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Post by hibernicus on Jul 22, 2014 22:25:58 GMT
The Belgian contribution to Catholic missionary enterprise was indeed remarkable; one has only to think of Fr Damian of Molokai or Fr Pierre de Smet, the great missionary to the North American Plains Indians. I believe the Society of the Divine Word missionaries, who had a strong C20 presence in IReland, were founded in Holland. Another relevant factor was that a lot of French and German religious orders maintained houses in the Low Countries when they were driven out of France during various Church-state disputes, or Germany during the Kulturkampf (or the earlier 1840s attempt by the Prussian state to exert control over Rhineland Catholicism). The famous German Jesuit house at Valkenburg (in the province of Limburg, down in the southern end of the Netherlands) where many Irish Jesuits spent a period of training, was founded during the Kulturkampf. THe Dutch Carmel where Edith Stein went when she had to leave Germany was near Valkenburg, and was also a German foundation dating from the Kulturkampf.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 23, 2014 8:08:16 GMT
Mgr Cremin's comparison of Ireland to the Netherlands was specifically based on the Dutch missionary endeavour and we are all familiar with St Damien. Even in popular culture, the Audrey Hepburn film "The Nun's Story" was based on a Belgian medical missionary sister.
The foundation of the Divine Word Missionaries is an illustration of how close the Rhineland and the Low Countries are. Though the founder, St Arnold Janssen, was a Rhinelander, but his surname is one I would associate more with Flanders, the Netherlands and the Frisian Islands which speak a dialect of German very close to Dutch. He went to Steyl in the Netherlands because of the Kulturkampf, but there was a natural association between the two.
Another feature of Dutch and Belgian Catholicism which resonates in Ireland is Marian devotion. We haven't heard from Melancholicus for some time, but he did volunteer work in Lourdes at some stage(probably more than once: his wife has a strong devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes and spent several summers there). What surprised Melancholicus, who knows the Netherlands well and speaks some Dutch, was that Dutch was one of the four major languages of the shrine with French, Italian and English. This is due to the continuing stream of Dutch pilgrims there.
I recall one anectdote from recent German politics which will amplify the point of the Rhineland-Low Country connexion. Helmut Kohl was a Rhineland Catholic from Ludwigshafen in the Bundesland of Rhineland-Palatinate and the diocese of Speyer, serious about his Catholicism but heavily influenced by liberalism (he extended the East German abortion law into West Germany after unification; before this the West German law was very restrictive). Anyway, when Kohl united Germany, his Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourgeois counterparts asked him to keep the capital in Bonn rather than moving it to Berlin - they had more affinity with Westphalian Bonn than Prussian Berlin. The Luxembourgeois Church uses German as its language too and likewise that is affected by the general decline.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 24, 2014 17:18:18 GMT
Indeed, one might argue that our focus on the nation-state leads us to underestimate the extent to which the Rhine is the great artery of Europe, and that it is to some extent a historical accident that the political arrangements around it developed the way it did. It might have been just as logical for the realms of Lothar (one of the three grandsons of Charlemagne who divided his empire between them; he got the middle bit while the other two got roughly what became France and Germany) to have become a political unit centred on the Rhine as the Hapsburg empire centred on the Danube. The original six-country EC could be seen as neo-Carolingian (and was often presented in those terms by Christian Democrat intellectuals) - an expression of a common heritage which had been obscured by later divisions. (Again, I have been reading a bit of Christopher Dawson lately, and his central argument that emphasis on nation-state history conceals an older and deeper shared heritage of Western Christendom, and indeed of Christendom tout court, and that the real unit of historical study ought to be the culture/civilisation and not the nation, is definitely in line with the Christian Democrat strain of the original Euro-project. Dawson's deep interest in the Late Roman/Patristic era, which he sees as having been neglected and implicitly as providing parallels for our own age, and his insistence that the Faith must not be equated with its particular cultural expression, so that there have been other forms of Christian civilisation in the past and may well be more in the future, also has a certain amount in common with the desire to get back to the Fathers and the belief in reinventing the Faith by removing certain cultural "excrescences" that we see in the Vatican II era.)
One other little Dawson point - in the 1930s he had a famous controversy with Eoin MacNeill in which MacNeill denounced Dawson for being much too fond of the Roman Empire, which MacNeill denounced as oppressive, destructive and "the worship of the Beast and his image", opining that it would have been better if the different peoples of Europe had developed without Roman rule/influence (though MacNeill does allow that in His inscrutable Providence God did allow the Empire to become an instrument for the spread of the Faith - which begs the question about whether faith and civilisation can be distinguished so easily as MacNeill implies). Now MacNeill was a very great scholar, and the Roman Empire was formed in a bloody and oppressive manner often overlooked by its admirers, and those admirers do tend to come from imperial powers which see empire from above and ignore or dismiss the painful view from below. Nevertheless, I must say MacNeill painfully reminds me of the writer in the PHOENIX recently who suggested that it would obviously have been better by any standard if Charles Martel had lost the Battle of Tours and Europe had become incorporated in the more "advanced/civilized" world of mediaeval Islamic civilisation. Even setting aside some obvious points, this requires a dismissal of what actually took place, and wishful thinking about the likely alternatives, which is so far-reaching it isn't really plausible.
I would suggest that what we see in the MacNeill/Dawson dispute is one of the divisions in Irish Catholic culture that has helped to bring about our current collapse. There were good reasons for the identification of Catholicism and Irish nationalism (not least because the identification was made by common enemies of both, and because it did imply a shared project for social reconstruction and dealing with the country's problems, even though that programme had its own limitations which are now all too apparent) but I am inclined to think that those C19 Catholics who saw themselves as Catholic first and Irish second, for all their faults (which were pretty considerable and might be summed up in the fallacy of the view that Ireland under the Union would have had no problems if the landlords were Catholic) did have an awareness of the dangers and limitations of modern nationalism which is also relevant.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jul 24, 2014 18:24:28 GMT
Interesting you should raise this topic, Hibernicus (I mean the interaction of Irishness and Catholicism), because today I found myself thinking of the newspaper editor D.P Moran and his views on Ireland and Irishness, as expressed in his book The Philosophy of Irish Ireland and his newspaper The Leader. Moran was portrayed as something of a buffoon in the Irish history text-book where I first encountered him, and he didn't do himself any favours by using slurs like "sour-faces" for Protestants. (Even though it's a funny term.)
But I really think he was on the ball about a lot. He was right to emphasise cultural and social Irishness rather than political separation, and I believe he was right to see partition as the better option. And I think he was right to emphasise Ireland's Catholicism, in contrast with other nationalist leaders who emphasised non-sectarianism.
One point he makes in The Philosophy of Irish Ireland really stuck with me-- that it doesn't really make sense to seek greater mutual understanding between two nations, since it's the fact that nations don't understand each other that makes them separate nations. I believe that.
I also find myself having to accept that, personally, I do think of Irishness as being rooted in Catholicism. It's true that there were many Protestant/Deist nationalist leaders in previous centuries, but like Moran I am not at all inspired by the vision of the Young Irelanders and their like. And I'm not just talking about my own personal preference here. I firmly believe that the kind of radical nationalism which descended from Young Ireland is inherently unstable and contradictory. I do believe that Irish nationalism only really makes sense, could only ever really have been stable and self-sustaining, if it was firmly Catholic and Gaeic-- Do chum Glóire Dé agus Onóir na hÉireann. I appeal to history-- look how quickly Irish nationalism unravelled when it ceased to be broadly Catholic.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 24, 2014 22:38:24 GMT
The point about the cross-sectarian nationalism of the United Irishmen and Young IRelanders was that it was the only sort that had a chance of working in those particular circumstances because the Protestants were too powerful to be ignored/overridden and the Catholics (by and large) too unskilled at running things. Partition only "worked" insofar as it did because the defeat of landlordism and the enfranchisement of a mass electorate had undermined Protestant power in the South (even then, from the 20s up to at least the 50s there was a lot of suppressed grumbling about the disproportionate Protestant presence in sections of business and the professions) while the development of local government and a Catholic education system created a "critical mass" of Catholics with the political and administrative skills to run things.
Another point to bear in mind was that both the United Irishmen and the Young Irelanders were betting to a considerable extent on Britain being defeated in a major European war, in which the victor would underwrite a new settlement (and hence the possibility of an Unionist/Protestant alliance with Britain would simply not be on the table any more). The United Irishmen hoped for a French victory in the Revolutionary/Napoleonic wars, the Young Ireland move towards direct preparation for rebellion in 1848 was critically driven by the hope that the Second French Republic of 1848 would trigger a second round of the Revolutionary Wars with a different result. The hope of a Franco-British war lingered for the rest of the C20, and the switch by separatists to Imperial Germany up to 1918 (and to Nazi Germany thereafter) was driven by the same rationale, that Irish nationalism could not really be secure unless British power was broken outside Ireland as well as within.
(One recurring criticism of separatism BTW was that this hope was never really going to work because Ireland's position meant she could never be as vital to another power as to Britain, so that Britain would always put more effort into defending herself against an attack from Ireland than any other power would into mounting such an attack. Hence the project of seeking an European patron would only lead to diversionary attacks in which the European ally would benefit by the divergence of British forces, but Ireland would be absolutely laid waste by the British response. De Valera recognised this logic perfectly well, hence his policy of combining formal neutrality with a lot of self-righteous public rhetoric about how this showed Ireland's moral superiority, with private defence co-operation with the Allies. This had the disadvantage that it deluded the Irish public about the real position, while attracting the opprobrium of the British public who also took the rhetoric at face value.)
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 24, 2014 22:50:53 GMT
Speaking for myself, I do think that it's not really possible to understand Irishness without awareness of the Protestant element; ignoring it simply leaves out too much of how we got where we are (for good and bad). Similarly, the "little Ireland" ethos of withdrawing within our own boundaries had its attractions during the breakdown of the liberal world order after 1914 (indeed there are certain resonances with the evocation of "deep England" and imperial protectionism of Stanley Baldwin's England, or the isolationist-nationalist element in interwar America) but it just didn't work in the post-1945 world. (Indeed a lot of the "little IReland" ethos had older precursors, like the advocacy of economic self-sufficiency by eighteenth-century Protestant Patriots; the trouble was that what was plausible in the C18 didn't work out in the C20). I'm inclined to think Dawson was right; the foundational unit is the transnational culture or civilisation, not the nation-state (though that doesn't mean the two are incompatible, and there's a plausible argument that democracy is not fully workable without the nation-state. The Union broke down because the BRitish saw us as alien to the extent that they were not prepared to make the same concessions to us that were made to the Scots - the official response to the Famine was not quite so bad as it was often painted, but it was ultimately founded on the assumption that the Irish were so distinct that they must ultimately pay for themselves, rather than sharing their burden with the whole UK - and that during World War I we decided they were ultimately different to us to the extent that we were not willing to die for them to the same extent they were willing to die for themselves, by accepting conscription.)
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 24, 2014 23:01:56 GMT
Two areas that this thread hasn't looked at so far: (1) The Northern IReland Troubles - the extent to which they encouraged the view that traditional Irish religious divisions were simply unacceptable and led to bloodshed and barbarism can't be overstated. (2) The breakdown of the traditional southern Irish economy after 1945, with its simple failure to deliver an acceptable standard of living for all the people born into it. This in turn has led to a more impersonal society with a very different sense of "moral economy" from its more face-to-face predecessor. (I do not mean that "moral economy" in this sense is necessarily morally superior, it would have included such charming notions as the view that childbirth out of wedlock cast a stain on a whole family which could only be removed by concealment/ostracism, that farm labourers should accept "their station in life" and not get above themselves, etc). I don't think the view that traditional Irish Catholicism was simply an expression of abstract moralism divorced from real life is accurate; the problem was the opposite, that it was so bound up with the particular social organisation of post-Famine Ireland that when that social organisation collapsed it couldn't adjust to the new situation. There certainly was a sense that there was an Irish way of life which was morally superior (coexisting, often in the same person, with bitter resentment at the darker sides of that society) which is difficult to recapture now.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jul 25, 2014 8:29:39 GMT
To what extent is poverty in the post-war Irish Republic overstated? My father was born in 1939 and he insists that people were much better off in the fifties and sixties than is believed today. He came from a very working-class background, too. For instance, he insists that he could afford to go out dancing every single night in the fifties.
My previous comment about Irish nationalism being inherently Catholic could be misread as being sectarian-- I didn't mean that. I don't at all mean to dismiss the contribution of Protestants. I simply mean that, in my view, nationalism requires a very definite and very specific imaginative ideal and I don't think it's possible for this ideal to be inter-denominational or multi-ethnic. So there is certainly room for other traditions but they are, to be blunt, subsidiary. I think it's a shame that the English no longer celebrate Guy Fawkes' Day-- Protestantism was its heritage.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 25, 2014 12:47:15 GMT
Gentlemen (and ladies, if they’re reading, please feel free to join this discussion), we need to focus on a couple of points. There is both a national and international element to this and we should try to keep both in mind. Obviously, we all know Ireland from the inside so this is always going to be our starting point. But I don’t want Irish nationalism to carry us off track. Anyway there are a few points I want to address by both contributors above which I think are germane to the issue.
When one considers the influence of Fr Wiltgen’s The Rhine Flows into the Tiber in traditionalist circles, one sees how close the link between the Low Countries, France and Germany are (Second World War notwithstanding). This rightly goes back to the region of Lotharingen after Charlemagne’s death and later to the Burgundian “empire” in the later Middles Ages which could have emerged as another force in Western Europe with France, the Holy Roman Empire and German Nation and England. Trouble about mediaeval history we read is that it focuses too much on England, France and the Empire and not enough on the many smaller entities. To return to Lotharingen, this went from the Low Countries through Alsace-Lorrraine (Lotharingen in German) and much of Switzerland into Northern Italy. The Dutch and German languages only seriously diverged at the Protestant reformation, as the Calvinists in the Netherlands had their own bible translation distinct from the Luther Bible and it was due to Swiss Calvinism (who also ignored the Luther Bible) that Schweitzerdeutsch is a distinct dialect (Dutch German speakers reputedly find Schweitzerdeutsch as easy to understand as native speakers from Germany and Austria). Before the reformation, the last non-Italian pope before St John Paul II was Adrian VI who is variously described as Dutch or German – the distinction wasn’t so precise in the early C16.
It is clear that the original European Coal and Steel Community and its successors were based on the Carolignian ideal; and that its founders were inspired by post-war Christian Democracy (there are several anecdotes on Konrad Adenauer’s personal piety, to talk of another Rhineland Catholic Chancellor, this one more traditional than Dr Kohl). It still inspires Christian Democrats – if John Bruton is someone here whom I would regard as such, but there are many more across Europe, including many in the new states of Eastern Europe. Given that much of the opposition to the EU comes from the traditional Catholic camp, we might at least examine why many of our natural allies in Europe are in favour, including Popes John Paul and Benedict. With regard to Eoghan MacNéill, two points need to be clarified in his regard. The obvious one is his cultural and political nationalism, but the second one is the state of scholarship at the time. Regarding the assertion that Irish nationality is bound up in Catholicism, perhaps Christianity is better word. I say this not as a non-sequitur to the statement on Professor MacNéill, but rather as a reflection of what I am reading at present. This is Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature by Kim McCone, published in Maynooth in 1990. The work represents a survey of scholarship in early Irish language, literature and history and cognate disciplines in the modern period (beginning about mid-C19 to its publication). It is very partisan, but more entertaining for all that. As result, it has a lot to say about various academics with starring roles in the area: Eoghan MacNéill, Daniel Binchy (particularly – the man was active until his death not long before the book’s publication), Myles Dillon and Proinsias MacCana come to mind immediately, whereas Prof McCone’s hero is James Carney (little observation: Prof MacNéill was Michael McDowell’s grandfather; Professor Binchy was William Binchy’s uncle; Professor Dillon was a cousin of John Dillon; and Professor Carney was Mr Justice Paul Carney’s father). Basically, Carney held a minority view within the Celtic Studies discipline until the 1980s in that he saw the corpus of pre-Norman Invasion Irish literature in Irish and Latin as a Christian literature and the majority regarded at least the material in Irish as simply the writing down of unadulterated pagan mythology and that hagiography in Hiberno-Latin was often heavily influenced by this. This latter view is referred to as “nativism” and though there is a lot of differences between the four scholars cited and others, the thesis is essentially the same. For example, Professor T. F. O’Rahilly was still applying a solar mythology analysis of the Irish sagas in the 1940s which was obsolete in analogous studies at the time and the Rees Brothers presented Irish and Welsh legends together in a highly popular book in the 1960s which gave a structuralist reading on them which was then current, but both had the fundamental pre-literate paganism of the stories as their belief. James Carney was the sole dissenting voice for many years.
To return to Professor MacNéill, who is under the spotlight here, one can see how his ideology and his scholarship complimented each other. MacNéill had scholarly disagreements with Patrick Pearse long before 1916. Now in comparison, Pearse was a well-read amateur and MacNéill was a professional. But Pearse was somewhat free of the sort of blinkers which academics can assume, so Pearse saw an analogy between Christ and Cú Chulainn which is often cited as blasphemy now, but was also seen as such by the academic community at the time, of whom MacNéill would have been a serious player. But Pearse had a point, even though he didn’t bring this to the conclusion of suggesting the Ulster cycle was Christian literature. The point in the thesis represented by Carney was that the monastic redactors who absorbed the Ulster Cycle would have shaped the stories in Christian fashion, thus Cú Chulainn is the son of the god Lugh, is exempt from a curse afflicting the men of Ulster, carries on his combat alone as a deliverer of the province, ultimately dies tied to a standing stone as a spear pierces his heart. (Now, think of another Pearse quote: “I will stand alone before the Gall as Christ hung naked before men” and picture the Oisín Kelly statue of Cú Chulainn in the GPO).
MacNéill would have been wrong in ruling Pearse’s insights out of court, but his argumentation would have been more impressive. The idea that Irish mythology was something isolated and preserved on our island unadulterated by Christianity and also by the civilisation of Greece and Rome (I’m going to come to MacNéill’s point on the Roman Empire later), it was something ancient and unique, which according to some people (Myles Dillon is a good example) had its nearest analogue in ancient India (again to transfer to ideological nationalism, Terence McSwiney and Gandhi were two men influenced by this idea). This idea that Irish language and literature was ancient and unique was a very powerful influence over a great many people in the early decades of independence. On a scholarly level, the more sophisticated reading put the Celtic fringe and India in the context of the over-arching domain of Indo-European studies, which was centred on Germany (still is). Now, it’s fair to say that the Nazis distorted the whole Indo-European proposition and used it to serve their ideology (to give an example of how far-reaching this was, in the 1930s, anti-British Iranian nationalists had their country’s name changed from Persia to Iran; you will see the context when you know that Aryan is derived from the same root as Iran, and than in some contexts, the terms Indo-Aryan and Indo-Germanic are used as synonyms for Indo-European). Now, I don’t want to apply the argument ad Hitlerum to Indo-European studies; someone like Daniel Binchy was influenced by it, but was still able to give a very accurate assessment of Hitler in Studies in 1933 (Binchy encountered him while doing advanced studies in Germany in the 1920s); but it is necessary to put Indo-European insights in context. But it can be a comfort in advancing an ideal of a nation untouched by civilisation and literacy and having analogues in other such societies. The idea of ills of civilisation goes back to Ancient Rome and Sparta.
McCone’s thesis, after Carney, is that the Irish texts rather than reflecting an ancient unchanged mythology is a literature deliberately worked to fit a Christian ethos, as seen in Patristic terms. So there was a focus on the Old Testament; typology was very important. But by the time the monks were finished, there was a deep Christian imprint through the literature. This wasn’t uniquely Irish either – McCone points to the experience of assessing Icelandic sagas through the generations before eventually coming to see this as Christian influence. I should state that Kim McCone is not a Catholic; he comes from a High Anglican background and he’s married to the mediaevalist Dr Katherine Simms, who is Archbishop George Otto Simms’ daughter. And though his ancestry is in the North West of Ireland, he himself is a native of Leicester who studied in Oxford, Germany and the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, learning Irish in Ros Muc and speaking it with a Connemara accent, which stands out in comparison to his Oxbridge accent when speaking English.
In regard to MacNéill’s view of civilisation and the Roman Empire, it is entirely understandable from the standpoint of an Irish nationalist, and especially from one steeped in studies of the pre-classical Indo-European past (now distinguished a lot from in his day). To look at a view in circulation, take Lew Wallace’s suggestions in Ben Hur, which is more about C19 America, but you get the picture. But look at it from another point, I am both a Russophile and a Germanophile, but I know of the great harm done by both nations (even to each other). Any of history’s great civilisations have had similar histories. MacNéill wished our small nation be separated from a great empire which has its own civilisation and there were many things he could cite in favour of this. Likewise, the Carolignian empire was the forge of feudalism. The post-Norman history of Ireland is in ways a very sorry story of attempts to graft a feudal system onto something else entirely. Some current ideologues unite this to the Roman Church’s suppression of an entity called the Celtic Church (a point McCone strongly refutes as a by-product of his work). MacNéill perhaps viewed history and religion separately (not surprising; many older traditionalist Catholics have similar outlooks coming from this immediate post-independence view). So in summary, we can stick to an idea of a civilisation shaping the world a la Dawson, which might have a greater acceptance among Celtic scholars now than at the time; and this discipline, no more than the situation of Catholic Ireland, needs to be contextualised.
Finally, if the mix of religion and nationalism on both sides of the border was unhealthy in the past, the post-troubles separation of the two, the lack of a healthy partriotism among both clergy and laity brings its own problems. I am worried how easily some attach themselves to the political fantasies of neo-mediaevalists and admirers of the ancien regime. Even of neo-pagans, God help us.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 25, 2014 19:39:12 GMT
MacNeill's criticism of Pearse's view of nationalism actually pre-dates his awareness of what Pearse was up to (some months before the Rising he produced a memo arguing against the view that the Volunteers were honour-bound to stage an insurrection; he knew there was what one might call a putschist group, but not that Pearse was part of it - he trusted Pearse as a personal friend, which was why he was so appalled to discover Pearse had deliberately deceived him, and having to spend the last 30 years of his life being caricatured as the meddling professor who had let down the Great HEro-Martyr did not improve his feelings on this point).
MacNeill's argument relates both to blasphemy (he thought that Pearse's interpretation of Cuchulainn was influenced by what he saw as Standish O'Grady's cult of pagan honour; it is worth noting that O'Grady was the son of an Evangelical Church of Ireland clergyman, so although his own religious views were hard to define there is a definite Christian influence on his image of Cuchulain, not least in his bowdlerisation of the hero's sexual peccadillos) and to the pragmatic position that once you identify your own political position with the will of God and dissent from it as blasphemy, it becomes very difficult to adjust to what circumstances demand. MacNeill's memo is very clearly based on the Catholic Just War doctrine, and he states clearly that he is willing to fight and sacrifice his own life if circumstances require it; what he objects to is the idea that armed revolt is desirable for its own sake, regardless of consequences.
One way of looking at the difference between them is that MacNeill's mindset is shaped by casuistic moral theology - under what circumstances is a certain act justified - while Pearse's mindset is more devotional (and bear in mind that emotional identification with Jesus's sufferings and identifying one's own sufferings with His is a fairly common prayer technique).
Another parallel that strikes me just now - I have been reading a bit lately about Evangelical Protestant debates on the 1980s and 1990s peace process. There was a group called Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland which was very influential at that time - partly because its members were evangelicals rather than theological liberals, and were thus challenging the politico-religious hardliners a la Paisley on their own grounds. The hardline position (which would have been thought of the time as "Paisleyite" but was not confined to his followers) was covenantal Calvinism - that the Ulster Unionists (or the British) as a people had entered into a covenant with God, and that political compromise was equivalent to breaking the covenant and abandoning God. (At one point a loyalist fringe group which burned several Catholic churches circulated a leaflet with the opening chapters of Deuteronomy Chapter 7, denouncing any toleration of idolatry as bringing down God's wrath.) The liberal-evangelical argument against this was that the slogan "For God and Ulster" by equating political and religious allegiance, was itself idolatrous. There is a certain affinity between this critique and the reason why many people are uneasy with Pearse.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 25, 2014 19:48:29 GMT
Dawson is interesting in this context because he is clearly criticising the view that one particular historical expression of Christian culture/civilisation is normative (a la some of the Lefebvrist idealisation of the ancien regime) while at the same time arguing that Christianity necessarily requires the articulation of a Christian culture (i.e. that it is not possible, nor morally permissible, to adopt the pure sect approach and treat secular culture as the work of the Devil, which Christians can do without - tempting as this may be when we consider the hype surrounding the current release of a trailer for the film version of FIFTY SHADES OF GREY). Dawson, it seems to me, represents a certain project of Catholicising modernity of which Vatican II was the highpoint, and which clearly hasn't worked out as Dawson and his generation intended. The question is, how do we address that failure? If that project failed when the Church was so much stronger, it doesn't seem likely that it can be revived in our current era; but reverting to the ancien regime is open to the same objection, and turning into an otherworldly sect which leaves the world to go to the Devil is IMHO no solution either (it is contrary to the Great Commission, for one thing).
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 25, 2014 19:57:16 GMT
In relation to Protestants and Irish nationality, I remember what a (Southern) Protestant of my acquaintance once said to me. He said the classic Irish Protestant stereotype of Irish Catholicism was to see it as an ever-menacing threat even at times when it was largely passive or indifferent towards PRotestantism, whereas the equivalent Irish Catholic attitude to Irish Protestantism was to assume that it didn't really exist - that it was a transient phenomenon and that the Protestants would soon disappear or cease to be Protestants.
The latter assumption was certainly very widespread in post-partition Ireland, partly because Evangelical Protestantism was much less culturally prominent not only here but worldwide then than it is now (or than it had been for much of the C19), partly because Protestantism was affected much earlier and more severely than Catholicism by modern loss of belief, so that it was easy to assume that Catholics, and especially Irish Catholics, were more immune to it than we have proved to be. I know this view was not universal and there was deep fear of future national apostasy, but I think the fear and complacency coexisted in ways it is hard to recapture.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 25, 2014 20:11:01 GMT
MacNeill v. Dawson on the Roman Empire fits into an ongoing argument about the Church's relationship to the temporal order which goes right back to Augustine v. Eusebius, or even to the history of the Old Testament Jewish kingdom. The problems I can see with MacNeill are two; his dismissal of empire is facile (it may be understandable but it's still facile), and he sees the nation as a natural association rather than a political creation raising the same problems as empire. (Then again, MacNeill was suspicious of the centralised state, partly because historians of a different political persuasion very often argued that the superiority of Norman over Celtic civilisation was shown precisely in its creation of a centralised state apparatus, which MacNeill quite truly points out is being presented as an end in itself when it could just as easily be seen as a more efficient system of robbery.) One odd little thought that has haunted me. I wonder could the present Irish (or European) situation be in some ways comparable to the Early Modern period, which saw the growth of a more powerful bureaucratic state apparatus, eliminating competing sources of loyalty, which was represented as desirable in order to preserve internal peace and organise against external threats? The turn to economic planning and state-run social services from the 60s could be seen in that light, with the Northern Troubles and the economic malaise of the post-independence state seen as the "Other" as the Wars of the Roses were for the Tudors or the equivalent conflicts for the early modern French monarchy.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jul 25, 2014 20:11:18 GMT
I would put forward as an example of modernity and tradition the religious right in America and Israel. Both seem to be examples of deeply traditional religious movements which are perfectly comfortable with cutting edge technology and advanced capitalism. (And advanced capitalism is what we will have even if we follow Catholic social teaching; it's a fact of life.) I don't think it's always fair to caricature this as prosperity gospelling.
Personally, I am uneasy with Pearse, as Hibernicus puts it. But his poetry and his writing has entered so deeply into me that it's quite simply a part of me. "The Fool" is impossible to get out of your soul-- and I don't even want to, for all my wariness of Pearse's overall philosophy.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jul 29, 2014 12:43:52 GMT
Though the Pearse-MacNéill divergence on a number of issues is very interesting, it tells us little about the decline, other than to see Pearse as an example of a devotional type Catholic and MacNéill as a more intellectual Catholic. In Ireland, at least, there tended to be more emphasis on the former among laity. This is something to examine.
In regard to MacNéill’s reaction against “civilisation” as per Rome and also the Gaelic vs Norman approach, this is where there was a problem with some of the older scholarship, caricatured by Professors Carney and McCone as “nativist”. This held that Ireland was made up of 150 more or less autonomous petty kingdoms, which like Swiss cantons, seems to have given no more than nominal allegiance to overkings, provincial kings or the high king. The thesis advanced by most historians of the period now, Donnchadh Ó Corráin for example, is that the provincial kingdoms were more highly centralised than what they had been given credit for in the past and that, for example, they were extremely effective in fighting the Viking menace. The career of Brian Boru still has some controversy surrounding it, but there is an acceptance that he had a concept of a national kingship and he was working towards that prior to Clontarf and there is also a thesis that the O’Connors were developing a feudal kingship before the Norman invasion shattered it (I know a bit less about this: I am just reporting the fact that there is such a theory).
This is pertinent to the decline question as there is a view that our current period is like the decline of the Roman Empire and also, many traditionalist glorify the late Middle Ages and feudalism. One might understand the former, but the latter will have to be corrected – the 13th was not necessarily the greatest of centuries. Configure this into views of the decline.
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