#henri daniel-rops

[byjoveimbeinghumble]

Christianity never innovates. It develops, it confirms, it sifts and it defines; but it cannot modify its essential characteristic, since this is none other than the fact of Revelation.

Henri Daniel-Rops, The Church of the Apostles and Martyrs (1960)

[melusinemuse]

He [Luther] had, of course, not the slightest idea that in adopting positions of this kind he was going to set in motion the gravest crisis which Christianity had ever experienced. He was, in his own words, 'a blind wretch who set off without knowing where he was going.'

Henri Daniel-Rops, The Protestant Reformation (JM Dent & Sons, 1961), p. 289.

[byjoveimbeinghumble]

Now that Rome had become too vast for Rome herself to control under the present system, it was necessary to modify her principles of government, to leave the narrow confines of the traditional city-state and to found an empire...In order to bring the grandiose plan into being, Octavian had to destroy the Republic’s ancient legal forms: the very greatest imperial schemes of history nearly always infringe on individual liberty. Octavian appropriated this liberty for the State, but he had learned much on this subject from the example of his uncle, Julius Caesar, and he knew how to retain the appearances of liberty, which were what men valued most.

Henri Daniel-Rops, The Church of the Apostles and Martyrs (1960)

[byjoveimbeinghumble]

The substitute of the State edict for the individual conscience is always a sure sign of decadence, in every country and in every age.

Henri Daniel-Rops, The Church of the Apostles and Martyrs (1960)

[byjoveimbeinghumble]

The Eastern provinces [of Christians] controlled by Galerius were the most harshly treated...Entire Christian villages are said to have been wiped out in Phrygia and Palestine. Egypt, which had already shown a peculiarly vicious sadism in the Decian persecution, surpassed these horrors. A perfection of cruelty was attained which it is impossible to set down in writing.To this cruelty the lowest of degradations was added: happy those Christian women whose manner of dying was no worse than to be bound naked to the stake.

Henri Daniel-Rops, The Church of the Apostles and Martyrs (1960)

[byjoveimbeinghumble]

[L]et us take a look at the picture painted by St Cyprian of the African Church at the moment when he became its leader [in the third century]:   ‘Each man applies himself to augmenting his own fortune. This is more important to the priests than piety, of more value than integrity of faith among the servants of God. It matters more than charitable works or moral rectitude. The men dare to clip their beards, the natural adornment of their faces, and the women paint theirs with cosmetics. The purity of men’s eyes - those works of God - is corrupted. People dye their hair all kinds of false colours. Ruse and artifice are employed in order to deceive simple souls. Christians marry unbelievers; members of Christ’s Church are prostituted to the pagans. Not only do men swear by all and sundry, they perjure themselves. They have only a conceited disdain for their betters. Every man pours venomous slander on his neighbour. Communities are divided by stubborn hatreds.’

Henri Daniel-Rops, The Church of the Apostles and Martyrs (1960)

[byjoveimbeinghumble]

The religious evolution which we have noted in the Empire’s early days had made constant progress ever since, and its characteristics had become increasingly accentuated. While the old indigenous gods - Italian, Celtic, Iberian and so on - continued to survive in the faith of the simplest, while official Rome, from the emperor to the lowest civil servant, maintained the cult of the State deities, the inexhaustible Asian Pantheon poured forth a flood of supernatural forces which was constantly being renewed. All these forces found their worshippers in Rome, while, alongside them, all the Asian occultisms, all the esoterisms, together with magic and astrology, seethed and bubbled and spread everywhere.   To obtain some idea of these spiritual eddies into which the pagan soul was swept at this time we must imagine what modern Europe would be like if, alongside a Christianity which remained as an administrative obligation, there existed swarms of Brahmin, Buddhist, Confucian and Moslem sects, and large numbers of spiritualist and theosophical churches; if the wisest folk ran their lives according to their horoscope; and if Tibetan lamas, Indian pandits, Moslem mullahs and voodoo wizards jostled blithely with priests, monks, Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis in the streets of Paris and London.

Henri Daniel-Rops, The Church of the Apostles and Martyrs (1960)

[melusinemuse]

Luther had married a few months earlier, in April 1525. Five months earlier he had still been telling his friend Spalatinus that 'his heart was little inclined to the conjugal union'; but in the former (now secularized) Augustinian monastery where he lived, he had offered hospitality to a group of nuns who had deserted their convents, and this cohabitation had caused him to alter his views. He had taken to wife an ex-Cistercian, Catherine von Bora, a daughter of the lesser nobility. Why? Certainly not as the result of passion. 'I am neither enamoured nor impassioned,' he confessed. Perhaps he hoped to find in those marital relations of which he was so fond of talking a means of quietening the tempest raging within him. 'This cools my blood.' Or it maybe that he was driven to take the step by his need to carry things to furthest extremes, to be totally true to his principles, to demolish an ecclesiastical rule which he regarded as a human invention, to free the priestly vocation from the yoke of celibacy. Or again he may have acted as he did partly in the certainty of causing a scandal, and out of arrogant delight in so doing. But Luther's main reason for plunging into matrimony was 'to set the devil at defiance.' In his view carnal love remained a sin, which God forgives out of pure mercy; but had he not once uttered this profound paradox, which sums up all his doctrine: 'Be a sinner, and sin hard, but believe even harder, and rejoice in God'? In accepting his sin completely he undoubtedly considered he was finding grace. All these reasons may well have been responsible for his decision. To them all must be added one last and very human factor - that fear of loneliness which man experiences as he sees the shadows lengthening... What an admission is implied in this marriage of an apostate priest!

Henri Daniel-Rops, The Protestant Reformation (JM Dent & Sons, 1961), p. 319.