Bedouelle Guy: Ilustrirana povijest crkve

Guy Bedouelle: An Illustrated History of the Church

It is no small challenge to take on the task of writing the history of such an old and contested institution as the Church. Many have tried their hand at it in various ways - libraries bear witness to their results. It is always a challenging and never finished job, because - how to finish what is the expression of a human being in its highest and lowest reaches, individually and collectively? Everything is never said there, that's why history, every history, is written again and again. With the Church, on the other hand, it is not only the human thing that is at stake, but also what it proclaims as from God, through Jesus Christ, given to people to be different than they would be only according to what is inherent in their nature. "Different" - that should also mean "better", because if the gospel and what has sprung from it throughout history do not make a person better, then what is all this for? And did they do it? Do they do that? There is no vantage point from which to sovereignly judge events and actors, to weigh their inspirations and faithfulness in implementation, and to give the final picture, so to speak - judgment. And yet it is being judged and talked about whether Christianity - Christianized and as an abstract idea - has brought something good to the human race. The answers, on the other hand, reflect the preferences of those who answer. And it is rightly so, because there is no opinion without assumptions, but - here you can learn from historians how to fight for an unbiased view - you have to think about and openly admit your own assumptions and allow yourself to be hit again and again by the reality that comes before our eyes through documents, through historical memory, yes, and through art which so wonderfully synthesizes what the written word needs many pages of text for, without yet satisfactorily saying what it has to say. This is the unique value of this monograph. It is not about the illustrations that accompany the text, nor is it about the history of art explained by its religious context. "It is - as the author Guy Bedouelle, professor of church history at the University of Fribourg, teaches us - about a new undertaking: to speak about the entire history of Latin Christianity by moving on two parallel and complementary paths, i.e. speaking in two voices, knowing that each of those two voices has its own specificity. If the sentence necessarily has some incompleteness in it due to brevity, syntax and harmony, the image will mediate the fullness by suggesting the complexity or harmony of the historical It will speak with the help of visual symbols, and it will be more appropriate to suggest to us a written word, either in order to be placed in a complex whole, i.e. in order to emphasize the details of its meaning, which are told by the long legends that accompany each illustration; thinking. Both of these paths are necessary for true understanding."