The Turn of the Soul

by Stelling, Lieke; Hendrix, Harald; Richardson, Todd M.

• ISBN13: 9789004218567
• ISBN10: 9004218564
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-01-01
• Publisher: Brill Academic Pub

Summary

The religious upheavals of the early modern period and the fierce debate they unleashed about true devotion gave conversion an unprecedented urgency. With their rich variety of emotive, aesthetic and rhetoric means of expression, literature and the visual arts proved particularly well-adapted means to address, explore and represent the complex nature of conversion. At the same time, many artists and authors experimented with the notion that the expressive character of their work could cultivate a sensory experience for the viewer that enacted conversion. Indeed, focusing on conversion as one of early modern Europe s most pressing religious issues, this volume demonstrates that conversion cannot be separated from the creative and spiritual ways in which it was given meaning.Contributors include Mathilde Bernard, John R. Decker, Xander van Eck, Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi, Lise Gosseye, Chloë Houston, Philip Major, Walter Melion, Bart Ramakers, E. Natalie Rothman, Alison Searle, Lieke Stelling, Jayme Yeo and Federico Zuliani.

Excerpts

INTRODUCTIONLieke Stelling and Todd M. RichardsonThe religious upheavals of the early modern period and the fierce debate they unleashed about true devotion gave conversion an unprecedented urgency. Whereas artists and authors had always been inspired by it, literary, artistic and technical developments in the Renaissance incited them to capture, represent and communicate the elusive concept of religious transformation in new ways. Never before did the practice of conversion appear in so many guises; indeed, never before were there so many doctrines and forms of piety to embrace or forswear. Prior to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, moreover, religious conversion had not been as intermingled with secular issues, such as politics, nationality and commerce, as it was in Renaissance Europe. There are three developments in particular that fostered the renewed interest in pious renewal or the exchange of religions: the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Western European colonial enterprises in the Americas, Africa and Asia, and the Ottoman colonial expansion.During the Reformation, new models of devotion to reach conversion were introduced that challenged traditional ideas of spiritual reform. Stressing humanity's complete dependence on God's grace, Luther and Calvin considered conversion first and foremost a divine intervention naturally flowing from God's righteousness and manifesting itself in repentance. Indeed, Calvin, in his Institutes, claimed that 'the whole of conversion to God is understood under the term 'repentance', and faith is not the least part of conversion'. At the same time, the Reformation also opened up a range of new possibilities for changing one's denominational identity. 'Conversion' now also implied the shift from one Christian fold to another form of Christianity. As such, conversion came to play a significant role within religious polemics, and was more than ever a political statement. The Christianization of Jews, too, was an issue within these debates. From around the end of the sixteenth century a belief developed that the conversion of the Jews would herald the Apocalypse. Many Reformers, including Luther, believed that the Jews' adoption of Christianity 'had awaited the preaching of the true Gospel'. Thus the conversion of the Jews, foreshadowed by Christianizations of individual Jews, served as a powerful argument in defence of Protestantism. Rome, in turn, responded to these ideas by forcing Jews to attend conversion sermons, hoping they would turn Catholic.The European colonial expansion into Africa, Asia and the New World created an industry for the training of missionaries, with a central focus on methods of conversion. For Peter Martyr, the chronicler of the Spanish explorations in central and Latin America, proselytizing was the first objective that sprang to mind when he realised that indigenous peoples were, as Stephen Greenblatt puts it, 'a tabula rasa ready to take the imprint of European civilization'. Martyr notes:for lyke as rased or vnpaynted tables, are apte to receaue what formes soo euer are fyrst drawen theron by the hande of the paynter, euen soo these naked and simple people, doo soone receaue the customes of owre Religion, and by conuersation with owre men, shake of theyr fierce and natiue barbarousnes.English colonists were no less zealous in their missionary ambitions. The Virginia settlers deployed various strategies to convince the Indians of the Protestant truth. The Virginia Company went as far as to instruct its Governor to take away or even execute the Indians' 'iniocasockes or Priestes'. Yet most conversion attempts were directed at children who had to be 'procured and instructed in the English language and manner'. The asymmetrical power relations between colonizer and colonized, however, often proved an obstacle to successful proselytizing. For instance, in 1622 disturbed trade relationships between the native inhabitants and the English residents in Jamestown resulted in the killing of a quarter of the English inhabitants, which temporarily ended conversion efforts.Scholars have pointed out that while many European seafaring nations were busy exploring and conquering indigenous territories in the New World, they simultaneously felt the threat of being colonized by the expanding Ottoman sultanate. This was the largest Islamic territory of early modern Europe, which, during its peak in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, stretched from the northern coast of northern Africa to Iraq and western Iran and from modern Turkey to south-east Europe. The Western European anxieties about Ottoman expansion were not unsubstantiated, if only because Islamic military forces managed to capture Christians in their European homelands. Yet European Christians were vexed more by the perceived vast number of voluntary conversions to Islam than by their enslaved compatriots who defected from their faith. Having turned pirate, many impoverished Christians came in contact with the Ottomans when they called in at Turkish ports or other cosmopolitan cities like Venice. In these places they managed to improve their worldly luck significantly by striking deals with the Ottomans and 'turning Turk'. This is not surprising if we realise that the make-up of the Ottoman society allowed for social, political and economic mobility to a much greater extent than European societies at the time. Moreover, '[t]he Ottoman Empire was a lavish provider of booty for daring and resourceful employees. This attractive power was recognized and understood by European contemporaries'. Renegades were able to join the army and even occupy important positions in administration. In 1606, a Turkish army officer proudly noted that he had command of 30,000 Christians who 'are the founders of our artillerie, and other Instruments of warre' and who are all 'Renegados' battling 'in defence of our lawe, and with vs to conquer your country'.It is not without irony that what the Western Christian tradition has deemed the prime examples of religious conversion, those of Paul of Tarsus and Augustine of Hippo, are also the most elusive and complex. This is partly due to the fact that not only is Augustine's regeneration inconceivable without Paul's, but the Christian conception of Paul's conversion is also determined by Augustine's reading of it. At the same time, both changes of heart as well as their reciprocity allow us to gain insight into the wide array of meanings and forms of divine experience that are indicated by the term 'conversion'.Paul only very briefly touches on his spiritual transformation in his Epistles. He describes it as a divine call inciting him to turn from his zealous persecution of the followers of Christ and to spread Jesus' gospel. Paul did not use a phrase that directly translates as 'religious conversion' when he referred to his experience, which can partly be explained by the fact that 'conversion' is hardly a biblical term. As Frederick Gaiser reminds us, 'readers of the English version of the Bible will run across terms like conversion or convert(s) or to convert only rarely […]. Yet definitions abound, and the phenomenon the unconditional turning of the human toward God is seen as fundamental to biblical religion'. Many of these definitions relate to the concept of repentance, a word that does occur regularly in Scripture. Three terms in the Old and New Testament that are often understood as conversion are the Hebrew word shubh and the Greek epistrefein and metanoein. Shubh literally means 'return', but is often explained as 'repent', for example in Jeremiah 3:14Turn [shubh], O backsliding children, sait