A Nativity Scene ("presepe") near Florence this year. This way of celebrating Christmas never went out of fashion in Southern Europe, and perhaps never will (but you may never know). It is part of the effort of making communication possible between people who don't speak the same language. The Catholic Church tried this method with some success, maybe we can learn something useful from this experience.
This is another non-catastrophistic post on the "Seneca Effect" blog, but don't worry. We'll return to doom and gloom next year.
The "Nativity Scene" is a traditional way to celebrate Christmas in Catholic countries, especially in Southern Europe. In Italy, it is known as the "presepe," a term that originally meant the "manger" where the baby Jesus was placed. If you have been a child in a country where this use is common, you cannot escape the fascination and the magic of these scenes. And, indeed, they make for a much more creative effort than the more recent tradition of the Christmas tree. Making a presepe may involve collecting moss from the garden to simulate the grass, making lakes using aluminum foil, creating trees with toothpicks and green-painted sponge chunks, a starry sky using blue paper with holes and, finally, the star of Bethlehem made, again, from aluminum foil.
As usual, for everything that exists, there is a reason for it to exist. And that holds also for Nativity Scenes. In the end, these scenes are forms of non-verbal communication. The fundamental point of religions such as Islam and Christianity is their universality. They accept all races, languages, regions, and cultures. That brings a problem of communication: how can an imam or a priest communicate with the faithful if they don't have a common language?
In the case of Islam, God spoke to the prophet Muhammad in Arabic, and that remains the sacred language of the faithful. Of course, modern Arabs do not easily understand the language spoken at the time of Muhammad and not all Muslims are native speakers of Arabic. But Islam focuses on the Quran, encouraging the faithful to study and understand its language. Islam is a text-based religion expressed mainly by the human voice of the mu'azzin. It sees images with diffidence,
For Christianity, the problem was much more difficult. God spoke to the prophets in Hebrew, the language of the Bible. Then, Jesus Christ spoke most likely Aramaic, whereas the Gospels were written in Greek. Then, when the center of Christianity moved to Rome, the holy texts were translated into Latin, which came to be seen as one of the main languages of Christianity. In addition, Christianity diffused rapidly into regions, such as Western Europe, which had emerged from the collapse of the Roman Empire as a hodgepodge of very different languages with different roots.
So, it made sense for the Christian Church to use visual imagery to carry the message to everybody. That was an early characteristic of Christianity, for instance, the sentence in Greek ("Iēsous Christos, Theou Yios, Sōtēr") (Jesus Christ Son of God, Savior) was turned into an acronym that could be read as "ichthys," which means "fish" and therefore could be expressed as the image of a fish. Not every Christian understood Greek, but everyone could recognize a fish.
Hello Ugo. You seem to have a bad link in the paragraph "Some of these "parks" still exist today. Below, you see an example from the San Vitale " ... clicking on the highlighted phrase "still exist today" brings a page not found error.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand a post on Nativity scenes is a very good idea, they are a very original form of decoration, and appeal to many who are not regular church goers.
Fixed, thanks. I had also misspelled "San Vivaldo" into "San Vitale"
ReplyDeleteSeriously, don't worry too much about different languages today - the manual read from - by all - is one, anyway...
ReplyDeleteI carefully compare between contents made on the net - in 3 languages...
They seem all taken from one manual - as if all are reading from one book of instructions for a dish-washing machine...
"World War III is actually ongoing" - English. "WW III already started " - Russian. "WW III is coming" - Arabic - and all of them give the exact same explanation on - why that is - letter by letter, phrase by phrase.
This is despite the cultural differences, geographies, locales and others - as if each speaker/author of them has spitted in the mouth of the other (an Iraqi saying on when parties agreed behind scene but pretend not knowing each other)...
The Fuel source is one and the Control is one, therefore the Theme all over the world is one - no matter how languages spoken are different...
"Science poetry?" - English. "Say Entropy, instead..." - Russian. "Is this true or philosophy?" - Arabic;
"In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most.
Energy, like time, flows from past to future"
Wailing.
Thanks, the linked article was worthwhile, as so many Cassandra posts (that I never saw when they were newly published) are. Do you remember "the media is the message" a book from the 70s? It seems like the electronic media are all just pictures now, with lots of short lived memes, and very little text. Maybe a bullet list or some celebrity names, but nothing too hard to read ... ArtDeco.
ReplyDeleteT.S. Eliot might not have agreed with you.
ReplyDeleteHello Ugo, if I'm not wrong, you posted some time ago some info about an history researcher who is focusing his activity on the 'historical Jesus', therefore, all the information about Jesus just from historical point of view. I cannot find anymore your reference, can you please indicate it to me? Many thanks in advance. Stefano
ReplyDeleteCome on, anonymous, many researchers are working, and have been working, on that. Myself and my coworker Ilaria, present our personal reflection on Jesus in our book "The Empty Sea" -- in our opinion he was the PR manager of a cooperative of fishermen operating on the Sea of Galilee!
DeleteIn my comment I signed Stefano as it is exactly my name. No one is anonymous here.
DeleteSorry, I don't have any google account and just wanted to make a comment quickly.
It is a very strange answer from your side, I know many of them, I just wanted the one you suggested.
But as it is not possible, I wish you all the best anyway. Kind regards, Stefano
Ops... sorry, Stefano, I missed your signature. Anyway, an answer to your question is difficult for me perhaps more than it is for you. I wrote several posts on the subject. You can use the search button on "Cassandra's Legacy" to find them
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