March 12, 2014

The local contingent  of the Class of  '55 met this morning to plan our 60th reunion. Of the 113 members of the graduating, 95 are alive (84%), 35 are dead.  The stats of the places of residence for those above ground is interesting:

Arkansas =  46,
Texas = 25,
Louisiana  = 5,
California = 2,
Tennessee = 2,
OK, AL, NV, and NC get one each.

Only two of us ventured north: one girl lives in Ohio and I spent 30 ye
ars in Kansas City, but as the writer Charles Portis said, “A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can’t quite achieve escape velocity.” I certainly could not.

March 14, 2014


Sacred Spaces


T
heophany is the appearance of a god. Apollo returns to Delphi each spring, St. Michael appeared at a cave in Gargano, Yawhe appeared to Moses in a burning bush, and  so on. Heirophany is a breakthrough of the sacred into the world. Mircea Eliade says:

"The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world". According to this view, all things need to imitate or conform to the sacred models established by hierophanies in order to have true reality: to traditional man, things "acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality".

So here are a few places and spaces which such breakthroughs occurred and the art and architecture subsequently constructed there.

I.  Saint Michael's Cave: Gargano, Italy.

entrance steps interior
       Entrance to the Church/Cave                Steps down to the Church                       Interior of the Church 

 

1.The grotto on Mt Garganus was a shrine for a pagan oracle famous for dream cures. A sick visitor would wrap himself in the skin of a black ram and spend the night in the cave. The hope was the oracle would either cure the visitor or inform him of a cure.
 The cult of St Michael began in Constantinople and was introduced by the Emperor Constantine who slept in the shrine of Sosthenium. A winged man appeared to him and declared himself to be St. Michael. Constantine established four churches around Consatntinoble.

2.The story here goes back to the year 490 when a farmer of the village lost his bull. After searching he found the bull apparently sick and kneeling in a deserted cave. To put the animal out of its misery, the farmer shot an arrow at it, but the arrow turned around and struck him instead. Stunned by the supernatural event, the man went to see the local bishop. The Bishop of Sipontum, however, had his doubts about the apparition, thinking perhaps he had just dreamed it, decided to ignore it and put it out of his mind

3.History repeated itself when the Archangel Saint Michael appeared to the Bishop. Saint Michael said: " I am Michael the Archangel and am always in the presence of God. I chose the cave as sacred to me. There will be no more shedding of bull's blood. There the rocks open widely, the sins of men may be pardoned. What is asked here in prayer will be granted. Therefore, go up to the mountain cave and dedicate it to the Christian God."  So the old pagan practices were replaced by Christian ones. 

4. Victoria and I visited the place December 27, 1994, starting in Manfradonia. Here is a record from Victoria's log.

"We asked at the hotel desk about busses and tickets and such. No one there spoke an iota of English and so it involved a fair amount of gesturing and rudimentary Italian to convince them that yes, we actually DO want to go to Monte Sant’Angelo. The nice black-eyed hotel kid came out to warn us that it would be ‘molto freddo’. We had to go to a bar – Il Pace – a few blocks away for bus tickets. We bought tickets and  waited maybe ten or twelve minutes and then what to our wondering eyes should appear but an actual bus. Going the actual right direction. Already miracles were happening.

The trip was up up up on the huge bus making tiny hairpin turns along a huge dropoff on one side. And this wasn’t happening slowly! Monte Sant’Angelo looked just like Manfredonia on a hill. Zillions of cement apartments. View was pretty though not much happening this time of year; terraced hillsides, sparse growth, sad olive groves. I imagine it’s nicer when warm. Also a good deal of what looked like mild earthquake damage. Everything in these parts is reinforced concrete. The hillsides were also full of caves, though how deep you couldn’t always see. So we arrived at the centro of Monte Sant’Angelo and INDEED it was molto freddo! We ascertained the time of the return trip (10:30), but we aren’t renowned for getting these things right.

5. Well, Monte Sant’Angelo was indeed molto freddo. We saw the Santuario di S. Michele though it was through gale force winds. Too cold to spend a lot of time looking at the portals. Then down the 89 steps (we counted!) and through the very impressive bronze doors, partly impressive because the frigid wind was blowing so hard we had trouble getting in. The stone church and the grotto. We couldn’t visit the Tomba di Rotari outside the campanile as it’s closed this time of year. The grotto, which is the curious bit, is surprisingly big. They had a couple rows of chairs lined up though I doubt anyone was lingering too long here this time of year. The bishop’s throne was marvelous and had it been about thirty degrees warmer in this place we would have admired it top to bottom. The statue of St. M was – as promised by all - no much to see."A day or so after we left the Gargano, the Italian news reported that a record snow fall had occurred there. Road and rail traffic was completely shut down. We had departed just in time...the second miracle.

6. Romans were familiar with the concept of syncretism because from their earliest times they had experienced it with, among others, the Greeks. The Romans incorporated the originally Greek Apollo and Hercules into their religion. They did not look at the religious aspects that they adopted from other cultures to be different or less meaningful from religious aspects that were Roman in origin. The early Roman acceptance of other cultures religions into their own made it easy for them to integrate the newly encountered religions they found as a result of their expansion.

The early Christian church used acts of supersedence  in replacing an old god with a new saint. Usually it worked if some attributes  of the old divinity could be discerned  in the new one. Add a little holy water, incense, and candles and the convert would think the church was not so different from the temple. A little sugar and the  medicine goes down.

The Church allowed some symbols and traditions to be carried over from older belief systems, so long as they are remade to fit into a Christian worldview.

Occasionally conversion is only superficial. For example, when Buddhism came to Japan, many converts simply added a statue of Buddha to the family shrine. Then when Christianity arrived they s placed a crucifix in the shrine along with Buddha. The more the merrier.


I remember seeing small carved hands, eyes, and legs in the Epidaurus Archaeological Museum that had been placed at the shrine 2,500 years ago in hopes of a cure for an ailment in that part of the body. Then a few days later seeing commercially made tin hands, eyes, and legs placed in an Orthodox church not so far from Epidaurus.


 

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