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Seeking Meaning Behind Epistolary Clichés: Intercessory Prayer Clauses in Christian Letters
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
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The letter, as the format of twenty-one of the twenty-seven documents in the canonical New Testament, is arguably the literary form which has played the most significant role in the history of Christianity. But scholars have often been troubled by how to treat the conventions framing Christian letters: since little of Christian literature from its earliest time to the medieval period escapes the influence of classical traditions of rhetoric, can constant epistolary formulas be taken as expressions of genuine sentiment? In fact, it is precisely because the lines between classical influence and Christian innovation are so difficult to make out that E. R. Curtius was able to argue that the humility formula of medieval charters, for so long assumed to have originated in Paul, was in fact a pagan Hellenistic prototype like scores of other rhetorical conventions. His study of the formula serves, Curtius writes, to ‘furnish a warning against making the Middle Ages more Christian or more pious than it was’, and to demonstrate that ‘a constant literary formula must not be regarded as the expression of spontaneous sentiment’. So the entrenchment of rhetoric in letter-writing is often set in opposition to genuine Christian feeling, commonplace utterance against living expression, empty verbiage against religious sincerity.
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References
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32 Paulinus, Ep. 33 (CSEL 29, 302); transl. Walsh, Letters of Paulinus of Nola 2, 161.
33 Ruricius, Ep. 1.1 (CSEL 21, 352); transl. Mathisen, Ruricius, 89.
34 ‘Tamen obsecro in caritate Christi, ne me umquam consolatoriis vel oratoriis dimittas reficere litteris’: Alcuin, Ep. 9 (MGH Epp. 4, 35).
35 ‘Sed cum recordatus sim domini mei, vestri genitoris, beatae memoriae Karoll …, quorum memoriam in orationibus cotidianam facio, prout oportet – revocans animum hacque fretus fiducia, istas vobis direxi litterulas’: Dungalus Scottus, Ep. 7 (MGH Epp. 4, 582).
36 Jerome, Ep. 114 (CSEL 55, 395); transl. Fremande et al., NPNF II 6, 215.
37 Boniface, Ep. 86 (MGH Epp. Sel. 1, 194); transl. E. Emerton, The Letters of Saint Boniface (1940; rev. edn, New York, 2000), 159.
38 Boniface, Ep. 103 (MGH Epp. Sel. 1, 226); transl. Emerton, Letters, 153.
39 ‘Ac ideo vestra oratione atque omnipotentis Dei misericordia maxime indigeo, ne deficiam in tribulationibus, in necessitatibus, in periculis et in temptationibus diversis’: Hrabanus Maurus, Ep. 27 (MGH Epp. 5, 441–2).
40 Pelikan, J., The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago, IL, 1971)Google Scholar, 133–9. See Origen, De Oratione 5 (PG 11, col. 429–434);Tertullian, De Oratione 29 (PL 1, cols 1195–6).
41 See Miriam Dobson’s comments in ‘Letters’, in eadem, and Ziemann, B., eds, Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century History (London, 2009), 57–73 Google Scholar, at 62–4.
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44 Gregory I, Ep. 8.29 (MGH Epp. 1, 30); transl. Martyn, 2: 524.