Gregory the Great in his Expositio in Canticis Canticorum, created between the years 594 or 595 and 598, ends the patristic tradition of allegorical commentaries on Sg. We are not in the possession of the complete text of Gregory’s commentary, as the text of the Pope’s interpretations finishes at Sg 1 : 8. The text of the commentary as we have it at present shows some signs of a revision made by Gregory I himself and has features characteristic of the original oral version of the text. The comparative study of Origen’s and Gregory’s commentaries shows that Pope Gregory I was familiar with Origen’s homilies and commentary on Sg and used his writings while working on his own text, but only sparingly. Gregory I undoubtedly took from Origen the general approach, some phrases, and at times the way in which exegesis of a certain extract was executed. Gregory discussed the biblical text in accordance with the principles of intellectual, parenetic and pastoral interpretation. The primary interest of the Pope was to extract the spiritual-mystical meaning of the text, and the allegorical interpretation is supposed to help man read the biblical text so that he can love God and follow Him. The allegorical reading of Sg, and actually of the whole Bible as well, should consequently kindle the love of God in man and fill him with thoughts of God. Gregory I recommends a spiritual-ascetic reading of the Bible: the reader is supposed to change his habits for the better, be able to alienate himself ascetically from the surrounding world, and in this way acquire contemplation of Godly matters.
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Gregory the Great in his Expositio in Canticis Canticorum, created between the years 594 or 595 and 598, ends the patristic tradition of allegorical commentaries on Sg. We are not in the possession of the complete text of Gregory’s commentary, as the text of the Pope’s interpretations finishes at Sg 1 : 8. The text of the commentary as we have it at present shows some signs of a revision made by Gregory I himself and has features characteristic of the original oral version of the text. The comparative study of Origen’s and Gregory’s commentaries shows that Pope Gregory I was familiar with Origen’s homilies and commentary on Sg and used his writings while working on his own text, but only sparingly. Gregory I undoubtedly took from Origen the general approach, some phrases, and at times the way in which exegesis of a certain extract was executed. Gregory discussed the biblical text in accordance with the principles of intellectual, parenetic and pastoral interpretation. The primary interest of the Pope was to extract the spiritual-mystical meaning of the text, and the allegorical interpretation is supposed to help man read the biblical text so that he can love God and follow Him. The allegorical reading of Sg, and actually of the whole Bible as well, should consequently kindle the love of God in man and fill him with thoughts of God. Gregory I recommends a spiritual-ascetic reading of the Bible: the reader is supposed to change his habits for the better, be able to alienate himself ascetically from the surrounding world, and in this way acquire contemplation of Godly matters.
Topic of entrance and exit sequences in Charles Sorel’s Description de l’isle de Portraiture (1659) and Mlle de Montpensier’s La Relation de l’Ile imaginaire (1659) The geographical production of the utopian island is paralleled by a number of textual mechanisms described by Jean-Michel Racault as topic of entrance and exit sequences. The close generic resemblance between French seventeenth century utopian and allegorical narratives of imagined islands, allows to ask about their topic similarity. The review of some of those sequences contained in Mademoiselle’s de Montpensier La Relation de l’Ile imaginaire and Charles Sorel La Description de l’isle de Portraiture, both published in 1659, shows however that they are an optional author’s choice and not a required narrative component.
Pešīttā is, admittedly, the main source for East Syrian liturgical books. Its form and content were mended by a poet in ʿōnyāṯā (poetic genre), in the hymnological collection Wardā (the thirteenth century) in a historical context known as "the Syrian Renaissance". It consequently leads to the modification of the Biblical text, to poetic gradation, as well as to updating and to contextualising of the stories of the Old and New Testament in the line of the analogical life experience of the author and his listeners. The interpretation of the Biblical text in the liturgical poetry Wardā takes into consideration the historical and political development when reflecting on the impact of the rupture of the Abbasid caliphate and the impact of the Mongolian-Tatar invasion on the most important liturgical piece of the Assyrian Church of the East at the time of its last literary-cultural heyday. Symbolic imaginary is not only an important part of poetry itself, but is an articulate element of East Syrian theology, spirituality and interreligious relations in Mesopotamia.
The now-longstanding academic revival of allegory, as well as its import as a perennial buzzword of contemporary art criticism, owes much to a group of essays published in the journal October in the early 1980s. Authors Craig Owens and Benjamin Buchloh, in turn, drew a bloodline to the ideas of allegory that occupied Walter Benjamin throughout his literary career. However, whereas Benjamin saw allegory as the expression of a radical, indeed messianic, view of political possibility, the October writers found in allegory a counter-paradigm against Modernism that would resist the latter's totalizing tendencies by pursing its own deconstructive fate of “lack of transcendence.” In the following essay, I trace the source of this discrepancy to the crucial theological underpinnings of Benjamin's concept of allegory, without which the allegorical forms - appropriation and montage - produce not miraculous flashes of unmediated recognition but the permanent impossibility of communication.
The paper “C. S. Lewis: The Romantic Rationalist” presents the way C. S. Lewis gives an account in his first fictional (allegorical) book, The Pilgrim’s Regress, of how he discovered Christianity on the converging paths of romanticism and rationalism. The outstanding scholar and author whose intellectual and spiritual development has turned him into one of the most influential Christian writers of the twentieth century became an atheist in his teens and after a long journey through different philosophical convictions he converted to Christianity in his early thirties, a change that affected his entire work. His love of literature was essential in discovering both the rational and the imaginative appeal of Christianity, which led him into a vision of the reality of the world and of life that satisfied the longing of his heart and the hunger of his imagination.
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