Posted on 04/22/2009 11:16:36 AM PDT by Sherman Logan
... Every half-millennium or so an event occurs in our history that changes the basis of society. The Romans come, the Romans go. The Normans come; and between their arrival in 1066 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 there is one seismic event after which society sets off (after a false start or two) on an entirely new course: the Reformation in England. When the Convocation of Canterbury of the Church in England agreed in March 1531 to accede to Henry's demands about church governance that included the clergy's recognition of him as head of the English church, it also triggered a process of such profound economic and political change that even today there is still dispute about the extent of the consequences. Let me add my three ha'porth: without the Reformation we would not have had what Seeley called "the expansion of England", we would not have had a middle class educated and powerful enough to initiate the industrial revolution, we would not have had the empire we did, and would not have had the land and sea power that kept us free from invasion and foreign influence: not to mention the theological consequences.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Well I can see arrogance on both sides here, but opression by a consensus of thought on only one.
Without hijacking the thread, I can only ask you, which society is more likely to advance economic development, Britian, which is wringing cestui que use fraud out of land ownership, or Italy, where an insult to the Pope gets you a visit to a torture chamber?
But what about the beauty wrought by Michelangleo? Suppose it were shut away by the purchaser not to be seen and shared by millions? It's purchase price would still accomplish but a fraction of the feeding/teaching of the poor, that is our job.
If I may:
The Church would be selling the timeless for the temporary; the patrimony of all for the convenience of a few.
There is an old Russian saying "Bad crops comes from God, hunger comes from man." IOW,there's more than enough food and/or potential for growing food in the world. The hunger you speak of comes from evil men for their own purposes. How would stripping the RCC of its art work change that?
How many bags of rice would selling Raphael's The School of Athens buy? And what happens after the rice is eaten...and forgotten? People are still hungry, tyrants are still evil, The Church has nothing to show for it, and we regular folks have nothing to restore, renew, affirm, and delight our faith and/or love of art.
Add to this the fact that a lot of the Church's treasure is tied of in things that simply can't be sold. They may be too big or too much a part of the landscape, i.e. the Sistine Chapel or Michelangelo's Pita; or, to be honest, things nobody in particular would wants: who'd want, for example, the Sarcophagus of Junius Bessus?
On that definition the first police state was the Papal States from 1357 to 1870
How was Henry VIII responsible for that?
Beetles Ping
“..showed that God’s Will can be disposed with whenever it is “inconvenient..”
really???
Rodrigo Borgia
You caught it. That’s the whole shebang.
The article is not saying it was fair or right, just simply where it lead to. You cannot deny that the rights of the common man were born out of the greed, capriciousness and arrogance of the aristocracy/crown and their battle for money and power.
That is ironic. We really do live in a world of lost knowledge.
True enough. Been guilty myself.
Not actually true. Kings of England, including Henry, had fully demonstrated their ability to loot the clergy when they felt it was needed.
His basic motivation was what he felt to be the absolute need for a legitimate male heir. Given that England had in the previous century fought an utterly devastating series of civil wars over the succession, it is difficult to argue with his theory that a male heir was essential. It seems unlikely that his desire for divorce was motivated by sexual desires, since kings of the time had little problem getting all they wanted outside of marriage. As Mel Brooks said, "It's GOOD to be the king!"
Previous kings of England and other monarchs had routinely been granted divorces or annulments under these circumstances. The basic reason Henry couldn't get one from the Pope was because Catherine's uncle, Charles V of Spain and the Empire, exerted extreme pressure on the Pope not to let Henry have what he wanted.
The great irony here is that Henry's male heir was sickly and died young, while his eventual female successor, Elizabeth, turned out to be by any standard one of the greatest rulers of all time.
Link please.
The monks could not have "invented" steel. Quite good, even exceptional, steel had been made for many centuries at this time, for instance by the Romans, Indians and Japanese. It just wasn't made in quantities that allowed it to be used for purposes other than for the most part arms and armor.
What the Industrial Revolution (eventually) provided was not steel, but rather cheap steel, cheap enough that it could be used for structural purposes.
The invention of movable type should be thrown into the mix, imo. The internet will have a similarly profound impact on civilization.
The Albigenses certainly shouldn’t have been crusaded against. But they were not forerunners of todays fundamanalists or evangelicals.
In fact, they were gnostics and Manicheans, not Christians by any logical use of the term. They had a great many doctrines wildly at variance with the Bible and Protestantism.
Steel didn't really become cheap until the invention of the Bessemer process in 1855, by which time the Industrial Revolution was well established, "And Iron -- Cold Iron -- was master of it all!"
That’s why I said “eventually.”
The changes in steel production rates in the later 19th century are staggering, going from a few thousands of tons per year to millions of tons per year in a very short time.
Steel, however, had gotten a lot cheaper well prior to Bessemer. While it had not gotten cheap enough to be used extensively for structural purposes yet, it became a lot more reasonably priced for its traditional tool and armament uses.
The most interesting thing is that the quality of steel has not improved, at least for tool/weapns uses, in close on 2,000 years. The old Japanese and Indian swordsmiths produced quality that has never been bettered.
OTOH, it might take an expert Japanese swordsmith a year to make one or a few blades. Such a product could never be inexpensive.
Perhaps not. But that was not the point. It's not like he said I'll take over the church and change the world. Just one of those unintended/unforeseen consequences. And lets face it, the church of old was a bit oppressive, especially in the sciences.
Hitler changed the world in profound ways still felt today. We can acknowledge that without looking up to him.
Info is from a paper magazine I read some time back. Don't know if there is a link.
"The monks could not have "invented" steel. Quite good, even exceptional, steel had been made for many centuries at this time, for instance by the Romans, Indians and Japanese. It just wasn't made in quantities that allowed it to be used for purposes other than for the most part arms and armor. What the Industrial Revolution (eventually) provided was not steel, but rather cheap steel, cheap enough that it could be used for structural purposes.
Which, as I recall the article, was precisely what the monks had almost perfected--large-scale production methodology (relative to the times). They were "on the cusp" of inventing the steel revolution. Henry screwed that. If he could have kept it in his pants, we'd probably have interplanetary travel today.
I disagree.
As the article says, the key factor in the Industrial Revolution is not the development of technology. We have always had brilliant individuals and groups that create new ways of doing things. The key factor in actually changing things is whether the society as a whole allows these individuals to move forward and actually implement their ideas, especially when they are able to profit from their inventiveness and interact with others. When this happens, one invention is able to build on another and a continuous process of development and improvement can begin.
China created most of the world’s technological advances prior to about 1500 AD. It essentially stalled out at that level due to government clamping down on innovation. The far less controlled and diverse society of Europe, with the England at least partially created by Henry VIII leading the way, went in a couple of hundred years from rough military and cultural equality with China and India to being far ahead of them. The reason was that individuals could change things in Europe. In China they could not. They weren’t allowed to.
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