Download Christianity and the Church under Siege

Birth of Modern Thought
The New Reading Public
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Literacy improved
Governments undertook state-financed
education
Skills in reading writing, and arithmetic
taught
Education
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Necessary for orderly political behavior
More productive labor force
Right knowledge leads to right actionenlightenment faith
Reading Material
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Literate population created new market
for new reading material
Newspapers alerted new products
through second Industrial Revolution
Books/journals creating material is
mediocre
Poor writing for poor readers
• Crime stories, political scandal, and advertising
• Pornography popular
• Political editorials influenced politics
Science at Mid Century
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Science very strong in the universities
in the mid 19th century
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From mid-19th century- Science and
Technology connected.
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Government saw a purpose to support
science as it would expand technology
Science- Auguste Comte
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Model for all human knowledge
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Comte argued human thought had 3 stages
• Theoretical stage: Physical nature explained in terms of
actions of spirits/divinities
• Metaphysical State: Abstract principles regarded as
operative agencies of nature.
• Positive State: Explanation of nature becomes exact
description of phenomena.
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Believed laws of social behavior discovered in same way as
laws of physical nature
Comte regarded as father of sociology
Religion of science that explain nature without
resorting to supernaturalism
Populizers lectured on scientific topics: science
answer to major questions of life
Darwin’s Theory
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Organisms with advantages survive and
live to increase population
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survival of the fittest
Body parts developed mechanistically
Undermined Bible, deism, and fixity of
nature
Physical and organic nature constantly
changing
Made people believe society, values,
customs, and beliefs should also change
Science and Ethics
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Philosophers modeled ethics on science
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Herbert Spencer
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Same concept to survival of human social relationships
Human society progressed through competition
Avoid aiding poor
Advocate aggressive competition between nations
Social Darwinism- Evolutionary ethics: “Might makes
right”
Thomas Henry Huxley
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Defender of Darwin
Physical cosmic process of evolution at odds with process of
human ethical development
Struggle held no ethical implications except to demonstrate
how human being should not behave
Christianity and the Church
under Siege
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Difficult time for Christian churches
intellectuals left faith
 Nation-states attacked influence
 Population attacked organization
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• church still remained popular
Intellectual Skepticism
• Intellectual attack challenged credibility,
accuracy and morality
• History
• David Strauss - The Life of Jesus
• claimed Jesus was a myth/ metaphor
• scholars contended human authors had edited
bible for problems and politics and Jews
• Questioning caused the most people to lose faith
Science
• Science undermined Christianity
• in 18th century, science supported faith
• Charles Lyell suggested earth older than
biblical records and removed God’s hand
from natural disasters
• Darwin attacked the Creation
• Anthropologists said religions sentiments
are just one more set of natural
phenomena
Morality
• Immoral biblical stories
• Differences between Old & New Testament
• Friedrich Nietzsche showed Christianity
glorified weakness
• Secularism of everyday life proved as
harmful as direct attacks
• Whole generations in cities grew up w/o
Christianity
Conflict Between Church and State
• The secular state clashed with Protestant
and Catholic churches
• liberals disliked dogma/political privileges
• primary area of conflict was education
• religions education debated
• Great Britain
• Education Act of 1870 provided statesupported schools
• all churches opposed improvements in education
• Increased cost of church schools
• Educational Act 1902, govt. supported religious and
secular schools
France
• Falloux Law of 1850
• local priest provided religious education
• Third Republic & Cath Church loathed
each other
• Jules Ferry passed laws replacing
religious instruction with civic training
• After Dreyfus affair
• pro-Dreyfus govt. of Pierre Waldeck
• Rousseau suppressed religious orders
• 1905, Napoleonic Concordat terminated and
church and state were separated
Germany and the Kulturkampf
• After unification,
• Bismarck felt Roman Cath Church
threatened unity
• Removed clergy from education
• “May Laws” of 1873
• Required priests to pass state exams
• Abolished power of pope
• Bismarck arrested and expelled most
Cath bishops from Prussia
• Bismarck’s Kulturkampf (cultural
struggle) against Cath Church failed,
was a great blunder for him
Areas of Religious Revival
• All over Europe
• Catholic churches were revived
• Gave attention to urban poor
• Final great effort to Christianize
Europe
• Well organized led and financed
•failed only because population of
Europe outstripped resources of
churches
The Roman Church and the Modern World
• Pope Pius IX issued the Syllabus of Errors
• set Cath Church against science/philosophy/politics
• 1869, First Vatican Council
• Council introduced dogma of papal infallibility on faith/ morals
• Spiritual authority became substitute for lost political/temporal
authority
• Pius succeeded by Leo XIII
• pronounced Rerum Novarum(1891)
• Defended private property/religious education
• Condemned socialism/Marxism
• supported laws to protect workers
• wanted corporate society, not socialism/capitalism
• Leo succeeded by Pius X
• condemned Catholic modernism
• required all priests to take anti-Modernist oath
• struggle b/t Catholicism/modern thought resumed
Islam and Late-NineteenthCentury European Thought
• Islam seen as product of culture
• seen as incapable of developing science/new ideas
• Opposed by Jamal al-din Al-Afghani
• Argued that Islam would eventually produce modern cultures
• European racial/cultural outlooks directed toward
Arab world,
• championed white racial supremacy
• reinforced by Christian missionaries,
• founded schools/hospitals, didn’t convert many (penalty for
abjuring Islam is death)
• Within Islamic world
• some thinkers (the Salafi) wanted to combine modern
thought w/reformed Islam
• led Muslims to oppose Western influence
• some movements simply rejected Western thought
Toward a TwentiethCentury Frame of Mind
Philosophers, scientists, psychologist
artists started showing reality
human nature/society
 challenged major presuppositions of
mid-19th century thought
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Science: The Revolution in Physics
• Discontent present over realism of 19th century
science
• Ernst Mach
• The Science of Mechanics:
• urged to consider concepts descriptive of
scientific observer as well as physical world
• by WWI scientist saw themselves as recording
observations of instruments and offering
models of nature
X Rays and Radiation
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Dec 1895 Wilhelm Roentgen published paper
on X rays
1896 Henri Becquerel discovered same
w/uranium
J.J. Thompson imagined electrons
1902 Rutherford explained cause of radiation
Theories of Quantum Energy
Relativity, and Uncertainty
• Max Planck theorized energy in packets
1900
• 1905 Albert Einstein published papers on
time/space continuum
• 1927, Heisenberg made uncertainty
principle
• scientists continued to get money from govt.s by
relating discovery with economic and military
Literature: Realism and Naturalism
• Morals went through changes
• realist movement showed hypocrisy
brutality and dullness in bourgeois life
• used scientific objectivity/observation
• Charles Dickens and Honore de Balzac
showed cruel industrial life based on $
• George Eliot used detailed characters
• all used artistry/imagination
• major figures of late-century realism showed
dreary/unseemly side of life
Flaubert and Zola
• Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was
1st realistic novel
• Emile Zola
• believed absolute physical and
psychological determinism ruled human
events,
• published lots of novels exploring taboo
subjects
• worldwide following
Ibsen and Shaw
• Henrik Ibsen
• Playwright
• stripped away illusory mask of morality
• Ibsen’s champion George Shaw
• made own realistic onslaught against
romanticism/respectability
• Realist writers hoped to change
moral perception
• often left readers unable to sustain old
values and uncertain where to find new
ones
Modernism
• Touched all arts, critical of middle-class
society/morality
• Concerned for aesthetic/beautiful
• Walter Patter: said art tries to achieve condition of
music
• Modernists thought art should influence others,
painters gave works musical titles,
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musicians combined sources
Picasso used multiple angles;
Some rejected traditional forms entirely
Bloomsbury Group: chief proponents of modernism
English
• Keynesian economics challenged much of 19th economic
structure
On Continent
• Marcel Proust used stream-of-consciousness
format
• Thomas Mann explored social experiences
• James Joyce transformed structure of the
paragraph
• Modernism arose before and flourished after
WWI afterwards
• readers less shocked
The Coming of Modern Art
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Create notes on the following topics
Impressionism
 Post-Impressionism
 Cubism
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Work on this Unit’s Art Analysis
Assignment
Friedrich Nietzsche and the Revolt
Against Reason
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• began to question adequacy of rational thinking
to address human situation
• remained unpopular in life
• wanted to tear away mask of respectable life and
question how humans made those masks
• The Birth of Tragedy
• urged non rational aspects of human nature as important
as rational ones
• Thus Spake Zarathustra
• criticized democracy/Christianity
• Uebermensch
• announced death of God, coming of Overman who would
embody heroism/greatness
• Nietzsche critical of racism, anti-Semitism
• Return to Homeric age
• thought Christian values/bourgeois morality prevented
humankind from achieving life on heroic level
• Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals
• sought to discover social and psychological sources of
judgment of right/wrong
• thought that we need “a critique of moral values” but values
must 1st be valued
• morality a human convention without no independent
existence
• Discovery allowed humans to create life-affirming values
and new moral order that glorified pride not meekness
• Appealed to feelings for questioning of rationalism
• humans had to forge from their own will and determination the
values that would exist in the world
The Birth of Psychoanalysis
• Development of Freud’s Early Theories
• Sigmund Freud
• Austrian Jew
• Allowed patients to talk freely
• Noticed neurotic symptoms resulted
from childhood (sexual) incidents
• rejected this view 1897
• Infantile Sexuality
• thought sexual drives exist in infants
• obliterated childhood innocence
Freud’s Concern with Dreams:
• Thought dreams must have
rational explanation
• concluded dreams let loose
unconscious wishes and drives
• unconscious drives contribute to
conscious behavior
•Related to infantile sexuality in The
Interpretation of Dreams(1900)
Freud’s Later Thought
• Developed new model of mind as struggle
between 3 entities:
• id: amoral/irrational instincts for pleasure
• superego: moral imperatives from society
• ego: mediator, allows personality to cope
w/demands
• Freud reflected romanticism and
Enlightenment
• hostile to religion
• wanted humane behavior
• Thought survival required suppression of
sexuality and aggression
Divisions in the Psychoanalytic Movement
• Freud’s disciples
• Carl Jung: Swiss student and parted ways
• Jung doubted primacy of sexual drives in
personality
• Put less faith in reason
• Thought humans had collective memory
• Modern Man in Search of a Soul
• Jung moved toward
mysticism/religion/romanticism
• By 1920s, Psychoanalytic movement
even more fragmented
• influenced sociology anthropology religion
literature
Retreat from Rationalism in
Politics
• Liberals/socialists agreed rational analysis could
discern problems/locate solutions
• by 1900, views came under attack, racial theorists
questioned them
• Max Weber
• German sociologist
• Thought rationalism was major development of
human history
• Bureaucratization was basic feature of social life
• noneconomic factors accounted for major
developments
• contrasted Marx
Theorists of Collective Behavior
• Social scientist:
• Lebon explored crowds/mobs,
• Sorel argued people led to goals by shared
ideals
• Durkheim/Wallas thought shared ideals bind
humans together
Racism
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Since 18th century
biologists classified humans by skin
color/civilization/ language
 Postulated existence of ancient race
called Aryans that spoke ancestor
language
 Debate over slavery developed racism
 Association with biological science gave
it prestige
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Count Arthur de Gobineau
• French reactionary
• Thought white Aryans unwisely
intermarried/diluted greatness in their
blood
• Racial thinkers applied Darwin’s
survival of the fittest to races and
nations
Chamberlain
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Englishman
Drew together strands of racial thought
Believed superior race could be
developed
Anti-Semitic, thought Jew was major
enemy of racial regeneration;
writings of Paul de Lagarde and Julius
Langbehn blamed Jews
Late-Century Nationalism
From 1870s onward
 nationalism became movement
w/mass support/parties
 nation replaced religion for secular
people
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used racial theory to support harsh
treatment of colonial peoples
 thought whites were best
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Anti-Semitism &
the Birth of Zionism
• Religious anti-Semitism old as Middle Ages
• during last 3rd of century
• As finance capitalism changed economics
• Europeans pressured to hate Jews
• Anti-Semitic Politics
• racial thought
• Jews could never assimilate,
• Jews responded w/Zionist movement to form
separate Jewish state
• Herzl’s Response
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Theodor Herzl called for separate Jewish state
directed call to poor Jews in the ghettos
Women and Modern Thought
• Ideas that shook Europe produced mixed results for
women
• Antifeminism in Late-Century Thought
• Influence of biology sustained stereotyped views of women
• emphasized mothering role
• Culture showed them susceptible to overwhelming
and destructive instincts
• Attack on religion actually reinforced stereotypes,
• Darwin a sexist
• Freud thought them incomplete
• Early sociologists took conservative view of
marriage/family/child rearing/divorce
New Directions in Feminism
• Revival of feminism
• some groups wanted suffrage,
• some activists raised other questions
• by 1900s, they had defined the key issues
Sexual Morality and the Family:
• Middle-class women challenged double standard of
sexual morality (prostitution) and male-dominated
family
• 1864-86, English prostitutes subject to Contagious
Diseases Acts
• police could examine prostitute/confine to locked hospital
w/o legal recourse
• purpose to protect men
• Laws angered middle-class women
• Laws assumed women were inferior to men
• Denied women freedom of their own body
• the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the
Contagious Diseases Acts (led by Josephine Butler) achieved
suspension in 1883 and repealed in 1886
• other nations adopted English model of regulation and
opposition (General Austrian Women’s Association)
• Feminist groups began to demand
equality in marriage
• Germany
• Mother’s Protection League contended
mother’s required help of the state
• Sweden
• Ellen Key said govt., rather than husbands,
should support mothers