Spiritual Kinship Between Formal Norms and Actual Practice: A Comparative Analysis in the Long Run (from the Early Middl
This chapter traces the development of spiritual kinship generated by baptism in Europe from the early Middle Ages until the present. Alfani contends that early church regulations relating to spiritual kinship and godparenthood were fairly uniform across
- PDF / 255,103 Bytes
- 21 Pages / 419.528 x 595.276 pts Page_size
- 81 Downloads / 162 Views
Spiritual Kinship Between Formal Norms and Actual Practice: A Comparative Analysis in the Long Run (from the Early Middle Ages Until Today) Guido Alfani
In Christian societies during the late Middle Ages, baptism did not merely represent a solemn and public recognition of the “natural” birth of a child. Rather, it was considered a second birth, a “spiritual birth” within a group of relatives normally different from that based on blood relations: the spiritual family, composed of godfathers and godmothers. Both for the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches, the baptismal ceremony established a tie of kinship between the people involved in the ceremony. This kind of kinship was called “spiritual” (in Latin, cognatio spiritualis) to distinguish it from others and in particular from the “natural” kinship (cognatio naturalis) connecting the baptized to his or her parents and blood relations.
G. Alfani (*) Dondena Centre and IGIER, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy © The Author(s) 2017 T. Thomas et al. (eds.), New Directions in Spiritual Kinship, Contemporary Anthropology of Religion, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_2
29
30
G. ALFANI
Beyond their religious significance, spiritual kinship ties had great social importance. The notion of spiritual kinship developed during the early Middle Ages in the Eastern Church, spreading to the Western from the eighth century. In the following centuries, and even after the East-West Schism of 1054, considering theology and church regulations, there were no relevant differences across Christian Europe in spiritual kinship and in related matters, like godparenthood. As happened with all other kinds of kinship, spiritual kinship was accompanied by an impediment to marriage between all those who were tied by it. Its extension (the number and kind of people among which it was established) changed in time, but by the fifteenth century, it involved all the key actors of the baptism (the baptized, his or her parents, the godparents and the person officiating—usually, a priest) as well as others. The extension of spiritual kinship changed also in space (between West and East, but also within such areas), mostly due to the number of godparents taking part in each baptism—an aspect regulated by social norms and practices which often disregarded partly or entirely the “official” norms. From the sixteenth century, the Reformation ended this situation of unity in diversity. By stating that spiritual kinship simply did not exist, while maintaining godparents who were considered useful tutors of the Christian education of children, Luther—paradoxically—allowed the survival in Protestant Europe of Medieval social practices about godparenthood. In Catholic Europe, the Council of Trent, while reaffirming spiritual kinship, limited its extent and deeply reformed godparenthood— consequently changing how ties of spiritual kinship were used as relational instruments. These transformations also differentiated Catholic and Protestant churches from the Orthodox, giving birth to an all-round process of diverg
Data Loading...
