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| Anglo-Catholic |
Anglo-CatholicThe terms Anglo-Catholic and Anglo-Catholicism describe people, groups, ideas, customs and practices within Anglicanism that emphasise continuity with Catholic tradition. Since the English Reformation there have always been Anglicans who identify themselves closely with traditional Catholic thought and practice. The concept of Anglo-Catholicism as a distinct sub-group or branch of Anglicanism, however, began to come to prominence in the Church of England during the Victorian era under the influence of the Oxford Movement or "Tractarians".
Practices and beliefs
Anglo-Catholic people and churches are usually identified by their liturgical practices and ornaments. Anglo-Catholics use many traditional Catholic practices in their liturgical ceremonies such as vestments, incense and candles and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Anglo-Catholic liturgical practices (incorrectly called 'Ritualism') were a particular source of controversy in the nineteenth century, especially in England where Parliament was asked to legislate against certain practices. Many Anglo-Catholic "innovations" (or, rather, revivals of dormant practices) have, however, since become accepted by most mainstream Anglicans.
What Anglo-Catholics believe is highly debated even among people who identify themselves as such. The Thirty-Nine Articles make distinctions between Anglican and Roman Catholic doctrine; but the Articles have never been regarded with much favour by Anglo-Catholics, and because they were purposely written in such a way as to be open to a wide range of interpretation, some Anglo-Catholics have defended Catholic practices and beliefs as being consistent with the Articles. Anglo-Catholic priests often hear private confessions and anoint the sick, regarding these practices (as do Roman Catholics) as sacraments; whereas more Protestant-minded Anglicans generally think of them as merely optional sacramental rites. (The classic Anglican aphorism regarding confession is "All may, none must, some should").
Anglo-Catholics share with Roman Catholics a belief in the sacramental nature of the priesthood and the sacrificial character of the Mass; many
encourage priestly celibacy, and until the 1970s almost all rejected the possibility of women receiving Holy Orders. In recent years, though, some Anglo-Catholics have accepted the ordination of women and other aspects of "liberalism" such as the use of modern and inclusive language in Bible translations and the liturgy. While the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic movement began partly as a reaction to liberalism, secularism and Evangelicalism in the Church of England, the movement's heirs in the modern church are far more diverse and in some respects more inclusive. The movement Affirming Catholicism is an example of a more liberal approach to Anglo-Catholic theology and practice.
Most of the groups making up the Continuing Anglican Movement are regarded, and regard themselves, as Anglo-Catholic.
In the Anglican Communion three terms are frequently — but not always correctly — used to denote the parish's style of worship: High Church, Low Church, and Broad Church (or Latitudinarian). "High Church" is generally used to describe moderate to advanced Anglo-Catholicism, "Low Church" is used for Anglicans of a more Evangelical or Protestant theology who emphasise the primacy of scripture, salvation by grace through faith alone and worship based on the official prayer books but with much less ceremonial. The term "Broad Church" is sometimes used for those "middle-of-the-road" Anglicans who are somewhere between the "high" and "low" traditions, or those who stress that there is room for diverse traditions in the Anglican Communion.
Some Anglo-Catholics (sometimes called Anglo-Papalists) consider themselves under Papal supremacy even though they are not in full communion with Rome. Many Anglo-Catholics seek for reunion with Roman Catholic Church. In fact a significant portion of Britain's Roman Catholics are former Anglicans or their descendants.
External links
- [http://justus.anglican.org/resources/pc/ Anglican texts at Project Cantebury]
Category:Anglicanism
- [http://www.anglocatholic.net Anglo-Catholic Central, with listings of Parishes, Dioceses, Orders, and Societies]
Category:Catholics not in communion with Rome
Category:Religion in the United Kingdom
Anglicanism
The term Anglican (from the "Angles" meaning English) describes the people and churches that follow the religious traditions developed by the established Church of England. The Anglican Communion codifies the Anglican relationship to the Church of England as a theologically broad and often diverging community of churches, which holds the English church as its mother institution. Adherents of Anglicanism worldwide number around 70 million.
The issue of Catholic and Protestant affiliation is often confusing. Whilst many Anglicans regard themselves as being within the Protestant tradition, many other Anglicans, especially Anglo-Catholics, do not consider themselves as being Protestants. The Church of England claims explicitly that the Church "upholds the catholic faith" (however, the Athanasian Creed states "And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance." The phrase "catholic church" by definition means the universal Christian Church but also holds the sense of the "church in its fullness" ). Ultimately, the Anglican Church is both catholic (stressing its continuity with the ancient Church), and Reformed / Protestant (noting that the Church does not accept the universal infallible authority of the Pope). The conduct of eucharistically-centred worship services is in keeping with the catholic liturgical tradition and the Communion emphasises its status of full communion with the Old Catholic Church — a small community of churches which split from the Roman Catholic Church in 1870 over the doctrine of papal infallibility. On the other hand, the development of Anglicanism as a distinctive church tradition is also deeply connected with the Protestant Reformation.
As with the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches (but unlike most Protestant churches), Anglicans claim authority within the church through apostolic succession from the first followers of Jesus. Anglicans traditionally date their church back to its first archbishop Saint Augustine of Canterbury in the 6th century and centuries earlier to the Roman occupation. Many other Anglicans, however, point out that Christian missionaries existed in the British lands from the 1st century and consider Celtic Christianity a prefix of their faith, since many Celtic elements remained. They also point out that bishops from the British Isles participated in the early Ecumenical Councils.
Origins
See also: History of the Church of England
While Anglicans acknowledge that the schism from papal authority under Henry VIII of England led to the Church of England existing as a separate entity, they also stress its continuity with the pre-Reformation Church of England. The organisational machinery of the Church of England was in place by the time of the Synod of Hertford in 673 AD when the English bishops were for the first time able to act as one body under the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Since the Elizabethan Religious Settlement the Church of England has enjoyed a heritage that is both Catholic and Protestant with the British monarch as its Supreme Governor. Contrary to much popular belief, the British monarch is not the constitutional "Head" of the Church of England and it is incorrect to refer to the monarch as such. The monarch has no constitutional role in Anglican churches in other parts of the world.
Nonetheless, the English Reformation was initially driven by the dynastic goals of Henry VIII of England, who, in his quest for a queen to bear him a male heir, found it necessary and profitable to replace the Papacy with the English crown. Henry's need for a legitimate male heir was real. England's previous experience in the twelfth century of rule by a queen had been a disaster that no-one wished to see repeated. (see Empress Matilda) It was not Henry's intention to found a new church. He was well informed enough about history to know that the powers he was claiming were those which had been exercised by European monarchs over the church in their dominions since the time of Constantine and that what had changed since then had been the growth of papal power. The Act of Supremacy put Henry at the head of the church in 1534, while acts such as the Dissolution of the Monasteries put huge amounts of church land and property into the hands of the Crown and ultimately into those of the English nobility. These created vested interests which made a powerful material incentive to support a separate Christian church in England under the rule of the Monarch. The theological justification for Anglican distinctiveness was begun by the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer and continued by other thinkers such as Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes. Cranmer had studied in Europe and was influenced by the ideas of the Reformation and had also married despite being a priest. Because Cranmer and other leaders of the Church of England had been ordained by bishops in the Apostolic Succession, and passed on that ordination to their successors, Anglicans consider that they have retained the historic apostolic succession.
During the short reign of Edward VI, Henry's son, Cranmer was able to move the Church of England significantly towards a more Protestant Calvinist position. The first Book of Common Prayer dates from this period. This reform was reversed abruptly in the subsequent reign of Queen Mary. Only under Queen Elizabeth I was the English church established as a reformed Catholic church.
In the 16th century religious life was an important part of the cement which held society together. Differences in religion were likely to lead to civil unrest at the very least, with treason and foreign invasion possibly thrown in as well. Elizabeth's solution to the problem of minimising bloodshed over religion in her dominions was a religious settlement which prescribed a fixed form of worship in which everyone was expected to take part, i.e. common prayer, but a belief system formulated in a way that would allow people with different understandings of what the Bible taught to give assent. The Protestant principle that all things must be proved by scripture was turned upside down in article VI of the Thirty-nine Articles, so that no one could be required to believe anything unless it could be clearly proved from the Scriptures. This recognised that there were areas where the Bible did not give clear cut teaching, where differences of opinion amongst Christians were legitimate. The bulk of the population was willing to go along with Elizabeth's religious settlement, but extremists at both ends of the theological spectrum would have nothing to do with it, and cracks in the facade of religious unity in England were appearing.
For the next century there were significant swings back and forth between the Puritans and those with a more Catholic understanding of Anglicanism. It must be understood that the concept of religious freedom was in those days neither understood nor accepted by many people, and that the groups involved in the struggle were aiming for control, not freedom. By continental standards the level of violence over religion was not high, but among the casualties were a king, (Charles I) and an Archbishop of Canterbury, (William Laud). The final outcome in 1660 after the Restoration of Charles II was not too far removed from the Elizabethan ideal. One difference was that the ideal of encompassing all the people of England in one religious organisation, taken for granted by the Tudors, had to be abandoned. The religious landscape of England assumed its present form, with an Anglican established church occupying the middle ground, and the two extremes, Roman Catholic and Puritan, too strong to be suppressed altogether, having to continue their existence outside the national church, rather than controlling it. The English Reformation may be said to have ended at this point.
The Elizabethan settlement failed in that it was never able to gain the assent of the entire English people. Yet as the Anglican form of Christianity is now flourishing in many parts of the world far away from England it may possibly have succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of anybody alive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Leadership
The Archbishop of Canterbury has a precedence of honour over the other archbishops of the Anglican Communion. He is recognised as primus inter pares, or first amongst equals. The Archbishop of Canterbury, however, does not exercise any direct authority in the provinces outside England. The current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, as former Archbishop of Wales, is the first primate appointed from outside the Church of England since the Reformation.
Since the reign of Henry VIII ultimate authority in the Church of England has been vested in the reigning monarch. Since the time of Elizabeth I the sovereign's title has been 'Supreme Governor' rather than 'Head' of the Church of England. In practice this means that the monarch has the responsibility of seeing that the administrative machinery of the church is running smoothly, and in particular that new bishops are appointed when needed. Today this responsibility is discharged by the Prime Minister. Anglican churches outside England do not have this relationship with the British monarch, however it remains the case that the Archbishop of Canterbury, leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, is appointed by the Crown of the United Kingdom (in theory; in practice by the Prime Minister).
Churches
Anglicanism is most commonly identified with the established Church of England, but Anglican churches exist in most parts of the world. In some countries (e.g., the United States, Scotland) the Anglican church is known as Episcopal, from the Latin episcopus, "bishop", which comes from a Greek word literally meaning an "overseer." Some Anglican churches are not in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury but are considered Anglican because they retain practices of the Church of England and the Book of Common Prayer.
Each national church or province is headed by a Primate called a Primus in the Scottish Episcopal Church, an Archbishop in most countries, a Presiding Bishop in the Episcopal Church USA, and a Prime Bishop in the Philippine Episcopal Church. These churches are divided into a number of dioceses, usually corresponding to state or metropolitan divisions.
There are three orders of the ordained ministry: deacon, priest and bishop. No requirement is made for clerical celibacy and women may be ordained as deacons in almost all provinces, as priests in many, and as bishops in a few provinces. Religious orders of monks, brothers, sisters and nuns were suppressed in England during the Reformation but made a reappearance in Victorian times.
Those Anglican churches "in communion" with the See of Canterbury constitute the Anglican Communion, a formal organisation made up of churches at the national level. However, there are a small number of churches which call themselves Anglican that are known as the "continuing church" movement and do not acknowledge the Anglican Communion. They consider the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, as well as some other member churches of the Anglican Communion, to have departed from the historic faith by ordaining women, altering the theological emphases of the historic Book of Common Prayer, and loosening the Church's traditional regulations concerning sexual and marital matters.
Doctrine
Anglicans look for authority (in the formula of Richard Hooker) in Scripture, Tradition (the practices and writings of the historical church) and Reason. While some teach that these three are of equal value (using an image of a three-legged stool), the Anglican formularies have always pointed to the primacy of Holy Scripture. Historically, Anglicans regard the Bible, the three Creeds (Nicene Creed, Apostles' Creed, and Athanasian Creed), the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and the Book of Common Prayer (1662) as the principal norms of doctrine. Thus it can be said that the Anglican Church retains much of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, but it is doctrinally Reformed.
This distinction is routinely a matter of debate both intra-denominationally and within the Anglican Communion members themselves. Since the Oxford Movement of the mid-19th century, many churches of the Communion have embraced and extended liturgical and pastoral practices dissimilar with most Protestant theology. This extends beyond the ceremony of High Church services to even more theologically significant territory. Anglican clergy practice all seven of the sacraments in a marked departure from the teaching of early Protestant thinkers like Martin Luther. (Even though opinions vary about the best way to understand these "sacramental rites") For example, Anglican clergy often hear private confessions from their parishioners, a practice mostly discontinued in Protestant denominations.
For these reasons and many others, many Anglicans prefer to be understood as a reformed catholic church, not as another institution falling under the general umbrella of "Protestantism."
Churchmanship
Anglicanism has always been characterised by diversity in theology and liturgy. Different individuals, groups, parishes, dioceses, and national churches may identify more with Catholic traditions and theology or, alternatively, with the principles of the Reformation.
Some Anglicans follow such Roman Catholic devotional practices as solemn benediction of the reserved sacrament, use of the rosary, and the invocation of the saints. Some give greater weight to the deuterocanonical books of the Bible. (See Biblical canon.) Officially, Anglican teaching is that these books are to be read in church for their instruction in morals, but not used to establish any doctrine.
For their part, those Anglicans who emphasise the Protestant nature of the Church stress the Reformation themes of salvation by grace through faith, the two sacraments of the Gospel, and Scripture as containing all that is necessary to salvation.
The range of Anglican belief and practice became particularly divisive during the 19th century, as the Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical movements emphasised the more Catholic or the more Reformed sides of Anglican Christianity. These groups or "parties" are still often equated with the terms "High Church" and "Low Church", and these terms are commonly used to speak of the level of ceremony that is favoured. These terms are also used to discuss the theological place of the organised church within the Body of Christ.
The spectrum of Anglican beliefs and practice is too large to be fit into these labels. Most Anglicans are probably somewhere in the middle and, in fact, stress that Anglicanism, rightly understood, is Christianity's "Via Media" (middle way) between Catholicism and Protestantism. Via Media may also be understood as underscoring Anglicanism's preference for a communitarian and methodological approach to theological issues rather than either relativism on the one hand or dogmatic absolutism on the other.
The nineteenth century saw the height of intellectual activity in the Anglican Church. Since that time, the theological contributions of the Church to the wider spectrum of Christian thought have declined dramatically. A recent trend has been the emergence of fundamentalism in some strands of Anglicanism. Fundamentalism, seen as an anti-intellectual movement, rejects all but the most literal readings of the Bible. This controversial doctrine is regarded by most as highly divisive, rejecting all prior tradition and is seen by its critics as a reactionary measure by those who cannot cope with the relativisation of truth that has been a predominant feature of the post-modernist epoch. Traditionally, Anglicanism had been associated with the English university systems and hence, the literary criticism produced in those organisations has been applied to the study of ancient scriptures.
A question of whether or not Christianity is a pacifist religion has remained a matter of debate for Anglicans. In 1937, the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship emerged as a distinct reform organisation, seeking to make pacifism a clearly defined part of Anglican theology. The group rapidly gained popularity amongst Anglican intellectuals, including Vera Brittain, Evelyn Underhill and former British political leader George Lansbury.
Whilst never actively endorsed by the Anglican Church, many Anglicans unofficially have adopted the Augustinian "Just War" doctrine. The Anglican Pacifist Fellowship remain highly active and rejects this doctrine. The Fellowship seeks to reform the Church by reintroducing the pacifism inherent in the beliefs of many of the earliest Christians and present in their interpretation of Christ's Sermon on the Mount. Confusing the matter all the more however, is that the 37th Article of Religion states clearly that "it is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars."
Religious life
A small but hugely influential aspect of Anglicanism is its religious orders of monks and nuns. Shortly after the beginning of the revival of the Catholic Movement in the Church of England, there was felt to be a need for some Anglican Sisters of Charity. In the 1840s Mother Priscilla Lydia Sellon became the first woman to take the vows of religion in communion with the Province of Canterbury since the Reformation. From the 1840s and throughout the next hundred years, religious orders for both men and women proliferated in the UK, the United States, Canada, and India, as well as in various countries of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.
Anglican religious life at one time boasted hundreds of orders and communities, and thousands of religious. An important aspect of Anglican religious life is that most communities of both men and women lived their lives consecrated to God under the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience (or in Benedictine communities, Stability, Conversion of Life, and Obedience) by practicing a mixed life of reciting the full eight services of the Breviary in choir, along with a daily Eucharist, plus service to the poor. The mixed life, combing aspects of the contemplative orders and the active orders remains to this day a hallmark of Anglican religious life.
Since the 1960s there has been a sharp falling off in the numbers of religious in most parts of the Anglican Communion. Many once large and international communities have been reduced to a single convent or monastery comprised of elderly men or women. In the last few decades of the 20th century, novices have for most communities been few and far between. Some orders and communities have already become extinct.
There are however, still several thousand Anglican religious working today in approximately 200 communities around the world.
The most surprising growth has been in the Melanesian countries of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea. The Melanesian Brotherhood, founded at Tabalia, Guadalcanal, in 1925 by Ini Kopuria, is now the largest Anglican Community in the world with over 450 brothers in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and the United Kingdom. The Sisters of the Church, started by Mother Emily Ayckbown in England in 1870, has more sisters in the Solomons than all their other communities. The Community of the Sisters of Melanesia, started in 1980 by Sister Nesta Tiboe, is a growing community of women throughout the Solomon Islands. The Society of Saint Francis, founded as a union of various Franciscan orders in the 1920s, has experienced great growth in the Solomon Islands. Other communities of religious have been started by Anglicans in Papua New Guinea and in Vanuatu. Most Melanesian Anglican religious are in their early to mid 20s, making the average age 40 to 50 years younger than their brothers and sisters in other countries. This growth is especially surprising because celibacy was not regarded as a Melanesian virtue.
See also
- Marian exiles
- Continuing Anglican Movement
- Anglican Use
- Anglican prayer beads
- Anglican Church of Canada
- Anglican Church of Australia
- Sydney Anglicans
- Christianity
- Christian apologetics
- Methodism
- Presbyterianism
- Baptists
External links
- [http://www.theanglicanwiki.org/index.php/Main_Page AnglicanWiki] - An Anglican wiki
- [http://justus.anglican.org/resources/pc/ Anglican historical texts]
- [http://www.anglicancommunion.org Anglican Communion] - The official site of the Anglican Communion.
- [http://www.anglicansonline.org Anglicans Online] - An unofficial site of the Anglican Communion. One of the biggest resources of Anglicanism in the world.
- [http://www.anglican.ca/index.htm] - Anglican Church of Canada website]
- [http://www.cofe.anglican.org/faith/anglican/ What it means to be an Anglican: Official CofE site]
- [http://www.religionfacts.com/christianity/denominations/anglicanism.htm Anglicanism: ReligionFacts.com] - Articles on Anglican history, ritual, and organisation, plus an image gallery of people and places.
- [http://www.anglicanpeacemaker.org.uk/ Anglican Pacifist Fellowship] - The official site of the Anglican Church's peace movement.
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Category:Religion in the United Kingdom
Category:Christian denominations
ko:성공회
ja:聖公会
Reformation: The word Reformation links here. For other uses of the term, please see Reformation (disambiguation).
The Protestant Reformation was a movement which emerged in the 16th century as a series of attempts to reform the Roman Catholic Church in Western Europe. The main front of the reformation was started by Martin Luther and his 95 Theses. The reformation ended in division and the establishment of new institutions, most importantly Lutheranism, the Reformed churches, and Anabaptists, a radical branch which name means "those who baptize again". It also led to the Counter-Reformation within the Roman Catholic Church, which theological draft and background were drawn up with the Council of Trent (1548–1563), when Rome struck back against the fundamental ideas defended by the Reformers, like Luther.
History and origins
- Anti-hierarchical movements: Catharism, Waldensianism, and others
- Avignon Papacy ("Babylonian Captivity of the Church"), Avignon, Great Schism
- Jan Hus, John Wycliffe, William Tyndale
- Northern Renaissance
Unrest in the Western Church and Empire culminated in the Avignon Papacy (1308–1378), and the papal schism (1378–1416), excited wars between princes, uprisings among the peasants, and widespread concern over corruption in the monastic system. A new nationalism also challenged the relatively internationalist medieval world.
One of the most disruptive and radical of the new perspectives came first from John Wycliffe at Oxford University, then from Jan Hus at the University of Prague. The Roman Catholic Church officially concluded this debate at the Council of Constance (1414–1418). The conclave condemned Jan Hus, who was executed (he had come under a promise of safe-conduct) and posthumously burned Wycliffe as a heretic.
Constance confirmed and strengthened the traditional medieval conception of church and empire. It did not address the national tensions, or the theological tensions which had been stirred up during the previous century. The council could not prevent schism and the Hussite Wars in Bohemia.
Historical upheaval usually yields a lot of new thinking as to how society should be organized. This was the case leading up to the Protestant Reformation. Following the breakdown of monastic institutions and scholasticism in late medieval Europe, accentuated by the ‘Babylonian Captivity’ of the Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the failure of conciliar reform, the sixteenth century saw the fermenting of a great cultural debate about religious reforms and later fundamental religious values. Historians would generally assume that the failure to reform (too many vested interests, lack of coordination in the reforming coalition) would eventually lead to a greater upheaval or even revolution, since the system must eventually be adjusted or disintegrate, and the failure of the Conciliar movement led to the Protestant Reformation in the European West. These frustrated reformist movements ranged from nominalism, modern devotion, to humanism occurring in conjunction with economic, political and demographic forces that contributed to a growing disaffection with the wealth and power of the elite clergy, sensitizing the population to the financial and moral corruption of the secular Renaissance church.
The outcome of the Black Death encouraged a radical reorganization of the economy, and eventually of European society. In the emerging urban centers, however, the calamities of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century, and the resultant labor shortages, provided a strong impetus for economic diversification and technological innovations. Following the Black Death, the initial loss of life due to famine, plague, and pestilence contributed to an intensification of capital accumulation in the urban areas, and thus a stimulus to trade, industry, and burgeoning urban growth in fields as diverse as banking (the Fugger banking family in Augsburg and the Medici family of Florence being the most prominent); textiles, armaments, especially stimulated by the Hundred Years War, and mining of iron ore due, in large part, to the booming armaments industry. Accumulation of surplus, competitive overproduction, and heightened competition to maximize economic advantage, contributed to civil war, aggressive militarism, and thus to centralization. As a direct result of the move toward centralization, leaders like Louis XI of France (1461-1483), the “spider king,” sought to remove all constitutional restrictions on the exercise of their authority. In England, France, and Spain the move toward centralization begun in the thirteenth century was carried to a successful conclusion.
But as recovery and prosperity progressed, enabling the population to reach its former levels in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the combination of both a newly-abundant labor supply as well as improved productivity, were 'mixed blessings' for many segments of Western European society. Despite tradition, landlords started the move to exclude peasants from 'common lands'. With trade stimulated, landowners increasingly moved away from the manorial economy. Woolen manufacturing greatly expanded in France, Germany, and the Netherlands and new textile industries began to develop.
The 'humanism' of the Renaissance period stimulated unprecedented academic ferment, and a concern for academic freedom. Ongoing, earnest theoretical debates occurred in the universities about the nature of the church, and the source and extent of the authority of the papacy, of councils, and of princes.
16th century
- Martin Luther, Johann Tetzel, Philipp Melanchthon, Indulgences, 95 Theses, Nicolaus Von Amsdorf
- Exsurge Domine, Diet of Worms (1521), Peasants' War
- Huldrych Zwingli and Zürich
- John Calvin and Geneva
- John Knox and Scotland
- Radical Reformers — Müntzer, Anabaptists, Menno Simons
- Reformation in France — Huguenots, Pierre Viret
Protestants generally trace their separation from the Roman Catholic Church to the 16th century, which is sometimes called the magisterial Reformation because the movement received support from the magistrates, the ruling authorities (as opposed to the radical Reformation, which had no state sponsorship). The protest erupted suddenly, in many places at once but particularly in Germany, during a time of threatened Islamic invasion¹ which distracted German princes in particular. To some degree, the protest can be explained by the events of the previous two centuries in Western Europe.
The protest began in earnest when Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk and professor at the University of Wittenberg, called in 1517 for reopening of debate on the sale of indulgences. Tradition holds that he nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg Castle's Church, which served as a pin board for university-related announcements. Luther's dissent marked a sudden outbreak with new and irresistible force of discontent which had been pushed underground but not resolved; the quick spread of discontent occurred to a large degree because of the printing press and the resulting swift movement of both ideas and documents (such as the 95 Theses).
It is noteworthy that the Reformation foundations were engaged by an Augustianism trend that marked both the mindset of Luther and Calvin, and oriented them to set forth thesis and ideas that pinpointed deeply their thought, heavily linked with the theologic teaching of the Doctor of Church (Aurelius Augustus of Hyppo), the well-known African Bishop of Hyppo, during the IV century. The Augustianism of the Reformers struggled against the Pelagianism, an insistent heresy officially banished from the Church since St. Augustin's early days.
Parallel to events in Germany, a movement began in Switzerland under the leadership of Huldrych Zwingli. These two movements quickly agreed on most issues, as the recently introduced printing press spread ideas rapidly from place to place, but some unresolved differences kept them separate. Some followers of Zwingli believed that the Reformation was too conservative, and moved independently toward more radical positions, some of which survive among modern day Anabaptists. Other Protestant movements grew up along lines of mysticism or humanism (cf. Erasmus), sometimes breaking from Rome or from the Protestants, or forming outside of the churches.
After this first stage of the Reformation, following the excommunication of Luther and condemnation of the Reformation by the Pope, the work and writings of John Calvin were influential in establishing a loose consensus among various groups in Switzerland, Scotland, Hungary, Germany and elsewhere. The separation of the Church of England from Rome under Henry VIII, beginning in 1529 and completed in 1536, brought England alongside this broad Reformed movement. However, religious changes in the English national church proceeded more conservatively than elsewhere in Europe. Reformers in the Church of England alternated for centuries, between sympathies for catholic traditions and Protestantism, progressively forging a stable compromise between adherence to ancient tradition and Protestantism, which is now sometimes called the via media.
Humanism to Protestantism
The frustrated reformism of the humanists, ushered in by the Renaissance, contributed to a growing impatience among reformers. Erasmus and later figures like Luther and Zwingli would emerge from this debate and eventually contribute to the second major schism of Christendom. Unfortunately for the church, the crisis of theology beginning with William of Ockham in the fourteenth century was occurring in conjunction with the new burgher discontent. Since the breakdown of the philosophical foundations of scholasticism, the new nominalism did not bode well for an institutional church legitimized as an intermediary between man and God. New thinking favored the notion that no religious doctrine can be supported by philosophical arguments, eroding the old alliance between reason and faith of the medieval period laid out by Thomas Aquinas.
The major individualistic reform movements that revolted against medieval scholasticism and the institutions that underpinned it were: humanism, devotionalism, and the observatine tradition. In Germany, “the modern way” or devotionalism caught on in the universities, requiring a redefinition of God, who was no longer a rational governing principle but an arbitrary, unknowable will that cannot be limited. God was now an unknowable absolute ruler, and religion would be more fervent and emotional. Thus, the ensuing revival of Augustinian theology, stating that man cannot be saved by his own efforts but only by the grace of God, would erode the legitimacy of the rigid institutions of the church meant to provide a channel for man to do good works and get into heaven. Humanism, however, was more of an educational reform movement with origins in the Renaissance's revival of classical learning and thought. A revolt against Aristotelian logic, it placed great emphasis on reforming individuals through eloquence as opposed to reason. The European Renaissance laid the foundation for the Northern humanists in its reinforcement of the traditional use of Latin as the great unifying cultural language.
The polarization the scholarly community in Germany over the Reuchlin (1455-1522) affair, attacked by the elite clergy for his study of Hebrew and Jewish texts, brought Luther fully in line with the humanist educational reforms who favored academic freedom. At the same time, the impact of the Renaissance would soon backfire against Southern Europe, also ushering in an age of reform and a repudiation of much of medieval Latin tradition. Led by Erasmus, the humanists condemned various forms of corruption within the Church, forms of corruption that might not have been any more prevalent than during the medieval zenith of the church. Erasmus held that true religion was a matter of inward devotion rather than an outward symbol of ceremony and ritual. Going back to ancient texts, scriptures, from this viewpoint the greatest culmination of the ancient tradition, are the guides to life. Favoring moral reforms and de-emphasizing didactic ritual, Erasmus laid the groundwork for Luther.
Humanism's intellectual anticlericalism would profoundly influence Luther. The increasingly well-educated middle sectors of Northern Germany, namely the educated community and city dwellers would turn to Luther's rethinking of religion to conceptualize their discontent according to the cultural medium of the era. The great rise of the burghers, the desire to run their new businesses free of institutional barriers or outmoded cultural practices, contributed to the appeal of humanist individualism. To many, papal institutions were rigid, especially regarding their views on just price and usury. In the North burghers and monarchs were united in their frustration for not paying any taxes to the nation, but collecting taxes from subjects and sending the revenues disproportionately to the Pope in Italy.
These trends heightened demands for significant reform and revitalization along with anticlericalism. New thinkers began noticing the divide between the priests and the flock. The clergy, for instance, were not always well-educated. Parish priests often did not know Latin and rural parishes often did not have great opportunities for theological education for many at the time. Due to its large landholdings and institutional rigidity, a rigidity to which the excessively large ranks of the clergy contributed, many bishops studied law, not theology, being relegated to the role of property managers trained in administration. While priests emphasized works of religiosity, the respectability of the church began diminishing, especially among well educated urbanites, and especially considering the recent strings of political humiliation, such as the apprehension of Pope Boniface VIII by Philip IV of France, the “Babylonian Captivity,” the Great Schism, and the failure of Conciliar reformism. In a sense, the campaign by Pope Leo X to raise funds to rebuild the St. Peter's Basilica was too much of an excess by the secular Renaissance church, prompting the high-pressure sale of indulgences that rendered the clerical establishments even more disliked in the cities.
Luther, taking the revival of the Augustinian notion of salvation by faith alone to new levels, borrowed from the humanists the sense of individualism, that each man can be his own priest (an attitude likely to find popular support considering the rapid rise of an educated urban middle class in the North), and that the only true authority is the Bible, echoing the reformist zeal of the Conciliar movement and opening up the debate once again on limiting the authority of the Pope. While his ideas called for the sharp redefinition of the dividing lines between the laity and the clergy, his ideas were still, by this point, reformist in nature. Luther's contention that the human will was incapable of following good, however, resulted in his rift with Erasmus finally distinguishing Lutheran reformism from humanism.
Religious Influences for the Reformation
While there were some parallels between certain movements within humanism and teachings later common among the Reformers, the main influence was the Bible itself. The Roman Catholic Church had itself been the main purveyor in Europe of humanism for centuries: the neo-Platonism of the scholastics and the neo-Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas and his followers had made humanism part of church dogma. Thus, when Luther and the other reformers adopted the standard of sola scriptura, making the Bible the sole measure of theology, that made the Reformation a reaction against the humanism of that time. Previously, the Scriptures had been seen as the pinnacle of a hierarchy of sacred texts.
Luther himself had been trained as a professor of the Bible and was teaching Bible at the University of Wittenberg when the Bible changed him. He later lamented that he wished he had learned the Bible earlier instead of spending so much time studying classical humanistic authors such as Plato and Aristotle. It appears that he was not familiar with the writings of earlier people who called for reformation, for example, he did not know the teachings of Jan Hus until he was introduced to them by a taunt from Johann Eck that he was teaching the same doctrines.
The Protestants emphasized such concepts as Justification by "faith alone" (not faith and good works or infused righteousness), "Scripture alone" (the Bible as the sole rule of faith, rather than the Bible plus Tradition), "the priesthood of all believers" (eschewing the special authority and power of the Roman Catholic sacramental priesthood), that all people are individually responsible for their status before God such that talk of mediation through any but Christ alone is unbiblical. Because they saw these teachings as stemming from the Bible, they encouraged publication of the Bible in the common language and universal education, for how can people avail themselves of the knowledge of their salvation without the ability to read the Bible?
Part of the revolt was an iconoclasm, seen in John Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli, but particularly amongst the radical reformers. Iconoclastic riots took place in Zürich (in 1523), Copenhagen (1530), Münster (1534), Geneva (1535), Augsburg (1537) and Scotland (1559).
The Reformation did not happen in a vacuum, as there were movements for centuries calling for a return to Biblical teachings, the most famous being from Wyclif and Jan Hus. It is no surprise that their teachings were later found in the Reformation, as they imbibed from the same source.
While it is true that there were calls for religious and doctrinal and moral reformation within and without the institutional church for centuries, apparently it was the invention of the printing press which allowed quick broadcasting of ideas, the rise in nationalistic fervor and popular discontent at the moral corruption in the church to coalesce in support for a reformation as never before. But the spark that started the Reformation and keeps it going even today is the doctrinal issues brought up by the Bible.
The Radical Reformation
Unskilled laborers and peasants recently squeezed from the countryside embraced the most radical theological options opened up by the religious revolution. Peasants and new migrants to the cities had little understanding of economics, so they had no understanding of the increasingly discredited just price concept and the influence of capitalism and mercantilism. They believed that higher prices were the result of unjust, parasitic, and immoral behavior.
Discontented and morally righteous, the lower classes were ready to follow leaders, who urged them to band together against immorality and decadence. They preached against landowners who took control of increasing areas, kings centralizing control and princes looking for increased tax revenues to fund their growing states.
The disadvantaged peasantry turned to radical leaders, to people like the Drummer of Niklashausen and later the Anabaptist preachers. Many of the Anabaptist preachers belonged to the peasant and laboring class.
The Anabaptists and other radical leaders were condemned by the Lutherans and nationalistic Germans. Nearly every country in Europe saw a flare up of failed peasant revolts motivated by religious concerns and executed according to religious doctrine. The Hungarian Peasants' War(1514), the revolt against Charles V in Spain (1520), the discontent of the lower classes in France with the excessive taxes levied by Louis XI, and the secret associations which prepared the way for the great Peasants' War of the lower classes in Germany (1524), show that discontent was not confined to any one country in Europe.
Lutheranism adopted by the German Territorial Princes
Luther, like Erasmus, in the beginning favored maintaining the bishops as an elite class for administrative purposes, though he denied that their succession from the Apostles gave their consecration any special sacramental value. And while Luther rejected many of the Catholic sacraments, as well as salvation by grace alone through both faith and good works (as opposed to the Protestant "faith alone") and indulgences, he firmly upheld the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. Luther favored a reformed theology of the Eucharist called consubstantiation, a doctrine of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist which depended on the faith of the congregation. Traditionally, the consecrated bread and wine were held to become, substantially, the body and blood of Christ (transubstantiation). Transubstantiation was most fully spelled out by the medieval scholastics, who agreed that the elements, once consecrated, remained the body and blood of Christ and could be worshipped as such. According to the doctrine of consubstantiation, the substances of the body and the blood of Christ and of the bread and the wine were held to coexist together in the consecrated Host during the communion service. However, any consecrated bread or wine left over would revert to its former state the moment the service ended.
Luther, along with his colleague Philipp Melanchthon, emphasized this point in his plea for the Reformation at the Reichstag in 1529 amid charges of heresy. But the changes he proposed were of such a fundamental nature that by their own logic they would automatically overthrow the old order; neither the Emperor nor the Church could possibly accept them, as Luther well knew. As was only to be expected, the edict by the Diet of Worms (1521) prohibited all innovations. Meanwhile, in these efforts to retain the guise of a Catholic reformer as opposed to a heretical revolutionary, and to appeal to German princes with his religious condemnation of the peasant revolts backed up by the Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms, Luther's growing conservatism would provoke more radical reformers.
At a religious conference with the Zwinglians in 1529, Melanchthon joined with Luther in opposing a union with Zwingli. There would finally be a schism in the reform movement due to Luther's belief in consubstantiation. His original intention was not schism, but with the Reichstag of Augsburg (1530) a separate Lutheran church finally emerged. In a sense, Luther would take theology further in its deviation from established Catholic dogma, forcing a rift between the humanist Erasmus and Luther. Similarly, Zwingli would further repudiate ritualism, and break with the increasingly conservative Luther.
While it would be an understatement to state that Erasmus, Luther, Zwingli, and Melanchthon regarded the fundamental theological questions quite seriously, their followers tended to split along socio-economic lines. Luther found great support from the new bourgeoisie in Germany's urban centers to overthrow the power of the landowning aristocracy and the Latin clergy, rooted in their control of land and peasant labor, which were the central means of production of the time. And up-and-coming merchants, not yet part of the ruling elite, rallied to Luther's cause. Zwingli, however, appealed to poorer segments of society who lacked the stake in German proto-nationalism among the ambitious, consolidating princes and the new bourgeoisie.
Aside from the enclosing of the lower classes, the middle sectors of Northern Germany, namely the educated community and city dwellers, would turn to religion to conceptualize their discontent according to the cultural medium of the era. The great rise of the burghers, the desire to run their new businesses free of institutional barriers or outmoded cultural practices contributed to the appeal of individualism. To many, papal institutions were rigid, especially regarding their views on just price and usury. In the North, burghers and monarchs were united in their frustration for not paying any taxes to the nation, but collecting taxes from subjects and sending the revenues disproportionately to Italy. In Northern Europe Luther appealed to the growing national consciousness of the German states because he denounced the Pope for involvement in politics as well as religion. Moreover, he backed the nobility, which was now justified to crush the Great Peasant Revolt of 1525 and to confiscate church property by Luther's Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. This explains the attraction of some territorial princes to Lutheranism, especially its Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. However, the Elector of Brandenburg, Joachim I, blamed Lutheranism for the revolt and so did others. In Brandenburg, it was only under his successor Joachim II that Lutheranism was established, and the old religion was not formally extinct in Brandenburg until the death of the last Catholic bishop there, Georg von Blumenthal.
With the church subordinate to and the agent of civil authority and peasant rebellions condemned on strict religious terms, Lutheranism and German nationalist sentiment were ideally suited to coincide.
Though Charles V fought the reformation, it is no coincidence either that the reign of his nationalistic predecessor Maximilian I saw the beginning of the Reformation. While the centralized states of western Europe had reached accords with the Vatican permitting them to draw on the rich property of the church for government expenditures, enabling them to form state churches that were greatly autonomous of Rome, similar moves on behalf of the Reich were unsuccessful so long as princes and prince bishops fought reforms to drop the pretension of secular universal empire.
English Reformation
See articles at :Category:English Reformation
Political Reformation
The course of the Reformation was different in England. There had long been a strong strain of anti-clericalism, and England had already given rise to the Lollard movement, which had inspired the Hussites in Bohemia. By the 1520s, however, the Lollards were not an active force, or, at least, certainly not a mass movement. The different character of the English Reformation came rather from the fact that it was driven initially by the political necessities of Henry VIII. Henry had once been a sincere Catholic and had even authored a book strongly criticizing Luther, but he later found it expedient and profitable to break with the Papacy. In 1534 The Act of Supremacy put Henry at the head of the church in England (that is, not the Church of England). Between 1535 and 1540, under Thomas Cromwell, the policy known as the Dissolution of the Monasteries was put into effect. The veneration of Saints, pilgrimages and pilgrim shrines were also attacked. Huge amounts of church land and property passed into the hands of the crown and ultimately into those of the nobility and gentry. The vested interest thus created made for a powerful force in support of the dissolutions.
There were many notable opponents to the Henrician Reformation, such as Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, who were executed for their opposition. But there was also a growing party of Protestants who were imbued with the Zwinglian and Calvinistic doctrines now current on the Continent. When Henry was destruction of images, and the closing of the chantries. Following a brief Roman Catholic reaction during the reign of Mary 1553-1558, a loose consensus developed during the reign of Elizabeth I, though this point is one of considerable debate among historians. Yet it is the so-called Elizabethan Settlement to which the origins of Anglicanism are traditionally ascribed. The compromise was uneasy and was capable of veering between extreme Calvinism on the one hand and Arminianism on the other, but compared to the bloody and chaotic state of affairs in contemporary France, it was relatively successful until the Puritan Revolution or English Civil War in the seventeenth century.
The success of the Counter-Reformation on the Continent and the growth of a Puritan party dedicated to further Protestant reform polarised the Elizabethan Age, although it was not until the 1640s that England underwent religious strife comparable to that which her neighbours had suffered some generations before.
Early Puritan Movement
The early Puritan Movement (late 16th century-17th century) was Reformed or Calvinist and was a movement for reform in the Church of England. Its origins lay in the discontent with the Elizabethan Religious Settlement. The desire was for the Church of England to resemble more closely the Protestant churches of Europe, especially Geneva. The Puritans objected to ornaments and ritual in the churches as idolatrous (vestments, surplices, organs, genuflection), which they castigated as "popish pomp and rags." (See Vestments controversy.) They also objected to ecclesiastical courts. They refused to endorse completely all of the ritual directions and formulas of the Book of Common Prayer; the imposition of its liturgical order by legal force and inspection sharpened Puritanism into a definite opposition movement.
The later Puritan movement were often referred to as Dissenters and Nonconformists and eventually led to the formation of various reformed denominations.
Resources
Printed Resources
- Belloc, Hilaire (1928), How the Reformation Happened, Tan Books & Publishing. ISBN 0-89555-465-8 (a Roman Catholic Perspective)
- Braaten, Carl E. and Robert W. Jenson. The Catholicity of the Reformation. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996. ISBN 0-8028-4220-8
- Cameron, Euan. The European Reformation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. (A standard textbook).
- Estep, William R. Renaissance & Reformaton. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986. ISBN 0-8028-0050-5
- Gonzales, Justo. The Story of Christianity, Vol. 2: The Reformation to the Present Day. San Francisco: Harper, 1985. ISBN 0060633166
- Pelikan, Jaroslav. Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700). Chicago: U Chicago Press, 1984 (focuses on religious teachings)
- Kolb, Robert. Confessing the Faith: Reformers Define the Church, 1530-1580. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1991. ISBN 0-570-04556-8
- MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation: A History. New York: Penguin 2003.
- Spitz, Lewis W. The Protestant Reformation: Major Documents. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1997. ISBN 0-570-04993-8
- Spitz, Lewis W. The Renaissance and Reformation Movements: Volume I, The Renaissance. Revised Edition. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1987. ISBN 0-570-03818-9
- Spitz, Lewis W. The Renaissance and Reformation Movements: Volume II, The Reformation. Revised Edition. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1987. ISBN 0-570-03819-7
Online Resources
Historical Materials
- Timelines
- Timeline for Renaissance & Reformation
- Timeline of the Protestant Reformation in England
- History of Protestantism
- Middle Ages in history
- A list of Protestant reformers
Primary Materials
- [http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/web/ninetyfive.html Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses]
- The Book of Common Prayer
- The Book of Concord
External links
- [http://history.hanover.edu/early/prot.html Internet Archive of Related Texts and Documents]
- [http://www.lepg.org/religion.htm A summary of the Reformation]
- [http://www.newgenevacenter.org/west/reformation.htm An Overview of the Protestant Reformation]
Category:Protestantism
Category:History of Europe
ko:종교 개혁
ja:宗教改革
Victorian era) gave her name to the historic era]]
The Victorian era of Great Britain is considered the height of the British industrial revolution and the apex of the British Empire. It is often defined as the years from 1837 to 1901, when Queen Victoria reigned, though many historians believe that the passage of the Reform Act 1832 marks the true inception of a new cultural era. The Victorian era was preceded by the Regency era and came before the Edwardian period.
Politics
The period is ostensibly characterized as a long period of peace and economic, colonial, and industrial consolidation, temporarily disrupted by the Crimean War, although Britain was at war every year during this period. Towards the end of the century, the policies of New Imperialism led to increasing colonial conflicts and eventually the Boer War. Domestically, the agenda was increasingly liberal with a number of shifts in the direction of gradual political reform and the widening of the franchise.
In the early part of the era the House of Commons was dominated by the two parties, the Whigs and the Tories. From the late 1850s onwards the Whigs became the Liberals. Many prominent statesmen led one or other of the parties, including Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel, Lord Derby, Lord Palmerston, William Ewart Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury. The unsolved problems relating to Ireland played a great part in politics in the later Victorian era, particularly in view of Gladstone's determination to achieve a political settlement.
In January 1858, the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, responded to the Orsini plot against French emperor Napoleon III, the bombs for which were purchased in Birmingham, by attempting to make such acts a felony, but the resulting uproar forced him to resign.
In July 1866, an angry crowd in London, protesting Russell's resignation as prime minister, was barred from Hyde Park by the police; it tore down iron railings and trampled the flower beds. Disturbances like this convinced Derby and Disraeli of the need for further parliamentary reform.
During 1875 Britain purchased Egypt's shares in the Suez Canal as the African nation was forced to raise money to pay off its debts.
In 1882 Egypt became a protectorate of Great Britain after British troops occupied land surrounding the Suez Canal in order to secure the vital trade route, and the passage to India.
In 1884 the Fabian Society was founded in London by a group of middle-class intellectuals, including Quaker Edward Pease, 17, Havelock Ellis, 25, and Edith Nesbit, 26, to promote socialism. George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells would be among many famous names to later join this society.
On Sunday, November 13, 1887, tens of thousands of people, many of them socialists or unemployed, gathered in Trafalgar Square to demonstrate against the government. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren ordered armed soldiers and 2,000 police constables to respond. Rioting broke out, hundreds were injured and two people died. This event was referred to as Bloody Sunday.
Events
In 1851 the Great Exhibition (the first World's Fair) was held in The Crystal Palace, with great success and international attention.
In 1888, the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper murdered and mutilated prostitutes on the streets of London, leading to world-wide press coverage and hysteria. Newspapers used the deaths to bring greater focus on the plight of the unemployed and to attack police and political leaders. The killer was never caught, and the affair contributed to Sir Charles Warren's resignation.
Science, technology and engineering
prostitutes]]
The impetus of the industrial revolution had already occurred, but it was during this period that the full effects of industrialisation made themselves felt, leading to the mass society of the 20th century. The revolution led to the rise of railways across the country and massive leaps forward in engineering, most famously by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
During the Victorian era, science grew into the discipline it is today. In addition to the increasing professionalism of university science, many Victorian gentlemen devoted their time to the study of natural history.
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 and had a tremendous effect on the popular mindset.
In January 1863, Prime Minister Gladstone opened the first section of the London Underground.
In 1882, incandescent electric lights were introduced to London streets, although it took many long years before they were installed everywhere.
The fallen woman
In the writings of Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth and others, prostitution began to be seen as a social problem, rather than just a fact of urban life. It also began to be seen as a feminist issue in the work of Josephine Butler, who attacked the long-established double standard of sexual morality. Prostitutes were often presented as victims in sentimental literature such Thomas Hood's poem "The Bridge of Sighs" and Dickens' novel Oliver Twist. The emphasis on the purity of women found in such works as John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilllies led to the portrayal of the prostititute as soiled and corrupted, who needed to be cleansed.
This emphasis on purity was allied to the stress on the homemaking role of women, who helped to create a space free from the pollution and corruption of the city. In this respect the prostitute came to have symbolic significance as the embodiment of the violation of that divide. The double standard remained in force. Divorce legislation introduced in 1857 allowed for a man to divorce his wife for adultery, but a woman could only divorce if adultery was accompanied by cruelty. The anonymity of the city led to a large increase in prostitution and unsanctioned sexual relationships. Dickens and other writers associated prostitution with the mechanisation and industrialisation of modern life, portraying prostitutes as human commodities consumed and thrown away like refuse when they were used up. Moral reform movements attempted to close down brothels, something that has sometimes been argued to have been a factor in the concentration of street-prostitution in Whitechapel by the late 1880s.
See also
- Victorian architecture
- Victorian fashion
- Victorian morality
- Victorian literature
- History of British society
- Women in the Victorian era
Sources and further reading
- Altick, Richard Daniel. Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature. W.W. Norton & Company: 1974. ISBN 039309376X.
- Burton, Antoinette (editor). Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain: A Reader. Palgrave Macmillan: 2001. ISBN 0312293356.
- Flanders, Judith. Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. W.W. Norton & Company: 2004. ISBN 0393052095.
- Mitchell, Sally. Daily Life in Victorian England. Greenwood Press: 1996. ISBN 0313294674.
- Wilson, A. N. The Victorians. Arrow Books: 2002. ISBN 0099451867
External links and references
- [http://www.victorianweb.org/ The Victorian Web]
- [http://www.victorianlondon.org/ The Victorian Dictionary]
- [http://www.victorian-music.com Victorian Music 1835-1903]
Category:Victorian era
ja:ヴィクトリア朝
Oxford Movement:For the 20th-century "Oxford Movement" or "Oxford Group" see Moral Re-Armament.
The Oxford Movement was a loose affiliation of High Church Anglicans, most of them members of the University of Oxford, who sought to demonstrate that the Church of England was a direct descendant of the Christian church established by the Apostles. It was also known as the Tractarian Movement after its series of publications, Tracts for the Times (1833–1841); the Tractarians were also called Puseyites (usually disparagingly) after one of their leaders, Edward Bouverie Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Christ Church, Oxford. Another important leader was John Henry Newman, a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, who had been strongly influenced by a sermon by John Keble in 1833 criticizing the increasing secularisation of the Church of England. Other prominent Tractarians were Thomas Keble, Archdeacon Henry Edward Manning, Richard Hurrell Froude, Robert Wilberforce, and Sir William Palmer.
In the ninetieth and final Tract, Newman argued that the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, as defined by the Council of Trent, were compatible with the Thirty-Nine Articles of the sixteenth-century Church of England. The Movement ended when Newman, driven further than he had expected by his own arguments, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845, to be followed by Manning in 1851. Anglo-Catholicism, which owes its revival to the Oxford Movement, has had a massive influence on global Anglicanism which continues to this day.
External links
- [http://justus.anglican.org/resources/pc/tracts/ Tracts for the Times]
Category:History of Oxfordshire
Category:University of Oxford
Category:Anglicanism
Category:Catholics not in communion with Rome
Category:Religion in the United Kingdom
Incense
Incense is a preparation of aromatic plant matter, often with the addition of essential oils extracted from plant or animal sources, intended to release fragrant smoke for religious, therapeutic, or aesthetic purposes as it smolders. In the past Chinese and Japanese society used incense as a time keeping device in the form of incense clocks.
Forms and use of incense
Incense is available in numerous forms and degree of processing. However incense can generally be separated into direct burning and indirect burning depending on how they are used.
In general, large and coarse incense tends to burn longer than finer incense; as well, direct burning incense requires less preparation prior to its use. Beyond these facts, preference in the form of incense used depends largely on culture, tradition, or personal tastes. Stick incense is the most common and preferred form of incense used in Chinese and Japanese culture, as such, most of the incense produce by these culture are in stick form.
Direct burning
incense clock
Also called combustible incense. When lit by a flame and then fanned out, the glowing ember on the incense will continue to smolder and burn away the rest of the incense without the continued input of heat. This class of incense is typcically made of finely ground fragrant incense materials that has been bound together by a combustible binder.
- Coil: Shaped into a coil, the incense is able to burn for an extended period; from hours to days.
- Cone: Incense of this form burns relatively fast.
- Cored stick: This form of stick incense has a supporting center core of bamboo. Higher quality varieties of this incense form have fragrant sandalwood cores. The core is coated by a thick layer of incense material that burns away with the core. This type of incense is commonly produced by the Indians and the Chinese.
- Solid stick: This stick incense has no supporting core and is completely made of incense material. Easily broken into pieces, it allows one to determine the specific amount of incense they wish to burn. This is the most commonly produced form of incense in Japan.
To use direct buring incense, one sets the incense on fire and then extinguishes the flame so that the incense continues to glow and smoke.
Indirect Burning
Also called non-combustible incense. The use of this class of incense requires a separate heat source since it does not produce an ember that burns itself. The heat is traditionally provided by charcoal and hot ash, though electrical censers are now available.
The incense is burned by placing them on top of the hot coals or the hot metal plate in the censer or thurible. This is the most common form of incense traditionally used in the middle east and the western world, though similar forms of incense are used by the Japanese in kodo (香道).
- Whole: The incense material is burned directly in its raw unprocessed form on top of coal embers.
- Powdered or granulated: The incense material is broken down into finer bits. This incense burns quickly and provides a short period of intense smells.
- Paste: The powdered or granulated incense material, is mixed together with a sticky and incombustible binder such as dried fruit, honey, or a soft resin and then formed to balls or small cakes. This is seen in many incense using cultures. Many Arabian incense, also called Bakhoor, are of this type.
Manufacturing
Incense manufacturing applies mainly to direct burning incense since it must be carefully blended and manufactured such that it has ability to slowly and evenly burn itself in entirety.
While indirect burning incense contians mainly fragrant materials, recipes and mixes for all direct burning incense consist of two things: fragrant materials and a combustible base.
Fragrant Materials
The fragrant materials provides the aroma and the fragrant smoke when the incense is burned. Many types of fragrant woods, resins, herbs,and essential oils are used as incense or to make incense. These fragrant materials are also commonly used in perfume formulations.
Plant materials
The following frangrance materials are often burned whole (copal, frankencense, etc.) or pulverized (cedar, sandalwood, etc.) before burning or further processing. These are commonly used in religious ceremonies since many of them are considered quite valuable. Essential oils of these materials may be used to make incense, but the resulting incense are usually considered inferior in quality.
- Agarwood
- Gum benzoin
- Clove
- Camphor
- Cedar
- Copal
- Cypress
- Frankincense
- Juniper
- Labdanum or ladanum
- Myrrh
- Nutmeg
- Patchouli
- Sage
- Sandalwood
- Star Anise
- Storax
Essential Oil Fragrances
The following frangrances are usually mixed into a carrier, such as wood powder or other solid fragrance material, before being formed into incense. Incense made primarily from essential oils are mainly used for pleasure and burned for their fragrances alone. Essential oil based incense is usually cheaper then original material incense.
- Cannabis
- Ferula or galbanum
- Jasmine
- Lotus
- Rose
- Ylang-ylang
Animal-based Materials
- Ambergris
- Musk
- Mollusc operculum
Combustible incense base
The combustible base not only binds the fragrant material together but also allows the produced incense to burn with a self-sustained ember, which propagates slowly and evenly through an entire piece of incense. The base also should not burn with a perceivable smell. Commercially, two types of incense base exists:
- Gum and oxidizer mixtures: Charcoal or wood powder forms the base of the mixture. Gums such as Gum Arabic or Gum Tragacanth are used to bind the mixture together while an oxidizer such as Sodium nitrate or Potassium nitrate sustains the burning of the incense. Fragrant materials are combined into the base as a powder prior to incense forming or after forming as essential oils. The formula for the charcoal based incense base is quite similar to black powder.
- Natural plant-based binders: Mucilaginous plant material such as Makko powder, which is made from the bark of the tabu-no-ki tree (Machilus thunbergii)(jap. 椨の木; たぶのき), is mixed with the fragrant materials and water. The mucilage from the wet binding powder hold the frangrant material together while the cellulose in the powder combusts to form a stable ember when the mixture dries. The dry binding powder usually consists of about 10% dry weight in the finished incense. Many other plants are suitable for use as this type of binder.
Mixture Properties
In order to burn evenly and properly, attention has to be paid to certain properties of the incense mixture:
- Oil content: Resinous materials such as Myrrh and Frankincense must not exceed the amount of dry materials in the mixture or else the incense will not smolder and burn. The higher the oil content, the more the dry materials needed in the mixture.
- Oxidizer quantity: The amount of "chemical" oxidizer in gum binded incense must be well proportioned. Too little, and the incense will not ignite, too much, and the incense will burn too quickly and not produce fragrant smoke.
- Mixture density: Incense mixture made with natural binders should not combined with too much water in mixing, or over compressed while being formed. This either results in uneven air distributions or undesirable densities in the mixture, which causes the incense to burns unevenly, too slowly or too quickly.
Forming Incense
After the fragrance mixture is determined, the materials must be combined with the incense based and formed into desired shapes. Incense is either extruded, pressed into forms, or coated onto a supporting material.
- Extruded and pressed: Small quantities of water is combined with the frangrace and incense base mixture and kneaded into a hard dough. The incense dough is then pressed into shaped forms to create cone and smaller coiled incense, or forced through a hydraulic press for solid stick incense. The formed incense is then trimmed and slowly dried. Incense produced in these fashions has a tendency to warp or mishapen when improperly dried and as such, must be placed in climate controlled rooms and rotated several times through the drying process.
- Coated: This method used mainly to produce cored incense of either larger coil (up to 1 meter in diameter) or cored stick forms. The supporting material, made of either of thin bamboo or wood is soaked in water or a thin water/glue mixture for a short time. The sticks are evenly separated then dipped into a tray of damp incense powder, consisting of frangrance materials and a plant based binder, usually makko. 3 to 4 layers of damp powder are coated onto the sticks, forming a 2 mm thick layer of incense material on the stick. The coated incense is then allowed to dry in open air. Additional coatings of incense mixture can be applyed after each period of successive drying. Incense that are burned in temples of Chinese traditional religion produced in this fashion can have a thickness between 1 to 2 cm.
Incense base can also be formed into incense shapes without any fragrance material. These are purchased by hobbists who immerse the preformed incense base in their own blends of essential oil mixtures to create specialized incense.
Religious and Ethnic use of Incense
Biblical Use
A compound of aromatic gums and balsams that will burn slowly, giving off a fragrant aroma. The Hebrew words qeto'reth and qetoh·rah' are from the root qa·tar', meaning "make sacrificial smoke." The equivalent in the Christian Greek Scriptures is thy·mi'a·ma.
The sacred incense prescribed for use in the wilderness tabernacle was made of costly materials that the congregation contributed. (Ex 25:1, 2, 6; 35:4, 5, 8, 27-29) In giving the divine formula for this fourfold mixture, God said to Moses: "Take to yourself perfumes: stacte drops and onycha and perfumed galbanum and pure frankincense. There should be the same portion of each. And you must make it into an incense, a spice mixture, the work of an ointment maker, salted, pure, something holy. And you must pound some of it into fine powder and put some of it before the Testimony in the tent of meeting, where I shall present myself to you. It should be most holy to you people." Then, to impress upon them the exclusiveness and holiness of the incense, God added: "Whoever makes any like it to enjoy its smell must be cut off from his people."-Ex 30:34-38; 37:29.
At the end of the Holy compartment of the tabernacle, next to the curtain dividing it off from the Most Holy, was located "the altar of incense." (Ex 30:1; 37:25; 40:5, 26, 27) There was also a similar incense altar in Solomon's temple. (1Ch 28:18; 2Ch 2:4) Upon these altars, every morning and evening the sacred incense was burned. (Ex 30:7, 8; 2Ch 13:11) Once a year on the Day of Atonement coals from the altar were taken in a censer, or fire holder, together with two handfuls of incense, into the Most Holy, where the incense was made to smoke before the mercy seat of the ark of the testimony.-Le 16:12, 13.
Roman Catholic Church
frankincense
The Roman Catholic church employs incense. At any Mass, a Priest may choose to use incense. Eastern Rite Catholic Churches, Traditional Catholic Churches and the Eastern Orthodox use incense more often at Mass. This incense is usually blessed before it is burned.
A thurible is used to contain incense as it is burned. The censer is swung at the object to be incensed; the swing is generally either single or double, depending on the reverence for the object being incensed; for particularly important objects (such as the Blessed Sacrament during its elevation) multiple swings may be performed.
Aside from being burnt, grains of blessed incense are placed in the Easter candle and in the sepulchre of consecrated altars. Many formulations of incense are currently used, often with frankincense, myrrh, styrax, copal or other aromatics.
The smoke of burning incense are viewed by many of the Roman Catholic faith as a sign of a good Christian's prayer. [http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07716a.htm]
Buddhism, Shinto and Japan
Christian
In the year 538 c.e. Buddhism was first introduced into Japan. Along with it across the ocean came statues of Buddha, ancient Sutras, as well as incense. From that moment on, incense has been an inseparable part of Japanese history. Incense holds an invaluable role in Buddhist ceremonies and rites as well as in those of the Shinto shrines. It is reputed to be a method of purifying the surroundings, bringing forth the Buddhist Alamkaraka (Realm of Adornment). Use of incense is spread through the country by touting its purifying and medicinal properties.
During the Asuka, Nara, and Heian eras of Japan, the frequency of foreign exchange missions traveling between T'ang China and Japan became increasingly frequent. Bringing with them Buddhism, Medicine, Art, and of course, Incense. Among the most prominent of them was the Chinese Buddhist Master Ganjin who established Toshodai-ji Temple in Nara during the year 759.
Incense has developed a deeply profound link bound closely to everyday Japanese life, and is comparable to the great popularity it held in ancient Chang-an (China), where the secular uses of incense came into great favor with the royal class. The mixing of various ingredients together and then kneading them together with plum meat or honey came to be widely used in rooms, placed in the sleeves of a garment, and even used to imbue clothes with. The development of such a love for incense in Japan is vividly detailed in the Tale of Genji.
From these simple beginnings it underwent a transformation into a mutual competition between each other's mixtures, referred to as "Takimono-awase" (Fragrance Mixing). Before long, it developed into the burning of natural raw incense ingredients, which was called "Ko-awase" (Incense Mixing). These elegant games later became the source of the Kodo ceremony (Way of Incense).
During the Feudal period (Sengoku jidai, 1490 - 1573) of Japan there arose a necessity for a simple as well as practical form of incense. Chinese of the Ming Dynasty transmitted the techniques of creating incense sticks. It was simple form of powdered incense rolled into a stick that was easy to carry and more affordable for the common people. This was the epoch of incense popularity. It flourished in acceptance with all classes, rich and poor. In the center of this limelight, was the city of Sakai. This popularity was mainly due to establishment of Sakai as a major port for foreign trade from China, Spain, and Portugal.
Baieido dates back to the Muromachi period (1338-1573) in Japanese history. During this period, the founder of Baieido, Kakuuemon Yamatoya, became a wholesaler of medicinal herbs in Sakai city. Sakai was a well-known trading port in ancient Japan in which incense trading was in high demand. In 1657, the founder named himself "Jinkoya Sakubei" and specialized in selling incense ingredients and incense sticks. "Jinkoya" (Aloes wood trader) was a name peculiar to Sakai, only medicinal wholesalers who specialized in incense were authorized to use this name. In the time-honored traditions of Jinkoya Sakubei, Baieido has dedicated itself to making incense for over 300 years. The method and recipes have been handed down from generation to generation in an unbroken secret oral tradition.
Ganjin.]]
Criticism of incense
Health risk
Some studies have shown that people who burn incense often, (exposed to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs) may be at increased risk for lung and bladder cancer as well as occupational skin and scrotal cancers. The risk of cancer from burning incense will depend on the levels of PAHs given off from the smoke and the length of time of exposure. However, the increased risk is usually associated with the chemical base or dipping of some incense sticks, and there are increasing numbers of chemical-free varieties available.
Strong smell
Some claim the use of incense aggravates allergies, causing many churches to stop using it. Others do not like scents near meals, and still others associate the smell with the drug subculture.
Flammability
Some insurance carriers and risk managers for churches have complained that since incense burns, there are insurance issues.
External links
- [http://www.fisheaters.com/incense.html The Traditional Catholic Use of Incense]
- [http://www.healthcentral.com/drdean/408/56902.html Health Central.com - Incense and cancer]
- [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1467409.stm BBC News | Health | Incense link to cancer]
- [http://www.baieido.co.jp/english/page2.html The History of Baieido]
- [http://www.japanese-incense.com Japanese incense and Kodo]
See also
- Incense Road
- Silk road
- Nag Champa
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Category:Religious behaviour and experience
ja:線香
Candle
A candle is a light source usually consisting of an internal wick which rises through the center of a column of solid fuel. Typically the fuel is some form of wax - paraffin wax being the most common. However in recent years new soy and vegetable candles have become popular.
Prior to the candle being ignited, the wick is saturated with the fuel in its solid form. The heat of the match or other flame being used to light the candle first melts and then vaporizes a small amount of the fuel. Once vaporized, the fuel combines with oxygen in the atmosphere to form a flame. This flame then provides sufficient heat to keep the candle burning via a self-sustaining chain of events: the heat of the flame melts the top of the mass of solid fuel, the liquified fuel then moves upward through the wick via capillary action, and the liquified fuel is then vaporized to burn within the candle's flame.
The burning of the fuel takes place in several distinct regions (as evidenced by the various colors that can be seen within the candle's flame). Within the bluer, hotter regions, hydrogen is being separated from the fuel and burned to form water vapor. The brighter, yellower part of the flame is the remaining carbon soot being oxidized to form carbon dioxide.
As the mass of the solid fuel is melted and consumed, the candle grows shorter. Portions of the wick that are not evaporating the liquid fuel are themselves consumed in the flame, limiting the exposed length of the wick.
Usage
carbon dioxide
Prior to the domestication of electricity, candles were a common source of lighting, before, and later in addition to, the oil lamp. Due to local availability and the cost of resources, for several centuries up to the 19th century candles were more common in northern Europe, and olive oil lamps more common in southern Europe and around the Mediterranean Sea. Makers of candles were known as chandlers.
Today, candles are usually used for their aesthetic value, particularly to set a soft, warm, or romantic ambience, and for emergency lighting during electrical power failures. Scented candles are common in aromatherapy. Small candles are often placed on birthday cakes.
Religion
Candles are used in religious ceremonies.
Buddhism
See Ubon Ratchathani Candle Festival
Christianity
In Christianity, they typically represent the light of God, or specificially the light of Christ, and are often placed on the altar. Votive candles may be lit as an accompaniment to prayer. Candles are lit by worshippers in front of icons in | | |