Symbolism of gems: Christian tradition and new interpretation in the sermons of the seventeenth century

Purpose: In the seventeenth century, secularization processes in the religious consciousness and in the Church Slavonic language introduced a number of changes into the system of symbols. Using the example of the thematic group of gems, this study considers new trends in symbols interpretation compared to the tradition of Christian exegesis. Since secularization primarily affected the oral genres of the Church Slavonic, the study focuses on the sermons. While remaining religious in their contents and functions, sermons received new forms of expression and new ways of representation which reflected the author’s position. In addition, the language of the sermon became closer to the popular language, in this case, to the “simple mova” - the Ukrainian. Results: The sources of our study are the sermons from TheKey of Understanding by Ioannicius Galyatovsky, published in Kiev in 1659-1660, and from The Garden of Mary the Mother of God by Anthony Radzivilovsky, published in Kiev in 1676. Both authors were contemporaries and graduates of the Kiev-Mohyla Collegium; their sermons are scholastic in nature with strong Baroque features. Allegorical amplification as a new creative method of working with text defines a new attitude of the author to the text as an object of discursive analysis. Following this method, the preacher sees his task in explaining the Holy Scripture, in decoding the symbols, in finding correspondences between the symbols and the phenomena of the surrounding life. The following questions arise: which methods and narrative sources the Baroque writers used and why traditional symbols “drowned” in semantic improvisations of the authors. The preachers tried to find something new and unusual; they were attracted to the secondary, non-essential, features and minor details; even the traditional symbolism of gems was viewed in a new light in terms of their utilitarian value. Both authors deviate from the traditional Christian exegesis both in their choice of gems and in the motivation of the symbol: the emphasis is placed on the supernatural and often imaginary properties of gems. Conclusion: Thus, the symbol as the carrier of the sacred ideas, which in the Middle Ages had an anagogical (sublime) nature, in the seventeenth century lost succinctness and ideality of representation, turned into a sense-perceived object and became “objectified.” The spiritual sense receded into the background giving way to the utilitarian value of the object. The preachers moved away from the tradition of Christian exegesis; for them the symbol primarily became an artistic image which they often explained arbitrarily based on the author’s attitudes and intellectual capacity.