scholarly journals Porcelain and Catholic Enlightenment: The Zwettler Tafelaufsatz

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 116-134
Author(s):  
Matthew Martin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World Order ◽  
Human Learning ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
The One ◽  
Representative Function ◽  
The Church

The mastery of a hard-paste porcelain technology in Dresden in 1708 was a major natural philosophical achievement for the European Enlightenment. From the outset, the material possessed a representative function at the Saxon court, where it served to promote the power and cultural prestige of the Wettin dynasty. As porcelain factories were established at courts across Europe, however, the material's signifying role became complex. On the one hand, its alchemical associations aligned it with unfettered princely power in the realm of the absolutist court. On the other, its origins in laboratory investigation could indicate a princely engagement with the Enlightenment pursuit of scientific knowledge. These contradictory associations reached an apogee in the so-called “Catholic Enlightenment,” producing artworks that sought to consolidate the church. This paper analyzes the Zwettler Tafelaufsatz—the great porcelain table centerpiece that was created in 1768 as part of a multimodal baroque celebration of Abbot Rayner Kollmann's jubilee at the Cistercian monastery of Zwettl in Lower Austria. Here the porcelain medium enabled the Cistercian brethren to argue for the continuing role of monasteries and monastic scholarship in eighteenth-century Enlightenment learning, while simultaneously declaring the limits of human learning and the ultimate supremacy of divine revelation in the context of an absolutist world order.

A ‘milky mass’ and ‘uniform material’: white marble in eighteenth-century French discourses on sculpture and geology

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-225
Author(s):  
Marthe Kretzschmar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Grain Size ◽  
Denis Diderot ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
White Marble ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interdisciplinary Network

Knowledge of the materiality of stone during the Enlightenment expanded following the exploration of mineralogical structure, to alter ideas about taxonomy and challenge the role of rocks in the history of the earth. Close studies of the material of marble sculpture generated expertise on grain size, surface varieties and stone deposits. This mode of reception became intertwined with contemporary controversies about the age of the earth. This article focuses on both French sculpture and geological discourses of the eighteenth century to reveal an international and interdisciplinary network centring on protagonists such as Denis Diderot, Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach and Étienne-Maurice Falconet; through these figures, debates can be connected concerning both geology and art theory. Within these contexts, the article discusses the translation processes between these artistic and geological interests.

Between Orthodoxy and Enlightenment

2019 ◽  
pp. 14-26
Author(s):  
Paul Helm
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Representative Selection ◽  
Adult Lives ◽  
The Church ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter is an attempt to gauge the theology of the Church of Scotland in the first half of the eighteenth century by considering a representative selection of theological writers of that period. Each of those considered—Thomas Blackwell, Robert Riccaltoun, and Thomas Halyburton—held parish ministries, two them for most of their adult lives, and two of them held chairs of theology. Distinct personalities, each upheld the position of the Westminster Standards con animo. Yet each reveal in their different ways an awareness of changes that the Enlightenment was bringing, calling for adaptation to the literary form of theology, or in its apologetic direction.

ALEXANDER GEDDES AT THE LIMITS OF THE CATHOLIC ENLIGHTENMENT

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK GOLDIE
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Catholic Priest ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Catholic Enlightenment ◽  
French Republicanism ◽  
The Revolution ◽  
Episcopal Authority

ABSTRACTIn the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) pressed Catholicism and the Enlightenment to the limits of their tolerance. A Catholic priest, he fled the censure of his Scottish superiors and settled in England, where he became a spokesman for the Catholic laity in their controversies with the hierarchy, and mingled in radical Protestant circles among the ‘Rational Dissenters’. In three domains, he appalled his contemporaries. First, Geddes prepared a new version of the Bible, which threatened to undermine the integrity of revelation, and offered mythopoeic accounts of the Old Testament that influenced Blake and Coleridge. Second, he embraced ‘ecclesiastical democracy’, denouncing papal and episcopal authority and proclaiming British Catholics to be ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’. Third, he applauded French republicanism, and adhered to the Revolution long after Edmund Burke had rendered such enthusiasm hazardous. Geddes was an extreme exponent of the Catholic Enlightenment, yet equally he was representative of several characteristic strands of eighteenth-century Catholicism, which would be obliterated in the ultramontane revanche of the following century.

Episcopal Tombs in Early Modern England

2004 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 654-680 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER SHERLOCK
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

The Reformation simultaneously transformed the identity and role of bishops in the Church of England, and the function of monuments to the dead. This article considers the extent to which tombs of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bishops represented a set of episcopal ideals distinct from those conveyed by the monuments of earlier bishops on the one hand and contemporary laity and clergy on the other. It argues that in death bishops were increasingly undifferentiated from other groups such as the gentry in the dress, posture, location and inscriptions of their monuments. As a result of the inherent tension between tradition and reform which surrounded both bishops and tombs, episcopal monuments were unsuccessful as a means of enhancing the status or preserving the memory and teachings of their subjects in the wake of the Reformation.

Radiant Healing

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth A. Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Medicine ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Medical Treatments ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Mental Wellness ◽  
In Transit ◽  
The Church

The Church of Divine Revelation and the Radiant Healing Center, in St. Catharines, Ontario, proposed that mystical realities shaped bodily and mental wellness. Receiving diagnoses and medical treatments from perceived disembodied beings, congregants in the 1920s and 1930s evoked the mystical origins of alternative medicine by envisioning health as a process through which spirit, mind and body coalesced. Female participants therefore were enabled to reject the label of pathology and heal themselves through the power of their minds. Uneasy with the label of paranormal or supernormal, members viewed their interactions as fulfilling rather than violating natural laws. In the process, spirits personified what Jeffrey Kripal has called “the sacred in transit” as they moved fluidly from the metaphysical to the physical. Crossing modern boundaries between faith and secular medicine, these St. Catharines spiritualists and the phantoms they envisioned reconceived the role of spirit as intervening in physical and mental processes.

Some Aspects of Serbian Religious Development in the Eighteenth Century

1954 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Jelavich
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Balkan Peninsula ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Religious Nationalism ◽  
Religious Development ◽  
Secondary Importance ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Church

The eighteenth century was an era of conflict and radical change within the Serbian church. After the establishment of Ottoman control in the Balkan peninsula, the Serbian nation remained united solely by the bonds of the church. It was the center of life and the unchallenged leader of the community. However, in the eighteenth century new ideals and new loyalties emerged which threatened the position of predominance previously enjoyed by the church. Religious nationalism gradually gave way before secular nationalism as the ideas of the enlightenment took root among the Serbs living within the Habsburg empire, until by the end of the century the church as an instrument of national unification had been relegated to a position of secondary importance. Moreover, the change was the result not only of the absorption of western thought by the Serbian intellectuals, but also of the rivalries of the Christian churches in the Balkans, a conflict whose roots are to be found in this century.

scholarly journals The doctrines of original sin and the virgin birth: divine revelation or human construct?

2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
I. J. J. Spangenberg
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
World View ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
First Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Grand Narrative ◽  
Virgin Birth ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The One

Two South African theologians, Ben du Toit and Anton van Niekerk, recently published books in which they argued that postmodern believers can no longer subscribe to the doctrines of original sin and the virgin birth. According to them both these doctrines reflect a pre-modern world-view which should be regarded as outdated. However, they would not like to take leave of the grand narrative of Christianity. There are some fundamental flaws in the reasoning of both scholars. The doctrine of the virgin birth is intertwined with the doctrine of original sin, and both are important to the orthodox doctrine of salvation. As it is not viable or consistent to tamper with some of the orthodox doctrines and try to keep the rest intact, we are left with two options, either to discard the whole system and start afresh, or to try and keep the whole package intact. However, biblical research since the Enlightenment has ruled out the second option. The paper argues in support of this case and attempts to offer a different way forward for Christians living in the twenty-first century than the one offered by Du Toit and Van Niekerk.

Wolfhart Pannenberg

2018 ◽  
pp. 486-504
Author(s):  
Friedericke Nuessel
Keyword(s):  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Systematic Theology ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Civil State ◽  
Wolfhart Pannenberg ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

This chapter describes the development of Wolfhart Pannenberg’s ecclesiology in his early work and explores his fully developed ecclesiology in the Systematic Theology of 1993. It analyses the fundamental role of the church to be a sign and foretaste of the kingdom of God. This involves a constitutive self-distinction of the church from any political order or civil state on the one hand and from the future kingdom of God on the other. Moreover, the chapter emphasizes the simultaneity of individual salvation and incorporation into the church as the body of Christ in Pannenberg, and demonstrates the ecclesiological task to overcome the divisions between churches in order to witness to the unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity of the church.

Church Building and Architecture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis P. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Church Building ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Church

Contrary to popular perceptions, the long eighteenth century was a period of significant church building and the architecture of the Church of England in this era played a critical role in religious vitality and theological formation. While certainly not to the expansive scale of Victorian church construction, the period was an era of significant building, in London, but also across the whole of the British Empire. Anglican churches in this era were marked not so much by stylistic questions as by programmatic concerns. The era produced the auditory church, designed to accommodate better the hearing of the sermon and the increasing importance of music in worship. There were also changes to communion practice that implicated the design of architecture. Finally, some few Anglicans considered the theological implications of historical inspiration but many more considered the role of sensibility and emotion in worship and in architecture as one of worship’s agents.

scholarly journals Some Thoughts on the Role of the Critical Intellectual in Contemporary Germany

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Erich Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
German Society ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Current Usage ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Professional Field ◽  
On Line ◽  
The One

The paper starts by relating the notion of the "critical intellectual" to the notion of "agent of social change" on the one hand, and to other potential types of agents of change on the other: women in revolt, artists, exiles and queer agencies. Proceeding to a brief characterisation of the socio-cultural and political context "Germany", we shall explore some meanings of attributes such as post-modern and consumer for contemporary German society and culture, arguing that these are cultural and economic terms, which denote current forms of expression for what continues to be a capitalist economy and a bourgeois democracy. One recurrent question will be what the contours might be of the figure of the "critical intellectual" under present day conditions. This is followed by a brief sketch of the meanings of "kritische(r) Intellektuelle(r)" in a historical ("geistesgeschichtlicher") perspective, mainly from the enlightenment onwards. We shall move on to a methodologically very different, but complementary, perspective, which is the consideration of current usage of the term with the help of large-scale electronic corpora of spoken language and an on-line search on the web. As we shall see, an important share and quality of the relevant meanings of a term lies in current usage, which may or may not be directly related to what we know from the history of ideas and/ or etymology. I shall then use examples from my own professional field of work for an exploration of what the role of a critical intellectual in a German context might be, discussing the field of natural language technologies. These examples will illustrate the fact that such a role has to involve participation in, rather than exclusively detached contemplation of, the sphere of production. They will also show that the role of the critical intellectual is, indeed, a locus of contestation in several respects. We finally broaden our perspective into a wider set of questions relating to the role of the critical intellectual, in German (and other) contexts. One of these questions will revolve around the notions of "values" and "ethics": Do we assume that the role of the critical intellectual is inherently connected to some systems of values, either in the sense of the enlightenment, and/or Marxism, and/or some other Weltanschauungs-system, or else do we believe that the position of a critical intellectual could be defined within some entirely market-driven ideology? Is there something like "truth", "progress" or "justice", other than what is successful on the market? Another one of these questions will focus on whether we can identify some force that motivates change in societies, and cultures, and what the role of the critical intellectual might be vis-à-vis such a force. One of our arguments here will be that among such forces may well be "contradictions", that this category of "contradiction" is in no way exhausted by the category of "difference" as currently debated. It will be argued, finally, that whereas the figure of the "critical intellectual", as we have tried to sketch it here, may be situated in a German context, its essential characteristics defy any attempts at claiming it for any one particular culture.

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