Status Updates From The Age of Division: Christ...

“Voltaire concluded his novel Candide with the protagonist, having abandoned hope in a God who seeks communion with man in the world, and by doing so to ‘cultivate our garden’.

“A second important step toward modernity occurred in France during what is often called the Enlightenment. This period might more properly be considered, with a nod to the old Christendom, the "benightenment." For what had once been the true light of the world-the gospel of Jesus Christ-became for the secular humanists of the eighteenth century nothing more than ignorance, superstition, and hypocrisy.”

“Pagan culture gained in popularity because the west had drifted away from the culture of the old Christendom, and because Western intellectuals were exhausted by the pessimistic culture of the new Christendom.”

“The idea of utopia sprang from the frustrations of seeking the kingdom of heaven in a civilization oriented towards Heaven but tragically denying the experience thereof. Utopia did not replace Christendom’s paradisiacal culture. It distorted it.”

Remember Magdeburg.

“Don’t talk to me about God. We killed God at Magdeburg”

“Most importantly, Christendom never recovered. The wars of Western religion had taken something from it that could never be restored. Though memories of the war’s victims were soon forgotten, the memory of its hypocrisy could not be.”

“The Thirty Years’ War marked the near total dereliction of Western Christendom. No previous event, no abomination of desolation, had so tarnished its history as the spectacle of Christians murdering each other in the name of the God of love.”

“As a result the long history of Western iconography came to an end. What this meant was that revealing the presence of God in the world was no longer the purpose of art. Demonstrating the ingenious presence of the artist was.”

“In the East, by contrast, icons were not painted in the naturalistic style, but in an anagogic style paralleling the heavenly symbolism of the liturgy.”

“But by this time, the RCC had brought ruin to the iconographical tradition of the West. It did so not through iconoclasm but through what can be called iconotorsion, that is, the twisting or distortion of iconography.” (Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael).

“Yet the principle of “scripture alone” ignored the fact that the New Testament had been written decades after the faith was given at Pentecost and was therefore the product of tradition. Scripture itself bore witness to the priority of tradition over scripture (Acts 2:42) and to the need to be faithful to tradition (2 Thess. 2:15).

“For in attacking the misplaced optimism they saw in scholasticism, Protestant theologians tore down all remaining convictions about the innate goodness of humanity.”

“Luther, a rebel in theology, was the staunchest of reactionaries when it came to civil disobedience.”

Hence there were movements like the Anabaptists, a counter-counter-reformation against conservative Lutheranism.

“While representing a real counter reformation against the innovations of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism also retained many of the practices and much of the ethos it had inherited from its rival.”

“Its leaders, in attacking the new Christendom, were not restoring the old Christendom to the West. They were in fact perpetuating the new.”

“For in the end Luther’s action was a reaction to the changes brought to the West by the Papal Reformation.”

“Pope Sixtus IV, who had written the bull formally assigning to the papacy the powerful of indulgences for the dead, had set an example by building the Sistine Chapel (which he named after himself.”

“Instead of communion with God, Western culture had brought Luther to a state of alienation from God.”

Western Christianity’s view of penance “became a way not only of turning toward God but of satisfying His anger.”

“Stillness is thus transformative and is the only true path toward the ecstasy of union with God.”

“The imitation of Christ” no longer recognizes the legitimacy of a division between the clergy and the laity.

Perhaps it set the ground rules for the Protestant reformation?

Iconography in the west in the 14th century focused on the death of Christ in the crucifixion, not the resurrection.

“Perhaps this played some role in provoking iconoclasm in the more radical (Protestants) among them”.

“Because it only claimed the particular is real, nominalism brought greater attention to the experience of the individual believer.”

“On the eve of the Reformation, Nominalism would become the leading school of western thought.”

Nominalism challenging a universal human nature that “the Son of God had assumed and in which all men shared” had “undermined the principle of divine participation.”

Some sort of proto Calvinism.