‘The Clergy who Affect to Call Themselves Orthodox’: Thomas Secker and the Defence of Anglican Orthodoxy, 1758–68

2007 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 342-353
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram

The spectre of the seventeenth century loomed large in the eighteenth century. The Anglican orthodox were particularly aghast at the radical assault on the religio-political order during the previous century and feared a reprise during theirs. In 1734, for instance, Thomas Seeker (1693–1768) warned his audience at St James’s, Westminster, that Charles I’s execution was ‘a most peculiarly instructive example of divine judgments, brought down by a sinful people on their own heads’. In all his providential interventions in human affairs, God teaches ‘an awful regard to himself, as moral governor of the world; and a faithful practice of true religion’. And what drew his divine wrath upon Britain during the 1650s was the abandonment of’real religion’ for ‘hypocrisy, superstition, and enthusiasm’. Certainly Laud and his followers might have displayed ‘an over warm zeal, and very blameable stiffness and severity’, Seeker acknowledged. ‘But there was also, in the enemies of the church, a most provoking bitterness and perverseness; with a wild eagerness for innovation, founded on ignorant prejudices, which their heated fancies raised into necessary truths; and then, looking on them, as the cause of Christ, they thought themselves bound and commissioned to overturn whatever was contrary to them.’

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Kurowiak

AbstractAs a work of propaganda, graphics Austroseraphicum Coelum Paulus Pontius should create a new reality, make appearances. The main impression while seeing the graphics is the admiration for the power of Habsburgs, which interacts with the power of the Mother of God. She, in turn, refers the viewer to God, as well as Franciscans placed on the graphic, they become a symbol of the Church. This is a starting point for further interpretation of the drawing. By the presence of certain characters, allegories, symbols, we can see references to a particular political situation in the Netherlands - the war with the northern provinces of Spain. The message of the graphic is: the Spanish Habsburgs, commissioned by the mission of God, they are able to fight all of the enemies, especially Protestants, with the help of Immaculate and the Franciscans. The main aim of the graphic is to convince the viewer that this will happen and to create in his mind a vision of the new reality. But Spain was in the seventeenth century nothing but a shadow of former itself (in the time of Philip IV the general condition of Spain get worse). That was the reason why they wanted to hold the belief that the empire continues unwavering. The form of this work (graphics), also allowed to export them around the world, and the ambiguity of the symbolic system, its contents relate to different contexts, and as a result, the Habsburgs, not only Spanish, they could promote their strength everywhere. Therefore it was used very well as a single work of propaganda, as well as a part of a broader campaign


Author(s):  
Karin Vélez

This chapter begins by examining how two peripheral artworks of the Virgin of Loreto, the eighteenth-century wooden statue from the Moxos missions and the seventeenth-century Roman painting by Caravaggio, each tapped into outside streams of Marian art. The same impetus for transformation is observed for the original icon of the Madonna of Loreto at the Italian shrine. Updates to this icon were spurred by an awareness of the world outside Loreto. The chapter concludes with a return to the frontier, to Canada, to consider some significantly named but lesser known Huron women converts who contributed to Mary's global public image. Overall, these case studies of modifications to the Virgin of Loreto reflect what mattered to people on both sides of the Atlantic about Mary at this time: she was alien, yet she was accessible; she moved, and she could also be moved.


1987 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 267-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. F. McMillan

We are all familiar with the idea that the Church is in the world but not of it, and that too great a preoccupation with earthly things may compromise the Church’s other-worldly objectives. One thinks of the extravagance of a Renaissance pope such as Leo X, reputed to have said, ‘Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us’: or of an ancien régime prelate like the Archbishop of Mainz, who arrived for the coronation of the Emperor Joseph II with a retinue of fourteen sumptuous carriages: or, in our own time, the Vatican’s reported links with some of the shadier elements in the world of international finance. Yet, it is equally obvious that lack of adequate material resources can act as a serious impediment to the Church’s mission to go forth and teach all nations. Excessive poverty, like excessive wealth, brings its own problems. As the adage has it, not money itself but the desire for money is the root of all evil. Excessive poverty and the desire for money are the themes which I wish to pursue in this paper, in the context of the Scottish Catholic Mission in the eighteenth century, and more specifically as they relate to the so-called Jansenist quarrels which divided the Mission in the 1730s and 1740s.


Tekstualia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (59) ◽  
pp. 27-40
Author(s):  
Mirosława Modrzewska

The article explores the affi nities between Byron’s works with the seventeenth-century literary tradition of carnivalesque discourse. These affi nities can be traced in his comical burlesque writings, such as The Devil’s Drive (1813), Beppo (1818), The Vision of Judgement (1822) and Don Juan (1819–1824). There is a well-established British critical tradition which sees the author of Don Juan as a continuator of Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century mock-heroic convention, but his use of the grotesque mode makes him the heir of Miguel de Cervantes or Francisco Quevedo. Byron’s literary identifi cation with the poetic style of the seventeenth-century baroque can be detected in his predilection for a comical deformation of characters, images and meanings. The poet uses the language of monstrosity and transgression to achieve political and religious provocation and to lure his reader into the world of a liberated language, freed from conventional connotations.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 135-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naoko Frances Hioki

This article works to identify an intersection of the Catholic and Buddhist pictorial traditions with regard to the symbolism of the journey to the spiritual world. In both Christian and Buddhist traditions, the river/ ocean is a popular symbol that designates the border between this world and the other world. A work of western-inspired Japanese folding screens known as Yōjin Sōgakuzu (Europeans Playing Music) is an outstanding example that makes use of the symbolism of the river to allude to one’s pilgrimage to the other world in the guise of a secular waterfront scene. The folding screens were painted in the seventeenth century by Japanese artists who were affiliated with the art studio founded by the Jesuits. An investigation of European sources of the painting will show how the painters modified the famous Catholic iconography of “The Ship of the Church” to match the taste of the Japanese patrons of the time. Further, comparisons with other Japanese paintings that similarly deal with the theme of the river will show that such secular scenes of waterfront leisure could demonstrate to the Japanese audience the life in the world beyond, as well as a journey to that world they anticipated.


1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 781-803 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Bergin

In the eighteenth century Louis XV's minister, Cardinal Dubois, defended himself against papal criticism of his appetite for church benefices by ordering that a list of benefices held by his seventeenth-century counterparts be prepared and sent to Rome. It was his way of proving that he was much less voracious than they had been.His defence serves to remind the historian of the extent to which the ancien régime church was dominated by powerful families and ministers, who enriched themselves considerably by amassing wealthy benefices. However, none of these cardinal-ministers, from Richelieu to Dubois, succeeded in founding ecclesiastical dynasties capable of preserving intact after their death the ecclesiastical possessions they had acquired; dynasties of this type had practically vanished by the mid-seventeenth century, having fallen foul of both the crown and of church reformers. While drawing enormous incomes from their benefices, Richelieu, Mazarin and Dubois accepted that their benefices, like their other offices, should be at the king's disposal after their death. This had not always been the case. Had Dubois’ historical curiosity been more disinterested, he would have discovered that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ecclesiastical dynasties of varying importance and staying-power had flourished within the French church, characterized by their ability to acquire and transmit large numbers of wealthy and prestigious benefices to family members over several generations. The minimum require ment for success was the breeding of younger sons and daughters prepared to ‘enter the church’ in order to perpetuate dynastic control of benefices.


2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
C.F.C. Coetzee

South Africa is known as one of the most violent countries in the world. Since the seventeenth century, violence has been part of our history. Violence also played a significant role during the years of apartheid and the revolutionary struggle against apartheid. It was widely expected that violence would decrease in a post-apartheid democratic South Africa, but on the contrary, violence has increased in most cases. Even the TRC did not succeed in its goal to achieve reconciliation. In this paper it is argued that theology and the church have a great and significant role to play. Churches and church leaders who supported revolutionary violence against the apartheid system on Biblical “grounds”, should confess their unbiblical hermeneutical approach and reject the option of violence. The church also has a calling in the education of young people, the pastoral care of criminals and victims, in proclaiming the true Gospel to the government and in creating an ethos of human rights.


Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram

The conclusion explains why the English Reformation ended in the late eighteenth century. It discounts a secular and secularizing Enlightenment as an explanation. Rather, it offers three other reasons for the Reformation’s ending. Firstly, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century enough time had passed to make the seventeenth-century wars of religion less threatening than they had seemed earlier in the century. Secondly, the Reformation issues with which the eighteenth-century English dealt got supplanted by other, more urgent ones, often having to do with England’s expanding empire. Finally, and importantly, the Reformation ended because the polemical divines who are the subject of this book failed fully in their tasks of defining truth and of defending the autonomy of the established Church of England. In the end, the modern state took on the role as truth’s arbiter and made the Church a subordinate, dependent institution.


Utilitas ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Burns

The object of this article is to examine, with the work of Jeremy Bentham as the principal example, one strand in the complex pattern of European social theory during the second half of the eighteenth century. This was of course the period not only of the American and French revolutions, but of the culmination of the movements of thought constituting what we know as the Enlightenment. Like all great historical episodes, the Enlightenment was both the fulfilment of long-established processes and the inauguration of new processes of which the fulfilment lay in the future. Thus the seminal ideas of seventeenth-century rationalism (in moral and social theory the idea, above all, of natural law) realized and perhaps exhausted their potentialities in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The ideas with which this article is concerned, however—conveniently grouped and labelled as the ideas of utilitarianism—only began to achieve systematic development in these later decades of the eighteenth century. Within that period—during the first half and more of Bentham's long life—attempts to apply those ideas to the solution of social problems met largely with failure and frustration. Yet unrealized potentialities remained, the realization of which was reserved for a time when the world of the philosophes no longer existed. The movements for social and political reform which have played so large a part in modern history since the French Revolution may be judged in widely differing ways; but whatever the verdict, these movements surely cannot be understood without due consideration of that part of their origins which lies in eighteenth-century utilitarianism.


Author(s):  
George Marsden

This chapter sketches some of the webs of interrelated contexts that helped shape Edwards’s life and work. It surveys some of the background contexts growing out of the Reformation, Puritanism in England, and related political developments including the seventeenth-century political revolutions. Then it turns to the background of seventeenth-century Puritan New England including ecclesiastical and political developments that shaped the world Edwards was born into. Finally it looks at the major social, political, and ecclesiastical contexts shaping Edwards’s world during his years in eighteenth-century New England. That includes relations to Indians both in warfare and in missions, British wars with Roman Catholic powers, colonial politics and local colonial government, hierarchical social assumptions, slavery, church controversies, especially regarding the sacraments, and international and colonial pietism and awakenings.


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