The next installment in the arts of the West journey looks at some consequences and implications of the Reformation. Including a novel assessment of the logic behind the dueling claims around the church with significant implications for the Band's exploration of the nature of reality.
If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction to the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and other topics have menu pages above.
Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry. We check regularly and it will be up there.
Caspar David Friedrich, The Cathedral, 1818, oil on canvas, Museum Georg Schäfer
Arts of the West posts generally look at major trends in cultural development and degeneration through the visual arts. The last few have been unusually - almost purely - art-centric. Time to get back to the wider view and make some observations about the implications of the Reformation for the relationship between the West and reality, as well as for the arts.
The aforementioned art centric posts...
Titian, The Entombment, 1559, oil on canvas, Prado Museum, Madrid
A couple of Venice posts looked at a unique society and its distinct art of color and light. Like this late Titian. Link to part one. Link to part two.
Apse mosaics in San Vitale, around 547, Ravenna
Then a deep dive into the incredible early Christian church of San Vitale took a detour back in time to blow out the idiot notion that post-antiquity was a "Dark Age". Click for link.
And now to return to the broader track and take up where the Northern Renaissance post left off. We will also swing into a new way to think about the logic – metaphysical and material – surrounding the collapse of the pre-modern Church.
The Reformation rocked the West like an earthquake - if an earthquake had metaphysical as well as socio-cultural consequences. The only events that are even close might be the Christianization or collapse of the Roman Empire, but the first had less immediate material impact and the second had less metaphysical. And neither was as abrupt. Of course, materialist peddlers of beast historical narratives undersell it as the less interesting b-side to the Renaissance - co-vestibules to their beloved modern world.
Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, around 1485, tempera on canvas, Florence, Uffizi
The Renaissance is sexier to beast narrative-huffers because of its pagan and humanist – that is, un-Christian – components. The Reformation is all about Christians – some misguided, but often zealous with staunch moral codes that are discomfiting to the huffers.
Since the Band is neither a materialist gelding nor a beast-dancer we consider the full ontological spectrum when considering civilizational trajectories. Several years of posting have made it clear that Christian metaphysics best conform with material fact and logical necessity. It should be obvious that the fragmentation of Christian unity would have enormous consequences across the fullness of reality.
Wilhelm von Kaulbach, The Age of the Reformation, 1862, Neues Museum, Berlin.
Prussian mural captures the link between the rupturing Christendom and inane ideas of Progress! and secular transcendence - that technical innovations mean finite, fallen human minds command abstract metaphysical absolutes. That "ages" have progressive "spirits" because... well... uh... Hegel. Retarded arrogance that leads to our current collapsing culture. Because a house built on lies can't last.
The Arts of the West posts are tracing a long journey from the origins of the West to the inversion and destruction of art in the modern period. And since art expresses culture, this means they also trace the inversion and degeneration of the culture of the West. On this the historical rise of secular transcendence is a canary in a coal mine – the indicator of something going seriously wrong even when surface beauty still lingers. There’s momentum to the West. Even after the wheels start to fall off, ingrained reflexive morality and technological advancements keep things looking good – even progressing – for a while. But like the dog days of summer, the days are shortening even as the temperature peaks. And eventually the reality becomes obvious. Our ghost run is winding down. The Band is tracing what happened in the hope that a future spring may avoid some obvious and disastrous errors.
We’ve chosen the Armory Show of 1913 as a destination for this journey for two reasons. It’s the symbolic splattering of modernist feces across the American cultural landscape while being early enough to avoid the impenetrable mass of lies called “the 20th Century”. Which is fine – the arrival of modernism is sufficient for big picture inversion. The rest is just accelerating consequences that can be addressed within the same degenerate framework.
Sterling Ruby, Basin Theology, 2014
Like this trash piled up in a soulless white room. Ugly, misshapen forms? Check. Stupid yet pretentious nonsense name? Check. Promotion of a degenerate hack by a converged institution? Check. The sense of a dying culture's last few circles of the bowl?...
Ladies and gentlemen... Art!
The Reformation doesn’t introduce mega-artists like the Renaissance's Titian or Raphael although there are Reformation artists to consider. But it impacts the arts of the West commensurately with its impact on culture. And because art expresses culture, we can see one through the other. So we have to deal with the Reformation indirectly – by looking at what happened to the arts and the impact on culture directly
The Reformation splits Western Christendom and transforms a societal configuration that had existed for a millennium. The Middle Ages are presided over by papacy and kings in an uneasy structure marred by encroachings and meddling but conceptually sensible. A Church for spiritual authority and a monarch for worldly authority have natural areas of conflict, but basically follow the God/Caesar split. And with clearly defined domains, it becomes easy to see improper liberties. The papal monarchy or kings meddling in ecclesiastic affairs are obvious violations of assigned place.
Jean Fouquet, Coronation of Charles VI from the Grandes Chroniques de France, 1455-1460 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, French 6465, fol. 457v.
We can instantly judge what’s wrong because the boundaries of the system are clear. The ecclesiastic authorities are clearly subordinate to royal symbols, while paying lip service to the idea that monarchy is a religious order. Neither should be the case. More on the logic of the system later.
The Reformation will tear up and reshuffle the system itself in ways that lack logical or scriptural coherence. What were legitimate criticisms of the failures of the Renaissance church became grounds for catastrophic war and cascading crises of authority.
The conventional origin story of the Reformation is well known. Luther suffered a spiritual crisis and after seeing the rabid materialism of the Roman Church nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenburg. The protection of the Elector of Saxony spared him the fate of earlier heretics and the mushrooming denominations and wars of religion followed. As with most official stories, much is left out, but the Band is more concerned with big patterns than minutia. Papal Rome under the Humanist opulence of Medici Pope Leo X and a court circle that included Raphael and Castiglione was a far cry from Apostolic piety.
Lucas Cranach the Elder, Elector Friedrich the Wise of Saxony, after 1532, oil on panel, Liechtenstein Museum
Luther's protector was quite the looker...
Raphael, Portrait of Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de' Medici and Luigi de' Rossi, 1518, oil on panel, Uffizi
These Medici "churchmen" ooze corruption and intrigue.
Comparing Cranach to Raphael makes it clear why it's the Italian Renaissance that was so pivotal to the arts of the West. Cranach was one of the preeminent artists of Northern Europe at the time, but next to Raphael he looks like a hack amateur.
Leo inherited his predecessor Julius II’s love of art without the grand cultural ambitions to guide it. Rome was an aesthetic and antiquarian hub – the greatest of Renaissance courts – but not much in the way of official Christianity. Great for the culture of the West, but easy to see where a devout Christian could have some real objections. Especially given all the systemic problems that had larded the late medieval Church like simony, nepotism, the sale of indulgences, etc. Remember that this was a time of mounting religious anxiety and zeal across Europe, as the pre-Reformation arts of the West post observed. An especially inopportune time for the Church to fall into venal materialism.
Reliquary Bust of St Baudime, 1150-1200, copper-gilt over wooden core, Church of Saint-Nectaire, Saint-Nectaire
Pilgrimage to venerate relics was a sign of this increasingly intense desire to connect viscerally with the divine. Relics were a medieval invention - pieces of saints believed to enhance the prayers of devotees. The development of figural reliquaries to hold the relics blurred the line between the bodily fragments and actual saints. Relics weren't meant to be worshipped in themselves, but that distinction was often lost on the masses. Golden figures like this, gleaming in candlelight on altars and promoted for veneration didn't exactly discourage idolatrous response.
Pilgrimage was a big deal economically and high-status relics important. It's why the Church turned a blind eye to improper response.
Reliquary Bust of Saint Balbina, 1520–30, South Netherlandish, oak, paint, gilt on wood, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Reliquaries just get more realistic and better able to encourage the kind of reaction that confuses veneration of the absent saint with worship of the object. Again, this was never officially permitted, but overlooked and even tacitly encouraged - pilgrimage was the big way to earn indulgences. The Reformers simply jettison the spiritual legitimacy of the whole saint-relic-pilgrimage-indulgence apparatus as an idolatrous addendum to Biblical Christianity.
There was another problem as well. Deeper, if not given the same attention in the standard histories but well covered in our occult posts. That’s the Hermetic occultism and other non-Christian sludge that seeped into Renaissance Christian humanism. Pope Leo X was second son of Lorenzo "the Magnificent" de' Medici, legendary ruler of Renaissance Florence, founder of the first Platonic Academy, and patron of the Neoplatonic and Hermetic occultism of Marsilio Ficino and others. Leo was born Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici and was educated by Lorenzo's court humanists along with his siblings and other select household youth, including the artist Michelangelo.
Marsilio Ficino’s introduction to his Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum in a manuscript dedicated to Lorenzo il Magnifico, 1491, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 21.8, fol. 3r.
Hermes Trismegistus was so important to Lorenzo that when the Corpus Hermeticum manuscript became available, he had Ficino postpone his translation of the recently recovered works of Plato to translate it.
In addition to his translation works, Ficino concocted his own philosophy - a hybrid of Neoplatonic, Hermetic, and other antique-sourced ideas derived from his humanist study. His "magnum opus", the Platonic Theology was an attempt to integrate this pagan sludge with Christian doctrine.
Leo X's papacy was an attempt to adapt a Medici-style court to Vatican. Sort of like Ficino's blending of Christianity and paganism on the page, only in real life. Ficino himself had died in 1499, but there was no shortage of new humanists to fill the void.
For example, Ficino’s pupil Francesco da Diacceto (1466-1522) was a key member of the new academy Leo established in 1515 as a continuation of his father's Platonic Academy - the Accademia Sacra dei Medici. Click for a free book on the Renaissance formation of the humanities. The Accademia Sacra dei Medici reference is on page 113. This body gets almost no mention in the usual historical surveys that we've seen. Here are a couple more references we found looking into it - reference 1, reference 2.
Michelangelo, The Dream of Human Life (Il Sogno), 1533, black chalk, The Courtauld Gallery, London.
Michelangelo grew up with Leo, and despite his conflict with the Medici family and animosity towards Raphael, belonged to the Accademia Sacra dei Medici. His enigmatic drawing "visualizes love, demonic nature or the World Soul that inspires divine goodness in waking or sleeping man". In other words, the same Christian humanist perversion of actual Christianity with the occult.
Only now in the heart of papal Rome...
So doctrinally as well as behaviorally, the Church had dropped the ball. The Band has been rightfully harsh with un-Christian papal occultism and monarchical trappings. To that end, we can sympathize with Reformist outrage. The solution, on the other hand...
Start with the underlying assumptions. Structurally, the initial Reformation process can be seen as an extension of Renaissance humanist epistemology. The way the Reformers called the legitimacy of the Church into question was to interrogate the original “source” material in the manner of literary scholars. Christian humanists had already turned their attention to early religious texts. Translations of the Bible by Cardinal Ximenes and Erasmus and renewed interest in the Patristic literature brought a new focus to the first Christian centuries.
Sandro Botticelli, Saint Augustine in his Study, 1480, fresco, Ognissanti Church, Florence
The eminent Florentine Renaissance painter presents the Father of the Western Church as a humanist scholar in a studiolo or aristocratic Renaissance study. It was natural that the Christian humanists of the Renaissance would consider Christian as well as pagan antiquity
The greatest legacy of the Christian humanist movement for the Reformation would be the examination of Biblical languages. The medieval Church has considered St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate to be the definitive translation since the early Christian period. But humanist linguistic scholars took up the original languages - Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic in the case of Cardinal Ximenes of Spain's massive Complutensian Polyglot project. And this publication was delayed by the publication privilege awarded the great Dutch humanist Erasmus for his Greek version.
The opening of Genesis from the Complutensian Polyglot Bible - the first printed polyglot of the whole text. Parallel passages in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic where relevant. Old Testament pages like this one put the Latin Vulgate between the Greek Septuagint and Hebrew with the Aramaic Torah - the Targum Onkelos and its Latin translation below. The New Testament combines Greek Gospels and the Latin Vulgate.
The work was completed in 1517 and published in 1520 after a brief delay.
New attention on older texts would have a massive impact on the Church - Catholic and Protestant. Medieval miracle tale and the authority of the Vulgate itself were called into question. Meanwhile, the invention of the printing press was an earthquake of its own in information technology and spread new ideas in previously unimagined ways. For the first time, the claims and literature of the Church could be cross-referenced against the original sources. On the one hand, this was a tremendous thing. But on the other, it opened the way to massive category errors that the beast historical narratives completely ignore. For obvious reasons. Hint - the absurd march of secular transcendence into modernity isn't really progress...
Humanist epistemology was built on authenticating and purifying texts. The humanists used philological analyses to assemble proof texts from different recensions and references. And not just recovery – dispelling of fakes as well.
Lorenzo Valla, Declamatio on the Donation of Constantine
15th-century humanist scholar Lorenzo Valla used linguistics and logic to claim an apex scalp when he showed the Donation of Constantine to be a forgery. Revealing credulous acceptance of medieval fakery was a big part of dismissing the Middle Ages as intellectually backwards or Dark.
But the basic premise of the Church was immune to things like bogus claims of papal kingship because its foundation wasn’t material. And bogus claims are. The Church was founded on references to "church" in the Bible – both the Gospels and Acts – and the early Christian groupings that followed. The papacy took different forms at different times, but these were all temporal manifestations of the original charge to St. Peter. The magisterium flows through material circumstance but isn’t composed of them. A bad actor could be cast out without meaningful impact on the structure. Even a huge fraud like the Donation of Constantine is still just a fraud.
Cesare Baronio, title page to the first volume of the Annales Ecclesiastici, 1588, Typographia Vaticana
The huge Annales project was a 12-volume history of the first 1200 years of the Church led by the great Oratorian historian Caesar Baronius. The intent was to counter Protestant claims that the Church deviated historically with a magisterial counter.
His philosophy of semper eadem or ever the same isn't a literal claim that everyone wears the same costumes that they did in Apostolic times. It’s that the same ethos and metaphysical truth shines through the cosmetic changes.
The argument that signifiers of ultimate reality are not subordinate to humanistic philological argument is consistent with the map of reality in the Band's Ontological Hierarchy. Ultimate reality is beyond apprehension or conception and Abstract Reality is an unchanging domain of immaterial ideals. Both are chained together by (divine) logos into a cascade of perpetual truth. Material Reality on the other hand is temporal and changing. Any manifestation of higher states within it will be as well. One can argue whether a particular claim to manifest is valid, but not that manifestations of higher states have to happen to be materially knowable. Otherwise there is no access to the super-logical, utterly transcendence of God.
If the Bible is accepted on faith as divinely inspired - and it has to be to work around the inherent limitations of material semiotics - why wouldn’t the Holy Spirit be able to align other material phenomena with timeless Truths?
Titian, Saint John the Evangelist on Patmos, 1553-1555, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art
If the Bible isn't a material manifestation of divine truth, there is no point to it. But if it is, it is necessarily different from what it represents - words instead of nous or some such. It's a representation - just one that is an account of what is True in a form we can apprehend.
Basic Reformation logic would agree on the Bible but not on most of the secondary addenda that the medieval Church claimed manifested divinity in accessible material form. These would be closer to the Pharisees castigated in the Gospels as driven by money and prestige to peddle fake – even inverted – dogmas. And if the Church had larded basic Christianity with fraudulence, what else about it is fake?
Hans Holbein, Christ as the True Light, around 1525, woodcut, British Museum
Reformation art - Holbein was a Swiss-German painter who adapted to the artistic hostility of his new Protestant circumstances as best he could. This piece centers on a flame supported by the symbols of the Evangelists representing the Gospels. On the left, Jesus points the masses to this source of truth. On the right, Church officials follow Renaissance humanist pagan darlings Plato and Aristotle into the darkness.
The contours of the problem come into view. What is the rightful authority for the manifestation of God's Truth in an entropic, fallen, limited material world?
The Church claims to be guided by the Holy Spirit or some formulation of the will of God. If that is the case, then the Church as a concept is correct and it’s the execution that is flawed. Reform becomes restoration of [Holy Spirit compliance] to realign the material manifestation with the Kingdom of Heaven it was founded to manifest.
Humanism is by definition inadequate for this task. It’s in the name. Humanistic epistemology is based on human ingenuity and not metaphysical necessity. This is painfully obvious once it sinks in that the Bible retains its referential truth despite translation. That is, despite literally being reworded in different material symbols.
Rembrandt, The Good Samaritan, after 1633, oil on panel, The Wallace Collection, London
The is a semiotic flexibility built into the Bible – there has to be based on the nature of textual understanding. To say nothing of transmission.
Then there's the reality within the Bible that Jesus himself speaks in parables – allegories that are other than what they mean literally. Like this subject by a great Protestant painter of the next century.
Image Credit: Peter Polter/ Getty Images
In ontological hierarchy terms, the absolute has to come through the material and contingent which means the representation – no matter how truthful – is fundamentally different from the message it transmits.
The valley of shadow as seen through the darkling glass.
This means ideal proof texts like one might find for Cicero aren’t applicable to a divinely True super-material message. And that's why the hierarchical part of the ontological hierarchy is so important. All texts are material representations - material objects that represent something other than what they are.
But a standard text is a material representations of the thoughts of another material being. The Band's perspective is that the human combines body, mind, and soul in alignment with the three levels of the ontological hierarchy [material, abstract, ultimate]. More or less what the ancient Greeks reasoned out some time ago. But we express our thoughts in representations, meaning we translate or reformulate them mentally into semiotic terms before producing the representation. No matter what we are discussing, it has to be expressed through a material representation. This graphic acknowledges that every ontological level is known to us representationally. Through material representional filters.
Consider. This sentence is an expression of an thought-impulse put into words mentally before being typed. There is an isomorphic relationship between the formulation of the thought in expressible form while in the mind and the representation that's produced to externally express it. Whatever nebulous form it first appeared as, it has to be put into representational form before it is usable in communication. And that representational form is a material creation - symbols, sounds, etc. that transmit materially. So a regular text is ontologically horizontal - the material record of the materialization of material human thought. And if the representational semiotics change - meaning different symbol - the meaning also changes.
A divinely inspired text is still a representation in a materially transmissible form. But it's ontologically vertical. The content being represented isn't parallel materialization of human thought. It's the necessarily imperfect materialization of a higher truth. Necessarily because timeless abstracts are not accessible to finite human minds qua themselves. They are what we can only represent. What we have to approximate in semiotic media that are definitionally incapable of the type of isomorphic semiosis that communicates our thoughts. The will of God can't be condensed into a material communicative medium because material vehicles are ontologically insufficient for the task.
Guillaume Budé, De l’institution du prince, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, gallica.bnf.fr Ms-5103, fol. 1v.
Lady Philology oversees the education of a humanist. The degree of philological precision in humanist exegesis wasn't appropriate to something of this nature.
That's not to call the Bible indeterminate - it's really determinate. It's just fundamentally allegorical in its mode of communication in a way that a manmade text can't be. Because a manmade text not transmitting across levels of reality in the same way. Which is how we can have translational leeway within a certain range. Allegory is "speaking other", not speaking unrelated.
It is obvious that this is known by faith. We can reason to a certain point from why the text must be divinely inspired, but to know that it is requires faith. Which raises an important question. On what grounds then can Luther or other Protestants alter the Biblical canon that had been in place for a millennium? The logic is here is painfully simple.
Either the Bible is divinely inspired truth from inception and therefore “above” human tinkering.
Or the Bible is subject to human revision and therefore not divinely inspired.
If the former, the philological profile of a canon known by faith to be inspired is irrelevant to its divine selection. If the latter, the texts have no more claim to truth than any other human book of tales. So it doesn't matter if you follow it because it has no authority. The same might be asked of a Church structure believed on faith to be guided by the Holy Spirit.
See the problem? Pointing out that relics are theologically preposterous or even that there is no justification for saintly intercession other than elastic scriptural readings is one thing. Declaring consubstantiation dogmatically True is another. Put more simply, where is the authority to turn criticism of the old manifestation into a new dogma?
Lucas Cranach the Younger, Luther Preaching with the Pope in the Jaws of Hell, around 1550, engraving, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden
This print is highly polemical but subtle too. The contrast is between a true religion centered on salvation through faith in Jesus' sacrifice and a fake one of manmade ranks, privileges, structures, and rituals. But note how it's Luther in a pose like Jesus' in Last Judgement paintings. Right hand pointing up to salvation, left consigning to Hell. Luther may not claim to be the Divine Judge, but the material semiotics of the picture associates him with that well-known figure. The implication is that he is a Christ-like entity of moral authority.
Hans Baldung Grien, Portrait of Martin Luther, 1521, woodcut
Sometimes it's not subtle at all. This print by another leading Reformation artist shows Luther with the old symbols of holiness - a halo and light from the dove of the Holy Spirit.
The images are great because they show contemporary popular impressions beyond written records. The Protestants pretended to reject the authoritative Church while applying it's symbols to their own leadership. Rhetorically, it says to take what he's saying as divinely authoritative while ignoring the actual question of legitimate dogmatic authority.
One credible structure that Luther did offer was his Priesthood of All Believers. The idea that each seeks Jesus through the Bible and prayer with pastoral guidance is scriptural and logically defensible. But here too the visual rhetoric teases authority that can't be overtly claimed.
Lucas Cranach the Elder, Passional Christi und Antichristi, 1521, woodcut, British Library, London
Cranach's illustrations for Luther's ally Melanchthon's polemical book contrast scenes of Jesus with the pope in the role of inverted Anti-Christ. Calling the pope Anti-Christ was common Reformation rhetoric and seems less a claim that the Apocalypse was happening that a way of calling the pope the opposite of the representative of Christ he claimed to be.
But in other prints, it's Luther set up opposite the wicked pope. If the pontiff is considered an inverted Antichrist, then presenting Luther as his inverse sets him up as a Christ-figure. Not exactly, but rhetoric doesn't work by logic. It works by feeling. And if early Protestants felt the pope was the opposite of what Jesus was like, then the opposite of that is literally Christ-like. Rhetorically, the feelings transfer and the real theological definitions irrelevant.
Lucas Cranach the Elder, Contrasting Protestant and Catholic Christianity, around 1545, colored woodcut, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
Collections of stock caricatures but the opposite natures are just as clear as in the Passional Christi und Antichristi
Then Luther begets other followers with their own metaphysically-absurd claims to be able to dictate canonicity.
Anonymous, Martin Luther and the Reformers, 1625-50
A crude painting that makes the point. They don't all agree. Do they assert that the Holy Spirit works openly through them?
Which ones?
Hans Holbein, Portrait of Henry VIII, 1540, oil on panel, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome
Certainly not Fat Blasphemer. There wasn't a more risibly self-fluffing fraud than this oleaginous pig's creation of a breakaway "church" to feed his appetites. And to liquidate venerable ecclesiastic foundations to line his and his bootlickers' pockets.
If any leader of the era is in the jaws of Hell...
Religious issues quickly become inseparable from political ones as princes choose sides. Fat Blasphemer is especially egregious, but the Wars of Religion are a century and a half wallow in unnecessary brutality.
Frans Hogenberg, Spaniards Occupy Antwerp, in 1576, end of the 16th century, copper engraving, Getty Images
The ferocity of the Spanish counterattack ended any hope of a political settlement. The Dutch saw the 80 Years War as an existential war for survival.
However one feels about religious questions, the European Wars of Religion were a culture-level disaster. And while the Reformation pitched freedom from iligitimate religious authority, the result was a proliferation of different authorities. Long-term this meant subordinating the spiritual to the socio-political, another big step on the road to "secularizing" the modern West.
The direct impact on art plays out in different ways. The Church had been the preeminent source of arts funding – the only source for much of the Middle Ages and conduit for most aristocratic money. The giants of the Renaissance like Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian all work for religious patrons.
Dirk van Delen, Iconoclasts in a Church, 1630, oil on panel, Rijksmuseum
Iconoclasm was an extreme but regular expression of Protestant hostility towards images. The impact on artists is obvious.
Anonymous, Protestants Clean Ship in a Catholic Church, 1566, engraving Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Catholics worship the seven-headed Beast and pope as Whore of Babylon while the devil flies away with crucifix and chalices. Meanwhile iconoclasts destroy images while others sweep up fragments.
Altar retable in the Jan van Arkel chapel, Utrecht Cathedral, 15th century, defaced during Beeldenstorm iconoclasm of 1566
The Dutch Beeldenstorm is the most famous Protestant iconoclasm, but most Protestant regions had one. The theological argument and rhetoric accused images and other Catholic liturgical items as idolatry. But there was a huge socio-political dimension as well.
The anger vented towards the Church was the product of deep dissatisfaction with reaction to a long-running spiritual crisis and betrayal by trusted institutions. Were mass awareness about the current church to penetrate the fruit-fly awareness of the masses, similar rage would be expected.
When Protestant sects reject or curtail religious art, they cut off the main venue for artists. Even the more moderate groups that don't reject images altogether still don't use art to the extent the Catholics do. The Reformation is as disruptive to traditional patterns of art as it is to the rest of society and culture.
Pieter Jansz. Saenredam, Interior of Saint Bavo, Haarlem, 1631, oil on panel, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Whitewashed Gothic interior without sculpture, pictures, or stained glass. Religious questions aside, the cost to Western culture was incalculable.
The Reformation doesn’t end art, but it disrupts and then channels it into new directions. New clients and markets emerge for different types of art. This brings in socio-economic considerations - the devastation and drain of decade after decade of grinding religious war was not conducive to a thriving art scene. It was Protestant Holland that developed the prosperity to emerge as an art center, building off the foundations of the older Northern Netherlandish Renaissance. Only without the old religious intensity that we saw in an earlier post.
The Dutch Golden Age that rose out of the initial chaos of the 80 Years War included one of the dominant painting traditions of the 17th century.
Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom, East Indiamen off a Coast, between 1600 and 1630, oil on canvas, Rijksmuseum
The Golden Age of the 17th century saw the Dutch as the preeminent sea trading power in Europe. An interlude between the Venetians of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and the British Empire of early modernity.
The rising prosperity of the Dutch Golden Age was different from the European monarchies because the newly independent United Provinces lacked a powerful aristocracy or Church. Obviously new economic elites were created, but the wealth was relatively more distributed. This created a different type of consumer - something closer to an emergent middle class. A relatively large percentage of the population with disposable income. Not enough for lavish palaces and vast artistic projects, but enough to buy paintings and support a different kind of artistic economy.
Pieter de Hooch, The Courtyard of a House in Delft, 1658, oil on canvas, National Gallery
The culture of the Dutch Golden Age was urban and affluent but not aristocratic. With an emphasis on a disciplined socio-political order that walked the line between unprecedented materialism and rigorous Biblical Protestantism.
This remarkable painting captures the clean, orderly nature of Golden Age life.
Abraham van Beyeren, Banquet Still Life, 1667, oil on canvas, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The tradition of lavish Dutch still-life painting reflects familiarity with the luxury goods made available by extensive trade and rising public affluence.
Note the presence of decaying items. This prosperity conflicted with the humility and self-sacrifice promoted by the Dutch Reformed religion. A picture like this has it both ways - pointing out that all material things are fleeting and perish Ecclesiastes-style, while also celebrating the availability and appearance of them.
Protestant art is dominated by new genres - scenes of everyday life, landscape, still life, and portraits all develop quickly. These subjects didn't have the overt religious subjects of older traditions and were suitable to a new urban client class. The next post will look more closely at the details, but it's already clear that the emergence of this new art was a directly outcome of the social changes spawned by the Reformation.
Catholic art, like Catholic society goes through a period of crisis before blasting into the affective, rhetorical, mystical triumphalism of the Baroque. This will be dealt with in a future post, but raises an important point to the Reformation.
Peter Paul Rubens, Miracle of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, 1617-1618, oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum
Grand altarpiece from the great Flemish painter of the counter-Reformation. Catholic art addressed Protestant attacks on several levels. The visual splendor reaffirms the legitimacy and value of religious art. And the subjects are polemical and didactic. It's confirming the legitimacy of sainthood, the new order of the Jesuits, the priesthood, and by extension the Catholic structure, and a traditional altar and Mass with chalice visible. All in a rhetorically engaging way.
Emphasis on ritual and organization give it away. A unified Christendom has to have a degree of flexibility since it has to accommodate everybody. The Middle Ages was full of borderline heterodoxy and mysticism that fell short of heresy and were tolerated. But rigid denominations require greater doctrinal homogeneity. It's not enough to be "Christian". It's what type of Christian you are.
Wenceslaus Hollar, The Augsburg Confession. State 2, 17th century, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Toronto
The Augsburg Confession was presented as a definitive statement of Lutheran dogma in 1530. Ten years later, Philipp Melanchthon wrote a revised Variata that was signed by Calvin. The two versions include significant differences in the nature of the sacrament. Which one was manifesting divine truth in material form under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and which was something a guy made up? Both can't be True. And if neither necessarily are, what makes their denominations objectively binding beyond a generic Christian fellowship?
So we're confronted by the irony of a religious freedom movement becoming grounds for greater control over belief. And that will undermine Christian objectivity as the idiot masses prove incapable of grasping the essential place of Christ and his sacrifice to any manifestation and waft into occultic unitarian assholery.
At this point it is necessary to address the logical parameters of the Reformation without weighing on specific dogmatics. We can untangle the main artistic developments in a part 2 to follow. The Band avoids issues around "denominations" because of our understanding of onto-epistemological linkage. Questions of UR are known by faith. Empirical observation or logical analysis may be consistent with faith-based knowing, but can can’t verify or refute. That’s a category error. A misapplication of epistemological mode to ontological level like using a mathematical formula to determine whether you liked dinner.
But is is obvious in the face of competing arguments that we have to lay out what can be claimed to be known and what is merely social custom.
The extended ontological hierarchy with the sub-logos descent into evil and existential negation. If interested, click for the post where we work this out.
The nature of Logos is important here - the divine extension through the levels of reality that manifests in the appropriate way on each. The Word or Jesus to logical truths, to empirical reality. All different ontologically, but all measures of truth as applicable to the appropriate domain. Rejecting truth - like the House of Lies - rejects logos for empirical falsehood and illogical assertions.
The appropriate manifestation for the level is essential. It captures the coexistence of different form and fundamental affinity. Truth known by faith is non-contradictory with truth known empirically or logically in the appropriate domains, because all three are connected by domain-specific manifestations of logos. But no set of controlled observations or logical algorithm can confirm the redemptive power of the Incarnation. The Incarnation is consistent with human survival in an entropic fallen world, but not verifiable in its terms.
Doctrine is the attempt to extrapolate logically from Biblical foundations given that the truth of the Bible is accepted on faith. We'll leave out the dogma-doctrine distinction - there is one - and stick to the more general doctrine for the sake of discussion. Like any divine expression, it tries to cross ontological levels through representation by applying abstract truths to changing material circumstances. And that opens two big interpretative issues.
1. Semiotic limitations – differences between referent & words and between how words are translated & interpreted in changing circumstances.2. Passage of time – changing socio-cultural context or medium of manifestation that interpretations take place in and materialize through.
There is a built-in susceptibility to moral entropy and progressive deviation in this ontological make-up of a material church. One that requires constant vigilance to prevent and resist. This is only possible by continually testing the current doctrinal forms against the original legitimating authority.
Anonymous German Painter, Christ Blessing, Surrounded by a Donor Family, around 1573–82, oil and gold on oak
If the authority of the Bible and the historical roots of Christianity are accepted on faith, there is validity in Reformation critique of the Renaissance Church. But there is a greater illogic in the response. It's that inherent limitations in Christianity itself as worldly manifestation of divine will that represents a constant challenge to church integrity.
Hence the need to properly assess the logic behind the religious positions around the Reformation in a way we haven’t seen done before.
The idea comes from an unlikely place.
The Band has mentioned Christopher Langan in the past, the man with the highest recorded IQ in America and candidate for the World’s Smartest title. We are in the process of working through his immensely dense reality theory called the CTMU for the next big project after the House of Lies. We aren’t in a position to comment further except to note that like any worthwhile intellectual exercise there is inspiration and influence.
Image adapted from Colossus by Alex Olmedo. It's a good representation of how it feels to dispute Langan intellectually.
One thing that makes Langan so remarkable - and challenging - is how he combines knowledge domains as if they were data points. The result is productive and innovative but escapes classification in the standard silos.
Most modern scholars or academics are masters of disciplinary lingo, not the epistemological foundations that disciplines supposedly codify. A discipline is merely a body of knowledge around a subject, but in the midwitted hives of modern academe, disciplinary structures and jargon become ends in themselves. This means the practitioners can't assess the fundamental limits of their own disciplines. Nor can they engage directly with aspects of reality that fall outside their disciplinary frames of reference. Readers of the Band know we recognize disciplinary formations are at best perspectives on reality and pursuit of deeper truth has to go beyond them. Langan is smarter and more capacious than we are and plate spins disciplines with more information density, but his approach resonates with us. In this case, he has us considering unorthodox applications of logic and sets.
In particular how depicting logical parameters in Venn diagram form makes structural relationships between sets instantly clear and recognizable.
Consider the gist of the Reformation debate. That the Church deviated over time from its founding principles and that those need to be restored. Not how the Reformation crapped the bed subsequently, but the founding principles. Everyone could agree that Christianity began at a certain moment in time, organization quickly followed, and the faith grew and spread across the ancient world. The issue was whether what developed historically remained consistent with the founding ethos.
Masaccio, The Distribution of Alms and Death of Ananias, between 1426 and 1427, fresco, Cappella Brancacci, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence
That's where the humanist epistemology seems to fit. The dispute is historico-interpretative - the interpretation of what happened historically in light of theological reference.
This manifests as disputes over legitimate authority - sola scriptura vs. tradition - as well as how authority is to be understood. Did certain things happen, and if they did, what do they mean? The Church is supposed to align people with God's will. The problem emerges when the particulars of that will and how best to align are in dispute. Leaving out the deceivers and self-servers. Good faith disputants only, since all sides agree God does know the heart.
This means that the core problem is temporal – as in occurring in time – because it involves that abstract/material interface. How God's unchanging abstract will is to be implemented in impermanent fallen human material reality.
Abstract reality is unchanging but immaterial - timeless founding concepts and ideals. Material reality is entropic and timebound, human structures that shift and change. The Church is an ongoing attempt to realize the former in the latter. Literally to materialize the former in the latter. If it goes wrong, it explicitly manifests negative temporal outcomes. Literally changing for the worse over time. If it goes right, the changing temporal outcomes will remain consistent with the founding principles, the realization of which is the purpose of the Church in the first place.
Sir James Thornhill, Paul Preaching in the Areopagus, 1729-31, oil on canvas, Royal Academy of Arts
Set aside the question of identifying what the timeless founding principles are for the moment. Logical structure is independent of the the specific content. We can be certain that they have to exist - whatever they are specifically - because a) the material Church appears at a moment in time to b) represent an immaterial divine will.
Since God is external to time and change, His will is not mutable. Therefore the founding principles of a material manifestation of that will must also be immutable or else the manifestation doesn't remain consistent with the will over time. And then the Church is no different than any other human club or organization ontologically. And here's a link to a post on the Pope's Satanic Throne, for no reason at all.
Now cross the necessity of a starting set of of principles that must remain consistent with the idea defining parameters can be expressed as a Venn diagram-able set. Think of those [timeless founding principles] as the starting parameters of a set called [Church]. Now shift from two-dimensional to three-dimension by extending temporally - add time as the z-axis. The [Church]-set parameters extended forward in time visualize the consistent defining principles for the historical Church as it develops as a volumetric form. The diagram clearly shows that metaphysically-legitimate historical Church is the temporal extension of the starting parameters.
It’s easiest to visualize this graphically.
Start with a simple Venn structure. The initial black square corresponds to material reality as understood in terms of the temporally unfolding socio-culture formation of the West.
Within that material reality, we can define a “space” for the Church corresponding to the consistent founding principles above expressed as socio-cultural parameters.
If we want, we can add another set of socio-cultural parameters corresponding to another set of materialized timeless founding principles. Call it [Papacy] - the internal subset responsible for the authoritative guidance and oversite of [Church]. [Papacy] is “inside” [Church] because its parameters and authority are subsets of the larger entity.
Makes sense in a general way. Now consider the parameterization. Unlike the parameters of a set, a cultural space is defined by a qualitative verbal description, not quantitative parameters. “Formula” or “formulation” fits, so long as we think of it as a qualitative one. So we’ll call our [Church] or [Papacy] boundary or definition a qualitative formula or Q-Form for short.
We do have to acknowledge semiotic differences – verbal language has less precision but more connotative breadth than a mathematical one. Any lexical definition has the inherent built-in imprecision of representing with words in sentences as opposed to the quantitative accuracy of numbers in strings. It’s still a set of defining parameters, but with more interpretative room. It’s clearer with the actual examples.
The qualitative formula - Q-Form - for the parameters of [Church] is the set of Biblical references that refers to the founding and organization of the Apostolic church.
Primarily Jesus’ references to "church" in the Gospels and the accounts of the early Christian groupings in the Acts of the Apostles.
The Q-Form for [Papacy] is the Petrine Succession – Jesus’ charge to Peter that he builds his church upon his rock. The breadth includes the what we know of Peter. He isn’t a cipher to be interpreted as anyone wants, but one of the first Apostles, with all that entails.
If he is the foundation of the Church to follow, its definition can’t contradict what we know about him as an Apostle. And that has to conform to the parameters of [Church] as well.
Now the initial parameters materialize timeless principles, but this materialization exists in time. As in, time passes from the beginning point. Temporally, the qualitative formula - Q-Form - defines the consistent principles that justify the entity from the outset forward. The historical Church grows and changes as time passes. Individual popes come and go, and many of those are show terrible moral character. But the timeless principles materialized in the foundation maintain consistent standards express the uniquely divine nature of the Church. They distribute evenly across all elements included within the set. In practice and in principle. Those are what separates the Church as from a social organization or differentiates a pope from a potentiate metaphysically. And best of all, they do it on the Church's own own claims.
That’s the thing about the Q-Form – it’s the initial legitimating formation that the Church and papacy themselves put forth.
Both claim to be instantiated by Christ with the Bible as proof. Therefore that same source determines their starting parameters in the manner of a Venn Diagrammed set, just qualitatively. The Q-Forms of [Church] and [Papacy].
Since the Church is a historical phenomenon - it exists materially in historical time - the initial formation is merely the beginning of a changing, developing temporal existence. Remember that change is endemic in material reality and neither proof nor disqualification of the legitimacy of the historical church in itself. Everything material changes. The question is whether the changes remain consistent with the founding parameters which are themselves based in the not-material. Are the material "translations" accurate so to speak.
This is the crux of the Reformation debate – the Protestants accuse the historical change of deviating from Christian truth while the Catholics claim consistency. Neither proffered anything like the socio-religious formations of the early Christian era. The dispute was alignment with the initial ethos.
Lucas Cranach the Younger, The Last Supper, 1565, oil on canvas, Johanniskirche, Dessau
Reformation altarpiece with Luther, Melanchthon and other Reformers in the place of the Apostles.
Paintings like this were intended to show the connection between the initial Christian and Reformation ethoi. They also ironically call to mind the physical historical differences between the 16th and 1st centuries. The rhetoric is clear, but whether or not they're consistent with the founding parameters of the historical church - the Q-Form of [Church] is still in question.
We can look at that graphically as projection over time from the initial Q-Form by adding that time axis.
We've shown the temporal extension of [Church] as a regular cylinder for clarity. It's a visual metaphor where the unchanging parameters of the founding principles are visualized graphically as an unchanging circumference of the historical "volume".
The socio-material form actual historical church will shift and change, but remains legitimate so long as this remains "within" the extended parameterization of the founding principles.
We can extend the Q-Form [Papacy] in the same way. The founding parameters become a temporal concpetual range for legitimate historical manifestation.
Visualizing the logical legitimacy of the historical church like this makes some facts instantly apparent. We know that the defining parameters of a set are distributed over all the elements within the set, meaning anything inside them conforms to them. Or else it isn't part of the set. [Church] and [Papacy] encompass socio-cultural reality over time, so all legitimate historical manifestations claiming to be the Church or its leadership has to be consistent with the determining Q-Forms.
Now rotate the graphics to a two-dimensional profile view for clarity. And because our graphic-creation powers are limited.
All we've done is depicted the graphics on the left side-on and shaded the volume representing the initial parameters extended temporally. It shows the historical dimension but doesn't show [Church] or [Papacy] as "areas" of the socio-cultural material plane. They still are. It just doesn't show in the simplified views.
All the graphic formats are the same temporally-extended parameter set. The differences are in the information that the different views show. Here are the three views in sequence to make it clear before moving to the next manipulation.
If we take slices of the third version, what you get are socio-cultural "snapshots" - manifestations of [Church] or [Papacy] at a single moment in time. In other words, the actual historical church at that date. It looks like this...
On the two-dimensional graphic these slices look like lines bisecting the extended socio-material field at certain points in time.
The lower picture switches to the first view and represents each of the slices from "above" - as [Church] parameterized at that moment in history. Time moves forward but the founding principles perpetually manifest as the defining parameters of the legitimate historical church.
Because the defining parameters of a set distribute over all its elements, every legitimate historic manifestation of the church has to correspond to to those. Logical necessity provides a means of evaluating whether particular examples of the historical church are legitimate. A means that recognizes the ontological difference between the material manifestation and the abstract principles it manifests.
The material is time-bound and always changing. Those changing characteristics are what comprise the historical church at any point and are orthogonal to the abstract parameters. They have to be - the abstract can't be material. But it is applicable. So for the material historical elements of the church to be legitimate as per the Biblical principles, they fall in the [Church] set extended temporally. The principles distribute over the material characteristics.
Visualize the historical development of the material church as a sequence of different polygons within the consistent defining parameters. These can change as the material church does - refining ritual and doctrine, etc. But to be legitimate, always staying within the original Q-Form for [Church].
We can do the same thing with the Q-Form for [Papacy] and the historic leadership of the church.
And because [Papacy] is a subset of [Church], the defining parameters of the later are also distributed over the leadership of the historical church.
What this means is that characteristics of the historic church or its leadership that fall outside the founding principles parameterized in the Q-Forms are not legitimate.
For example, consider the Q-Form for [Papacy] - the Petrine succession - within the Q-Form for [Church] - the Biblical foundations. Remember - we're accepting the Church's own argument at this point. That upon this rock I build my Church means Peter is declared an archetypal "vicar of Christ" that begets a legalistically-defined "pontiff" atop a hierarchy. Of course, none of that is mentioned by Jesus - it's all that historical change and development that comes later in time. Which raises the logical question - is this consistent with the distributed Q-Forms that define the legitimate extension of the defining parameters?
Peter Paul Rubens, Christ's Charge to Peter, 1616, oil on oak panel, London, The Wallace Collection
The foundation of the papacy as imagined by the great Flemish counter-Reformation painter of the early Baroque. The rhetoric is pointed - Peter kisses Jesus' hand as he gives him the keys in a manner suggestive of kissing the pope's ring. The sheep allude to the role of Good Shepherd and charge to feed my sheep that the historical church authorities somewhat disingenuously claimed as a mission.
If we're taking the historic claim of legitimacy at face value, a polemical picture like this is the most favorable possible visualization. And it emphasizes that Peter is an Apostle by including some of the others.
That Peter's an Apostle is centrally important. They are the ones closest to Jesus and his mission who are empowered to carry it on after his Ascension.
Pentecost, illumination from the Syrian Rabula Gospels, 6th century, Florence, Biblioteca Mediceo Laurenziana, cod. Plut. I, 560, f.14v.
Depiction of the Holy Spirit bestowing the gifts of language to the Apostles as flames. The picture shows Mary in the group - combining passages from Acts 1 and 2.
Acts 1:13-14 - And when they were come in, they went up into an upper room... These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren.
Acts 2:2-4 - And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
Set aside later artists' efforts to elevate the explicit Biblical status of Mary - the history of Marian devotion is beyond the scope of the Band. Focus on the Biblical foundations of the institutional papacy and priesthood and what that means for the defining principles parameterized as our Q-Forms. An institutional priesthood is justified by arguments of Apostolic succession and the papacy by Petrine succession as distinct among the others. Therefore, logic holds that if papal supremacy is actually legitimate, Peter is the apostolic archetype of pope. This means Peter must be the supreme apostle. Otherwise there is nothing to differentiate the Petrine Succession from the other Apostolic successions.
Jesus specifically addresses the issue of "greatest Apostle" in the very Bible that gives the concept of Petrine Succession it's claim to authority. Making it part of the set of Biblical principles that define those starting parameters or Q-Form. In fact, it's so significant that it appears in more than one Gospel. Here are NIV versions from Matthew and Luke for the modern English. The Arts of the West group will recognize the venerable symbols of the tetramorph - the man and ox respectively.
An order of spiritual leadership based on the Biblical Apostles ranks according to degree of service in the manner of Jesus and childlike innocence. This is because the Gospels repeatedly differentiate between this world and the Kingdom of God. Caesar's and God's. Last shall be first. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal (John 12:25). And so forth. The difference between the Kingdom of God and the fallen material world is one of opposites, not representational continuity like in Neoplatonism. Logos ties levels of reality together, but that's a path out of material entanglement. The fallen, entropic, temporal world offers no pathway on its own to the eternal life Jesus offers.
This means that wealth, power claims, titles, reverence of the Reformation papacy contradicts clear Biblical statements on Apostolic greatness. It doesn't matter if the concept of "pope" can be defined through Biblical interpretation - the Q-Form of [Papacy] - if the material institution doesn't conform to the defining parameters.
The current occupant of the Vatican enthroned between golden cherubim in the manner of the Holy of Holies is well outside the parameters of [Papacy] or [Church]. One's opinion on the Petrine succession argument is irrelevant to recognizing that this is a total inversion of the ethos of the Biblical Apostles.
The Q-Form doesn't distribute onto the claimed manifestation placing it outside the set.
What the papacy did was take the Kingdom that Jesus characterized as reversing the state of this world and redefined it in the terms of this world. After explaining how the greatest of Apostles is a servant in Luke, he describes the reward to follow. You are those who have stood by me in my trials. And I confer on you a kingdom, just as my Father conferred one on me, so that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Luke 22:28-30. The Kingdom of the Father.
Opposite, not the same. Expressed in terms of the historical West, the political ruler needs to be Christian to rule morally. And there needs to be some form of moral or doctrinal leadership within the material church that conforms to Biblical principles. But the Christian leader is not exalted with worldly privilege and luxury like a political ruler.
Consider Peter.
Guido Reni, Crucifixion of St Peter, 1604-1605, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca, Vatican
According to early church tradition Peter was crucified upside-down to differentiate himself from Jesus. Here's the account from the approximately 2nd-century apocryphal Acts of Peter 37
I beseech you the executioners, crucify me thus, with the head downward and not otherwise: and the reason wherefore, I will tell unto them that hear.
Reni's painting falls into that early Baroque idiom that emphasized counter-Reformation values. Like the primacy of Peter, the value of martyrdom, and the continuity between the early and contemporary Church.
Contrast this with a Portuguese Renaissance painting that captures the papal vision of St. Peter. Especially the Apostolic humility and service in the painting up above. Here, "Peter" has been reimagined enthroned and crowned like a Renaissance pope.
Grão Vasco, Saint Peter, 1530-1535, oil on wood panel, Viseu, Museu Grão Vasco
It's appropriate that Peter was said to have been crucified upside-down so as to not be confused with Jesus. Because these "successors" to Peter can't be confused with him either. Though for different reasons...
Neither the medieval-imperial nor the Reformation-era papacy were legitimate authorities by the logic their own distributed defining parameters. The answer to the leadership question would be an entity or entities that conformed to the Biblical principles of Apostolic greatness. Unfortunately, the Reformers were every bit as subject to the lure of worldly authority.
Running a moral community would always be a problem. But blurring the line between religious and political leadership was never the answer.
To say nothing about Fat Blasphemer...
And that's before the fragmentation of Western Christendom into dueling doctrines, then official "national" churches and the subordination to material interests, and then the inverted non-Biblical skinsuits of today.
But that's getting ahead of ourselves. It's sufficient for this post to map out the basic logic of using Biblical principles to legitimate material temporal ecclesiastic structures. The next post will look at the implications of Reformation and counter-Reformation on art and culture.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Blind Leading the Blind, 1568, distemper on linen canvas, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples