Posted on 10/08/2013 5:24:17 PM PDT by marshmallow
A new exhibition at Tate Britain highlights the scale of destruction to artworks in the Tudor period a staggering amount of books and music were also destroyed
The slashed and broken medieval images displayed in the new Art Under Attack exhibition at the Tate are a reminder of what we lost in the hundred and fifty years after the Reformation. Even now there is denial about the scale of the erasing of our medieval past. The Tate estimates we lost 90% of our religious art. It was probably even more than that. The destruction was on a scale that far outstrips the modern efforts of Islamist extremists. And it was not only art we lost, but also books and music.
We think of Henry VIII and the destruction of the monasteries, but that was not the end of the destruction, it marked the beginning. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, hailed the reign of his son, the boy king Edward VI, as that of a new Josiah, destroyer of idols. After his coronation an orgy of iconoclasm was launched. In churches rood screens, tombs with their prayers for the dead, and stain glass windows, were smashed. The Elizabethan antiquarian John Stow complained, some of this Christian Taliban judged every image to be an idol, so that not only religious art, but even the secular thirteenth century carvings of kings in Ludgate were broken.
Books too were burned on a vast scale. Earlier this year Melvyn Bragg was on TV telling us about William Tyndale during the reign of Henry VIII, and the forces of Catholic conservatism blocking publication of his English bible with its attached Lutheran commentaries. But conservatives were not alone in wishing to suppress books that contained ideas they did not agree with. When the monasteries were suppressed.....
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicherald.co.uk ...
Ah, yes, we are such a good and moral society.
Certainly there are benefits besides being obedient to the king of the vatican.
They say the difference between Heaven and Hell is personnel Management.
Heaven has German mechanics, French chefs, British police, Swiss bankers, Italian lovers.
Hell has French mechanics, British chefs, German police, Swiss lovers and Italian bankers.
I learned it as the
European dream:
Germans in charge of organization
English in charge of etiquette
French in charge of food
Italians in charge of fun
and the European nightmare:
Italians in charge of organization
French in charge of etiquette
English in charge of food
Germans in charge of fun
I am sure all the Catholics will be happy that St Louis took their division today.
Where are the Swiss?
European Dream: Swiss in charge of Riflery.
European Nightmare: (I don’t know a darned thing that the Swiss wouldn’t do well).
. . . not my king. He’s just a man. But, the current occupant of the office seems to be inspiring a lot of people. As for the loss/benefit equation, well, you might want to look around. The prevailing liberalism of our times, their secularism, even nihilism and various forms of modern atheism . . . all have roots in the Reformation. The medieval Church needed to evolve, to be sure, away from the feudal construct of the Middle Ages, and to reform itself from within, but the intellectual cosmos of medieval life and thought was a wonderfully organic and spiritually profound construct (SEE C.S. Lewis), one which the Renaissance squandered and the Reformation lost. And it is our loss.
Is there no Spain?
-— I never was much of an art lover. ——
Hopefully because modern art is garbage.
But God is Truth. And Truth is convertible with Goodness and Beauty.
To reject beauty is to reject truth.
It was a polemical term aimed, really, at the Old Regime by its enemies, not at all the result of serious historical study, which was used in the process of discarding the very notion of Christian monarchy, in favor of something like Bourgeois republicanism.
My dictionary gives its date as 1830-1840.
After the old regime went out, after the French Revolution, After the Empire, and during the bourbon restoration. Of course the English would have been less affected by French politics.
I rather like bourgeois republican government, certainly compared to pretended Christian Monarcy. That latter would include Henry 8th which all Catholics know was pure evil.
Rather, Truth is G-d.
Some people are easy to inspire. I wish them well.
Yes, the internet has its roots in the Reformation.
Publishing the Bible was at that time a subversive act. After all, wouldn’t the priests tell people what they needed to know?
What happened in France from 1789-1815 was not politics” but a sea change more akin to what happened in The Roman world is the last century before Christ. Long before the Revolution, the aristocracy has lost faith in its own standards and was casting about for new ones. We forget that Louis XVI was a reforming monarch, not unlike the Bourbons in Spain or Joseph in Austria. If he was confused and not very bright, he was a good man , pulled this way and that by the members of his court, who were from a nobilty that has not outlet for its frustrations. If Louis had not the opportunity to call an Estate-general at the start of his reign, how different things might have been. But of course, everyone was a believer in absolute monarchy. Yet paradoxically, England was much admired. Howe different the history of France would have been if the American rebellion had collapsed at the end of 1776, as it almost did, or if in the fall of 1777, Howe had moved enough troops up to help Burgoynes advance from Canada instead of moving to occupy Philadelphia.
The feudal construct—I would say constitution— of the Middle Ages prevented the emergence of an autocracy as in Russia, and before that, in Byzantium, and before that in the late Christian Empire.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of the Middle Ages, even of feudalism. I just think that the Church got a little too embroiled in it.
Oh c’mon. He inspires millions. Why criticize them?
Sermons, actually, were in English, or in the vernacular on the Continent. But, I’ll let you take your Biblical cues from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Quakers, Anabaptists, Mormons, Unitarians, your own flawless interpretation, or from whatever holy rollers you choose. Your choices are myriad.
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