Jacob Medina’s Reviews > The Age of Division: Christendom from the Great Schism to the Protestant Reformation > Status Update

“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).