The Problem of Papal Power in the Ecclesiology of St. Bernard

1974 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
J. W. Gray
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Basic Ideas ◽  
Inherent Ambiguity

Born in 1090, dying in 1153, Bernard Abbot of Clairvaux lived through the aftermath of that great ideological upheaval which is generally (though rather misleadingly) known as the ‘Investiture Contest’. As he played a leading part in the religious life and ecclesiastical politics of his age it is not surprising that his massive output of sermons, treatises and letters should have given rise to an even more massive output of historiographical comment and interpretation. It is equally understandable that modern Bernardine studies should have tended to concentrate on the question of Bernard's attitude to the basic ideas of the eleventh-century reform movement—and, in particular, to the expression which was given to these by Gregory VII during his stormy pontificate. Yet, as Dr Kennan has recently pointed out, so far from providing a clear answer to this question these studies confront us with a ‘bewildering garden … from which a student can pluck an interpretation of Bernard's … theory as Gregorian, anti-Gregorian,…proto-protestant or any one of a variety of other hues’. Can order be brought into this chaos, or do these various interpretations reflect an inherent ambiguity in Bernard's own thought?

Abbot Desiderius of Montecassino and the Gregorian Papacy

1979 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-326
Author(s):  
G. A. Loud
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Southern Italy ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Single Institution ◽  
Latin Church ◽  
Gregorian Reform

Of all the churches affected by the Gregorian reform movement few were more notable than the monastery of Montecassino. Not only the latter's own writers but even Pope Gregory vii himself described it as famous throughout Christendom. In southern Italy it was undoubtedly the most important single institution of the Latin Church. Founded by St Benedict in 529, by the eleventh century it was exempt from normal ecclesiastical jurisdiction and was the centre of a franchise free from the obligations of lay society. Under the abbacy of Desiderius of Benevento (1058–87) it enjoyed its golden age of political, intellectual and artistic influence. Its monks filled many south Italian bishoprics, and a number of them were promoted to be cardinals. Three times in sixty years, in 1057, 1087 and 1118, a Cassinese monk attained the see of St Peter. Desiderius himself was elected to succeed Gregory vii in 1087, with the title of Victor iii.

scholarly journals Influence of European humanism after trento concilium on the Ukrainian renaissance worldview formation

2015 ◽  
pp. 101-109
Author(s):  
Mykola Shkriblyak
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
Comprehensive Analysis ◽  
Renaissance Period ◽  
Worldview Formation ◽  
Basic Ideas

The article presents a comprehensive analysis of historiosophical Polish influence on the formation of Renaissance ideas and their reflection in ideology structure of the Ukrainian people. The author analyzes the basic ideas of humanism factors that penetrated into ethnic Ukraine – Rus lands, their point and the ideological sources and highlights the extent of their impact on the denomination and religious life of the Ukrainian people in the renaissance period.

Architecture and Western Civilization

1946 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-222
Author(s):  
John U. Nef
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
European History ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Western European ◽  
Law Courts ◽  
The Mind

All aspects of the life of an age are interrelated, even when the interrelations express themselves in cross purposes and intellectual dissolution. Whether or not they embody forms and ideas worthy to be dignified by the name of architecture, the buildings of any period are an expression of it. They reflect, in varying degrees, its economic and social development, the enactments of its legislative bodies, the acts of its administrative officials, the decisions of its law courts, the character and course of its wars. They also express, again in varying degrees, its methods of education, its religious life, its natural science, its thought and its art. They are, to some extent, the expression of past traditions and works of the mind which have retained a hold on the life of the period or have been revived by its thinkers and artists, as classical antiquity has been revived again and again in Western European history since the eleventh century.

‘The surest road to heaven’: ascetic spiritualities in English post-conquest religious life

1973 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 45-57
Author(s):  
Derek Baker
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Monastic Communities ◽  
Secular Society ◽  
Papal Legate

That the changes which occurred in the conduct of the regular and ascetic life in the eleventh century were deep seated has long been accepted, and their dependence on a fundamental reappraisal of the principles and practice of that life is clearly demonstrated by contemporaries. This ‘crisis’, as it has become normal to term it, was characterised by a rejection of the world and worldly values. In a general social context it can be seen in ‘gregorian’ ideas and attitudes on the relations between church and state, on the status and attributes of the clergy, and on the position and authority of the popes as individuals and the papacy as an institution. In the context of the regular life it is evident in a rejection of the formal round and ritual over-elaboration of monastic observance, and in an abhorrence of die complex inter-relationship and inter-dependence of monastic communities and the secular society in which diey were set. When the papal legate Hugh, archbishop of Lyons, wrote to Robert of Molesme accepting and authorising the abbot’s proposed initiative he indicated where the issues and problems layyou and your sons, brethren of the community of Molesme, appeared before us at Lyons and pledged yourselves to follow from now on more strictly and more perfectly the rule of the most holy Benedict, which so far in that monastery you have observed poorly and neglectfully. Since it has been proven that because of many hindering circumstances you could not accomplish your aim in the aforementioned place, we ... consider that it would be expedient for you to retire to another place which the divine munificence will point out to you and there serve the Lord undisturbedly in a more wholesome manner.

scholarly journals The Making of Nordic Monasticism, c. 1076–c. 1350

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 581
Author(s):  
James G. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Original Writings ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Ruling Elite ◽  
Nordic Region ◽  
Stable Community

The introduction of regular religious life in the Nordic region is less well-documented than in the neighbouring kingdoms of northern Europe. In the absence of well-preserved manuscript and material remains, unfounded and sometimes distorting suppositions have been made about the timeline of monastic settlement and the character of the conventual life it brought. Recent archival and archaeological research can offer fresh insights into these questions. The arrival of authentic regular life may have been as early as the second quarter of the eleventh century in Denmark and Iceland, but there was no secure or stable community in any part of Scandinavia until the turn of the next century. A settled monastic network arose from a compact between the leadership of the secular church and the ruling elite, a partnership motivated as much by the shared pursuit of political, social and economic power as by any personal piety. Yet, the force of this patronal programme did not inhibit the development of monastic cultures reflected in books, original writings, church and conventual buildings, which bear comparison with the European mainstream.

Crossroads and Crises in the Religious Life of the Later Eleventh Century

1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 137-148
Author(s):  
Derek Baker
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
The West ◽  
General Sense ◽  
The Individual

It is fifty years since Germain Morin, in an article in the Revue Bénédictine articulated discussion of the tensions and developments in eleventh and early twelfth-century regular, and para-regular, life around a central ‘crisis of cenobitism’, and twenty years since Leclercq stabilised the debate in a wide ranging article which has become the basis of all subsequent comment. This crisis in the cenobitic life is now a commonplace, expressed in Leclercq’s terms as ‘the crisis of prosperity’ and answered by the resurgence of rural monasticism, eremitical in character, in reaction to the elaborate structures and relationships of an established monasticism resident in the urban centres of population and influence. The individual austerities and renunciations of Romuald stand at the beginning of a proliferating development in western Christendom, and may, in a general sense, be taken to characterise these new initiatives. The direct influence of Romualdine ideas and practices, whether through his foundations or through his self-proclaimed spiritual heir Damian, which is sometimes alleged is difficult to prove, but there is an obvious consonance between the Italian experiments and those elsewhere in the west, a compatibility of outlook and attitude between Romuald and Damian, and men like Bruno, Stephen Harding, Robert of Arbrissel.

Civic Religions

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guido Marnef
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
City Governments ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Administration And Supervision ◽  
Religious Landscape

As centers of a vivid socioeconomic, cultural and religious life cities acted as important agents of religious change. This chapter starts with a survey of the multilayered religious landscape of the late medieval cities. Civic authorities played an increasing role in the administration and supervision of the sacred and developed a specific type of civic religion. The religious Reform movement launched in the 1520s by Martin Luther and other evangelic-minded Reformers was to a large extent an urban event. The pace and the dynamics of Reform were complex and diverse depending on the political and social context of the cities involved. City governments aimed for civic unity and religious uniformity but this ideal was difficult to realize in a period of increasing religious fragmentation.

Traditionalism and Continuity during the Last Century of Anglo-Saxon Monasticism

1989 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia Gransden
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Strict Enforcement ◽  
Rule Of Benedict ◽  
The Ideal

Those writing at the time, and subsequent historians, have tended to exaggerate the importance of the tenth-century monastic revival and of the reform movement which followed the Norman Conquest. During each period contemporary writers glorified the achievements of the reformation, of which they themselves were products, and belittled or even denigrated the religious life of the preceding era. This was partly because the hallmark of both reformations was the strict enforcement of the Rule of Benedict; the ideal of strict Benedictinism appealed to those writing during the reformations, since they themselves were strict Benedictines, and it has appealed to some historians in our own day. One result has been a tendency to emphasise the influence of continental models so much that it overshadows the importance of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. David Knowles makes continental influence on the tenth-century revival the theme of chapter 1 of hisThe Monastic Order in England.

The Public Debate on Clerical Marriage in the Late Eleventh Century

2010 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 688-706 ◽  
Author(s):  
LEIDULF MELVE
Keyword(s):  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Subject

The article offers an analysis of the public debate on priestly marriage, conducted in the last decades of the eleventh century. This was the first debate on the subject in six hundred years, erupting in the context of the reform movement. Although the theme of priestly marriage was mentioned in the Carolingian period as well as in the tenth and first half of the eleventh century, it was the anonymous defence of clerical marriage, the Epistola de continentia clericorum, that gave rise to a wide-ranging public debate. The article examines this debate in terms of the argumentative approaches used by the participants, the aim being to emphasise an important undercurrent in the understanding of priestly marriage contrary to the official – or Gratian – view on the issue.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document