I'm half-tempted to show this to some Dutch Reformed friends of mine, but causing heart attacks is hardly nice...
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
What relevance did that one peasant republic(that had existed) in Germany have anyway?
There's a fine line between heterodoxy and heresy!
Do you practice hesychasm? Western Christianity has a tendency, due to its intrinsic rationalism, to do away with mystery. Save mystery. Mystery is important. People naturally gravitate to mystery. When the mysterious is pulled away people are no longer interested.
I'm sure they'd retort with the standard Trent denied "by faith alone" but not making mention that's because Roman dogma insists on the unity of faith and grace. Even Satan knows Christ is Lord of the World but that isn't helping him out!
Aman, the Hebrew and Aramaic word for "belief" whereby English derives the word "amen," does not mean mere affirmation. Hebrew is a task-oriented language with double or triple meanings in many words. Belief entails action in Hebrew. Hence why the more ancient Christianities keep faith (and "works") together. Fun stuff.
What relevance did that one peasant republic(that had existed) in Germany have anyway?
Friedrich Engels will write some pretty little book about the Peasant Wars and Marxists will still be in denial that their worldview is a heretical outgrowth of the Christian eschatological tradition.
- 1
Hesychasm sounds so interesting. I love to believe as all things hide mysteries, also I enjoy philosophy and Christian theology. I am a writter in real life, unfortunely my novels are written in my native tongue - Romanian
Reading this makes me all the more annoyed at the anti-Catholics of my youth who spoke of what they didn't know... and taught me to do the same.
It also makes me agree even more that if Trent had happened sooner we (properly) would have avoided much trouble. Though finding ourselves further along these trajectories, I do believe that us Protestants are more in the right.
And good job working on more modern translations! I find such work very useful.
Interestingly, as an American Protestant I've found myself fascinated the other direction. I spent years being curious about Orthodox Christianity, and am now getting curious about Nestorian Christianity.
It also makes me agree even more that if Trent had happened sooner we (properly) would have avoided much trouble. Though finding ourselves further along these trajectories, I do believe that us Protestants are more in the right.
And good job working on more modern translations! I find such work very useful.
Interestingly, as an American Protestant I've found myself fascinated the other direction. I spent years being curious about Orthodox Christianity, and am now getting curious about Nestorian Christianity.
@Idhrendur
I am fascinated by Orthodox Christianity in reality because is my religion but I not have read scholarly writtings about her and rest of Christianity.
I am fascinated by Orthodox Christianity in reality because is my religion but I not have read scholarly writtings about her and rest of Christianity.
Reading this makes me all the more annoyed at the anti-Catholics of my youth who spoke of what they didn't know... and taught me to do the same.
It also makes me agree even more that if Trent had happened sooner we (properly) would have avoided much trouble. Though finding ourselves further along these trajectories, I do believe that us Protestants are more in the right.
And good job working on more modern translations! I find such work very useful.
Interestingly, as an American Protestant I've found myself fascinated the other direction. I spent years being curious about Orthodox Christianity, and am now getting curious about Nestorian Christianity.
Nestorianism!
Heresy! Isn't it often the case that those who know the least speak on the subjects which they know not? Out of a certain principle of self-respect, and concern for not spreading false news, I tend to only speak and publish on things I know or am giving an interpretation of. You know, I've met and talked to some Reformed Calvinist pastors and writers (I was once supralapsarian Reformed in an earlier life) who share the same sentiment. If Trent happened earlier, the ruptures may have been less.
In the end, it comes down to the tired "Trent denied salvation by faith" which, is technically true, if you don't mention that in Catholicism salvation is by faith and grace because they are interconnected akin to Homoousion.
Well, I don't think you should look too deeply into an AAR for such a scholarly read!
Though I do go out of my way, though the French personality certainly shows his disdain for Protestantism from time to time, to portray the theological controversies as per the actual dogmatic positions and confessions and writings of the Christianities in question.As for an academic article, I'll PM you an article of mine on the theology of Saint Augustine. Granted, it's 10,000 words and in English, if you're able to get through it maybe it will help you in your ever growing interests. Though I'm something of an academic theologian in real life having been trained and published in historical theology and patristic exegesis.
BOOK II: THE REFORMATION
PART TWO: THE COUNTER REFORMATION
VI
The End of Christendom
PART TWO: THE COUNTER REFORMATION
VI
The End of Christendom
What the Reformation and Counter-Reformation wrought was, undoubtedly, the end of Christendom. Civilizations rise and fall. This is apparent to anyone without logs in their eyes and are students of history. From Daniel to Augustine to Ibn Khaldun to Oswald Spengler, it should be obvious that civilizations are organic lifeforms going through rise and decline cycles before exhausting into death and being replaced by a new cellular organism that replaces it.
Roman civilization, a subset of the broader classical civilization, died and was replaced by Gothic civilization which, in turn, died and was replaced by Christian civilization beginning with the glorious and essential coronation of Charlemagne. Christian civilization, that civilization which undergirded Christendom, was part classical, part Gothic, but very much owed to the contribution of the Frankish-Gothic tribes in the formation of Christendom from the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties. Afterward it fragmented, or decentralized, into a now codified dogma of Catholic social philosophy called subsidiary—that autonomy and power ought to be concentrated in the most local environment rather than in centralized and bloated environments.
From the Bronze Age collapse to today, the rise and fall of civilizations tend to correspond with being outpaced by technology and an overburdensome flux of people into the lands of the now decadent civilizations which have become excessively materialistic. Softness sowed by technological and economic progress leaves a now luxurious and antinomian people susceptible to invasion from hardier peoples. The end of Christendom, of Christian civilization, that civilization spanning from the coronation of Charlemagne through the Renaissance and into the Reformation, was not destroyed by the latter but the former.
The printing press and other technological advances, mostly military in nature which would wreak their ugly head in the Evangelical Wars, directly contributed to the collapse of Christendom. Technology had gotten out of control. But rather than humans being absorbed by technology, as the dream of transhumanists today, the printing press broke the monopoly of power and control which the Church, its institutions, universities, and the clerical class had over the people. Ironically, the printing press did more to advance the principle of subsidiary by driving local autonomy and power out of the diaconate churches, conferences, seminaries, and schools, and into the household—or sort of.
FIGURE 1: The Printing Press, the most decisive technological instrument which hastened the demise of Christendom.
Protestants were very keen to try and control the printing press but failed. Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin never intended for the public masses to become their own theologians as is the case with modern Evangelicalism. They sought tight control too—but wielded the printing press in their fight against the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the power of the printing press was too much for Catholics and Protestants to control. It overwhelmed Christendom, coupled with the fire of the Reformation, and the Catholic appropriation of the new technologies in waging the Counter Reformation and the Evangelical Wars only hastened the printing press’ blunt thrust into the heart of Christian civilization.
But even Christian civilization was destined to die. Perhaps it would have been wise for many to return to venerable Saint Augustine and his City of God—or perhaps just Sacred Scripture. The city of man, the kingdoms of the world, are given over to their desires. But the Church remains and perseveres till the end.
So out of the fire of the apocalypse was to be born a new civilization; one headed by Louis-Joseph and be an infusion of the prior civilizations: Roman, Gothic, and Christian, into early modern. It took up the organic inheritance of the previous civilizations, with the newfound militant spirituality of war Christianity, and the technological advances which made that civilization possible in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After all, it was Louis-Joseph and the Angevin Quenoy family which led this new civilization forward. From France, to Naples, to Hungary, across the seas of the Mediterranean, indeed, even within the Roman Curia, the Quenoy Family would have done the Merovingians, Carolingians, and Capetians proud.
But the end of Christendom was peculiar in that it self-cannibalized. The new civilization which was emerging in its place was born through the fire of internal and external conflict. When the Ottomans pressed across the Bosporus and seized Constantinople, the gates of Europe were flung wide open. It seemed, at a time, as if the trend of external invasion and migrations of people into the decadent civilization could have hastened the collapse of Christendom—since the invincible Ottoman armies and navies were sailing even onto the coasts of the newly formed Kingdom of Spain and sacking proud Italian cities like Venice, Naples, and Genoa. The Ottoman armies marched quickly into Hungary, defeating the Hungarians, all the while Christians were fighting each other not so much—at this point—for religious reasons as much as for purely political ones. With such weakness and decadence abounding, it should have been easy for the Ottomans to storm across the Danube and into Germany if not for the Holy Alliance spearheaded by Pope Alexander VII (the former Cardinal-Bishop of Anjou) and the Angevin-led alliance which included Spain.
The dynamics of the end of Christendom were unique in this respect. The three great Catholic dynasties of Europe consolidated in weird ways. The Habsburgs, controlling Southern Germany and the Lowlands, became the bulwark of internal Christian scheming and battles in dealing with the Protestant Reformation and the Evangelical Wars. The Quenoy, consolidating France, turned eastward to confront the rising threat of the Ottoman Empire, trying to put back together not only the ancient dynastic thrones of their French forebears but equally constituting a new, modern, militant Christian civilization being born from the fires of the Reformation, the Evangelical Wars, and the Ottoman Wars. The Trastamara in Spain, having expelled the Moors, though losing Catalonia and Naples to the Angevins, looked westward and busily began colonizing the Americas and bringing the glory of Hispanic Catholic civilization there. Indeed, one could say that Christendom shifted from Europe to Spanish America since Spain was relatively unscathed from all the fires of the sixteenth century.
FIGURE 2: Europe on the eve of the Evangelical Wars, 1565, and also the ascension of Louis-Joseph which happened in the same year.
Irrespective of how one approaches the end of Christendom, there can be no denying that Christendom was shattered by the Reformation, Counter Reformation, printing press, Evangelical Wars, and the Ottoman invasions. The shell, or external walls, of Christendom might have remained. But the new civilization which emerged just prior to the subsequent rise of “Enlightenment” and antinomian civilization which characterizes much of modernity—which is itself in its terminal decline phase—was one born in hardship, war, and bloodshed. In this way it wasn’t so different than how other civilizations, in their bloody deaths, give birth to something new like with the overthrow of Uranus by Cronus and his castrated phallus, having fallen into the womb of Thalassa, gave birth to Aphrodite from stormy seas and white foam.
Last edited:
Who controls eastern Findland? or did Novgorod survive long enough to become protestant?
I suppose one could consider the Reformation period as a sort of additional forging. Those denominations that survived were strengthened, those that fell by the wayside proved brittle.
Not perhaps the best analogy, but I thought of it just now reading the above.
Not perhaps the best analogy, but I thought of it just now reading the above.
When I went to Catholic School twenty years ago, I was taught that for a long time the Holy Spirit was referred to as being the Holy Ghost and that the Holy Spirit is a modern term. So would the Canon as originally written use the term Holy Ghost instead of Holy Spirit?
Last edited:
Spiritus Sanctus is the Latin phrase in the Vulgate and all ecclesiastical Latin writings and documents concerning the "Holy Spirit." A pitilessly literal translation would be Spirit Sacred or Sanctifying Spirit. Holy Ghost was the English translation of the Douay–Rheims Bible, with the NT being published in 1582, 29 years before the more famous English translation of the King James Bible. The D-R was commissioned by the Catholic Church, since, contrary ignorance, always accepted some degree of vernacular Scriptures. (The Latin Bible was itself a vernacular translation of the Septuagint because Latin was the spoken vernacular of the western portion of the Roman Empire.) As such, Holy Ghost became de facto English tradition. I translated the Trent statements re-contextualized as the Council of Rodez in this AAR. I opted for the Holy Spirit.
On the issue of the Douay-Rheims, I would highly recommend. It is a beautiful English translation (like the King James), contains all the proper books of the Bible (the "Deuterocanon"), and has good occasional footnotes on certain prophetic passages (especially concerning Daniel 9 and the 70 weeks prophecy). It's also useful to have the book of the Maccabees because the Abomination of Desolation occurs there, which is prophesied in Daniel but also first prophesied by Ezekiel. The Church Fathers, for instance, linked it with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.; Luke 17, 21, and Matthew 24, then, are not "futuristic" prophesies but statements by Christ concerning the coming end of the Aaronic Priesthood, Temple system, and divorce prophesied in Jeremiah 31 and Hosea 2 which did occur in the lifetime of some of those who were listening to Jesus speak just as he said.
But back to Trent, written in Latin, "Spiritus Sanctus," you can translate it as you want. The original English translations of that phrase, as mentioned in the D-R Bible, used Holy Ghost. Thus, by virtue of this simple accidental fact of translation, established Holy Ghost as the traditional rendering of the Latin. Holy Spirit is, then, a more "modern" translation of the Latin phrase.
Last edited:
BOOK II: THE REFORMATION
PART THREE: THE EVANGELICAL WARS
I
The Origins of a Not-So Religious War
PART THREE: THE EVANGELICAL WARS
I
The Origins of a Not-So Religious War
I am now tasked, as I’ve promised, to discharge my responsibilities of detailing the Evangelical Wars which—when taken in conjuncture with the Wars of the Holy Alliance against the invading Ottoman Turks—constituted one of the two major transnational and continent-spanning events that dominated the world of Louis-Joseph I. I have previously discussed, even if briefly, how the war came about. The obvious event that everyone can visibly see was the overthrow of the Catholic Duke Maximilian I by the Protestant (Calvinist) pretender Albert I. While sectarianism was involved in the overthrow, insofar that we see a rightful Catholic prince being overthrown by a Protestant upstart, the origins of the Evangelical Wars go deeper than mere religious disputations.
What the Reformation unleashed, which few Protestants like to acknowledge in their rosy and romantic depictions of the event, is that greed, lust, and political ambition was as much part of the Reformation as a few renegade clerics and academicians thinking the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church had lost its way. I will not, though it entices me to do so, discuss how much of presuppositional Lutheran, Reformed, and Anabaptist theology is, implicitly, a return to Arianism, Docetism, or Nestorianism as it relates to Christology and soteriology, it suffices for me to say that the complexities of theology cannot be prima facie accepted as if Protestant presuppositional approaches are de facto, and de fide, true, and therefore there is no need to deal with historical theology and Christology apart from erroneously and disastrously “mining” the Church Fathers for one or two agreement points to show how the Fathers apparently taught Protestant theology though no one with such a knowledge of the Fathers, including Augustine, would agree to this. As Augustine said in City of God, Ham, the notorious middle son of Noah, prefigured the hot heretics, proclaiming the nakedness of the Christ of the passion and atonement (whom Noah prefigured) without knowing what he was doing.[1] I have previously discussed these longer roots indirectly; the looting of Christendom, the flight of the monks and nuns, the dissolution of the monasteries, all served to enhance the power of lustful princes who saw the Reformation as an opening wedge for temporal power and ambitions by overthrowing the perceived shackles of the Catholic magisterium and juridical structures that limited political centralization and power.
The centralization of state power was one of the consequential effects of the Reformation, especially in Protestant lands compared to the more dispersed and decentralized lands of the Catholic monarchies despite the Protestant accusation of divine rights of kings which, in actuality, was more of a secular doctrine established by the French political jurist and philosopher Jean Bodin and his Six Books of the Commonwealth. Moreover, there was filial-dynastic ambitions which were unleashed by the unshackling of the Catholic magisterium over the lands of the Holy Roman Empire and Christendom more broadly. To this end, even the Catholic dynasties took advantage of the Evangelical Wars to advance their worldly political agenda too. The Habsburgs and the Quenoy, along with the Trastamara and decadent Valois, were the three great Catholic dynasties with the Quenoy emerging as the fourth. The Witteslbach, Tudor, and Hohenzollern were the three great Protestant dynasties which utilized the wars to advance their agendas; some dynasties emerged as winners and others as losers.
FIGURE 1: Duke Albert I, the pretender of Bavaria who was the visible cause of a war that had roots going back centuries before his birth and seizure of power.
Many lesser noble families throughout France, Germany, and Hungary were equally caught up in this entanglement of ambition, power, and politics; so much so that by the latter parts of the Evangelical Wars Protestants were allying with Catholics and Catholics allying with Protestants when it suited them to do so. Any concise and specialized study of the war disproves the modern “religious war” only theory. If so, how do the shifting alliances of Protestants and Catholics and Catholics and Protestants affirm this hypothesis? It doesn’t. It gives more credence to the political nature of the conflict. It may have started with Protestants and Catholics on respective sides, more for political than religious purposes even at the start as hitherto explained, but quickly divulged into a byzantine network of shifting alliances and noble feuds who allied indiscriminately whenever it was beneficial for local powers and principalities to do so.
Therefore, it suffices to say that there are many webs and complexities that were leading to the explosion of the Evangelical Wars. Without going into exhaustive detail, which would distract us, there were old aristocratic feuds which had nothing to do with religion as these feuding lines went back to when all families were nominally Catholic. The division of some families along religious lines post-Reformation only gave further justification for these noble families to reengage in their longstanding enmities and hatred of each other. Additionally, there was the reality of imperial politics; the Evangelical Wars coincided with the centralization of state political power and colonialism—as Carl von Clausewitz said, “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” He was right, of course, and the Evangelical Wars, despite the veil of religiosity to it, was more political than anything else. Furthermore, there was the opportunity for lesser nobles and the body politic of the German principalities to overthrow the power of the Church in the Evangelical Wars. This contest between princely secular power and Church spiritual authority, the “two swords” doctrine enumerated by Pope Boniface VIII’s famous papal bull Unam Sanctam, was now in the crosshairs of the German princes who just happened to be Protestant because by being Protestant they had an extra arm in the fight. The Evangelical Wars, then, can rightly be seen as an extension of the Guelph-Ghibelline conflicts which were rooted in the Investiture Controveries of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries.
Given this reality, I hope the reader affords me the opportunity to get into this truly transformative political event in the history of Europe which also gave rise to the fourth race of kings which is the subject of this book. The reader should be able to see how this series of conflicts was more than a squabble over matters of dogmatic theology. The councils and confessions and creeds was where the intellectual and theological battles were being waged. On the ground, however, and for the rest of the sixteenth century, the “Evangelical Wars” may have had the flavor of religious conflict to them, but deep into the heart of the matter was a conflict born of longstanding political rivalries, ambitions, and good old earthly enmity like when Romulus slaughtered Remus.
FIGURE 2: “Allegory of Louis-Joseph as King of Land and Sea.”
It was in this byzantine moment of sixteenth century Europe that the seed of the fourth race of kings was born, ascended to the apanage lands of Provence, Kingdom of Catalonia and Algiers, and was thrust into the thick of blood, fire, and smoke. The world before Louis-Joseph, thus, is coming to an end. The third and final part of this second book under the first half of my history is thus transitioning from the world before Louis-Joseph to the world of Louis-Joseph, after which the second half of this history shall detail Europa in the age of Louis-Joseph I.
[1] City of God, XVI.ii.
The Fourth Race is born in a time of war.
Would it be any other way? All the 'great' cities of men are founded in acts and times of violence! I think a certain saint from Hippo had much to say about this!
I've been binge reading this AAR and its strange but very informative style and I must say you've had me hooked the further I've read, learned things I never thought off (Saint Augustine having sex in mass is one particular thing I'll now remember just for its utter hilarity ). This AAR certainly reads more like a series of factual volumes found in some interdimentional library instead of just another work of fiction so bravo for going with this style!
I've never been that much of a French player as I focus more on the ERE's (tragic) history, but I must say, I like this work on the first daughter of the Church. Can't wait for the next update, and the inevitable showdown between the French lilly and the Ottoman crescent. It's going to be quite a rivalry just like OTL Austria & the Ottomans for sure!
). This AAR certainly reads more like a series of factual volumes found in some interdimentional library instead of just another work of fiction so bravo for going with this style!I've never been that much of a French player as I focus more on the ERE's (tragic) history, but I must say, I like this work on the first daughter of the Church. Can't wait for the next update, and the inevitable showdown between the French lilly and the Ottoman crescent. It's going to be quite a rivalry just like OTL Austria & the Ottomans for sure!
Oh you should really try to get around to reading Confessions. It is a remarkably readable work, and still has a lot to say to us today about growing up and stuff even if one ignores the natural religious dimension.I've been binge reading this AAR and its strange but very informative style and I must say you've had me hooked the further I've read, learned things I never thought off (Saint Augustine having sex in mass is one particular thing I'll now remember just for its utter hilarity
I've been binge reading this AAR and its strange but very informative style and I must say you've had me hooked the further I've read, learned things I never thought off (Saint Augustine having sex in mass is one particular thing I'll now remember just for its utter hilarity
I've never been that much of a French player as I focus more on the ERE's (tragic) history, but I must say, I like this work on the first daughter of the Church. Can't wait for the next update, and the inevitable showdown between the French lilly and the Ottoman crescent. It's going to be quite a rivalry just like OTL Austria & the Ottomans for sure!
Thanks for dropping in, and by, TWR! I do quite like how you described the content of this AAR, as "a series of factual volumes found in some interdeimentional library"! xD Admittedly, the uniqueness of the obvious voice of the historian is one of the things I do enjoy when writing. Although I've become heavily burdened, if that's the right word, with my contractual bimonthly column, freelancing, and grad school work, what time I get to put on the cloak of our author is quite a joy!
My first ever published academic article was related to the ERE, Byzantine and Byzantine Christian iconography and symbolism. And after 5 years, I've finally sent off a 12000 word historiographical assessment of representations of the ERE in western scholarship. So I understand why one would prefer the ERE over France. I don't play as France much, though I do like a good game as Provence/Anjou for the equally "tragic" history of the House of Anjou.
Augustine's sense of humor and couched esoteric implications is one of the great joys reading him. "To Carthage I came and found myself sizzling in a frying pan of illicit lusts." (My translation of that famous opening sentence in book III.
I've also written a commentary on understanding Augustine's visionary ascents and the wonders of theology and language involved in it. Just remember, before the Ostia vision he was in a region of destitution and at Ostia is enters an abode of abundance.
This post is to allow for a clean break for the readers for the forthcoming post beginning on page 16.