“Intellectually ‘Fuori del Mondo’”

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-84
Author(s):  
Joe Moffett
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Anti Semitism

In “Intellectually ‘Fuori del Mondo’”: Pound’s Johnson,” Joe Moffett observes that, despite Ezra Pound’s repugnant anti-Semitism and questionable support for the Mussolini regime, he continues to be viewed as one of the Modernism’s most influential artists. In works such as The Spirit of Romance, The Guide to Kulchur, and ABC of Reading, Pound argued for the literature and ideas he felt were most vital for preservation and study. Among these great works and writers stands Samuel Johnson. Pound praises Johnson as “admirable because he will not lick boots, but intellectually ‘fuori del mondo,’ living in the seventeenth century, so far as Europe is concerned.” The chapter explores the connection between these two writers, with special attention paid to direct citations of Johnson in Pound’s poetry and prose.

scholarly journals Roman Imperium and the Restoration Church

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 159-175
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Rose
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
State Relations

This article examines the late-seventeenth-century Church of England's understanding of rulers’ ecclesiastical imperium through analysing a pamphlet debate about Julian the Apostate and Church-state relations in the fourth-century Roman empire. In 1682 an Anglican cleric, Samuel Johnson, printed an account of Julian's reign that argued that the primitive Christians had resisted the emperor's persecutory policies and that Johnson's contemporaries should adopt the same stance towards the Catholic heir presumptive, James, duke of York. Surveying the reaction to Johnson, this article probes the ability of Anglican royalists to map fourth-century Roman onto seventeenth-century English imperium, their assertions about how Christians should respond to an apostate monarch, and whether these authors fulfilled such claims when James came to the throne. It also considers their negotiation of the question of whether miracles existed in the fourth-century imperial Church. It concludes that, despite Rome's territorial dimensions, imperium remained a fundamentally legal-constitutional concept in this period, and that the debate over Julian highlights the fundamentally tense and ambivalent relationship between Church and empire.

The Jew in Seventeenth-Century Protestant Thought

1977 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Healey
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
The Third ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Masses

In his pamphlet entitled From the First to the Last of the Just, Jean-Paul Lichtenberg concludes a brief history of Jewish-Christian relations with a list of five periods to each of which he assigns a particular quality of anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism. Of the third period, 1096–1520, marked by the Crusades, the Ghetto and the Inquisition, Lichtenberg remarks,“the pogroms, the massacres and the persecutions perpetrated on the Jews by Christian hands are the manifestation of a Christian anti-Semitism of the people, fed by harsh and comtemptuous preaching. Doctrinal anti-Judaism had filtered down to the masses and given birth to anti-Semitism. The end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance brought about no changes in this situation. Relations between Christians and Jews are already poisoned and only the coming of the (French) Revolution will bring a change in the situation [emphasis added]. One may qualify the Christian anti-Semitism which prevails during this period as an anti-Semitism of passion based upon religion or, again, as an anti-Semitism of intolerance.”

Early Whig Ideology, Ancient Constitutionalism, and the Reverend Samuel Johnson

1993 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melinda Zook
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Samuel Johnson ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
The Political ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Political Opposition ◽  
Political Ideas

In 1833, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “I do not know where I could put my hand upon a book containing so much sense with sound constitutional doctrine as this thin folio of Johnson's works.” The “Johnson” to whom Coleridge referred was not the celebrated Doctor Samuel Johnson of the eighteenth century but instead the late seventeenth-century Whig clergyman, the Reverend Samuel Johnson. Reverend Johnson's single volume of complete works impressed Coleridge; he scribbled laudatory remarks throughout the margins of a 1710 edition. Coleridge admired the directness of Johnson's style and his persuasive method of argumentation. Johnson would have appreciated Coleridge's comments. They reflected the way he himself understood his work—as sound constitutional doctrine, plainly put.Yet for all its clarity and consistency, Johnson's political thinking was not always appreciated by England's political elite of the 1680s and 1690s. The implications of Johnson's political ideas—much like those of his contemporary John Locke—were understood as far too revolutionary and destabilizing. However, Johnson's fiery prose and sardonic wit often proved useful to the political opposition: from the Whig exclusionists of the early 1680s, to the supporters of William and Mary in 1688/89, to the radical Whigs and country Tories of the 1690s and early eighteenth century.Johnson's career as a Whig propagandist spanned 1679 to 1700. Among his contemporaries, he was undoubtedly most renowned for his strident anti-Catholicism and for the brutal punishments that he endured for his radical politics.

The High Point (IV): Spiritual Crisis (1650–1713)

1997 ◽  
pp. 170-194
Author(s):  
Jonathan Israel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Late Fifteenth ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One

This chapter explores how, during the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Jewish world was shaken spiritually more profoundly than at any time since the expulsions of the late fifteenth century. A mounting turmoil of inner pressures erupted in the 1650s and 1660s in a drama which was to convulse world Jewry for decades. Moreover, although this Jewish upheaval had some separate and independent roots, unconnected with the current intellectual preoccupations of Christian Europe, it took place during, and shared some causes with, the deepening crisis besetting seventeenth-century European culture as a whole. Inevitably, the ferment within the Synagogue interacted on the wider upheaval within European devotion and thought, the one chain of encounters pervading the other in a remarkable process of cultural transformation. Ultimately, the upheaval is perhaps best understood as a cultural reaction to the immense disruptions and migrations of the previous two centuries and the many unresolved contradictions the vast treks, first to the East and then to the West, had given rise to. It may be true that the reintegration of Jews was more economic than cultural, yet the rifts and disintegrative tendencies within western Christendom had placed the age-old confrontation of Christianity and Judaism on a totally new basis. The chapter then looks at the Shabbatean movement, Spinozism, philosemitism, and anti-Semitism.

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