Religious freedom
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So how do all of you see the status of preservation/conservation of pre-socialist art in socialism? That’s all i’m asking. People today work on medieval cathedrals, perform period music they have researched, restore stained glass, repair damage etc., learn ancient languages and create their own art emulating long-gone styles. Doing so is exciting for them but does not turn them into political reactionaries or religious freaks. Or would you prefer the past obliterated?
What the revolutionaries of the day will do, will be up to them at the time.It would be mere speculation of me, to convey or attempt to convey how I see,
the status of preservation/conservation of pre-socialist art in socialism?
That’s all i’m asking.
You went a helluva long way for a short cut then.
No it is not, merely asking the question. A number of comrades admitted to sharing some of your aesthetic sensibilities, but you just plowed on regardless and flooded the thread and resorted to smearing us, with as some how in association with this behaviour,
In Greece I saw age-old Byzantine frescos ruined with Communist Party graffiti.
The history of the past is already written in the present. Quite few things have been as well as frescos are trashed by it.
Since Marx wrote,
“capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” The Genesis of Industrial Capitalism.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htmit has become a shape shifting Frankenstein monster and our job is to freeze frame it in broad laypersons terms, which can be understood sufficiently to aid the immense majority to destroy it.
The more recent events, the present flood of human suffering seeking asylum, the causes of two world wars and innumerable smaller ones, past and still ongoing, and the war science of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, obscured by sinecured academia from above and distorted by ideological understandings from below, are surely more cause for immediate concern.
I think William Morris would be writing a lot more political stuff these days, as he was then.
Deleted.
Your broad general points have not been unwelcome.Your flooding of replies and smears and condescending extrapolations to socialists less so.
You say,
We are products of our history. Robbed of history we are impoverished. One could learn the techniques of medieval art to memorialise the rebels and revolutionaries of the time in new creations employing the old techniques.
But the rebels and resisters of the medieval era, the flotsam and jetsam of their historic times, their followers still to be wiped out or merely dispersed back into their former servitude,remaining mere subjects in thrall or opposition, to the new ruling elites, enough to sacrifice their leaders.
So we learned the very broad the lesson of the class struggle.
You blithely ignored Wez’s end point example about ,
whilst studying at art school we went on a visit to a museum and I came across a tiny paleolithic carving of a bison in stone. It took my breath away. Both of these reactions are emotional and aesthetic and both inspired me to learn more about medieval cathedrals and stone age art – for profoundly antithetical reasons.
The hand which carved the bison was suffice, no need to smuggle stone masons signatures into it as in some of the medieval examples.
So the lesson of all wealth being the product of human labour applied to nature given raw materials.(LTV)
Socialist have indeed learned lessons from the uses and misuses of art, in the service of the ruling classes of their days, as well as its present use as speculative distraction.
You are tilting at windmills again.
In this wide-ranging book, Professor Eamon Duffy explores the broad sweep of the English Reformation, and the ways in which that Reformation has been written about. Tracing the fraught history of religious change in Tudor England, and the retellings of that history to shape a protestant national identity, once again he emphasizes the importance of the study of late medieval religion and material culture for our understanding of this most formative and fascinating of eras.
Superb book!
Dystopia with a chuckle:
English- Protestant-patriotic-dystopian novel, and a good laugh:
Being loath to judge someone just by their name, I thought I’d check first and Duffy is indeed a Roman Catholic, a former member of the Pontifical Historical Commission no less.
Sounds like an attempt to rewrite history from the point of view of the losers. The Roman Catholic Church only defends “religious freedom” when it’s in a minority.
Just evening up a top-heavy pro-Reformation bias in this country and in the schooling we all received – and what I dare say most here also go for … despite the fact that the utter misery it caused the mass of working people was unprecedented until then.
Just evening up a top-heavy pro-Reformation bias in this country and in the schooling we all received
I wouldn’t be so sure of that. I expect many here will have gone to a Roman Catholic school and been taught by nuns and Christian Brothers and so would not have been taught about Bloody Mary, Guy Fawkes and Mary Queen of Scots being baddies. I imagine they will have been pictured as heroes. Perhaps, anyone here who had a Catholic education imposed on them can confirm this.
And I had the protestant version imposed on me.
Whether you are more anti-Catholic than anti-protestant doesn’t really matter, as the book has information glossed over and ignored by protestant writers, and you can read both sides. Atm, i’m reading this alongside Christopher Hill’s The English Bible.
A socialist reads without hindrance.
You could go for the Kingsley Amis novel! 😀
I finished reading that during the first lockdown, though it is more about the next historical period. It’s heavy going with all the footnotes but good stuff. And you can see how Protestantism was a first step towards secularism (though it took nearly three centuries to get there) and so historically progressive compared to Catholicism.
So was Nazism historically progressive, completing the German Revolution, and Stalinism – collectivising and slaughtering.
Progress is often worse for those living through it than what went before.
Catholic countries are as much in modern capitalism today, industrialised and technological, as Britain is.
For me, it is the wholesale destruction of art and of books, and the loss of medieval knowledge and literature that the Reformation perpetrated … and all for monarch and rich cronies and landowners, with the peasantry suffering the most … that’s what makes me sick of the pro-Reformation bias and the targeting of Catholicism as “the worst” of Christianity, when today I don’t think it is.
Either way, Duffy’s book is still enlightening in counselling a healthy revision where apt.
“I expect many here will have gone to a Roman Catholic school and been taught by nuns and Christian Brothers and so would not have been taught about Bloody Mary, Guy Fawkes and Mary Queen of Scots being baddies. I imagine they will have been pictured as heroes. Perhaps, anyone here who had a Catholic education imposed on them can confirm this.”
As a “recovering Catholic” my own experience of a 1960s-70s Catholic “Education” were as follows:
Junior school – Started in the just pre Vatican II era, Latin mass, once a week in school, marched off to benediction every Thursday afternoon (replaced by Stations of the Cross during Lent). Changed to the English mass in about ’66 I think.
Everything about school was religious, The local parish priest was in the school hovering around every day. Catechism for 45 mins every morning “Who made you”- “God made me”, “why did God make you” – “God made me, to know him, to love him, to serve him in this world and to be happy with him in the next” Collecting pennies to give to the “Black Babies”, if you collected a full sheet you got to choose the name the child was christened! So there’s probably 1/2 dozen poor fuckers in Africa in their mid 50s wondering how they ended up being called Wyn (Wyn Davies Newcastle Centre forward of the mid to late 60s).
Being coached for about 6 months for first communion and first confession (I had to make things up in confession, I’d never done anything, I was only bloody 7 years old), having the Spanish Inquisition every Monday morning for those who hadn’t been to mass (there were teachers stationed at each Mass so they knew who’d been and who hadn’t). You got the belt if you hadn’t.
In the small amount of time left for genuine education all texts had (approved by the diocese of Hexham and Newcastle) stamped on the inside cover, so what little history we were taught obviously met with the approval of the local Bishop.
Senior School – Things went from bad to worse. If you passed the 11+ and your family had a bit of brass you went to St Cuthbert’s (Alma Mater of Sting, Laurie McMenemy, Cardinal Basil Hume, Neil Tennant, Declan Donnelly, etc.) If passed the 11+ and your family were potless you went to St Mary’s (Alma Mater of several noted Tyneside’s notorious “families”, one of whom was recently exonerated at the Old Bailey for about the 14th time). My family were potless so that’s where I ended up. (I realised it was a rough school when I found out it had its own coroner)
The school houses were More, Fisher, Campion and Maine (all Catholics put to death by Prods), the only history we were taught was pre Tudor history, the texts were again pro Catholic and approved by the church, no mention of the reformation, I think they thought if they didn’t talk about it people might forget it ever happened.
We were told specifically in Geography that we wouldn’t be studying Eastern Europe or China, as they were “Communist Countries” and against the Catholic way of life. We were taught the dangers of VD and contraception by the local priest and my mate got six of the best for politely asking the question “father, if you don’t play the game, why are you making the rules?”. Mass was a regular feature as were appearances from various priests, nuns, etc.
There were regular “retreats” to the local monastery for weekend stays, where attempts to recruit for holy orders met with no success. However the secret way into the wine cellars was passed down by generation after generation of pupils in complete secrecy so copious amounts of sweet and sickly alter wine were consumed by grateful 13 year olds.
The head master was from Glasgow and the most Catholic man who ever lived, but Catholic in the Glasgow sense of the word (Celtic mad, keen on a fight and massively intimidating). As a result, all of the school sports teams played in Celtic kit, just in case the local Prod schools hadn’t realised we were papists.
Daily assembly consisted of about 3/4 an hour of prayers (Hail Holy Queen and regular Novenas to the Virgin Mary) you had to stand to attention for the full duration in absolute silence and if you moved (or as sometimes happened fainted with exhaustion) you got the belt. There was then a whip round to send the local disabled kids off to Lourdes, and if you didn’t cough up you got the belt.
The school had a secondary economy which operated mainly out of shop lifting, and anything could be bought for about 10% of the usual price at the top of the sports field from the younger members of the local “families” and it was not unusual to see the odd teacher approach these kids, especially in the run up to Christmas.
When you finally reached the sixth form there was a degree of relaxation, you could study post reformation history as long as it was French or Spanish history (because the Catholics “won”), but on the plus side twice a year there was a sixth form social evening with a free bar, to which the female pupils of the local Convent School (La Sagesse) were invited. (The head had connections with S and N brewery who would drop off several complimentary kegs of ale with the strict instructions that none of the underage drinkers could have more than a gallon)
Apart from that, it was all fairly normal.
No wonder you prefer the pro-Reformation narrative!
Were you an evicted 16th century peasant being branded for vagrancy, with all that had mattered to you in life blasted away, I dare say you wouldn’t.
The horrors you are describing are of course anachronistic, and the institution itself the Tridentine Church – itself the product of the Reformation: the Catholic version.
I am not ignorant of its oppressiveness and do not seek to defend it, not being a Christian of any kind. There was even a Catholic Calvinism, called Jansenism, modelled on the equally bleak protestant original. Restif de la Bretonne, the writer, was educated by Jansenists, and his account resembles yours. Yours may not have been Jansenist, but it was equally Tridentine, that is, Reformation Catholic. Needless to say, Restif loathed the Church ever after.
But as it is the history of England’s Reformation that is the topic, I shall boldly say that the medieval serf was far better off than the Reformation era evictee and pauper. It might have hastened the bourgeois revolution, but that was scarcely of comfort for its victims to contemplate, had they been able to comprehend it.
Most from Scotland views schools as an unpleasant form of segregation.
The preponderance of Catholic schools in Scotland is said to have been a deal made by John Wheatley with the Catholic Church to end its anti-Labour Party stance and end its support for the Liberal Party based on its Irish Home Rule policy, promising a future Labour government would introduce state financing of Catholic schools.
I was educated at a state school in Scotland, and that was not a secular education, having school assemblies with prayers and hymns and a term outing to local C of S church. The religious studies class was however more a social studies class, incorporating lessons on sex and drugs.
As for the Reformation, i admit an interest into the many heresies preceding and accompanying it such as the Taborites.
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2013/05/sunday-sermon-taborites.html
And also the cults such as the Ranters of the English Revolution.
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-ranters-religious-libertines.html
Started in the just pre Vatican II era, Latin mass, once a week in school, marched off to benediction every Thursday afternoon (replaced by Stations of the Cross during Lent).
You lucky sod, BD! At my old catholic school in South Africa we had to endure compulsory mass TWICE a week plus prayers – I think it was called “angelus” or something like that – every evening. It was the sheer boredom of it all that put me off religion eventually
You mention confession. I remember around the age of 11 or so being inordinately obsessed with the distinction between venial sin and mortal sin – the former (for those not aware of the difference) landing you in purgatory; the latter condemning you to everlasting hellfire. You certainly wouldn’t want to be struck down dead just having committed a mortal sin.
So it became quite imperative to clean your slate ASAP or at least weekly. Then you could start all over again the following week = ‘cos, lets face it, committing a sin was fun (particularly when the hormones started kicking in) but you wouldn’t want it to get out of hand. For instance, you wouldn’t want to commit a mortal sin on Monday and have to wait anxiously till Friday when your confession was heard in case you were knocked over and killed by the number 56 bus on Wednesday. The prospect of going to purgatory on the other hand, was bearable because it was only temporary – a bit like detention after school hours – and, besides, nobody’s perfect.
I once broke a wooden post on the school site playing “tossing the caber” when there was some building work being done on the school with building materials lying which us kids loved to get our hands on. I recall fretting over the monetary value of the wooden post and wondering whether it was sufficient to warrant the charge of having committed a mortal sin. Somehow I had got it into my head that the monetary value of a mortal sin was in the region of ten South African Rands and I nervously enquired of the priest in the confession box the following Friday whether he could confirm this was the case
Its quite extraordinary what religious beliefs can do to young impressionable minds!
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