all about reformation
Counter-Reformation, movement within the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th and 17th centuries that sought to revitalize the Church and to oppose Protestantism. Some historians object to the term as implying only the negative elements in the movement, and they prefer designations such as Catholic Reformation or Catholic Restoration. They stress the high spirituality that animated many leaders of the movement, which often had no direct relation to the Protestant Reformation.Cries for reform of the Church characterized the 15th century, as Christians reacted to the scandal of the Great Schism and became more sensitive to religious abuses. The Italian religious reformer Girolamo Savonarola scathingly criticized the worldliness of his contemporary, Pope Alexander VI. The so-called observantist movement within the mendicant orders tried to recall members to a more austere life, and humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus attempted to create alternatives to the sterile speculations of academic theology. Sincere as these efforts were, they long remained uncoordinated and failed to have a perceptible impact on the institution as a whole.
The spirituality of the Counter-Reformation was activist, directed towards the evangelization of the newly explored territories in the Far East and in North and South America. Vast tax-free Church possessions, constituting, according to varying estimates, as much as one-fifth to one-third of the lands of Europe, incited the envy and resentment of the land-poor peasantry. Science as an undiluted good, popular education, democracy, progress-all these ideals of the Enlightenment have retained their appeal in the 20th century. In Rome, St Philip Neri had religious texts set to music and performed in informal gatherings, a practice that soon developed into the oratorio. With heavy foreign subvention and intervention on both sides, the tensions erupted in the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, which raged from 1618 to 1648 and left Germany devastated, its religious energies exhausted. II EARLY INFLUENCES The precursors of the Enlightenment can be traced to the 17th century and earlier. Only when Paul III became pope in 1534 did the Church receive the leadership it needed to orchestrate these impulses towards reform and to meet the challenge of the Protestants. He soon turned against the peasants, however, and, in a pamphlet entitled Wider die mordischen und raubischen Rotten der Bauern, (Against the Murdering, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, 1525), violently condemned them for resorting to violence. Human aspirations, they believed, should not be centred on the next life, but rather on improving this life. Although his writings were prohibited by imperial edict, they were openly sold and were powerful instruments in turning the great! German cities into centres of Lutheranism. The Enlightenment affected every sphere of culture, not simply philosophy: the Mozart opera The Magic Flute (1791), a tribute to freemasonry and to German unity, is imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment, as is the Beethoven work Fidelio (1814). Many proponents of the Enlightenment were not philosophers in the strict sense; they were popularizers engaged in a self-conscious effort to win converts. 1961), as well as his monumental study of political institutions, The Spirit of Laws (1748; trans. Because they were journalists and propagandists as much as true philosophers, historians often refer to them by the French word philosophes.
Common topics in this essay:
French Revolution,
II Austria,
Immanuel Kant,
Catholic Church-as,
Alexander Pope,
Sigmund Freud,
Peasants' War,
Roman Catholicism,
Social Contract,
Denis Diderot,
roman catholic,
western europe,
french revolution,
holy roman,
religious reformer,
holy roman emperor,
american colonies,
human mind,
reformer john,
enlightenment ideals,
20th century,
marquis de condorcet,
peace augsburg 1555,
europe american colonies,
roman catholic church,
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