Spiritus, ecclesiae anima: Colet, Linacre, and a Galenic Mystical Body

Moreana ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 51 (Number 197- (3-4) ◽  
pp. 115-137
Author(s):  
Daniel Lochman

John Colet knew Thomas Linacre for approximately three decades, from their mutual residence in Italy during the early 1490s through varied pedagogical, professional, and social contacts in and around London prior to Colet’s death in 1519. It is not certain that Colet knew Linacre’s original Latin translations of Galen’s therapeutic works, the first printed in 1517. Yet several of Colet’s works associate a spiritual physician—a phrase linked to Colet himself at least since Thomas More’s 1504 letter inviting him to London—with Paul’s trope of the mystical body. Using Galenic discourse to describe the “physiology” of the ideal mystical body, Colet emphasizes by contrast a diseased ecclesia in need of healing by the Spirit, who alone can invigorate the mediating “vital spirits” that are spiritual physicians—ministers within the church. Colet’s application of sophisticated Galenic discourse to the mystical body coincided with the humanist interest in Galen’s works evident in Linacre’s translations, and it accompanied growing concern for health related to waves of epidemics in London during the first two decades of the sixteenth century as well as Colet’s involvement in licensure of London physicians. This paper explores the implications of Colet’s adaptation of Galenic principles to the mystical body and suggests that Colet fostered a strain of medical discourse that persisted well into the sixteenth century.

1984 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 153-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. M. Sutherland

Persecution is self-explanatory, but toleration, when one starts to consider it, blurs like the recollection of a dream. To what, in the first place, does toleration refer: to deviant opinions, deviant practices, or to potentially subversive organisations? Genuine toleration has probably always been very rare—and probably still is. In the sense of complete religious liberty, it was not generally accepted until varying dates in the nineteenth century. Then it had more to do with materialism and indifference than with any generous spirit of tolerance. If, in the sixteenth century, toleration was not entirely unknown—both in theory and in practice—it must be attributed to something more compelling than ‘a disposition to be patient with the opinions of others’—in the OED’s rather engaging definition. For one thing, toleration was not then regarded as a particularly desirable virtue, and therefore not widely entertained as an ideal. The ideal was rather that God, in his mercy and wisdom, should reunite the Church, or churches. This was expressed, for example, in the preamble to the edict of Nantes in 1598, though one could discount it as propaganda.


Author(s):  
Ruqaya Saeed Khalkhal

The darkness that Europe lived in the shadow of the Church obscured the light that was radiating in other parts, and even put forward the idea of democracy by birth, especially that it emerged from the tent of Greek civilization did not mature in later centuries, especially after the clergy and ideological orientation for Protestants and Catholics at the crossroads Political life, but when the Renaissance emerged and the intellectual movement began to interact both at the level of science and politics, the Europeans in democracy found refuge to get rid of the tyranny of the church, and the fruits of the application of democracy began to appear on the surface of most Western societies, which were at the forefront to be doubtful forms of governece.        Democracy, both in theory and in practice, did not always reflect Western political realities, and even since the Greek proposition, it has not lived up to the idealism that was expected to ensure continuity. Even if there is a perception of the success of the democratic process in Western societies, but it was repulsed unable to apply in Islamic societies, because of the social contradiction added to the nature of the ruling regimes, and it is neither scientific nor realistic to convey perceptions or applications that do not conflict only with our civilized reality The political realization created by certain historical circumstances, and then disguises the different reality that produced them for the purpose of resonance in the ideal application.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Brühwiler

This article examines public education and the establishment of the nation-state in the first half of the nineteenth century in Switzerland. Textbooks, governmental decisions, and reports are analyzed in order to better understand how citizenship is depicted in school textbooks and whether (federal) political changes affected the image of the “imagined citizen” portrayed in such texts. The “ideal citizen” was, first and foremost, a communal and cantonal member of a twofold society run by the church and the secular government, in which nationality was depicted as a third realm.


Author(s):  
Charles Hefling

This book surveys the contents and the history of the Book of Common Prayer, a sacred text which has been a foundational document of the Church of England and the other churches in the worldwide community of Anglican Christianity. The Prayer Book is primarily a liturgical text—a set of scripts for enacting events of corporate worship. As such it is at once a standard of theological doctrine and an expression of spirituality. The first part of this survey begins with an examination of one Prayer Book liturgy, known as Divine Service, in some detail. Also discussed are the rites for weddings, ordinations, and funerals and for the sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The second part considers the original version of the Book of Common Prayer in the context of the sixteenth-century Reformation, then as revised and built into the Elizabethan settlement of religion in England. Later chapters discuss the reception, revision, rejection, and restoration of the Prayer Book during its first hundred years. The establishment of the text in its classical form in 1662 was followed by a “golden age” in the eighteenth century, which included the emergence of a modified version in the United States. The narrative concludes with a chapter on the displacement of the Book of Common Prayer as a norm of Anglican identity. Two specialized chapters concentrate on the Prayer Book as a visible artifact and as a text set to music.


Author(s):  
Nicola Clark

Throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, the Howards are usually described as religiously ‘conservative’, resisting the reformist impulse of the Reformation while conforming to the royal supremacy over the Church. The women of the family have played little part in this characterization, yet they too lived through the earliest stages of the Reformation. This chapter shows that what we see is not a family following the lead of its patriarch in religious matters at this early stage of the Reformation, but that this did not stop them maintaining strong kinship relations across the shifting religious spectrum.


Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

This chapter investigates changes in mentalities after the Black Death, comparing practices never before analysed in this context—funerary and labour laws and processions to calm God’s anger. While processions were rare or conflictual as in Catania and Messina in 1348, these rituals during later plagues bound communities together in the face of disaster. The chapter then turns to another trend yet to be noticed by historians. Among the multitude of saints and blessed ones canonized from 1348 to the eighteenth century, the Church was deeply reluctant to honour, even name, any of the thousands who sacrificed their lives to succour plague victims, physically or spiritually, especially in 1348: the Church recognized no Black Death martyrs. By the sixteenth century, however, city-wide processions and other communal rituals bound communities together with charity for the poor, works of art, and charitable displays of thanksgiving to long-dead holy men and women.


Author(s):  
Michael P. DeJonge

If the church decides to seize the wheel, to speak the directly political word, Bonhoeffer writes, then the church will find itself in statu confessionis. This chapter examines the phrase status confessionis to shed further light on Bonhoeffer’s idea of the church’s directly political word (the concern of Chapter 7). The phrase originates in a sixteenth-century episode where the emperor, with help from accommodating religious leaders, forced changes in order and rites on the Lutheran churches. The phrase status confessionis came to be seen as the battle cry of those who resisted these changes, the gnesio-Lutherans. In adopting this language, Bonhoeffer identifies a parallel between the sixteenth century and 1933, when Hitler and the Nazi regime threatened to force changes in church order (especially concerning church members of Jewish ancestry) on the church with accommodation from church leaders.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.


1947 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 127-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Seston

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.


2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 62-67
Author(s):  
olivier bauer

What is a rat doing on a Last Supper plate? Did Jesus and his disciples really eat such a disgusting animal? At the end of the sixteenth century, an anonymous artist positioned a rat in front of Jesus in a Last Supper window of the church of Warwick (UK). The Gospels do not state that Jesus' last meal included rat, and rat was not a common food at that time; so why did the artist include a rat, if it is indeed a rat? The rat could convey a mysterious message. At the Lord's Table, the real “rat” might not be who he seems to be!


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