypticism: from Burton Mack’s Jesus to North American Liberalism

This article takes a different look at the work of Burton Mack on apocalypticism and the post-historical Jesus crystallisation of the Christian ‘myth of innocence’ in terms of the social history of scholarship. After a critical assessment of previous receptions of Mack’s work from the era of the ‘Jesus wars’, there is a discussion of Mack’s place in broader cross-disciplinary tendencies in the study of apocalypticism with reference to the influence of liberal and Marxist approaches generally and those of Norman Cohn and Eric Hobsbawm specifically. Mack’s approach to apocalypticism should be seen as a thoroughgoing updating of Cold War liberal constructions of apocalypticism for an era of American ‘culture wars’, from Reagan to Trump. Part of this updating has also meant that, while much of his work against the apocalyptic Christian myth of innocence has been explicitly aimed at the de-legitimising the Right, it also continues the old Cold War intellectual battles by implicitly de-legitimising anything deemed excessively Marxist.

Dance of the Hours

This chapter demonstrates the formative role dance played in the Christianization of the liturgy and the sacralization of time. Using evidence from liturgical manuals, musical notation, and rituals, it traces how devotional choreography recuperated pagan motifs, impressed itself onto the regular rhythms of the liturgical calendar, and partook in the dance of the cosmos. In church dramas, dance exerted a didactic function, reinforcing the theme of Christian salvation alongside anti-Judaic rhetoric. The first section traces the authorization of liturgical dance in the Western Middle Ages. Through its ritualization of dance, the Western Church reinvented ancient rites within the discipline of the Latin liturgy. The second section illuminates the use of dance in liturgical drama. On the liturgical stage, the reenactment of Christian history offered a space for the ambivalence of dance to be worked out and re-signified. The third section offers a close reading of one specific liturgical dance ritual in Auxerre. This rite reconciled a pre-Christian myth with medieval eschatology and the Christian ordo.

Modernity in the Context of the Discourse on Secularization

The article considers the problem of the relations between modernity and secularization. The author argues that the discourse on secularization is the most appropriate strategy for modern self-understanding. The discourse itself is not homogeneous. One approach is a classical theory of secularization, which considers the secularization as a universal world-historical process, which passed the stages “modernization – secularization – rationalization.” Other approach is to interpret modern society as a post-secular society, but with relevance to religious ethos. This approach considers Modernity as a unique social reality with a specific type of rationality and a set of behavioral strategies, which were formed as a result of the transformation (secularization) of religious social reality, the center of which was a Christian myth. Accordingly, modernization becomes the result of secularization, and not vice versa, as the proponents of the first approach assumed. The thematization in the discourse on the secularization of a new type of society, which J. Habermas called post-secular society, demonstrates a crisis of principles constituting the Modernity’s foundations. Predictions of the epoch of an irreligious society did not come true, and secular reason is now forced to reckon with other types of rationality and take them into account, including in public space. This situation suggests that we are witnessing the birth of a new form of social reality. Thus, the article concludes: (1) discourse on secularization is recognized as the most adequate strategy of the comprehension of Modernity; (2) secularization should be viewed as a consistent detranscendentalization of Christian social reality; (3) the emergence of a post-secular society indicates fundamental transformations in the field of the most general ideas about the nature of cultural mind and cultural identities.

Jewish Christianity, Pauline Christianity, and the Critical Study of the New Testament: Thomas Morgan and F. C. Baur

This chapter explores the development of an occlusionistic model of Jewish Christianity, and its relationship to the rise of critical New Testament scholarship, in the works of English Deist Thomas Morgan and German theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur. Morgan and Baur did not abandon John Toland's humanistic retelling of Christian myth so much as simply reconfigure the role of Jewish Christianity within it. The apostles no longer stood alongside Jesus as examples of an authoritative incarnation of transcendent Christianity in Jewish cultural forms. Now they represented the first occlusion of transcendent Christianity by those Jewish forms. The normative authority traditionally ascribed to the apostles and their purported writings, accordingly, was effectively reduced to the singular apostle Paul and his letters. The commingling of the latter with the former in the New Testament was explained in terms of a pervasive and multifaceted miscoloration of transcendent Christianity by its first, Jewish receptacle during the apostolic and postapostolic eras. Thus, Morgan and, more consequentially, Baur both called for a systematic and thoroughly critical study of the New Testament itself, precisely to distill from all its Jewish trappings the true, transcendent Christianity they assumed it concealed.

Bulgakov code in the novel of V. Pelevin “Chapaev and Empty”

The relevance of the research is due to the significance of the Bulgakov intertext in the novel by V. Pelevin. The article shows that the Bulgakov code “Chapaeva and Void” turned out to be practically outside the zones of scientific interest. Meanwhile, his analysis and understanding of man and the novel. Pelevin writes “Surfaces”, “Masters and Margaritas”, like everything that makes them look like all works that demonstrate almost all structural levels: components, compositions, problems, subjects, character systems and motifs. The study of Bulgakov’s intertext allows us to say that Pelevin uses Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita” as the main suit, and the Bulgakov’s code, in addition to the Buddhist one, is fundamentally important for the interpretation of “Chapaev and Void”. Pelevin conducts a kind of philosophical and religious dialogue with the classic. Bulgakov’s worldview is built on Christian values, which is most manifested in his “sunset” novel. The axiology of the novel is subordinate to Christian ideology, in particular, its moral component. As you know, in “Chapaev and the Void” certain aspects of Orthodoxy are rigidly parodyed. However, the dispute with the predecessor does not occur in the aspect of the deconstruction of the Christian myth and the presentation of the more relevant - the Buddhist. The author of "Chapaev and the Void" doubts that it is based on all possible patterns, that is, history has nothing to do with spiritual views, when individual ways of finding harmony are revealed through rejection of previous moral and ethical programs. The novel "Chapaev and the Void", as well as "The Master and Margarita", can be defined as two-address texts. Turning to the broad readership, Pelevin creates a comfortable and recognizable system of signs generated by the mass culture. Each element of his novel supposes inconsistency and ambiguity, which allows the author to pose the most important philosophical problems.