The exterior of the mosque. Photo: Anna-Liisa Tolonen

The city of Córdoba hosts a remarkable monument, which has two names: Mezquita and Cathedral. According to travel guides, the building is a former mosque which could include up to 40 000 persons. It is also the main church of Córdoba at which Christians regularly gather to celebrate the Mass.

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The history of the city, as well as that of all Andalusia, is characterized by diversity of religions. In the 12th century, the Jewish scholar Maimonides as well as the Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (known also as Averroes) lived and worked in Córdoba, in which one of the world’s largest libraries was located.

After the conquest in 1236, the minaret of the mosque was converted to the bell tower of the cathedral. Photo: Anna-Liisa Tolonen

A visitor may find the beauty and sense of harmony of the mosque-cathedral reassuring. At the same time, the space evokes anxiety. Is this peaceful coexistence, religious traditions in smooth historical continuum or blatantly against one another? Are both Islam and Christianity presented equally or is one repressed by the other? And where does the over and over conquered site hide the Jewish history which is also characteristic of the area?

Fine pieces of both Muslim and Christian architecture coexist and collide in the mosque-cathedral. Photo: Anna-Liisa Tolonen

Religious tolerance and recognition were themes discussed at the annual meeting of the European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS) organized this year in Córdoba. In a seminar focused on early Christianity, eleven scholars presented their work. Among them were also Outi Lehtipuu, Anna-Liisa Tolonen, and Ismo Dunderberg, representing Reason and Religious Recognition CoE. Lehtipuu evaluated early church fathers’ recognitions of women in their comments on “no longer male and female … in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). Tolonen discussed early Christian identity politics: (how) could same figures be respected both as Jews and as martyrs for Christ? Dunderberg presented Origen’s attitude toward his rival Heracleon, whose thoughts Origen transmits in critical but also approving manner.

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In the concluding discussion of the seminar, themes of tolerance and recognition met with ideological-critical questions about power and violence. The participants reflected on the naming of events and phenomena, which often already involves certain positions, attitudes as well as problems. The study of encounter between different religions does not lead into simplifying either–or conclusions; rather, it may challenge us to understand history in greater diversity. While it is irresponsible to deny or belittle conflicts, a critical analysis of coexistence cannot be satisfactory if only apparent contradictions dominate our views of history.

Text: Outi Lehtipuu & Anna-Liisa Tolonen

Holberg Prize Laureate 2015, Marina Warner invited five young Nordic scholars to a Masterclass on “Living in Words: The Question of Myth”. Warner – a novelist,  historian and mythographer – has focused on stories and story-telling, “[b]oth from the perspective of illusion, which often has an ideological and political component, and all the way across to the conception of myth as a deeper and poetic truth … to explore long-lasting, but often disregarded forms of expression, such as popular stories and vernacular imagery in order to understand interactions of culture and ethics.”

Marina Warner (left), Houman Sadri from the University of Gothenburg, Marion Poilvez from the University of Iceland, Eemeli Hakoköngäs from the University of Helsinki, Anna-Liisa Tolonen from the University of Helsinki, and Per Esben Svelstad from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Photo: Julia Beate Bådsvik / The Holberg Prize Organizers.

I was one among the participants of the Masterclass, encouraged to share from the stories I work with and to explore the ways they make sense of the world around. This is the written version of my presentation at the occasion.

* * *
A mother was taken captive and her seven sons with her. They were all brought before the king. He commanded the eldest of the boys to renounce his religion but the boy, proving that the king had no authority over him, refused. He was put to death immediately. The same happened to all the brothers, one after another, until only the one last was left. At this point, the king turns to the mother.
“See what I have done! Come, tell your youngest one to obey me. Save his future and yours.”
So she obeys and steps forth. She talks to her son in their common native language. Then the boy, only a child, rushes to the king wanting to be killed like his brothers and as quickly as possible.

Now only the mother and the king are left, surrounded by the corpses of her dead sons. And I am puzzled; the story is not finished yet but I do not know how to go on.

* * *
Everyone who opens their Bible should realize that they are not alone. Even when it is kept closed, the Bible talks in our cultures and societies with multiple voices, because in it, as in many other holy scriptures, different stories abound. It is often impossible to discern the oral traditions, which preceded – and perhaps determined – the known literary versions of the stories. But it is just as impossible to claim that their oral communication would have disappeared, as if the written word had replaced it. The Bible is recited, sung, illustrated, translated, excerpted, reorganized and so forth on a daily basis… Some of its parts may be put to sleep for a hundred years; yet, there are no letters so dead that they could not be brought back to life.

Photo: Anna-Liisa Tolonen

The oral communication of scriptures never ceased and much of what makes up the Bible continued its life also outside of it. Such is the case of the story you just heard, about the mother who lost her seven sons. I wrote it down last week, oneThursday morning at work. But I also took it from “the Bible”, from the Books of the Maccabees (2 Macc 7; 4 Macc 8:1–18:24), or from the Rabbis, from Christian hagiography, from the hymns of the Oriental Churches, the frescoes, or the medieval illustrations of the Psalter…

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The story of the mother and her seven sons is traditionally known in two different historical contexts of conflict and resistance. In the Christian traditions – and from the Middle Ages onward, increasingly also in Jewish traditions – it is often told as part of the history of the Maccabean Revolt (160s bce). The seven sons are known as martyrs, fearless witnesses for faith, and their mother is credited above all for her steadfastness and selflessness/altruism. They help to save their nation from tyranny.

Taking the role of adult men who are absent from the scene, the mother and her young offspring exemplify the virtues of courage and manliness. They rise to represent the backbone and morale of their oppressed community. Their example stresses everyone’s involvement and commitment to the cause, for if these people could do it, what excuse could anyone else have not to bother…?

In the Rabbinic traditions, the story is told in the context of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem. The mother with her sons shows herself a heroic but desperate figure, illustrating in an emotional way the bitter fate of the destroyed city and its people.

But here, winners and losers are not determined according to casualties. Rather, the woman and her children counter masculine presentations of power. By their tragic passive aggression, incapability as well as unwillingness to conquer, they not only reveal the weakness of their persecutors but also question the value of religious submission and challenged well-known examples of heroic faith, such as that of Abraham.

In addition to conflict situations, where resistance needs to be motivated and defeat glorified, stories of martyrdom are also told during times of peace. The memories of martyrs are cherished to prompt maintenance of a distinct religious identity. They warn against cultural assimilation, which the story-tellers often associates with spiritual laziness. It is dangerous to feel at home in a foreign environment… Whatever the situation, one should make sure to educate one’s children like the mother of those seven boys.

The conclusion of the story, the part which I was hesitant about, exemplifies the multi-functionality of stories in an outstanding way. Why? Because we can’t decide what happens to the mother! The story-tellers in East and West, from early on, stress her role in the event. It is really only the mother’s destiny that signifies the point of the whole story. We are interested in knowing how she felt and managed the situation. But it is as if she had left us with a range of alternatives. At one extreme, her joy and pride color the scene. Lifting her hands up in praise amidst the bloody scenery, as if rewarded, she astonishes us. They say she has become as hard – no, harder – than men. At the other extreme, she collapses, falls in despair, her mind breaks apart and she kills herself. She has been made into a graveyard. And in between these two, there are various mixes of cries and laughter, of loss and satisfaction, for each story-teller to make use of.

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Stories of martyrdom have potential for various uses, not least because of their power to narrate a conflict with a religious cause. They can give cosmic, universal, and moral dimensions to what was once a local catastrophe. History is skimmed through in order to (re)discover spiritual and practical examples of self-sacrifice at the frontier. Also suffering today requires reasons, justification, glorification, denial, victimization and humiliation.

* * *

In April 2012, I was in Jerusalem. With a friend of mine, we decided to attend a prayer for the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. It was an ecumenical event organized at a monastery. Christians, Muslims and Jews were invited. After the opening, a woman stepped forth. She held a photo of her four sons, who were all in jail, and she told us what had happened to them, one after another.

– Haraam, this woman has lost everything! I whispered to my friend. I was wondering if the poor widow was left with any relatives at all to provide for her. As we were there, in the to this day quite patriarchal society, my reaction came in as natural, or so I thought.

Photo: Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center

– But she is not alone, my friend responded, pointing to the man who was sitting in the first row. – That’s the father of the boys.

And I realized: she is the mother of my story! She gets to speak in public; she is the one to represent their broken home, the disfigured nation. She embodies the losses and hopes of these people, the right to resist and exist. I had a thousand questions: How do you do that? Whose mouth is that, whose tears, whose womb? Whose words do you use? What choices were you given? Are you not going insane? But I was not given answers; we were there to lament, to feel her pain perhaps, hoping to be comforted in her shadow.

And some two kilometers away, inside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, in the quiet of the Jewish quarter, there is a narrow shadowy alley with long steep stairs. Someone once told me that if ever I pass by, I should climb those stairs carefully, one by one. And there, I should recall a woman who once upon a time lost all her seven sons in just one day…

Text: Anna-Liisa Tolonen

Icon: Tuula Ahonen Photo: Timo Kilpeläinen/Lusto

The Fifth Nordic Conference in Philosophy of Religion brought to Helsinki a group of more than fifty scholars of philosophy, theology, and religious studies. The theme of the conference, organized by the Nordic Society of Philosophy of Religion and held June 8–11, was the origins of religion. Among the distinguished speakers were Simo Knuuttila, Ingolf Zackariasson, Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, and Jan-Olav Henriksen. In conjunction with the Nordic conference, the Centre of Excellence Reason and Religious Recognition hosted a special one-day symposium titled Religion and Recognition in co-operation with the Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies. In addition to talks given by members of the CoE, this symposium featured keynote talks by our international collaborators Wayne Proudfoot from Columbia University and Thomas Schmidt from Johan Wolfgang Goethe University. Proudfoot’s talk challenged Honneth’s theory of recognition on account of its failure to do proper justice to the phenomenon of religion. Schmidt, in turn, approached the theme of recognition from the perspective of a Hegel scholar. Also Heikki Ikäheimo – a representative of the “Jyväskylä School of Recognition”, as Thomas Schmidt put it – from the University of New South Wales gave an interesting talk on the potential causes for lack of recognition.

Hanne Appelqvist

More information about the conference

Nils Hallvard Korsvoll (MF Norwegian School of Theology)

In these two days of discussing various interfaces between texts and rituals it has become increasingly clear to me that the category scripture in itself is insufficient to describe the range of venues and contexts where we find biblical material. Tracing the presence and use of biblical text in various contexts, it seems we must treat scripture as an analytic rather than a descriptive category.

Presenting some observations from my own work on Syriac amulets from Late Antiquity, where the references to biblical stories are enigmatic in both their low number and in their vagueness, it was fascinating (and also a bit reassuring) to hear and see the papers from other fields and materials that also grapple with sliding notions and conceptions of scripture and its use in different contexts.

Several presenters engaged with the how biblical text is described and contextualised, exploring the notions of scripture and how this aligns with the biblical texts we find in our sources. Liv Ingeborg Lied (MF Norwegian School of Theology) drew up a thick description of the use of 2 Baruch in a 13th century lectionary manuscript from Deir as-Surian in Egypt, to illustrate that manuscript context and use is more than simply a witness to the 1st-2nd century work 2 Baruch. Benjamin Wold (Trinity College Dublin) addressed the notion and discussion around Torah in 4QInstruction, exploring what Torah here entails and means, and indeed whether this concept, as we know it, is at all present here. Ewa Balicka-Witakowska (Uppsala University) described and showed us examples of the on-going use of scroll-phylacteries in Ethiopia, tracing especially the figure of Solomon and his great magical powers and their use in these scrolls.

Liv Ingeborg Lied speaking

Then, others addressed how scholars identify and categorise elements pertaining to scripture and ritual in our sources. David Shepherd (Trinity College Dublin) addressed the Sotah-ritual described in Numbers 5, and explored various parallels to this, arguing that this biblical trial by ordeal appears to have more in common with Egyptian ritual practice than necessarily the Mesopotamian cases it has been compared to by previous scholarship. Kipp Davis (University of Adger) re-evaluated the criteria for categorisation and identification of small-sized scrolls in the Qumran-material, suggesting that many of their traits point towards a use as ritual objects.

Finally, there was also discussion as to the discursive aspects and trends found in ancient sources when dealing with questions of magic/ritual and authoritative text. Maijastina Kahlos (University of Helsinki) addressed the discourse in early Christianity regarding magic, outlining it as a discourse of othering where bishops and Christian leaders used the label magic in order to mark and condemn practices they disapproved of and were outside their realm of influence. Miira Tuominen (University of Jyväskylä) explored Porphyry’s arguments against the sacrifice and consumption of animals, examining how his treatise On abstinence from injuring animals engages with and conceptualises ritual and its effects.

Hanne von Weissenberg, Miira Tuominen and Outi Lehtipuu starting the discussion.

I find that the papers, in different ways, all addressed aspects of what I have found in my work on Syriac amulets, where, as I mentioned, the use of biblical text or themes appears to be somehow, somewhat unaligned (although certainly not separated from!) the idea of scripture. The fact that such discrepancies, or ambiguities, are also present in so many other historical sources and corpus’ of material are then a comforting reassurance for further work on my material with the idea that scripture is perhaps not best used as a descriptive category, but rather as an analytical category. And the papers and discussions in this workshop on text, ritual and magic have furthermore provided me with many new avenues for approaching these questions.

I therefore want to thank the organisers and our hosts from the CSTT and RRR centres of excellence here at Helsinki University, as well as all the participants, especially the respondents whose excellent contributions I did not have space to include in my text here, for two wonderful days, and I hope we will be seeing more of each other in the future!

Already during the first year 2014, there was a well-functioning group dynamics in the Centre of Excellence. Amongst the researchers, this soon led to discussions of developing some novel forms of research interaction which could utilize and further develop the observable positive drive.

During 26–27 February 2015, the CoE then organized a two-day Recognition Retreat at the course centre Hvittorp in Kirkkonummi. The event was the first of its kind, and its idea was to get together, to get to know each other’s research topics better, and to develop some common strategies for the CoE.

In the first afternoon’s programme, there were six presentations of individual research topics with a coffee break in between. The presentations were given by Joona Salminen, Tim Riggs, Panu-Matti Pöykkö, Hanne Appelqvist, Heikki Haara, and Aku Visala.

After the papers, it was time for dinner. The programme then continued with a discussion of Risto Saarinen’s book manuscript Recognition and Religion: A Historical and Systematic Study. A day before, on Wednesday 25 February, Saarinen had presented both the CoE and his own research topics at a meeting of The Philosophical Society of Finland in Helsinki.

After the official proceedings of the first day, the discussions were continued in a more relaxed manner while enjoying some evening snacks, drinks, and good company.

Upon returning to the big hall from Friday morning’s breakfast gathering, the second day started with a mapping and updating of the CoE’s overall timeline, and a listing of various activities and events during the CoE period, most of which still remains in the future.

The participants then divided into three groups in which various topics were discussed. These included academic research publications, popular writing and other forms of societal impact, and aspects of our research strategy.

After the final brainstorming sessions, the retreat concluded with a lunch, and the participants then started returning to the world.