Cadaver obedience

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As blind obedience is called an obedience where the obedient one another's will fully, like a will-less to carcasses are subjected.

prehistory

The linguistic form of the German word “cadaver obedience” goes back to the statutes of the Jesuit order. The founder of the order, Ignatius von Loyola , prepared the text in Spanish and had his secretary Juan Alfonso de Polanco translate it into Latin . The version published by the Congregation for the Order in 1558 states:

“Et sibi quisque persuadeat, quòd qui sub Obedientia vivunt, se ferri ac regi a divina Providentia per Superiores suos sinere debent perinde, ac si cadaver essent , quod quoquoversus ferri, et quacunque ratione tractari se sinit; vel similiter, atque senis baculus , qui, ubicunque, et quacunque in re velit eo uti, qui eum manu tenet, ei inservit. "

“We should be aware that each of those who live in obedience must be guided and guided by Divine Providence through the Superior as if they were a dead bodywho can be taken anywhere and treated in whatever way, or like an old man's staff who serves wherever and for whatever purpose he wants to use it. "

- German translation by Peter Knauer (1998)

The comparison of unrestricted obedience with the willlessness of a corpse is due to an already medieval pictorial tradition, which was shaped by Francis of Assisi , to which Robert Bellarmin referred to justification in disputes within the Jesuit order in 1588 about this conception of obedience. Because even Francis of Assisi had the perfect and highest form of obedience ( perfecta et summa obedientia ) towards the superior compared to a dead, dead body ( corpus mortuum , corpus exanime ), which can be taken wherever you want without reluctance and without grumbling , even when seated on a catheter , does not look up, but down (i.e. does not become cocky, but remains humble) and even dressed in purple only looks pale than before (i.e. does not make people forget the decay to death, but rather visualizes it all the more clearly) .

This comparison, which in turn biblical to the imagery of the corpus mortuum than the sake of Christ killed anknüpft body, found in the monastic and spiritual world of the late Middle Ages widespread and has also been taken up by the female religious orders, so when Catherine of Siena in a letter to the sisters in Perugia:

“O obedienza dolce, che non hai mai pena! Tu fai vivere, e correre gli uomini, morti; perocchè uccidi la propria volontà: e tanto quanto è più morto, più corre velocemente, perocchè la mente e l'anima ch'è morta all'amore proprio d'una perversa volontà sensitiva, più leggermente fa il corso suo, e uniscesi col suo sposo eterno con affetto d'amore; e viene a tanta elevazione e dolcezza di mente, che essendo mortale, comincia a gustare l'odore ei frutti delli Immortali. ”

“Oh sweet obedience that you will never suffer! You bring the people, the dead, to life and to run; because you kill your own will: and the more it has died, the faster it runs, because the spirit and the soul, which has died to the self-love of a perverse sensual will, runs its course the easier and unites with its eternal bridegroom in the Affect of love; and reaches such an elevation and sweetness of the spirit that in the state of mortality it begins to taste the scent and fruits of the immortals. "

Ignatius of Loyola also followed up on this monastic tradition. In the Spanish version of his text, he used the formulation cuerpo muerto and not the term cadaver, which was only widespread through the Latin translation . More recently it has been suggested that the Spanish formulation need not necessarily refer to a dead body. Unlike the corpus mortuum or corpus exanime in the Franciscan tradition, Loyola could have meant more generally an “inanimate object”, as he concretized it in his second comparison, the stick in the hand of the old man.

German "cadaver obedience"

In the course of the conflict between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and even more so in the criticism of the Jesuit order, which was shaped by the concept of freedom and anti-clericalism of the Enlightenment , its concept of obedience also became the subject of critical interpretations and suspicions. In their German translations and paraphrases of the statutes of the order, after the re-admission of the order of 1814, the German critics repeatedly emphasized the comparative formula "as if you were a cadaver" in a markedly close connection to Polanco's Latin translation and caricatured the Jesuits in his obligation to behave “Like a cadaver that can be turned and turned at will” as a counter-image to one's own ideas of freedom of will-making decisions and sensible subordination. In France, it was especially Eugène Sue who at that time gave anti-Jesuit propaganda the broadest readership through his successful novel Le juif errant (1845, German: The Eternal Jew ) and who popularized the terms obéissance de cadavre and obéissance cadavérique .

The German compound cadaver obedience only emerged in the debates of the Kulturkampf of the 1870s about the prohibition of the order in the German Reich in 1872 , as an anti-Jesuit catchphrase that quickly found widespread use and soon found its way into other European languages as Germanism since then it has often been used in a transferred manner to characterize the mentality of the Prussian and German military and the society that was shaped by them.

See also

Web links

Wiktionary: cadaver obedience  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Const. pars 6, cap. 1 § 1; quoted here from the edition Constitutiones Societatis Iesu. Anno 1558. Romae, in aedibus Societatis Iesu. 1558. Reprinted from the Original Edition , London 1838, p. 71; the authoritative edition today, identical in text form and modified in spelling and punctuation, can be found in the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu (MHSI), vol. 65, 1938, p. 176.
  2. ↑ Literally "a carcass", "a corpse"
  3. ↑ a b Peter Knauer (Ed.), Ignatius von Loyola: Statutes of the Society of Jesus , 3rd edition Frankfurt / Main 1980, p. 547; see. Ignatius von Loyola: Founding texts of the Society of Jesus , Würzburg 1998, p. 740.
  4. ↑ See Silvia Mostaccio: Codificare l'oboperza. Le fonti normative di gesuiti, oratoriani e cappuccini a fine Cinquecento , in: Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica 1 (2005), p. 49-60, here p. 52f. ( Online version , accessed February 23, 2009)
  5. ↑ Thomas von Celano : Vita secunda sancti Francisci , cap. CXII, § 152 ( online text ( memento of December 9, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), last accessed on February 23, 2009); see. Speculum Perfectionis status fratris Minoris , cap. 48: Qualiter assimilavit perfectum obedientem corpori mortuo ( online text ( memento of November 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), last accessed on February 23, 2009); Bonaventure : Legenda maior sancti Francisci , cap. VI, 4, 8–13 ( online text ( Memento from May 21, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), last accessed on February 23, 2009)
  6. ^ Niccolo Tommaseo (Ed.): Le Lettere di S. Caterina da Siena , Volume III, Barbèra, Florence 1860, Epist. CCXVII, pp. 219-225, here p. 224.
  7. ↑ So also according to a letter from Polancos dated June 1, 1555: “Desea en los de la Compañía vna resignatión de sus proprios voluntades, y vna indiferentia para todo lo que les fuere ordenado, lo qual suele significar por vn bastón de viejo, que se dexa mouer á toda la voluntad dél, o como de vn cuerpo muerto, que donde le lleuan va sin repugnatia ninguna. ” Epist. 1884, § 7, in: Monumenta Ignatiana ex autographis vel ex antiquioribus exemplis collecta , Series I, Tomus III, Madrid 1905, pp. 499–503, here p. 502.
  8. ↑ Jesuit education for unconditional obedience , in: Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus (Ed.): Sophronizon , Vol. VII, Issue 3, 1825, pp. 99–112, pp. 107f.
  9. ↑ Characterization of the Jesuit order from the historical point of view , in: HEG Paulus, Sophronizon , Jg. X, Heft 5, 1828, pp. 75-108, here p. 84.
  10. ^ Eugène Sue: Le juif errant , Paris 1851, p. 147, p. 284 ( PDF at Google Books , last accessed on February 23, 2009)
  11. ↑ The first dictionary lists the proverbs lexicon by Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander († 1879) , published since 1869, in the additions to the fifth and last volume "Cadaveroborsam" published by Joseph Bergmann in 1880 with evidence from a speech on May 8, 1875: " Was Concerning obedience to the cadaver, which is held up to us, this expression is based on a prescription of St. Francis, who used the parable: "Take a corpse, place it wherever you want, it will never grumble, resist and refuse to obey; that is true Christian obedience. " "(Col. 1094)