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The Importance Of Ritual Part II — Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.

September 8, 2011

Hagia Sophia had been built during the reign of the Emperor Justinian between the years 532-537 AD and was the largest church in the world.

The first concept to be rendered questionable by both this definition [To repeat from the previous post: Liturgy [wrote I. H. Dalmais in Principles of the Liturgy] belongs in the order of doing (ergon) not of knowing (logos). Logical thought cannot get far with it; liturgical actions yield their intelligibility in their performance, and this performance takes place at the level of sensible realities, not as exclusively material, but as vehicles of overtones capable of awakening the mind and heart to acceptance of realities belonging to a different order.] and the sea change in sociological thinking charted by Flanagan is the notion of simplicity as a criterion for sound liturgical practice. To the sociologist, it is by no means self-evident that brief, clear rites have greater transformative potential than complex, abundant, lavish, rich, long rites, furnished with elaborate ceremonial. Noble simplicity of rite has been a theme of liturgical reforms since the Enlightenment, as the previous chapter noted. It had not commended itself, however, purely as an anthropological desideratum. It was also regarded as a hallmark of the primitive Church. Though falling outside the sociologist’s provenance, this too is now a matter of question.

The decision of the post-conciliar reformers to return to a pre-Carolingian Roman tradition as earlier and therefore simpler and so better was predictable given the influence on the tradition of liturgical scholarship of the “comparative liturgy” approach pioneered by the South German historian of liturgy Anton Baumstark. Baumstark’s book with that title was both liturgiologically pioneering and enormously successful; it was translated into various languages and enjoyed numerous reprintings. However, the work of F. S. West on Baumstark’s Comparative Liturgy [A. Baumstark, Liturgie comparee, 3d ed. (Chevetogne, 1953); the work's original is French, since it began life as lectures to Bauduin's monks at Amay.] in its intellectual setting has shown that his comparative method was itself drawn, somewhat strangely, from the biology of the German Naturphi!osophen (like Goethe) as well as from the comparative anatomy of such nineteenth-century natural scientists as Georges Cuvier and Charles Darwin. [F. S. West, Anton Baumstark's Comparative Liturgy in Its Intellectual Contex", doctoral thesis (Notre Dame, Ind. 1988), described in P. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Origins of Early Liturgy (London, 1992)]

It assumed as a law, consequently, that liturgical evolution moved from simplicity and brevity to richness and prolixity, even though Baumstark had to admit that one could also see evidence of a contrary movement, a tendency later to abbreviate what earlier had been fuller. As the Anglican liturgiologist Paul Bradshaw, now professor of Liturgy at Notre Dame, Indiana, has pointed out:

This admission that liturgical development might in fact proceed in either direction robs [Baumstark's] classification of any predictive power. We cannot judge a liturgical phenomenon …..’late’ simply because it exhibits prolixity.
[Bradshaw, Search for the Origins]

Nor, a fortiori, can we make an adverse value judgment on some liturgical rite, text, or practice because it lacks that dubiously reliable hallmark of primitive authenticity. One member of the post-conciliar Consilium who found the eagerness to apply the criterion of simplicity quite excessive, the Premonstratensian liturgist and author of a standard study of the sources of the Roman Liturgy Dom Boniface Luykx, signified his displeasure rather strongly by transferring to the Byzantine ritual church where he is now abbot of the Byzantine-Ukrainian monastery of the Transfiguration in northern California. [18R Galadza, "Abbot Boniface Luykx as Liturgist and liturgisatel", in Following the Star from the East: Essays in Honor of Archimandrite Boniface Luykx, ed. A. Chirovsky (Ottawa, Chicago, Lviv, 1992)].

A second concept that Flanagan would see as treated by Churchmen with a marked degree of sociological naivete is that of intelligibility in rite. The notion that the more intelligible the sign, the more effectively it will enter the lives of the faithful is implausible to the sociological imagination. It cannot simply be assumed that people will naturally assent more deeply once they have comprehended.

As Flanagan explains, a certain opacity is essential to symbolic action in the sociologists’ account, so that to attempt to render symbols wholly transparent is, to their mind, a thoroughly misguided proceeding. “[Symbols] proclaim that which transcends the conditions under which clarity through intervention is possible. They embody that which is unavailable to rational manipulation. [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] And if total vernacularization of liturgical language and the insistence on translation styles that win comprehension at the cost of banality were too frequently the result of the principle of immediate comprehensibility in the realm of the spoken word, an insistence on the complete visibility of every detail of what was happening at the altar (and hence not only the removal of rood screens but also the eventual victory of versus populum celebration) was its counterpart in the visual realm.

Here, as Flanagan remarks, it was not realized that, sociologically, “veiling”, “marking a distance”, and “tactful reticence” are necessary to reverence. But such terms as reverence, with its connotations of restraint, deference, and awe, soon became prominent by their absence in liturgical discussion.

A third key concept, community, has already been touched on apropos of Gueranger. To Flanagan, the concept of community as such — just like that, without any further qualification — is too vague to bear a specifically Christian meaning. Moreover, it can easily degenerate into the creation of a transiently benevolent atmosphere through (literal or metaphorical “glad-handing” (an eloquent Americanism). What liturgists needed but failed to find was a concept of community defined distinctively as the product of a ritual assembly itself keyed into a mystery exceeding that assembly’s limits.

As the English priest-sociologist Anthony Archer had pointed out in his study The Two Catholic Churches, the preconciliar Liturgy at least imposed a ritual authority on all classes and individuals, [A. Archer, The Two Catholic Churches: A Study in Oppression (London, 1986)] thus preventing the emergence of groups who would seize the Liturgy for their own purposes or of figures who would treat it as an opportunity for the display of their communications skills. It is not really clear whether clericalism, defined as the undue prominence, within an ecclesial community, of the sacramentally ordained, is less apparent or more apparent in a liturgical rite where the priest is constantly face to face with the congregation and encouraged to introduce some at least of the Liturgy’s salient parts, rather than being absorbed impersonally into a ritual role.

A fourth crucial idea, after simplicity, intelligibility, and community, an idea not so much this tune in the Council’s Liturgy Constitution or any official text as in the commentators who took it upon themselves to interpret the reformed rite to the clergy and others, was that of liturgical agency, in other words, the role, increasingly personalized and sometimes in a pejorative sense theatrical, to be played by the celebrant of the Liturgy and other liturgical ministers. Here Flanagan notes that, sociologically, a priest cannot as celebrant present himself at Mass in the same fashion as that in which he greets his parishioners afterward. The liturgical role must conceal or at least detract attention from the person, so as to focus it the more strongly elsewhere.

The liturgical actor wishes to cast glory onto God in acts of worship that somehow minimize or preclude these elements of worth falling onto himself. Like the self, the social has to be present to enable the act to appear, but it has to disappear if the end of reverence is to be realized.
[Flanagan. Sociology and Liturgy]

To the sociological eye, rites work best when they are repetitive and formalized, so that the liturgical actor can practice a certain forgetfulness of self, “playing into his role, as Flanagan puts it, “embodying the possibility of its existence”. In this he may need a certain distance, at least at points, from other worshippers. As Flanagan explains, too unilateral an emphasis on proximity is sociologically misplaced. Rites that do not allow a sense of distance deny to the people, paradoxically, a means of appropriating the act of worship, crippling them just at the point where they could be taking off Godward by a leap of religious imagination. For liturgical actors, though presented within a social frame, have to convey properties of what lies beyond that frame, a rumor of angels.

But where does this leave the notion of participation, which is so key not only to the Enlightenment and Catholic Revival discussions in their different ways but also to that modern movement begun in the years before the Great War as well as, and not least, in the papacy’s gradual acceptance of its proposals in the pontificates of the last three “Pian” popes, Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII? For Flanagan, active, outward participation is to be evaluated according to “the degree to which it generates inner appropriation, interior assent”. An English Benedictine liturgist, Dom Bernard McElligott of Ampleforth, founder of the Society of Saint Gregory, had commented on the philology as early as the year of the introduction of the Novus Ordo, 1970.

By using the word “active” for actuosa the Church’s intention has been misunderstood, and generally, if perhaps unconsciously, taken to mean bodily activity; whereas what the Church really asks for is full, sincere, mental activity, expressed externally by the body.
[B. McElligott, "Active Participation", in A Voice for All Time: Essays on the Liturgy of the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council, ed. C. Francis and M. Lynch (Bristol, 1994)]

As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has emphasized, the term actuosa participatio at the Council included silence as well as speaking and singing and hence disqualifies any activist misconstrual of “living participation” (as Trapp had called it — See his liturgical essays in The Feast of Faith (San Francisco, 1986). Flanagan’s interpretation is, evidently, not unwarranted.

The absence in the postconciliar Liturgy of the atmosphere of intense silence and devotion once so striking to observers raises the question as to whether actuosa participatio, assessed in terms of Flanagan’s criterion, is more advanced or less advanced than it was before the Council opened. Here of course tricks of memory and nostalgia, as well as wishful thinking based on ecclesiastical partisanship, may deceive us. Not every eucharistic worshipper at a celebration according to the Missale Pianum before 1962 was burning with fervor, just as not everyone at a celebration according to the Missale Paulinum after 1970 is manifestly bored. But a German sociologist’s investigation of a large suburban parish in 1960 provides an example of the relatively objective testing possible. As Flanagan comments,

Many of his subjects reported that they came to Mass to find a space in which to reestablish their spiritual equilibrium, the calmness of the rite — a re-iterated notion — giving a context in which they could adjust the proportions of an often confused existence.
[Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

Nor could one accuse Msgr. J. D. Crichton, the doyen of living liturgists in England, of insouciance toward the new rites, yet he has spoken recently of a loss of reverence which ultimately leads to a loss of the sense of the transcendent God who is the supreme Object of all worship. In a way we are in danger of forgetting what worship is about. It is not just a heartwarming experience for those who like that sort of thing. [J. D. Crichton, Worshipping with Awe and Reverence, Priests and People]

Or, as Father Anthony Conlon, a London parish priest, has put it in a paper read to the International Eucharistic Congress at Seville in 1994:

The overemphasis on active participation, which only conceives of worship in terms of the community realizing its group dynamic through a bias in favor of “doing things”, is a serious hindrance to any understanding of the Mass as essentially a liturgical setting of an historic action of divine mercy and sacrifice.
[A. Conlon, The Participation of the Faithful in the Post-Conciliar Liturgy: A Critical Perspective on Contemporary Practice in XLV Convenlus Eucharisticus Internationalis, Sevilla 1-13. Vi .1993, Christus Lumen Gentiuci, Euchanstia el Evangelizatio (Vatican City, 1993)]‘

Here then it is not simply a question of failing to advert properly to the divine transcendence in general. More devastatingly, when the Mass is at issue, there is inadequate advertence to that supreme act whereby the divine transcendence engaged itself in Trinitarian fashion for our definitive salvation on Calvary, when the Son offered himself to the Father in the Spirit so that his Sacrifice could be fruitful in the renewed pouring out of himself in the propitiatory intercession of the Eucharist and its foundation in his High Priestly prayer in the heavens.

Too much can be centered on the contribution made by the participants as though that alone made for the efficacy of the Eucharist and less attention — if any — may be paid to the sacramental offering of the great High Priest.
[A. Conlon, The Participation of the Faithful in the Post-Conciliar Liturgy: A Critical Perspective on Contemporary Practice]

The fact that in many parish celebrations the church building is evidently regarded as simply an assembly point before Mass starts and a place of concourse when Mass ends, in sharp contrast to the former practice when many people made prayers of preparation before Mass and prayers of thanksgiving after it and certainly were not disabled in so doing by other worshippers, points toward the same conclusion. If active participation is rightly evaluated by the quality of inner participation it arouses, then, it would seem, it has not yet succeeded in its task.

What from the sociologist’s standpoint has been overlooked is that, as Flanagan remarks, liturgical forms operate in the manner of icons — opening up a sense of the presence of the divine, not of course by the painterly means of color and line, but through social actions believed to be endowed and intended to be endowed with “holy purpose”.

Flanagan’s overall conclusion is that the Roman Liturgy has fallen into the hands of “convivial Puritans”. For these, procedures for worship are to be kept as simple as possible so as to maximize social relationships in the production of the rite. A ritual minimalism serves to sustain a relaxed atmosphere where all may contribute informally. “Bind us together” is the theme song of a liturgical life where hierarchy and ceremony are treated as deleterious to happy togetherness.

To Flanagan, as to Martin, this is simply wrongheaded.

Informal or endlessly adaptable Liturgy may be beau mais ce nest pas la guerre. The shape of the rite takes on “unfruitful unpredictability”, impairing its claim to constitute, indeed, a public order of worship. As the phenomenologist of religion Rudolf Otto saw at the beginning of this century, an undisciplined rite clamantly [vocab: loudly]asserting direct links with the production of the numinous has little chance of representing the latter successfully when compared with one that humbly petitions the holy in solemn mode.

Such tacit, mysterious qualities of rite, Flanagan continues, are, moreover, what permit its endless replaying. He likens to this the way a literary classic (The Brothers Karamazov, Moby Dick) can be endlessly reread if it be in a positive sense “ambiguous”, namely, not increasing the reader’s uncertainty about meaning but rather maintaining openness to ultimate meaning (the sacred).

Repeated use, so Flanagan concludes: “generates a passage of growth into understanding the implications of what cannot be grasped, and at the same time fuels a wish to have more revealed from what is concealed.” [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] The message is that the adhesive that holds rites together has become too diluted to stick, and Flanagan looks to older forms of the Latin Liturgy for assistance when he writes: “Formal traditional forms of rite cannot be dismissed as being inherently culturally incredible. These rites only become incredible when they are deemed to be so .” [Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

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The Importance Of Ritual Part I — Fr. Aidan Nichols O.P.

September 7, 2011

Fifty years earlier on the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, January 25, 1959, Pope John Paul XXIII had announced the convocation of a general council for the universal Church. And the Second Vatican Council was born.

Reporting on the world of British scholarship, it is a remarkable fact, which has not been as noticed as it deserves, that both Catholic and Anglican social anthropologists and sociologists have tended to take, from the standpoint of their own disciplines rather than simply from personal preference, a somewhat negative attitude toward the mid-twentieth-century liturgical reform that has had so marked an influence on both communions. They have a tendency to think that in the broader lines of its departures from the traditional Liturgy reform may, in certain of its characteristic emphases, rest on a mistake — not doctrinal mistake, but a failure in human prudence.

The idiom of the writers I shall be expounding is not easy, so perhaps we might begin relatively gently with a text written by an Anglican sociologist whose marks are, however, highly pertinent to the Catholic practice of Liturgy in the Western Church today. In Two Critiques of Spontaneity, Professor David Martin of the London School of Economics attacked what he called the “popular local heresy” of that “cult of choice” that wherever possible opts against an order of rules and roles in the name of spontaneity. [D. Martin, Two Critiques of Spontaneity (London, 1973)]

Though this “cult” has some respectable origins – he mentions religious notions of conscience and personal decision, and moral ideas of political liberty and existential authenticity, as well as the Romantic concept of genius and the psychoanalytical ideal of autonomy — the tree that grows from these roots has become stunted and deformed. Basically, one truth, or one collection of truths, has been stressed at the expense of the complementary truths that are their necessary counterpart. The result is a dangerous and destructive imbalance.

Libertarians stressing spontaneity — and Martin makes clear that such figures operate not only in civil society but also in ecclesial society and not least in its worship — ignore the preconditions of freedom in a determinate order of stable rules and defined roles that constitute, in Kantian language, the social a priori of personal identity, the latter’s necessary condition. In their anti-institutionalism, extreme personalists are sawing off the branch on which they are sitting.

“Institutions”, in the various senses of that word, are needful if persons with a definite sense of identity are to exist at all. When all is said and done, man, though he may not be as context-bound as an animal, is not as context-free as an angel. It is then the embedded character of freedom that is ignored by the partisans of spontaneity, and here we must include liturgical advocates of multiple choice, of endless adaptation and unscripted presidential intervention for the establishment of free rapport with others. For such libertarians, “the noumenal self [Martin means the underlying or essential `self'] is already full of experiential potency. Traditional modes are mere automatic transfers: everyman must start afresh.”[D. Martin, Two Critiques of Spontaneity (London, 1973)]

In the critique Martin is rejecting, traditional churches (that is, churches with traditional worship) are regarded as diverting the impulse to authenticity into “silted channels of alienated tradition and super-imposed forms”. Their “received rituals” and “automatic repetitions” are “frozen icons of freedom, stories from which the dynamism has been drained”. What the proponents of spontaneity would substitute for these Martin writes of scathingly as a “total and easy immersion in the All”. As he warns, “total immediacy produces total relativity.” Where each and every chosen experience is regarded as equally valuable, each by the same token may just as well be described as equally worthless.

Writing as a sociologist, Martin asserts the imperative need to defend discipline, habit, continuity, the located and familiar, the bounded and particularized, rules, roles, and relations. A rule, as he puts it, indicates the “existence of a regularity”: something that enables one to anticipate and so to act. Anticipating, acting, knowing where and who you are turn on the due existence of rules. The stability and definition of the latter are generative of psychological health, just as authority and hierarchy, rightly exercised, are necessary for the flourishing of that social health which Scripture calls “justice”. Without rules there would be only what Martin terms “unidimensional determination by peers”, the law of the jungle. [D. Martin, Two Critiques]

Martin regards the ideas of meaningful relationship and significant personal encounter as wholly impotent when considered as bases on which to found the life of groups or even individuals. Why? Because these concepts are virtually without content. “One seeks for the personally significant [but] nothing is signified.” The ideology of the experiencing self, in whose name traditional forms, including traditional liturgical rites, are rejected, is “literally self-defeating”, for beyond a certain point the emphasis on direct experience diminishes the very possibility of experience at all. How constricting, not least experientially, is a liturgy that insists on expressing the experience, the concrete self-understanding, of the immediate group that enacts it.

The experiential illumination of the Gospel depends, Martin considers, on rote and rite. As he puts it: “What is done by rote and performed in ritual provides the necessary substratum of habit on the basis of which experience becomes possible.” And invoking the literary critic George Steiner, [G. Steiner, Bluebeards Castle (London, 1971)] he asks what must it mean for a civilization to hear the Gospels repeated time and time again in the central rites of the Church. Not only, then, are repetition and ritual form not to be set over against authentic identity. More than this, they cannot be counterposed to creativity either. As Martin writes: “The shortest way to creativity is habituation to technical means of expression and steady soaking in an historical context.”[Martin, Two Critiques] And in a daring comparison with the Incarnation of the divine Word, he concludes: “Those who have accepted the conditions of confinement find they are present at a miraculous birth, limited by time and place, fully human, before which even angels cover their faces.” [Martin, Two Critiques]

A fuller account in the shape of a Catholic counterpart to Martin’s criticism is Kieran Flanagan’s Sociology and Liturgy, which marries an Anglo-American sociological tradition to the Germanophone theology of Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar. [K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy: Representations of the Holy (London, 1991)] Flanagan, an Irishman who is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Bristol, rejects what he regards as a consensus of practical liturgists who favor the maximizing of active participation so as to confer a democratic quality on rite and would keep liturgical symbols and actions as simple and intelligible as possible.

Stressing by contrast the ceremonious, formal, and allegorical qualities of ritual as well as what he terms ritual’s “ambiguity”, Flanagan describes the pastoral-liturgical consensus in bald terms as “sociologically misconceived”. It ignores the question of “how the cultural is domesticated and harnessed in a ritual performance that proclaims a distinctive witness.” [K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] Emphasizing the functions of ceremony, the opacity of symbols, the complexity of actions, and the qualities of beauty and holiness that give the social form of rite a distinctive coloration, Flanagan echoes Martin in deploring

the rise of consumer-friendly rites and a demand for loose and lax “happy clappy” events full of meet and greet transactions. These trivialize the social, preclude deeper meanings being read into the action, and skate along the surface of some very thin ice where all attention to danger, awe and reverence is bracketed. These are rites of the immediate that demand instantaneous theological results.”
[K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

“Liberal” liturgists are in fact dismantling the entire sacred superstructure that rites exist to serve.

The apparent theological strong point of such pastoral liturgical approaches lies, Flanagan remarks, in the notion of the missionary significance of duly adapted rites. A century and more earlier, Dom Gueranger had also spoken of the evangelical power of the Liturgy, but he had seen this as expressed indirectly in its spiritual beauty. Now, however, it is to be expressed directly in a conscious opening of the Church to the world.

Unfortunately, so Flanagan explains, this “delivers Christianity to a school of sociological thought that regards rituals as social constructions shaped to express and to mirror the ideological sensitivities of the age”. [K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy] The result is that the rite comes to be seen as the projection of the dispositions of the actors involved in the act of worship rather than as first and foremost the work of grace, a bestowal of transcendence that (to be sure) makes use of human agents for its enactment but does not, Pelagius-like, consist of such agency. In favor of traditional ritual, by contrast, is the fact that the quality of habit (one of Martin’s favorite words) endows liturgical action with “an impunity, an absence of worry about the credibility of what is represented”.

As Flanagan would see things, the Second Vatican Council simply took place too early so far as the history of sociology is concerned. In a retrospective view of the revisionist phase of the liturgical movement in the period from the Second World War to the Council and the subsequent reform, he writes:

Theology inserted the notion of cultural praxis into its approach to liturgy, but failed to secure the sociological instruments through which this could be monitored and understood. The relationship of rite to the cultural was far more ambiguous and complex than had been understood at the time of the Council. The question of the significance of the social came from within theological efforts to renew liturgical form — not from sociology. Only recently has a form of sociology emerged that could offer a means of understanding liturgical operations in a way that is compatible with their theological basis.’
[K. Flanagan, Sociology and Liturgy]

The principal schools of sociology “available” when the Council opened were positivist, empiricist, or functionalist. Only in the course of the 1960s and 1970s did the stress of the late-nineteenth-century German philosopher of method Wilhelm Dilthey on the distinctive nature of the cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) have its impact on sociology, as sociologists began to realize the need for a sociological imagination if they were to grasp the meaning of social forms for those human subjects who live in and with them. At last they started to ask themselves how belief systems, now taken seriously even or especially if they were religious, succeed in having cultural expression. Alas, it was then too late for such sociologists to be of use to the actual liturgical reformers. The postconciliar Consilium ad exsequendam Constitutionem de Sacra Liturgia was wound up in 1975 through absorption into the Congregation for Divine Worship, that year coinciding more or less with a real turning point in the anthropology of religion as new schools of thought began to emphasize meaning, not explanation, the non-rational as well as the rational, and ritual’s transformative power: all of which led to a new respect for the formal, ceremonious ordering of rite, the very thing that avant-garde liturgists most abhorred and the liturgical reform itself preserved only in severely truncated guise.

Yeats’ rhetorical question “How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?” was suddenly grasped in the academy as it ceased to be understood in the Church. And Flanagan suggests (albeit cautiously) that the consequent mishandling of the modernization of rite accelerated the decline of such traditional churches as his own.

He contrasts the impoverished concepts used to “deliver rite to the cultural” — simplicity, intelligibility, adaptation to “modern man” — with the subtle description of the Liturgy given by the Dominican liturgiologist Irenee-Henri Dalmais in his contribution to Canon Aime Martimort’s four-volume study The Church at Prayer.

Liturgy [wrote Dalmais] belongs in the order of doing (ergon) not of knowing (logos). Logical thought cannot get far with it; liturgical actions yield their intelligibility in their performance, and this performance takes place at the level of sensible realities, not as exclusively material, but as vehicles of overtones capable of awakening the mind and heart to acceptance of realities belonging to a different order. [I. H. Dalmais, "The Liturgy as Celebration of the Mystery of Salvation", in Principles of the Liturgy, vol. 1 of The Church at Prayer, ed. A. G. Martimort (London, 1967)]

 

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The King James Bible at 400

August 29, 2011

Leland Ryken, professor of English at Wheaton College, and author of “The Legacy of the King James Bible,” recently penned a tribute to the KJB in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal. While referring to the King James in the past tense may suggest its demise, that is utterly untrue. It consistently ranks, year after year, either second or third on the list of Bible sales in the United States and the King James Version now has two modern translations that perpetuate its translation philosophy and style while updating its scholarship and language: the New King James Version and the English Standard Version.

It was never the Bible of the Catholic Church, although “an acceptable translation but not the preferred one.” The Catholic version of the Bible contains all of the books found in the KJV plus 14 books and some extra chapters of Ruth that Protestants had removed from the Canon. All of those books are in the Old Testament and, oddly enough, were originally included in the King James translation.The Roman Catholic Lectionary (the scripture that is read in all Catholic Churches is a book that has it organized in the proper reading order) uses the New American Bible translation in America. The actual official Bible of the Church is the Biblia Sacra Vulgata as translated into Latin (the Latin Vulgate) by St. Jerome about a thousand years ago. In America the second choice of most Catholics for the English translation is the New Jerusalem Bible.

In seminary we were told to use the New Revised Standard Version which has a Catholic Edition. In accordance with the Code of Canon Law Canon 825.1, the New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition, has the imprimatur of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (USA) and the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops granted on 12 September 1991 and 15 October 1991 respectively. Hence, the NRSV(Catholic Edition) is officially approved by the Catholic Church and can be profitably used by Catholics in study and devotional reading of the Bible. Liturgical usage of the Bible demands conformance to Catholic doctrine and an adapted form of the NRSV has recently (2008) been approved by the Vatican for the Catholic Church in Canada. Although the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops approves only the New American Bible for liturgical use, the NRSV is quoted in the English-language edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (which also quotes from the RSV).

Mark Noll relates some of the political rationale that pushed for a new translation of the Bible in the sixteenth century:

James nonetheless took the initiative to commission the leading lights in England’s intellectual firmament to prepare a new translation. He did this for several reasons, but the primary one was to assert his own authority. James had been crowned King of Scotland in 1567 when he was only thirteen months old. Through a perilous youth and then with steely determination after he obtained his majority, James successfully stabilized the economic condition of his desperately poor land, held his own in tense theological debate with his Presbyterian tutors, and — most important — unified the intransigent factions that had made life impossible for his mother, Mary Queen of Scots.

As the newly crowned monarch of England, where the stakes were higher and the factions more powerful and almost as belligerent as in Scotland, James used all of his considerable wiles to secure his own rule and consolidate a realm in imminent danger of fracture. Commissioning the new translation was a stroke of genius. A respected Bible prepared for public reading could strengthen and unify the state church (thus demonstrating the king’s authority to his bishops). A translation undertaken at the request of Puritans showed that they too might find a place in the king’s church (even if James rejected all of their other proposals for reform). A learned translation would advertise his considerable expertise as scholar and lay theologian (in both Scotland and England, James made his own metrical translations of the Psalms direct from Hebrew). Not least, promoting a scriptural text that replaced the Geneva Bible would rid the realm of the Geneva notes that specified the circumstances in which subjects could disobey their monarchs.

As much as politics lay behind James’ decision for a new translation, it was not coincidental that the result was a literary masterpiece, for the king’s royal self-interest was matched by his acumen as a scholar-theologian. James, in other words, really did want a translation superior in scholarship and language to what had gone before. Yet this desire meshed perfectly with his need for a text that undergirded the king’s authority while unifying his people.
Mark Noll, Long Live the King, Books & Culture Nov/Dec 2011

However, more than sales numbers or approval by Church bodies, the true influence and power of the King James Bible is most profound in the realm of literature and cultural presence:

However imitated or parodied, the language is dignified, beautiful, sonorous and elegant. “Godliness with contentment is great gain” — six words and unforgettable. “Give us this day our daily bread.” “The Lord is my light and my salvation.” The King James style is a paradox: It is usually simple in vocabulary while majestic and elevating in effect.

Many of the formulations are impossible to forget, having passed into everyday English usage: “the land of the living,” “at their wit’s end,” “the salt of the earth,” “the root of the matter,” “labor of love,” “fell flat on his face.” When the famous sayings from the King James Version were extracted from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations into a freestanding book in 2005, the book ran to more than 200 pages!

For more than three centuries, the King James Bible provided the central frame of reference for the English-speaking world. Former Yale University Prof. George Lindbeck well claims that until recently “Christendom dwelt imaginatively in the biblical world.” During the years of its dominance, the King James Bible was the omnipresent force in any cultural sphere that we can name — education (especially childhood education), religion, family and home, the courtroom, political discourse, language and literacy, choral music and hymns, art and literature. For more than two centuries children in England and America learned to read by way of the Bible.

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address contains so many biblical references that someone has written a whole book on the subject. When President Truman lit the White House Christmas tree on Dec. 24, 1945, his address to the war-weary nation included an exhortation “to make real the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’” (Isaiah 2:4).

The influence of the King James Bible is perhaps most profound in the realm of literature. From Milton’s “Paradise Lost” to Toni Morrison’s “Paradise,” it is a presence quite apart from the author’s religious stance. In his book “The Bible as Literature,” British literary scholar T. R. Henn said it best: “The Authorized Version of 1611 . . . achieves as we read a strange authority and power as a work of literature. It becomes one with the Western tradition, because it is its single greatest source.”
Leland Ryken, How We Got the Best-Selling Book of All Time, The Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2011

Perhaps the group of Puritans who conspired to meet the new ruling monarch of England upon the death of Queen Elizabeth I in March 1603 as his procession moved from Scotland to England would be the most surprised to learn that it was their list of grievances and requests presented to King James that had resulted some 400 + years later in the creation of the bestselling book of all time and the most quoted book in the English language.

They had asked not for a new Bible but an end to the obligatory wearing of vestments by ministers, or the end to the practice of ministers not living in the parishes to which they had been appointed and the like. In response, the Hampton Court Conference met in January 1604 to consider their requests:

It was a farce: Four hand-picked Puritan moderates were pitted against 18 Church of England heavyweights. King James rejected all Puritan requests and even threatened to “harry the Puritans out of the land or worse.” Then, at the last minute, the Puritans requested that the king commission a new English translation of the Bible.

This is somewhat surprising, inasmuch as the Puritans’ preferred English Bible, the Geneva Bible, was by far the most-used and best-selling translation of the time. It is not entirely clear why they made the request. More surprisingly, the king granted it.

One fourth of the translators were of Puritan convictions, and the selection of all 47 was based solely on scholarly expertise. They were the best that England possessed in terms of biblical knowledge and facility with the Hebrew and Greek of the original texts of the Bible. It took them six years to finish. Remarkably, everyone on the translation committee rose above sectarian spirit.

The King James Version was not an original translation. It was a revision — technically of the Bishops’ Bible of 1568, but actually of an entire century of English Bible translations starting with William Tyndale. This history lies behind a famous statement in the preface to the King James Version: “Truly (good Christian reader) we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one, . . . but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one.”

The King James Bible is familiarly called the Authorized Version, but the king who lent his name to the translation never officially authorized it, even though he hoped that the new translation would help to unify a politically and religiously divided kingdom (a kingdom that would erupt into civil war not long after his death in 1625). Nor did church officials authorize the new translation. The King James Version in reality was authorized by the people, who chose it over others. For three and a half centuries, when English-speaking people spoke of “the Bible,” they meant the King James Version.
Leland Ryken, How We Got the Best-Selling Book of All Time, The Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2011

Happy 400 KJB!

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The Decline Of The Unity Of Medieval Christendom III – Christopher Dawson

August 8, 2011

In the heart of the Charolais-Brionnais, the basilica of Paray-le-Monial is a masterpiece of Romanesque art. It is a reflection, unique in Burgundy and in the whole of Europe, of the great abbey church of Cluny III, the biggest church of medieval Christendom, which was demolished after the French Revolution.

Christopher Dawson takes up the historical span of 1275-1525 during which time a steady disintegration of the medieval ideal of unity occurred. In the second installment Dawson had traced the developments in the Conciliar Movement, the final effort of medieval Christendom to assert its unity against the centrifugal tendencies represented by the Great Schism and the national heresies of the Wycliffites and the Hussites. We join the narrative where the Council at Constance on November 1, 1414 had brought the great schism of Avignon and the Roman popes to an end.

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The Council was now approaching its own end. There only remained the difficult question of reform, which occupied the final sessions — especially the question of Papal Taxation, which was finally settled by the four national Concordats — with Italy, Germany, France and Spain — signed on May 3, 1418. But already the Council had been dissolved after a closing session on April 22. The new Pope, refusing the offer of Avignon or a German city, began his slow progress back to Rome, which he finally entered on September 30, 1420.

From this moment the Papacy separated itself from the Conciliar Movement, which had reached its high water mark at Constance. When the Council of Basel met in 1431, it soon showed itself determined to assert its authority as the infallible representative of the universal Church. Pope Eugenius IV, who had succeeded Martin V early in the same year, ordered his legate, Cardinal Cesarini, to transfer the Council to Bologna on account of the scanty attendance. It replied by a reassertion of the decree of Constance — that a General Council “derived its power immediately from Christ, and that all men, even the Pope, are bound to obey it in matters pertaining to the Faith, the extirpation of heresy, and the reformation of the Church in head and members.”

Thus the open breach between the Pope and the Council threatened a renewal of the schism which had been so painfully ended at Constance. But the fact that the Hussites had accepted the Council and that negotiations with them had been initiated by the Papal Legate Cesarini — who had resigned his presidency of the Council when the Pope ordered its dissolution but did not conceal his sympathy with the Conciliarist position — delayed the final break.

Pope Eugenius was induced to recognize the Council, and withdrew his decree of dissolution in September 1433. But the strength of the Council was due to the support it received from the Northern and Western secular powers, the Emperor Frederick III and France and Spain. The Council itself was composed mainly of the delegates from the Northern universities, but the bishops were very few; their numbers sank to only twenty by 1436. It was this minority assembly, dominated by its anti-papal majority, which did all in its power to reduce the authority and the revenues of the Holy See.

The breaking point was brought about by the negotiations for reunion with the East, when both the Pope and the Council sent embassies to Constantinople in 1436-37, inviting the Greeks to a conference. The Pope’s proposal for a meeting in North Italy was naturally preferred to the Council’s proposal of Avignon. The Pope accordingly transferred the Council from Basel to Ferrara in September 1437, where the Greeks were received in March 1438. But while the reunion of the Western and Byzantine Churches was being worked out at Ferrara and Florence, the Council of Basel had declared the supremacy of the Council over the Pope as a truth of faith, and went on to depose Eugenius IV as a heretic and destroyer of the rights of the Church (June 25, 1439).

Thus at the very moment when the historic schism of the Eastern and Western Churches was being extinguished at Florence, the Council of Basel, now reduced to a mere handful of bishops, created a new schism in the North by the election of Amadeus, the Duke of Savoy, on November 5, 1439, as Pope Felix V. The new anti-Pope met with scanty recognition, except in Germany and Aragon. Even here the diplomacy of the Roman Pope was triumphant. In February 1447, Eugenius IV received the restoration of the obedience of the German envoys at Rome a few days before his death.

His successor, Nicholas V, was a man of exceptional moral stature. He did all in his power to facilitate the abdication of the anti-Pope and the dissolution of the Council in April 1449. Thus the long and bitter controversies of the Conciliar period, which had threatened the subversion of the traditional order of the Church, were ended in an atmosphere of apparent good will and mutual tolerance.

At the same time the age of the Councils saw a further catastrophic decline in the countries in Northern Europe which had been the center of the earlier medieval culture. After an interval which enabled France temporarily to recover its prosperity, the Hundred Years War was resumed in 1415 and complicated by the disastrous civil war between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs which led to the English conquest of France. The years from 1419 to 1444 were perhaps the most disastrous that the French people have ever experienced. The strength of popular religion at this time was shown by the career of St. Joan who came to the help of the people when their leaders had failed them, but the tragic end of her mission also showed how weak and time-serving the French Church had become.

The same failure is to be seen in the rise of the new heresies in England and Bohemia. William Langland’s poem, Piers Plowman, reveals the depth of the religion of the people in the 14th century. But though he still writes as a faithful Catholic, he despairs of the state of the Church, and it is not to the Papacy or the religious Orders but to the King and the Commons that he looks for help. At the same time the reforming movement in England first expressed itself in a definitely revolutionary form. The author of the movement, John Wycliffe (c. 1330-84), was in many respects a typical figure of the late scholastic period at Oxford, where he had been master of Balliol College in 1360. He achieved notoriety as a spokesman of the national grievances against the Papacy.

As the chief clerical spokesman on behalf of John of Gaunt’s anti-clerical policy, he was brought into conflict with the bishops and finally with the Papacy, by which his opinions were condemned in 1377. But he continued to enjoy the protection of John of Gaunt thenceforward until his death in 1384, and so was able to continue to propagate his ideas, which became steadily more uncompromising and more unorthodox. By the time of his death he had completely broken with Catholicism and had given his followers, the Poor Preachers, a store of heretical principles that they were to develop still further in the years that followed.

He denied the supremacy of the Papacy and the Divine Authority of the hierarchical Church, since the true Church is the assembly of the predestinate and no one can know with certainty who are its members. He held that the only certain rule of faith was to be found in the Scriptures, which everyone must interpret for himself and which should be made available to all men in their own tongue. Wycliffe insisted that the doctrine of Transubstantiation had no ground in Scripture and that the sacrifice of the Mass was not of divine institution. Above all, and this was the starting point of his doctrine, the Church has no right to have possessions, and the temporal power has the right to appropriate them and correct the misdeeds of the clergy.

The propagation of Wycliffe’s ideas was suppressed or driven underground in England by the repressive policy of the new Lancastrian dynasty in the early 15th century, but it was destined to have a profound impact on the opposite corner of Europe through the work of John Hus and Jerome of Prague. Bohemia had enjoyed a period of great prosperity in the 14th century under the rule of the House of Luxemburg, and the University of Prague had become the greatest center of studies in central Europe; but the prosperity of the kingdom brought it into close relations with Germany and the rest of Europe, so that the University had become a center for foreign influences. In the course of the century, however, Czech national feeling asserted itself, and the beginnings of the vernacular literature made their appearance. This movement found its focus in the demands for the reform of the Church, which had suffered from the moral and financial corruption of the Avignon period.

This reforming movement found expression in the vernacular preaching and writing of John of Millitz, Thomas of Stitny, and Mathias of Janov. In its beginnings it was entirely orthodox, though there arose some opposition among the clergy, especially those of German origin. But at the beginning of the 15th century, the new leader of the reformers, John Hus, came under Wycliffite influence, and thenceforward the movement of reform became identified with the doctrines of Wycliffe, the personality of Hus, and the cause of Czech nationalism. At first the support of King Wenceslaus permitted Hus to carry on his work, and he was able to make the University of Prague a center of his teaching. But in 1415, in face of the opposition of the bishops, he appealed to the General Council which had just met at Constance and presented himself to defend his own cause. In spite of the safe conduct which had been granted him by the Emperor Sigismund, the Council put him on trial and condemned and executed him as a heretic. Thus the leader of the reforming movement was put to death by the reforming Council.

In Bohemia Hus was regarded as a martyr, and the whole Czech people rallied in defense of his doctrine, led by the University of Prague from which the Germans had been expelled. It must be noted that John Hus and the Czech reformers differ from Wycliffe and the Protestants alike in their insistence on the doctrine of the Real Presence and the importance that they attached to the Sacrifice of the Altar.

And when the Emperor Sigismund succeeded to the crown on the death of his brother, King Wenceslaus, the Czechs rose in arms against the man who had betrayed their national hero. It is true that they were not united, since the Hussite principles of private judgment and the free interpretation of Scripture naturally tended to produce divisions, ranging from the Utraquists, dissident Catholics demanding only the reform of the Church and the right of the laity to receive the chalice in Holy Communion, to the Taborites, who adopted the principles of Wycliffe in their full rigor and attempted to establish the law of the Gospel and the Rule of the Saints by the sword; while outside these two main parties a great variety of sectarian extremism was to be found, as in England under the Commonwealth.

Nevertheless they were sufficiently united under the great Taborite leaders, Ziska and Procopius, to repel triumphantly for eleven years the successive crusades that were launched against them by Sigismund and the Church. Thus for the first time the unity of Western Christendom was broken by a movement which was both religious and national, and which foreshadowed the revolt of the German people in the following century. Nevertheless this warning was disregarded by the Western Church, and the closing period of the Middle Ages, from 1440 to 1520, was occupied with very different problems.

For when the restored Papacy, in the person of Martin V, at last returned from Constance to Rome in 1420, it went back to a new world. It left the world of the schoolmen for that of the humanists and the world of the feudal monarchies for that of the city states. It came out of the autumn shadows of the Gothic North into the springtime of the Italian Renaissance.

At the same time, the Papacy was faced with a new set of problems. It had to deal not only with the theoretical ecclesiastical issues which had been raised by the Conciliar Movement, but with the concrete problem of establishing its position amidst the fiercely competitive political life of the Italian States. And while the Council of Constance had been preoccupied by the dangers of the new Hussite heresy that had emerged in Bohemia, the Papacy was faced with the more formidable danger of Turkish conquest which overshadowed the Mediterranean world.

This was a matter of life and death for the great Italian maritime republics which lived by their trade with the Eastern Mediterranean and their colonial possessions in the Aegean and on the Black Sea. Greece and the Aegean were now a mosaic of Greek and Italian States with Florentines at Athens, Venetians in Crete, and Genoese at Constantinople and in the Crimea. Conditions had never been so favorable for a reunion of Greek and Latin Christendom, since the Byzantine emperors were no less anxious than the popes to end the schism between the Churches which was the main obstacle to the establishment of a common front against the Turks.

The achievement of this union was the first task of the restored Papacy, and it was brought to a successful issue at the Council of Florence in 1439 (Mark of Ephesus was actually the only Orthodox bishop to refuse his signature.) by the joint efforts of the Byzantine Emperor John VIII, supported by Archbishop Bessarion of Nicaea and Archbishop Isidore of Kiev, on the one side, and the Florentine humanist Ambrogio Traversari.

From a political point of view the union of Florence was a failure, since it came too late to avert the Turkish danger; and the efforts of the popes, above all of Calixtus III and Pius II, to organize a last crusade ended in failure and disillusionment. The ecclesiastical union also proved abortive. Though officially it survived until the Turkish conquest of Constantinople (1453), it was vehemently rejected by the great mass of Byzantine Christians.

They even preferred Turkish rule to union with the Papacy. “Better,” said they, “the prophet’s turban than the pope’s tiara.” But from the cultural point of view the temporary reunion was more significant, since it helped to strengthen the Hellenic element in the Renaissance and brought to Italy some of the leaders of late Byzantine culture, like Cardinal Bessarion, a great scholar and a great Churchman who might have been elected pope in 1455 had it not been for the opposition of the French party, voiced, appropriately enough, by the Cardinal of Avignon.

The failure of the union of the Churches and of the movement for the rescue of the Christian East was a great misfortune for the Church, since it was the one issue which might have once more united Christendom under the leadership of the Papacy and given it the power to transcend the petty politics of the Italian principalities. We see this in the career of Pius II (1458-64), who was a typical representative of the new Renaissance culture, a humanist of the humanists, the first, and perhaps the only, popular novelist to be elected pope and the only pope who has written his autobiography. (His romance Lucretia and Euryalus, written when he was a diplomat at Vienna in 1444, was extremely popular and was translated into English in the 16th century.)

Yet from the moment he became pope he threw himself heart and soul into the cause of the crusade and devoted all his energies and eloquence to an effort to overcome the divisions of the West and to unite Christendom in a common effort. Nor were his efforts limited to words. He took the cross himself, and although he was a dying man, he travelled to Ancona to launch the crusade in person.

But with the fading of this last hope of uniting the west to save Eastern Christendom, the Papacy became more and more absorbed in the little world of Italian politics. No doubt the Renaissance popes were generous patrons of art and literature, but so were the other Italian princes, and the more successful the Papacy was in establishing its temporal power and prestige, the more it came to resemble the other Italian princedoms. The dangers of secularization had never been so great as at the end of the century — when the protest of the Italian reformers was silenced by the execution of Savonarola and Alexander VI and his son Caesar Borgia dominated the scene.

It seemed as though the evil times of the 10th century were returning, when the Papacy had been the prey of local factions among the lawless nobles of the Campagna. That situation had been ended by the intervention of the German emperors and by the reformed monasticism of Northern Europe, and now once more northern armies broke into Italy, and the rivalries and ambitions of the Italian principalities became overshadowed and absorbed by the wider conflict of the great European powers. Once again a movement of religious reform arose in the North, but this time it was a movement of religious revolution which subverted the bases of the medieval order and Catholic unity.

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The Decline Of The Unity Of Medieval Christendom II – Christopher Dawson

August 5, 2011

Birgitta of Sweden on an altarpiece in Salem church, Södermanland, Sweden

A continuation from the previous post…These writings come from Dawson’s lectures at Harvard as the first occupant of the Charles Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies at the Harvard Divinity School (1958). They were published as The Dividing of Christendom. For 12 bucks how can you go wrong?

Meanwhile Europe was entering on a period of economic decline and social disaster. In the previous period — that is, from the 11th to the 13th century — the population and wealth of medieval Christendom had been steadily increasing, owing to the revival of trade and the movement of internal colonization which created new villages in the forests and wastelands. But from the beginnings of the 14th century a movement of decline began which lasted for two hundred years. The origins of this change are difficult to explain, since according to the economic historians, population had already begun to decline at the end of the 13th century.

But about the middle of the 14th century the decline is obvious and catastrophic. The Black Death, the greatest of all recorded epidemics, swept over the whole of Europe and destroyed a third of the population in three years, from 1347 to 1350. At the same time the Hundred Years War wrecked the work of Philip IV and his predecessors. The richest land in Europe fell a prey to foreign invasion and the ravages of the Free Companies of mercenary soldiers. The churches and monasteries were destroyed and the open country was reduced to it desert. At the same time in the Southeast the Turks entered Europe, and after establishing their capital at Adrianople in 1366, proceeded to destroy the flourishing Christian kingdoms of the Balkans, while Christian Russia still remained under the Tartar yoke.

All these disasters had a demoralizing effect on the Church and on Christian culture in general. The effects of the Black Death, for example, on the clergy and the religious orders were serious and far-reaching, since at the same time it reduced the clerical personnel and weakened ecclesiastical discipline. Yet in spite of all this, the 14th century cannot be described as an irreligious age. On the contrary it was the great age of medieval mysticism which produced a series of great saints and spiritual writers all over Europe, such as Tauler and Suso in Germany, Ruysbroeck and Gerard Groote in the Netherlands, Richard Rolle and the author of “The Cloud of Unknowing” in England, St. Catherine of Siena and Bl. John Colombini in Italy, and St. Bridget in Sweden.

This movement of spiritual introversion may have been due in some degree to the turning away of the Christian mind from a world which was in revolt against the Church and the Christian order. But this is only partially true, for the great women mystics or prophetesses of the age — St. Bridget of Sweden and St. Catherine of Siena — intervened repeatedly in the external life of the Church and were in part responsible for bringing about the return of the Papacy from Avignon to Rome from 1367 to 1370 and again in 1377.

Yet this proved no remedy for the ills of the Church. On the contrary, the return of the Popes from Avignon to Rome was followed by the violent crisis of the Great Schism during which all the evils of the Avignon period became magnified. Christendom was divided, not as at the Reformation by theological differences, but on the purely juridical question, which of the two rival popes was the legitimate one. Public opinion had protested only too loudly against the abuses of the Avignon regime. It now found itself faced by two identical systems, each claiming to be absolutely exclusive, so that the evils of the previous period were all precisely doubled.

From this impasse there was no outlet by the accepted principles of canon law, and the time had come when William of Ockham’s revolutionary ideas could bear fruit. The leadership of Christendom now passed to the University of Paris, which was the last stronghold of medieval unity and also the great center of Ockhamist thought.

For the next thirty or forty years the doctors of Paris championed the cause of unity against the Popes and Kings and succeeded in achieving a brief triumph through the Conciliar Movement.

The Conciliar Movement represents the final effort of medieval Christendom to assert its unity against the centrifugal tendencies represented by the Great Schism and the national heresies of the Wycliffites and the Hussites. It was the culmination of medieval constitutionalism in its attempts to give constitutional form to the ideal of Christendom as a single religious society, divided politically among a number of national kingdoms. The General Councils which were convoked to end the Schism under the influence of the University of Paris and the French monarchy were unlike the General Councils of the past. They were parliaments of Christendom, which were attended by the whole body of Christian princes with two or three exceptions, and in which the representatives of the universities played a larger part than the bishops.

The Conciliar Movement was prepared by the two national Councils held in Paris in 1395 and 1406. In these the conciliarist policy was worked out — viz., the withdrawal of obedience from the two claimants to the Papacy in order to induce their resignation. But they were unable to coerce the obstinate resistance of the Avignon Pope Benedict XIII. He withstood both the withdrawal of the French obedience and a seven months’ siege of the Palace of Avignon; and after his escape from Avignon in 1403 he himself summoned a General Council to meet at Perpignon in 1408 which was almost entirely Spanish in composition.

But at this point the cardinals of both popes united to withdraw their obedience alike from the Avignon and the Roman popes and summoned a joint Council to meet at Pisa in the spring of 1409 for the election of a new pope. This was in agreement with the policy of the French monarchy, which had declared its neutrality between the two popes and had decided at a national council in Paris to support the forthcoming Ecumenical Council.

This Council, which met at Pisa on March 25, 1409, was an extraordinarily representative body. In addition to bishops and abbots, it included hundreds of deputies from cathedral chapters and from the universities, the generals of the great religious and military Orders, together with the ambassadors of seventeen states representing almost the whole body of Christian princes. In spite of this varied membership this assembly showed a remarkable degree of unanimity in dealing with the crucial issue of the schism.

They summoned both the claimants to the Papacy to appear before them, and on their non-appearance proceeded to try and depose them both, in accordance with the conciliarist thesis of the Universities. Next they proceeded to the election of a new pope of the united Church, chosen by the joint efforts of the cardinals of both obediences. After a short conclave of eleven days these agreed unanimously on the choice of Peter Philarghi, the Greek archbishop of Milan, who took the name of Alexander V. The Council then dissolved after decreeing the convocation of a new General Council to meet in April 1412 to carry out further measures for the reform of the Church.

But the apparent outstanding success of the Council of Pisa was deceptive. The new Pope lived only ten months. His successor, John XXIII (Baldassare Cossa), elected May 17, 1410, lacked the moral authority to make good his claims against the Roman Pope, Gregory XII, or the Avignon claimant, Benedict XIII, who had now withdrawn to his family fortress at Peniscola in Aragon. Consequently, after the failure of the General Council which John had summoned at Rome in 1412, he was forced to acquiesce in the Emperor Sigismund’s plan for a new Council to be held at Constance on November 1, 1414.

The new Council was even more a parliament of Christendom than the Council of Pisa had been, since it was divided into four nations — Italian, German, French and English — in whose deliberations the representatives of the princes and of the universities, as well as the bishops, were entitled to vote. Thus from the beginning the Council of Constance was dominated by the Northern peoples — the French, the Germans and the English; and the position of the Pope, John XXIII, who relied on the Italian vote, became increasingly difficult, until on March 2, 1415, he was prevailed upon to abdicate. But he soon repented of his action, and on March 20 he escaped from Constance and took refuge with Frederick of Austria.

This, however, led to an explosion of anti-papal feeling, in which the famous Four Decrees were passed. These declared that the Council derived its authority directly from Christ, that the whole world including the Pope himself was subject to this authority, and that the flight of the Pope was an act of contumacy which justified the suspicion that he was joining the schism and had fallen into heresy. This action of the Council met with a wide measure of secular support. The Emperor issued the ban of the Empire against Frederick of Austria, whose lands were overrun by the Swiss and the Bavarians, so that he was obliged to surrender the Pope to the representatives of the Council.

The Council next proceeded to the trial of the Pope, who was condemned and deposed on May 29, 1415, as “unworthy, useless and harmful.” The sentence was accepted by John XXIII, who was now a prisoner in the hands of the Council. The Church was now practically without a pope, since Gregory XII, the Roman Pope, abdicated shortly afterwards (July 14, 1415) and Benedict XIII was deprived of his last support, the King of Aragon, by the Treaty of Narbonne at the end of the same year. Meanwhile the Council had asserted its authority by the trial and execution of John Hus (July 6, 1415), who had presented himself at Constance, trusting in the safe conduct of the Emperor. This act precipitated the national revolution of the Czech people against the Emperor and the Church, which was to defy all the crusading efforts of the rest of Christendom for seventeen years.

But the Council, oblivious of the storm which it had aroused, went on to consider the election of a new pope, and to devise a wide program of reform. By the decree Frequens (October 5, 1417) it laid down that the General Council was the chief instrument for the cultivation of God’s field, the Church, the neglect of which was the chief reason for the disorder of Christendom. It decreed that the next General Council should be convened in five years’ time, and thereafter they must be held at intervals of from seven to ten years. It then proceeded to elect Oddo Colonna as Pope Martin V on November 11, 1417. At last the schism was brought to an end.

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The Decline Of The Unity Of Medieval Christendom – Christopher Dawson

August 4, 2011

Are we living in an age where an old order gives way to a new? The Church will survive.

And slowly answered Arthur from the barge:
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within Himself make pure! but thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.
But now farewell. I am going a long way
With these thou seest -if indeed I go -
(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)
To the island-valley of Avilion;
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard-lawns
And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea,
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.” “
‘Morte d’Arthur’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson

The breakdown of the medieval synthesis and the loss of the unity of medieval Christendom was a gradual process which covers some two and a half centuries of European history, from 1275-1525. This two hundred and fifty years of progressive decline corresponds to the preceding period of unification — the two hundred and fifty years of centripetal movement which ran from the year 1000 to 1250 and which saw the foundation and growth of the papal reform of the Western Church. This second period, of declining unity, is as much a part of medieval culture as the first. Indeed, many of the phenomena which we regard as typically “medieval” belong to this period — for example, the histories of Joinville and Froissart, the poems of Dante and William Langland, the writings of St. Catherine of Siena and the German mystics of the Rhineland, the Imitation of Christ and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.

Nevertheless the whole period shows a steady disintegration of the medieval ideal of unity, marked by two main features — negatively by the loss of international unity and the transcendent supra-political authority of the Papacy, and positively by the growth of the modern states and the national political unit. In the earlier Middle Ages, the State in our sense of the word hardly existed. There were a vast number of political and social units — feudal fiefs, duchies, counties and baronies, loosely held together by their allegiance to king or Emperor. There were Free Cities and Leagues of Cities, like the Lombard Commune or the Hanseatic League. There were ecclesiastical principalities like the German prince-bishoprics, and the great independent abbeys. Finally there were the religious and military Orders — international organizations which lived their own lives and obeyed their own authorities in whatever country of Europe they might happen to be situated.

And all of these groups were inextricably intermingled so that it was difficult to say which of them was the State. For instance, much of Southwest France belonged to the king of England, but not as a part of the English kingdom. It remained a fief of the French crown, to which the English king was bound to do homage for it. Such a situation is inconceivable in the modern political organization of Europe. It was possible then because the whole of Western Europe formed part of a single society — Christendom — not a political society it is true, but much more than anything we understand by a common religion or a common culture.

It was rooted in the medieval belief that the whole Christian people formed a single body with a twofold organization — the Regnum and the Sacerdotium [vocab: Sacerdotium is a Latin term meaning the earthly hierarchy whose primary goal was the salvation of the soul.] the Empire and the Papacy, and though the former never succeeded in making good its claim to universal authority, the latter gave Western Europe a real international organization, which was far more powerful than the local and partial authority of the secular states.

At the end of the 13th century, however, the sense of the common unity of Christendom was beginning to weaken. The fall of Acre, the last remnant of Christian territory in Palestine, in 1291 marks the decay of the Crusading spirit, and the destruction of the great Order of the Templars by Philip IV of France in 1307-12 was even more symptomatic of the coming of a new spirit. The rise of the national feudal monarchies in the West had already begun to threaten the supremacy of the international Church.

Throughout the second half of the 13th century, France had been growing in power and prosperity. She was no longer a loose confederation of feudal principalities. She was a national state, the unity of which was embodied not only in the monarchy, but in the States General, the representative assembly of the Estates of the Realm, which first appears in 1302, seven years after the similar organization of the English Parliament. Moreover, the king no longer governed through the great hereditary officers of state and the bishops. Their place was being taken by a professional class of officials and lawyers, many of them men of humble origin from southern France, who had acquired from their study of the Roman Law the ideals of royal supremacy and absolute sovereign states.

These forces, represented by men like Pierre Flote, Dubois, and above all, Nogaret, the professor of law from Montpellier, came into violent conflict with the papal theocracy in the person of its most uncompromising representative, Boniface VIII, in regard to the right of the secular power to tax the goods of the Church. The French emissary had declared to the Pope: “Your power is in words, that of my master is in deeds,” and Nogaret proved the truth of the boast by the brutal outrage of Anagni, which sent a shock of horror through Christendom, as is testified by Dante’s famous lines: “I see the flower-de-luce Anagni enter, and Christ in his own Vicar captive made; I see him yet another time derided; I see renewed the vinegar and gall, and between living thieves I see him slain.” (Purgatorio XX, 86) Two years later, a French pope was elected, and the Papacy was transferred to France. The victory of the French monarchy seemed complete.

Nevertheless, the international position of the Papacy was not immediately affected by the change. In some respects, it actually gained by its close union with the power of France, which was the great creative force in the culture. It was during the Avignon period that the supremacy of the Pope over the Church attained its highest point, especially in ecclesiastical taxation and in the right of provision to vacant benefices. It was its moral power and prestige that were declining. At the time of the struggle of the investitures, the conscience of Europe was on the side of the Papacy against the secularized feudal state; but now the danger of secularization came from within, from the luxury of the court of Avignon and the enormous development of the international system of papal finance. The reforming party began to look to the state as the power that might free the Church from the incubus of material wealth and leave it free to devote all its energies to its spiritual function.

Yet it may be said that in a sense both these problems in the form they assumed during the later Middle Ages were actually due to the achievements of the earlier reforming movement. For the recognition of the Holy See as the effective ruler of the Church and of the Curia as the ultimate court of appeal for the whole of Christendom had involved a highly organized system of ecclesiastical centralization which required an elaborate financial and fiscal system to support it.

This international ecclesiastical bureaucracy and financial system came into existence while the medieval state was still organized on a feudal and agrarian basis, so that when the western kingdoms came to develop an efficient administrative and financial system they found themselves face to face with the highly organized pontifical system. As a result the royal chancery and the papal chancery claimed jurisdiction in the same cases and the royal and pontifical exchequers claimed rights of taxation over the same sources of revenue. This conflict was an inevitable one, since there could be no question of a separation of Church and State. No one denied the universality of the Church, yet it was equally impossible to deny that the clergy were an integral part of the Kingdom — an Estate of the Realm.

If the claims of the Papacy, as asserted, for example, by Boniface VIII in the bull Clericis Laicos, had been accepted in full, any system of national taxation would have become impossible, and similarly with the papal claim to appoint its own nominees to bishoprics and ecclesiastical dignities at a time when bishops and abbots held high public offices in the national kingdoms. On the other hand, if the regalist position of the Kings’ lawyers had been accepted, the central government of the Church would have been deprived of the economic means of existence.

This dilemma was overcome owing to the fact that while each party insisted in theory on their total rights in their laws and public pronouncements, in practice they reached an agreed settlement by negotiation of each point as it arose. But this was an unsatisfactory solution, since it involved a great deal of hard bargaining and subordinated the spiritual interests of the Church to the economic interests of rival bureaucracies. The increasing importance for the Papacy of these financial questions led to a growing criticism of the abuses that seemed inseparable from the system.

These criticisms were already frequent in the 14th century when the Papacy resided at Avignon. John XXII (1316-34) and his successors were not bad popes, but they were primarily lawyers and administrators, and the more efficient was their administration, the richer became the court at Avignon — actually the cardinals had more of this wealth than the pope  — and the louder became the protests of its critics. There is one important exception — Benedict XII (1334-42), the Cistercian theologian Jacques Fournier.

Consequently it is not surprising that this period saw the final break between the Papacy and the spiritual reformers whose alliance had been the dominant factor in the formation of medieval Christendom. The left wing of the Franciscans had been in revolt since the end of the 13th century, and now in 1328 the head of the Order, Michael of Cesena, supported by its leading philosopher William of Ockham, defied Pope John XXII and appealed from the court of Avignon to the judgment of the universal Church, as represented by a General Council.

This was an event of no small importance, for William of Ockham was the leading mind of his age. He was the initiator — the venerabilis inceptor — of the via moderna which took the place of the classical scholasticism of the 13th century — the via antiqua — as the accepted doctrine of the universities for nearly two centuries, down to the time of Luther. The fact that such a man should have broken with the Avignon Papacy and devoted the last twenty years of his life to supporting the cause of the temporal power against it, both in Germany and in England, and advocating a new theory of the Church and its authority, shows the seriousness of the situation. In his view, which may have been influenced by the even more radical theories of his contemporary and ally, Marsilius of Padua, the ultimate authority lies not in the Pope but in the Church as a whole, and if the Pope fails, as John XXII in his view had done, it was the right and duty of the whole body of the faithful to intervene by means of a General Council.

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The Cultural Consequences Of Christian Disunity II – Christopher Dawson

July 26, 2011

Resurrection of Christ, Bellini, 1475-79

A continuation of yesterday’s post…

It is difficult to exaggerate the harm that was inflicted on Christian culture by the century of religious strife that followed the Reformation. The great controversy between Catholicism and Protestantism rapidly degenerated into a state of religious and civil war which divided Christendom into two armed camps. There could be no question of spiritual reconciliation so long as Catholics and Protestants were cutting one another’s throats, and calling in foreign mercenaries to help in the work of mutual destruction, as was the case in France in the 16th century and in Germany in the 17th.

Even within the Protestant world religious controversy became the cause of social conflict or its pretext, as we see in the case of the Civil War in England. That war was indeed far less destructive and atrocious than the great religious wars of the Continent, but it demonstrated even more clearly the essential futility and irrationality of religious conflict, in which each military victory led to fresh divisions and further conflicts until no solution was possible save a tired and disillusioned return to the traditional order in Church and State.

It was during this century of sterile and inconclusive religious conflict that the ground was prepared for the secularization of European culture. The convinced secularists were an infinitesimal minority of the European population, but they had no need to be strong since the Christians did their work for them. All they had to do was to point the moral, very cautiously at first, like Montaigne, and then with gradually increasing confidence and vigor, as with Hobbes and Bayle, and the English Deists. It was, however, an Anglican clergyman, a High Churchman to boot, who spoke the final word in The Tale of a Tub.

Thus it is not too much to say that the fate of Christian culture and the development of modern civilization have been determined or conditioned by the state of war which existed between Christians from the Reformation to the Revolution  — first a century of civil war in the strict sense and then a century or more of cold war and antagonism.

And though today Christians are at last emerging from this atmosphere of hatred and suspicion, the modern Christian world is still divided by the religious frontiers established in that age of religious strife. As a volcanic eruption changes the face of nature — overwhelming fertile lands with fields of lava and changing the course of rivers and the shape of islands — this great religious cataclysm has changed the course of history and altered the face of Western culture for ages to come. It is impossible to ignore this dark and tragic side of religious history; for if we do not face it, we cannot understand the inevitable character of the movement of secularization.

On the other hand, it is a still greater mistake to see the dark side only, as the thinkers of the Enlightenment did, and to ignore the spiritual and cultural achievements of the post-Reformation period.

For the energies of divided Christendom were not all absorbed in internecine conflict. On both the Catholic and the Protestant side the Reformation was followed by the development of new forms of religious life and thought. These were of course very different, so that they have sometimes been regarded as opposite to one another. Yet I think it is possible to trace a certain parallelism between them, which was no doubt due to their common historical background and to common cultural influences.

  1. In the first place there was on both sides of the religious frontiers a return to moral discipline after the laxity of the early Renaissance period. On the Protestant side this took the form of the Calvinist discipline which was the main inspiration of English and American Puritanism in the 17th century and the parallel ethos of the Presbyterian Covenanters in Scotland. It is one of the paradoxes of religious history that a theology which centered in the doctrines of predestination and reprobation and denied or minimized the freedom of the human will should have developed an ethos of personal responsibility which expressed itself in moral activism. There can, however, be no doubt that the hallmark of the new Protestant culture is just this spirit of moral activism, which was based on intensive theological training, but which found expression in secular life — in war and business — no less than in the life of the Churches.

    On the Catholic side the restoration of moral discipline took the form primarily of a return to the tradition of monastic asceticism. But this tradition was now brought out of the cloister into the world and applied by the new religious orders, above all by the Jesuits, to the contemporary situation, that is to say, to the needs of the Church, to the restoration of ecclesiastical unity and order, to the education of both the clergy and the laity, and to preaching and missionary propaganda.

    But in addition to the moral asceticism of the Counter-Reformation there was also on the Catholic side a certain tendency to theological rigorism which is much more akin to the theological tendencies of Puritanism.

    This theological rigorism produced the Jansenist movement, which caused a serious breach in the unity of Post-Reformation Catholicism, at least in France. The theological feud between the Jansenists and the Jesuits and the controversy about grace and free will bear an extraordinary similarity to that between the Puritans and the Arminians [Arminianism is a school of soteriological thought within Protestant Christianity based on the theological ideas of the Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609)and his historic followers, the Remonstrants. The doctrine's acceptance stretches through much of Christianity from the early arguments between Athanasius and Origen, to Augustine of Hippo's defense of "original sin."] on the same questions.

  2. In the second place the Post-Reformation period is characterized by the interiorization of religion and the intensive cultivation of the spiritual life. In the Catholic world this expressed itself above all in the great mystical movement which began in Spain and Italy in the 16th century and spread to France and England in the following century. But it is also represented by the ascetic spirituality of the Counter-Reformation. Indeed the most influential of all the spiritual works of the age — the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius — was, as its name denotes, essentially ascetic, and used the reason and the imagination in order to produce a psychological change in the personality. On the Protestant side, the mystical element is less significant, for the main emphasis was always placed on the experience of conversion and personal conviction of sin and redemption.

    The Pietist movement in the Lutheran church (which was later in date than the Catholic spiritual revival) was not devoid of an element of mysticism, while some of the minority sects, like the Quakers, were more definitely mystical and ultimately came to be influenced strongly by the less orthodox representatives of the Catholic mystical tradition.

    There was in fact an interesting underground movement towards religious unity and spiritual reconciliation which was carried on by representatives of these extremist groups, such as Peter Poiret in the Netherlands, who attempted to create a common eirenic [vocab: favoring, conducive to, or operating toward peace, moderation, or conciliation ] theology based on the consensus mysticorum [Of or belonging to secret rites or mysteries. Used in the neuter singular nominative (?), mysticum/mystica]; and Isaac Watts translated Jesuit sacred poetry. Though this movement was an isolated one, which affected an infinitesimal minority of Protestants, it does indicate the existence of Catholicizing tendencies in the Pietist movement as a whole, which explains the hostile reaction to the movement on the part of Protestant historians like Ritschl.

  3. Finally, in the third place, both Catholic and Protestant Europe were deeply influenced by the culture of the Renaissance. On both sides there was a continuous effort to use the new learning for Christian ends and to bring the new culture and art into relation with the Christian tradition. Thus the ideal of a Christian Humanism held a central place in both Catholic and Protestant culture and provided an important link or bridge between them.

    It is true that its influence was much stronger in Catholic Europe owing to the fact that Italy was both the home of the Renaissance and the center of Catholic culture. Moreover, Catholicism was able to use the new art and music and architecture of the Renaissance in the service of religion in a way which the aniconic [vocab: not employing or permitting images, idols, etc.: an aniconic religion]and non-liturgical character of Protestantism made impossible.

Thus the Baroque culture, in which the spirit of Christian Humanism found its full social and artistic expression, was exclusively or predominantly Catholic, and the sharing of this common culture gave the entire Catholic world from Peru to Poland an international unity which Protestant Europe never possessed.

In Northern Europe the influence of humanism was confined to the educated classes and found expression only in literature. But in this field it was triumphant, and throughout the 17th century, in England above all, the spirit of Christian Humanism inspired not only the poetry of Donne and Herbert and Milton and Vaughan but also the thought of the Cambridge Platonists and the Caroline divines, as well as of men of letters like Sir Thomas Browne and Isaac Walton.

Nevertheless all this wealth of literary culture could not prevent an increasing divergence between the social and psychological tendencies of Catholic and Protestant society. The Baroque culture integrated asceticism with mysticism, and humanism with popular culture, through the common media of art and liturgy; but in the Protestant world, the religious culture of the masses, which was derived from the Bible and the sermon, had no access to the imaginative world of the humanist poet and artist. Thus it was on the popular level that the differences between the two cultures are most obvious and their separation is most complete.

For what could be sharper than the contrast between the popular culture of Catholic Europe with its pilgrimages and festivals and sacred dramas all centering in the great Baroque churches which were the painted palaces of the Saints, and the austere religious life of the hard-working Protestant artisan and shopkeeper which found its only outward expression in the weekly attendance in a bare meeting house to listen to the long sermons of the Puritan divines and to sing long psalms in metrical but far from poetical versions?

This difference in the form of the religious life found expression in a corresponding difference of psychological types and spiritual personalities. A man like Cotton Mather had no doubt received a good classical education, but no one can call him a Christian Humanist. His character was formed in the same mould as that of his congregation. Whereas on the other side, men like St. Francis de Sales or Fenelon were humanists not only in their classical culture but in their spirituality and their personal relations.

This failure of Protestantism to assimilate the Christian Humanist tradition completely caused a certain impoverishment and aridity in English and American cultures and led ultimately to those defects which Matthew Arnold was to criticize so vigorously in the 19th century. Nevertheless Protestant culture had its own distinctive qualities. The moral energy of the Puritan tradition inspired the new bourgeois culture of the English-speaking world in the later 17th and 18th centuries and gave it the strength which enabled it to overcome its rivals and dominate the world.

What I am concerned with at the moment, however, is not to judge the values of these two forms of culture, but to point out their differences and show how their divergence contributed to the disunity of the Christian world. For when the age of religious war was over, Europe was still divided (and America also) by a difference of moral values and psychological antipathies. And these differences are harder to surmount than the theological ones, because they go so deep into the unconscious mind and have become a part of the personality and the national character.

When we come to the 19th century we shall find plenty of cases of men who have lost all conscious connection with religion but who nevertheless retain the social and national prejudices which they have inherited from their Catholic or Protestant backgrounds.

Similarly when the barriers were first broken down it was due not only to the theological converts and apologists, like Newman, but to the cultural converts, like Arnold and Ruskin. Arnold is a particularly significant case, because he admitted his debt to the Oxford Movement, though he did not concern himself with the theological questions which were its raison d’être, but concentrated all his attention on the cultural weaknesses of the Protestant tradition and the need for a revision of English cultural values.

The same phenomenon is to be found on the Catholic side, though it is less easy to point to a representative figure. But one may mention the attempt of a group of Catholic sociologists in France in the later 19th century to criticize Catholic social ethics by comparison with the moral energy and activism of Anglo-Saxon culture — an attempt which was, I believe, the real source of the Americanist controversy [vocab: Beginning in the 1880s, the Church in America was rocked by a series of debates that historians later came to call collectively the Americanist controversy. In general, disagreements revolved around how an increasingly immigrant church would relate to its host country: Would American Catholics retain strong ties to Europe and maintain their native languages, or would they attempt to assimilate as quickly as possible? See the Americanist Controversy here. http://www.catholichistory.net/Events/AmericanistControversy.htm].

Now I do not wish to suggest that we should approach the study of Catholicism and Divided Christendom in the spirit of Matthew Arnold rather than in that of Newman or Moehler. These are theological questions, and the last word must always rest with the theologians.

Yet as an historian I am convinced that the main sources of Christian division and the chief obstacle to Christian unity have been and are cultural rather than theological. Consequently, I believe that it is only by combining the study of the history of Christian culture with the study of theology that we can understand the nature and extent of the problem with which we have to deal.

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The Cultural Consequences Of Christian Disunity I – Christopher Dawson

July 25, 2011

Jean Restout, Pentecost, 1732

If you still don’t understand the divide between Catholics and Protestants, this is perhaps the most lucid and intelligent historical and cultural assessment of that division that I have ever encountered.

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Of all divisions between Christians, that between Catholics and Protestants is the deepest and the most pregnant in its historical consequences. It is so deep that we cannot see any solution to it in the present period and under existing historical circumstances. But at least it is possible for us to take the first step by attempting to overcome the enormous gap in mutual understanding which has hitherto rendered any intellectual contact or collaboration impossible.

From this point of view the problem is not to be found so much in the sphere of theology, strictly speaking, as in that of culture and historical tradition. For the changes that followed the Reformation are not only the work of the Churches and the theologians. They are also the work of the statesmen and the soldiers. The Catholic and Protestant worlds have been divided from one another by centuries of war and power politics, and the result has been that they no longer share a common social experience. Each has its own version of history, its own social inheritance, as well as its own religious beliefs and standards of orthodoxy. And nowhere is this state of things more striking than in America, where the English Protestant North and the Spanish Catholic South formed two completely different worlds which had no mental contact with one another.

It was not until the 19th century that this state of cultural separation came to an end; and the change was especially sharp in the English-speaking countries when Catholicism and Protestantism finally came together within the same societies and cultures. In England this was due to the movement of intellectual rapprochement which is represented by the Oxford Movement and the personality of Newman, while in America it was the result of external forces — above all the mass immigration of the Irish Catholics to America in the middle of the 19th century, which produced such profound social changes, particularly in New England.

Nowhere in the world have Catholicism and Protestantism been brought together more suddenly and closely than in Boston. Throughout the 19th century these two sections of the population remained separate peoples, although they necessarily shared the same national and regional citizenship. It is only in quite recent times that they have come to share a common culture. But this culture is a purely secular one; and one of the reasons that it is so completely secular is that there has been this complete cleavage of spiritual tradition and absence of intellectual contact between Catholics and Protestants.

No doubt there are many other factors in the secularization of modern culture, but this is one for which Christians are directly responsible. The movement of history, which for Christians in some way reflects the action of divine providence, has put an end to the social division of Christendom which followed the religious revolution of the 16th century. Hence it is now our business to see that the inner division in our culture should also be overcome by a progressive movement of intellectual understanding, the reconstitution of a common world of discourse and of a new dialogue between Catholics and Protestants.

In this work of mutual explanation there are two main fields to be covered. First there is the theological field, in which the student has to study the positive developments of Catholic and Protestant doctrine so as to understand the exact nature of the divergence in our beliefs. In the past this field had become a battleground of theological controversy so that it was a source of division and antagonism rather than understanding. Indeed it was the controversial character of theology that did more than anything else to discredit it in the eyes of the world. It is only in recent times that theological studies have taken a new direction and there is a growing tendency to re-examine the whole question in the light of first principles.

We see the results of this new theological orientation in the French series published under the title Unam Sanctam, and there has been a parallel movement of theological thought in Germany. Indeed it was there that the new approach first originated more than a century ago with the writings of John Adam Moehler. Today there is an international literature on the theology of Christian unity, which is likely to increase as a result of the Ecumenical Council.

But in addition to this theological study we have also to study the historical background and the cultural development of Catholic and Protestant society during the centuries of disunity. It is these historical studies that have been most neglected in the past, owing to the artificial separation between ecclesiastical and political history, which has had the effect of focusing the light of historical research on certain limited aspects of the past and of neglecting others that were intrinsically no less important. Thus political history has developed as the history of the European State system and the power conflict between the European dynasties and empires, and finally of the political revolutions that have changed the forms of the state.

It is only in modern times that historians have attempted to rectify this one-sided emphasis by opening up the new field of economic history, which today is generally recognized as no less important than political history.

But this is an exception, and there are still important fields of culture which are relatively uncultivated by the historians. The obvious solution would seem to be the expansion of historical science to include the whole of human culture in all its manifestations; but in spite of the efforts of German culture-historians to create a new study of this kind, it has failed to establish itself as a scientific discipline and is still looked on with considerable suspicion by the professional historians. In any case, we have to consider the question of religious history as a field of study which historians ought to take account of, but which they have in fact neglected. No doubt their answer would be that this is the business of the ecclesiastical historians. This is true enough in theory. In practice, however, ecclesiastical history is as highly specialized as political history, which it resembles in certain aspects.

The ecclesiastical historians have dealt exhaustively with the history of heresies and theological controversies, but they have shown little interest in religious culture. Even such a famous book as Ritschl’s History of Pietism is not a genuinely historical work. It is a polemical work, devoted to the demonstration of a theological thesis rather than to the exposition of a phase of religious history or the explanation of a form of religious experience. In fact it is not to the ecclesiastical historians but to the literary historians that we must look for the main achievements in this field. With all his faults SainteBeuve was a real religious historian when he wrote his Port Royal; and in our own days I think that the best approach to religious history has been made from the literary side, in respect of Catholicism, by Bremond in his literary study of religious experience in France in the 17th century, and of Protestantism by Professors Perry Miller and Johnston in their study of the New England mind.

When we come to the subject of this work, which is the development of the Catholic and Protestant cultures in modern times, we shall find ourselves in a no man’s land, between the political and the ecclesiastical historians. For while the actual schism which destroyed the religious unity of Western Europe has been studied exhaustively by both. groups of historians, neither of them has paid much attention to the development of the new forms of religious culture which took the place of the old common culture of medieval Christendom. Yet no one can deny their importance, for they had a considerable effect not only on the development of literature and music and art but also on the structure of social life, as we see in a very striking way in the contrasts in the social development of the two Americas.

And it is the same with the following period. For the political and ecclesiastical historians have both written a great deal on the history of the 18th century Enlightenment and on the political and religious revolution which followed it, but the religious revival of the 19th century, which transformed and re-created the Christian world that we know and in which we live, has, I believe, never been studied in its cultural aspects. One should perhaps make an exception as far as North America is concerned. For American Catholicism is the creation of this period, and in so far as historians attempt to study American Catholicism, they are bound to focus their attention on the 19th century development. Even so, it is impossible to study that development without studying the European background from which it emerged and which influenced its development in so many different ways. Yet there has been no study of the European Catholic revival by American historians, so far as I am aware, and very few translations of European works on the subject.

Moreover there is another and more fundamental reason why religious history during the last century or two should be a neglected and difficult field. For this is the age when the secularization of Western culture was triumphant and when religion was consequently pushed out of social life and increasingly treated as a private affair that only concerned the individual conscience. Whereas in the past religion had occupied the center of the stage of world history, so that a monk and a mystic like St. Bernard had moved armies and had become a counselor of kings, now it had withdrawn into private life and had left the stage of history to the representatives of the new political and economic forces.

This progressive extrusion of Christianity from culture is the price that Christendom has had to pay for its loss of unity  – it is part of what Richard Niebuhr has called “the Ethical Failure of the Divided Church.” The tragedy of schism is that it is a progressive evil. Schism breeds schism, until every social antagonism is reflected in some new religious division and no common Christian culture is conceivable. In the old world of united Christendom these social antagonisms were as strong as they are today, but they were antagonisms within a common society, and the Church was seen as the ultimate bond of unity. As William Langland writes, “He called that house Unity — which is Holy Church in English.” No one was more aware than Langland of the evils of contemporary society — the whole of Piers Plowman is an impassioned plea for social and religious reform, so much so that he has sometimes been regarded as a harbinger of the Protestant Reformation. But his emphasis is always on unity: “Call we to all the Commons that they come into Unity” “and there stand and do battle against Belial’s children.” As I have pointed out elsewhere, the creative age of medieval culture was the result of the alliance between the Papacy and the Northern Reformers, represented by the Cluniacs and the Cistercians, and when this alliance was broken, the vitality of medieval culture declined.

The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century represents a final breach between the Papacy and the Northern Reformers — between the principle of authority and the principle of reformation. But both principles were alike essential to the traditions of Western Christendom, and, even in the state of division neither part of the Christian world could dispense with them. Therefore the Catholic world developed a new reforming movement, as represented by the Jesuits and the other new religious Orders; while the Protestant world had to create new patterns of authority and theological tradition, such as we see in the ecclesiastical and theological discipline of the Calvinist Churches. But this pattern was never a universal one, and the Protestant world was weakened from the beginning by continuous theological controversies which produced a further series of schisms and permanent divisions between the different Protestant Churches.

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The French Revolution And Catholicism In The 18th Century by Christopher Dawkins

July 11, 2011

The advance of the Enlightenment weakened the influence of religion on culture, especially the influence of the Catholic religion on French culture. And French culture enjoyed such a cosmopolitan influence in the 18th century that its example was followed by the rest of Europe, with the exception of England. The influence of the Enlightenment, it is true, was mainly confined to the educated classes, and the great mass of the peasant population everywhere remained faithful to its religious beliefs and traditions. To a superficial observer the Church still held a dominant position in Catholic Europe. It was surrounded by wealth and privilege and its constitutional position in the different countries gave it a power of control over education and publishing which seemed to render it immune to criticism.

Nevertheless in the course of a few years all this was completely changed. In France it lost its privileged position and became an outlawed and persecuted society. In Germany and Italy the independence of the ecclesiastical states was destroyed, the monasteries were dissolved, Church property was secularized, and finally in Italy the Pope was deprived of his temporal power and was expelled from Rome and brought a prisoner to France.

All this was the result of the French Revolution. Obviously it was much more than a political revolution: it was a reformation of an even more fundamental kind than the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. The latter, even in its most revolutionary moments, asserted its loyalty to the Gospel and the Christian faith, but the Revolution was more far-reaching and swept away the entire structure of organized Christian institutions so far as it was possible to do so.

But the two movements resemble one another in that they were spiritual revolutions which changed every side of life — political, social, and religious — the Reformation being primarily a religious movement that was linked with great political and social changes, and the Revolution primarily a political movement which was founded on an ideology which involved fundamental religious and moral principles.

We speak of the “French” Revolution as we do of the “German” Reformation, but they were both of them European movements which affected the whole of Western culture. Both of them were highly complex. In both of them we see the most exalted ideals coexisting with materialist motives, the most enlightened principles and the narrowest intolerance, utopian milleniarism and the will to power. In the case of the French Revolution it is possible to distinguish a number of different factors — some of which seem to contradict one another, but which all played an essential part in the historical process.

First there is the political factor. Everyone from the king downwards recognized the need for a reform of the state. In the days of Louis XIV and Colbert, France had been the leader in the creation of the centralized national state. But in the 18th century she had failed to maintain this leadership. The monarchy had become inefficient, not because it was too strong but because it was too weak. The Revolution attempted to cure this paralysis by a complete reorganization of government and administration; first, (a) according to the principle of Liberal Constitutionalism, (b) then by democracy and popular dictatorship and (c) finally by the military imperialism of Napoleon. Thus the wheel of revolution had traversed a complete circle and France was back again in the old tradition of centralized monarchy — more centralized and more absolute than ever, though more democratic in so far as the Bourbon monarch had been replaced by a band of successful generals.

The second factor in the Revolution is represented by the Enlightenment, which, as we have seen, had prepared the way for it by half a century of criticism and propaganda which spared neither institutions nor beliefs. The Enlightenment is most completely represented by the group of intelligentsia which called themselves “the philosophes” and organized the publication of the French Encyclopedia in the middle of the century. Their propaganda was directed above all against the Church and all forms of organized religion, and it was not primarily concerned with political change. But its unbounded faith in the unlimited power of reason to change human behavior and social institutions lies at the root of the whole program of legislative reform during the early years of the Revolution.

It is true that this belief in the power of reason was not confined to the philosophes alone, but was shared by the very influential group of the Economists, the disciples of Quesnay and Gournay. These were not irresponsible men of letters, but serious administrators and statesmen, and they were equally representative of the spirit of the Enlightenment in their unbounded faith in the possibility of the immediate transformation of society by radical reforms.

But the most important element in the revolutionary ideology had its origin not in the rationalism of the Enlightenment, but in the movement of democratic idealism which had many of the characteristics of a new religion and which in fact became for a few decisive years the established religion of the French Republic. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, its originator, was a typical example of that restless, perpetually dissatisfied class — the revolutionary intelligentsia. Like so many of his successors he was a man of religious instincts who had lost his religious roots, and who laid the blame for his own unhappiness and instability on the disordered state of the society in which he lived. He was a moral optimist and a historical pessimist, asserting the goodness of man and nature and the corruption of contemporary society. Yet at the same time he was ready to idealize the State and he was prepared to offer it unlimited homage, if only the will of the people could be substituted for the authority of the law, and the doctrines of the Churches replaced by the religion of nature and natural morality.

Yet in spite of this radical breach with historical Christianity, there is no doubt that Rousseau’s social idealism was a reaction against the secularization of the modern state and an attempt to recover that sense of spiritual community which Christian society possessed in the past. For Rousseau’s fundamental principle of the equality of man is a spiritual principle analogous to the doctrine of Christian fellowship rather than to the political rights of a citizen, and the related principle of fraternity is obviously derived from the Christian combination of Christian fellowship with charity rather than from the political relation of citizenship to civil behavior or public spirit.

It was Rousseau who transformed the natural religion of the philosophers into a religious cult which appealed to something deeper than reason in human nature. And thus it was under the influence of Rousseau’s ideals that the French Revolution was hailed as the regeneration of humanity, and the democracy of the First French Republic was felt to be more than a state — a spiritual community, the Church of the new humanity. Wordsworth has described, as a witness and partaker of the emotions of the time, how the birth of democracy transformed the “meagre, stale, forbidding ways” of politics by the breadth of a new spiritual life so that he “found benevolence and blessedness / spread like a fragrance everywhere, when spring / hath left no corner of the land untouched” — a power which united the poet and the man of action in a common task,

Not in Utopia — subterranean fields
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us — the place where in the end,
We find our happiness or not at all!

Thus to the men of 1789 the essence of the Revolution was to be found not in financial or even constitutional reform, but in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which marked a new era in the history of humanity. They felt, like Thomas Paine, who wrote as Lafayette’s spokesman to the English-speaking world:

In the Declaration of Rights we see the solemn and majestic spectacle of a Nation opening its commission, under the auspices of its Creator, to establish a government, a scene so new, and so transcendently unequalled by anything in the European world, that the name of a Revolution is diminutive of its character, and it rises into a Regeneration of Man…

Government founded on a moral theory of universal peace, on the indefeasible hereditary Rights of Man, is now revolving from West to East by a stronger impulse than the Government of the sword revolved from East to West. It interests not particular individuals but Nations in its progress and promises a new era to the human race.

Thus the French Revolution falls into place as part of a world revolution which would restore to mankind the original rights of which it had been robbed at the very dawn of history by the tyranny of kings and priests.

Never did so great an opportunity offer itself to England, and to all Europe, as is produced by the two Revolutions of America and France. By the former, freedom has a national champion in the western world; and by the latter, in Europe. When another Nation shall join France, despotism and bad government will scarcely dare to appear. To use a trite expression, the iron is becoming hot all over Europe. The insulted German and the enslaved Spaniard, the Russ and the Pole, are beginning to think. The present age will hereafter merit to be called the Age of Reason, and the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world.

This new faith was indeed destined to change the world, but it changed it by unleashing forces of social revolution which were very different from anything the liberal reformers had imagined. For the liberal aristocracy and the bourgeoisie who had launched the Revolution were not the People, and in some respects were even further from the People than the clergy and the provincial nobility who remained faithful to the old order.

Behind the liberal aristocrats and lawyers who formed the majority of the States General lay the vast anonymous power of the people which had made the monarchy and had been in turn shaped by it, and now it was to make the Revolution. To the Liberal idealists — men like Lafayette and Clermont Tonnerre, the Abbe Fauchet and the orators of the Gironde  — the Revolution meant the realization of the ideals of the Enlightenment, liberty and toleration, the rights of man and the religion of humanity.

They did not see that they were on the edge of a precipice and that the world they knew was about to be swallowed up in a tempest of change which would destroy both them and their ideals. For, as the Revolution advanced, it gradually revealed the naked reality that had been veiled by the antiquated trappings of royalty and tradition, the General Will, which was not the benevolent abstraction the disciples of Rousseau had worshipped, but a fierce will to power which destroyed every man and institution that stood in its way. As de Maistre wrote, the will of the people was a battering ram with twenty million men behind it.

If we turn to the history of the Revolution in relation to the Catholic Church, we shall see how all these different factors were reflected in the religious policies of the successive governments.

The relations of Church and State under the old regime were so intimate that a revolution in the state inevitably affected the rights of the Church and the privileges of the clergy. But the National Assembly was not content to make these inevitable changes in the external relations of the State to the Church. It aimed at nothing less than the wholesale reconstruction of the national church. The reformation of the Gallican Church by the National Assembly was in fact as drastic as the Reformation of the Church in England by Henry VIII. Like the latter, the National Assembly dissolved the monasteries and abolished the religious Orders; it created a national church as in England, which was in practice entirely dependent on the State, though any interference in matters of faith and dogma was disclaimed.

But it went far beyond the English Reformation in its wholesale confiscation of Church property and in its revolutionary changes in the hierarchy and ecclesiastical organization. The ancient ecclesiastical provinces and dioceses were swept away, and the map of Gallia Sancta was redrawn so as to coincide with that of the new France, with the department as the diocesan unit. Both bishops and parish priests were to be chosen by election like other municipal officers and by the same electoral bodies — the bishops by the electors of the department and the priests by those of the district.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, as it was called, which was enacted in May 1790, was mainly the work of the lawyers, like Lanjuinais and Camus, who represented the Gallican and Jansenist ideals of the old parliamentary opposition, but behind the legalism of these narrow and unimaginative minds there was the liberal idealism which believed that the Revolution was destined to unite humanity in a new spiritual unity and demanded that the Church itself should become the apostle of this humanitarian gospel.

This was the ideal which the Abbé Fauchet preached to enthusiastic audiences at the Palais Royal in the autumn of 1790. “There can be only one true religion,” he declared, “the religion which says to men, Love one another. This religion exists; it is as eternal as the law of love: it has hitherto been unrealized, and disregarded by men who have been separated by the law of hereditary descent that has ruled the world: we must show it to them in its naked purity and truth, and the human race attracted by its divine beauty will adore it with all its heart.”[ Aulard, L'Eloquence Parlesnentaire pendant la Revolution, II, iii]

According to Fauchet, Catholics and Freemasons could unite to preach the great religious truths which found their social expression in the Revolution. But the Church of Talleyrand was as unfitted as the Freemasonry of Philippe Égalité to become the organ of this democratic mystique. Though the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was too radical to be reconciled with orthodox Catholicism, it was far too traditional to satisfy the demands of revolutionary idealism. It was not enough to bind the carcass of the old church to the new state. What the Revolution demanded was a new civic religion which would be entirely totalitarian in spirit and would recognize no higher duty than the service of the state.

Thus the Constitutional Church satisfied neither party. Instead of strengthening national unity by enlisting the Church in the service of the Revolution, it produced a religious schism which gradually brought French Catholicism into direct conflict with the new order. At first Catholic opinion, as represented by the clerical delegates to the National Assembly, had adopted a very sympathetic attitude to the Revolution and even accepted the secularization of Church property and the sacrifice of clerical privileges with little resistance. But it was a different matter when it came to the complete reorganization of the internal order of the Church without regard for ecclesiastical traditions or canonical principles. The bishops, with the exception of Talleyrand and five or six others, refused to accept the proposed changes, and they were followed by more than half of the clergy and a large part of the population.

Even then the schism might have been avoided, since Rome was slow to issue its condemnation and there was an influential minority in the Assembly which realized the dangers of a complete break. Unfortunately the intolerant legalism of the majority forced the issue upon every parish priest and village congregation by obliging the clergy to swear fidelity to the civil constitution under pain of deprivation, and those who refused, the Non-jurors, or “insermentés,” were regarded as disloyal to the Revolution, since it was easy to confuse opposition to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy with opposition to the Constitution itself.

From this point the era of persecution begins which was to last with some brief intermissions until the coming of Bonaparte. In theory, the Catholics — that is to say, the Non-jurors — possessed the rights of freedom of conscience and could say Mass and administer the sacraments privately, but in practice they were subjected to the violence of the mob, which made a practice of beating up anyone who was bold enough to attend these unlicensed services. It was these outrages which led André Chénier, who himself was not a believer, to publish his famous pamphlet “The Altars of Fear,” against mass intimidation. “We no longer build temples to Fear,” he wrote, “like the Greeks. Yet never has the dark goddess been honored by a more universal cult. The whole of Paris is her temple and all respectable people have become her priests and every day offer to her in sacrifice their thoughts and their conscience.”

In the following year-1792 — the persecution became legalized as a result of the outbreak of war with Austria in April and the wave of fear and suspicion which swept the country. In May a law was passed which made all the non-juring clergy liable to deportation. Many of them were imprisoned as suspect, and when the great massacre of the prisons took place in September, 223 priests were murdered, and a number in the provinces. Henceforward, Catholicism was only able to exist in secret as an underground resistance movement. Most of the clergy took refuge in England and elsewhere, and those who remained lived under the constant threat of the guillotine, for by a law passed in March 1793, sentence of death was passed on any priest who had avoided deportation.

Nor was the situation of the Constitutional Church and the clergy who had taken the oath much better. With the coming of the Republic in 1792, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had lost its legal status and the way was open for the complete de-Christianization of France. The Revolutionary Calendar with its ten-day week and its civic festivals replaced the traditional Christian calendar and feasts, and the churches were closed or converted into temples of the new cult. The priests and bishops of the Constitutional Church were induced by threats or cajolery to abjure their priesthood and renounce their faith, though there was a minority led by Gregoire, the Constitutional Bishop of Blois, who remained staunch to their vows. This anti-Christian movement reached its climax in November, 1793, when all the churches in Paris were closed by the Commune and the notorious celebration of the worship of the goddess, Reason, was carried out in the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

Throughout France a carnival of sacrilege and iconoclasm took place which wrecked the churches and defaced religious monuments and works of art. But these excesses soon produced a reaction. As I have already said, the dynamic spirit of the Revolution was not the rationalism of Voltaire but the religion of Rousseau, which rejected atheism with horror and professed a fervent belief in the Divine Being and the supremacy of the moral law.

The great representative of this creed in the Convention was Maximilien Robespierre, the leader of the Jacobin party, and he owed his unique position in the republic to the inflexible rigidity and conviction with which he maintained its dogmas. In contrast to the other revolutionary leaders like Mirabeau, Marat and Danton, he regarded the Revolution as essentially a moral and religious reformation. And he saw that it was not enough to give a negative or secular expression to the spiritual ideals of the new order.

No doubt, as we have seen, the establishment of a new civil religion was implicit in the whole development of the Revolution from the Feast of the Federation in 1790 onwards, but hitherto its religious character had been concealed by the negative anti-clericalism of the extremists like Hébert and Chaumette who were responsible for the anti-religious outrages of 1793. But Robespierre was determined to purge the temple of Democracy of these unclean spirits and vindicate the religious character of the Republic. He began his campaign in the autumn of 1793 by purging the Jacobin party of all atheistic elements and thus making it the organ of the new religious movement. Next he destroyed the rival parties, above all the Cordeliers, whom he regarded as the representatives of social atheism, so that the Jacobins were the only party in the State — at once a political party, a Church, and an Inquisition. The road was now clear for the establishment of “the Republic of Virtue.”

Anyone who studies the history of the First French Republic cannot fail to be impressed by the way in which the Jacobins anticipated practically all the characteristic features of the modern totalitarian regimes: the dictatorship of a party in the name of the community, the use of propaganda and appeals to mass emotion, as well as violence and terrorism, the conception of revolutionary justice as a social weapon, the regulation of economic life in order to realize revolutionary ideals, and above all the attempt to enforce a uniform ideology on the whole people and the proscription and persecution of every other form of political thought.

From our present point of view, however, the most important thing about this prototype of all our modern revolutionary and communitarian movements, is that it also marks the decisive turning point in the relations between the State and the Christian Church. Although it finally resulted in the separation of Church and State, this was the very opposite of the ideal which it consciously aimed at. Its intention was to unite rather than to separate, to destroy the traditional dualism of the two powers and the two Societies and to reabsorb the Church in the Community. Nevertheless, this community was not a secular community in the strict sense of the word. The new republic as conceived by Robespierre and Saint-Just and by their master Rousseau before them was a spiritual community, based on definite moral doctrines and finding direct religious expression in an official civic cult.

As we have seen, the Revolution at first attempted to combine the new faith with the old religion by the creation of a Constitutional Church separated from Rome and inseparably bound up with the new state. But the victory of Robespierre and the Jacobins involved the abandonment of this compromise and the institution of the religion of Nature and the Supreme Being as the official faith of the republic. The feasts of the Church were abolished in favor of the new civic festivals, Sundays made way for the Decadi, and the churches were secularized or devoted to the new cult. Thus the democratic community became a counter church of which Robespierre was at once the high priest and the grand inquisitor, while Catholicism and atheism alike were ruthlessly proscribed.

This was the boldest and most logical attempt to solve the problem of the relations of Church and State, or rather the relations of religion and society, that had been made since the Reformation, and its failure largely accounts for the collapse of the democratic experiment and the coming of a military dictatorship.

After the tremendous events of 1794, culminating in the execution of Robespierre and the fall of his party, the remaining five years of the revolutionary period seem an anticlimax. But we must remember that the fall of the Jacobins did not involve any fundamental change in the spirit or religious ideals of the Revolution. Under the Directory, the civil religion of Robespierre was continued by Theophilanthropism and the Decadary cult, and the persecution of Christianity which was relaxed for a moment after the fall of Robespierre was revived in all its severity after the coup d’etat of Fructidor (Sept. 1797) when hundreds of priests were deported to Guiana or imprisoned at Oleron and the Ile de Re. The coming of Bonaparte in 1799 at last put an end to all this, and nothing contributed more to make his government popular and successful than his disavowal of the policy of persecution.

Bonaparte was not a Christian. As he once said, “I don’t believe in religion but in the idea of God.” However, his Deism was very different from that of Robespierre, and he was prepared to make a public gesture of conformity and to renew the old alliance between Church and State as a necessary foundation for his work of social reconstruction. It was in this spirit that he signed the famous concordat of 1801 with Pope Pius VII which at last restored legal recognition to the Catholic Church. But it was not so easy to undo the destructive effects of the last eleven years. It was a new century and a new world in which the Church was almost a stranger. An immense work of moral and religious reconstruction had still to be undertaken.

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The Age Of The Enlightenment – Christopher Dawson

July 8, 2011

Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (French: La Liberté guidant le peuple), 1830

I must confess that I knew so little of the history below, I was embarrassed. Or perhaps I should say more precisely, I knew the history but had no idea what it meant.

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Notwithstanding the contribution made by England to the European Enlightenment and the profound influence it exerted on French thought, it was in France itself that the Enlightenment achieved its fullest expression and from France that it was diffused throughout the rest of Europe.

This was no doubt largely due to the international prestige that French culture had already acquired during the reign of Louis XIV, when Versailles had become not only the pattern of European monarchy, but also the arbiter of European manners and taste. Moreover this classical culture was extremely rational in spirit, though not yet rationalist. It consisted indeed of two diverse and actually contradictory elements. There was the Gallican Catholic culture which flowered in Bossuet and the great preachers, in Mabillon and the Benedictine scholars, and in the spiritual culture of the mystical and spiritual writers like St. Vincent de Paul. But on the other hand there was a strong movement of scientific rationalism deriving from the thought of the later Italian Renaissance — the work of such men as Gassendi and Campanella, above all of the outstanding genius who embodied this movement, Rene Descartes (1596-1650).

It was Descartes’ aim to reorganize the world of thought on abstract mathematical principles. He was a revolutionary genius who made a clean sweep of the principles of authority and tradition, and built a new intellectual world on the basis of scientific and geometrical reason. Yet there was a profound affinity and even a spiritual identity between the rationalism of this most independent of thinkers (who spent his life in voluntary exile in Holland) and the spirit of the new classical French culture.

In spite of the opposition of all the vested interests in the Church and the universities, the Cartesian movement won the support not only of the scientific world but of all the leaders of French culture, including metaphysicians and theologians like Malebranche and Thomassin, as well as the teachers of Port Royal, like Lancelot and Nicole. So that the philosophy of the classical culture was Cartesianism based on methodic doubt and rigid mathematical reasoning, and valuing clarity above all things. Its literary ideal, as expressed by Boileau, was also a purely rational one. “Le Bon Sens” was his supreme principle, and he counsels the poet,

Aimez donc la Raison et que tous vos ecrits
Empruntent d’elle seule et leur lustre et leur prix.

Love is the reason. As always your writing
Borrow from itself and their luster and price

Boileau understood “bon sens” and the rule of reason in a strictly orthodox form, though his orthodoxy made room for the Gallicanism of Bossuet and the Jansenism of Arnauld.

But as soon as the death of Louis XIV replaced the rigid authoritarianism of the Grand Siècle by the liberty and license of the Regency, Reason became Rationalism and “le bon sens” the kind of “common sense” which regards mystery and miracle as absurd, and defines faith as belief in what is irrational. At this stage of the French Enlightenment, the most representative figure was Fontenelle, whose long life covers the century from 1657 to 1757. Fontenelle was a Cartesian with wide scientific interests and a gift of exposition which made him the inaugurator of the new science and philosophy of the Salon, which was henceforward to be characteristic of the French Enlightenment.

The powerful movement of scientific and philosophical ideas which influenced the course of English culture during the 17th century owed little to Descartes or his school. It was a parallel movement which had similar roots in the scientific culture of the later Renaissance, but differed widely from the French development, though to some extent it shared a common social and political background. In the culture of the Enlightenment the two elements met. There was indeed more of Locke than of Descartes in the philosophy of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists.

The acceptance of English empiricism and experimentalism, however, did nothing to change the spirit of Rationalism which had been impressed so strongly on French thought by Descartes and Fontenelle. Consequently the influence of Locke in France was very different from what it was in England.

The spirit of the English Locke was readily assimilated by English Protestantism and became a bridge between science and religion, but the French Locke was made the standard-bearer of a party far more revolutionary and destructive than were even the English Deists in England. The French philosophers were not merely anti-clerical, but openly anti-Christian.

Yet the movement was not purely negative. The Enlightenment had a positive ideal which finds its best expression in the great Encyclopaedia, above all in D’Alembert’s Discours Preliminaire (1751). Nevertheless it was the negative and destructive genius of Voltaire that remained the dominant spirit of the movement. He was perhaps the most brilliant pamphleteer that has ever existed, and certainly the most long lived, for his literary productions never flagged for sixty years, and throughout the most of that time he ruled literary Europe with the scourge of his ridicule and the sword of his wit.

This destructive and negative aspect of the French Enlightenment contributed very materially to the French Revolution and the destruction of the Gallican Church. When the war against authority which the philosophes had carried on for fifty years was transferred from the sphere of culture and religion to that of politics, it was inevitable that it should carry with it the ideology which had inspired it in its pre-political phase. Indeed the relation between the two phases of the movement is to a very great extent one of cause and effect, since you cannot have a cultural and spiritual revolution without ultimately producing a political revolution also. By this I do not mean that the philosophes were political revolutionaries. On the contrary their political ideal was in general that of enlightened despotism, and the most representative figures like Voltaire and D’Alembert and Baron Grimm did their best to ingratiate themselves with the courts of Russia, Prussia and Austria.

But even if this alliance with the autocrats had been wider and more thorough than it was, it is highly doubtful if the revolutionary effects of the new ideas could have been permanently excluded from politics:

 “The destructive criticism of the philosophers,” as I have written elsewhere, “had undermined the order of Christian culture more completely than they realized, and it only needed the coming of a dynamic emotional impulse which appealed to the masses for the revolution to become a social and political reality.

This element was supplied by Rousseau and his disciples, who found in the democratic ideology of the rights of man and the general will a new faith strong enough to transform the rationalist and aristocratic spirit of the Enlightenment into the passionate and democratic spirit of the Revolution. The theories of Rousseau had the same relation to the ideology of the Jacobin party as the theories of Karl Marx to the ideology of communism. Indeed there is a genetic relation between Rousseauist Jacobinism and Marxist Communism. For the history of the modern European revolutionary movement has been a continuous development, so that democracy, nationalism, socialism and communism are all of them successive or simultaneous aspects of the same process. Thus there is a socialist element in the thought of a typical nationalist like Fichte, a democratic element in Marx, and a nationalist element in Stalin.“

Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent his life in close relation with the French Enlightenment, but in bitter hostility to its great leader, Voltaire. At first sight the forces were unevenly matched — on the one side, the friend of princes and the master mind of a brilliant intellectual society, on the other a lonely persecuted neurotic, who lived an underground existence in hiding from his real and imaginary enemies. And yet this outsider and natural Ishmaelite succeeded in gaining the enthusiastic support of the French intelligentsia, and unleashed the new emotional forces that found expression more than ten years after his death in the world-shaking upheaval of the French Revolution. Rousseau, in contrast to the Encyclopaedists, had a genuinely religious temperament, and the cult of nature and humanity, to which the Deists in England and France had offered their sincere but cerebral allegiance, acquired from him a religious fervor and an emotional conviction which proved contagious and irresistible.

For a generation — during the last third of the 18th century — the Religion of Nature became a real religion and no mere ideological fantasy, a faith in which men believed with their whole souls and for which they were prepared to die. In spite of the vagueness of its beliefs — its faith in progress, its hope in the coming of an age of social perfection and universal happiness, its optimistic faith in a providential order of nature, its belief in Democracy and the doctrine of political freedom, social equality and spiritual fraternity — it would be a mistake to underestimate its religious character, since it continued to be the dominant creed of a great part of Western civilization down to the beginning of the 20th century. Indeed the present spiritual crisis of our culture is due not so much to the loss of the traditional faith in Christianity, which had already occurred by the time of the French Revolution, as to the collapse of this new religion which has occurred in the present century, especially after the two world wars.

Thus in France and the countries under the direct influence of the Revolution, it is perhaps more accurate to speak of the de-Christianization of culture than of its secularization, while in England the course of development was the reverse. However, as in all periods of religious revolt, more people were detached from the old religion than were converted to the new. A very large part of the population was left in a state of moral confusion, acquiescing in the destruction of the old order without giving any profound adhesion to the religious ideals of the new.

The French Revolution created a bourgeois society and a secular culture, and yet the average French bourgeois remained a lukewarm Catholic, and his wife a pious and practicing one. It was the intelligentsia and the urban working class which remained faithful to the revolutionary tradition. It was from these two classes that 19th century socialism originated, and its earlier “utopian” forms were still inspired by the same ideals of the Religion of Nature and Humanity which had inspired the French Revolution.

The American Revolution owed a great deal to the influence of Locke and the culture of the English Enlightenment, and it made in turn an important contribution to the French Revolution. But it also possessed its own intrinsic importance and made its independent contribution to the culture of the modern world. The classical figure of the American Enlightenment is Benjamin Franklin, who stands in an analogous position to Locke in England and Voltaire in France, and in the following generation we have Thomas Paine, an American by adoption, who is equally important as a politician and a religious (or anti-religious) propagandist, and, a little later, Jefferson, who represents the culture of the American Enlightenment in its most mature form.

All three men were Deists, and it is difficult to distinguish any clear theological differences between them, but they differed remarkably in personality and social attitude. This difference was in part due to the differences in the several colonial cultures, and in the case of Paine, to the fact that he was thirty-seven when he first came to America. Nevertheless, the American Revolution itself exerted a formative influence on American culture to a much greater degree than the English Revolution in England, or the French in France. This was partly owing to the fact that the established Church of Virginia and the other Southern colonies was almost destroyed, and there was for a time nothing to take its place, so that the organized forces of religion were weaker during the years that followed the Revolution than at any period in American History. [Cf. G. A. Koch, Republican Religion: The American Revolution and the Cult of Reason (New York, Holt, 1938) on this point.]

But, apart from this, American culture had been already secularized by the influence of the frontiers where settlements had been made beyond the control of the Churches. The Quakers at least were aware of this, and took disciplinary measures against migration into regions beyond the reach of the regular meetings. In this matter there is a sharp contrast with the tradition of Spanish and French America, where the Church accompanied the pioneers from the beginning. The responsibility lay of course largely with the Church of England, which failed to create any American bishops. But New England was founded by men who wished to get away from bishops anyhow, and there the Revolution produced less secularization than elsewhere, since the Congregational Churches kept their hold on their people.

Yet in spite of the growing secularization of culture from above through the Enlightenment which primarily affected the intelligentsia, the European masses remained faithful to Christianity throughout the 18th century; and in England where the movement of secularization had begun first, and had been least affected by political repression, the 18th century actually saw a spontaneous religious revival on a very large scale. This revival had its center in the unprivileged classes, often the poorest and the most uneducated, such as the miners of Cornwall. It did not attempt to influence Church or State directly, and it was not until the end of the century that the related evangelical movement as represented by William Wilberforce and the so-called “Clapham Sect” began to have a direct influence on public life, first by its propaganda against the slave trade and later on by an alliance with the humanitarians of the Enlightenment.

In particular Wesley and his well-organized followers powerfully affected the history of American culture. For it was largely through his influence and that of his ally Whitefield that the secularizing efforts of the Revolutionary epoch were overcome. No other non-American has ever had such a strong and lasting effect on America, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that he was one of the Founding Fathers of the 19th century American culture. This is all the more remarkable since he was himself a strong Tory and an outspoken opponent of the Revolution.

One of the most important effects of this religious revival was the rise of Protestant missions. Hitherto, Protestantism had been notably lacking in missionary enterprise. But in the 18th century the Moravians, the German Pietist sect which had had a great influence on Wesley and the first stages of the Methodist movement, were the first to turn their attention in this direction in 1731. It was not until the close of the century, with the foundation of the Protestant missionary societies and Carey’s mission to India, that the movement became widespread.

Thenceforward throughout the 19th century it increased steadily, decade by decade, and had a considerable influence on world culture by its promotion of cultural contacts and the spread of Western Christian education in the East. The 19th century was in fact a great missionary age for Protestants and Catholics alike, and the secondary effects that these missions produced on culture deserve more study from secular historians than they have hitherto received.

In Catholic Europe the impact of the Enlightenment on the tradition of Christian culture was more destructive, though there also it was slow to affect the peasantry and the masses. As we have seen, the tendency to sectarian division that is the characteristic note of this period in Protestant Europe also affected the Catholics, at least in France and the Netherlands. But where the Baroque culture was strongest — in the Mediterranean lands, in Central and Eastern Europe, and in Latin America — this was not so. There the unity of religion and culture was almost complete, and it is very doubtful if it would ever have been dissolved had it been left to itself. But the change in the balance of power in the second half of the 17th century produced far-reaching changes in the sphere of culture as well as that of politics which ultimately extended to religion as well.

For the age of Louis XIV was an age not only of French political predominance, but also of French cultural prestige. The new models of classical taste and style evolved at the French court and in the salons and academies outside the old Baroque patterns, and though Louis XIV prided himself on his orthodoxy, the spirit of French classical authors was deeply influenced by Gallicanism, Jansenism, and Cartesian rationalism. From the moment that this spirit triumphed, the retreat of the mystics (as Henri Bremond calls it) begins, and from the end of the 17th century classical culture led on without a break to the culture of the Enlightenment and the great rationalist attack on revealed religion.

Moreover, since Louis XIV had succeeded in obtaining the Hapsburg inheritance of the Spanish Empire for his grandson, Spain had passed into the Bourbon orbit and had ceased to exercise an independent leadership in Catholic culture. The result was a breach in the continuity of Spanish culture which led to the divorce of Spain from her old connections with Austria and Baroque Europe and incorporated her artificially and externally in the new international society of French culture with which she had no organic historical relation.

But in parts of Europe the Baroque culture lasted far into the 18th century, especially in the Hapsburg empire, which extended from the Turkish frontier to the Rhine at Freiburg im Breisgau. Here the reigns of Charles VI and Maria Teresa witness its last great achievements in architecture, sculpture and music, though not in literature and thought. When the Enlightenment did reach this part of Europe, it did so through the Enlightened Despotism of Joseph II and encountered considerable popular resistance.

In Latin Europe, on the other hand, the Enlightenment advanced more rapidly and was more overtly anti-Christian. Though the Bourbon monarchies were everywhere officially devoted to the defense of the Christian order, their defense was half-hearted and ill-directed and the enemies of religion had powerful friends at court, especially at the court of Louis XV in the time of Choiseul (1759-70), when the Bourbon courts, after the expulsion of the Jesuits from their respective countries, took joint measures to force the Papacy to abolish the Order, which it finally did in 1773. This was the most disastrous blow ever inflicted on the Counter-Reformation culture. It weakened and disorganized Catholic higher education throughout Europe, wrecked the work of the missions in the East and in America, and destroyed the only force capable of meeting the anti-Christian propaganda of the Encyclopaedists.

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