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Cultural History of Catholic Christianity. Pre-Critical History. Pre-critical History: supports identity of a given community Artistic: selects, orders, describes, awakens and sustains readers’ interest, tries to persuade and convince Ethical: apportions praise and blame
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Pre-Critical History • Pre-critical History: supports identity of a given community • Artistic: selects, orders, describes, awakens and sustains readers’ interest, tries to persuade and convince • Ethical: apportions praise and blame • Explanatory: accounts for existing institutions in terms of origins and development and contrasts them with those found in other communities • Apologetic: corrects false accounts of the community’s past, refutes calumnies of outsiders • Prophetic: foresight for the future
Critical History • Critical History: objective knowledge of the past • Heuristic: brings to light relevant data • Ecstatic: leads inquirer out of original perspectives to perspectives proper to the object • Selective: chooses out of a totality of data those relevant to the understanding achieved • Critical: removes data from one use or context to another • Constructive: weaves together the web of interconnected links grounded in the data cumulatively brought to light as understanding progresses
Questions for Historical Inquiry • Who did (or refrained from doing) what? • When (what were its antecedents and consequences)? • Where (are there geographically parallel or analogous instances)? • Under what circumstances? • From what motives? • With what results? • What did those doing the action think it meant? • What was “going forward” or “retreating” in the community undergoing this/these action(s)?
Christopher Dawson as Critical Historian • Framework: • Crisis precipitating intense spiritual activity generating a new apostolate • Achievement creating new form of Christian culture in life, art, and thought • Attack from without or within with earlier phase’s achievement depreciated
“Seven Stages of Western Culture” • Age of Hellenism • Roman Empire • Formation of Western and Eastern Christendom • Medieval Christendom • Humanist Culture and Religious Division • Age of Revolution • Disintegration of Europe
“Six Ages of the Church” • Origins to Constantinian Conversion (c. 30 – 313 CE) • Constantinian Conversion to Rise of Islam (c. 313 CE – c. 632 CE) • Construction of European Christendom (c. 632 CE – c. 1085 CE) • Emancipation of the Church from Feudal Structures (c. 1085 – c. 1520 CE)
Reformations and Revolutions (c. 1520 CE – c. 1789 CE) • The Church and the Modern World (c. 1789 CE – c. 1962 CE) • [The Church and the Post-Modern World (c. 1962 CE – the present]