Dr. Javier Pérez Embid Wamba, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Huelva, will give a talk on the contrast between the cult of saints in Christianity and in Eastern religions. The exhibition will focus on the evolution of the cult of the saints from the Lower Roman Empire throughout the Middle Ages, which came to represent between 30 and 40 percent of the space and time occupied by the Christian liturgy. When Jesuit missionaries came into contact with Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism in India, China and Japan in the mid-16th century, they had no other categories for their understanding than the image of Greco-Roman polytheism.
However, within these religions, forms of veneration of human figures who are exponents of spiritual perfection had developed that make them the object of comparison (through the mechanism of cult formation, through hagiographic traditions and through their mediating role between the divine and the human) with Western saints. And the resulting contrast makes it possible to answer the questions to what extent the cult of the saints is a distinctive feature of Christianity, and how the comparative history of religions can contribute to universal brotherhood.
Portuguese