The City Gate

Fleet Marriages

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 20:20:29 -0500

Peter Gay touches on the topic of marriage in his intellectual history of the Enlightenment. He mentions that the grounds for marriage were beginning to transition in the 18th century from interests in family connections and property to love. But as this was the age of reason, it was expected to be “an intellective, natural, sensible, and rational love.” This can be seen in the passage of the Marriage Act of 1753 in England. Couples could no longer exchange private vows, but instead had to be married in a church after completing a process that caused at least a short delay before the ceremony. This was meant to encourage “a sedate and fixed love and not a sudden flash of passion which dazzles the understanding.”

One of the forms of marriage this act was meant to stop was called Fleet Marriage. The church had always encouraged its involvement in the formation of marriages just as many people had tried to avoid this. Marriage in Fleet Prison, a debtor's prison in London, was a popular option because it was cheap and avoided the notice of parents, the church, or the authorities. It had turned that part of London into a Las Vegas-like haven for quickie marriages. This did not fit the ideal of a rational marriage.

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Music, Culture and the Early Church

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 21:21:50 -0500

As I mentioned in the previous entry, the church has always had a complex task in the evaluation and integration of the creations of culture within its mission. The church must play a redeeming role with the surrounding culture while not valuing that which is antithetical to its purpose. The use of music in its worship is an excellent illustration of the inherent tensions in this task. The decision of the early church with regard to music was a unique one in ecclesiastical history and bears looking at.

The early church had a single response to instrumental music in the church: it did not belong. The style did not matter. The instrumentation did not matter. The lyrics did not matter. Instrumental music in the Graeco-Roman culture was a part of pagan religious celebrations and licentious entertainments and therefore had no place in the church. It was even debated whether singing should be allowed. The concern was that the emotional response from the melody may be greater than that of the words. Augustine went so far as to call it sin. In his Confessions, he writes about his struggles with music:

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Plundering the Pagans

Tue, 12 Sep 2006 21:38:37 -0500

Church and culture. It has been an uneasy and complex relationship. The church must contextualize the gospel to communicate it to the culture without distorting its message. The culture influences the forms of worship and the discourse of the church. In many ways this second interaction has caused the larger disagreements of the two within the church. It has touched everything from styles of music to language to feasts and festivals. It began with the creation of the church and continues today.

The church developed within the cultural context of the Graeco-Roman world even as its religious origins are Jewish in nature. The music, language, and philosophy of the time were inherently pagan given their roots. The church needed these, though, as it worked out its theology and worship. This created an obvious tension between the desire to use the intellectual and artistic fruits of the Classical Greeks and yet not be overly influenced by the ideals of that society. This tension can be illustrated through the rhetorical question of Tertullian in the early 3rd century: “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” The answer for Tertullian is that the church does not and should not depend on classical thought.

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Empiricism and the Supernatural

Fri, 08 Sep 2006 21:41:28 -0500

I came across some interesting quotes about miracles in a book about the Enlightenment. Diderot wrote that he would not believe the report of a resurrection even if all of Paris were testifying to it. Similarly, Hume said that he would deny the resurrection of Queen Elizabeth against the testimony of all the historians of England. Both Diderot and Hume began with an a priori belief that miracles were impossible. I compare this to one of the famous sayings of Sherlock Holmes, “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” I can imagine one of the philosophes of the Enlightenment saying something like this. An actual resurrection is impossible scientifically so the search is on to find the improbable event that fooled all those people.

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Natural Politics

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 20:33:11 -0500

Natural theology was popular in England in the 18th century and into the 19th century. This type of theology is rooted in the study of the natural world. Today's intelligent design arguments are an echo of many of the ideas from that time period. As a thought experiment motivated by natural theology, I wondered what a political theory developed purely on observations of nature might result in. It turns out that Thomas Aquinas already considered this in the 13th century. He determined that a monarchy was the best form of government using natural arguments. The heart is the primary mover of the body. Bees have a single queen. Reason has power of the soul. So “every natural governance is governance by one” and since “whatever is in accord with nature is best”, a single ruler must be best.

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Stupidity, Christianity & Ignorance

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 21:28:33 -0500

David Hume used these words to describe those portions of the world that had not been touched by the Enlightenment in his time. In The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism, Peter Gay claims that this rejection of religion and superstition was necessary to give the philosophes the freedom to criticize the past — especially the Christian role in the development of Western culture. He writes that “scholars could see the Christian millennium fairly only after polemicists had freed themselves from it by seeing it unfairly.” What Gay fails to note is that his history of the Enlightenment is written within the intellectual context that was created by Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire and others. If the rejection of Christian presuppositions was necessary for the development of a true critique of the past, it seems to follow that a questioning of the foundations of a modern, rational worldview are needed for Gay's task.

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Historian's Purpose

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 16:31:26 -0500

Yes, this may be a little esoteric, but it's something that I have recently pondered.

Is the purpose of a historian to ensure that the significant events of the past will not be forgotten or to explain the present in terms of the past?

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Eighty Years' War Frustrations

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 19:27:31 -0500

During the Eighty Years' War, the city of Ostend had a rough time of it. It was a Protestant city surrounded by Catholic territory and the armies of Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor, King of Spain, yada, yada). The other Dutch cities could not provide support due to their own wartime struggles. The obvious answer was to write to the Dutch immigrant community in England for food and soldiers. It didn't take too long for two hundred men to show up. The food was another story. Their English supporters sent a ship full of grain and English beer. Unfortunately, the ship was intercepted by pirates supported by their enemies. Major disappointment.

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The Sin of Starch

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 22:26:19 -0500

Near the end of the sixteenth century, a Puritan preacher described starching your clothes this way:

“that most devilish device of Starch...a sin so abominable that it doth cry so loudly in the Lord's ears for vengeance”

This quote only makes sense in its context. Famines and general food shortages were very common in this time period. This was due to the enormous population growth all over Europe, the lack of commercial farming, dependence on a single crop (grain - especially wheat), and the many wars. It has been estimated that a person experienced one famine on average in a lifetime. And these were boil leather or chase down the cats in the street sort of famines. This left people very anxious about the availability of food. In England bakers would be put in the stocks for selling bread below the specified weight. Given that starch was derived from wheat, the preacher's fury is a little more understandable.

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