RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Animism Annihilationism
too received comforting promises from the angel. When the daughter was one year old the parents prepared a banquet, and Anna sang a song of praise similar to the Magnificat. When three years of age, Mary, having been dedicated before her birth to the service of God, was brought to Jerusalem by her parents and given to the priests to be educated in the Temple. According to later apocryphal legends, Joachim died soon after Mary's birth, and Anna, " not out of sensual lusts, but at the prompting of the Holy Spirit," married first Cleophas, to whom she bore Mary, the wife of Alphaeus, and after his death Salomas, by whom she became the mother of a third Mary, the wife of Zebedaeus. The legend in this form, which owes its development to the luxuriant Anne cult of the later medieval period, was known to Jean Gerson (d. 1429; cf. his Oratio de nativitate virginis Maria, Opera, hi. 59). Conrad Wimpina (in his Oratio de divw Anna trinvbio, 1518), as well as Johann Eck (in a sermon in vol. iii. of his Homilia, Paris, 1579), defended the legend.
Thus the most fantastic excesses of the Anne cult coincide with the Reformation epoch, and were defended by Roman Catholic theologians of the most different schools, — not only immaculistic Franciscans, but also Dominicans, Carmelites, -and Augustinian hermits. Even Luther, in his youth, when overtaken by a thunderstorm, cried to Anne for help, and vowed, if delivered, to become a monk (Kostlin, Leben Luthers, i. 49, Berlin, 1893). It was a firm belief in the popular mind of the time that Christ's grandmother preserved health, made rich, and protected in death. The pictorial representations of the fifteenth to the seventeenth century dedicated to Anne are almost innumerable as well as the Anne churches. In post-Reformation times popes promoted the Anne cult; thus Gregory XIII. in 1584 ordered that on July 26, the supposed day of Anne's death, a double mass should be said throughout the whole Church; and Benedict XIV. in his De festis Maria Virginis (ii. 9), recommends the veneration of St. Anne. In the Greek church St. Anne is also celebrated, partly by festivals (July 25 in commemoration of her death; Dec. 9, as the day of her conception; Sept. 9, as the day of her marriage with Joachim), partly by a rich ascetic-homiletical literature, which reaches back to Gregory of Nyssa, but without following the later medieval legends of Western tradition.
O. ZoCKLEBf.
Bibliography: J. Trithemius, De laudibus S. Anna?, Mainz, 1494; P. Canisius, S. J., De Maria deipara virgine, i. 4, Ingolstadt, 1577; C. Frantz, Geschichte des Marten- und Annen-Cultus, Halberstadt, 1854; H. Samson, Die Schutzheiligen, pp. 1 sqq., Paderborn, 1889. From the Protestant standpoint: G. Kawerau, Caspar Oiittel, pp. 16 sqq., Halle, 1882; E. Schaumkell, Der Cultus der heiligen Anna am Ausgang des Mittelalters, Freiburg, 1893; G. Bossert, St. Anna Cultus in Wurttemberg, in Blatter fur wurttembergixche Kirchengeschichte, i. (1886) 17, 64 sqq. For Anne in art: H. Detzel, Christliche Ikonographie, i. 66-80, Freiburg, 1894.
ANNEX, PETER. See Deism.
ANNI CLERI: A method of repaying loans for the erection of a church or parsonage, whereby succeeding pastors contribute a portion of their income in fixed instalments.
ANNIHILATIONISM-
Definition and Classification of Theories (§ 1).
Pure Mortalism (§2).
Conditional Immortality (§ 3).
Annihilationism Proper ( § 4) .
Mingling of Theories ( § 5) .
Early History of Annihilationistic Theories (§6).
Nineteenth Century Theories (§ 7).
English Advocates (§ 8).
Modifications of the Theory (§9).
A term designating broadly a large body of theories which unite in contending that human beings pass, or are put, out of existi. Defini- ence altogether. These theories fall tion and logically into three classes, according Classifica- as they hold that all souls, being tion of mortal, actually cease to exist at Theories, death; or that, souls being naturally mortal, only those persist in life to which immortality is given by God; or that, though souls are naturally immortal and persist in existence unless destroyed by a force working upon them from without, wicked souls are actually thus destroyed. These three classes of theories may be conveniently called respectively, (1) pure mortalism, (2) conditional immortality, and (3) annihilationism proper.
The common contention of the theories which form the first of these classes is that human life is bound up with the organism, and 2. Pure that therefore the entire man passes Mortalism. out of being with the dissolution of the organism. The usual basis of this contention is either materialistic or pantheistic or at least pantheizing (e.g., realistic); the soul being conceived in the former case as but a function of organized matter and necessarily ceasing to exist with the dissolution of the organism, in the latter case as but the individualized manifestation of a much more extensive entity, back into which it sinks with the dissolution of the organism in connection with which the individualization takes place. Rarely, however, the contention in question is based on the notion that the soul, although a spiritual entity distinct from the material body, is incapable of maintaining its existence separate from the body. The promise of eternal life is too essential an element of Christianity for theories like these to thrive in a Christian atmosphere. It is even admitted now by Stade, Oort, Schwally, and others that the Old Testament, even in its oldest strata, presupposes the persistence of life after death,— which used to be very commonly denied. Nevertheless, the materialists (e.g., Feuerbach, Vogt, Moleschott, Buchner, Hackel), and pantheists (Spinoza, Fichte, Schellmg, Hegel, Strauss; cf. S. Davidson, Doctrine of the Last Things, London, 1882, pp. 132-133), still deny the possibility of immortality; and in exceedingly wide circles, even among those who would not wholly break with Christianity, men permit themselves to cherish nothing more than a " hope " of it (S. Hoekstra, De hoop der onsterfelijkheid, Amsterdam, 1867; L. W E. Rauwenhoff, Wijsbegeerte van den Godsdienst, Leyden, 1887, p. 811; cf. the " Ingersoll Lectures")-
Annihilationism