There were plenty of political reasons to consider. I can post more in depth later, but it is likely that the Pope used the Crusades to consolidate papal power in the face of increasing agitation and independence of Holy Roman Emperors.
Please tell me the “appropriate” term used by historians when people falsify history to push their own agendas. Is it “historical negation?” By the way, I am open to learning the factually awful things the Catholic Church has done…I have believed in the exaggerations of it for most of my life after all (thank you public school and History Channel).
I’m learning about events and terms I’ve never even heard of before.It is interesting that the most observant Jews, or those who practice their religion most fervently, choose to live in situations and places that could easily be described as ghettos.
I don’t know the history of the term, but I suspect that as usual the more precise, technical use came first and the loaded, popular use came second. As C. S. Lewis said, words tend over time to take on meanings that equate to either “good” or “bad,” losing their more nuanced meanings. Naturally this is more likely to happen in popular usage, which then exerts pressure on the technical usage. For instance, the recent scholars who have challenged the “Whig” interpretation of the English Reformation (such as Duffy and Scarisbrick) are usually called “revisionists.” But obviously the more entrenched your usage becomes, the harder it will be for a professor to use that term in front of a class without prejudicing the students against the scholarship in question.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_revisionism_%28negationism%29
Has someone gave a revisionist re-definition of the term “revisionist history?”
Wikipedia uses the term “negationism.” I haven’t heard it. Generally we just call it “bad history” or “propaganda masquerading as history” or something of the sort. I’m not sure it deserves a technical term. It’s just history done badly–and of course all history written by fallible human beings is done imperfectly to some extent. Hence the need for continual “revision.”
Yes. I got the fundamentalist version because I was homeschooled–but in a way that was easier to correct because it was obviously coming from a particular, biased religious perspective. The History Channel is in my experience almost completely untrustworthy for anything before the eighteenth century (it may not be very good even for more recent stuff–the earlier stuff is what I know more about). Back when my wife and I had more cable channels, I used to joke that the History Channel should be renamed the Sci-Fi- channel and the Sci-Fi channel the Horror Channel!
And sorry for coming down strong. My frustration is that non-historians don’t realize how continually historians question and revise their paradigms, and making “revisionism” a bad word will just further confuse the issue. Also, as I’ve suggested, for Catholics “revisionist” history is often friendlier than “traditional” history. Much of the traditional narrative of Western history was created in the 18th and 19th centuries (such as the “myth of the flat earth”) by secular/Protestant historians who were heavily biased against Catholicism.Thanks everyone for the fruitful discussion
But the trajectory in the late 11th century was the other way round. It was the Papacy that was asserting its independence of the Empire. In the early 11th century the Papacy was corrupt and under the control of the local Roman aristocracy. The HRE helped promote the reform of the Papacy, and then found that it had created a “monster” (from the imperial perspective).
interesting perspective. however, considering how the Jews have been persecuted throughout the centuries and the anti-semitism that seems to never go away, i can understand somewhat why they would choose to remain separate and isolated.
Good point.Much of what we can say about world history comes from English law via America - i.e. broadly “Reformation cultures”.
Since America has been the most powerful country in the world financially since 1918, it has been able to influence everything else. Asians wear American business suits, and Africans drink Coca-Cola. This influence obviously has allowed wealthy America to send mostly-Protestant missionaries across the world. For 100 years before 1918, Britain was the most powerful, and it dominated sea trade for 200 years before 1918, and that meant it dominated colonisation and missionary activity…
Economics would have developed very differently without the Reformation. Our Western stock exchange can be traced to the banks of Ludgate Hill and the tulip-gardens of Amsterdam. The Western system of usury evolved, in the last 300 years, within the legal relationship between Whitehall, the Temple Bar, and the merchants above the River Thames. At the very least, without the Reformation there would’ve been no American “Gilded Age” at the end of the 19th century, which was the result of an Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethic. Who knows what the New World would be like?
In politics, I doubt very much that our current situation would exist, even remotely. I believe the Catholic monarchies of Europe considered Britain, the Netherlands, and Lutheran princes to be dangerously radical in their relative egalitarianism. England’s republican-lite suffrage developed far beyond Magna Carta, after the Reformation. The limits on the monarch, freedom of religion, and comparatively free press were very Protestant ideas.
In law, the Inns of Court in London were definitely influenced by Protestant principles of private judgment and freedom of conscience, ideas rejected by Pius IX and others. The right to silence, the “golden thread” of presumed innocence before proven guilt, and other ideas of law which we take for granted, were created within English Protestant philosophical humanism.
In terms of the second half of the title, what churches would look like, we know the Gothic revolution was at its height and beginning to give way to Classicism by 1510. Without the Protestant drive to destroy images, crosses, and statues, and to “clean up” the churches, who knows how things would have developed? English, Swedish, and Lutheran baroque were very austere and minimalist, compared to the explosive Jesuit, French, and Italian churches of later days.
I don’t think Rome would have developed altars versus-populum without the perceived need for ecumenical outreach to Protestantism. I don’t think Rome would have allowed a vernacular Mass without Protestantism as an example. You never know, though, as the Orthodox always kept the vernacular. Who knows where dialogue might’ve gone with them?
Aesthetic predictions are always speculation.
Well-said, brother. This holds particularly true for the Arian heresy & schism in the 4th century. I think 70% or more of the Catholic bishops simply became Arians. They were mighty in Milan, and spread their errors across the Balkans at Arminium and Seleucia, very large councils with 300-400 heretical bishops.
Here is the secret of unity.
I think it all rather depends on whether one supposes that the Papacy would have a level of independence from circumstances. With the Spanish in control of Italy (holding Southern Italy, with client States elsewhere) nobody they didn’t approve of was going to be Pope and, even should that unlikely event occur, they’d ignore what they didn’t like - Philip II was as in as much control of his ‘National Church’ as any Protestant Monarch could hope to be. These would be highly unlikely circumstances for the Papacy to develop a theory of international and local niceness. The only counter-balance was France (and the Ottoman Turks to annoy the Austrian Habsburgs, of course).
My ‘Italian’ cynicism tends to the idea that dealing with anything Italian-based has great opportunities for intellectual brilliance and considerable artistic style on the one hand, balanced by our huge talents in the fields of governmental incompetence and corruption on a grand scale - at its worst in areas that were controlled/dominated by the Spanish.
Unfortunately, for the vast majority of European Jews, China might as well have been a distant planet.Kaninchen you are Jewish correct? How about a better deal?
The way societies develop depends on a number of factors - science and technology, obviously, and that could happen (as it did) in a world of educated men sitting in their libraries/‘laboratories’ and corresponding with other educated men sitting in their libraries/‘laboratories’ - these men could be more, or less, religious. That this could happen was crucial but equally crucial was the existence/development of the kind of society where surplus money was available, where there was enough of a potential market to develop, and where there was enough social mobility to make effort and ambition worthwhile and so on.
I have rarely met anyone who forgets this. I know a lot of people who mistakenly think that absolute monarchy was something traditionally promoted by the Church, and forget that the Church was the major factor *limiting *royal power in the later Middle Ages. Or if this is mentioned, it’s simply mentioned as evidence of how power-hungry the Popes were.
It’s fair to point out, though, that Luther and other Reformers didn’t have a problem with Tridentine Catholicism (which didn’t exist yet). They had a problem, precisely, with the Church that corresponded with pre-Tridentine Catholicism. That is the Church (the pre-Tridentine church) that most Catholics, today, acknowledge was corrupt as well.
I personally am much fonder of Erasmus–in terms of his temperament and his doctrines–than I am of Luther. To “blame” the Reformation in a literal sense, however, for the reaction that was the Counter-Reformation, ironically brings up one of the very things Luther and Erasmus wrangled about – the freedom of the will (I am not sure whether you were assigning blame in the strict sense of moral responsibility and of strict causality, but I’m taking the word “blame” at face value). The Counter-Reformation was how the church at that time chose to respond to the Reformation, or what they perceived as a necessary response. They were responsible for their reactions, not Luther. Similarly, the Reformation was how Luther chose to respond to what he saw as corruption in the church. But if – objectively speaking – it is fair to blame the Reformation for the Counter-Reformation, then it is fair to blame the acknowledged corruption in the Church at that time for the Reformation.
The proposed reforms of Czech Catholic Jan Hus (14th century) would have brought many of the reforms of Vatican II into the pre-Reformation church, as some Catholics have pointed out! Hus was burned at the stake for his heretical ideas, not so much for his theology–which was acceptably orthodox by Catholic standards, even as regards the sacraments–but for having questioned the authority of the pope too vigorously. The dilemma was, how to propose those reforms without questioning the authority of the pope to vigorously? (even Erasmus, who took sides with the Catholic church against Luther, was later placed on the Index of Forbidden books). What Hus advocated was greater participation of the laity in all aspects of church life – including use of the Czech vernacular during church services. He also emphasized more immediate access to the Bible, I believe. As we all know, greater laity participation was a huge part of Vatican II.
I think part of the issue in this particular scenario we’ve all concocted is how to “dethrone” a certain Greek philosopher from his pedestal.
Hard to say! What I do know, or what I had a distinct impression of, is that the Wars of Religion damaged the credibility of religious belief in the eyes of many Europeans and Americans (just as Soviet communism, no doubt, damaged the credibility of atheism in the minds of many!)
Hmm… It looks as if Voltaire (Jesuit-educated, by the way) was of a mind regarding the desirability of religious pluralism from the perspective of peaceful co-existence. He writes: