STEP BY STEP TOWARDS THE SACRED

2018

The aim of the volume is a comparative study of non-European pilgrimages under different historical conditions and changing power relations. Historic transformations but also continuities in organization, bodily and spiritual experience, as well as individual and collective motives are discussed. Written by an interdisciplinary group of authors, their various disciplinary perspectives offer insight into the differences in methods, theoretical reflections and the use and meanings of objects in ritual performances. The construction of sacred spaces as landscapes of imagination reflects a wide range of meaning in regard of the growing complexity and social dynamism in times of postmodernity. Keywords: Interdisciplinary approach; non-European pilgrimages; transformation and continuity; theories of pilgrimage studies Ziel des Bandes ist eine vergleichende Analyse außereuropäischer Pilgerreisen unter verschiedenen historischen Bedingungen und Machtverhältnissen. Untersucht werden historische Transformationsprozesse, aber auch Kontinuitäten bezüglich der Organisation, der körperlichen und spirituellen Erfahrungen sowie der individuellen und kollektiven Motive der Pilger. Die interdisziplinäre Zusammensetzung der Autoren vermittelt Einblicke in unterschiedliche Methoden, theoretische Reflektionen sowie den Gebrauch und die Bedeutung von Objekten in rituellen Performances. Die Konstruktion von heiligen Orten als Landschaften der Imagination reflektiert eine große Vielfalt an Bedeutungen in Bezug auf die komplexen und dynamischen Prozesse im Zeitalter der Postmoderne.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2013

Icons and the Liturgy, East and West

Reflections on the Sacred , 2021

Reflections on the Sacred - a comparative phenomenological religious studies seminar, at Engelsberg November 2021. The subject of special interest to the seminar is the sacred and the meaning it carries in various cultures and settings for the individual. How is meaning and the purpose of life created and perceived from a comparative perspective in different cultures? What is perceived as sacred and holy in the sense Rudolf Otto conceived religion as das ganz andere in present day? How do different ontologies, basic assumptions about the human existence, compare and influence the perception of the sacred and give rise to meaning in different cultures and cultural settings? Max Weber claimed that with the entzauberung der Welt, the influence of religious ideas did not disappear. His thesis implies that religion is a kind of matrix that can transform itself in an explicitly secular, but quasi- religious fashion. To what extent can it be said that modern societies and ideologies carry with them essentially religious/spiritual forms and structures and therefore purport basic assumptions about reality? How do we distinguish between the truly secular and the sacred in today’s world? Capitalism, socialism, and the green ecological movements are in this sense obvious objects of study were remnants of thought-patterns from a Christian eschatology seems to echo from notions of paradise lost to apocalyptic ideas about the end of the world. The conference is organised in order to reappraise and revitalise the discipline of History of Religions and also make it more relevant for understanding our contemporary society.

from Spiritual Path - Sacred Place: Myth Ritual and Meaning in Architecture, Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1996

2016

For any pilgrim who walks along the Via Dolorosa to the church of the Holy Sepulchre today, as in the medieval and early modern periods, the experience combines the sacred with the profane, the public with the personal. On the one hand, pilgrims walk along the route they believed Christ took to the site of his crucifixion, on the other they walk along a street lined with shops to the church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the site of Calvary, a building made holy not only through being the site of the events central to the Christian faith (a liminal space as the locus for Christ's resurrection), but also through the rite of consecration, 1 and through the liturgical rites conducted there on a daily basis. Both en route and once inside the church the pilgrims may choose to participate in public prayers, that is those of their tour group, and sometimes, as on Good Friday, the liturgies of the Christian churches, or conduct their own private devotions, or to take part in both. Such pilgrimages, by visiting the places of Christ's life, help the participant to come closer to the heavenly Jerusalem; in his early twelfth-century guide to the Holy Places, Rorgo Fretellus urged his audience to 'ponder upon the heavenly city of Jerusalem … which is an allegory for us of the heavenly paradise'. 2 Inevitably, however, the secular penetrated into such terrestrial paradises, be they twelfthcentury Jerusalem or fourteenth-century Rome, where stall holders selling food and 1 Egeria witnessed the feast of the dedication of the Holy Sepulchre on her pilgrimage to the Holy Land 381-4 AD:

"In the framework of the new semiotic conceptualization of transcendence proposed by Eero Tarasti (2000: 17-36), this article analyzes the phenomenological and semiotic mechanisms characterizing the tension between rituals and routines as well as the dialectics between their symbolic efficacy and inefficacy. Through which semiotic processes do rituals acquire the capacity of “domesticating” the frontier between an environment of belonging and one of non-belonging, bringing about a semantic path and a rhetoric strategy of acclimation and tolerance, and therefore a regime of sedentary belonging? Through which semiotic processes, on the contrary, do rituals lose such capacity, thus turning into simple routines, or worse, becoming unable to smooth out the intensity of transition and the extension of distance implied by a frontier of belonging? The present article will seek to answer such questions through a thorough analysis of the phenomenology and semiotics of religious processions. On the one hand, these rituals succeed in congregating several individual agencies (Leone 2010a), thus helping them to obliterate the frontier between the sacred environment of the place of worship and the profane environment of the space surrounding it. Consequently, in religious processions, subjects experience an enlargement of the environment of the sacred that encourages them to believe in its omnipresence, in the reassuring belief that their entire existence takes place (literally and metaphorically) under the protection of transcendence. On the other hand, “accidents” caused by the persistence of individual agencies within the collective one constantly “threaten” the symbolic efficacy of religious processions: the tentative expansion of the sacred environment into the profane one results in a symmetrical expansion of the latter into the former. The collective agency of rituals disintegrates into the individual agencies of routines until subjects not only no longer believe that transcendence extends its protection also over the profane environment, but on the contrary, fear that such protection is fragile in the sacred environment as well. Rituals do not only turn into routines but collapse into the re-emergence of the insecurity of transition. Acclimation and tolerance turn into invasion and exile. The profane invades the sacred, and the believer feels exiled even in the protected environment of the place of worship."

GORGIA PRESS, 2019

This volume presents the work of contemporary Orthodox thinkers who attempt to integrate the theological and the mystical. Exciting and provocative chapters treat a wide variety of mysticism, including early Church accounts, patristics (including the seemingly ever-popular subject of deification), liturgy, iconography, spiritual practice, and contemporary efforts to find mystical sense in cyber-technologies and post-humanism. Table of Contents (v) Preface and Acknowledgements (vii) Abbreviations (ix) Introduction: Mysticism and its Historical Manifestations (1) Sergey Trostyanskiy and Jess Gilbert I. MYSTICAL THEOLOGY AND CHURCH MOTHERS AND FATHERS (9) I.1. The Relation Between the Incomprehensibility of God and the Naming of God in the Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius (11) Theodore Damian I.2. Toward an Understanding of Maximus the Confessor’s Mystical Theology of Deification: The Spiritual Sabbath / Eighth Day Sequence in Two Hundred Chapters on Theology (27) Jess Gilbert I.3. Mystical Theology in the Writings of Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius Areopagite (51) Eirini Artemi and Christos Terezis I.4. Analogy in the Mystical Theology of Gregory of Nyssa: Transcending Negation and Affirmation (69) Robert F. Fortuin I.5. Recapitulative Reversal and the Restoration of Humanity in St. Irenaeus (85) Don Springer I.6. Kindling Divine Fire: The Mystical Sayings of St. Syncletica (99) V.K. McCarty II. LITURGY, SACRAMENTS, AND ICONS (115) II.1. The Kingdom of the Holy Trinity and the Movement of a Community in the Sacrificial Spirit of Christ: The importance of Father Dumitru Stăniloae’s Mystical and Ascetic Vision of the Holy Liturgy (117) Ciprian Streza II.2. The Sacraments of the Church: Basis of Spirituality, Building Blocks of the Kingdom (145) Philip Zymaris II.3. The Mystery of Representation: Theodore the Studite on Seeing the Invisible (169) Sergey Trostyanskiy III. CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE AND APPLICATIONS (191) III.1 Understanding My Avatar: Cyberbeing, Bio-Digital Personhood, and Fictional Transcendences from an Orthodox Perspective (193) Inti Yanes-Fernandez III.2. A Theory of Practice: A Meditation on Practice Itself (217) Mark W. Flory III.3. The Prayer of the Heart as Method of cognitive-behavioural Psychotherapy (237) Cameron McCabe III.4. Orthopraxis and Theosis: The Role of Ritual in the Training of the Mind (249) Anthony Perkins

Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021

This paper aims to offer a theological taxonomy vis-à-vis the practice of pilgrimage. The taxonomy is constructed around three theological imperatives: that of Revelation, of the Incarnation, and the Sacramental. Acknowledging the polymorphic nature of pilgrimages, as religious, social, and ethno-cultural events which invite multi-layered investigation, this paper proposes an interdisciplinary bridging exercise by translating these theological imperatives into language that can be related to the sociological, anthropological, or ethnographic approach to pilgrimage, in order to highlight some interdisciplinary points of correspondence. The paper also touches on issues of secularization, the negotiation of public space by the religious event, and queries the role of the Church—particularly in the Eastern Orthodox context—in translating or inhibiting the translation of said theological imperatives in the wider social milieu.