Latin Church Research Articles

Abbot Desiderius of Montecassino and the Gregorian Papacy

Of all the churches affected by the Gregorian reform movement few were more notable than the monastery of Montecassino. Not only the latter's own writers but even Pope Gregory vii himself described it as famous throughout Christendom. In southern Italy it was undoubtedly the most important single institution of the Latin Church. Founded by St Benedict in 529, by the eleventh century it was exempt from normal ecclesiastical jurisdiction and was the centre of a franchise free from the obligations of lay society. Under the abbacy of Desiderius of Benevento (1058–87) it enjoyed its golden age of political, intellectual and artistic influence. Its monks filled many south Italian bishoprics, and a number of them were promoted to be cardinals. Three times in sixty years, in 1057, 1087 and 1118, a Cassinese monk attained the see of St Peter. Desiderius himself was elected to succeed Gregory vii in 1087, with the title of Victor iii.

Athanasios of Constantinople: A Study of Byzantine Reactions to Latin Religious Infiltration

When the twenty–two year old Andronicos II (1282–1328) acceded to the throne of Byzantium, the empire was in a state of political, social, and ecclesiastical decline. This paper will consider the attempts of Patriarch Athanasios I to reverse this process of decay and to eliminate foreign religious elements from the capital of the Orthodox Byzantine empire. In 1261, the Byzantine empire had been restored to its capital, Constantinople, after fifty-seven years of Latin occupation. The city, however, had declined sadly from its former glory. The area of its effective hegemony was reduced to sections of western Anatolia and Greece, some islands in the Aegean, and Byzantine Thrace. Even this pitiful remnant was subject to the continuing assaults of the Turks, the pillaging of Catalan mercenaries turned hostile, the exploitation of Latin merchants, and threats of a Western military adventure to restore a Latin kingdom and Church of Constantinople.

The papal scandal (presidential address)

The Greek word skandalon means a stumbling-block, an offence. As such it is used frequently in the Septuagint and the new testament. In Byzantine texts at least from the eleventh century the word is employed as a collective noun to denote the many obstacles that stood in the way of union between the Greek and Latin churches. In the thirteenth century, however, it is often qualified by the phrase ‘relating to or concerning the pope’—τò κατά τòν πάπαν σκάνδαλον. It was as if the pope or the papacy had come to be identified as the cause or agent of the stumbling-block that lay in the path of understanding. This is the ‘papal scandal’ that I have in mind.

Bonaventura, the two mendicant orders, and the Greeks at the council of Lyons (1274)

For centuries it has been believed that at the famous council of Lyons, held in 1274 to reunite the Latin and Greek churches, the leading role defending Latin theological views in the debates that presumably took place was played by the great Franciscan theologian, Bonaventura. Recently, however, this view has been seriously called into question, and a re-evaluation of his role and that of other leading protagonists would seem to be in order. Far from being the ‘soul of the union,’ and the man who ‘crushed the Greeks in theological debate,’ as has been generally believed, Bonaventura’s part in the union seems to have been very limited. It is the purpose of this paper not only to put in clearer light and in its true context the work of Bonaventura with regard to the Greeks at the council, but also to indicate, if only rather briefly, the parts taken by other mendicants, the Franciscans John Parastron and Jerome of Ascoli, and the Dominicans, Albertus Magnus, William of Moerbeke, and their minister general, Peter of Tarentaise. Our aim, then, is to ascertain the relative importance of their respective roles in the preparations for, and the proclamation of, religious union.

A Greek Démarche on the Eve of the Council of Florence

Despite the superabundance of material available for the historical preliminaries and the progress of the Council of Ferrara-Florence, there is a source which to all intents and purposes has been neglected and has, therefore, remained outside the purview of the historiography concerning this critical Council. In more than one respect this source sheds significant light on the attitudes, mechanics and state of mind of at least some Greek sections and their aspirations in the matter of the union of the Greek and Latin Churches. The source is not an official document but, as we shall presently see, a memorandum or, to use Foreign Office jargon, a minute by a highly placed official who was not either in his private or public capacity in any way involved in the matter reported. The memorandum demands attention on several counts. It records an unexpected approach on the part of some Greeks to the duke of Milan shortly before Eugenius IV decided to transfer the Council from Ferrara to Florence. The record reveals, like a flashlight, how much diplomatic activity was going on in the corridors of power, in the couloirs, in the backrooms safely removed from the gaze of the public, of the annalists, official shorthand writers, and the forerunners of the modern journalists and of the media, that is to say, the diarists, eavesdroppers and reporters appointed by the various European courts at the seat of the Council. This memorandum or minute is the only source that informs posterity of an abortive, but nonetheless very symptomatic approach intended to settle the question of the union by radical means. Above all, the memorandum faithfully reflects the age-old Byzantine ideology which reached back into the somewhat hazy ancient Roman period and which had matured over more than a millennium that manifestly linkedNea Romawith Roman antiquity. The core and tenor of this approach associates historical continuity with historical Roman law, a combination that had served as the very ingredient, nay, as theanimathat gave birth to, and shaped the future of, the Church in Byzantine realms.

Latin Church Music under Edward VI

Latin Church Music under Edward VI

Het Tweede Concilie van Lyon (1274) Beschouwingen bij het 7e Eeuwfeest

The Second Council of Lyons (1274). Reflections after Seven Centuries The Council of Lyons was convoked by Gregory X primarily to launch a new crusade to regain the Holy Places. Union of the Churches, which the Greek Emperor, Michael VIII Palaeologus, had been using in his relations with the popes already for a dozen years to incline the popes to restrain a western attack on his Empire, would greatly facilitate a crusade. The Greeks were invited to the council provided there was some sign forthcoming of their having ended the schism dividing them from the Latin Church. With difficulty Michael persuaded the bulk of the Greek hierarchy to acknowledge the prerogatives of the Roman See — primacy of jurisdiction, right as a universal court of appeal, and commemoration of the popeʼs name in the oriental Liturgy — and on that basis to agree to union. Michael, himself, with a small hut sincere group, went further and accepted complete Roman faith including the Filioque doctrine. At Lyons the two delegates of the Greek Church wholeheartedly embraced union. The Council rejoiced and defined the double Procession of the Holy Spirit. In Constantinople opposition to the union was widespread, but the synod repeated its acceptance of the papal prerogatives. On the Holy Spirit it said nothing; seemingly it carefully avoided having the subject raised. Michael VIII, to satisfy Latin demands for a growing implementation of the union in the Empire had recourse to violence against his subjects. When he died in 1282 his name was execrated and the union was finished.

The Middle English Resurrection Play and Its Dramatic Antecedents

The Middle English Resurrection Play and Its Dramatic Antecedents Robert A. Brawer The representation of the. resurrection in medieval drama is the focal point of contemporary scholarly efforts to reassess long-established views concerning the origin, development, and critical evaluation of the earliest religious theater in the West. For early historians of the theater, the dramatization of the resurrection in the Latin church drama was regarded as the kernel or nucleus out of which evolved a vernacular drama that encompassed the whole of Christian redemptive history. The earliest Latin plays of the resurrection were said to be not only different from, but dramatically inferior to the vernacular plays which purportedly refined them by supplying more elaborate dialogue, characterization, and spectacle; indeed, the Latin plays could hardly be distinguished from the liturgical rites that sup­ posedly gave birth to them and within which they were origi­ nally incorporated. Contemporary scholars have reversed this notion of the evolution of religious drama and the judgment im­ plicit in it. O. B. Hardison, V. A. Kolve, and, most recently, Rosemary Woolf have, in their extended treatments of the sub­ ject, denied that there is any organic connection between the Latin drama of the church and the Corpus Christi plays or their vernacular antecedents, the Anglo-Norman plays of the twelfth century. Arguing that the Latin and vernacular plays belong to two distinct theatrical traditions, they have provided a basis for evaluating each type of drama according to criteria proper to it. Distinctions between the Latin and cycle plays are not only quantitative—the scope of the latter is immeasurably greater— but, even more significantly, qualitative: the original liturgical plays are decorous and formal in their iconic quality of repre­ sentation, processionally stylized mode of performance, and use of sung dialogue borrowed from Scripture and the liturgy; the 77 78 Robert A. Brawer cycle plays, more fully representational in their development of naturalistic dialogue, character, and circumstantial detail. Ac­ cordingly, any attempt at a comparative evaluation of their art must acknowledge such differences.! Yet despite the thoroughness with which these scholars have discredited the notion of an organic relationship or even indi­ vidual points of similarity between the Latin and vernacular religious plays,2 they have not exhausted all the possibilities for the discovery of significant analogies between them. For Rose­ mary Woolf, the direct influence of the Latin drama upon the cycles is “negligible”; yet she allows that the “vernacular re­ ligious drama would have been inconceivable as a form had not the liturgical offices of Easter and Christmas come to include passages of drama . . and further, that “the liturgical drama, rather than literary sources, provided an abiding authoritative model for the mystery cycles.”3 Such a statement needs more specific amplification than Miss Woolf gives it, for it requires us to consider the principles on which drama, as a distinctive form of art, is based. Before distinguishing particular modes of stag­ ing, representation, and dialogue, we must ask what the general function of the medieval resurrection play as a dramatic action of a certain kind really is. The term “action” as used here means more than the simple physical sequence of events on the stage. As the dynamic principle of organization behind the play as a whole, this action may be described as one in which Christ demonstrates, by his successive manifestations and actual appearances to his grieving and spiritually faltering disciples, the efficacy of his mission to redeem mankind and thus instills in them an enduring belief and faith in his royal sovereignty and in the success of their own apostolic mission. So defined, this action is essential to both liturgical and vernacular dramatizations of the resurrection, since it gives dramatic form to the representation of essentially borrowed materials. Within the play there is introduced and developed a moral conflict that is universal in scope, since the problem of belief and faith that besets the disciples in their humanity is one which is perennially faced by mankind in general. Hence, the resurrection play has an inherent emotional power for the spec­ tator. This emotional power is enhanced by its movement, or what Mary Marshall has called its dramatic peripety, from sor­ row...

Social Justice and the Latin Churches

Social Justice and the Latin Churches

Latin American Church GrowthSocial Justice and the Latin Churches. Church and Society in Latin America

Latin American Church GrowthSocial Justice and the Latin Churches. Church and Society in Latin America

Social Justice and the Latin Churches. Translated by Jorge Lara-Braud. Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1969. 137 pp. $2.95

Social Justice and the Latin Churches. Translated by Jorge Lara-Braud. Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1969. 137 pp. $2.95

Towards the Recovery of Wisdom

The most important task facing the West today is the recovery of that spiritual tradition which, by the fourteenth century, had found widespread expression and had its representatives throughout Catholic Europe, but which was then lost in the convulsions which shook the Latin Church in the sixteenth century, as attention was directed predominantly to questions of institutional authority, dogmatic orthodoxy and political advantage. Such, at least, is the view which in varying ways has recently been expressed by men of learning and perception whose viewpoint is that of non-European and non-Christian cultures, notably Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist. There have been suggestions of a similar kind from Christians who have opened their minds to the testimony of these other religions and cultures. Five recently published books which bear upon this subject are Edward Conze’s Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies, Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s The Encounter of Man and Nature, Frithjof Schuon’s In the Tracks of Buddhism, William Johnston’s The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing, and Sisirkumar Ghose’s Mystics and Society.The malaise of modern Western society, whose symptoms are high rates of alcoholism and other forms of drug addiction, suicide, violence, the increase of mental illness, the steady but lethal pollution of the atmosphere and the earth’s waters, and the prodigal squandering of natural resources with little thought for the future, are seen by more than one of these writers as being connected with the fact that from about the end of the fifteenth century European religion became divorced from the perennial philosophy (with its spiritual understanding of nature) of which until then it had formed a branch.

A Baroque Account of Byzantine Architecture Leone Allacci's "De templis Graecorum recentioribus"

IN 1640, Jean Morin, a French priest of the Oratory and sometime spiritual counsellor to Queen Henrietta Maria, was summoned to Rome by Urban VIII. The Pope's intention was to assemble the scholars most learned in the history of the Orthodox faith, his ultimate purpose to consummate the ancient dream of union between the Latin and Greek churches. In the course of his two years in Rome, Morin met and became a firm friend of Leone Allacci, a scriptor in the Vatican library. Both men were converts to Catholicism: Morin had abandoned Calvinism and Allacci the Orthodox faith of his childhood on Chios.

Kerygma and History

Kerygma and History Get access MANFRED HOFFMANN MANFRED HOFFMANN MANFRED HOFFMANN (B.D., Methodist Theological Seminary, Frankfurt, Germany; Dr. Theol. Heidelberg University) is Assistant Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. His translation of Hans von Campenhausen's The Fathers of the Latin Church has been published by A. and C. Black, London, while his own study, Der Dialog bei den christlichen Sckriftstellern der ersten vier Jahrhunderte, is to be brought out by the Berliner Akedemie der Wissnschaften in 1965. The present contribution is conceived - and published - as a programmatic essay Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume XXXIII, Issue 1, January 1965, Pages 24–33, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/XXXIII.1.24 Published: 01 January 1965

The Fathers of the Latin Church

The Fathers of the Latin Church

Book Review: The Fathers of the Latin Church

Book Review: The Fathers of the Latin Church

The Orthodox Churches on Church-State Relations and Religious Liberty

Apart from the pre-Constantinian era of church history, the areas conquered by Islam, and the modern situation under the rule of militant atheism, the Orthodox churches show a very strong preference for church-state unity and have even been somewhat over-accused of submission to the state, especially by those who try to apply Latin problematics in dealing with this question. Within the Roman Empire, the Latin churches were involved in the very same church-state relations as the Greek churches, until the barbarian invasions gave occasion to the papacy to re volt against the Roman Empire by accepting the status of a vas sal feudal kingdom of the Frankish Empire. The actual result of this arrangement was the enslavement of the church to pow erful secular interests, since the election of pope and king of the Papal States became one identical event, and since the election of bishops was generally put into the hands of the kings of Eu rope. In order to liberate the papacy and the churches of the West from secular interests, strict clericalism and papo-caesaris tic theories were evolved, which, however, proved in the long run much more successful on paper and in the imagination of pious Catholics and some Protestants than in practice. There are still alive many members of the last generation to witness the cen turies-old veto power exercised over papal elections by the Em perors of the Holy Roman Empire and Austria. Aside from the so-called radical reformers, the Reformation churches also showed strong tendencies to unite church and state. In America, pluralism and secular humanism made it necessary to follow the lead of the free churches in developing church and state separation in order to guarantee religious lib erty and to make possible civic cooperation for the common good. Besides this American concern for religious liberty, there is the missionary concern for the freedom of prosyletizing activi ties within those countries and societies which treat such enter prises as a form of foreign aggression. Then there is the weaker

The Councils and their Significance

The Council of Florence, about which I have recently been reading Fr Gill's monumental work, is surely one of the more poignant, and I would say gallant failures of history. I feel also that it has a special interest for me as a Dominican, since the chief spokesman on the Latin Side in the theological debates was the Dominican John Montenero; a Greek Dominican bishop, Andrew Chrysoberges, played a prominent part in the negotiations that preceded and followed the Council; and finally the patriarch Joseph II, who died a few weeks before the union was proclaimed, was buried in the Dominican church of S. Maria Novella. But for two more substantial reasons it is also of particular significance for subject this evening; it did achieve a union, however precarious and short-lived, between the Latins and the Greeks, and a union elicited from genuine hard discussion of the points at issue between the two Churches; and secondly it really settled once and for all the issue that Was dividing the Latin Church on whether or not a council has authority over the pope.

The Papacy and the Greeks (1122–1153)

It is the peculiar distinction of Steven Runciman to have directed our attention to the importance of the twelfth century in the “hardening” of the schism between the Greek and Latin Churches. In the main, Runciman attributes this unhappy development to those tensions which arose between East and West as a result of the crusades and the establishment of the Latin States in Syria-Palestine. While it is not our intention to question Runciman's arguments, it may be suggested that there are other fruitful approaches to the problem of relations between Rome and Constantinople in the twelfth century which Runciman has touched on only in passing. In general terms, it is the purpose of this article to suggest that the development of the schism must also be understood within the context of a complex political drama, centred on southern Italy, in which the Papacy, the Normans, the Germans and the Greeks were the chief protagonists. Our investigation will be confined to the period extending from the signing of the Concordat of Worms in 1122 to the death of Pope Eugene III in 1153. The purpose of the opening section which follows is: 1) to describe the genesis of this web of conflicting aims and objectives; 2) to indicate in what ways the problem of church union had become woven into the fabric of these political developments; 3) to delineate the various responses, both ecclesiastical and political, which the Papacy made to these new developments in her relations with the Greeks prior to the Second Crusade.

The Problem of Handel's Latin Church Music

The Problem of Handel's Latin Church Music