The Vitae of the Holy Martyrs Acisclus and Victoria of Cordova: The Value of Hagiographic Literature in the Context of Missionary Service

Abstract

Missionary service as the preaching of the intact teaching of the Church occupies one of the key places in the communication of eternal truths and eternal values to society, which could significantly contribute to solving a number of ideological problems. In this context, the lives of the holy martyrs Acisclus and Victoria of Cordova are considered as an important link in the dialogue of Eastern and Western cultures and a component of missiology containing doctrinal principles and moral imeratives. The specificity of hagiographic literature lies in the representation of the system of spiritual and moral values on the scale of the personal qualities of a particular saint, depicted through a christocentric model of understanding reality, the confession of the Triune God as a perfect and absolute value, the vocation of a person to godlike. The life in question illustrates the importance of the decision to be freely guided by the totality of basic Christian values and to carry out the course of life on their basis. The presented article will be useful to specialists in the history of the Church, dogmatic and moral theology, philology and cultural studies.