留学dissertation范文：天主教的比较与历史:Comparison and History of the Catholic Church

1450到1700年间是欧洲发生巨大转变和矛盾的时期。知识、科学和文艺复兴时期的文化启蒙是盛开的，但占主导地位的社会力量几乎总是宗教，特别是天主教。

宇宙的格局，世界的历史和命运，以及社会、政治和家庭关系的排列，都用圣经和神学术语来解释。信仰和仪式影响了许多不同层次的人，使精神，智力，情感呼吁。公共事务和私人事务都深受宗教的影响。

鉴于政教分离的概念是外国平民甚至大多数受过教育的人的时候，教会和政府之间的界限是模糊的或不存在的，因此教堂占据了形而上学和心理的伟大的父亲的形象和空间，与他们互动是由，和谁保持秩序并给予祝福和惩罚，通过各种仪式：规定的仪式，仪式和圣礼。这些从平凡到崇高，从庸俗到庄严，在过去的250年里交织在千百万人日常生活的结构之中。

 

Did Early Modern (c. 1450-1700) Catholics have a better appreciation of the 'need' for rituals than Protestants?

 

INTRODUCTION 简介

 

The years 1450 to 1700 were a time of great transition and contradiction in Europe. The intellectual, scientific, and cultural enlightenment of the Renaissance was blooming prodigiously, yet the dominant societal force was almost invariably religion, particularly Roman Catholicism, whose sole domination gave way to an uneasy – at best – power-sharing relationship with its so-called bastard child, Protestantism, whose birth was circa 1517. Though Protestantism was a just reaction to the hypocritical corruption and tyranny of the bloated Catholic bureaucracy, whose raison d’etre had become as much about the perpetuation of its own control over Western civilization than about spirituality and enlightenment, both strains of Christianity nevertheless were intensely patriarchal, hierarchical, and structured, and as such relied heavily on a variety of traditions and rituals to perpetuate social and religious continuity and stability during a time of turmoil. It was a two-way dynamic, also – it is difficult to overestimate the degree to which common people in the Early Modern period framed their existence and its meaning through Christianity:

 

The pattern of the cosmos, the history and destiny of the world, and the ordering of social, political and domestic relations were all explained in biblical and theological terms. … Faith and ritual affected people at many different levels, making spiritual, intellectual, emotional and visceral appeals. Public and private affairs alike were deeply infused by religion.[1]

 

Given that the notion of separation of church and state was foreign to commoners and even most educated people of the time, the line between the Church and governments was blurry or nonexistent, and thus the Church occupied the metaphysical and psychological persona and space of The Great Father Figure, with whom interaction was governed by, and who maintained order and meted out blessings and punishments through a variety of rituals: prescribed rites, ceremonies, and sacraments. These ranged from the mundane to the sublime; the vulgar to the dignified and were interwoven into the fabric of everyday life for tens of millions of people during the aforementioned 250 years. While doubtlessly there was much sincerity of intention from the Church (Catholic or Protestant in variety) in terms of attempting to bring spiritual edification to its followers, the Church also had what seemed to be an almost genetically encoded need to exert and perpetuate its power. Rituals were a key component these ongoing efforts, because after all, “ritualization is first and foremost a strategy for the construction of certain types of power relationships effective within particular social organizations,”[2] in this case power and relationships that were both benevolent and punitive in both nature and habit.#p#分页标题#e#

 

Though the average citizen was still devoutly religious and found much solace in religious practices and rituals, the Catholic Church’s fortunes had ebbed somewhat by 1450 in comparison to the virtually unrestricted power it had enjoyed for several centuries prior. The devastating human cost of the bubonic plague, a.k.a. The Black Death, had not only severely undermined the conventional economic structures that held Europe together, but had also severely undermined the populations’ faith in the power of Catholic Church. The Church, despite predictable assurances and dicta proclaiming their power over sickness and death as the living representative of Christ on earth, was utterly powerless to curtail the shocking and inescapably vast tragedy of the Black Plague. Between 1347 and 1351, it is estimated that the Plague killed between a third and half of Europe’s entire population – tens of millions of people. The Church promised they could cure the sick and banish the disease, but they of course could not, as their entrenched hostility to science had left them with a blind spot with respect to medicine, to say nothing of their complicity in perpetuating the socioeconomic structures which facilitated unsanitary living conditions suffered by most common people – the chief reason for the spread of the Plague. Ironically, however, the morose and somber zeitgeist that was predominant in Europe after the Black Plague, the result of the collective grief of a civilization having lost a colossal part of itself, resulted in some people clinging even more tightly to the structures and rituals of their religion. Though life itself was fragile, fleeting, and often seemed to unfold with a cavalier cruelty, the structure and order of religious ritual provided the belief, authentic or not, that there was some structure and order to the greater universe. “…Sterility, bankruptcy, or death could strike anyone at any time, but rituals provided a countervailing principle of order… Rituals brought the cosmic order into daily life by giving person access to divine power.” [3] Nonetheless, the inescapable conclusion drawn by many people was that the Church, rituals or no rituals, was impotent to stop the greatest human tragedy anyone had experienced. As such, the atmosphere in the decades comprising the tumultuous wake following the Plague was one in which people were far more willing and interested in secular and scientific approaches to problems like disease, poverty, and other common woes. This shift contributed heavily to both the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation itself.

 

The advent of the Renaissance, agreed upon by most scholars as being around the middle of the 15th century, coincided with what is termed Early Modern Catholicism, a religion that found itself directly competing for the people’s relevance and trust with subversive elements within Renaissance science, art, and literature which began in Italy and quickly spread throughout Europe. Some elements of the Renaissance were intentionally subversive in attacking the Church; others had subversive effects inasmuch as the scientific or philosophical conclusions they reached were not in accord with Church doctrines. In particular, scientific advancements rooted in the use of empiricism – which demanded verifiable, tangible proof instead of faith in abstractions or religious dogma – presented a direct challenge to the authority of the Church. The collective work of a succession of scientists, including Copernicus, Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, seriously undermined a variety of official Church positions that seem ludicrous in retrospect, such as the insistence that the solar system – and indeed, the universe – revolved around the Earth. The Catholic Church’s reaction to the shifting tides was its own rather fierce effort to reassert its power and relevance in both earthly and spiritual domains through a variety of methods ranging from clumsy and violent suppression of ideas it deemed impertinent or blasphemous, to a Reformation within itself (the Council of Trent, 1545-1563) to counter the great schism in Christianity caused by the Protestant Reformation. A constant theme, though, was a perpetual Catholic insistence on the use and value of rituals both for less noble purposes of control and power, as well as more noble humanitarian and spiritual purposes. Even the Protestants, breaking so strongly with the Catholics as they did, recognized the value of rituals and utilized them to both perpetuate and increase their numbers and institutional strength as they competed with Catholics to win the souls and minds of the Renaissance-era Europeans. To understand these rituals is to understand, at least from one perspective, an era so far removed from our own that it is difficult for many people to comprehend the times as much beyond ornate barbarism. Europe of the era was more than such a one-dimensional reality; it was, as all history is, a history of human beings struggling to make sense of their lives, people who “during the Early Modern period exhibited a highly sophisticated sensitivity to rituals. As the English jurist, John Selden put it in his Table Talk (London, 1689), ‘to know what was generally believed in all ages, the way is to consult the liturgies.’”[4] Indeed we shall, paying close attention to whether Catholics or Protestants seemed to have a better comprehension of why people might embrace and/or cling to ritual.#p#分页标题#e#

 

CATHOLIC VIEWPOINT 天主教的观点

 

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church ascended to the role of the most powerful and far-reaching organization on the planet, thanks in part to the vestigial influence it inherited from its incestuous intertwinement with the civic element of the Roman Empire itself –Emperor Flavius Theodosius had declared Christianity the state religion in 391 A.D., an extremely fortuitous turn of events given the centuries of vicious persecution endured by Christians at the hands of the Roman government. However, the Catholic Church claimed its legitimacy and roots as far back as the initial years after Christ’s death, holding the (later controversial) institutional conviction that its papal lineage was descended directly from the apostle (and later saint) Peter, whom is considered under Catholic tradition to be the first Pope. The Pope was, and is considered to this day to be the Vicar of Christ, acting on His behalf and wielding His authority; the Pope carries the official title ‘Vicar of Christ and the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church.’ In keeping with such an inflated sense of importance, the Pope is considered infallible, a state of perfection the Church maintains was and is granted by Jesus himself:

 

Christ endowed the Church's shepherds with the charism of infallibility in matters of faith and morals. The exercise of this charism takes several forms… The Roman Pontiff, head of the college of bishops, enjoys this infallibility in virtue of his office, when, as supreme pastor and teacher of all the faithful -- who confirms his brethren in the faith he proclaims by a definitive act a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals.... When the Church through its supreme Magisterium [the Pope] proposes a doctrine ‘for belief as being divinely revealed,’ and as the teaching of Christ, the definitions ‘must be adhered to with the obedience of faith.’[5]

 

Other relevant tenets of Catholicism included the notion of a separation of man from God due to sin. The Church offered a chance to be reunited with God through a combination of faith and good works, and served as an essential intermediary between man and God/Christ. The byzantine structures and rituals of the Church served as means of manifesting the means for reconnection and for better or for worse, the Church – from the Pope on down – has always had an authoritarian and arbitrary control over what those means were and are, including the invention and perpetuation of any number of rituals which are not necessarily literally prescribed by Biblical texts (though the Catholics would argue they in fact are). Nonetheless, the Church believes the infallibility of the Pope endows it with the power to do whatever it deems fit to enable mankind to reconnect and reunite with God through the Church, which is a sine qua non intermediary between God and man – in fact, according to Catholic doctrine, “the Church's first purpose is to be the sacrament of the inner union of men with God."[6]#p#分页标题#e#

 

The sacraments, plural, are in fact a key component of Catholic ritual, and are considered actions that are integral demonstrations and requirements of faith. ‘Sacramentals,’ or signs and symbols that manifest spiritual power, often went hand in hand with the sacraments. The sacraments were intended to confer the grace of the Holy Spirit on the faithful; sacramentals were intended to facilitate cooperation with God by serving as reminders of His glory. There are seven sacraments:

 

Baptism – the initial sacrament, involving the immersion in or pouring of water on the head of a newborn. It is intended to free the person from original sin and ‘mark’ the person as belonging to Christ and embark him or her on a Christian path.

Confirmation – the second chronological sacrament, intended to signify a deepening and solidifying of a person’s walk with Christ and membership in the Church. It is generally administered to young adults who have undertaken biblical study and church-sponsored activities to deepen their faith and illustrate their commitment to good works.

The Eucharist – unlike the first two sacraments, the Eucharist is administered numerous times – weekly participation is generally considered mandatory, if not obligatory. Perhaps the most important Catholic sacrament, the Eucharist involves the sharing of bread and wine between Church and churchgoer to honor Christ’s sacrifice of his body and blood in a ritual He described to his disciples during the Last Supper (Matthew 26:26-28; Mark 14:22-24; Luke 22:19-20). The Catholic Church holds that during this ritual, the bread and wine literally become, in every manner except physical appearance, the body and blood of Christ -- and invokes the spiritual ramifications therein. This divine process is known as transubstantiation; the bread and wine are transformed into both the physical and spiritual substance of Jesus’ body and blood.

Reconciliation – known currently as the confession process and consists of a priest bestowing spiritual healing on a person who has increased his or her distance from God by sinning; it involves four elements: the confession of sin; the person’s authentic contrition and wish to reconcile; the priest’s recommendation for penance, i.e., what the person can do to make up for the sin(s); and lastly, the priest’s absolution. This sacrament, more than any other, cements the Church’s mandatory role as an intermediary between God and man.

Anointing of the Sick – a special blessing and spiritual healing administered to a sick person, which also includes last rites for the dying.

Holy Orders – the sacrament by which a lay believer is endowed with the privileges, powers, and responsibilities of church leader, specifically a bishop, priest, or deacon. Only a bishop can administer this particular sacrament.#p#分页标题#e#

Matrimony – a couple marries in the presence of a church official, though by tradition the couple is understood to be administering the sacrament to one another. Once a couple has accepted the sacrament of marriage, the Church holds that the union cannot be dissolved.

Though ostensibly purely religious or spiritual in nature, the sacraments in fact touched every major rite of passage in a person’s life – birth, the transition to adulthood, marriage, sickness, and death, as well as everything in between – the temptation to sin, the acts and consequences of sin, the celebration of the idea that Jesus gave his life so that sin would not permanently estrange mankind from God. In addition to mandating participation in the sacraments, the Catholic Church also recognized the value of allowing them to intermix and intermingle with the various local secular (and sometimes even pagan!) customs and celebrations that went along with the same rites of passage. In this way, the church made itself indispensable by insinuating itself into every facet of daily life. And for good measure, the church fortified its societal value by declaring itself indispensable for good measure, on no less an authority than the Son of God Himself.

 

If the sacraments were the ritualistic cornerstones of the Church’s religious and social interaction with the flock, then sacramentals were the symbols and tools used to facilitate the rituals, and in some cases assumed ritual elements themselves. Sacramentals included such actions as the making of the sign of the cross to bless oneself; the use of holy water to bless a physical space, object, or another person; the display of blessed icons; and exorcisms. Though linked in some sense, the sacramentals were not necessarily dependent on sacraments’ ceremony within churches, i.e., they permeated everyday life outside of the church, thereby extending its authority. The words of a modern Catholic, theologian Scott Hahn, perhaps best sum up the best intention these Early Modern Catholic rituals and their elements: “God [has] a particular and characteristic way of dealing with His people down through the ages. He made covenants with them, and he always sealed these covenants not with an abstract lecture on the nature of salvation and law, but with an outward sign, a physical sign.”[7] Perhaps, then, the sacraments and sacramentals were the physical symbols of these covenants. But benevolent as they may have been in intent, they were not always benevolently exercised – or exorcised, as it were – in practice.

 

Indeed, the latter sacramental in the aforementioned list, exorcism, was a way in which the Church wielded the punitive element of its vast power over its followers. To challenge the role of the church in any way was an act of heresy punishable in any number of fashions ranging in magnitude from excommunication to exorcism to execution. For a religious institution priding itself – publicly, at least – on facilitating spiritual redemption and forgiveness of sin, the Church unfortunately was an active participant in a litany of barbaric and genocidal pursuits that relied on the circular logic of its own self-declared absolute spiritual authority to legitimize activities that as often as not had to do with irrational, cruel, or selfish human agendas, more than bona fide efforts spiritual edification or purification. (Regrettably, the former was often cloaked in the guise of the latter.) Nothing if not consistent in its methodology, the Church utilized a panoply of rituals, of varying degrees of formality compared to the sacraments, including sacramentals in an arbitrary fashion, to maintain order and mete out justice. According to Church writings, "One of the most remarkable effects of sacramentals is the virtue to drive away evil spirits whose mysterious and baleful operations affect sometimes the physical activity of man. To combat this occult power the Church has recourse to exorcism, and sacramentals."[8]#p#分页标题#e#

 

Exorcism, though certainly more rare than, say, weekly celebrations of the Eucharist, provided ample pageantry, drama, and the ability to instill fear and awe in the populations which, despite the advances of the Renaissance, were still heavily steeped in superstition. One particularly noteworthy (and gruesome) story is recounted in great detail within a 1703 report entitled The Cheats and Illusions of Romish Priests and Exorcists, delivered to the Archbishop of Canterbury in England to foment anti-Catholic sentiments amongst Protestants. The report, translated from French to English, describes the unfortunate fate of a one Father Urbain Grandier, the Catholic parish priest of St.-Pierre-du-Marché in Loudun, France, who was accused of witchcraft in 1630 by a group of nuns. The sisters claimed Grandier had wielded his considerable spiritual authority to command demons to possess them and force them to exhibit a variety of unholy behavior. In reality, Grandier was guilty of indiscreet disregard of his vows of celibacy and otherwise living a more ostentatious life than the Church deemed proper for a priest, which had made him some enemies within the Church hierarchy and local community. To complicate matters, Grandier had earned the specific wrath of his superior, Cardinal Richelieu, about whom Grandier had penned an unflattering and acerbic tract. The nuns made a public spectacle of their putative possession; “They uttered cries so horrible and so loud that nothing like it was ever heard before. They made use of expressions so indecent as to shame the most debauched of men, while their acts, both in exposing themselves and inviting lewd behavior from those present would have astonished the inmates of the lowest brothels in the country.”[9] An exorcist was dispatched who, not coincidentally, was an enemy of Grandier, and in addition to conducting the exorcism ritual in public, he also urged the nuns – who were faking the entire spectacle – to continue and heighten the freakishness of their antics. He was soon joined by other exorcism “experts” from Loudon and within short order, thousands of people were watching daily as the exorcists shouted, read Bible verses, sprinkled holy water, genuflected, and theatrically performed sections of the Catholic Rite of Exorcism, a codified, specific, and comprehensive ritual of its own. In short order, the public outcry against Grandier became so overwhelming that the Cardinal was ‘forced’ to arrest him. He was tortured brutally by a surgeon ordered to probe for the ‘Devil’s Mark,’ an arbitrary defined body feature which could be anything from a mole to a birthmark, supposedly serving as evidence the Devil had branded his servant: “the barbarous surgeon would make them see that the other parts of [Grandier’s] body were very sensible, he turned the probe at the other end, which was very sharp pointed, and thrust it to the very bone; and then the abundance of people [outside] heard complaints so bitter, and cries so piercing, that they [were] moved...to the heart.”[10] It only got worse from there. The Cardinal refused to allow Grandier a civil trial and instead, forged a confessional document which – laughable now, but frightening at the time – was a contract between Satan and Grandier bearing ‘signatures’ of hellish figures such as Astaroth, Beelzebub, and Leviathan, and Lucifer himself. (See Figure A.) The Cardinal deemed this evidence enough to deny Grandier any recourse through the government courts and his tribunal sentenced Grandier to a horrific form of torture known as ‘the boots,’ which were “wedges that fitted the legs from ankles to knees. The torturer used a large, heavy hammer to pound the wedges, driving them closer together. At each strike, the inquisitor repeated the question. The wedges lacerated flesh and crushed bone, sometimes so thoroughly that marrow gushed out and the legs were rendered useless.”[11] Grandier confessed nothing under the torture – which was carried out by the local priests. He cried out to God that his accusers were hypocrites with their own agenda, enraging the priests, who tried to silence him by dumping holy water on him. Eventually, the sadistic priests were so enraged by their failure to extract any information about ‘accomplices’ out of him that they burned him alive -- and conscious (generally, the victim was at least strangled to unconsciousness first), in front of a huge crowd.#p#分页标题#e#

 

In this, one of far too many examples in the Early Modern Era, the grotesque rituals of exorcism and witchcraft, one as ungrounded in rational science as the other, had served a dual purpose – to reinforce the Church’s position as a mighty force against the Devil, who ostensibly roamed the earth in search of victims and accomplices, and also to send a clear message to those who were listening that it was both unwise to stray too far from the Church’s teachings and even less wise to cross paths with Cardinal Richelieu, who clearly had no qualms about vulgar and public displays of power. The Church could be benevolent if the flock toed the line, i.e., the seven sacraments, but indescribably cruel and merciless when threatened or insulted – utilizing the same symbols and rituals employed in its benevolent acts. Of course, without a public appetite for grotesque spectacle – hardly unique to the Early Modern period, the Church rituals would not have been quite so effective. In any case, the success of the Church’s carrot-and-stick approach to herding the flock can hardly be doubted.

 

Another self-justified ritual that the Catholic Church utilized to ensure its own relevance and staying power was the system of indulgences. Indulgences were pardons granted by the church for all or part of a temporal punishment mandated by sins, as opposed to the eternal punishment, pardon for which was granted by the sacraments of baptism and reconciliation. As the Church states,

 

An indulgence is a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church which, as the minister of redemption, dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and the saints.[12]

 

An arbitrary penance for temporal punishment, for example 10 days of feeding the poor because one had suffered from impure thoughts, was assigned as part of reconciliation, but an indulgence granted by the Church – who believed it had an inexhaustible bank account of spiritual goodwill -- could dispense with any such temporal punishment if it chose to. Indulgences were usually meted out in time measurements: days, weeks, etc. Further complicating matters was the Church’s belief that those believers who died without having dispense with the totality of accumulated punishments for their temporal sins would have to wait in Purgatory – a halfway house of sorts between earth and Heaven – until those temporal sins were paid off. The Church granted itself the power to bestow indulgences not just to individuals for their own sins, but also to family members on behalf of relatives whose souls were believed to be Purgatory’s state of limbo.

 

If this paradigm were not already complicated and suspect as it was, the Church further muddied the practical and moral aspects of indulgences by allowing money to enter into the equation. The most notorious example, in fact, was one of the straws that broke the proverbial camel’s back and helped cause the Protestant Reformation. In 1517, Pope Leo X announced that indulgences would be awarded to those Catholics who gave alms to assist in the spectacularly ambitious (and expensive) rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The project had not been undertaken for entirely spiritual motivations; Pope Julius II, a notorious egomaniac, had wished for a burial place whose grandeur would match his own sense of self-importance, given the association with St. Peter himself. The notion of even using the term ‘alms’ in conjunction with the project was also suspect, given the Church was not exactly known for being impoverished; if any financial strain was present, it was of the Church’s own making. Nonetheless, the sale of these indulgences was sanctioned blessed by the Vicar of Christ, who appointed a loyal lieutenant to tour Europe collecting money. This most enthusiastic salesperson was a Dominican Friar named Johan Tetzel, who was Leo’s commissioner of indulgences for Germany. The certificates he issued (see Figure B) provoked outrage from many fellow Catholic figures (or at least those who possessed enough personal power to dare challenge the Church) because of their suspect language: “By the authority of all the saints, and in mercy towards you, I absolve you from all sins and misdeeds and remit all punishments for ten days.” Some took this to mean the Church was willing to forgive sins in advance and therefore was sanctioning sinful behavior; worse, the language was inconsistent with Catholic theology, insofar as indulgences were intended to render unnecessary the punishments mandated by temporal sin. (The sin itself was already forgiven and required no absolution; penance was the requirement and the indulgences were penance vouchers, if you will.) In addition the muddled theology, Tetzel’s marketing campaign was shameless. As he traveled around Europe gleefully raising money, he employed the slogan “as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”[13] For many Catholics, even the most loyal and faithful, the rituals had become detached from their spiritual moorings.#p#分页标题#e#

 

PROTESTANT VIEWPOINT 新教的观点

 

One church figure who found the selling of indulgences repugnant was Martin Luther, a Franciscan monk and priest at the Castle Church in Saxony. He was deeply concerned that those with more money could buy their, or their dead relatives’, way out punishment for temporal sins, or worse, that some of the poor – who would often travel to the Vatican to donate what little money they had – were being exploited by the Church instead of receiving its blessings without the strings of money. A bold man, Luther preached three sermons criticizing the current method of administering indulgences between 1516 and 1517. Indulgences were not Luther’s only point of deep disagreement with the Church. He believed the Church’s self-perceived role as mediator between God and man, and the rituals it employed in that role, had become dangerously distorted and had lost their spiritual authority. Accordingly, he wrote his 95 Theses, which gained widespread distribution throughout Europe within two months, thanks to a new invention of the Renaissance – the printing press. 95 Theses directly challenged the Church, accusing it of greed and debasing itself by overindulgence in worldly matters, and asked for a debate and clarification from the Church regarding the theological basis for the administration of indulgences. (Luther was careful not to assert that the Pope did not have the right to grant them, just that the methodology was suspect and corrupt.) Additionally, and perhaps more shockingly, Luther openly questioned the infallibility and supreme authority of the papacy. Pope Leo X was outraged and demanded on several occasions that Luther recant and declare his submission to the Church, but Luther refused and Leo excommunicated him in January 1521, then declared him a heretic and banned his writings in July of the same year. Luther was spared a more gruesome fate, a la witch, by virtue of his good relationship with Elector Frederick of Saxony, who was expected to become the next Holy Roman Emperor and whose good graces Pope Leo wished to maintain. Frederick arranged to have Luther taken into protective custody, and Luther spent the remainder of his life dependent upon the protection of sympathetic princes.

 

Luther’s boldness unleashed a series of transformations known as the Protestant Reformation, that had profound political effects on Europe that would reverberate for years to come in clashes of Protestants vs. Catholics – many of them bloody. But from a religious and social perspective, Luther ushered in a re-examination, and ultimately, a reorganization of the way Christianity defined and facilitated the relationship between God and man, including the role and use of rituals. The essence of Luther’s grievances was not necessarily his objection to indulgences, though perhaps they were the catalyst. Luther represented a new philosophy, which eventually was embodied in the various offshoots of Protestantism, all of which refused to accept that the Church was a required intermediary between God and man, nor were the arbitrary and complex procedures – often manifested in required rituals such as the sacraments – necessary for salvation or the maintenance of faith. In essence, the Church had become more style than substance. Eventually, due to the philosophical groundwork laid by theologians such as St. Augustine and expounded upon and propagated by Luther, the Protestant movement came to hold salvation was earned by the act of faith alone, not faith and good works as the Catholic Church insisted. Luther wrote:#p#分页标题#e#

 

Beware, therefore, that the external pomp of works and the deceits of man-made ordinances do not deceive you, lest you wrong the divine truth and your faith. If you would be saved, you must begin with the faith of the sacraments, without any works whatever. The works will follow faith, but do not think too lightly of faith, for it is the most excellent and difficult of all works. Through it alone you will be saved, even if you should be compelled to do without any other works. For faith is a work of God, not of man, as Paul teaches [Eph. 2:8]. The other works he works through us and with our help, but this one alone he works in us and without our help.[14]

 

Ultimately, Protestantism held that though the Church provided valuable tools and helped strengthen communities, each man was responsible for his own relationship with God -- ultimately his own priest. This reflected the growing power of secularism, which held that man was both owed and possessed inherent individual power to control his mortal destiny, and that the quality of his life on earth carried as much importance as the afterlife. In total, these were direct strikes at the self-appointed and self-perpetuating relevance of the Catholic Church.

 

It is worth noting here that to divide the theological camps simply into Catholicism vs. Protestantism is to oversimplify – there were numerous Protestant splinter groups and factions within the Reform movement. The Church of England, or Anglican Church, was founded in 1531 so that King Henry VIII could dispense with the inconveniences of Catholic marital vows; other movements within Europe included Lutheranism, close adherents of Luther; Calvinism and its Presbyterians; Anabaptists, etc. There is not room here to describe them all, or their myriad differences, but certainly it is safe to say that what they all had in common was a desire to re-examine and reform the Catholic Church’s role as intermediary and how that role manifested itself in ritual. This Protestant Reformation went far beyond mere theological debate and discussion, and into practical nuts-and-bolts changes to the practical details of how the Protestant Churches would make changes to or altogether discard the myriad rituals of Catholicism to avoid Luther’s “deceits of man-made ordinances.”

 

Accordingly, the deconstruction of the theological underpinnings and mechanics of the seven sacraments were among the changes wrought by the demands of the Reformation. For example, the aforementioned Anabaptists acquired their moniker because they believed the sacrament of baptism to be theologically valueless when performed on an infant. Infants, they asserted, were incapable of believing in anything, much less God, and that the act of faith and the seeking of grace required conscious, cognizant choices, or at the very least a capacity for believing in the power of grace and faith. This state was only present at an older age, and so the ability to believe was considered a requirement of those known as credobaptists.#p#分页标题#e#

 

Luther himself believed in the theological primacy of Biblical text over Church rituals, and that any ritual or practice that was not directly predicated on a Biblical command or Biblical recommendation from Jesus or an apostle was to be treated as suspect. Accordingly, such practices as praying to saints, spiritual pilgrimages, penance, fasting, or the issuance of indulgences – particularly insofar as they were related to purgatory -- were mostly dismissed as Catholic inventions devoid of any true spiritual meaning. Sacramentals such as the veneration of relics were also dismissed in favor of looking to the power of Biblical texts in the abstract, as whimsically summarized in this 17th-century English ballad:

 

"Not all the Popes Trinkets, which heere are brought forth,

 

Can ballance the Bible for weight, and true worth:

 

Your Bells, Beads and Crosses, you see will not doo't

 

Or pull down your scale, with the divell to boot."[15]

 

The dismissal of sacramentals was not always a mere exercise in humor, however. The disagreement led many Protestants to go as far as to call Catholics idolaters or agents of Lucifer. In England, a

 

… pronounced anti-Catholic propaganda was sure to disseminate the view that the use of crucifixes, trinkets and all other inanimate objects were wrong, and that to use them was almost satanic. This was perhaps partly educating the people in the Protestant belief that such things are not needed for salvation, but even if this were not the case, it would certainly push people in a more Protestant direction, making them disassociate themselves from Catholicism.[16]

 

The seven sacraments themselves also came under assault from Luther. His take on the sacraments was to advocate the outright discarding of five of the seven – keeping only baptism and the Eucharist and ‘demoting’ the others to places of spiritual importance, but no longer in the same category or importance. Luther did not materially disagree with the Catholic Church regarding the metaphysical aspects of the Eucharist, though he rejected transubstantiation as a concept. (Nonetheless, he believed the Eucharist to be spiritually paramount.) Furthermore, the administering of these remaining two sacraments did not require an ordained church official in the Catholic tradition, though Luther certainly believed there was a usefulness to clergy. The discarding of Reconciliation, or the sacrament of confession, was of particular importance to Luther in terms of illustrating his belief that mankind did not require a human intercessor to obtain forgiveness or grace from God; he merely needed his own faith and his own desire to repent. (In some Protestant denominations, such as Episcopalianism / Anglicanism, the elements of Reconciliation were folded into the Eucharist ceremonies, where private confession in one’s own thoughts precedes the Eucharist, during which the confessed sins are forgiven.) In the case of marriage, Luther did not believe that it was an indissoluble arrangement, though he certainly would never have sanctioned the wanton revolving door of wives kept up by such figures as Henry VIII.#p#分页标题#e#

 

Another notable Protestant reformer was the Swiss priest Ulrich Zwingli, who is considered by many to be as important to the Reformation as Luther himself. Zwingli and Luther actually had a substantive disagreement as to the power and importance of the Eucharist. Zwingli believed that the Eucharist, though relevant and important, was essentially a ritual of respect and remembrance that honored Jesus’ command during the Lord’s Supper to “do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22:19). Accordingly, many of his followers ceased to administer/receive the Eucharist on a weekly basis and the ritual was downgraded to a quarterly occurrence or only attached to holy holidays such as Easter or Christmas. When Swiss and German reformers met in 1529 to attempt to reconcile and unify their religious movements, they agreed on most every substantial issue except the theological place of the Eucharist. Luther went so far as to announce that he did not believe a person who disagreed with him on the importance of the Eucharist was an unlikely candidate to receive salvation. (Squabbling about the Eucharist even splintered into excruciatingly nuanced debates about what precisely happened both metaphysically and physically during the Eucharist, leading to such arcane concepts as consubstantiation vs. transubstantiation.) In this, the Reformers had lost sight of the impetus for reform and were mired in the mechanics of the sacraments, rather than their ultimate spiritual purpose.

 

John Calvin, father of Presbyterianism and another Protestant reformer probably best-known for his views on predestination and the moral strictness he fervently advocated, actually propagated the most sweeping dismissal of Catholic rituals. Anything relating to papal structure, hierarchy, or formal pomp and circumstance, was anathema to him. The Presbyterian service was stripped- down – including a prohibition on “all ritual, vestments, instrumental music, images, and stained-glass windows.”[17] To Calvin, such displays were tantamount to the sort of idol worship he felt was expressly forbidden by the Bible. On the other extreme was the Anglican Church, which other than discarding the sacrament of Reconciliation/confession, adhered for the most part to Catholic-style rituals and hierarchal church governing structures, earning Anglicans the modern-day nickname ‘Catholic Light.’

 

It is worth noting that despite the considerable reforms undertaken in the variety of Protestant denominational offshoots across Europe, an obsession with and harsh punishment of witchcraft remained a common practice, as well as the concomitant sadistic rituals such as torture and exorcism. A median estimate based on a variety of historians’ work suggests that approximately 100,000 people were killed in the prosecution of witchcraft, real or imagined, in the 300 years between 1400 and 1700.[18] Nor can one Church or the other be solely blamed for the genocide; much persecution originated from within the masses; witch trials were more “than [a] straightforward imposition of learned beliefs on the populace.” [19] They were, sadly, rituals in and of themselves that were enabled by both the public; its bloodlust and hysteria demanded ‘justice’ from the Church, which obliged at an alarming rate – a 90% conviction rate in one Swiss province. (It is also worth noting that when not busy burning witches, Protestants and Catholics found time to burn one another, as their theological skirmishes were not always fought in the polite strictures of dueling proclamations and sermons.)#p#分页标题#e#

 

Not to be outdone, the Catholic Church decided to embark on some ‘reforms’ of its own, recognizing perhaps belatedly that its formerly universal iron grip on Europe was unspooling. Pope Paul III, who ruled from 1534-1549, called together the Council of Trent in 1543 to undertake a comprehensive theological, structural, and procedural review of the Catholic Church and its practices. The number of bishops, priests, and other dignitaries in attendance at the Council reached into the hundreds at times, and over the course of 18 years, the Council issued 16 dogmatic decrees. The main conclusions amounted to the Church essentially reaffirming its own position on every theological and ritualistic disagreement that had accumulated between it and the various factions of Protestantism. The Church maintained that salvation was accomplished by faith and good works, not merely faith as Luther had asserted; it held that its own interpretation of the Bible was final and that any individual or group which disagreed with the Church’s judgment in matters of interpretation was a heretic; Church traditions such as the selling of indulgences were equally as valid as Biblically rooted traditions. Accordingly, the Church reaffirmed the seminal importance of the seven sacraments, as well as most all of its sacramental traditions and elements used to perform and augment the sacraments, including the veneration of saints and objects, penance. The concept of purgatory was also upheld.

 

The Church did not merely reassert itself philosophically; it reasserted itself in tangible terms as well. It established the innocuous-sounding Congregation of the Holy Office, an investigative, judicial, and punitive body that became known as the feared Inquisition. While the sadistic brutality against those branded heretics gradually tapered off by 1700 in favor of ‘mere’ excommunication, the Church was still extremely proactive in monitoring, censoring, and punishing thoughts and words it deemed counter to its divine authority. In 1557, for example, the Church added to its litany of rituals the extensive compilation and maintenance of a list of banned literature, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("List of Prohibited Books"), which included sublists of works corrections expected to be made to literature deemed ‘correctable,’ as opposed to having been rejected outright – ‘damnable.’

 

It is hardly surprising, then, that Europe eventually plunged into violent conflict in the wake of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The Thirty Years’ War, an effort by Catholics to wipe out Protestantism from 1618-1649, engulfed the entirety of the continent, though it was mainly fought on the territory now known as Germany, and dragged virtually every nation-state and province into a horrifically bloody struggle. Various historians have estimated the losses as numbering between 7.5 and 11 million dead.#p#分页标题#e#

 

RITUAL IN TRANSITION – WHO WAS RIGHT? 过渡仪式-谁是正确的？

 

In retrospect, despite the demonizing, literally in some cases, of Catholicism and its practices, “it seems that much of the Reformation was not so much anti-Catholic at its heart as it was a specific response (and often a reaction) to the dominant Thomistic [that of Thomas Aquinas] orthodoxy.”[20] The anti-science bent of the Catholic Church and its inflexible, stubborn insistence on the belief that Jesus had sanctioned the sacraments, to say nothing of its own belief in its unerring infallibility, was the target of Protestant criticism, certainly not Catholicism’s deeply rooted desire to bring the spiritual edification of Christ to both the faithful and faithless (though certainly, the faithless were less gently handled). As such, it was not the sacraments that Protestants despised – they certainly had no objections to marriage or the confession of sins, for example – rather, it was what they considered the sacraments’ disproportionate weight in comparison to the Bible itself and the other more abstract spiritual elements of Christian faith. The Protestant Reformers’ dismantling of institutions and rituals, and their frowning upon many sacramentals, was not an attempt to sweep Catholicism aside or destroy it, but rather to recalibrate the variables in the salvation equation. It was not that rituals played no worthy value in the unfolding of a person’s faith; it was just that they believed the Catholics had overvalued them and a return was needed to the original intent of scriptures. What the Protestants failed to understand, however, in attempting to sever the rituals from the Church, is that for Catholics, the ritual was the Church from a certain perspective. The need for religion, then, could not logically be separated from the need for ritual, though the Protestant Reformers tried mightily. The struggle, perhaps, should not have been as epic and violent as it was, but the resistance to change in Europe of the time was, as we shall read presently, considerable. (We shall also see that where the stubborn Catholics may have been wrong, the zealous Protestant Reformers were not always right.)

 

The changes in ritual and the losses of ritual in the epic struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism was not merely a lofty theological debate played out in philosophical tracts and great transcontinental wars. The changes had to be navigated and adjusted to in the daily lives of the ordinary faithful who had grown dependent on rituals that had gone largely unchanged for centuries. In England, for example, not all his/her majesty’s subjects had taken brutal transition to Anglicanism in a sanguine fashion:

 

Roger Martyn (c. 1527-1615) lovingly recalled the seasonal rituals, church decorations, and devotional equipment that were lost from his parish church of Long Melford, Suffolk, in the course of the reformation… From the time of his childhood he relished the richness, festivity and community of the old religion, with its saints’ days, processions and bonfires. Writing [his] memoir later in Elizabeth’s reign, Martyn’s nostalgia was tempered by hopes that Catholic worship might one day again be restored. He even preserved remnants of the proscribed religious equipment in case their use was sanctioned again.[21]#p#分页标题#e#

 

The Reformers had to win the hearts and minds of the average people in both England and across the continent, which was an uphill battle considering the common person’s deep aversion to change: to abandon Catholicism “involved embracing novelty in an era that despised and distrusted innovation, and validated all change by its compatibility with the inherited wisdom, custom and teaching of the ages.”[22] The trick, then, was to frame the Reformation less as a revolution, per se, or even anything new, but more as a return to the basics from whence the Catholic Church had gone badly astray. The goal was “restoration, not innovation.”[23] From a purely spiritual and theological perspective, there were a number of liberating and liberal effects to the Reformation, but the Protestant churches were just as liable to attempt to exert authoritarian structures of their own design on the common people, with mixed results.

 

One of the ironies of the Renaissance was that its general encouragement that people should think more for themselves and take more responsibility for the way in which their lives unfolded resulted in a tendency for common people to not passively accept dicta from Church authority figures. Very few were willing to abandon their deeply held religious beliefs in favor of secularism and science, but neither were they as willing to blindly accept Church expectations regarding how their faith should express itself through ritual practices. This created a variety of cultural, religious, and social cross-currents that resulted in a hodgepodge of conflicting or hybridized rituals. Some people were content to discard ‘popish’ practices altogether and embrace the stripped-down worship practices, for example, the Calvinists; others picked, chose, discarded, and adopted ritualistic elements a la carte as they saw fit, regardless of what the clergy might have been insisting upon. The “lesser participants in what [were] intended to be rites of power exert[ed] themselves through consent, resistance, and misinterpretation; they appropriat[ed] rituals and ma[de] them their own."[24] In the frequent situations where Protestants sought to remove or abolish some of these rituals, motivated by their desire to abolish ritualistic behavior that was not Biblically sanctioned or otherwise possessing some Biblical antecedent or purify their execution and/or intent, they sometimes ran afoul of local customs.

 

One such example had to do with marriage ceremonies. The sacrament of marriage and its accompanying rituals were cornerstones of Catholic belief and the Protestant movement had, while removing marriage from sacrament status, had simultaneously moved to assert itself in regulation of sexuality: “The Reformers… conscious of it or not, sought first of all better to tame and domesticate the wild beast of sexuality than Catholicism had, so that human beings might be adequately insulated against the lesser world of nature and fully introduced into a higher existence, a civilized, existence, characterized by the channeling of base instincts."[25] In this particular instance, the drunken banquets that often accompanied weddings, and the licentious behavior often reported at them, including rampant fornication and even rape, was frowned upon or forbidden by many Protestant clergy. This did not go over well with the common people, for whom the ritual of marriage went simply beyond the theological element of the sacrament and the ceremony. The sacrament and ceremony had profound and important social value for communities – it was an occasion on which they could gather, forget their troubles, blow off some proverbial steam, and celebrate the happy union of a member of their community. Where the Protestant clergy sought to stifle these celebrations, the people reacted coldly.#p#分页标题#e#

 

Amazingly, another ritualistic practice (though certainly not spiritual in nature), the patronage of brothels, was actually often semi-sanctioned by Catholic church officials before the Reformation:

 

To some extent, pre-Reformation churchmen had tended to tolerate the existence of brothels, arguing that although they were sinful, they pre vented yet greater sin. In one metaphor, brothels were a kind of sewer which kept the rest of society clean: prostitutes ensured the purity of 'respectable' women. One Dominican monk, asked for his advice by the town council of Cracow, could even approve the establishment of a civic brothel in the town as 'the lesser evil.'[26]

 

Luther embodied the beliefs of most Protestant Reformers in his vocal and strident criticism and forbidding of any such behavior. Whereas the Catholic Church may have viewed brothels as a tolerable focal point through which to sublimate less savory male sexual desire in order to preserve social structures, the Protestants believed the only appropriate outlet for male sexuality was the confines of marriage, no exceptions. “Luther believed public brothels simply legitimated sexual rapaciousness in men... Ordering and channeling male sexuality into marriage was the solution, not encouraging anarchic male desire.”[27] Thus many Protestant cities shut down their brothels and ran off the prostitutes, to the great consternation of many communities for whom the brothel had played a part in a sexual rite of passage, particularly for young boys passing through puberty.

 

As mentioned before, a variety of Catholic rituals, including the sacraments, had been historically been integrated into local customs. In other cases, conversely, where the Catholic Church had been unable to stomp out certain pagan rituals, such as festivals related to the change of seasons or harvest, they had shrewdly taken to incorporating them into Church rituals. One such example was the Carnival, which the Church put on its official calendar as a late-winter, pre-Lent festival. Carnival embodied the evolution of a variety of ancient fertility rites and was a bit of a carnal safety valve, a chance for dancing, costumes, drinking, the wearing of masks, and other less innocuous debauchery before the austerity and spiritual reflection demanded by Lent and Easter. As with brothels, the Catholic Church reasoned that it was best to channel or sublimate rowdy impulses into rituals over which the Church could exercise some measure of supervision and into which it could inject some sort of religious content. Unfortunately, the Protestants did not hold Carnival with the same begrudging esteem and abolished it wherever they could. For example, in Northern Germany, where Lutheranism was rooted the most deeply, Carnival all but vanished.

 

Another Protestant reformation of a Catholic practice – the celibacy of church officials -- also had mixed results. Luther had, to his credit, exhibited a rather liberal point of view in stating that the desire for sex was inherently human and not inherently sinful, a distinct departure from the Catholic view. Sex, he believed, “… [was] like sleeping, eating or drinking; and consequently, to like a vow of chastity as monks, nuns and priests do is tantamount to vowing the impossible…When Luther [wrote] about sexuality, he often thinks of it as a force which cannot be denied.”[28] Accordingly, he believed the Catholic practice of celibacy to be a waste of time and unattainable in any case. Given his alternate belief that marriage was the sole proper outlet for sex, a ‘hospital’ for lust, as he termed it, Luther believed that church officials could and should serve as proper sexual role models to their communities by being faithfully married. So ended the paradigm in which the priesthood was a class of unmarried men who often lived with and/or carried on with concubines in openly secret arrangements, if you will, presenting a somewhat varied model of what was socially acceptable, if done so quietly. Instead, under the Protestant Reformation, the church clergy were expected to be married and raise a family, and were often subject to visitations from church leaders who came around to inspect the proper undertaking of the pillars and institutions of family life. Sexual behavior outside of the context of marriage and procreation was driven deeper underground, and the pressure to marry and raise children within a rigid social paradigm increased. The tendrils of the Church, while retracted in a theological sense, had manifested themselves in yet another new mode of control over the flock.#p#分页标题#e#

 

The role of the Bible and the practice of disseminating and interpreting its context was another ritual that evolved with unintended consequences due to the Reformation. As Luther and other Reformers pushed for a paradigm shift onto the primacy of Biblical text, they also pushed to have the Bible taken out of the ossified clutches of the Catholic clergy, where it was kept closely guarded away from the masses, both physically and literally, no pun intended, by virtue of the fact that the Bible primarily existed in limited numbers and in Latin translations. Catholic services were conducted in Latin prior to the Counter-Reformation. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that one of Luther’s main projects upon going into exile at Wartburg Castle after his 1521 excommunication was a translation of the Bible into German vernacular. The same printing press that aided the promulgation of his 95 Theses aided the spread of the Bible among common people, in their own language. (William Tyndale published an English-language translation of the Bible in 1525, with Luther’s blessing and assistance.) Though most common people were illiterate, at least there were opportunities to hear services conducted in their own native language, and those who could read were able to undertake their own personal study. The unintended consequence, however, was the fact that with the elimination of the Catholic clergy as interpreters of scripture and arbiters in matters of theological interpretation, the existential uncertainty of having to find one’s own individual meanings in scripture became a reality. The abstractions of morality and faith became the organizing principles of the Protestant Church in many ways, as opposed to the concrete, tangible objects and predictable rituals of the Catholic Church. Catholicism was

 

… a performing religion, and suited an illiterate world. Catholicism did not emphasize the importance of Bible-reading, on the contrary it diminished it, placing all importance on the educated priest. It paradoxically therefore, allowed the illiterate man or woman more of an opportunity to participate. All they had to do to was listen and respond to the Priest, and partake in communal prayer, Confession, and other Catholic rituals. In many ways Catholicism also offered more comfort. Crucifixes, candles, rosaries, paintings, images, these were all tangible things that a person could touch and make sense of, where as for most the Bible was just pages of unmeaningful letters, and the words of an incompetent preacher, just incomprehensible ramblings.[29]

 

Like the Renaissance that was unfolding concurrently, Protestantism demanded more than passivity from its participants – spiritual interactivity to match the intellectual interactivity of the spread of sciences and art forms. The Reformation and the Renaissance introduced grey areas into a landscape that was formerly only black and white. This sort of relativistic thinking favored the educated elites more than it did the masses, who were not generally endowed with either the education or the luxury of time to contemplate theological or scientific mysteries. They tended to prefer and need the comfort of constancy and the predictability of structure. As such, Protestantism did not deliver any more certainty or reassurance about the mortal or immortal world than did Catholicism.#p#分页标题#e#

 

CONCLUSION 结论

 

If nothing else, the Catholic Church allowed for an uneasy coexistence and connection between the divine and the vulgar/mundane through its system of rituals. Having attempted to strip religion of a great deal of that ritualistic bridge, Protestantism replaced it with a turgid austerity and moralism that was in many ways more oppressive than the papal foolishness it was intended to supplant. "The world of minister and godly book, of Sabbath observance, sermon-gadding and repetition, sobriety, chastity, respectability and thrift, stood over against the world of the ale-house and the cunning man, of ballad and broad side, May-pole and dancing and Sunday-sports, tabling and dicing, bowling and cards, cakes and ale, and getting wenches with child."[30] The Protestant Reformers were critical of the Catholic church for its indulgence of worldly things, the tolerance of certain all-too-human behavior among them, but the Catholic Church knew that its relevance depended on its ability to connect with people within their daily lives. Their rituals were not abstract, per se, but mostly concrete, and as importantly, directly tied to the life and death cycles of human beings, their rites of passage in all seasons -- literal and metaphorical. It is impossible to tell, even with the hindsight of history, how much of the Church obsession with ritual was and is a long-standing benevolent effort to make religion real to its believers, vs. the obsession with ritual being a function of the Church’s greed to maintain its absolute power. Either way, the Catholic Church understood the need for ritual, whether to perpetuate itself or to imbue daily life with a level of comfort and regularity that in the Early Modern period was desperately needed. It understood something that the Protestant Church of the time perhaps did not, which is that “… if the physical dimensions of popular religion are important, so, too, is the communal dimension. Whether it's the family, the neighborhood, the Church, or the communion of saints, community defines us, makes us who we are.