- Title Pages
- Illustration
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: <i>John McManners, Man and Historian</i>
- 1 <i>The Science of Sin: Jacques de Sainte-Beuve and his</i> Cas de conscience
- 2 John Dury and the Practice of Irenicism
- 3 An Irish Opportunist in Paris: Dr Piers de Girardin
- 4 ‘Il fallut même réveiller les Suisses’: Aspects of Private Religious Practice in a Public Setting in Eighteenth-Century Versailles
- 5 A Quest for Peace in the Church: The Abbé A. J. C. Clément's Journey to Rome of 1758
- 6 Secular Simony: The Clergy and the Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France
- 7 ‘Superstitious enemies of the flesh’? The Variety of Benedictine Responses to the Enlightenment
- 8 Joseph II and the Monasteries of Austria and Hungary
- 9 A ‘lay divine’: Burke, Christianity, and the Preservation of the British State, 1790–1797
- 10 The Kirk, the French Revolution, and the Burden of Scottish Whiggery
- 11 Religion according to Napoleon: The Limitations of Pragmatism
- 12 Religious Reactions in Post-Revolutionary French Literature: Chateaubriand, Constant, Mme de Staël, Joseph de Maistre
- 13 A Not Exclusive Truth: An Early Nineteenth-Century Pastoral Theology and Erasmus
- 14 The Office of Chief Rabbi: A Very English Institution
- 15 ‘A footing beyond Time’: Church, State, and the Individual in Carlyle's Historical Writing
- 16 LʼÉglise, lʼÉtat et lʼUniversité: Les Facultés de Théologie Catholique en France au XIX<sup>e</sup> siècle
- 17 Colonial Church Establishment in the Aftermath of the Colenso Controversy
- 18 The British Ambassador and the Funeral of Pope Pius IX
- 19 Eastern Horizons: Anglicans and the Oriental Orthodox Churches
- Epilogue: The Changing Role of the Ecclesiastical Historian
- Bibliography of John McManners's Works
- Index
‘Superstitious enemies of the flesh’? The Variety of Benedictine Responses to the Enlightenment
‘Superstitious enemies of the flesh’? The Variety of Benedictine Responses to the Enlightenment
- Chapter:
- (p.149) 7 ‘Superstitious enemies of the flesh’? The Variety of Benedictine Responses to the Enlightenment
- Source:
- Religious Change in Europe 1650–1914
- Author(s):
Dom Aidan Bellenger
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
The thinkers of the European Enlightenment were born into a Christian world and, however jaundiced the views of many of them became of the ‘ascetic, superstitious enemies of the flesh’, it is remarkable how some kind of dialogue was maintained between many Church members, including monks, and those who, to use one of Peter Gay's definitions of Enlightenment, looked towards ‘the organized habit of criticism’. Both those who remained attached to the Church and those who chose to reject it shared a love of classical antiquity and a lack of appreciation for the Middle Ages. When one looks at Benedictine monasticism today, one tends to look through a neo-Gothic filter of revived medievalism.
Keywords: Enlightenment, Christian world, Middle Ages, Benedictine monasticism, medievalism, Church
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- Title Pages
- Illustration
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: <i>John McManners, Man and Historian</i>
- 1 <i>The Science of Sin: Jacques de Sainte-Beuve and his</i> Cas de conscience
- 2 John Dury and the Practice of Irenicism
- 3 An Irish Opportunist in Paris: Dr Piers de Girardin
- 4 ‘Il fallut même réveiller les Suisses’: Aspects of Private Religious Practice in a Public Setting in Eighteenth-Century Versailles
- 5 A Quest for Peace in the Church: The Abbé A. J. C. Clément's Journey to Rome of 1758
- 6 Secular Simony: The Clergy and the Sale of Offices in Eighteenth-Century France
- 7 ‘Superstitious enemies of the flesh’? The Variety of Benedictine Responses to the Enlightenment
- 8 Joseph II and the Monasteries of Austria and Hungary
- 9 A ‘lay divine’: Burke, Christianity, and the Preservation of the British State, 1790–1797
- 10 The Kirk, the French Revolution, and the Burden of Scottish Whiggery
- 11 Religion according to Napoleon: The Limitations of Pragmatism
- 12 Religious Reactions in Post-Revolutionary French Literature: Chateaubriand, Constant, Mme de Staël, Joseph de Maistre
- 13 A Not Exclusive Truth: An Early Nineteenth-Century Pastoral Theology and Erasmus
- 14 The Office of Chief Rabbi: A Very English Institution
- 15 ‘A footing beyond Time’: Church, State, and the Individual in Carlyle's Historical Writing
- 16 LʼÉglise, lʼÉtat et lʼUniversité: Les Facultés de Théologie Catholique en France au XIX<sup>e</sup> siècle
- 17 Colonial Church Establishment in the Aftermath of the Colenso Controversy
- 18 The British Ambassador and the Funeral of Pope Pius IX
- 19 Eastern Horizons: Anglicans and the Oriental Orthodox Churches
- Epilogue: The Changing Role of the Ecclesiastical Historian
- Bibliography of John McManners's Works
- Index
