Many secular historians use the phrase, Renaissance and Reformation, for our period.
Renaissance is from the French and means rebirth or revitalization.
Began in Italy and spread to the rest of Europe.
Humanism “In the fifteenth century, the term "umanista," or "humanist," was current and described a professional group of teachers whose subject matter consisted of those areas that were called studia humanitatis. The studia humanitatis originated in the middle ages and were all those educational disciplines outside of theology and natural science. Humanism was not opposed to logic, as is commonly held, but opposed to the particular brand of logic known as Scholasticism. In point of fact, the humanists actively revised the science of logic.” http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/REN/HUMANISM.HTM
Ad fontes literally “to the sources
Fascination with the language and art of the ancients:the importance of style
` Fruits of Humanism
Purify Latin
Recover Greek
Use ancient models of art
David by Michaelangelo
New forms of scholarship
Closely related to print and numerous editions of the classics
Northern and Eastern Humanism
Christianismus Renascens. The rebirth of Christianity through the study of ancient literature.
Was Latin to be the language of literature or the vernaculars
Often centered in such Universities as Vienna, later Cambridge and Oxford
French Humanism was often concerned with the study of the law
Guillaume Bud (1468-1540)
Noted for his studies of Roman Law, especially the Digests
Used historical and critical methods
Jacques Lefvre d'étaples (1450-1536),
Passion for religious reform
Neoplatonic in philosophy
English Humanism
John Colet (1467?-1519),
Great educator: founded St. Paul’s School
German Humanism
Began with the First edition of Tacitus Germania in 1473
Strongly nationalistic
Very critical of the church.
Sebastian Brant (d. 1521)“The Ship of Fools”
Originally in German
Johann Reuchlin 1455-1522
fascinated with Hebrew
De Rudimentis Hebraicis
Wrote on the Cabalah
Debate with Johannes Pfefferkorn (1469-1521) over
Whether Jewish books should be destroyed
Desiderius Erasmus, 1466-1536;
convinced internationalist
strong critic of the church. 1509 the Praise of Folly
[priests] insist that they’re properly performed their duty if they reel off perfunctorily their feeble prayers which I’d be greatly surprised if any god could hear or understand. . .but when it comes to harvesting their gains they’re all on the alert, every one of them an expert in the law. . .the priests who call themselves “secular: push the burden of piety on the regulars and they pass it on to the monks; the less strict monks shift it to the stricter orders, and the whole lot of them leave it to the mendicants; and from there, it goes to the Carthusians, amongst whom alone piety lies hidden in fact so well that you can scarcely get a glimpse of it.
` The enchiridion militis Christiani 1502
religion is a matter of the individual and the heart
sins can be confessed to god
rejected scholastic theology the laity are the key to the revival of the church The principle role of the clergy is to function
as educators
Erasmus does not see the essence of the church
in rituals, priests, doctrines or institutions:
in today’s language, faith is a style of life
McGrath writes:
The revolutionary significance of Erasmus Enchiridion lies in its daring new suggestion that the recognition of the Christian vocation of the lay person holds the key to the revival of the Church. Clerical and ecclesiastical authority is discounted. Scripture should and must be made available to all, in order that all may return ad fontes, to drink of the fresh and living waters of the Christian faith, rather than the stagnant ponds of late medieval religion.
The Greek New Testament with translation 1516
Proved many vulgate readings unlikely, such as do penance
For repentance
Sacrament for mysterion (
Gratia plena for blessed or favored.
Editions of the Fathers
9 volumes of St. Jerome
The fathers had a purer faith than the moderns.
Paul could exhibit faith, but . . .his definition of it is hardly magisterial.. .The apostles knew personally the mother of Jesus, but which of them proved how she had been kept immaculate from Adam’s sin with the logic our theologians display? The apostles baptized wherever thay went, but no where did they teach the formal, material, efficient,and final cause of Baptism, , ,Who could understand a of this unless he has frittered away thirty-six whole years over the metaphysics of Arsitotle and Scotus. (Praise of Folly)
Effects of Humanism on the Reformation:
Humanism wrote for a small elite
Luther and Calvin often made their works popular: not vice versa
Provided the scholar basis that all the Reformers used for their
Theology. No Erasmian New Testament. No Luther Bible
Young Humanists welcomed the Reformation; older repudiated it
Five General points of similarity and difference
1. both disliked, even dispised, scholastic theology, but for different reasons. For the humanists, scholasticism was dark and mysterious. It was bad latin, worse greek, and poorly argued. For the reformers, scholasticism was wrong: it was not true. They could and occasionally did use scholastic arguments when they fit their own purpose
2. all acknowledged the authority of Scripture. The reformers saw the Scriptures as the Word of God; the humanists tended to see them as the “source” of the Christian tradition
3. Both humanist and reformers appealed to the fathers. The humanist tended to prefer Origin and Jerome for the eloquence of their latin; the Reformers preferred Augustine for the supposed clarity of his doctrinal teaching
4. Both believed in the reform of education and the liberal arts. Many joined humanist joined the reformation for this reason, and one of the major outcomes of the Reformation was that the humanist program of education was written into law.
5. Both sides were committed to the revival of rhetoric as an important mode of communication.
The Old Catholic Church
Remember from last semester than the thirteen and fourteenth centuries had not been good to the church. From the scandal of the Avignon Papacy and the exile of the Popes from Rome to the Black Death and economic problems, the church was not doing well. The loss of almost one fourth of all Christian terrirtory to the Turks at this time provoked another dimension of the crisis in ecclesiastical faith. Furthermore, the church was not popular with the advocates of the new learning who tended to see its corruptions and its immoral leaders.
Three Areas of Examination:
Popular Religion
The Sacramental Round
Finances
Popular Religion. The popular religion of the late medieval period was shaped around ordinary human life/ The church provided a sacred canopy with protection in this world and the next. In many ways, this religion was profoundly this worldly. Cameron writes:
. Cameron writes:
Popular belief was much less concerned with the hereafter than with the present life. Most lay people were less worried about saving their souls than about everyday security. Hence, they took steps to ensure that they and theirs had enough to eat they performed rites to protect protect crops from blight, storms or dearth, and their animals from disease and death. They wished to avoid illness and sudden death, especially in dangerous contexts, like a sea voyage or wartime; finally, they used an arsenal of supernatural charms to preserve their looks, to attract a suitable partner, to ensure and guard children against disease and demonic possession when they were most vulnerable.
Books of magic charms
children born with a cowl
seventh sons (am daughters)
special task for feast days such as collecting herbs on St. John’s day
special value of eggs laid on good Friday
St. Margaret protected in childbirth
no amount of good theology seemed to end these religious practices
ordinary people were particularly concerned with the sacramentalia of the
church: holy water, blessed candles, St. John’s herbs. etc
In general, the countryside would resist the reformation which was often
an urban or courtly movement.
Europe’s elites also had their popular religious practices:
among the most important of these was the collection and viewing
of relics. Luther’s prince. Frederick, had a especially large
collection
another was the importance of centers of pilgrimage where one
go for healing or for another type of blessing. Most
pilgrimage centers had especially eloquent preachers
endowment of masses and monasteries
the special gifts to the church of art and sacred objects
the special devoting of children as oblates
(almost all monks and an even high percentage of nuns were endowed by their parents whose gifts supported their ministries)
very heavy participation in the rites and rituals of the church especially such feasts as Ascension (the raising of the Christ figure) and Corpus Christi
the confraternities and other paraecclesial bodies
Both for the urban elites and the rural poor, the church provided much of the entertainment and drama in their lives. Such feasts as Corpus Christi and the various ways in which the stations of the cross were celebrated functioned in this way as did the various feasts of patron saints and the like
In short, popular religion was most often concerned with doing something or experiencing something rather than understanding something.
The only exception to this was the popularity of many traveling preachers: Michel Menot, Jan Burgman, or such noted preachers as Johann Geiler von Kayserberg..
Cities that hoped to become important business centers often endowed a preacher
or had the royal “chaplains” preach.
Luther at Wittenberg and Zwingli at Zurick were chosen as preachers before they became reformers. The reformation may have spread this interest in preaching, but, as Luther himself noted, his hearers became restive when he tried
to preach theology and departed from his more popular (and traditional) style that stressed stories, popular wisdom, and how to live daily life. Hell-fire and damnation sermons were prized before and after the reformation. Indeed, in this sense the Reformation was possible only because late medieval religion was as it was and not otherwise.
The sources surprisingly indicate that most people were relatively content with late medieval religion. The laity, for instance, found the system of indulgences and donations—the so-called mathematics of salvation—comfortable and healing. Religious observance was popular—and some areas of that observance—such as Mary more popular than ever.
Abuses: Present-day students of the Reformation are acutely aware of how many of the problems of the late medieval church were related to larger problems of church order and finance. The German Diet had been protesting these abuses for some fifty years before the Reformation and continued to do so even after the reformation had begun. Many of the complaints in Luther’s Appeal to the Christian Nobility were long standing problems that the German Diets had long campaigned against and occasionally even tried to amend
Serious financial problems: the church was doing far more than its resources
permitted
the practice of non-residence and of the cheap vicar and curate
on a higher level, many bishops often held several offices and positions
the increasing need for money for administration
Many priests were not educated and those who were, often went to
the bishops or other courts.
church courts
the tithe was failing. The tax had been set at a time when the church did
less
too much property (the temporalities) in church hands
Financial and Moral Problems Existed on all levels:
Three levels of clerical existence:
The papal court
the bishops
the priests
the clerical proletariate
the very high cost of the papal court and some of its visible corruption. “The papacy became an Italian Renaissance Court and the pope was increasingly perceived to be nothing more than an Italian prince whose problems and interestes were now local and egoistic rather than universal and pastoral.
Alexander V (Borgia)
sexually promiscuous
father of Cesare and Lucretia Borgia
sponsored art
ROMA: Radix Omnia Malorum Avarica
Julius II
warrior pope
also great sponsor of Art
left a huge debt
he was said to have made the streets of Rome safe
Leo X
Medici
We have been given the papacy; let us enjoy it.
Many bishops imitated the papacy on a smaller scale
Like the priests, many bishops were absentees whose work was conducted
by vicars general or by suffragant bishops
multiple problems with clerical celibacy that were financial related. Priests
could, in effect, pay a yearly fine for their mistresses.
The same attitudes led many priests, especially those in wealthy parishes, to live very worldly lives.
Many complaints about clerical ignorance. (although the wills of many
parish clergy—not all resident—indicate that most owned some books
The fact of the matter is that everyone (or almost every one had a program of reform that was designed to fix these problems.
The word, reform, came from medieval philosophy. The form of a thing was its eternal essence that could not change. It was what made something into something. To re-form something was to re-store its original form. In that sense, it was an inherently conservative idea that tended to compare the present with the past and to see the past as the source of present truth.
Many demands that the church be reformed in “head and members”
biological metaphor
Many of the renaissance popes appointed commissions to examine
the bureaucracy and to make recommendations for reform
Generally failed: the bureaucrats usually found reasons
why the positions should continue
Paul II actually ended the Council of Abbreviators
next pope restored it
several attempts to reform the sacred College of Cardinals
The Curia once asked Alexander to limit the number of women
who had access to the papal court
Many observant movements in monasticism.
Luther’s own house in Erfurt was a reformed or observant
monastery
The benedictines under Lodovico Barbo had reformed many
houses in Italy
In Germany, Johann Rode worked to reform Benedictine
houses
The Augustinians were reformed by
the followers of Floren Radewijns in Holland
(called the Windsheimers after their most important house)
Franciscan reformers had a strong Observant branch
The Carthusians boasted they never needed reformation because
they were never de-formed
In some ways, monasteries and monastic orders were the easiest
places to reform. Although most inhabitants of monasteries
were second sons and daughters, sent there for various
some people continued to have a passion for asceticism and
for holy living—including many of those involuntarily sent
to a religious house. Others, likewise, were converted to a
strict life once in the monastery.
Diocesian attempts at reform:
Niccolo Albergati, bishop of Bologna, and a Carthusian was an
active reformer of his diocese. Eight year visitation
Antonio of Florence worked on the morals of his clergy
said to have used torture to get confessions
Christoph von Stadion, bishop of Augsberg,
Hugo von Hohenlandenberg, bishop of Constance
Rarely worked for more than one bishop’s period of office and usually
not that long
By 1500, reform was a popular, but not successful clique On some matters, Luther and his supporters were preaching to the choir on much of
this
The Sacramental Order:
Medieval theologians had seven sacraments that provided a sacred round to life:
Baptism
Confirmation
Marriage
Holy Orders
Penance
Communion
Extreme Unction or last rites
The heart of the system lay in the renewal rites of penance/communion. An individual went to Confession and became holy, received Christ, sinned, and then went back to Confession to renew the holy estate. Confession was the key to the system. It revolved around the issue of whether a person was truly contrite or close enough to contrite to truly turn to God with heartfelt sorrow for sin.
The system was not rigid. Most theologians allowed for a person to be forgiven if they had any sorrow at all for sin—attrition some called it—and many argued that the very act of coming to confession represented “sorrow” enough. Moreover, the penances, which had been significant in earlier days, had declined to a handful of prayers, a rosary or two, and a few Our Fathers. These penalties could be soften further by indulgences. In theory, any punishment for sin not expiated by these means would be removed in purgatory. The system could be cheapened further by the choice of a confessor.
The point was not the sorrow for sin. In fact, the real question was whether a person trusted and believed in the power of the church or not. Despair was not needed or desired.
Theologians debated these according to the via antiqua or the via moderna
Indulgences