Heresy and Dissent

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来自 Yale University 的课程

A Journey through Western Christianity: from Persecuted Faith to Global Religion (200 - 1650)

203 个评分

Yale University

A Journey through Western Christianity: from Persecuted Faith to Global Religion (200 - 1650)

203 个评分

This course follows the extraordinary development of Western Christianity from its early persecution under the Roman Empire in the third century to its global expansion with the Jesuits of the early modern world. We explore the dynamic and diverse character of a religion with an enormous cast characters. We will meet men and women who tell stories of faith as well as of violence, suppression, and division. Along the way, we encounter Perpetua and her martyrdom in Carthage; the struggles of Augustine the bishop in North Africa; the zeal of Celtic monks and missionaries; the viciousness of the Crusades; the visions of Brigit of Sweden; and the fracturing of Christianity by Martin Luther’s protest. We hear the voices of great theologians as well as of those branded heretics by the Church, a powerful reminder that the growth of Christianity is a story with many narratives of competing visions of reform and ideals, powerful critiques of corruption and venality, and exclusion of the vanquished. The troubled history of Christian engagement with Jews and Muslims is found in pogroms and expulsions, but also in the astonishing ways in which the culture of the West was transformed by Jewish and Islamic learning. We shall explore the stunning beauty of the Book of Kells, exquisitely prepared by monks as the Vikings terrorized the coast of England. We will experience the blue light of the windows of Chartres, and ponder the opening questions of Thomas Aquinas’ great Summa. We will read from the Gutenberg Bible of the fifteenth century, which heralded the revolution brought by the printing press. We will travel from Calvin’s Geneva to Elizabeth’s England to Trent, where a Catholic Council met to inaugurate a modern, missionary Catholic church. We will walk through the great Escorial of Philip II of Spain, hear the poetry of John of the Cross, and follow the Jesuits to Brazil and China. Christianity in the West was forged in the fires of conflict and tumult, and it brought forth both creativity and violence. It echoed with calls for God’s world to be transformed, it inspired the most sublime art and architecture, yet it also revealed the power of the union of cross and sword to destroy. The course is a journey through the formation of the West as one strand of Christianity, as one chapter in a global story. It is a journey that has shaped our world.

从本节课中

Medieval Devotion

“Medieval Devotion,” moves away from the universities and cathedrals of Europe and investigates the lives of ordinary Christians trying to maintain their spiritual lives in an era almost 1000 years ago. The Church developed and popularized many devotional practices in this era, a number of which remain a part of Christianity today. Sacraments, saints, relics, pilgrimages, and the papacy are examined in this module, as all experienced an enormous growth in importance during the medieval era. Many of these features of Christianity became controversial, with Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century rejecting some of these devotional and ecclesiological features.

Heresy and Dissent9:43

与讲师见面

Bruce Gordon
Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History
Yale Divinity School

Although dissent became an intrical part of late Medieval Christianity,

amongst individuals and groups, the Inquisition had largely succeeded

in suppressing the major heresies of the Cathars and the Waldensians.

Although the latter, the Waldensians still survived in small pockets.

Nevertheless, in the 14th and 15th century,

two extraordinary movements emerged that were to have a profound effect,

not only on the Medieval world, but well into the Reformation.

The two principal figures around which these movements were organized,

and to whom the move names were given were John Wycliffe,

the Oxford theologian, and Jan Hus, rector of the University of Prague.

Wycliffe was a brilliant theologian, one of the great minds of his age,

and he had many followers within the university who took up his views,

but also, in addition to his theological teaching,

he was a critic of abuses and practices within the church.

Many of those practices were integral to the life of the late Medieval church,

such as pilgrimages.

The transubstantiation, the doctrine that the bread and

wine really become the body and blood of Christ.

And indulgences, Wycliffe, himself,

he taught within the university context but

his followers soon spread beyond the walls of the city,

and into the villages and cities of England.

Their message became even more radical than Wycliffe, himself.

They preached against the abuses at the priesthood, celibacy, and

a whole range of ideas that they held to be contrary to the word of scripture,

not at least to which, of course, the teaching of transubstantiation.

This group became known as the Lollards.

And the Lollards were one of the most influential movements within England

in the 14th, and into the 15th century.

The Inquisition had no place in England, but nevertheless,

from 1401, heresy laws were passed,

that those who were convicted of heresy were to be burned at the stake.

This led to a period of persecution of the Lollards.

Although, not that many were actually killed in the flames.

The Lollards, central to their teaching, was the word of God.

And perhaps, most famous of all this was the Wycliffe Bible,

which emerged between 1382 and 1395.

Here, we have an Image of the Wycliffe's Bible.

It is the translation that was made into English, not, although it bears

the name of Wycliffe, not by Wycliffe alone, but by a group of translators.

This particular image here, the first chapter of the Gospel of John.

In the beginning was the word.

The Wycliffe Bible was the major translation

of the Latin Vulgate into English, and

it caused considerable consternation amongst the officials of the Church,

and of the government who sought to suppress translations,

because they were associated with the Lollard heresy.

This movement towards emphasis on scripture and

the defense of scripture as the only basis of authority,

led of course many including John Fox,

to portray the Lollards as the forerunners of the English reformers.

John Wycliffe himself referred to famously as the morning star of the reformation.

So, this movement not only was influential in England, but

Wycliffe himself, his writings were read by Jan Hus.

And Jan Hus all saw himself as a faithful disciple of the church,

but grew increasingly critical of many of its practices and abuses.

Which brought him into controversy, not least because of his preaching.

Hus' story is extraordinary.

He was given a safe conduct to the Council of Constance.

The Council that had finally repaired the great schism within the church.

Emperor Sigismund had agreed to allow Hus to

come to the Council of Constance.

And he was given a certificate

that attested to his orthodoxy.

However, when Hus arrived in Constance,

he found a very different circumstance.

That opposition, which was considerable to his teaching,

and person, led to his execution, burnt at the stake,

as is represented in this 1430s illustration,

a colored wood cut from a chronicle.

And here we see, below, his ashes being loaded into a cart.

Hus died a martyr, and was seen and

continues to be seen as a great figure, a heroic figure.

It is said that when he died, he was at the stake, he predicted

that although he would die, one would come after him, and

this was thought to be predicting the rise of Martin Luther.

And eventually,

Martin Luther would associate himself quite closely with Jan Hus.

Although Hus died in 1450, at the Council of Constance,

he had many followers, but those followers as is often the case,

interpreted his thoughts in different directions.

The Utraquists, and the Taborites.

The Utraquists largely made up of checked nobolin.

So, a well educated class, the Taborities, much more apocalyptic and

radical, and drawing more from the peasant class.

What they shared in common which was reflected in the Four Articles of Prague,

in 1419, was a belief that was central to Hus's own teaching.

And that was that the lay people should receive both the bread and the wine,

that they should receive the cup and not just the Eucharistic wafer,

that the Eucharist should be administered in both kinds.

This had been a central part of Hus' teaching,

and was taken up as a defining issue of the Hussites.

So much so, that when their armies would go into battle

against the papal forces, which were launched as a crusade,

they would have banners on which the Eucharistic cup would be portrayed.

Hus left an extraordinary legacy, but

his followers are the ones who developed it into a major movement.

So much so, that it could not be suppressed by the papal and

imperial forces, whose crusades against the Hussites ended in disaster.

Nevertheless, the Hussites eventually divided.

The Utraquists Came to the Council of Basel,

to make a reconciliation with the Catholic Church,

one that acknowledged their position.

So, they found agreement with the Consularis,

the Taborites rejected this, and were ultimately defeated.

Hus' teaching remained an essential part of a whole development of theology,

that would be picked up by the reformers who saw him as

one of the great figures of the late Medieval church.

The Lollards and the Hussites demonstrate the diversity of thought and

practice within the great Medieval world.

And that gives us a sense of not only the richness of that culture,

but of its powerful sense of dissent.

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