medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
A few thoughts...
On this list, we're dealing with medieval religion/philosophy, certainly riddled with anti-semitism mingled with interesting ideas, many of which are still with us today. We simply separate the wheat from the chaff.
Someone mentioned Plato. I find enormous similarities among Plato, Paul, Augustine and Jung. Is this a condemnation of all four, of one of the four?
Psychology, like religion and philosophy, is an art not a science, much as some psychologists like to think it is. We discuss, as a matter of course and as the subject of this list, all sorts of things whose "objective reality" we cannot prove.
The notion of "collective unconscious" and "archetypes" _may_ have sprung from 19th-c. rationalist attempts to disprove religious beliefs. J.G.Fraser's _Golden Bough_ points out the similarities in myths and legends across cultures, continents and time periods; he particularly attacked the idea of Christ's death and resurrection. Joseph Campbell's _Hero with a Thousand Faces_ and Jesse Weston's (sp?) _From Ritual to Romance_ (also Northrop Frye's _Anatomy of Criticism_) ran with the idea and deeply influenced literary criticism, which has proven much more amenable to archetypal/psychological criticism than has critical study of the visual arts.
I find the similarities in shapes, images, figures, motifs, etc. that Rochelle pointed out deeply fascinating. Can any of these hypotheses be proven? Not a chance. Are they worth discussing in academic circles? I think so. For me, anything capable of proof isn't worth discussing ;-)))
MG
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