Article

Name: The Theme of the Heart in the Great Mirror Collection and Its Reception in the Well-Known Russian Hagiological Narrative about the Antiochian Bishop Ignatius the God-Bearer

Authors: Svetlana K. Sevastyanova

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Literary Life of the Plot

Abstract:

This article focuses the theme of the heart, a particularly compelling element in the collection “The Great Mirror”. Special attention is paid to narratives about the heart with the marks of God (the literal inscription of the name of Jesus upon the heart). Employing a comprehensive approach to Old Russian literature, visual arts, and church historiography, the author identifies a range of Russian-language liturgical and hagiographic texts about Ignatius the God-Bearer. These texts are compared with the account in “The Great Mirror” describing the saint’s death. While the surviving hagiological sources about St. Ingatius (liturgical texts and three lives of saints) do not directly address his heart, this theme can be found in the Cheti-Minei (Menaion Reader) by Demetrius of Rostov. In spite of being a supporter of Orthodox doctrine, the bishop did not reject certain Western cultural influences, skillfully interpolating them into Orthodox confessional culture to strengthen it. In his writing on Ignatius, he softened the physiological emphasis of Western Christian symbolism of the heart, alien to the Orthodox conceptual understanding of the image. Instead, he established within in Orthodox cardiognosticism the image of the heart, rooted in Holy Scripture and patristic teachings, as a symbol of Christ, the center of the Orthodox faith, and the “cell” of prayer. The collective body of hagiological texts on Ignatius the God-Bearer allows us to interpret the Antiochian bishop’s declared identification of a Christian with the God-Bearer as a likeness of Christ in a broad ecclesiological sense, and the image of the heart ‘filled with God’ as a symbol of Orthodoxy.

Keywords: the theme of the heart with the signs of God, the collection “The Great Mirror”, Bishop of Anti-och Ignatius the God-Bearer, hagiological narrative, Saint Demetrius of Rostov

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