(1996). Medieval hagiography and post‐tridentine hagiology shaping Robertson Davies's own sense of the marvelous in fifth business (1970) The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, pp. 1153-1163.

ArgumentSeeing a prodigious cure happen and then testifying about it certainly differs from attending an air pump experiment in order to bear witness to it. Yet early-modern saint-making and the “new” or “experimental philosophy” shared juridical roots, and thereby an understanding of the role of testimony for the establishment of “matters of fact” and for the production of legitimate knowledge. The reforms carried out after the Council of Trent, especially during Urban VIII's pontificate, of the juridical procedures for saint-making in (...) the Catholic Church implied a new attitude towards the examination of proposed miracles. Most of these miracles were healings. While the appeal to medical expertise had long been common, and skepticism had often manifested itself regarding cures or extraordinary bodily phenomena, both were now given formal status. Miracle inquests henceforth leaned towards refuting miraculousness by means of natural explanations. The procedure was systematized in a treatise published in the 1730s by Prospero Lambertini. The combination of Lambertini's work with the canonization causes in which he acted as the “devil's advocate” in charge of disputing arguments favorable to a sainthood candidate allows for a reconstruction of the interplay between the juridical and scientific economies of saint-making, and of the role of testimony in the production of trust and evidence. (shrink)

The author analyzes the methodology of working with contingent events and how the concept of contingent and other related concepts is conceptualized in post-Tridentine scholastic philosophy. In particular, the article examines the theory of moral modalities that emerged in the XVI–XVII centuries, describing knowledge about contingent and patterns of human behavior; the separation of physical and moral in the context of contingent reality produced by human will; as well as the concepts of probabilistic knowledge and the methodology of the (...) sciences about contingent facts. Based on the analysis of the data of scholastic ideas and concepts, the author identifies the key characteristics of knowledge about the contingent and identifies the common core of approaches to the theorization of contingent events in post-Trident scholasticism. (shrink)

La clôture des religieuses et les rapports de genre dans les couvents italiens (fin XVIe – début XVIIe siècle). L’article examine les changements dans les rapports de genre introduits par les normes du Concile de Trente sur les religieux, en particulier celles concernant la clôture des moniales. À Florence et Bologne prises comme terrains d’observation, les correspondances de l’archevêque Alessandro de’Medici avec le monastère florentin des Murate (1579-1606) et de l’archevêque de Bologne Ludovico Ludovisi avec ses vicaires (1624-1627) permettent de (...) discuter la “perméabilité” de la clôture, un concept avancé par la critique récente. Les règles de la clôture n’ont interrompu ni les rapports étroits des monastères avec la cité et la société, ni la présence dans les couvents de filles à éduquer, veuves et femmes en rupture de ban conjugal, mais elles ont fortement réduit l’autonomie des religieuses, en déléguant aux évêques et à la Congrégation romaine sur les Religieux le contrôle de l’entrée dans les monastères. Les effets de la clôture tridentine à l’intérieur des monastères se traduisent par des changements significatifs dans la hiérarchie des offices, l’organisation de la communauté par classes d’âge et l’orientation des affects vers des personnes du même sexe. En ce qui concerne les rapports de genre, enfin, le rôle des confesseurs, référents masculins privilégiés des nonnes (que ce soit sur le plan spirituel ou sur celui des équilibres internes du monastère), se renforce. (shrink)

Especially after the 1610s, Tridentine Catholicism forcefully reasserted itself as a prominent political and intellectual force in the Spanish Netherlands. Integrating this reality into accounts of Spanish-Netherlandish science in the 17th century has been a considerable challenge for historians of science. The latter either turned their gazes elsewhere or assumed a fundamental incompatibility between “science” and “religion,” thus securing one dominant explanation for the classic thesis that the Spanish Netherlands largely “lost the plot” of the so-called Scientific Revolution after (...) the 1620s. This paper turns to a local debate on Thomas Fienus's embryological theses (1620), which has never been studied, to test the underlying assumption that “science” and “religion” can be taken as two distinct and/or opposed categories of historical analysis. I show that this assumption not only fails to capture historical actors' experiences and understandings, but also that it fails to consider how tensions between medicine and theology were positively productive. First, I argue that medical philosophizing was positively motivated by socio-religious concerns of its own. Second, I show that, far from being a protracted battle between two stable positions, the debate constituted an instance of boundary work, where medical philosophers like Fienus progressively tested and repositioned the theological credentials of their preferred theses. This ushered in the adoption of a probabilistic epistemology that increasingly secured Catholic theology's normative credibility and the pursuit of autonomous natural-philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

This paper explores conflations of martyrdom, spectatorship, and image theory in Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of St. Peter (1601). It argues that Caravaggio employs an “iconic” visual formula as a response to the pressures of a post-Tridentine poetics. Through these strategies, an iconography of immediacy and presence is paired with a sacrificial subject-matter. This merging united witness and visual experience in the shape of the sacred image. Martyrdom, as both a historical and representational phenomenon of early modern sociality and culture, invoked (...) the act of spectatorship. In connecting the Crucifixion of St. Peter with the cultural and aesthetic paradigms of post-Tridentine Italy, the article argues that Caravaggio’s image re-imagines the codes of iconic repre­sentation. While not a novel academic context for Caravaggio scholarship, I will read this image less as the expression of stylistic tensions in the Roman artworld than as the result of overlapping frameworks—martyrdom, Petrine iconography, and a Counter-Reformation aesthetic. Reenergized as part of the visual rhetoric of Tridentine politics, the icon reflected a new propensity for paleochristian cultural revival. Discussing both the contextual pressures of this new aesthetic regime as well as intertwining it with the increasing presence of Catholic image treatises, the article suggests an “iconic” space for reading Caravaggio’s Crucifixion. This “iconic” framework is built into the charged discourse surrounding the image itself. (shrink)

In European culture the sacred and the secular have existed in a dialectical relationship. Prodi sees the fifteenth-century crisis of Christianity as opening up three paths that eroded this dualism and tended towards modernity: civic-republican religion, sacred monarchy, and the territorial churches. Important counter-forces, which sought to maintain dualism, included the Roman-Tridentine Compromise, and those forms of Radical Christianity which rejected confessionalisation outright. During the Eighteenth Century, all these phenomena tended to contribute to one of two tendencies: towards civic (...) religion, or towards political religion. The former preserved a distinction between conscience and law; the latter comprised a state religion which sought to perfect all of human nature. It was civic religion which become embodied in the early USA, alienating God from worldly power, but leaving him as the guarantor of agreements between humans. Back in Europe, Prodi tracks the relationship between the Catholic Church and the new national states. He then turns to the political religions of the Twentieth Century. Prodi concludes by emphasising that this dualism of sacred and secular power lay at the centre of Western modernity, and expresses his fears about the collapse of civic religion into political religion, especially in the USA. (shrink)

Catholic theologians after Trent saw the Protestant teaching about the remnants of original sin in the justified as one of the ‘chief ’ errors of Protestant soteriology. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Martin Chemnitz, and many Protestant theologians believed that a view of concupiscence as sinful, strictly speaking, did away with any reliance on good works. This conviction also clarified the Christian’s dependence on the imputed righteousness of Christ. Catholic theologians condemned this position as detracting from the work of Christ who (...) takes away the sins of the world. The rejection of this teaching—and the affirmation of Trent’s statement that original sin is taken away and that the justified at baptism is without stain or ‘immaculate’ before God—is essential for understanding Catholic opposition to Protestant soteriology. Two Spanish Dominican Thomists, Domingo de Soto and Bartolomé de Medina, rejected the Protestant teaching on imputation in part because of its connection with the view on the remnants of original sin in the justified. Adrian and Peter van Walenburch, brothers who served as auxiliary bishops of Cologne in the second half of the seventeenth century, argued that the Protestants of their time now agreed with the Catholic Church on a number of soteriological points. They also drew upon some of their post–Tridentine predecessors to offer a Catholic account of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Nonetheless, the issue of sin in the justified remained a point of serious controversy. (shrink)

La résistance au protestantisme, durant les années de paix qui suivent l'édit d'Amboise, fut ritualisée par le miracle de Laon (1566), dont l'actrice principale fut la jeune femme, Nicole Obry, originaire de Vervins en Picardie. Possédée d'une trentaine de diables « elle en était tellement tourmentée qu'on lui oyait craquer les os... » - disait à l'époque Florimond de Raemond. Suite aux exorcismes successifs, effectués à l'aide de l'hostie (donc du « corps de notre Seigneur ») les diables quittent la (...) jeune femme. Seul Beelzebub résiste. Enfin, le 6 février 1566 lui aussi sort, s'inclinant ainsi devant le pouvoir épiscopal. Le présent ouvrage est le premier à examiner les divers récits dont fit l'objet le miracle de Laon entre 1566 et 1578. Le cabaliste chrétien, Guillaume Postel, y voit la réalisation de la suprématie politique et religieuse « gauloise » et le début de l'ère nouvelle. Jean Boulaese, amanuensis de Postel et chroniqueur le plus zélé du miracle, considère celui-ci tantôt comme moyen d'obtenir de l'argent en vue de l'impression de la Bible en langue arabe, tantôt comme moyen de promouvoir sa propre carrière. Christophe de Héricourt, doyen de Laon, et chroniqueur dit « officiel » ou « royal », veut surtout éviter d'offenser les huguenots. Enfin, Barthélemy de Faye, conseiller-clerc au Parlement de Paris, cherche par son récit, à faire de la propagande tant pour les décrets tridentins sur la résidence des évêques que pour un gallicanisme modéré. Les récits du miracle de Laon fournissent ainsi un excellent témoignage de la diversité des catholicismes français à l'époque mouvementée des guerres de religion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In his influential study, The Harvest of Medieval Theology, Heiko Oberman had drawn two broad categories by which to classify the late medieval conception of Holy Scripture and the Catholic Tradition. The first, Tradition I, held Scripture to be the sole source of Catholic doctrine such that Tradition was equated with the exegetical contribution of the holy doctors. What Oberman deemed Tradition II maintained that Holy Scripture is not (...) sufficient for the determination of Catholic doctrine such that it needed to be supplemented by a separate extra-scriptural source of revelation. And it is within Tradition II that Oberman placed William of Ockham. That is to say Ockham was deemed a proponent of a so-called ‘two-sources’ principle of divine revelation. In fact, Oberman went on to say that, “we may conclude that Occam is not just playing with the two-sources theory but that he indeed believes in the solidity of the argument in its totality.”1 Influential as Oberman’s theory has been over the past forty years, however, the strict categorization of ‘one source’ over and against ‘two-sources’ may indeed be detrimental to an assessment of Ockham’s views on the authoritative determination of Catholic doctrine.This essay will focus primarily on Ockham’s conception of biblical authority relative to that of extra-scriptural sources, most notably papal authority. We will also look at two other fourteenth-century Franciscans, his predecessor John Duns Scotus and his successor William Woodford. This will provide us with an opportunity to assess the ways in which different Franciscan theologians handled the nuances of doctrinal authority in light of the specific concerns they faced. In the case of Scotus such questions were less polemically charged than they were for Ockham and Woodford. They usually came up within the confines of his Ordinatio and pertained to doctrines that Scotus willingly embraced even as he tried to make sense of their formulation. Ockham and Woodford, on the other hand, faced flesh and blood opponents in fierce debates: Ockham against the papacy and Woodford against the English Wycliffites. In an era when the precise relationship between authoritative sources was not very well defined, we will see these latter two Franciscans take different tacks as they addressed the exigencies of the moment, thereby highlighting the flexibility of Franciscan views of scriptural and extra-scriptural authority in the fourteenth century.First, though, we can offer some perspective on Oberman’s one source/two sources dichotomy. Oberman was one among many scholars—Protestant and Catholic—charting a grand history of Scripture and Tradition in the run-up to the Second Vatican Council. Much scholarly interest was specifically focused on what the Council of Trent had meant in its formal statement of April 8, 1546 when referring to “the truth and discipline [of the Gospel] contained in the written books and in the unwritten traditions.”2 In an effort to draw out the full intention of this statement scholars turned to an earlier draft to see if it could further illuminate what the Tridentine fathers meant. The earlier draft spoke of the truth and discipline of the Gospel being contained partly in the written books and partly in the unwritten traditions. In light of this fact scholars asked whether the final edition’s use of ‘and’ meant that all Catholic doctrine comes down fully in Scripture and fully in the traditions of the Church, such that either form of transmission sufficiently communicates this doctrine; or does the ‘and’ carry the weight of the earlier ‘partly’ such that Scripture contains only a portion of the truth and thus must be supplemented by unwritten traditions?Did the change from ‘partly … partly’ to ‘and’ signify a change in meaning? Not according to Oberman who was sure that the Council intended to affirm that Scripture does not contain all doctrinal truths.3 Whereas George Tavard concluded just the.. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage, issu de la thèse de doctorat de Xenia von Tippelskirch, s’ouvre sur des questions apparemment simples : que lisaient les femmes dans l’Italie des xvie et xviie siècles? Qui étaient ces lectrices et comment lisaient-elles? À partir de ces questionnements initiaux, c’est en réalité une tout autre histoire que nous propose l’auteure, celle d’une mise sous tutelle progressive de la lecture féminine dans le contexte de la réforme tridentine. Spécialiste de l’histoire culturelle, l’...

The paper focuses on some aspects of the early modern aftermath of supposition theory within the framework of the protestant logical tradition. Due to the growing influence of Humanism, supposition theory from the third decade of the sixteenth century was the object of general neglect and contempt. While in the late sixteenth-century a number of standard textbooks of post-Tridentine scholastic logic reintegrated this doctrine, although in a bowdlerized version, it remained for a century out of the scope of Protestant (...) logic. The situation changed when the Strasburg Lutheran theologian J.C. Dannhauer, who in 1630 developed and propagated the program of a new discipline which he called ‘general hermeneutics’, accentuating the importance of supposition theory as an indispensable device for the purpose of textual interpretation. Due to Dannhauer’s influence on later developments of hermeneutics, which in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was regarded as a logical discipline, supposition theory is still present in several logical treatises of the eighteenth century. The explication of the underlying views on the notion of supposition and its logico-semantic function may give at least some clues as to how to answer the question of what supposition theory was all about. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Original Sin Revisited:A Recent Proposal on Thomas Aquinas, Original Sin, and the Challenge of EvolutionReinhard Hütter"For some years now, the theological layman has been surprised to note that in Catholic preaching, as well as in the theological literature that comes to his attention, there is either hardly any mention of the peccatum originale, or that this doctrine is even explicitly dismissed—with suppression of the canons of the Council of (...) Trent—as an erroneous path inspired by Augustine."—Robert Spaemann1Original Sin Passé—"after" Original Sin?The doctrine and later dogma of original sin had been a central topic of Catholic dogmatic theology up to the Second Vatican Council.2 One only has to consult the exhaustive bibliographies in the respective volumes Urstand, Fall und Erbsünde (in three parts) of the Handbuch der Dogmengeschichte.3 [End Page 693] Still echoing this long-standing, abiding preoccupation—researched during the Council and published in 1967—is the important tour d'horizon and noteworthy working hypothesis advanced by Henri Rondet, S.J., Original Sin: The Patristic and Theological Background.4 Soon after Vatican II a quite unexpected "sign of the time" found its way into Catholic theology—a widespread allergy to the theological topics of sin in general and of original sin in particular began to affect the post-conciliar mood, an unwillingness to acknowledge sin precisely as sin, let alone original sin and the concomitant original guilt. In polite and enlightened post-Vatican II Catholic theological society, one best ignored what was now seen as an unbecoming topic, unless the intention was, of course, to revise, that is, to "de-dogmatize," the received understanding of the Tridentine dogma of original sin, be it along Schleiermacherian lines (original sin as the sin of the world)5 or along Hegelian lines (the Fall and original sin as the unavoidable entailments of human finitude and freedom)6 or along Heideggerian lines (the co-conditionedness of the fundamental human existential situation of transcendental freedom by the historical facticity of collective human guilt since the inception of human history).7 Other post-conciliar progressive theologians took it upon themselves to go further than that and to "de-mythologize" the Catholic faith as a whole, and thus bring it up to date to the new standards of an [End Page 694] enlightened and increasingly secularized age: original sin, mortal sin, last judgment, hell, and eternal damnation all had to go in one or the other way together with angels, demons, and the evil one—at least the personhood (some sundry metaphysical principle of evil, possibly rooted in God, was, maybe, permissible; a person of a created, purely spiritual subsistence, definitely not)—into the dustbin of bygone theological notions, now thanks to a dynamic progressively transformative development of the understanding of faith, suddenly "untruths," or at best mythological remnants of a bygone pre-scientific age.8 Consequently, from the self-secularizing view of what took itself to be progressive Catholic theology, embracing the normative horizon of the immanent frame together with its immanent transcendence of perpetual human progress, the hamartiological and eschatological horizon brightened up considerably, especially in Germany, Holland, and Belgium, looking increasingly like the non-transcendent, historically immanent eschatology of Immanuel Kant's The End of all Things (1794)—a gradual vertical asymptotic approximation of human cultural and social progress to the ideal of the "kingdom of God." The problems that evolutionary theory and historical-critical exegesis of Genesis 1-3 might have posed for a de facto (salvation-)historical state of original justice became serendipitously immaterial, since the object of contention had been preemptively removed. A radically reinterpreted or simply dismissed doctrine of original sin made any concerns about a historical state of original justice and a historical fall immaterial.With original sin transposed by revisionist systematic theologians and mortal sin abolished by proportionalist moral theologians, it became increasingly unclear what Jesus Christ came to save humanity from, really, besides [End Page 695] offering the gnosis of the sublime all-embracing dynamic of an irresistible universal divine embrace, an unqualified transcendent acceptation and indeed affirmation of the very goodness of de facto human nature ("God accepts and affirms us exactly... (shrink)

Due to the elusive nature of the surviving documentation, it is often difficult to assess in what areas and to what extent the Tridentine prescriptions on sacred images led to acts of censorship directed at works of art. The Milanese diocese at the time of Archbishop Carlo Borromeo (1564–84) stands out as a rare case for which policies concerning the control of sacred art and their practical implementation are relatively well documented. This article examines Borromeo’s legislation on religious artworks (...) and how it was translated into practice, highlighting the role played by the administrative system of his diocese in the effort to identify and censor inappropriate works of art. I bring to light these dynamics through an in-depth analysis of the so-called Index of Profane Paintings, a document recording the results of a systematic enquiry into artworks that did not comply with Tridentine standards, carried out in the Milanese diocese under Borromeo. Despite being the only known evidence of an investigation of this kind made in the sixteenth century, this document has been largely ignored by art historians. I discuss the date and circumstances in which the Index was compiled, as well as the methods and targets of the enquiry it records. I then examine the problems raised by the artworks denounced and the solutions envisaged for them, exploring their relationship with contemporary religious and visual culture. A revised transcription and an English translation of the document are given in the Appendices. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Renaissance Project of Knowing:Lorenzo Valla and Salvatore Camporeale’s Contributions to the Querelle Between Rhetoric and PhilosophyMelissa Meriam BullardThe Journal of the History of Ideas has published two symposia devoted to examinations of Lorenzo Valla's place in Renaissance intellectual history, both of which sought to situate Valla in his appropriate contemporary context and to assess his contributions to developing tools of rhetorical analysis and textual criticism in the fifteenth (...) century. In the first JHI debate published in 1989, Salvatore Camporeale's foundational reexamination of Valla's views on language, rhetoric, and theology was frequently cited; and his assessment served as a fulcrum in the disparate interpretations offered by John Monfasani and by Richard Waswo and Sarah Gravelle.1 In the second forum published in 1996, Camporeale was invited to contribute an essay on Valla's famous critique of the false Donation of Constantine; therein the Roman humanist had appealed for Christian renewal inspired by an early Christianity, unburdened by medieval ontological discourse, and seeking to subvert the imperial (Constantinian) model of the church that had dominated since the fourth century.2More than half a century later in the early sixteenth century, reform-minded intellectuals such as Erasmus, More, Luther, and Melanchthon picked up Valla's pleas and used his insights and textual criticism to buttress their own calls for ecclesiastical reform, challenging the claims to authority of the [End Page 477] Roman church. But despite the popularity among the reformers of Valla's two most noted and provocative texts, his rhetorical and philological refutation of the Donation of Constantine and his annotations for a new translation of the New Testament from Greek, his legacy gradually faded from prominence after the sixteenth century. By then when the Protestants' split from Rome had become an accepted reality, and their battle to achieve a place in a divided Christian world won, the reformers' use of Valla's arguments no longer seemed so controversial. For its part, Catholic discourse in the Tridentine era had reverted to reassertions of papal hierarchy along the Constantinian model. Valla's other contributions to understanding rhetorical hermeneutics and philosophy gradually receded, especially from Anglophone intellectual consciousness and in some quarters even from the metanarratives of intellectual history.3 His legacy frequently goes unacknowledged in reconstructions of antecedents to modern intellectual history and philosophy despite the late twentieth century's lingering love affair with philosophies of language and the stress on contextualization pioneered by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, which share many of the same concerns Valla had plumbed for his day.4 The present group of essays attempts to address that lacuna in various ways, by revisiting Valla's contributions to the philosophy of language, by casting his story forward to understand the nature of his legacy beyond the Renaissance and Reformation, and by exploring why his and other Renaissance humanists' contributions to the project of human knowledge have been minimized or overlooked in more recent times. It is the contention of all the contributors that Valla, and to wit Camporeale's Valla, richly deserves our attention and that his overlooked legacy endures.Beginning in the 1970s Salvatore Camporeale, the leading modern Valla specialist, wrote and lectured widely to highlight the Roman humanist's place in the history of thought and to discuss him in an idiom reflective of modern sensitivities to issues of rhetoric, philosophy, language, and historical context.5 Camporeale's massive tome, Lorenzo Valla. Umanesimo e teologia (Florence, 1972) has only slowly made its fortune beyond Italy and Europe. The book, densely written and daunting for its close philological examination of variant texts and datings, has been more often consulted than read outside [End Page 478] the select circle of Valla devotees, this despite Eugenio Garin's clearly stated appreciation in his presentation of the volume. Garin lauded the depth and precision of Camporeale's scholarship and the lucidity with which he brought into focus the rich fabric of fifteenth-century theological disputes that engaged Valla and that invested his understanding of language and philology.6 Through careful and insightful analysis, Camporeale not only established Quintilian as the major inspiration behind Valla's rhetorical theory, but, logical step by logical step, he... (shrink)

In chapter one I will try to reconstruct a plot, or a hidden agenda, in the discussion in ethics between the beginning of the twentieth century and 1958, the year of a decisive turning point in ethics, both Anglo-Saxon and Continental, and strangely enough also the year of the beginning of the end of the Cold War, of post-Tridentine Catholicism, and perhaps something else. My hypothesis will be that there are two similar starting points for the Anglo-Saxon and the (...) Continental twentieth-century discussion, the philosophies of Henry Sidgwick and Friedrich Nietzsche, both expressions of some kind of ethical scepticism, and that a third, somewhat analogous starting-point could be found in Émile Durkheim, the proponent of the dream of the morale laïque. I will discuss how far the diagnosis formulated by Karl-Otto Apel of a kind of ‘parallel convergence' between existentialism and analytic philosophy, based on the shared division of facts and values that eventually justified two kinds of 'decisionism' is useful in making sense of the agenda of the discussion. In the second chapter I will discuss the reasons for two parallel U-turns around 1958 which brought back traditional schools of normative ethics, 'deontologism' and utilitarianism, as well as the reasons for criticism to both schools from the heterogeneous alignment of virtue ethics. In the third chapter I will discuss the remarkable phenomenon of the emergence, starting with the Sixties or the early Seventies, of ‘applied’ ethics. I examine the reasons, both theoretical and political, for the revival, the point to which applied ethics may look as a grand return of a casuistic and natural law way of thinking, or in Alan Donagan’s words a case of “reverse subversion” of the modern secular world by traditional Scholastic ways of thinking, and the difficult coexistence between general normative ethics and procedures for settling issues in a ‘reasonable’ way while dissent on issues of principle is as alive as ever. Then I try to draw a provisional moral. My suggestions are that (i) casuistry is more alive than ever; (ii) natural law thinking is more alive than ever; (iii) moral dilemmas never arise; (iv) moral dissent is treatable, with the right strategy; (v) practical philosophy does not need the same degree of exactness as the theoretical sciences but this is no obstacle to its working in practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article examines William Barclay's response to Jean Boucher's De Justa Abdicatione Henrici Tertii in view of the complexities of Catholic political thought in this post-Tridentine period. It argues that Barclay's famous category of ‘monarchomach’ is problematic for its avoidance of the issue of confessional difference, and that on questions of the relationship between the respublica and the ecclesia Barclay struggled to find an adequate response to Boucher in his De Regno et Regali Potestate. His De Potestate Papae is (...) treated as the intellectual extension of his battle with Boucher, and more broadly his confrontation with the position of the Catholic League and Jesuits on indirect papal power. By considering Barclay's works in the context of French Gallicanism and the Catholic League in the French Wars of Religion, this discussion aims to reposition Barclay in relation to other Catholic political theorists and thereby re-evaluate the category of Catholic resistance theory. (shrink)

De Lubac, a French theologian, underlines the theme of freedom, referring to St. Augustine against an intellectualistic rationalism prevailed in post-Tridentine Catholic thought.

In this Introduction to “Re‐thinking Dionsyius the Areopagite” it is first explained that the volume sets out to illuminate the contemporary interest in “apophaticism” by close comparison with the original project of the CD. However, given the elusiveness and generativity of the Dionysian tradition, this can only be done adequately by also providing a road‐map of the many historic interpretations of the Dionysian corpus, both East and West. Three constellating themes in the volume are then outlined: 1. The importance of (...) Dionysius for the regeneration of both Roman Catholic and Orthodox contemporary theology, in latter‐day riposte to Kantianism; 2. The significance of Dionysius for suggesting a fluid, post‐modern vision of the self; and 3. The importance of a possible re‐reading of Dionysius's impact on both Lutheran and Tridentine spirituality in the era of early modernity. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore the challeges raised by Germain Grisez to Karl Rahner’s theory of fundamental option. Dr. Grisez holds that Fr. Rahner misunderstood the Tridentine teaching on justification, and posited the inaccessability of fundamental option to reflection. After reviewing Dr. Grisez’ position and the Tridentine doctrine of justification, the article will explore Fr. Rahner’s writings on fundamental option, and form conclusions regarding the conversation between Karl Rahner and Germain Grisez.

Debates concerning the relationship between Tridentine Catholicism and Catholicism after Vatican II dominate theological conversation today, particularly with regard to understandings of the Church and its engagement with the world. Current historical narratives paint ecclesiology after the Council of Trent as dominated by juridical concerns, uniformity, and institutionalism. Purportedly neglected are the spiritual, diverse, and missional aspects of the Church. This book challenges such narratives by investigating the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez's theology of ecclesial unity and catholicity. Analyzing standard (...) as well as overlooked sources of Suárez's ecclesiology, the author shows how Suárez wrestles with the new demands of his time and anticipates later ecumenical developments in twentieth-century Catholic ecclesiology. Early modern expansion prompted theologians after Trent to reckon with the ecclesial status of baptized Protestants, the Greek Orthodox, and non-believers in the New World. It further prompted reflection on the universality, or catholicity, of the Church, and how the Church's mission to the nations serves her greater unity in Christ. Throughout this exposition, the author reveals Suárez's vision of the Church to be deeply spiritual, diverse, and missional-not at the expense of the institutional, but as it's necessary and life-giving source. The Church, for Suárez, is primarily a way of life. This book explores not only Suárez's speculative ecclesiology, but how the unity and catholicity of the body of Christ is lived out in practice, that is, in the worship and works of the faithful, and, most notably, in the charism of his own religious order, the Society of Jesus. Suárez thus shows his readers what the spiritual dynamic between Christic unity and missional catholicity should look like in the Church. (shrink)

Hunt, Anne The 1917 Code of Canon Law had only two general canons on the laity. It made a clear demarcation between the clergy and the laity. The clergy always have precedence over the laity. The laity cannot perform any act of jurisdiction or order. The Code reflects the ecclesiology of the post-Tridentine church, famously expressed by Pope Pius X who, in 1906, described the church as essentially an unequal society. That ecclesiology assumes a pyramidal model of church. The (...) apostolate of the church is basically that of the hierarchy. Ministries pertain to the ordained. Custodianship of revelation resides with the hierarchy. Lay people effectively have the status of dependent children: it is for them to submit to and receive from the hierarchy. The theology of the church's mission was also limited, with the work of evangelization considered to be that of missionaries and basically directed outside the church. The laity, it seemed, had no mission. While necessarily reflecting the ecclesiological and historical circumstances of its era, it was nevertheless a deficient ecclesiology in a number of ways. Even the language to describe the unordained faithful remained undeveloped with the term 'lay' in common parlance connoting the inexpert and unqualified in contrast to those with professional competence and authority, and as such inadequate to the ecclesial reality of the laity. (shrink)

De nature homilétique, la prédication de Calvin suit le principe de la lectio continua, proche du commentaire des lectiones. Le réformateur mentionne souvent les philosophes, de manière positive pour les savoirs qu’ils représentent, mais aussi pour les critiquer. La philosophie et les philosophes sont des réalités ambivalentes, comme dans l’ Institution de la religion chrestienne, et désignent les savoirs humains sur le monde et sur l’homme en tant qu’on peut ou qu’on ose envisager ces réalités comme indépendantes de Dieu. Les (...) plus grands éloges de la philosophie donnent lieu aux condamnations les plus vives. Calvin utilise aussi la désignation de philosophes pour critiquer des adversaires contemporains : d’une part la théologie scolastique et tridentine, d’autre part les « moyenneurs » érasmiens. Le réformateur oppose les deux « styles », celui de la philosophie et celui de la révélation scripturaire, à la fois comme deux méthodes discursives, deux styles au sens littéraire, et deux stratégies : seules les Écritures saintes sont capables de conduire efficacement à la vraie sagesse (chrétienne). (shrink)

This article seeks to explore the challeges raised by Germain Grisez to Karl Rahner’s theory of fundamental option. Dr. Grisez holds that Fr. Rahner misunderstood the Tridentine teaching on justification, and posited the inaccessability of fundamental option to reflection. After reviewing Dr. Grisez’ position and the Tridentine doctrine of justification, the article will explore Fr. Rahner’s writings on fundamental option, and form conclusions regarding the conversation between Karl Rahner and Germain Grisez.

Sont intervenus dans la rédaction du C.É.C. majoritairement des évêques : ceux de la Commission directrice, ceux du Comité de rédaction qui en ont rédigé les trois premières parties, le tiers de l’Épiscopat qui a proposé de multiples amendements et le pape lui-même. D’autres membres de l’Église ont aussi joué un rôle important : le rédacteur de la quatrième partie et le secrétaire de rédaction et tous les experts qui ont été consultés à diverses étapes de son élaboration. De schéma (...) en schéma, l’exposé initialement prévu en trois parties s’affine, se complète par un prologue et finit par devenir quadripartite comme le Catéchisme tridentin de 1566. L’évolution de sa structure donne déjà quelqu’idée de la manière dont certains enseignements de Vatican II ont été "reçus". (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt is known that throughout the seventeenth century the world system proposed by Tycho Brahe assumed a preponderant position in the Iberian cosmological debate, according to many opinions the one showing the best agreement to empirical evidence. Moreover, the Tychonian model did not present the difficulties of apparent contradiction with scriptures, as the heliocentric system of Nicolaus Copernicus did, since it kept the earth fixed at the centre of the world. However, Tycho, as a Lutheran author, was targeted by the (...) Inquisition. Passages of various works of the Danish astronomer were included in the Spanish Indices of 1632, 1640 and 1707, although the formal condemnation of the Roman Inquisition never materialized. In the network of the Society of Jesus a seemingly informal censorship also circulated, apparently based on Tridentine determinations, published in 1651 in the influential work of Giambattista Riccioli Almagestum novum. In this paper I will discuss the scope, effects and limitations of the censorship of Tycho's scientific books in Portugal and Spain, through the analysis of several annotated copies, preserved manly in Iberian libraries, with a special attention to books with a well-established provenance in past Jesuit colleges. (shrink)

The paper aims to examine the role of Benet Perera’s and Roberto Bellarmino’s exegetic models in the development of the relationship between the nascent Galilean science and post-Tridentine catholic theology. It intends to show that, during the early decades of seventeenth century, the Catholic Church dealt with the Scientific Revolution with the same hermeneutical tools that it had employed to confront the Protestant Reformation half a century before. However, new science involved a philosophical and scientific culture change so vast (...) and intricate that those models turned out to be inadequate to understand the birth and characteristics of the new era. (shrink)

One of the prominent debates of post-Tridentine scholasticism addressed probability, often expressed by the term “moral” (or adverbially, “morally”), originally motivated by the epistemology of decision-making and the debates on predestination and “middle knowledge”. Puente (or Pedro) Hurtado de Mendoza (1578–1641), an Iberian Jesuit and the author of one of the earliest Jesuit philosophy courses, entered this debate in the early-seventeenth century. This paper presents his 1610s and 1620s analyses of different forms or degrees of evidence, certainty, and necessity (...) or impossibility, addressing the commonly-used trichotomy of the “metaphysical”, “physical”, and “moral”, in which “moral” is the weakest form of a modality, together with the paradigmatic examples and interesting applications of the framework. (shrink)

This paper takes as its point of departure the rise of online Adoration of the Reserved Sacrament during the widespread suspension of worship in response to COVID‐19. Taking the phenomenon seriously as an instance of the sensus fidelium exposes limitations in the Tridentine formulation of the mode of sacramental presence. Alternative approaches may be developed with reference to the thinking of two post‐Heideggerian philosophers, Marion and Nancy, who in different ways explore the subject's encounter with the divine in the (...) phenomenal world as a double kenosis, without reference to an abstract concept of Being. These accounts together suggest an account of adoration as a kenotic response to divine kenosis and so suggest understandings of Eucharistic Adoration that are not bounded by the constraints of physical materiality. The paper concludes by considering the wider applicability of this approach in a world that is, increasingly, a hybrid of physical and ‘virtual’ phenomena and at a time when US Catholics are believed to be losing their faith in the real presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements. (shrink)

Who owns the girl’s body, the parents, or the daughter herself? In Catholic casuistry, this issue has not only been occasionally touched upon, it has been topical among the commentators on Aquinas (STh II-II, q. 154, a. 6) from the 16th up to the 18th centuries. Nevertheless, modern scholarship ignores this big dispute. The distortion of early modern history in consequence thereof precludes a fair appraisal of the achievements of the Christian schools within the Habsburgian commonwealth. Whereas the Iberian Peninsula (...) was the theatre of the endeavour here described (Domingo de Soto OP, Luis de Molina SJ, Gabriel Vázquez SJ, Juan de Lugo SJ, the Salmantine Carmelites), Jansenist France was forward in defeating it. The quarrel about this issue gains an additional interest by the observation that it represents the rare case where the schoolmen themselves had the keen feeling that the stand they took represented a divide between two ages, medieval and modern, viz. Pre-Tridentine and Post-Tridentine. The main purpose of the present paper, then, is to render a necessary piece of apologetics. Its focus is on the deplorable situation in which we presently are due to the rotten feminist convictions about how things went. (shrink)

The mystical and spiritual authors of the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries provided rich inspiration for Kierkegaard's religious thought. Kierkegaard owned numerous works by these authors, who are associated with the spiritual traditions of Rheno‐Flemish mysticism, Devotio Moderna, post‐Tridentine and Baroque Catholicism, and Reformed Pietism. The accurate spiritual diagnostics and the apt methods of spiritual formation found in (Pseudo‐)Tauler, Theologia Deutsch, Abraham a Sancta Clara, and François Fénelon deeply impressed Kierkegaard. He adopted and further developed motifs from the mystical and (...) spiritual authors in a variety of his writings, and his journals contain abundant reflections on themes from Thomas à Kempis, Ludovicus Blosius, and Gerhard Tersteegen, such as the imitation of Christ, spiritual guidance, or divine pedagogy. The best testimony to the importance of spiritual literature for Kierkegaard is the fact that he sought counsel in it in a personal crisis when he was deciding on the future of his religious authorship. (shrink)

Le propos de l’article est l’analyse de la cérémonie de la prise d’habit au sein de l’Ordre Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel aux xviie et xviiie siècles. À partir des sources normatives, picturales et hagiographiques, cette cérémonie est détaillée, notamment la scénographie de l’avant/après, gommant toute marque féminine. Certaines pratiques témoignent de la mise en impatience de ce passage de la soie au drap, qui se traduit par des prises d’habit clandestines, prématurées ou des portraits de mondaines usurpatrices en habit de carmélites. (...) Il est vrai que le modèle absolu de La Madeleine, compte tenu des origines le plus souvent princières des postulantes, n’est pas étranger au prestige de la métamorphose. Réalité et construction représentative permettent de montrer comment le Carmel s’est approprié une cérémonie, qui, dans le contexte compétitif entre les ordres de la liturgie tridentine, valorise la femme, par le biais de la moniale, affranchie des attributs de son sexe. Mais surtout, la vêture a su rendre spectaculaire et désirable ce qui a priori ne l’est pas, la pauvreté et la pénitence du corps et de ses attributs, dans le but avoué du recrutement de nouvelles postulantes. De la rivalité entre drap et soie, le vainqueur n’est pas forcément celui que l’on croit. (shrink)

Le propos de l’article est l’analyse de la cérémonie de la prise d’habit au sein de l’Ordre Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel aux xviie et xviiie siècles. À partir des sources normatives, picturales et hagiographiques, cette cérémonie est détaillée, notamment la scénographie de l’avant/après, gommant toute marque féminine (présence de cheveux, soins pour un teint pâle, vêtement ajusté, usage de soieries, de bijoux, etc.). Certaines pratiques témoignent de la mise en impatience de ce passage de la soie au drap, qui se traduit (...) par des prises d’habit clandestines, prématurées ou des portraits de mondaines usurpatrices en habit de carmélites. Il est vrai que le modèle absolu de La Madeleine, compte tenu des origines le plus souvent princières des postulantes, n’est pas étranger au prestige de la métamorphose. Réalité et construction représentative permettent de montrer comment le Carmel s’est approprié une cérémonie, qui, dans le contexte compétitif entre les ordres de la liturgie tridentine, valorise la femme, par le biais de la moniale, affranchie des attributs de son sexe. Mais surtout, la vêture a su rendre spectaculaire et désirable ce qui a priori ne l’est pas, la pauvreté et la pénitence du corps et de ses attributs, dans le but avoué du recrutement de nouvelles postulantes. De la rivalité entre drap et soie, le vainqueur n’est pas forcément celui que l’on croit. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Catholic Theological Ethics Past, Present, and Future: The Trento Conference Edited by James F. Keenan, and: The Social Mission of the US Catholic Church: A Theological Perspective by Charles E. CurranDaniel CosacchiCatholic Theological Ethics Past, Present, and Future: The Trento Conference EDITED BY JAMES F. KEENAN Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011. 337 pp. $40.00The Social Mission of the US Catholic Church: A Theological Perspective CHARLES E. CURRAN Washington, (...) DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011. 196 pp. $29.95To read both Catholic Theological Ethics Past, Present, and Future and The Social Mission of the US Catholic Church is to take a whirlwind tour—theological, historical, and geographical—through the Roman Catholic ethical tradition. Both volumes present wonderfully rich material and invaluable resources for the study of Christian ethics. Charles Curran and James Keenan are two of the foremost Catholic ethicists in the United States today. Keenan’s case is to be applauded for convening the 2010 conference in Trento, which brought together some six hundred Roman Catholic ethicists from around the world. His book, which assembles that conference’s thirty-one plenary addresses, does justice to this tremendous feat. Curran, for his part, has produced a text that focuses acutely on the Church in the United States and will benefit ethicists for years to come.Keenan uses the introduction to Catholic Theological Ethics Past, Present, and Future to provide an overview of the Trento conference and its attendees and proceedings. Keenan expertly identifies a common theme among the 240 diverse papers at the conference, noting that ethicists “always begin with the premise that there is a deficit in our location, and, therefore, we need to work together to find a way to remedy it” (6). What follows in the remainder of the book boldly moves toward remedies for many of the world’s ills. A few of these essays deserve particular mention.The conference and the collection of essays share the basic organizational principle of looking to the past, the present, and the future of Catholic theological ethics. Unsurprisingly, the Council of Trent played a foundational role in understanding the “past” of Catholic moral theology. Laurenti Magesa [End Page 216] (Kenya) explains that the African experience of the Council of Trent has remained largely unchanged since the conclusion of that council: “The Catholic Church in Africa is essentially a Tridentine church” (57). This essay makes clear that in Africa, the dominant voices are Western males. The missing voices, then, are given attention by Antônio Moser (Brazil), Anne Nasimiyu-Wasike (Kenya), and Bryan Massingale (United States). Massingale’s essay was most impressive, addressing the role of racism in our culture and concluding that Catholic ethicists “need to lament, mourn, and grieve our history” (121). This, he claims, is both a fruitful way to act in the present and a hopeful way to look toward the future.In focusing on the present, the strongest subsection of the book attended to political ethics. Here David Kaulemu’s (Zimbabwe) essay, “Catholic Social Teaching at a Crossroad,” has the potential to open the eyes of any reader. He writes, “It is frustrating and discouraging to the lay faithful to be inspired by Catholic social teaching and yet receive no recognition or support by ‘official’ church structures” (177). This highlights a serious problem to which all Catholic ethicists must attend. As for the future, Julie Hanlon Rubio (United States) points to a tripartite vision for marriage in the twenty-first century that sets high standards not only within the marital unit itself but also for the impact of the spouses on the larger society. Julie Clague (Scotland) presents a wonderful essay on the burgeoning relationship between moral theology and gender.Among the wealth of positive features of this collection is the great geographical diversity of the authors. This affirms that Catholic theological ethics is very healthy throughout the entire world and that on each continent there are voices of women and men willing to contribute fresh ideas to the discipline. In a time when there is so much tension between theologians and bishops, we should also be grateful that there are two essays from members of the episcopacy (Archbishop Bruno... (shrink)

This article looks for scanning the History of the Council of Trent emphatically in what concerns to the antecedents that went through its path and culminate in it. Under the key of an “Ecclesia semper reformanda” we look for understanding the internal reformations in the Church of that age not as private diligences to the Council's motion, as if the Council was the great awakener of a monolithic Church to the needs of an intrareformation, but, despite this, aiming the history (...) of the Council, often, in that time of crisis in Latin Church, at that context of the rise and expansion of Protestantism, it's possible to see, in Church's breast, a wish of ecclesiastical, pastoral and dogmatic reformation, renovation and updating that, ulteriorly, was already largely disseminated in practices and discussions of the Church even before the very Council. Indeed, we have discovered a movement of internal and previous reformation that converged to Trent and greatly influenced it, so we say that almost there was nothing new in the Council, any pastoral or dogmatic guideline exclusive and genuinely tridentine. Trent's just the apex, the vertex, so to speak, the crown of intrareformist movement within the Church as we shall show in our research, drawing Council's history from long before, unveiling what came previously about the discussions and directions taken. (shrink)

This paper carried out bibliographical and documentary investigation on exploratory research with a qualitative approach in collect and analysis of data by consulting the sites and documents of various religious groups, systematizing liturgical and spirituality understanding, checking divergences and convergences and producing key considerations about liturgical and theological aspects and pastoral practice, to contribute with integral mission practice. Cults and religious celebrations in different churches and denominations have certain rites and actions that give them specific characteristics in order to allow (...) its members to experience their faith in the celebrative space, at churches or in open spaces, this set takes the name liturgy. The so called Tridentine liturgy, while celebrative practices, is eminently clergy centered. The assumed liturgical language has become far from full understanding of most of the faithful. The great mass of Catholics could not deeply connect them with what was celebrated in its temples. With the opening of Vatican Council II and the discussions held under its auspices, on its subsequent sessions, there was a rethink that also intends to answer for the claims of local churches about various aspects of a liturgy that is more participatory. There is a set of tensions between those who remained in favor of the former rite, called Tridentine rite, and those according to the following rite set at the Second Vatican Council, both with allowed use by the Holy See. Differences between the rites, and theological and spiritual understandings alleged, the differences are not in the foundation of matter itself, since if we takes not the letter but the lex orandi spirit, both one and the other has the same requirements for the mystery celebration that is full of sacrifice dimensions, this deeply catechetical nature, and Passover, when Christ becomes present as sacrificial gift and scatological hope. It is found that on stir core is a necessary liturgical studies which influences on effective participation, in any of the rites, when used in the celebrations. (shrink)

Résumé — La controverse religieuse qui a suivi l’essor du luthéranisme est ordinairement présentée comme le moteur principal de la reviviscence du pyrrhonisme à l’âge moderne. Au XVIe siècle, la religion aurait fait du pyrrhonisme un outil apologétique puissant, véritable arme que s’opposeraient les diverses confessions. Pourtant, comme le note Bayle dans son Dictionnaire, les rapports entre le scepticisme et la théologie sont extrêmement ambigus : un rapide tableau des appréciations portées par les théologiens chrétiens montrent que, chez les Réformés (...) comme chez les catholiques, l’humiliation des lumières naturelles est pensée comme une entrave à l’instauration de la foi. Seuls les courants pauliniens et mystiques voient dans cette philosophie un moyen bénéfique à la vie spirituelle. Pour devenir un outil intellectuel reconnu dans les milieux catholiques tridentins, le pyrrhonisme a dû subir une métamorphose radicale : Omer Talon, suivi par Gentian Hervet, ont reconfiguré le pyrrhonisme à partir du modèle probabiliste de la Nouvelle Académie, pourtant récusé par Sextus Empiricus. Assoupli, le scepticisme a alors été pensé comme le moyen privilégié d’une refondation de la dialectique rationaliste et de la défense de la foi.— The religious controversy which followed the development of Lutheranism is usually presented as the main engine of the revivescence of the Pyrrhonism in early modern period. In the sixteenth century, religion would have made by Pyrrhonism a powerful apologetic tool, true weapon that adverse confessions would have set against each other. Nevertheless, as Bayle notes it in its Dictionary, the connection between scepticism and theology is extremely ambiguous : a fast outline of the appreciations carried by the Christian theologians shows that, by protestants as well as by Catholics, the humiliation of natural lights is thought as an obstacle of the institution of faith. Only the Paulinian and mystic currents see in such a philosophy a beneficial resource for spiritual life. To become an intellectual tool recognized in the catholic Tridentin circles, Pyrrhonism must have been subjected to a radical transformation : Omer Talon, followed by Gentian Hervet, has restructured Pyrrhonism from the probabilistic model of the New Academy, even though such a model was rejected by Sextus Empiricus. Such mitigated, scepticism has then been considered as one of the privileged means of the refondation of rationalistic dialectic, and of the defence of faith. (shrink)

Although sovereign power is often defined as transcending legal and religious norms, the work of historians like Prodi and Agamben has drawn our attention to the ways in which modern accounts of sovereignty depend fundamentally upon the fusion and transformation of these norms. In Latin Christendom, this process was enabled by the juridical quality of ecclesiastical authority, its expression through laws similar in form and structure to those of civil power. There was, however, an important strand of Catholic thinking from (...) the late-sixteenth century which emphasised the centrality of sacrifice, rather than law or jurisdiction, in creating communities. For Catholic polemicists like Rossaeus (William Reynolds) sacrifice came before law and the juridical organisation of human society was secondary to the ritual and ceremonial. This article will examine the roots of this claim in post-Tridentine discussions of the Mass as a sacrifice and will go on to show how it was used to defend the primacy of the Catholic Church, particularly in 1590s France. It will consider the impact of this argument and suggest its importance in provoking new and more powerful articulations of both royal sovereignty and papal power. (shrink)

Theorists of Gallican liberty took as their premise the idea that France had an exceptional status amongst the national Christian churches. However, as contemporaries had noted, the precise definition of Gallican liberties remained at stake; Antoine Hotman noted in his treatise on the subject that ‘it is a strange phenomenon that everyone talks of the liberties of the Gallican Church and, most of the time, very few people know what they are and cannot account for their origins or for their (...) progress’. Within the context of French reactions to the papal excommunications of Henri III and Henri de Navarre, and reception of the Tridentine decrees, the question of how to define Gallican liberty was an extremely pertinent one. This article examines the treatment of Gallican ideas in Catholic League treatises as they negotiated a balance between arguments for Gallican independence and indirect papal power. Despite accusations from their contemporaries that they were attacking the Gallican church, Leaguer discussions of Gallican liberty frequently proved to be an integral part of the argument that Catholicity was a ‘fundamental law’ of France. (shrink)