Suchergebnisse

Until quite recently the major polytheistic religious systems have been approached from essentially two different angles: as relics of primitive mentality or as the prefiguration of type of monotheism similar to Judaeo-Christianism. The study of these religions per se has been limited to philological and historical analysis. The changes in the field of religious studies during the last thirty years have affected the sociology anthro pology and history of religions and make it possible to state new terms the problems of the comparative method as applied to the ancient religions. This article treats the Greek example and in the three areas of the ritual (sacrifice), myths, and figurative system of symbols attempts to define the contents of cooperative research programme which specialists could undertake with the purpose of establishing for the written civilizations of the past, a differential typology of religious systems.

Charles J. Halperin, Tverian political thought in the fifteenth century.
The pokhval'noe slovo (word of praise) to Grand Prince Boris Aleksandrovich of Tver' attributed to the monk Foma has not been correctly interpreted as an expression of Tverian political thought in the fifteenth century. First, although it does discuss the Council of Florence, it never accuses the Greeks of apostasy, and therefore its use of Byzantine Imperial epithets and titulature do not constitute an attempted translatio imperio such as is found in the Muscovite tales of the Council, or later in the theory of Moscow-the Third Rome. Secondly, Foma's careful usage suggests that the Muscovite monopoly of the myth of the Russian Land had not been broken by Muscovy's civil war, and that the more provincial concept of the Tverian Land is used by Foma in its stead. Such "land" (zemli) terminology in Old Russian political thought has not been sufficiently studied.

We have Bonaparte to thank for the notion and even the expression « la grande nation », in any case it was the who transmitted it to the Directoire in July 1797, like an echo of an expression used by a delegation of the people from peninsular Greece. The author follows the path of the idea — half-way between truth and myth— and sets it back into the context of Bonaparte's Ottoman policy; the author studies the latter's vision of a Greek national revival and on a wider scale the ideas he took from Volney who launched the theme in his Ruins. Bonaparte's thinking on the near East and his contacts with the Ottoman world allow him to define, through the Grande Nation concept, a symbolic expression of a republican revival, partly the fruit of his victories but which, in its deepest reality, already announces the Empire. In any case, the expression taken up and has great and immediate success in the context of the Directoire's propaganda war.