RamistThomist
Puritanboard Clerk
Schaff, Philip and David. History of the Christian Church vol. 6: The Late Middle Ages1294-1517, Hendrickson Reprint.
The sub-narrative in this volume is “The Emergence of Liberty in the Late Middle Ages.” The trick was to provide for the liberty of the individual man without overfeeding church or state. The minor key is how bad scholasticism is. Schaff is not a neutral historian, but that’s what makes him fun to read.
Schaff has this bad habit of seeing every mystic as a proto-evangelical, which lets him cover up all their faults. He tries to excuse Meister Eckhart’s pantheism by noting that it is “Christian pantheism.” That doesn’t make it better.
Schaff sees the Papacy’s decline beginning with Boniface (11), whose reign contained the diabolical Unum Sanctum. Both swords belong to the church. The temporal is “wielded for it, the spiritual by it.” The disaster of the Avignon Papacy called for the time of conciliarism, whose greatest, yet compromised, moment was in the Council of Constance. It put a theoretical (yet never practical) check on papal power, yet it also burned Jan Huss.
The climax of this volume is Schaff’s fine, if somewhat hagiographical, treatment of the “Reformers before the Reformation.” He gives a good survey of Wyclif’s thought and a heart-wrenching treatment of Jan Huss.
He has a lurid section on the Renaissance Popes. You feel guilty for reading it (since their lives read like dime-store romance novels), but you can’t stop, either.
While he has a good section on the Spanish Inquisition, the section on witchcraft calls for some remarks. He correctly reported the facts (especially in the abominable Malleus Maleficarum). He ridicules the belief in witches. He comes close to mocking the belief in the spiritual world, altogether. Schaff, much like the fanatics he decries, was a child of his time. Respectable people, whether conservative or liberal, just didn’t believe in witches.
That raises a problem, though. The Bible does believe in witches. To be fair, the medieval treatment of witches went far beyond incompetency. The correct response, though, is not a functional deism. Rather, we should investigate what the ancient man, including the biblical writers, actually thought about the spiritual realm.
Nonetheless, it makes for good reading, and Schaff is already and always a good writer.
The sub-narrative in this volume is “The Emergence of Liberty in the Late Middle Ages.” The trick was to provide for the liberty of the individual man without overfeeding church or state. The minor key is how bad scholasticism is. Schaff is not a neutral historian, but that’s what makes him fun to read.
Schaff has this bad habit of seeing every mystic as a proto-evangelical, which lets him cover up all their faults. He tries to excuse Meister Eckhart’s pantheism by noting that it is “Christian pantheism.” That doesn’t make it better.
Schaff sees the Papacy’s decline beginning with Boniface (11), whose reign contained the diabolical Unum Sanctum. Both swords belong to the church. The temporal is “wielded for it, the spiritual by it.” The disaster of the Avignon Papacy called for the time of conciliarism, whose greatest, yet compromised, moment was in the Council of Constance. It put a theoretical (yet never practical) check on papal power, yet it also burned Jan Huss.
The climax of this volume is Schaff’s fine, if somewhat hagiographical, treatment of the “Reformers before the Reformation.” He gives a good survey of Wyclif’s thought and a heart-wrenching treatment of Jan Huss.
He has a lurid section on the Renaissance Popes. You feel guilty for reading it (since their lives read like dime-store romance novels), but you can’t stop, either.
While he has a good section on the Spanish Inquisition, the section on witchcraft calls for some remarks. He correctly reported the facts (especially in the abominable Malleus Maleficarum). He ridicules the belief in witches. He comes close to mocking the belief in the spiritual world, altogether. Schaff, much like the fanatics he decries, was a child of his time. Respectable people, whether conservative or liberal, just didn’t believe in witches.
That raises a problem, though. The Bible does believe in witches. To be fair, the medieval treatment of witches went far beyond incompetency. The correct response, though, is not a functional deism. Rather, we should investigate what the ancient man, including the biblical writers, actually thought about the spiritual realm.
Nonetheless, it makes for good reading, and Schaff is already and always a good writer.
