Jean de Serres and the politics of religious pacification, 1594–8

1975 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 223-244
Author(s):  
W. B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
Church Courts ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

Like most other rulers of his time, king Henry IV of France wished to see a single religion practised within his realm. But in the late sixteenth century, as is well known, the state of France was such as to make this objective singularly difficult to achieve. The protestants, of whom Henry had been until his accession the political leader, were a sturdy minority, with a well-developed system of church courts for the definition of doctrine and the administration of discipline. The catholics, who adhered to the centuries-old established church of the kingdom, had no doubt become much more aware of their own religious heritage by the thirty years of civil and ecclesiastical strife they had had to endure. Henry himself, who announced his second conversion to catholicism in the summer of 1593, was never able to shed a certain aura of denominational ambivalence; he himself said, in a famous anecdote, that his own religion was one of the mysteries of Europe. Yet some measure of religious pacification and conciliation was clearly essential for France in the 1590s, both for the health of the country and for the security of the man who was her sovereign ruler. And under the circumstances existing in France, new initiatives and fresh ideas were needed. As an english historian observed, some years ago, for Henry to be accepted by the french as their ‘Most Christian King and eldest son of the Church, a new definition of Church and Christian would be required.’

The Political Theory of the Disruption

1916 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold J. Laski
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Secular Society ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Political Principles ◽  
The Church

“Of political principles,” says a distinguished authority, “whether they be those of order or of freedom, we must seek in religious and quasi-theological writings for the highest and most notable expressions.” No one, in truth, will deny the accuracy of this claim for those ages before the Reformation transferred the centre of political authority from church to state. What is too rarely realised is the modernism of those writings in all save form. Just as the medieval state had to fight hard for relief from ecclesiastical trammels, so does its modern exclusiveness throw the burden of a kindred struggle upon its erstwhile rival. The church, intelligibly enough, is compelled to seek the protection of its liberties lest it become no more than the religious department of an otherwise secular society. The main problem, in fact, for the political theorist is still that which lies at the root of medieval conflict. What is the definition of sovereignty? Shall the nature and personality of those groups of which the state is so formidably one be regarded as in its gift to define? Can the state tolerate alongside itself churches which avow themselves societates perfectae, claiming exemption from its jurisdiction even when, as often enough, they traverse the field over which it ploughs? Is the state but one of many, or are those many but parts of itself, the one?

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Intangible Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Print Literacy

The section introduces Part II, which spans the period 1946 to 2014, by tracing the history of the debates about culture within UNESCO from 1947 to 2009. It considers the central part print literacy played in the early decades, and the gradual emergence of what came to be called ‘intangible heritage’; the political divisions of the Cold War that had a bearing not just on questions of the state and its role as a guardian of culture but on the idea of cultural expression as a commodity; the slow shift away from an exclusively intellectualist definition of culture to a more broadly anthropological one; and the realpolitik surrounding the debates about cultural diversity since the 1990s. The section concludes by showing how at the turn of the new millennium UNESCO caught up with the radical ways in which Tagore and Joyce thought about linguistic and cultural diversity.

The Indirectly Political Word of the Church

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. DeJonge
Keyword(s):  
Word Type ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
The State ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
Type 3 ◽  
The Church

This chapter continues the examination of Bonhoeffer’s first phase of resistance through an exposition of “The Church and the Jewish Question,” turning now to the modes of resistance proper to the church’s preaching office. Because such resistance involves the church speaking against the state, it appears to stand in contradiction with Bonhoeffer’s suggestion earlier in the essay that the church should not speak out against the state. This is in fact not a contradiction but rather the coherent expression of the political vision as outlined in the first several chapters of this book, which requires that the church criticize the state under certain circumstances but not others. The specific form of word examined here is the indirectly political word (type 3 resistance) by which the church reminds the messianic state of its mandate to preserve the world with neither “too little” nor “too much” order.

Constantine as a ‘Bishop’

1947 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 127-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Seston
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Obiter Dictum ◽  
The Church ◽  
As If

The author of the Vita Constantini (traditionally and persistently identified with Eusebius, despite the silence of St. Jerome), tells us that Constantine ‘at a banquet he was giving to the bishops declared that he too was a bishop. He added these words which I heard with my own ears: ἀλλ᾽ ὑμεῖϛ μὲν τῶν εἴσω τῆϛ ἐκτὸϛ ὑπὸ θεοῦ καθεσταμένοϛ ἐπίσκοπϛ ἂν εἴην ’.In attempts to define the relations between the first Christian emperor and the Church, no phrase is more frequently quoted than this obiter dictum. In the sixteenth century the French scholar Henri de Valois rendered τῶν ἐκτόϛ as if it were the genitive of τὰ ἐκτόϛ, and since then it has been the practice to regard Constantine as an ‘évèque du dehors’: the Emperor either exercised episcopal functions though not consecrated, or supervised mundane affairs (that is, the State), after the fashion of a bishop, or else held from God a temporal commission for ecclesiastical government, the bishops retaining control of dogma, ethics and discipline. Each of these three distinct interpretations is equally admissible.

The Trocadéro

2021 ◽  
pp. 193-246
Author(s):  
Jennifer Walker
Keyword(s):  
Religious Right ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Music ◽  
State Apparatus ◽  
French Republicanism ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Concert Programs ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Church

This chapter takes for its focus the high point of the Parisian musical season in 1900: the ten state-sponsored concerts officiels of the 1900 Exposition Universelle de Paris. As had been the case in 1878 and 1889, the goal of these concerts was to promote specifically Republican ideals through music. Yet in 1900, these ideals had transformed into a secular construction of Frenchness that absorbed Catholicism as a foundational trait of national identity. Although the Church was not represented in any official capacity either on the musical planning commission or on the concert programs themselves, the repertoire performed throughout these concerts created a narrative that centered around a sense of reconciliation between Church State. The carefully crafted vision put forth by the State relied heavily on transformations of the Church for the formation of a cohesive Republican identity such that the Church was present in its displays, theaters, and concerts in a way not seen in any previous Exposition. In the heart of Paris, the Trocadéro hosted a significant amount of explicitly religious music that, when mediated through actors deployed through the state apparatus on an international stage, transformed the Church into an integrated facet of French Republicanism that could be proudly displayed to the Exposition’s international audiences. These concerts functioned not as nostalgic emblems of a Revolutionary past nor as attacks against the political and religious right, but, rather, as a site of transformation at which the Republic co-opted Catholicism as an indispensable aspect of its own French identity.

Soviet Atheism and Its Aftermath

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonja Luehrmann
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Engagement ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Integration ◽  
World War ◽  
Freedom Of Conscience ◽  
The Church

If Soviet atheism is a variety of secularism, it more resembles eliminationist movements viewing religions as obstacles to the political integration of citizens into the state. Before World War II, the Bolshevik government issued decrees to disentangle the state from the church. Later, Khrushchev emphasized atheism and closed churches as part of a general populist, mobilizational approach to promoting communist values. By the 1970s, religious practices were not precluded but were assigned a marginal space outside of public engagement. The post-Soviet era has seen self-reported religiosity increase, while self-reported atheism has diminished, although remaining significant. Russia’s 1997 law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations requires a denomination to exist in a region for fifteen years to enjoy the full legal and tax status. Today, Russia differentiates between “good” religions that help to promote particular moral visions and “bad” religions that create social strife, promote violence, and endanger public health.

Religious Societies: Methodist and Evangelical 1738–1800

1986 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 279-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Voluntary Activity ◽  
Church Courts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Market Situation ◽  
Social Controls ◽  
The Church

One does not have to believe in free trade to recognize that in religion as well as economic life the erosion of a monopoly can provoke an uprush of private enterprise. It must be more than coincidental that two modern ‘church in danger’ crises which accompanied an erosion of Anglican hegemony - the Revolution of 1688 and the constitutional crises of 1828–32 – were followed by bursts of voluntary activity. Clusters of private societies were formed to fill up part of the space vacated by the state, as it withdrew itself further from active support of the establishment. After the Toleration Act perceptive churchmen felt even more acutely the realities of religious pluralism and competition. Anglicanism was now approaching what looked uncomfortably like a market situation; needing to be promoted; actively sold. Despite the political and social advantages still enjoyed by the Church, the confessional state in its plenitude of power had gone, and Anglican pre-eminence had to be preserved by other means. One means was through voluntary societies. The Society for the Reformation of Manners hoped by private prosecutions to exert some of the social controls once more properly exercised by the Church courts. The S.P.G. sought to encourage Anglican piety in the plantations and the S.P.C.K. to extend it at home by promoting charity schools and disseminating godly tracts. It was a task of voluntarism to reassert, as far as possible, what authority remained to a church which, because it could not effectively coerce, had to persuade.

The Disintegration of the Tory-Anglican Alliance in the Struggle for Catholic Emancipation

1960 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clyde J. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

The late 1820's, particularly the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, marked the end of an era in the history of the English Established Church. Earlier, for more than a century, the Anglican hierarchy had served as an appendage of the political system dominated by the landed interests; and since the younger Pitt's time, the Church had functioned politically as an ally of the Tory Party. By the year 1827. however, churchmen faced a rapidly changing political environment.

The Braggart in Italian Renaissance Comedy

PMLA ◽  
1943 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-83
Author(s):  
Daniel C. Boughner
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
The Political ◽  
Elizabethan Drama ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Conventional Type

The chief purpose of this paper is to describe one phase of the domestication of Latin drama on the Renaissance stage, specifically to show how a conventional type made famous by the Roman comedians, the miles gloriosus, was fashioned by the academic playwrights of sixteenth-century Italy into an instrument of contemporary satire. A secondary aim is to provide a fuller literary background for the study of the braggart in Elizabethan drama. Such analysis requires a summary of themes, situations, and attitudes that have enriched the comic tradition of Europe, and demands also a definition of the comic spirit that exposes and derides the vainglorious folly of the alazon or boaster who struts and brags of his merits in utter disregard of truth. Menander and his disciples in Latin comedy developed a satiric method which the Italians borrowed for the ridicule of modern representatives of the alazon. Any consideration of the commedia erudita must also be prefaced by a review of the political conditions in Italy that brought to prominence such hated types as the Spaniard and other mercenary soldiers. This paper describes the rôle of the Spaniard and traces the evolution of the braggart from the imitations of Plautus and Terence, through the modifications of conventional themes, and finally to the new elements inspired by the changed domestic conditions of the peninsula.

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