The Curia at an Impasse

2021 ◽  
pp. 114-134
Author(s):  
Stefania Tutino
Keyword(s):  
Ecclesiastical History

Although Gradi’s evaluation concluded that the documents on Giovanni were forgeries, when the Congregations of the Index and the Inquisition were asked to provide a final deliberation on Giovanni’s case, they reached an impasse. This chapter explains the nature of this impasse through the conflict of opinion between Stefano Gradi and Ludovico Marracci, another learned Catholic intellectual tasked by the Curia to examine the documents concerning Giovanni’s case. The debate between Gradi and Marracci shows that the case of Giovanni’s alleged sanctity uncovered fundamental and uncomfortable questions. How much can the truth of doctrine depend on the truth of the facts before theology loses its ontological autonomy and becomes simply a branch of ecclesiastical history or philological criticism? How much can the truth of doctrine ignore the truth of the facts without being engulfed in the same fiction from which it is supposed to keep its distance?

Anti-Palamism in Hans-Georg Beck’s Earlier Works: The Russian Origins and Some Catholic Parallels. Part I

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-104
Author(s):  
Дмитрий Игоревич Макаров
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
The Real ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
German Scholar

ХансГеорг Бек (1910-1999), крупнейший немецкий византинист ХХ в., прошёл путь от бенедиктинского монаха до мюнхенского профессора, создателя всеобъемлющей концепции истории Византии и византийской культуры. Вопросы истории Церкви и богословия занимали его с первых шагов научной деятельности. Будучи учеником крупнейшего историка схоластики Мартина Грабмана, Бек усвоил томистский взгляд на богословие и потому отрицал реальное различение в Боге сущности и энергий, раскрытое свт. Григорием Паламой. Но если в своей первой статье «Борьба за томистское понимание богословия в Византии» (1935) Бек критикует паламизм «извне», с позиций неосхоластики, то в своей светской диссертации о Феодоре Метохите (1952) - уже «изнутри», пытаясь доказать несовместимость паламизма с халкидонитским православием. Hans-Georg Beck (1910-1999), the most outstanding 20th-century German Byzantinist, has gone a long way from a Benedictine monk to professor in Munich, a creator of a comprehensive conception of Byzantine general and cultural history. The problems of ecclesiastical history and theology were in the center of his scientific activity from its first steps on. As a student of Martin Grabmann, a prominent historian of Western scholasticism, Beck appropriated the Thomist view of theology. That is why he denied the real distinction between essence and energies in God, which had been disclosed and analyzed by Gregory Palamas. If in his first 1935 article, The Struggle for the Thomist Concept of Theology in Byzantium, Beck criticized Palamism «from outside», i. e., from the neoscholastic viewpoint, it was later then, in his secular thesis of 1952, that the German scholar tried to censure the Palamite doctrine «from inside» by making the case of its incompatibility with the Chalcedonian Orthodoxy.

Admiration and Awe

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Urquízar-Herrera
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
Bell Tower ◽  
Negotiation Of Identity ◽  
Historical Controversy

This book offers the first systematic analysis of the cultural and religious appropriation of Andalusian architecture by Spanish historians during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early Modern Spain was left with a significant Islamic heritage: Córdoba Mosque had been turned into a cathedral, in Seville the Aljama Mosque’s minaret was transformed into a Christian bell tower, and Granada Alhambra had become a Renaissance palace. To date this process of Christian appropriation has frequently been discussed as a phenomenon of hybridisation. However, during that period the construction of a Spanish national identity became a key focus of historical discourse. The aforementioned cultural hybridity encountered partial opposition from those seeking to establish cultural and religious homogeneity. The Iberian Peninsula’s Islamic past became a major concern and historical writing served as the site for a complex negotiation of identity. Historians and antiquarians used a range of strategies to re-appropriate the meaning of medieval Islamic heritage as befitted the new identity of Spain as a Catholic monarchy and empire. On one hand, the monuments’ Islamic origin was subjected to historical revisions and re-identified as Roman or Phoenician. On the other hand, religious forgeries were invented that staked claims for buildings and cities having been founded by Christians prior to the arrival of the Muslims in Spain. Islamic stones were used as core evidence in debates shaping the early development of archaeology, and they also became the centre of a historical controversy about the origin of Spain as a nation and its ecclesiastical history.

Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Dutch Golden Age

This book investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focusses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, its language, and the historical context in which it originated. The book charts contested issues of biblical philology in mainstream Dutch Calvinism, to determine whether Spinoza’s work on the Bible had any bearing on the Reformed understanding of the way society should engage with Scripture. Spinoza has received massive attention, both inside and outside academia. His unconventional interpretation of the Old Testament passages has been examined repeatedly over the decades. So has that of fellow ‘radicals’ (rationalists, radicals, deists, libertines, enthusiasts), against the backdrop of a society that is assumed to have been hostile, overwhelmed, static, and uniform. This book inverts this perspective and looks at how the Dutch Republic digested biblical philology and biblical criticism, including that of Spinoza. It takes into account the highly neglected area of the Reformed ministry and theology of the Dutch Golden Age. The result is that Dutch ecclesiastical history, up until now the preserve of the partisan scholarship of confessionalized church historians, is brought into dialogue with Early Modern intellectual currents. This book concludes that Spinoza, rather than simply pushing biblical scholarship in the direction of modernity, acted in an indirect way upon ongoing debates in Dutch society, shifting trends in those debates, but not always in the same direction, and not always equally profoundly, at all times, on all levels.

Theology in the Church of England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. W. Young
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Ecclesiastical History ◽  
International Reputation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
Anglican Theology ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

The dismissive characterization of Anglican divinity between 1688 and 1800 as defensive and rationalistic, made by Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen, has proved more enduring than most other aspects of a Victorian critique of the eighteenth-century Church of England. By directly addressing the analytical narratives offered by Pattison and Stephen, this chapter offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of this neglected period in the history of English theology. The chapter explores the many contributions to patristic study, ecclesiastical history, and doctrinal controversy made by theologians with a once deservedly international reputation: William Cave, Richard Bentley, William Law, William Warburton, Joseph Butler, George Berkeley, and William Paley were vitalizing influences on Anglican theology, all of whom were systematically depreciated by their agnostic Victorian successors. This chapter offers a revisionist account of the many achievements in eighteenth-century Anglican divinity.

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