Original scientific paper
"THE MIRACLE" AS A LITERARY DESTINATION (INTERSECTION) IN COMMUNICATION BETWEEN TWO WORLDS, THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL, IN THE BIOGRAPHIES OF THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURY SAINTS IN CROATIAN LITERATURE
Divna Zečević
; Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagren, Croatia
Abstract
The biographies of the saints, as examples and models for imitation,
represent exciting, edifying, and entertaining texts intended for all
the social strata. Imitation is the final degree in the practice of
lessons in piety: legere, credere, docere, imitare (to read, to believe,
to edify, to imitate).
The present is not without ambiguity, since eternity is reflected
within it. Everyday life assumes value in the very fact of how much
eternity it contains, meaning the fear of God and love for God, and,
consequently, the life here and now is a transitional form of life, the
battlefield for the future i.e. for eternal life.
The lives of the saints unfold in the cleft and struggle between
the two worlds: members of Humankind live in this world so as to
confirm their rightful place in the other, sublime world, the afterlife.
The lives of the saints emerged from the belief that both worlds are
in close, mutual permeation. Miracles arose as a literary form of
communication between the two firmly connected worlds: the
physical and the metaphysical; we could say that a miracle takes
place when nothing but a miracle remains, as a sudden paradoxical
incision of the supernatural into the natural world.
Keywords
religious literature; biographies of the saints, sermons; models to be imitated; the aesthetics of the paradox
Hrčak ID:
33479
URI
Publication date:
13.6.2000.
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