The paper deals with a popular type of the Annunciation lyric in medieval English poetry. A brief survey of the role of the angelic announcement to Mary in medieval art and culture is given. The argument then pursues several distinctive traits of this kind of lyric in a number of poems from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. The distinguishing features include a tripartite structure, a common set of words, phrases, ideas and images, emphasis on singing, a spring setting, tryst between lovers, and the use of popular genres, particularly ballads and carols. By analogy with music, it is argued that a certain popular code for the Annunciation existed, against which interesting artistic transformations of the theme were introduced. For example, the Annunciation was evoked in a highly compressed and allusive manner by means of but a few elements of the code. The principal elements of the alleged code derived from popular art and imagination. Their application to theological issues frequently led to the blurring of boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and between the Christian and the pagan. The paper proposes a distinction between Lent and alleluia subtypes of the Annunciation lyric. It also demonstrates how the pastourelle, aubade, and chanson d'aventure conventions of secular love poetry were adapted to represent the Annunciation. Finally, it suggests a connection between the lyric "At a spryng wel" and a specific statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, like the much-reverenced statue of Our Lady at Walsingham.
Lost in Secular Love full crack [key]
Accordingly, and following further Weber's linkage ofmysticism and individualism, rather than prophetical communalism, one wouldexpect any such re-essentialization of the Christian message to move in thedirection of a more mystical Jesus--as in Jung (1959) on Christ as archetypeof the Self, Teilhard de Chardin (1959) on all life as divinely incarnated,and Simone Weil (1951/2009; Hunt, 2017) on the suffering of Jesus opening toa mystical grace. Already Gurdjieff (1973; in Ouspensky, 1949) had describedhis Sufi-inspired system as an "esoteric Christianity," suggestingthat a truly Christian love could only have been originally empowered for theearliest Christians by the inner strength of felt presence conferred by thecharismatic impact of Jesus and his key disciples. Christian doctrines oflove and forgiveness could only be fully sustained through that sense ofenergized numinous presence. One can see how coming to fully believe that allone's past sins had been completely and finally forgiven, and that allfollowing this path of love--"On Earth as it is in Heaven"--couldnever die, would have created and empowered this sense of a timeless here andnow presence--with feelings of grace and gratitude and love of othersemerging out that sense of empowerment (Hunt, 2012). It would be, forGurdjieff, this experience of vitally embodied beingness, supporting theethics of love and compassion, that would more easily have been lost in alater mainstream Christianity.
While Reich was clearly influenced here, his Murder of Christ(1953), despite its reiterated bitterness over his government persecution andhis identification with an impending martyrdom, develops its own version ofJesus as this-worldly sensate mystic--its importance for Reich reflected bothin his diaries and in the many books on the historical Jesus in his personallibrary (Reich, 1994; Sharaf, 1983). Without the dogmas of virgin birth orafterlife, his Jesus--with his "soft glow" and "orgonoticradiance" (Reich, 1953, p. 35) would have known the fullness of genitallove--consistent with more recent discoveries of some of the Gnostic gospels(King, 2003; Kasser, Meyer, & Wurst, 2006). Actual dying for Reichbecomes a near-death experience of mergence back into cosmic orgone, whilethe incarnation becomes Reich's hope for "the newborn infant, theeternal child of the future," with its "inborn potentialities"finally understood and supported (Reich, 1953, p. 197). 2ff7e9595c
Comments