varia
It has been a hectic week: for quite some time now, I've been on the verge of finishing a draft of the third chapter of my M.A. thesis. Well, it's close now; I can taste it. I expect to defend by the summer.
I have to say that I've been enjoying this last stretch of research immensely. It has taken awhile, but I think that I have gotten my head around the role of miracle in the early hagiographies (for which, see Clare Stancliffe's St. Martin and his hagiographer [Oxford, 1983]).
Other recent reading includes:
God's Plagiarist by R. Howard Bloch (University of Chicago Press, 1994). It deals with the Abbe J.-P. Migne, who is best known in the world of patristics as the man who edited the Patrologia Latina and the Patrologia Graeca, a huge collection of approx. 500 volumes presenting original texts of virtually every late antique and mediaeval theologian, ecclesiastical historian, et al.
posted by Chris @ 6:51 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Kappa,
How has this study affected your religious beliefs?
Ken
Ken,
To give you a short answer, it has. I'm much less inclined to just dismiss miracle reports in hagiography out of hand -- as my religious upbringing would have me do. A heavy dose of Enlightenment empiricism has made it next to impossible for a modern to get inside the pre-modern mentality that is telling these stories. So, in truth, I don't think we can just blithely say that something didn't happen. That's not to say that there is no logical explanation for any of these miracles; I just believe that we have to be very careful about dismissing them so quickly.
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