Journal articles on the topic 'Theology – History – 18th century'

This article tells the story of Christian natural theology from the late 18th century to our own time by locating the key moments and thinkers, who have shaped how natural theology has been practiced in the past and how it is now being re-assessed and developed. I will summarize certain key elements that unite all forms of natural theology and assess briefly two basic criticisms of natural theology.

Sir Charles Bell, a 19th century surgeon, anatomist and artist, was heavily influenced by the religious practice of Natural Theology, a belief which implied that the world is created by an Intelligent Designer. In the 18th century, William Paley, later Rector of Bishop Wearmouth, wrote the seminal book about Natural Theology. Charles Bell who practised in London and Edinburgh used his artistic skills to underline his teaching of anatomy and surgery. Later, Bell wrote one of the eight Bridgewater Treatises on the Hand. Bell went on to illustrate the final edition of Paley’s Natural Theology in which he demonstrated that proof of Design were to be found in the animal frame, reflecting his earlier work on art and human structure. It is concluded that Charles Bell and William Paley’s ideals were in harmony with each other, holding the same belief about Creation. This paper argues that Bell’s understanding and devotion to Natural Theology allowed him to accurately explain function, realism and expression in the human body, all revealing the direct influence of the Divine Creator.

In this article, the author tries to reflect the emergence of the intellectual concept of “Church History” through a number of theoretical frameworks, setting this discursive turn on the map of the epoch using several narratives. The first is the problem of the cultural gap arising during the 18th century between the intellectual elites of the nobility and clergy. Second, we examine the bureaucratization of the empire leading both to the convergence of parallel “ecclesiastical” and “civil” administrative structures and to the emergence of the bureaucratic layer between episcopate and the monarch, who was considered as the formal “head” of the earthly ecclesiastical structure. Third, we consider the establishment of the administrative bonds between governmental authorities and individuals, which were understood as being in competition for the “pastoral” power of the church hierarchy. We next examine the change in the mode of knowledge distribution, which took place within the emergence of the “public sphere” in the early 19th-century Russian Empire. Finally, we look at the problem of the national identity emerging in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which was centered around the concept of the ethnic community and political body (and its history) rather than on the community of believers actualized in the discourse of the epoch as the concept of Church (and its history). All those narratives on social change strive to explain the global change in Orthodox theology, which became centered on ecclesiology. This change might be effectively problematized as a transition between first and second “orders of theology” within the framework proposed by G. Kaufman. This method of explanation may be especially productive when it comes to drawing an analogy between Russian and Western theology in the modern period.

The study analyses the political theology and imagery of a female Russian ruler in the first half of the 18th century in the context of the European political discourses on feminine rulers during the baroque period. The coronation ritual of Empress Elizabeth (ruled 1741-1761, crowned 25 April 1742) reflected in the coronation book (1744) illustrates the transition of European images of a baroque feminine ruler into the semiotics of westernized Russian absolutism. Elizabeth appears in the court media (sermons, engravings in the coronation book, poems, etc.) as the natural, God-given mother of all Russians, saving Orthodoxy from the political chaos of the previous rule, combining both masculine and feminine images of a ruler. The image of Elizabeth in the sermon by Archbishop of Novgorod Ambrosii illustrates a Russian variation of the political liturgy of absolutist culture in the 18th century.

Starting from a passage of Adam Steuart's refutation of Descartes' Notae in programma quoddam, this essay reconstructs the debate on the innate idea of God in infants (incorrectly attributed to Descartes by Steuart, who was a Calvinist) that took place in Lutheran-oriented philosophy and theology between the end of the 16th and the middle of the 18th century. It is shown that one of the most common questions in modern philosophy is closely connected with theological thinking - in this case Lutheran - from the formulation of the dogmatic systems up until their criticism by the Enlightenment. Also explained is the way in which the reception of Cartesianism was singularly influenced by the various backgrounds and the different and continuously changing polemical goals that inspired each author. In fact, Descartes was even accused of being a Lutheran.Key words: History of modern philosophy, History of Protestant theology, History of Cartesianism, History of Lutheranism, Reception of Cartesianism.

This study examines the origins, early history, and theological problems of the Barthian and Germanic predominance in Korean Protestant theology. The originators and most influential promoters of the predominance were Rev. Chai-choon Kim (1901–1987) and Dr Jong-sung Rhee (1922–2011), the theological and denominational leaders of the more or less liberalist Korean Presbyterian churches. Both of them went almost the same theological way: After getting to know Karl Barth and his dominance in Japan and deepening their knowledge of Barthian theology in the USA, they fought against the Korean Presbyterian churches’ conservative, Old Princeton theology on the basis of Barthian theology. Having witnessed the notorious conflicts and schisms of the Presbyterian Church of Korea (PCK), both Kim and Rhee presupposed that the principal culprit of the conflicts and schisms was the conservative, Old Princeton (Reformed Orthodox) theology that the American Presbyterian Korea missionaries had successfully planted in Korean Presbyterian churches. So in order to attack the missionaries’ theology as well as to justify their liberalist theology, both Kim and Rhee profoundly accepted the Barthian triumph frame: the Reformed Orthodoxy of the 17th and 18th centuries was defeated by the liberalism of the 19th century, which was, in turn, overcome by the Barthian Neo-Orthodoxy of the 20th century. Although the frame itself has recently been proved to be unfounded, both Kim and Rhee blindly accepted it and led their numerous followers to throw out both the missionaries and their Old Princeton theology. Nevertheless, Kim and Rhee ‘threw the baby out with the bathwater’; they led the next generation to be deprived of its own Reformed history, whose living legacy has been the missionaries’ Reformed Orthodoxy and Old Princeton theology. On the other hand, having accepted Barthian theology enthusiastically, both Kim and Rhee exploited it mainly to condemn the missionaries’ theology, ending up failing to integrate it into their own theologies.

Abstract Gotthold Ephraim Lessing stands out among the thinkers of the 18th century for his refusal to synthesize theology and philosophy. But due to his notorious ambivalence about religious questions, even Lessing’s contemporaries remained uncertain whether he ultimately sided with the former or the latter. The short dialogue Hercules and Omphale is, to the detriment of research on this topic, largely unknown. I show that the dialogue offers in a nutshell Lessing’s comprehensive analysis of the intellectual and religious situation of his time. By calling on the mythical travesty of the Asian queen and the Greek hero, Lessing illustrates the mutual attraction that has led astray both Enlightenment philosophy and contemporary Lutheran orthodoxy. Implicitly, his diagnosis of the aberrations of philosophy and theology sheds light on Lessing’s own position. The twofold criticism is an attempt to restore theology as well as philosophy in their genuine forms and to reestablish their proper relationship. Through his twofold restitutio in integrum, Lessing is able to reopen the quarrel between orthodoxy and the Enlightenment and, thus, to radically renew the all but forgotten theologico-philosophical antagonism.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, very vibrant debates regarding the question of the divine attributes (ṣifāt), one of the central issues in the history of Islamic theology, arose among the Muslims of the Russian Empire. A continuation of pre-existing debates taking place at the time in Central Asia, the controversy over the attributes revolved around the question of their ontological relationship to the divine essence (ḏāt), and whether the predominant view, that of Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī, rendered the attributes too distinct from the essence, thus violating God’s oneness. One very prominent participant was the Tatar scholar Šihāb al-Dīn al-Marǧānī (d. 1889), who crafted a sophisticated critique of Taftāzānī and articulated a novel view of the attributes, based on the work of another Tatar scholar, Abū Naṣr Qūrṣāwī (d. 1812). This paper argues that not only do these debates show the continuation of the kalām tradition into the modern era, but they also represent important developments of that tradition in their own right, against the view that post-classical theology had become repetitive and derivative.

The 18th-century European Enlightenment championed rational philosophy and scientific methodology, rather than any form of traditional theology, as the way to understand the objective truth.1 In their quest for the fundamental truth, France's philosophes, the rational and anticlerical intellectuals of the Age of Reason, were forced to brave official censorship, persecution, and imprisonment as they disentangled themselves from their Christian heritage. Thus, the French Enlightenment was informed by a dualistic view of history—an ongoing contest between reason and faith. Although faith had gained ascendancy with Christianity's triumph over classical antiquity in the late 3rd and 4th centuries, according to the philosophes, many of whom served as key contributors to the Encyclopédie, religion and science had once again joined battle in the 18th century, this time with science and reason poised to overcome religious irrationality.2 In this context, the renowned philosophe Voltaire, in his highly controversial Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), attacks Christian dogma, refutes the tenet of Christ's divine nature, and rejects the possibility of miracles as running contrary to all scientific evidence.3 Similarly, in Système de la Nature (1770), another philosophe, d'Holbach, deplores man's pursuit of the chimeras of religious revelation and refusal to engage in rational methods of inquiry.4 The arguments of Voltaire and d'Holbach are just two examples of the French Enlightenment tenet that knowledge can be based only on science and reason.

The research is significant due to the undiminishing interest shown by philosophers, philologists and culture experts to an eternal question of all times – the creation of the world by God. This aspect demands special consideration. That is why, the article aims to define the cosmogony as a part of the historiosophy, more precisely, the poetic cosmogony as a part of the artistic historiosophy. To achieve this aim, it is necessary to answer the following questions: 1) what is the fundamental principle of the world (universe), and is the poet focused on this particular problem? 2) what does this fundamental principle consist of? what are the constituents of the world? 3) how does it show itself? where is it situated? where does it exist? how did the world come into existence? The answers to these questions can be provided not only by religion and theology but also by science, philosophy and mythology. The analysis is carried out on the material of cosmogonical poems of four Russian 18th–19th century poets: “World’s Creation. Panegyric Song” (1779–1782) by А. N. Radishchev, “Reflection on World’s Creation Based on the First Chapter of Genesis” (1784, 1804) and “The Fate of the Ancient World or the Flood” (1789, 1804) by S. S. Bobrov, “Matter” (1796) by P. А. Slovtsov, “Song to the Creator” (“Pesn’ Sotvorivshemu vsja”) (1817) by S. А. Shirinsky-Shikhmatov. The conducted research found out, that all authors of the above writings put into verse versions of the so-called cosmogonic myths reputable for them, which describe how the universe originated, more or less. Four poets rely in their cosmogenesis reflections on some myth invariants to be found in the Old Testament [6], but these are the variants, and sometimes even concepts, alternating to the Bible determine an individual diversity of historiosophical constructs of our “metaphysical” poets. The material from this article can be used in teaching the following disciplines: history, 18th-century Russian literature and philosophy.

The article uses a case study of the manuscript The History of Turkey written by an anonymous author in French in the 18th century and kept in the Bern City Library archives, to discuss West European writers’ evaluation of Dmitry Kantemir’s works. Dmitry Kantemir was not only a prominent political leader and diplomat, but also one of the most educated people in Eastern Europe of his time. When living in Constantinople, he attended a theological school, then studied history, philosophy, literature, art, theology, and ancient languages (he knew eight languages). Highly regarded in Russia, his writings attracted attention in the West and were used as sources by European historians. As an outstanding scientist and diplomat in Eastern Europe, Dmitry Kantemir earned the recognition of his Western European contemporaries as well as historians of later periods, who highly appreciated his works. This article analyses one historical plot, which has not been in the focus of scholarly studies so far: Kantemir’s History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire is mentioned as one of the main sources in the manuscript The History of Turkey and repeatedly quoted there.

Psychology as taught in Ghanaian universities is largely Eurocentric and imported. Calls have been made to indigenize psychology in Ghana. In response to this call, this paper attempts to construct a history of psychology in Ghana so as to provide a background for the study of the content and process of what psychology would and/or ought to become in Ghana. It does so by going as far back as the University of Sankore, Timbuktu established in 989AD where intellectual development flourished in the ancient Empire of Mali through to the 1700s and 1800s when Black Muslim scholars established Koranic schools, paying particular attention to scholarly works in medicine, theology and philosophy. Attention is then drawn to Anton Wilhelm Amo’s dissertation, De Humanae Mentis “Apatheia” and Disputatio Philosophica Continens Ideam Distinctam (both written in 1734) as well as some 18th and 19th century Ghanaian scholars. Special mention is also made about the contributions by the Department of Psychology at the University of Ghana (established in May 1967) in postcolonial Ghana as one of the first departments of psychology in Anglophone West Africa. The paper also discusses the challenges associated with the application of psychological knowledge in its current form in Ghana and ends by attempting to formulate the form an indigenous Ghanaian psychology could to take.

The article presents an excursion into the history of the origin of the scientific discipline of “church law” in the system of humanitarian knowledge of the Russian Empire in the 19th century. Church law throughout the 18th century was considered part of the spectrum of theological disciplines and was developed exclusively by professors of theology. The idea of teaching “ecclesiastical jurisprudence” in secular universities of the Russian Empire remained controversial for a long time. But with the change in the Statutes of Imperial Universities at the beginning of the 19th century, the practice of teaching church law began to enter university education. By the middle of the 19th century, the situation had completely transformed; church-legal topics became the object of scientific research by secular lawyers and jurists. The article reflects the institutional changes in the field of university education that have influenced the state of teaching church law. The work demonstrates the evolution of methods and approaches within the discipline of “church law”. Institutional changes in the charters of secular educational institutions gave a powerful impetus to the development of a unified methodology for teaching church law. Two research areas (theological and legal) that dominate the system of church law have improved this discipline, enriching it with methodological findings. In conclusion, the complexity and relevance of this problem in the study of church law at the present stage is presented.

Islam as a religious system is generally based on three principal teachings called as aqidah (theology), syari'ah (law), and tasawwuf (Sufism, moral and spiritual). Each thought and the Islamic expertise have also established Muslim communities that demonstrate the diversity of social and religious history in various regions on the spread of Islam. In the history of the spread of Islam in Indonesia, particularly the Sufis always showed a significant role in each period of social change. Therefore, further discussion of this paper will be based on the development of tarekat communities. The historical facts in this study are presented gradually based on the unique cases in each period. The tarekat communities in Nusantara in the early period of Islam, which is the 13th century until the 17th century, have established the religious system patterned on the diversity of doctrine, thought, and tradition that is acculturative with various cultures of the local society in Nusantara. Then they developed during the Dutch colonial period in the 18th century and the 19th century. Besides contributing in the Islam religious founding, they also contributed in the patriotism struggle and even protested in the form of rebellion towards the Dutch colonial. The Sufis from various tarekat streams displayed antagonistic of political acts towards the Colonial government policies. It was developed at the beginning of the 20th century, which is the period of nationalism and of Islamic reform movements. The social force of tarekat people became an indicator of the religion revival that was very influencing towards the nationalism movement in Indonesia. The last one, it has been developing on the independence day of Indonesia, which is called the contemporary period, until today. The tarekat people have built a community system variously based on the principle of beliefs and various ritual activities. The tarekat people always develop, modify, and actualize the tasawwuf teachings and the tarekat practice, mainly in order to complete the spirituality and morality improvement of the society. The tarekat people’s contributions are very helpful for the society in general in order to fulfill the mental necessity. Their religiosity is also strategic enough to be used as a control media for the moral life of the nation.

The paper analyzes the role of political theology of Russian 18th century in the legitimation ideology of Catherine II aimed at justification of the palace coup of 1762. The subject of analysis is the sermon delivered by Konstantin (Borkovskiy) in Moscow on July 10th, 1762, and dedicated to explanation of the events of the coup. The author shows that Konstantin’s sermon deploys two main systems of argumentation: providential appeal to the history understood as uncovering of God’s plan for Russia (Augustinism), and the cult of monarch supported by the historical and Biblical comparisons and the direct glorification of monarch’s specific qualities. These parameters of Konstantin’s sermon could be compared with the earlier block of political sermons of Elizabeth’s age and the other texts which were justifying the coup (official manifestoes, poetical panegyrics). Such comparison allows author to conclude that Augustinism, being an intellectual tool to justify the fall of the monarch, was an unchangeable element of the legitimation ideology of the age, while the glorification of the monarch, being a tool to explain the enthronement of a particular person, was acquiring its ideological content depending on the circumstances. And even though the legitimation strategy of the 1762 coup included secular ideological systems (for instance, natural and Roman law, anti-absolutist rhetoric), the political theology remained pivotal element of Catherine’s legitimation ideology.

AbstractThe Matenadaran, Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts, is a unique repository of Armenian and Oriental manuscripts. The Oriental Collection of the Matenadaran (known usually as Arabo-Persian Collection), including manuscripts in Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, Indian and other languages (total ca. 2,500), is formed over a long time and is regularly augmented by purchases and gifts. This collection covers nearly all subjects of human and natural sciences and culture, including theology, jurisprudence, Qur'ānic sciences, Tafsīrs, Hadīthes, lexicography, literature, poetry, history, politics, philosophy, logic, astronomy, magic, mathematics, medicine, veterinary, and agriculture. Among them there are some Sufi codices from the period of the 15th to the 19th century, illustrated and illuminated in the various ateliers in Iran and the region. The article presents the analysis of some Oriental medieval miniatures from the Matenadaran Collection connected with the Sufi motifs in their compositions. The most important are illustrative cycles of a copy dating back to 1848-1849 of the Commentaries of the Seven Qasidas by Husayn Ibn Ahmad al-Zuzani (Ms. no. 1610); of the Afghan manuscript of the 18th century Gulshan-i Afghan by 'Ali Akbar Oraqzay (Ms. no. 538); of a manuscript (no. 599) dated from 1841-1842 and containing the poem Yusuf va Zuleykha by 'Abd ul-Rahman Djami; and of a manuscript of 1629 (no.1036), the travel diary of the Iranian diplomat Muhammad 'Ali Bek Isfahani; as well a number of single miniature compositions from the collection of Louise Aslanian (Paris) (no.1999).

By the late 18th century, the Moravian mission project had grown into a global enterprise. Moravian missionaries’ personal and emotional engagements with the people they sought to convert impacted not only on their understanding of Christianity, but also caused them to rethink the nature of civilization and humanity in light of their frontier experiences. In this article I discuss the construction of ‘savagery’ in the mission ethnography of C. G. A. Oldendorp (1721–87). Oldendorp’s journey to slave-holding societies in the Danish West Indies, where Moravian missions had been established in the 1730s, and his own experiences of the violence of these societies had such an impact on him that his proto-ethnographic descriptions of all the inhabitants of the Danish West Indies – from slaves to slaveholders – broke with traditional representations of savagery. He suggested two different paths for emotional transformation: one for slaves, and another for slaveholders. His views aligned with those of the later abolitionists, yet he was writing sixty years before those movements first gained public momentum in Great Britain. In many ways, therefore, this early mission ethnography reshaped contemporary understandings of ‘savagery’. I consider how Oldendorp did this in relation to a Moravian theology of the heart and love of Christ, the emerging Scottish Enlightenment philosophy of ‘love of humanity’ and its use in colonial encounters between missionaries and local people, and especially the emotions that were provoked by the extreme violence of the slavery system in this colonial contact zone.

Development of educational - educational activities and training in higher educational institutions of Ukraine spiritual in Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra began in the mid of the mid-nineteenth century. This was facilitated by the allocation of educational courses from the context of philosophy and moral theology, increased secular aspects of education and teaching pedagogical subjects and the requirement to prepare high-quality teachers. It was created by a number of manuals and textbooks that evaluated both contemporaries and the next generation of scientists, educators and teachers.History of education in the Ukrainian lands is primarily a history of the monastic institutions of education. Since the XVIІI century in Central Ukraine (Poltava, Pereyaslav, Chernihiv), the demand for high quality secular and religious education in accordance with the best European models. Cells of such education are training systems, "monastic monastery – Seminary", in particular in Poltava (Holy cross monastery Slavonic Seminary) and Pereyaslavl (ascension monastery – Seminary of Pereyaslav), which was formed by descendants of the Kyiv-Pechersk monastery and monastic monasteries. This testifies to the high scientific-pedagogical and organizational effectiveness in a difficult economic, social, political circumstances of the historical period and the territory of Central Ukraine educational complex "the monastery-Seminary" as centers of spirituality, education, mentality of the Ukrainian people. In fact, Holy cross and Poltava and Pereyaslavl Voznesensky Cathedral monasteries for their money, as earned by the monks, and secured charitable donations of the population, kept and developed original educational complexes, which included: the Seminary, the Seminary for courses, monastic library, a temple, a hospital, several parochial schools, United by a common concern about the appropriate level of education as spiritual persons, and secular population of the region.

Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) was the first person to report the discovery of oxygen and describe some of its extraordinary properties. As such he merits a special place in the history of respiratory physiology. In addition his descriptions in elegant 18th-century English were particularly arresting, and rereading them never fails to give a special pleasure. The gas was actually first prepared by Scheele (1742–1786) but his report was delayed. Lavoisier (1743–1794) repeated Priestley's initial experiment and went on to describe the true nature of oxygen that had eluded Priestley, who never abandoned the erroneous phlogiston theory. In addition to oxygen, Priestley isolated and characterized seven other gases. However, most of his writings were in theology because he was a conscientious clergyman all his life. Priestley was a product of the Enlightenment and argued that all beliefs should be able to stand the scientific scrutiny of experimental investigations. As a result his extreme liberal views were severely criticized by the established Church of England. In addition he was a supporter of both the French and American Revolutions. Ultimately his political and religious attitudes provoked a riot during which his home and his scientific equipment were destroyed. He therefore emigrated to America in 1794 where his friends included Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. He settled in Northumberland, Pennsylvania although his scientific work never recovered from his forced departure. But the descriptions of his experiments with oxygen will always remain a high point in the history of respiratory physiology.

Introduction. V. N. Tatishchev, one of the founders of the Russian history studies, was notable for his broad views on the evolution of society and economic order. His economic views were not widely discussed during his lifetime and were not much in demand afterwards. Familiarity with his major works is hampered by the fact that they were almost never published in the form of notes, letters, and manuscripts. The ambiguity of his approaches, conclusions, recommendations and, accordingly, their evaluation was noted by many researchers who took diametrically opposed views. Deep erudition, reliance on Western European philosophy and Russian theology allowed the enlightener to create the conceptual milestones of the future institutional program. Theoretical analysis. Modernization of society should be based on constant changes in existing legislative and economic practices, ideological perceptions, and cultural patterns. This approach allows us to identify the most effective institutions (formal and informal rules), taking into account national specifics. Methodologically, the relationship between changes in public administration and social ethos “vertically and horizontally” is established; the importance of societal economic culture as a factor of sustainable development is emphasized. Empirical analysis. Considered chronologically consecutive works on purely economic topics and legal foundations of power are supported by a significant array of letters to Peter I, the Academy of Sciences, the Berg Collegium, and public figures of the first half of the 18th century. According to the thinker, economic policy, both at micro and macro levels, should be based on regulations, organizational adaptation and rational borrowing. The qualitative description of the structure of social relations of absolutist Russia, in the form of “physiology of society”, which resonates with the modern concepts in economic sociology and new institutional economic theory, is highlighted. Results. V. N. Tatishchev can reasonably be considered the conceptual forerunner of the modern theory of institutionalism. As an enlightener, in the spirit of eighteenth-century social thought, he created an introduction to the importance of permanent changes in Russian economic and social structures. The imperative of state construction of the economy at the macro level is supported by attention to micro-changes in the form of regular economic practices, combining elements of originality and creative borrowing of foreign innovations. Evolutionary approach of the thinker echoes the formation and development of economic views of the XIX and XX centuries, especially in the prerequisites of the theory of history periodization and the transition from one political order to another on the basis of changes in institutions (formal and informal rules).

The Polish version of the article was published in Roczniki Humanistyczne 61 (2013), issue 2. The article presents Polish reactions to the famous Jesuit mission in England of 1580, and thus also the beginnings of the formation of the worship of St Edmund Campion in Poland. They are connected with the publication in Kraków (1583) of a translation of Robert Persons’ account entitled De persecutione Anglicana, but also with the position that the history of Campion’s mission took in the work of Piotr Skarga SJ. The Polish writer, showing a lively interest in what was going on with English Catholics and inspiring political interventions in support of Jesuits imprisoned in England (including his subordinate, the Vilnius professor James Bosgrave), in subsequent editions of his very popular hagiographic collection Żywoty świętych [The Lives of Saints] presented Przydatek […] o świętych męczennikach [A Supplement […] on Saint Martyrs] which was modified several times, and in it a paragraph titled O męczennikach w Anglijej [On Martyrs in England]. Its most basic part consisted of—starting with the 1585 edition—the story of St Edmund Campion, St Ralph Sherwin and Alexander Briant’s mission and martyrdom, which was a free adaptation of the narration contained in Concertatio Ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia by John Fenn and John Gibson (1583). Skarga’s interest in the figure of Campion was also reflected in the Polish translation of Rationes decem (1583) that he made at the request of King Stephen Báthory. It may be said that Rationes decem (also published in Latin in 1605) became one of the fundamental apologetic texts in Poland of the early-modern age, and St Edmund Campion, in a sense, became the patron of controversial theology, which would find its confirmation in the 18th century adaptation of Nicholas Sanders and Edward Rishton’s work De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani (1748) written by Jan Poszakowski.

The article presents the results of work on archaeographic research of the Metropolinate of Novosibirsk parish book collections, done in 2019–2020. The researchers of the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts of SPSTL SB RAS inventoried the books of Cyrillic and civil press kept in the parish library of Holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke in Kupino (Kupinsky district of Novosibirsk province). 35 Orthodox books of the Cyrillic tradition and of the Russian civil type of the first half of the 17th – early 20th centuries were made known, among them, 2 editions of the 17th century printed by the Moscow Print Yard, 4 Old Believer editions of the late 19th – early 20th centuries, 19 Synodal editions of the Cyrillic type from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries and 12 Synodal editions of the Russian civil type. The aim of the article is to present the results of scientific description and an archaeographic analysis of individual features of the most interesting book exemplars. Through complication of describing such book collections, which did not usually preserve intact or partially samples of pre-revolutionary parish book stocks and were shaped from various sources, priority was given to describing the owner’s signs of each sample that reflected the history of their existence in one or another social environment. Among the earliest there were described the perfectly preserved Moscow Gospel of 1627, the owner’s and donative records of which reflected its displacement from the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to Moscovia, where it could have come after Smolensk campaign of Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich. Another interesting example of editions of the Moscow Print Yard already from the post-schism period is the Irmologion of 1657, in which course of the description significant differences from other known copies were revealed. The late Old Believers liturgical books, that preserved the fragments of hand-written and early printed books, give interesting owners signs. The collection of synodal publications of the St Luke parish library covers a wide chronological and thematic range. Besides liturgical books such as psalteries, missal books, miscellanies of Akathist hymns there are also collections of sermons, manuals on theology, church singing and Sacred history. The article presents brief versions of the books of Cyrillic press of the St Like parish library, clearly showing the wide geographical distribution of the Russian Orthodox book both in the late medieval times and in the 20th century, as well as characteristic signs of its existence in various readership.

Введение. Известный в дореволюционной России публицист и духовный писатель Евгений Поселянин (настоящая фамилия Погожев), пройдя путь сомнений в вере и получив духовное возрождение в Оптиной Пустыни, стал участником развернувшейся между интеллигенцией и представителями Русской Православной Церкви дискуссии начала XX в. Церковность эстетического сознания Е. Поселянина определила основную задачу всего его творчества, заключавшуюся в воспроизведении и передаче духовного мира Русского Православия. Цель. Творчество известного духовного писателя и публициста конца XIX – начала XX в. Евгения Николаевича Поселянина, совершенно забытое на несколько десятилетий советской эпохи, требует реабилитации и серьезного научного исследования. Материал и методы. Исследуется сборник жизнеописаний Е. Поселянина «Русские подвижники 19-го века» (1900 г.). Работа написана в русле исторической поэтики. Результаты и обсуждение. В литературной деятельности Поселянина отразились важнейшие духовно-культурные искания его современников и художественно-эстетические тенденции конца XIX – начала XX в. Религиозное возрождение начала XX в. привело к сдвигу границ внутри русской культуры, при котором произошло сближение и взаимовлияние богословия, философии, науки с художественной литературой, что отразилось на трансформации традиционных художественно-эстетических форм. В творчестве Е. Поселянина можно проследить, как церковные темы и православное содержание облекаются в характерные для светской литературы и отходящие от строгих жанровых канонов литературные формы, которые становятся более пластичными жанровыми образованиями, открытыми для выражения и передачи современным человеком опыта духовной жизни. Заключение. Книга Е. Поселянина «Русские подвижники 19-го века» представляет собой документ русской духовной жизни XVIII–XIX столетий. В этом сборнике биографических очерков традиционализм жизнеописания святого размывается жанровыми новациями: включением структурных элементов из других художественных и публицистических церковных жанров (патерики, проповеди, церковная история) и популярной в светской литературе беллетризованной мемуарно-биографической прозы. Introduction. Evgeny Poselyanin, a well-known publicist and spiritual writer in pre-revolutionary Russia, having traveled the path of doubts in faith and received a spiritual revival in Optina Pustyn, became a participant in the discussion between the intelligentsia and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church at the beginning of the 20th century. The ecclesiastical nature of E. Poselyanin’s aesthetic consciousness determined the main task of all his work, which was to reproduce and transmit the spiritual world of Russian Orthodoxy. Aim and objectives. The work of the famous spiritual writer and publicist of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. Evgeny Nikolaevich Poselyanin, completely forgotten for several decades of the Soviet era, requires «rehabilitation» and serious scientific research. Material and methods. The article examines the collection of biographies of E. Poselyanin «Russian ascetics of the 19th century» (1900 edition). The research is written in the mainstream of historical poetics. Results and discussion. Poselyanin’s literary activity reflected the most important spiritual and cultural searches of his contemporaries and artistic and aesthetic tendencies of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. Religious revival of the early 20th century led to a shift in boundaries within Russian culture, during which there was a convergence and mutual influence of theology, philosophy, science with fiction, which was reflected in the transformation of traditional artistic and aesthetic forms. In the work of E. Poselyanin, one can trace how church themes and Orthodox content are clothed in literary forms characteristic of secular literature and departing from strict genre canons, which are becoming more plastic genre formations open for the expression and transmission of the experience of spiritual life by modern man. Conclusion. The book by E. Poselyanin «Russian ascetics of the 19th century» is a document of Russian spiritual life in the 18th – 19th centuries. In this collection of biographical sketches, the traditionalism of the life of the saint is eroded by genre innovations: the inclusion of structural elements from other artistic and journalistic church genres (paterics, sermons, church history) and fictionalized, memoir and biographical prose popular in secular literature.

Grundtvig's Relations with Luther and the Lutheran TraditionBy Leif GraneGrundtvig’s relations with Luther and the Lutheran tradition are essential in nearly the whole of Grundtvig’s lifetime. The key position that he attributed to Luther in connection with his religious crisis 1810-11, remained with the Reformer until the very last, though there were changes on the way in his evaluation of the Reformation.The source material is overwhelming. It comprises all Grundtvig’s historical and church historical works, but also a large number of his theological writings, besides a number of his poems and hymns. Prior to Grundtvig’s lifelong occupation with Luther there had been a rejection of tradition as he had met with it in the Conservative supranaturalism. After the Romantic awakening at Egeløkke and the subsequent »Asarus« (the- ecstatic immersion in Nordic mythology), over the religious crisis 1810-1811, when Grundtvig thought he was »returning« to Luther, it was a different Luther from the one he had left a few years before. Though Grundtvig emphasizes the infallibility of the Bible, it is wrong to describe him as »Lutheran-Orthodox« in the traditional sense. In Grundtvig’s interpretation, Luther is above all the guarantee of the view of history he had acquired in his Romantic period, but given his own personal stamp, as it appeared in slightly different ways in the World Chronicles of 1812 and 1817. There already he turns against the theologization of the message of the Reformation that set in with the confessional writings. Ever since he maintained the view of the Reformation that he expounds in the two World Chronicles, though the evaluation of it changed somewhat, especially after 1825.The church view that Grundtvig presented for the first time in »Kirkens Gienmæle« (The Rejoinder of the Church), and which he explained in detail in »Om den sande Christendom« (About True Christianity) and »Om Christendommens Sandhed« (About the Truth of Christianity), was bound to lead to a conflict (as it did) with the Protestant »Scripturalism«, and thus to clarity about the disagreement with Luther. This conflict attained a greater degree of precision with the distinctions between church and state, and church and school, as they were presented in »Skal den lutherske Reformation virkelig fortsættes?« (Should the Lutheran Reformation Really Be Continued? 1830), but it was not really until the publication of the third part of »Haandbog I Verdens-Historien« (Handbook in World History) that the view of church history and of Luther’s place in it, inspired by the congregational letters in the Apocalypse, was presented, in order to be more closely developed, partly in poetical form in »Christenhedens Syvstjeme« (The Seven Star of Christendom), partly in lectures in »Kirke-Spejl« (Church Mirror).Grundtvig had to reject orthodoxy since the genuineness of Baptism and Eucharist depended on their originating from Christ Himself. Nothing of universal validity could therefore have come into existence in the 16th century.Thus the evaluation of Luther and Lutheranism must depend on how far Lutheranism corresponded to what all Christians have in common. Luther is praised for the discovery that only the Word and the Spirit must reign in the church. It is understandable therefore that Luther had to break down the false idea of the church that had prevailed since Cyprian, and Grundtvig remained unswervingly loyal to him. But he cannot avoid the question why Luther’s work crumbled after his death. The answer is that it crumbled because of »Scripturalism« which Grundtvig considers a spurious inheritance from Alexandrian theology. We must maintain Luther’s faith which centres on all that is fundamentally Christian, but not his theological method.Grundtvig believes that with his criticism of Luther he is really closer to him than those who are cringing admirers of him. Grundtvig confesses himself to having committed the mistake of confusing the Bible with Christianity, and he cannot exempt Luther from a great responsibility for this aberration. All the same, in Luther’s case the wrong Yet Luther was induced to want to make his own experiences universally valid since he did not understand that his own use of the Scriptures could not possibly be right for every man. Here Grundtvig is on the track of the individualism which to him is an inevitable consequence of Scripturalism: everybody reads as he knows best. It was not in school, but in church that he saw Luther’s great and imperishable achievement.So while Grundtvig cannot exempt Luther from some responsibility for an unfortunate development in the relation between church and school, he is very anxious to exempt him from any responsibility for the assumption of power in the church by the princes, which is due, in his opinion, to a conspiracy between the princes and the theologians with a view to tying the peoples to the symbolical books.In the development of Grundtvig’s view of church history it turns out that the interest in the national, cultural and civic significance of the Reformation has not decreased after he has given up fighting for a Christian culture. The Reformation must, as must church history on the whole, be seen in the context of the histories of the peoples. Therefore, if it is not to be pure witchcraft, it must have its foundation deep in the Middle Ages.Grundtvig points to what he calls »the new Christendom«: from the English and the Germans to the North. Viewed in that light, the Reformation is a struggle for a Christian life, a folkelig life of the people, and enlightenment.Though the 17th century wrenched all life out of what was bom in the 16th, and the 18th century abandoned both Christianity and folkelig life altogether, it was of great significance for culture and enlightenment that the people was made familiar with Luther’s catechism, Bible and hymn book. What was fundamentally Christian survived, while folkelig life lay dormant.The Reformation was unfinished, and its completion must wait until the end of time. But compulsion is approaching the end, and the force of the Reformation in relation to mother tongue and folkelig life manifests itself more strongly than ever before, Gmndtvig believes. What is fundamentally Christian in Luther must be maintained and carried onwards, while the Christian enlightenment, i.e. theology, depends on the time in question.Life is the same, but the light is historically determined. With this concept of freedom, which distinguishes between the faith in Christ as permanent and the freedom of the Holy Ghost that liberates us from being tied to the theology of the old, Gmndtvig may convincingly claim that it is he who – with his criticism - is loyal to Luther, i.e. to »the most excellent Father in Christ since the days of the Apostles«.

This article discusses the common ground between William James and the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Recent commentators on this overlap have characterised philosophical anthropology as combining science (in particular biology and medicine) and Kantian teleology, for instance in Kant’s seminal definition of anthropology as being concerned with what the human being makes of itself, as distinct from what attributes it is given by nature. This article registers the tension between Kantian thinking, which reckons to ground experience in a priori categories, and William James’s psychology, which begins and ends with experience. It explores overlap between James’s approach and the characteristic holism of 18th-century philosophical anthropology, which centres on the idea of understanding and analysing the human as a whole, and presents the main anthropological elements of James’s position, namely his antipathy to separation, his concerns about the binomial terms of traditional philosophy, his preference for experience over substances, his sense that this holist doctrine of experience shows a way out of sterile impasses, a preference for description over causation, and scepticism. It then goes on to register the common ground with key ideas in the work of anthropologists from around 1800, along with some references to anthropologists who come in James’s wake, in particular Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, in order to reconceptualise the connection between James’s ideas and the tradition of anthropological thinking in German letters since the late 18th-century, beyond its characterisation as a combination of scientific positivism and teleology.

The article is a historiographical examination of the reception of the Danish reformer Hans Tausen: The Lutheran Orthodox theologians (late 16th-17th century) distanced themselves from Tausen, as they identified his theology as ‘Zwinglian’. Pietism and Rationalism (second half of the 18th century), in contrast, defended Tausen and even called him the ‘Danish Luther’ because of what they saw as ‘Lutheran’ aspects of his theology. A critical focus (from around 1850) did not change the general description. The article emphasizes that the examinations of the 20th century are still to be grouped into two, since the focus either is on the ‘Lutheran’ perspectives or Tausen as influenced by the ‘humanistic’ Reformation, by some alternatively identified as a kind of ‘Philippistic’ or ‘Wittenberg’ theology. A renewed examination of Tausen’s theology must rather be understood as a synthesis of continuity and reorientation.

It is well known that the seeds from which the modern discipline of OT theology grew are already found in 17th and 18th century discussion of the relationship between Bible and Church, which tended to drive a wedge between the two, regarding canon in historical rather than theological terms; stressing the difference between what is transient and particular in the Bible and what is universal and of abiding significance; and placing the task of deciding which is which upon the shoulders of the individual reader rather than upon the church. Free investigation of the Bible, unfettered by church tradition and theology, was to be the way ahead. OT theology finds its roots more particularly in the 18th century discussion of the nature of and the relationship between Biblical Theology and Dogmatic Theology, and in particular in Gabler's classic theoreticalstatementof their nature and relationship. The first book which may strictly be called an OT theology appeared in 1796: an historical discussion of the ideas to be found in the OT, with an emphasis on their probable origin and the stages through which Hebrew religious thought had passed, compared and contrasted with the beliefs of other ancient peoples, and evaluated from the point of view of rationalistic religion. Here we find the unreserved acceptance of Gabler's principle that OT theology must in the first instance be a descriptive and historical discipline, freed from dogmatic constraints and resistant to the premature merging of OT and NT — a principle which in the succeeding century was accepted by writers across the whole theological spectrum, including those of orthodox and conservative inclination.

Summary Until the publication of the Micmac grammar of Father Pacifique (1939, 1990), the only published grammar of Micmac was that of Father Pierre-Antoine Maillard (c. 1710–1762), which although it was written early in the 18th century, was not published until the middle of the 19th century (1864). This work has formed the basis of all subsequent linguistic analysis of Micmac, since the missionary priests used it to help them learn the language, and Father Pacifique, in his 1939 grammar (which is today used as a handbook by those learning the language) acknowledges his profound debt to his distinguished predecessor.

On Grundtvig’s Thought and Post-Lutheran PhilosophyAn introduction to Danevirke IIBy William MichelsenGrundtvig’s considerations on the life of man in his periodical Danevirke (1816- 19) are the result of his critical reading of the major works in modern philosophy and in protestant theology since 1517. His criticism of the works can be found in Prospect o f World Chronicle Especially in the Age o f Luther from 1817; his own comments are presented in Danevirke. Inevitably the criticism has affected the comments, making them difficult to read today in our altered circumstances. Yet all philosophy and theology since Luther has seen itself in relation to the same works, though in most cases reaching a different conclusion from Grundtvig’s. It is three hundred years of thought he is concerned with.Grundtvig denotes the fundamental concepts in his thought with the words: Sense, Knowledge, and Made in G od’s Image. By “sense” he means the faculties through which we apprehend existence, both the outer existence and the inner: sight, hearing, and feeling. With their aid man already in childhood builds up not only his environment but also his self-awareness. Here Grundtvig ascribes the fundamental sense to feeling. Sight, he says, is both the faculty through which we receive images of the outer world, but also as the inner sense the faculty through which we create imaginative pictures of what we cannot see directly with the outer eye. Such pictures may be true or false, that is, illusions. When Grundtvig had his visions, he regarded the true visions as brought about by God, and the false as produced by “the Father of Lies”, the Devil. Hearing, the sense through which we perceive words and thus learn to speak, is for Grundtvig the basis of human reason, which he considers a faculty developed later and which could therefore under no circumstances be the basis of the human psyche.The creation of man in God’s image, as both the Old and the New Testament relate it, means that man is made to resemble his Maker, though from the outset he is in no way a complete image of God. Rather, he finds himself in a slow development towards this goal; a development that is still marked by the Fall. Grundtvig has given his first exposition of his thinking on the subject in the unfinished second edition of Brief Prospect of World Chronicle, the first edition of which appeared in 1812. These pages from 1814 are reprinted at the front of this edition of Grundtvig Studies.Grundtvig’s understanding of the old Danish word, vidskab, (knowledge) is as the intellectual superstructure of the sciences through which we form our world-view. He demanded of himself that his ideas should be understandable to every thinking person, and that they should be expressed in pure Danish without the loan-words constructed by philosophers. Naturally they should also be in agreement with common sense as well as classical logic. He paid no heed to Kant’s Critique o f Pure Reason, which is a major reason why he has been attacked for being unable to understand what he read and unable to think sensibly himself. Søren Kierkegaard chose a different tactic in his criticism of contemporary thought, but Kierkegaard’s tactic in no way changed Grundtvig’s views. Understanding Grundtvig therefore requires that one begins from the same starting-point that he offered his readers, even though posterity has called it naive realism.Part of fundamental experience, says Grundtvig, is that every person is both body and spirit, and that the bodily and the spiritual cannot be separated in the living person. He calls this permanent link between body and spirit man’s Self or Soul.Since man’s life is limited in time and moves in only a limited space, Grundtvig believes that time and space are also limited, are not endless. Man is not master of time and space; but he can imagine beings living an endless existence which is called everlasting. From this comes the idea of an everlasting life.Such ideas come into being through the Word, by which Grundtvig does not mean constructed sound symbols but something that the child learns from the other people it trusts. In this way man comes to trust the super-human word too: God’s Word. It is from this Word of God that the world man lives in and man himself are created. This idea is not the experience of the individual, however, but something which belongs to mankind’s, i.e. all men’s common experience, which Grundtvig calls History. No man has experienced the creation of the world, but ideas of it have been transmitted from man to man through history. Grundtvig calls his view of man and the life of man a historical view of man. However, he does not regard this view as science (videnskab) but only knowledge (vidskab). He also avoids the word “philosophy” in his thought because his view goes against the conttemporary misuse of the word.Grundtvig’s thought rejects every philosophy which claims to explain man and his existence solely through human reason and without regard to man’s limitation in time and space. Instead he maintains that we can only know human life through the experience of individual peoples and the whole human race, i.e. through History. This is the criticism he makes in the first of his “reflections”, which has the title On the Philosophical Century, a term that comprises the philosophy of the 18th century from Christian Wolf to Schelling.According to Grundtvig the task of philosophy and the sciences is to understand mankind. But when he contemplates man as an image of his Creator, he maintains that man knows what he is an image of, even though he cannot conceive it. He can only conceive himself. His task is to attain a true picture of himself - “to conceive oneself in Truth”. Grundtvig believes this means conceiving man as the inconceivable God has created him.In his criticism of the philosophy of the 18th century Grundtvig does not mention Leibniz. But in his World Chronicle from 1817 he does mention his Théodicée (1710). He admits that the defence of Christianity which Leibniz presents was built on the same logical foundation as his own view, namely the basic principle of contradiction. But he nevertheless claims that this foundation was an illusion. For Christianity exceeds all human reason, though it is not in conflict with it. And if one wishes to support Christianity with philosophical proof, one risks leading it to destruction: “Supports are ready to fall, and what rests on them wobbles when it is pushed. ” This was almost what happened when Leibniz’s pupil, Christian Wolf, built his system on Leibniz’s philosophy. And this is why Grundtvig’s criticism of 18th century philosophy begins with Christian Wolf.What is the core of Grundtvig’s criticism? What is the main purpose of this lengthy presentation, which appeared just as obscure to contemporary readers as it does to present-day readers, however willing they may be to follow him?Grundtvig’s criticism of “the philosophical century” is to the effect that man is attempting the impossible: to conceive who or what has created the world and man himself, God. This is impossible, if only because man is incapable of conceiving anything greater than himself and his existence, limited by time and space. He can imagine something greater but he cannot conceive it. He can believe in God and an everlasting life, but neither God nor everlasting life can he conceive philosophically.Man’s philosophical and scientific task is limited to understanding himself and his existence in time and space. And since he only knows his development up to the point at which he lives, he cannot achieve any systematic description or explanation of human life in its entirety, as that would require a development he does not know of.This is the core of Grundtvig’s thought and of his criticism of the philosophy of his time and of previous centuries. But it may well be difficult to perceive or deduce this from his first philosophical consideration in Danevirke, partly due to the polemical tone and the words and thoughts that are foreign to us, and partly because his way of thinking is disfigured by a terrible misprint in his criticism of this philosophy which was the basis of all contemporary thought. It is not especially Kant that Grundtvig singles out; he is attacking every philosophy which maintains that human reason can conceive a being which is created by itself, absolutely independent of anything else. He then continues: “... and what it cannot conceive it cannot itself be either, since reason is in no way outside (udenfor) as far as it conceives... - as if Grundtvig would argue against the idea that reason was “outside”. That is not his aim. The sentence only makes sense when the word udenfor is separated into its component parts: It then reads: “... since reason is not, unless it conceives; it is a concept, and in us a temporal concept which cannot possibly conceive anything eternal and unchangeable; and the self-dependent is eternal, the self-dependent living truth is unchangeable.”This was Grundtvig’s main assertion in the dispute over Schelling’s philosophy. It is extended here to cover the whole of “the philosophical century” and thus Kant’s philosophy too. God is and will remain inconceivable. One can believe in Him, but one cannot conceive Him. Religion can just as little be replaced as supported by philosophy. Grundtvig refuses to accept the philosophical artifice of turning time and space into categories of human thought (and thus in principle everlasting).Man cannot conceive eternal truth. But he can conceive that nothing can be true if it excludes man as he really is. For eternal truth has created man as he is.This is the use to which Grundtvig puts the basic principle of contradiction in his view of the relationship between reason and faith. He does not attempt to prove that God exists, or what faculties He has, or that He created the world and man. But he does maintain that whoever denies that God can create and has created the world contradicts himself. For man does exist, and has created neither himself nor the world - nor his own reason.Grundtvig goes no further in his application of the basic principle of contradiction in the essay. But he claims that he has the right to use it in his evaluation of men’s deeds throughout history; see also Henning H.irup's doctorate: Grundtvig’s View o f Faith and Knowledge (Copenhagen 1949).The purpose of this first consideration is not only to contradict contemporary philosophy but to make room for historical knowledge. Grundtvig elaborates his concepts in two other essays: On Historical Knowledge and On Developing the Chronicle in the same volume. His aim with all three articles - and with the periodical in general - was to marshal an alternative to the contemporary view that it was possible to adduce another ground for an understanding of human life than historical knowledge, that is, in a speculative natural philosophy. According to Grundtvig History shows that man is “a being in the process of developing himself’. He asserts that what is developing itself must already be present in man as “woven into” him. He himself cannot generate it, he must conceive it. God’s revelation as man does not mean that man has produced God, but that he is made in God’s image. So when Grundtvig speaks here of God’s “revelation in time”, he is not thinking of religious experiences but incontrovertible historical events.

Abstract For centuries, philosophers and theologians debated the meaning of monstrous births. This article describes the debates that took place in the early modern period concerning the origins of monstrous births and examines how they might be relevant to our understanding of disability today. I begin with the central questions that accompanied the birth of conjoined twins in the early 17th century as well as the theological origins of those questions. I then show the shifts that occurred in philosophical debate in the 18th century, which reveal the changing understanding of God’s interaction with creation, as well as the burgeoning medical responses to monstrous births. By reexamining these earlier debates, I claim some of the earlier questions posed by philosophers and theologians have been neglected but remain relevant in bioethics debates concerning how best to consider and treat newborns with certain disabilities.

Ann Griffiths, an 18th-century farm wife and hymn writer, is well-known in her native Wales, though relatively unstudied in English. Even in translation her hymns and letters offer a strikingly beautiful as well as informative window into the Trinitarian spirituality of 18th-century Welsh Methodism. Historically, her Trinitarianism is notable in that it is largely assumed and primarily based in the economic Trinity, and yet, is nonetheless profound in its orthodoxy given the Trinitarian controversy of the long century prior. More than mere historical curiosity, however, Griffiths’s writing is particularly intriguing on two points that can edify the church today. First, she writes with considerable theological depth despite a lack of education, religious or otherwise, and second, her theology is both technically rich as well as profoundly devotional.

En las primeras páginas de la Histoire de l’empire de Russie sous Pierre le Grand, publicada entre 1759 y 1763, Voltaire presenta una serie de reflexiones acerca del método que se debería seguir al escribir un trabajo histórico y de las características que debería tener un historiador ideal. El objetivo de este trabajo es evaluar en qué medida el texto se ajusta a la metodología que Voltaire se propone seguir. Se intenta mostrar que el autor se aleja por momentos de la misma, poniendo en riesgo el plan de la obra. Por otra parte, el artículo pone de relieve ciertas diferencias ideológicas y epistemológicas entre Voltaire y Diderot a propósito de la historia rusa, algo que puede resultar llamativo, en la medida en que sus textos son colocados, en general, bajo las mismas categorías historiográficas. En un plano más general, el texto arroja algunas luces acerca de la teoría de la historia en el siècle des Lumières.

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, I wish to discuss the origins of The Swedish Academy Dictionary against the backdrop of the social and cultural history of lexicography in 18th and 19th century Europe. Second, to consider material aspects of lexicography – the dictionary as interface – in light of German media scientist Friedrich Kittler’s “media materialism”. Ultimately, both purposes intend to describe how letters and writing have been constructed and arranged through-out the course of history. In Kittler’s view, “the intimization of literature”, that took place during second half of the 18th century, brought about a fundamental change in the way language and text were perceived. However, parallel to this development an institutionalization and disciplining of language and literature took place. The rise of modern society, the nation state, print capitalism and modern science in 18th century Europe necessitated (and were furthered by) a disciplining of language and literature. This era was for these reasons a golden age for lexicographers and scholars whose work focused on the vernacular. In this article the rise of the alphabetically ordered dictionary and the corresponding downfall of the topical dictionary that occurred around 1700 is regarded as a technological threshold. This development is interesting not only within the field of history of lexicography, but arguably also, since information and thought are connected to the basic principles of mediality, this development has bearings on the epistemo-logical revolution of the 18th century witnessed in, among other things, Enlightenment thought and literature.

The 150th anniversary of the death of N.M. Maksimovich-Ambodik, an outstanding Russian doctor of the 18th century, the ancestor of Russian obstetrics. He was born in Ukraine, in the village of Veprike, Poltava province. Intended by his parents for a spiritual career and was sent to study at the Kiev Theological Academy, but, disillusioned with theology, he left it in order to study legal sciences.