“I Believe Because it is Absurd”: The Enlightenment Invention of Tertullian'sCredo

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-364
Author(s):  
Peter Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Cognitive Status ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Common

Tertullian is widely regarded as having originated the expressionCredo quia absurdum (est)(I believe because it is absurd) and the phrase often appears in contemporary polemics about the rationality of religious belief. Patristic scholars have long pointed out that Tertullian never said this or meant anything like it. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to the circumstances in which this specific phrase came into existence and why, in spite of its dubious provenance, it continues to be regarded by many as a legitimate characterization of religious faith. This paper shows how Tertullian's original expression—“It is certain, because impossible”—was first misrepresented and modified in the early modern period. In seventeenth century England a “credo” version—I believebecause it is impossible—became the common form of Tertullian's maxim. A further modification, building on the first, was effected by the EnlightenmentphilosopheVoltaire, who added the “absurdity condition” and gave us the modern version of the paradox: I believebecause it is absurd. These modifications played a significant role in Enlightenment representations of religion as irrational, and signal the beginning of a new understanding of faith as an epistemic vice. This doubtful maxim continues to play a role in debates about the cognitive status of religious faith, and its failure to succumb to the historical evidence against it is owing to its ongoing rhetorical usefulness in such debates.

The Longue Durée of the French Bourgeoisie

2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Heller
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
Dialectical Opposition ◽  
The Revolution

AbstractBeginning with Engels, Marxist historiography viewed the absolute monarchy in France as mediating between the nobility and the emergent capitalist bourgeoisie. More recent Marxist accounts stress that the absolute monarchy reflected the interests of the nobility. Revisionist Marxist historians have taken this perspective to an extreme arguing that, at the height of the Bourbon monarchy in the seventeenth century, a capitalist bourgeoisie did not exist. This paper argues that, in taking such a view, these historians have ignored the ongoing dialectical opposition between the forces of rent and profit in the early-modern period. As a result, they have severed the connection between the ancien régime and the Revolution of 1789. Despite being thrown on the defensive by the advance of rent and the crystallisation of the absolutist state, a capitalist bourgeoisie that emerged in sixteenth-century France survived and persevered during the seventeenth century. It resumed the initiative in the succeeding period of the Enlightenment.

The Folly of the Cross

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Viladesau
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Theology Of The Cross ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Fourth Volume ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Satisfaction Model

This work surveys the ways in which theologians, artists, and composers of the early modern period dealt with the passion and death of Christ. The fourth volume in a series, it locates the theology of the cross in the context of modern thought, beginning with the Enlightenment, which challenged traditional Christian notions of salvation and of Christ himself. It shows how new models of salvation were proposed by liberal theology, replacing the older “satisfaction” model with theories of Christ as bringer of God’s spirit and as social revolutionary. It shows how the arts during this period both preserved the classical tradition and responded to innovations in theology and in style.

scholarly journals Violence as Identity: Christians and Muslims in Hungary in the Medieval and Early Modern Period

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Nora Berend
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern Period

Wrote Miklós Zrínyi (Nikola Zrinski) in the mid seventeenth century about those who died fighting against the Ottomans. The poet, who himself was engaged in both politics and war, defined Hungarian identity as Christian and premised on warfare unto death against Muslims.

CIRCULATING MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE IN EARLY SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY: MUSICA POETICA TREATISES OF JOHANN HERMANN SCHEIN AND MICHAEL ALTENBURG IN THE LIBRARY OF JOHANN CASPAR TROST

2016 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 131-201
Author(s):  
Inga Mai Groote ◽  
Dietrich Hakelberg
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Book History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Learning And Teaching ◽  
Musical Education ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Musical Knowledge ◽  
Musica Poetica

Recent research on the library of Johann Caspar Trost the Elder, organist in Halberstadt, has led to the identification of a manuscript with two unknown treatises on musica poetica, one a lost treatise by Johann Hermann Schein and the other an unknown treatise by Michael Altenburg. Together they offer fresh insights into the learning and teaching of music in the early modern period. The books once owned by Trost also have close connections to his personal and professional life. This article situates the newly discovered manuscript in the framework of book history and Trost’s biography, and discusses the two treatises against the background of contemporary books of musical instruction (Calvisius, Lippius, or Finolt). The historical context of the manuscript, its theoretical sources and its origins all serve to contribute to and further the current understanding of musical education in early modern central Germany. An edition of the treatises is provided.

scholarly journals “Turkish” Textiles in South-Eastern and East-Central Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Evidence of Transylvanian Customs Accounts

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 363-382
Author(s):  
Mária Pakucs-Willcocks
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Serial Data

Abstract This paper analyzes data from customs accounts in Transylvania from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth on traffic in textiles and textile products from the Ottoman Empire. Cotton was known and commercialized in Transylvania from the fifteenth century; serial data will show that traffic in Ottoman cotton and silk textiles as well as in textile objects such as carpets grew considerably during the second half of the seventeenth century. Customs registers from that period also indicate that Poland and Hungary were destinations for Ottoman imports, but Transylvania was a consumer’s market for cotton textiles.

Looking for Regional Words in Late Seventeenth-Century England: Bishop White Kennett and his Glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695)

Sederi ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 153-174
Author(s):  
Javier Ruano García
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Morphological Traits ◽  
Additional Data ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Lexical Diversity ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Descriptive Account ◽  
History Of

The analysis of regional dialects in the Early Modern period has commonly been disregarded in favour of an ample scholarly interest in the ‘authorised’ version of English which came to be eventually established as a standard. The history of regional ‘Englishes’ at this time still remains to a very great extent in oblivion, owing mainly to an apparent scarcity of sources which supply trustworthy data. Research in this field has been for the most part focused on phonological, orthographical and morphological traits by virtue of the rather more abundant information that dialect testimonies yield about them. Regional lexical diversity has, on the contrary, deserved no special attention as uncertainty arises with regard to what was provincially restricted and what was not. This paper endeavours to offer additional data to the gloomy lexical scene of Early Modern regional English. It is our aim to give a descriptive account of the dialect words collated by Bishop White Kennett’s glossary to Parochial Antiquities (1695). This underutilised specimen does actually widen the information furnished by other well known canonical word-lists and provides concrete geographical data that might help us contribute to complete the sketchy map of lexical provincialisms at the time.

Two Early Modern Revolts

2019 ◽  
pp. 45-70
Author(s):  
Susan Marks
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Common Humanity ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right ◽  
Early English ◽  
Right To Buy

This chapter continues the discussion of early English social criticism with a consideration of two uprisings of the early modern period: Kett’s Rebellion (1549) and the Midland Rising (1607). These uprisings were formidable instances of organised resistance to enclosure and related changes, and the texts which have come down to us concerning them connect that resistance to a belief in the original equality of all human beings, the common humanity of rich and poor, and the fundamental right of everyone to live (including the right to buy essential provisions at a fair and affordable price).

The Accidents of the Soul

2021 ◽  
pp. 55-82
Author(s):  
Benedict S. Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Medical Diagnostics ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Human Actions ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Diagnostic Medicine ◽  
Over Time

“The Accidents of the Soul” asks which disciplines were seen to provide a knowledge of the passions in the early modern period, and how that map of the disciplines changed over time. It opens by noting the relatively minor position the passions held in a received philosophical “science of the soul,” itself divided between physics and metaphysics. As “accidents of the soul”—that is, contingent qualitative alterations in the soul—the passions lay at the margins of philosophical knowledge: they were seen as subject to too much particularity and contingency to belong to what one author called “certaine science.” They belonged instead to the “low” sciences, the practical sciences, fields that study human actions and that therefore were seen to produce a merely probable knowledge of particulars: fields like rhetoric, politics, poetics, ethics. The passions also belonged to medicine insofar as diagnostic medicine was understood as an art: in medicine, “accidents” are symptoms and the phrase “accidents of the soul” belongs to medical discourse insofar as it takes account of the particularities of the passions as part of a regimen of health. The chapter situates the seventeenth-century treatises on the passions in relation to various kinds of discourse on the passions all seen as promoting forms of probable knowledge on the model of medical diagnostics: physiology and “characterology,” most notably. It ends with a reading of Shakespeare’s Othello as a text that probes the limits—and the dangers—of this probable knowledge of the passions.

scholarly journals The International Ceramics Trade and Social Change in the Red River Delta in the Early Modern Period

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Ueda Shinya ◽  
Nishino Noriko
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
River Delta ◽  
Red River ◽  
Traditional Society ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Red River Delta ◽  
Modern Period

Abstract Nishimura Masanari argued that the construction of enclosed-type levees caused the water level of the Red River to rise in seventeenth-century northern Vietnam, and he suggested that this phenomenon triggered social changes that brought about the establishment of Vietnamese “traditional society,” represented by the autonomous villages of the Red River Delta. Nishimura’s archaeological discussion of the transition from horseshoe-shaped levees to enclosed-type levees suggests new ways of studying socioeconomic change in early modern Vietnam. This article examines the utilization of the dry riverbed area of the Red River near Hanoi and tracks changes in the position of the levee near the neighboring villages of Bát Tràng and Kim Lan from the seventeenth century onward. The article shows that Nishimura’s argument concerning the levee network makes it possible to locate the establishment of early modern Vietnamese society in the “Age of Commerce.”

scholarly journals Sons of Something: Taxes, Lawsuits, and Local Political Control in Sixteenth-Century Castile

2007 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauricio Drelichman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Gain Control ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Tax Exemptions ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Economic Stagnation ◽  
High Level

The widespread ennoblement of the Spanish bourgeoisie in the Early Modern period has been traditionally considered one of the main causes of the “crisis of the seventeenth century.” Using a new time series of nobility cases I provide the first quantitative assessment of Castilian ennoblement. Contrary to established scholarship, I find that the tax exemptions cannot alone explain the flight to privilege. My data show that the central motivation behind ennoblement was to gain control of local governments. Although ennoblement reflected a high level of redistributive activity, there is no evidence linking it to economic stagnation in Spain.

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