Babette’s Feast: Protestant Pietism, the Conflict of Spirit and Flesh, and Reconciliatory Grace in the Danish Babette’s Feast

In curbing the authority of the ecclesiastical Magisterium the Reformation movement brought the authority of the Holy Scripture to the forefront as the normative foundation of Christian theology. One of its basic axioms is the sola scriptum principle, meaning that all one needs to know in order to live in a salvific relation to God can be acquired scripture alone. This constitutes the formal, epistemological principle of Protestant theology up to today, and complements the material principles solus Christus, sola gratia, and sola fide. Whereas these material principles refer to the manifestation of salvation in Christ (alone), to the eternal ground of salvation through the grace of God (alone), and to the gift of salvation by faith (alone), the formal principle oi sola scriptura calls upon the Christian to realize that these three principles of material truth are made known to us (only) by the formal principle by Holy The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture. 1 On the one hand, the Reformers taught that Holy Scripture not only offers testimony to the Word of God but also is itself of divine origin since the authors wrote under the immediate influence of God. In view of this, GWis ultimately the principal author, while the writing humans are only instrumental scribes. It follows from that that the Bible possesses divine authority. On the other hand the Reformers distinguished between the Bible as the Word of God and the Word of God in the Bible. Furthermore they made a distinction between the written word of the biblical books and the Logos, the eternal word of God, which speaks through the words of the Bible and addresses the reader here and now, existentially. As a testimony to and a medium o/the Word of God the Holy Scripture for Luther is Christ's spiritual body, 2 and thus the authority of the biblical scriptures is a derived and secondary authority. This authority does not rest simply on the sacred text as such but rather on the proclamation of God's grace-filled Lordship over nature

LIKE OTHER WESTERN DEMOCRACIES, ISRAEL is experiencing profound processes of change. Such processes are evident in the physical, cultural, social, political, and economic spheres. The following are some apparent, but characteristic, examples of changes that have occurred in Israel: I. The physical sphere--As a result of the much increased population and its concentration on the coastal plain, which necessitated massive road construction and extensive private and public housing projects, and as a result of the changing tastes of many Israelis, the landscape, especially in the metropolitan and urban areas, is becoming similar to that in any other modern country in North America, Europe, or South East Asia. 2. The cultural sphere-Architecture, literature, visual arts, and pop music have lost much of their specific Israeli flavor and have become similar to those that are fashionable in other western countries.

The subject of this research is the theme of violence in Colombian art as a reflection of political and social conflicts in the country. Political, economic and social problems in the history of Colombia of the XX century are closely intertwined, resulting in a complicated situation of coups d’état and terror, which affects different types of art in the country and representatives of the cultural elite. The conflict that stretches since the early XX century is reflected in the Colombian architecture and painting. It is depicted as rather conservatism and alienation from the constituency in architecture, and from the critical perspective in painting. The projects of the Palace of Justice are taken as an example of the changes in architecture. Trends in the visual arts are revealed in the works of Beatriz Gonzalez and Doris Salcedo. One of the central events in the political and social history of Colombia of the XX century – 1985 Palace of Justice siege – has found a special place in their art. The novelty of this research lies in using the comparative method of analysis. This is the first Russian-language research to draw the parallel between the architectural changes in the projects of the Palace of Justice in Bogota and the impact of the events of November 6 and 7, 1985 upon Colombian painting based on the works of the two remarkable Colombian artists. It is established that different types of art show different response to the political and social disturbances that take place in the country. This is substantiated by differentiation of the political-social order in various types of art.

“Destruction in art” is not destruction of art, neither is it iconoclasm. The term “destruction in art” refers to a wide variety of heterogenous manifestations throughout the arts in all mediums; identifies destructive forces in society and nature; stands for art that employs destructive processes in the service of constructive, innovative, aesthetic ends; and often represents art devoted to cultural, social, and political criticism and change. Destruction, nihilism, anarchism, and other related subjects, which emerged in the 19th century in the context of philosophical and aesthetic aspects of romanticism, were bodies of thought that contributed to the ethos of the modernist avant-garde and its sequential, revolutionary artistic movements. Destruction in art came to the fore in artists’ creations of disparate objects and all types of actions in the 20th century, and it is an approach to art, music, poetry, and other artistic practices that have continued in the 21st century. The term “destruction in art” appeared notably in the work of artist and Holocaust survivor Gustav Metzger in a newspaper publication in November 1959. In March 1960, Swiss artist Jean Tinguely famously staged “Homage to New York,” a mechanical sculpture that unexpectedly spontaneously burst into flame, destroying itself in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1961, the Argentine artist Kenneth Kemble organized the exhibition “Arte Destructivo” in Buenos Aires. The nomenclature of “destruction in art,” however, only became canonical following the international “Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS)” in 1966, organized in London by Metzger with the Irish writer and concrete poet John Sharkey. DIAS, a month-long event, provided evidence of how artists throughout the world were responding to the destruction wreaked by World War II and to an entirely changed future with the advent of atomic and nuclear weapons. With DIAS, destruction in art emerged as the most aggressive artistic genre to confront social and cultural conditions in the wake of World War II, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War bifurcation of the globe between communism and capitalism, and war and conflict throughout the planet in national struggles against colonialism, among other political and social conflicts. This tumultuous period also witnessed massive changes in and challenges to social mores, including struggles for racial, sexual, and ethnic equality that practitioners of destruction in art often championed in their work. Such upheaval signified the heterogeneity of global values, and destruction in art often contributed to efforts to examine and undermine hegemonic power wherever it prevailed. The plurality of destruction in art procedures, materials, results, and contexts contributed to a paradigm shift from the historical avant-garde’s developmental model to heterogeneity throughout the arts. Many critics, art historians, and artists, from the 1960s to the present, have interpreted the intersection of new approaches to art, especially the inclusion of the body, language, and texts in visual art, as related to some examples of destruction in art that have also been associated with such types of art as “conceptual,” “dematerialized,” “formless,” and “anti-art,” the latter most frequently represented in some kinds of performance art and object-based installations that include abjection. While the multifarious expressions of destruction in art have demonstrated processes and effects related to all of these terms, destruction in art customarily produces an act of destruction that results in a disassembled, burned, or otherwise destructively altered object; a body in pain and/or traumatic action; a jarring or altered sound work; a deconstructed, reassembled text or poem; and so forth. To accommodate such diversity, this article is organized thematically and chronologically as a means to underscore the widely distinct, yet interrelated theorizations and materializations that, when considered together, offer a broad view of the philosophical and material foundations and practices of destruction in art.

ABSTRACTPlesch examines changing attitudes towards the gaucho as a musician in nineteenth-century Argentina through literary, musical and iconographic sources. She proposes the existence of a discursive formation gaucho, whose archive comprises travellers' writings, official reports, memoirs, visual arts, literature and music. Despised and persecuted throughout most of the nineteenth century, the gaucho was considered by Argentine elites as the epitome of ‘barbarism’, and his music was consistently described in derogatory terms. This attitude would be dramatically reversed towards the end of the century, when he was promoted to the role of national character and his cultural universe used as a source for the construction of a distinctive Argentine high culture that included the visual arts, literature and music. Plesch analyses the dominant discourse on the gaucho from colonial times to the publication of Martín Fierro (1872) and identifies four strategies of Othering at work: debasement, homogeneity, timelessness and Orientalism. They constitute, in the symbolic realm, the counterpart to the larger strategy of domination of the gaucho. In the second part of the article she examines the use of the gaucho and his world in the aesthetic production of Argentine cultural nationalism, isolating three key features: use, nostalgia and distancing. These are connected to the xenophobia unleashed by mass immigration and the modernization of the country, and the consequent need for elites to create a distinctive type of Argentine identity. The antithetical representations of the gaucho and his music, Plesch concludes, can only be understood in relation to the changing needs and political agendas of hegemonic society.

Creating Visible Children?

This volume centres on one of the most dramatic periods of Italian History: 1900-1945. It examines the crisis of the liberal state as it undergoes a process of significant transformation, which starts with a process of modernization and leads to the totalitarian fascist state. Lyttelton and his international team discuss the social and moral conflicts resulting from modernisation, the two world wars and the fascist regime, considering the issues from both national and international standpoints. The discussion includes the developments and impact of the changes on religion, literature, and the visual arts.

ABSTRACTWhere theatre was not dependent on a projector and screen for the manifestation of its fictitious worlds, cinema had to rely on such equipment for its representation of moving photographic images. In so doing, cinema could achieve what theatre could only allude to with the help of costumes, set design and the general consensus of the audience: a representation of the world itself. Nevertheless, this ability of cinematicity could only be achieved at the price of a temporal and existential disjunction between actor and spectator — a matter that did not occur in theatre as a result of its liveness. What happens, though, when the two media are brought together; when theatre's stage becomes the backstage for cinema, and cinema's construction is a live performance? This article analyses Katie Mitchell's intermedial performance…some trace of her (2008) through an examination of the distinction between cinematic and theatrical art forms. The authors look at the amalgamation of the theatrical space with the cinematic space, examining what intermedial approaches to artistic creation have on the performing and visual arts and their spectatorial experiences. For this, they reflect on Mitchell's controversially received work through the prism of existential phenomenology, examining the ontological implications of the performance's intermediality.

Ifhigh culture, asTheodorAdornoonce proposed, promises a reality that does not exist, why, at the fin de siècle, did it hold such great attraction for Central Europe's populist politicians who were most attuned to the realities of everyday life? The answer, at least for imperial Austria, is that those politicians believed high culture to possess an integrative social function, which forced them to reconcile notions of “high” culture with “mass” culture. This was particularly true in Vienna, where the city's public performance venues for art, music, stage theater, and visual art stood as monuments to the values that the liberal middle classes had enshrined in the 1867 Constitution. A literate knowledge of this cultural system—its canon of symphonic music; the literature of tragedy, drama, and farce; and classical and contemporary genres of painting—was essential for civic participation in an era of liberal political and cultural hegemony. This article examines one cultural association that attempted to exploit the interaction between German high culture and two spheres, which are commonly thought to stand at odds with elite, high culture: popular culture and mass politics. Rather than a simple, cultural divide, this relationship created a contested “terrain of political and social conflict” in the decades preceding World War I. This terrain was of enormous consequence for Viennese of every social class.

ABSTRACTThis article conceptualises the challenges that curators of the visual arts working in post-conflict contexts face in terms of doing justice to the competing narratives and representations of past violence. To do so, the article first proposes the concept of the city-as-museum, in which independent artists and residential communities may act as curators as much as museum professionals and state organisations do. Against this background, the article goes on to consider the particular curatorial issues presented by the context of “dark tourism” in places like Northern Ireland, where social conflict itself has become the subject of exhibition. We then zoom in on three Loyalist peace walls in Belfast to suggest that those walls have been curated to represent a particular vision of a post-conflict society. We examine recent developments in mural production that have emerged alongside the site’s popularity as a “pleasurable” experience for visitors to the city. We suggest that this tension between the Troubles and the visitor’s experience generates a discourse on its own that is translated in the kind of wall monument that is created. In that sense, we can, for instance, view the murals in Belfast as sites of creative art on the one hand, and as political visions of the future of the city and region on the other hand. We cast light on the continued significance of the murals as expressions of community identities, and examine their ability to promote narratives of both division and tolerance between communities in the post-conflict city.

Jorge Eduardo Eielson (Lima 1924 - Milan 2006) and Mario Vargas Llosa (Arequipa, Peru, 1936; Winner of the Nobel prize in 2010) are certainly two 'exemplary Peruvians', as they have both started by digging into the history and social conflicts of their country, before opening up to global culture and reality with an interdisciplinary and intercultural spirit: Vargas Llosa did so using fiction, theatre, non-fiction and journalism; Eielson used poetry, the visual arts, non-fiction and journalism. The volume offers a rich itinerary starting from an interview with Vargas Llosa by José Miguel Oviedo (Florence, 2008), and then goes through individual aspects of the work by the two authors. It is then accompanied by photographic records and a DVD with an elaboration of Eielson's visual works, paintings and poems.

Erotic Irony and Polarity in Antony and Cleopatra Get access Michael Payne Michael Payne Bucknell University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 24, Issue 3, Summer 1973, Pages 265–279, https://doi.org/10.2307/2868352 Published: 01 July 1973

Sangre (Spanish for “blood”) is a series of choreographic works developed in Toronto by Colombian artist Olga Barrios. The project was presented in three phases and united by the theme of dehumanization of violence through acts of war. These works are framed within a multidisciplinary approach in which the staging of dance is supported by elements of theatre, video, and music. The choreography involves research into the themes of rhythm, image, and theatricality. Many places in the world deal with longstanding social conflicts. Colombia, my country of origin, has a history with strong issues of social violence that are related to the social/political environment of inequality and corruption. This conflict has lasted more than four decades and its end seems further away every day. Because of this ongoing situation and its involvement in every facet of Colombian society, everyone has a story to tell. Every day there is news of horrendous acts happening in small towns, usually affecting innocent people caught in the middle. Most of the people in Colombia no longer know to whom this conflict belongs or the motivations behind it. They have to live with the consequences: the fear in the atmosphere, and the dehumanization caused by war. There are many acts related to this social violence of war such as kidnappings, massacres and forced displacements. Based on the resonance of some of these acts, I began the choreographic process of the series Sangre. Each piece in this series focused on one of these acts. Thus, the piece “Behind Windows” was initiated by the theme of kidnapping, “Los Ausentes” (The Absent Ones) focused on a massacre, and the dance installation “Moving Earth” centered around images of forced displacements. The first piece “Behind Windows” was choreographed and performed as a solo in the McLean Performance Studio at York University as part of the MFA thesis concert “Cuatro.” The second piece of the series, “Los Ausentes,” was choreographed for the six dancers of the York Dance Ensemble and was presented in the Sandra Faire and Ivan Fecan Theatre at York University as part of the second MFA thesis concert “Penumbra.” The last piece “Moving Earth,” is an exploration of a specific site resulting in the creation of a dance installation where the nature of the space changed the dynamic of spatial composition. This final piece was presented at Arta Gallery in the Distillery District in Toronto. In developing my choreographic work, I used strong contrast between elements of narrative, movement, music and theatre. I also explored my own reality as a woman whose life is affected by technology and information of the contemporary world; however, I found it important to maintain some sense of history and a flavour of the past. In the use of video I explored how the two-dimensional world of video can play and negotiate with the three-dimensional world of the body in performance. This project was possible thanks to the collaborations of many artists and friends: Project Supervisor Carol Anderson (Professor at MFA Dance Department at York University) ; Composer/Musicians Diego Marulanda and Luisito Orbegoso; Visual Artists , Maria Flawia Litwin, Alexandra Gelis and Trevor Schwellnus; Dramaturg Alejandro Roncería; Costume Designer Ruth Gutiérrez. Dancers: Krista Antonio, Brittany-Brie D’Amico, Hannah Greyson-Gaito, Mellisa Kwok, Jennifer Lee and Caroline Vukson. Adriana Sabogal, Fay Athari, Amy Stewart, Mayahuel Tecozautla, Amanda Paixao and my husband Juan Carlos Márquez.

1. Introduction In information age the "information+ism" is a necessary result of word formation, and appear many relevant now words such as informationalism, informatism,informationism and informatilism, they have different meaning and are applied in the fields of sociology, philosophy, art and literature. In general, the "informationalism" comes from the information sociology, its appeal is a kind of social (historical) view of informationalism; "informatism" mainly comes from the art and poetry circles, with an advocating of information art expression; "informationism" and "infornatilism" comes mainly from the philosophy, and they pursuit of an information world outlook. Due to the complicated implication of "information+ism", we need to perform specific investigation to clarify the different meaning of them, and then find which doctrine is acceptable or unacceptable especially from philosophy. 2. Four words about information+ism From print publications and cyber source we can find at least four words about "information+ism": informationalism, informatism,informationism and informatilism. They are formed and popular in different subject areas and show the complexity of information doctrine. 1. Informationalism as a sociological concept was proposed most early by the Canadian scholar David Lyon (D. Lyon, 1988) and USA scholar Maunel Castells(M. Castells, 1996). In his Information Society published in 1988,David Lyon took the informationalism as a similar theory with the post- industrialism, and use it to describe the emergence of a new social structure. He said that we take the "informationalism" to understand the technological and social organization of production and management, among them the application of new information technology constitutes the intellectual potential and the productivity based by information. In this view, the development and diffusion of information technology lead to the changes of social community structure pattern. This meaning of informationalism was inherited and expanded the influence by Castells. Since 1990's he published his Information Ages Trilogy (The rise of the network society, The end of Millennium and The Power of Identity ) and constantly used the concept of informationalism to describe the paradigm of the new technology with the information technology as its foundation and the network technology as its core. He think it is speeding up remodeling the material basis of society, and has exerted a profound and significant influence to the economy, politics and culture of contemporary society and the whole social life as well as the corresponding system, and also led to the change of social structure, therefore it was regarded as "the historical most decisive factors of the whole world".( Manuel Castells, 1996) For Castells the informationalism is a new technological paradigm, which emphasized the overall impact of information technology on society and its fundamental role for changing the age, and reflected a proposition of "information technology determinism", so it also can be called as "informationizationism". In this field its synonyms are information age,network society and so on ,and its Contrast word is industrialism. As you can see, Castells' "information" in the "informationalism" is the short term of "information technology", and even referred to "modern information technology". Therefore, the informationalism on this context is essentially the "information technology doctrine ", more precisely the "modern information technology doctrine ", and even can be said to be "the doctrine of the network", its expression is the decisive influence of information technology such as computer and network to contemporary society. In a sense, it also is an effort to seek the technology roots of the changes in contemporary society, So the term "informationalism" is properly expressed his Worship on information technology in the view of social development, and then he took it as a perspective to puts forward the concept of "informational capitalism", also in China some scholars proposed the "informational socialism" and "information of communism". Because of this "first application" for "informationalism", which makes it became the proper noun referencing the theory of Castells, or synonymous with "information society" or "informationization". In a recent paper Zhou Liqian and Søren Brier (Zhou Liqian and Søren Brier, 2015) use "Pan- informationalism" to reference the philosophical proposition, especially classify the view of Wu Kun to this camp, which marks the meaning of "informationalism" going beyond the sociology and expanding to philosophy field. 2. Informatism appeared earlier than informationalism, it is with complicated usage at least in three disciplines: art and literature, politics and philosophy. (1) The informatism from art and literature (first from the 1970' art) is a kind of ways for art expression. The Wikipedia describes it as information art, data art or electronic art, which is a form of art that makes use of electronic media and it synthesizes computer science, information technology, and more classical forms of art, including performance art, visual art, new media art and conceptual art, it often includes interaction with computers that generate artistic content based on the processing of large amounts of data. Information art data can be manifested using photographs, census data, micropayments, personal profiles and expressions, video clips, search engine results, digital painting, network signals, and prose. In China the dominant usage of informatism is to reference a new school of poetry: the network poetry(or informatism poetry), Some network poets named their style and characteristics of poetry as "informatism", and then they created a web site for http://informatism.org.,it born in 1993 or 1994 and becomes very active 10 years later in early 21st century, so it also is called contemporary art movement mainly in poetry. Informatism poetry explained the general relationship between poetry and information. In the new age, information goes into our spirit, into our poetry entity, our poetry environment full of omnipresent information, and our poetry are always surrounded by information, the whole meaning of information movement subsumes the spirit phenomenon of poetry. Our practice of poetry creation can be understood as information movement reducing to the native state of the process of poetry, we even can't confirm thoroughly the reliability of the information source in the process of poetry creation. The informational transmission, feedback, alienation and exhaustion form of unlimited survival practice, and poetry can be saw as the aesthetic simulation of this kind of process. (Shi Yang) (2) The informatism from politics is used as "bureaucratic informatism". David T. Johnson defined it as the bureaucracy has the information, but other people do not have. As a privilege, the right to information becomes a confidential legal system, forms the social divide between people, and also becomes the means for "elites" to keep control of social conflict and changes. (3) The informatism from philosophy is mainly in the phrase "dialectical informatism" (DIAINF). Rafael Capurro thinks Wolfgang Hofkirchner's method as "dialectical informatism" —a deferent new version of dialectical materialism(DIAMAT) when Wolfgang takes an evolutionary perspective to see information as a feature of emergence and goes back to the etymological roots (information as "giving form") in his establishment of a unified information theory. (Rafael Capurro[6]) Both the usage (2) and (3) are sporadic, and mainly the informatism express a general view of art doctrine, or a new idea and expression of literary and artistic creation. 3. Informationism has two usages, one is the term first used by Richard Price in 1991 in the magazine Interference to describe common trends in the work of a group of Scottish poets. Their work was later collected in the anthology Contraflow on the Super Highway (1994). Inside it there is an introduction: Approaching the Informationists. Another one is considered as a new philosophical trend, it is the focal point in this paper and will be introduced soon afterwards. 4. Informatilism is a word used only by a Chinese scholar Shen Xinxi(沈新曦) and only take it as a philosophy category. In Shen Xinxi's view, information includes two kinds: "original information" and "derived information". In its own deductive history the "original information" shows as rule, relation, structure of N order's(0≤N≤7) things of universe including the derived information since C.E.Shannon. (Shen Xinxi, 2007) 3. Multiple dimensions of philosophical informationism From above we can see that all four words (informationalism, informatism, informationism and informatilism) have the philosophical meaning. Due to the informationism is used by more scholars in philosophy circle, so we can mainly take it as a philosophical theory. Based on the research in China as I know, there are multiple dimensions for philosophical informationism: 1. Axiological informationism views that information (resource) is more important than material (resource),it is a prevalent values while the information age is coming, and it also becomes the dominant ideology of contemporary economic philosophy, political philosophy and so on. But it is not involved in the ontological issue such as whether or not the information is dependent on the matter. 2. Epistemological informationism claims that information decide the matter, or information guide material items, this is actually another way of saying concept guiding artificial object, or man's intent leading the creation (building). The information here indicates knowledge, idea, purpose, and so on. 3. Ontological informationism is the most important philosophical informationism. In China the ontological informationism match a kind of definitions of "information", which is based on the disciplines tripartite division into material, energy and information and take them as three major elements of the world(also from Wiener's "information was neither a matter, nor energy, and information was the information"). If a philosophical point of view take one of them as the most basic elements, which can be respectively formed the "materialism", " energetism" and "informationism". Miao Dong-sheng, a Chinese scholar, uses explicitly the "only-informationism" to sum up physicist Wheeler's point of view. John Archibald Wheeler divided his life in physics research and the evolution of world view into three periods: the first period he believed everything is particle, the second the field, and the third the information. In the third perspective, one will think the information is the only reality, or more real than material; the material is the derivative item of information, there is information first in the world , and then the material. Due to above Professor Miao thinks that " Wheeler is advocating an ontology of informational monism, so it should be called only-informationism. There have been idealism and materialism in the human cognitive history, and now there is another ontology : only-informationism ." (Miao, 2008) Wheeler's famous point is "It from bit" and "Everything is information". In his view the information is not only an independent existence that differed from matter and mind, but also the most basic existence, because whole universe was initiated from information, it is why we call informationism not materialism. In China there also are some similar viewpoints, such as "information is the fundamental factor of the universe", "The material is an aggregate of information"(Wang Jiang-huo), "Information generate world, the universe is a deductive process of information"(Shen Xin-xi), and so on. We can call the ontology informationism as "strong informationism" or "radical informationism", and the others as "weak informationism" or "mild informationism". 4. How to evaluate the philosophical informationism? Which kind of philosophical informationism can we accept? Axiological and epistemological informationism is certainly acceptable, and ontological informationism is difficult to be accepted. "Ontology" is a very complex concept, if it is interpreted as the theory of the essence of "being" or the foundation of the world (what initiates another one between physical and mental phenomena), then the ontological doctrine can be differentiated into materialism and idealism, so we will face the problems of relationship between informationism with materialism and idealism. Some axiological and epistemological informationists are not ontological informationists even if they claim the existence of ontology information. The key problem is how to understand the relationship between the information and material. If one asserts that information is a property of matter and its existence depends on the material, then we can say that his assertion of informationism is a new form of materialism but not an ontological informationism. If one asserts that information belongs to mental phenomenon similar to news, message (telling something to somebody), knowledge, data and further think such information can't rely on the material, we should classified it as a new form of idealism. If one asserts that information is a "third" phenomenon beyond both material and mental phenomenon, then it is also beyond materialism and idealism and belongs to the "third form" of ontology theory. So far there are three different ontological positions about infromationism can be found: The first one thinks of it as a new form of materialism (Rafael Capurro , maybe including Wu Kun); The second one takes it as a new form of idealism (Miao Dongsheng thinks Wheeler's opinion); The third one asserts that it is beyond materialism and idealism and belongs to the third form of ontology theory (Shen Xinxi). The first one is not but the second and third ones are access to the ontological informationism. The difficulty of ontological informationism is how to understand the information without the material carrier, or how bare-information "bare-information" can existence? If there is no reasonable explanation for how information initially produces material, we should think the ontological informationism is unreasonable. bare-information 5. Conclusion How to understand information philosophically decided how to evaluate ontological informationism for us. In my opinion, because the information is not equal to the material or any physical items, so the ontological informationism as a form of materialism is not reasonable. And due to the existence of information is inseparable not only from material but also from person's consciousness, namely the information is not the third being beyond the physical and mental phenomena, so the ontological informationism as third kinds of ontological doctrine transcending materialism and idealism is also untenable. Furthermore, how to understand information philosophically is determined by ho to understand philosophy. When Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver develop their mathematical theory of communication, they intend to eliminate the "psychological factors" involved in the concept of information, in order to establish a "measure of information in terms of purely physical quantities." (C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver, 1949) They intend to forget the specific common meaning of information, i.e., the semantic and pragmatic levels of the concept.( Rafael Capurro[14]) Philosophy is different from science. If we see philosophy as the studies of the relation between Men and world (so philosophy is not a research only about matter or only about Man, but about Man-matter), then the information as a philosophical concept should be understood involving human being rather than a phenomenon unrelated to people, i.e. it indicates a major human characteristic and so there is no "nature information", all information is "human information". More immediately, information can be regarded as the virtual form of material reality, it belongs to the mental world —— a mental phenomenon emphasizing communication and semantic function. With this understanding of information and philosophy, we can say that the ontological informationism is a new form of idealism. If you are a materialist, you certainly will not agree with it. References and Notes David Lyon , The information society. Issues and illusions,Cambridge, Polity Press, 1988. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society,Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 1996. From Wikipedia, Information art, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_art. Shi Yang, Informatism,http://shiyang.net/?cat=6. John A. Wheeler, At Home in the Universe, New York, Spring-Verlag Inc., 1996. Rafael Capurro, etc., Is a Unified Theory of Information Feasible? http://www.capurro.de/trialog.htm. Richard Price, Informationism, http://www.hydrohotel.net/informationist1.htm. Miao Dongsheng: A review of Wheeler's information view, Journal of Huazhong University of Science and Technology (Social Science Edition), Wuhan, China, 2008(2). Wu Kun, Philosophy of information, The Commercial Press, Beijing, 2005. Shen Xinxi, informatilism, Cozy House Publisher, New York, 2007. Wang Jiang-huo, Unified theory of information, China University of Political Science and Law Press, Beijing, 2012. Zhou Liqian and Søren Brier, Is There a Philosophy of Information in Chinese Style? Philosophical Analysis, 2015,Vol 6. No.1 E. Shannon and W. Weaver: The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, University of Illinois Press ,1949. Rafael Capurro,EPISTEMOLOGY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE, http://www.capurro.de/trita.htm

Prague workshop, Pietà, c. 1400, from amongst the sculptures found beneath Bern Minster, 1986. Limestone, original height c. 85–90cm. Bern: Historisches Museum. Photo: Bernisches Historisches Museum/S. Rebsamen. The religious turmoil of the sixteenth century constituted a turning point in the history of Western Christian art. The iconoclasm precipitated by the Protestant Reformation was unprecedented in its scope: throughout northern Europe sculptures, altarpieces, paintings, stained-glass windows and ecclesiastical treasures fell victim to the purifying zeal of evangelical reformers. Images that had been venerated for generations were labelled as idols, and smashed to pieces (plate 1). Churches that had been filled with representations of sacred history were stripped bare. In response, the Catholic Church reaffirmed the value of visual representations. Theologians provided detailed guidelines for their production and use, and wealthy patrons stimulated the revival of religious art. While Protestantism devalued images and privileged hearing over seeing, the importance that Catholicism accorded to the visual was made manifest in the art and architecture of the baroque. The broad outlines of this history are familiar and incontestable. With regard to religious images, the Reformation certainly brought about a dramatic bifurcation, both at the level of theological debate and at the level of lived piety. Yet the Protestant destruction and the Catholic defence of images were merely two parts of a more complex story. The essays gathered together in this volume analyze the myriad ways in which both Protestant and Catholic reform stimulated the production of religious art during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The special issue examines the nature of images produced during the early years of the evangelical movement, asking how both theologians and artists responded to a new understanding of Christian history and soteriology. It traces the rich and diverse Protestant visual cultures that developed during the confessional age, and explores the variety of Catholic responses to pressure for reform. At the volume's heart lies a desire to understand how religious art was shaped by the splintering of Western Christendom that began five hundred years ago with Martin Luther's Reformation. Luther's own position with regard to religious images was far from straightforward. From 1522 he was a determined opponent of iconoclasm. Yet for Luther images were peripheral to true piety. In 1545, towards the end of his life, he preached a sermon in which he spoke of the two kingdoms present upon earth, ‘the kingdom of Christ and the worldly kingdom’. Christ's kingdom, through which we achieve salvation, is ‘a hearing-kingdom, not a seeing-kingdom; for the eyes do not lead and guide us to where we know and find Christ, but rather the ears must do this’.1 Here Luther privileged hearing above seeing – word over image – in a manner characteristic of evangelical teaching. Reformed theologians went much further. John Calvin undertook a thorough attack on the ‘superstitions of popery’. Idolatry – understood as a diminution of the honour due to God – occupied a more prominent place in his thought that in Luther's. Reformed Protestantism rewrote the Decalogue, making the prohibition of images a decree in its own right, and directed Christian worship towards a God who transcended all materiality.2 Yet Protestant piety was not fundamentally opposed to the visual. Even in his 1545 sermon, Luther accepted ‘visual sensation as part of the work that must be done to create religious conviction’.3 The Reformation, at least in its Lutheran manifestation, sought not to reject religious seeing, but rather to control it and the other senses (including hearing) through faith. The Catholic Church's defence of religious imagery was similarly nuanced. At its twenty-fifth session (3 December 1563) the Council of Trent stated that images were to be honoured, but not in a superstitious manner. Holy images – as opposed to idols – were of great value because through them Christians were moved to adore Christ, to remember the examples of the saints, and to cultivate piety. Theologians – most notably Johannes Molanus (1533–85) and Gabriele Paleotti (1522–97) – expanded on these themes.4 Catholic patrons commissioned illustrated books, devotional prints, paintings, sculpture and architecture, seeking to use images, as well as words, to awaken the senses and to engage Christians’ hearts and minds.5 Catholics continued to trust in the sacred power of images and relics. During the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the cultic use of images – the veneration of paintings and sculptures of Christ and the saints – flourished throughout Catholic Europe.6 No Protestant image – not even a miraculous portrait of Luther – was a place of holy presence akin to the Jesuit reliquary examined in this volume by Mia Mochizuki.7 Yet Catholic belief in immanence, in the intermingling of the spiritual and material, always coexisted with scepticism about the value of the visual. Catholic reform, from the late Middle Ages onwards, emphasized the importance of inner contemplation.8 During the sixteenth century Catholic commentators wrote, like their Lutheran counterparts, of images’ pedagogical value and affective potential.9 In the seventeenth century new devotional practices encouraged meditation on images as well as texts, and spread amongst Protestants as well as Catholics.10 In this volume, these new devotional practices provide the backdrop for Bridget Heal's investigation of the later history of Lucas Cranach's Schneeberg Altarpiece, and for Christine Göttler's analysis of the Catholic Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria's religious patronage. What of the visual cultures that evolved across Protestant Europe? Lutherans, driven by their desire to distinguish themselves from radical iconoclasts, allowed many images to survive intact and in situ in churches. They were convinced that God's Word would triumph over idolatry and superstition.11 Luther and his fellow Wittenberg reformers made extensive use of visual propaganda and illustrated key religious texts (the Bible and catechism, most notably), a reflection of their belief in the value of seeing for acquiring religious knowledge and understanding. The copious religious output of the Cranach workshop – altarpieces, epitaphs, portraits and prints – defined Lutheran visual culture for much of the sixteenth century, in Germany and beyond. Elsewhere – in Swiss and Southern German cities during the 1520s and 1530s, in France and in the Northern Netherlands – Protestantism's relationship with art was much more strongly shaped by iconoclasm. Yet memories of recent destruction did not prevent the production of new objects and images. In Calvinist churches Protestantism redirected rather than removed congregations’ desires to adorn and to commemorate.12 The domestic use of religious imagery also continued. Even in Reformed areas – for example in seventeenth-century Zürich, examined here by Andrew Morrall – religious iconographies were used in the home to foster a sense of confessional consciousness.13 The nature of these Protestant visual cultures – the position of art during and after iconoclasm – is an important theme of this volume. Christopher Wood has suggested that ‘Protestant iconophobia … permanently affected the ways in which images were made, exhibited and judged’. He writes of the ‘insulating strategies’ devised by artists in order to avoid charges of idolatry.14 In terms of medium, Protestants tended to favour black and white prints over sculptures and brightly coloured paintings that might seduce the eye. The 1519 woodcut known as Karlstadt's Wagen (wagon), analyzed here in an essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks, and the seventeenth-century Tischzucht (table discipline) broadsheets examined by Morrall exemplify this tendency. In terms of content, Protestant art is most readily associated with polemic, pedagogy, and allegory, and, in the case of the Northern Netherlands, with landscape, still life and everyday scenes filled with moralizing content. Regarding style, Protestant artists supposedly strove for plainness, for a visual culture ‘stripped of conspicuous artifice and deceptive pictorial rhetoric’.15 Here recent scholarship on Cranach is key: Joseph Koerner, for example, has argued that the art produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his son in the service of the Lutheran Reformation deliberately eschewed aesthetic pleasure and affective power in favour of communicating evangelical doctrine.16 He speaks of the ‘mortification of painting though text, gesture, and style’.17 But not all religious art was polemical; not all religious art defended itself, as much of Cranach's did, from its enemies, the iconoclasts. Iconoclasm does not, Shira Brisman argues here, help us to read graphic studies of the period. Brisman asks us to dismiss iconoclasm from the privileged position that it has held in studies of sixteenth-century art. We need, she suggests, to erase our knowledge of images’ fall from grace in order to understand the works of Albrecht Dürer and others. Iconoclasm also played remarkably little part in the story of Lucas Cranach the Elder's first evangelical altarpiece, installed in the parish church in Schneeberg in 1539 and eventually, after a traumatic interlude during the Thirty Years’ War, reset in a magnificent baroque frame in the eighteenth century. The creators of some images certainly did respond to contemporary fear of the ‘uncontrolled nature of iconic representation’:18 Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt's Wagen, for example, in which Cranach's woodcut images are overburdened with explanatory texts. Others, however, continued to rely on very different modes of viewing: on ambiguity, as with Sebald Beham's small engraving of Moses and Aaron examined by Mitchell Merback; or on the restrained use of the imagination, as with Jan van Goyen's skyscapes, analyzed by Amy Powell. Their creators seem to have recognized, as Dürer did, that ‘pictures are, at best, mediators, affecting without determining what their viewers see in them’.19 The supposed bifurcation between a Protestant aesthetic of plainness and a Catholic effusion of colour and ornament can be seen by juxtaposing Morrall's Tischzucht prints with Mochizuki's seventeenth-century Portuguese reliquary. Yet it leaves in interpretative limbo the baroque incarnation of the Lutheran Schneeberg Altarpiece, which presents its central Cranach crucifixion panel as a relic, held aloft by angels and encased within an elaborately carved and gilded frame. This special issue brings together art historians and historians to consider the relationship between art and religious reform. The divisions between disciplines are no longer rigid, as they were in the days when Aby Warburg established his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek. Historians make effective use of visual and material evidence (though perhaps still not as often as they might); art historians ground their work in detailed historical understanding. For both, the Reformation, with its image disputes and iconoclasm, has acted as an intellectual lodestone since the 1960s.20 The essays assembled in this volume show how porous traditional disciplinary boundaries have become, but highlight the healthy plurality of methodological approaches that the religious art of the early modern era continues to inspire. Some of these essays tie images firmly to the religious, social and political contexts in which they were produced and received, reconstructed through close readings of texts. Others focus their attention primarily on images’ non-verbal means of communication, suggesting that the power of art can never be fully captured through words. Brisman's and Powell's essays in particular invite us to pay proper attention to artistic processes and to art's tendency to develop through visual conversations. They remind us that art, like music, requires us to exercise our historical imaginations differently.21 The volume has been timed to coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, yet Martin Luther himself is more or less absent from its pages. He appears in the analysis of Karlstadt's Wagen, but he did not design this first piece of Reformation visual propaganda. He appears in Merback's discussion of Beham's 1526 engraving, but his thought does not explain the iconography. His theology offered a qualified endorsement of religious images, but cannot account for the flourishing of Lutheran art in parts of the Holy Roman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At a moment at which twenty-first-century anniversary culture celebrates ‘The Reformation’, focusing its attention on a particular date and on a particular man, this volume does the opposite. It adopts a broad chronology, ranging from the first decade of reform, the dawn of a new era in northern Europe, through the confessional age to the early eighteenth century. Three essays focus on the period of Umbruch – upheaval – during the early Reformation; five move into the seventeenth century, juxtaposing Protestant with Catholic, Lutheran Saxony and Reformed Zürich with Bavaria and the Jesuits’ overseas missions. These later essays show that although images played an important role in creating confessional consciousness, devotional art did not simply reflect theological divisions. It crossed confessional borders, and also evoked much broader cultural landscapes, landscapes that were being transformed during the early modern period by historical forces other than religion. The essay by Lyndal Roper and Jennifer Spinks that opens this collection focuses on a woodcut produced by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his Wittenberg colleague Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (see plate 1, page 258–259). It was almost certainly the first piece of visual propaganda for the Reformation, produced in January 1519 at a moment at which the evangelical movement was still finding its way. It is a fascinating image: it draws on well-established visual formulae to present a procession of figures, and prefigures later Lutheran propaganda in its use of binary opposition and mockery. Its design is, however, overly complex. Its images are hard to make out because of the abundance of texts, and these texts are hard to decipher and understand. The woodcut was so cryptic, in fact, that Karlstadt had to produce a lengthy written tract to explain it to his supporters. Despite its apparently sequential structure, the woodcut was intended to be read, Roper and Spinks argue, not as a polemical narrative but as part of a devotional exercise. Karlstadt's written explanation suggests that he intended it to be used as a series of discrete points for meditation, as an invitation to reflect on key aspects of Augustinian theology. The woodcut is also intriguing because it was produced at a moment at which the early evangelical movement was still coloured by mystical piety, before the rupture between Luther and the more radical reformers – the Schwärmer or fanatics, as he labelled them – that shaped the 1520s so decisively. Karlstadt himself went on to publish, in 1522, the first evangelical defence of iconoclasm, On the Removal of Images. The 1519 woodcut provides, therefore, vivid testimony of the extent to which iconoclasts understood the religious and psychological power of images. It helps us to understand why image makers became image breakers. Hans Sebald Beham's 1526 Moses and Aaron, examined in Mitchell Merback's essay, is a very different type of image, one of the small-scale engravings for which the Beham brothers were famous (see plate 1, page 288). It is labelled with MOSE and AARON, and signed and dated, but that is all: it suffers from none of the textual overburdening of Karlstadt's Wagen. It shows two half-length figures seated on a mountainside with an open codex on their laps and the blank stone tablets of the Law resting beside them. The image's narrative and its doctrinal message resist easy interpretation, but this time such an opacity is intentional. Merback situates the engraving in the context of the debates about Mosaic Law that followed the Peasants’ Revolt of 1524–25, at a time when the split between the Wittenberg theologians and radicals such as Karlstadt and Thomas Müntzer had become irrevocable. The engraving was also, however, he suggests, a personal reflection on religious exile, on Beham's own experiences as a ‘non-aligned evangelical’ who had been expelled from Nuremberg in 1525, and labelled a ‘godless painter’. The image testifies to Beham's familiarity with Lutheran teachings on the relationship between the Law and Gospel. But Luther's writings – even his 1525 sermon How Christians Should Regard Moses – offer no simple key for its interpretation. Rather, the artist produced his own reading, an allegory of the parting of ways between the Lutherans and Spiritualists. The priestly Aaron reads the codex before him while Moses, the lawgiver in Luther's interpretation, gazes out, seeking illumination beyond the Word. Beham has, Merback suggests, ‘subtly reasserted the hero's prophetic vocation and charisma’. The image can be read as veiled polemic against Wittenberg, or perhaps as a warning to both sides at a time of discord. Both of these first essays explore the relationship between image and word. The visual cannot, it seems, be reduced to an expression of the verbal, even in the case of Karlstadt's Wagen, with its inscriptions and detailed they are to with their must be allowed to for as Lutheran Shira Brisman's essay on graphic studies made the time of the Reformation these in a very different The she suggests, prophetic of the destruction that images during the most of But we resist seeing them as and iconoclasm from the of Christ's with a piece of and of the Christ with a beside it (see plate 1, page and plate page that cannot be in words. We see Brisman as of a visual that the through a of Images she suggests, their own the by the of the artist to to resist the narrative by or we might by and engravings such as examined by Spinks and we a different type of interpretative – one that not, as for Sebald from to the of the Reformation, but rather from the artistic processes of the While the first essays in very different art's role at the of a new the two us into the confessional Bridget Heal's essay focuses on Lutheran on a Protestant in from the early of the Reformation the eighteenth century, religious art It examines Cranach's Schneeberg and its This has a it was installed in 1539 but by during the Thirty Years’ Its were in Schneeberg in but the was in when the church was were in a and frame that in situ (see plate 1, page The Protestant of which the is a example, our of Lutheran art. Heal's the within the context of two broader the of Lutheran confessional and the of Lutheran piety. in particular the importance of historical not for the image's original and but also for its The of the made use of the visual of the baroque – perhaps not the cultural of the It also, however, a understanding of images’ devotional a new perhaps to them a role in the by which the intellectual (the knowledge of became the affective presence in the Protestants the with Cranach's image through the of and dramatic Andrew Morrall's essay us to Zürich, to a very different religious Morrall his discussion a painting of the of a Hans seated at a The of and a life are here in the of the and and in the domestic that them. The painting Morrall an expression of a Protestant and was part of a broader visual of Tischzucht that to the Morrall also explores the of of the of images by the for Protestantism he suggests, an It the of art, made it and and stripped it of or was by its to and its The images used by Morrall in the to by Brisman – for the image is a message must be out through In Zürich the Reformation brought he suggests, the of images. In the seventeenth-century art flourished in the of iconoclasm, as Amy shows in discussion of the paintings of Jan van argues that of iconoclasm, its of and in the works examined here and in like them. explores van Goyen's his use of and which did not, as art of the period did, filled with like the on the in church a of images that never fully These suggests, be seen as images of the by as to In a however, artistic had to be with – van who van Goyen's in him for not far from the Goyen's paintings were also – he is thought to have been a Catholic, but his works across the confessional responses to iconoclasm have been in through the of church and through the analysis of the religious and of and Here adopts a different one that art recent in and in the found in and early modern art. she van Goyen's of a particular she also against a that images within their historical brings seventeenth-century painting into with modern art, in particular to the use of which later played a role in of Here van Goyen's paintings from their own time and themselves to the With Christine Göttler's essay we move to a Catholic to the Bavaria of the Duke Wilhelm V examines the and the and cultural of within an Catholic focuses on the that the at his and and on a series of engravings of by Jan and that were to Bavaria's and made extensive use of images, and to their and religious from the to the The examined here however, a It not on but on reform, on on or from the – a for the after his in This by the but it was to move beyond confessional It in some Despite the that the on and the was in the at for example, were and that sacred scenes or They suggests, to the that to the religious of the The of the of the religious was key to both Protestant and Catholic reform, but in Duke and it was to be through In the essay of the volume Mia a detailed of one particular a Portuguese reliquary from the of the seventeenth century (see plate 1, page Here the of Catholicism that were present in Göttler's of into a account of the importance of overseas and for early modern religious At the of Mochizuki's reliquary is a of the from in the that the with them on their missions. It is in a that was to and and evoked The image is in this with of It is, suggests, seeking to through its of sacred It is an through its and its brings together two that of the of Western Christendom and the polemical that and that of with the The essay us that while iconoclasm did, without the ways in which religious images were made, exhibited and received, image or also a much cultural In his Joseph the essays within this volume in a broad The Protestant Reformation of merely one in the history of iconoclasm, a history that to the present art to both image making and image how and why iconoclasm to be accorded an important place within the history of art. he a tendency – certainly in this volume – to focus not on of destruction but rather on the in their It was the of iconoclasm that the attention of social history and art history during the and however, against the backdrop of image in and we seem more by the ways in which early modern cultures – both Protestant and Catholic – responded to the of iconoclasm, and were transformed by the that it The workshop that to this special issue was by the and the are very for the also to for to the for their help and and above all to for the