cahn | 18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 38

Gonna go ahead and make this post even though Yuletide is coming...

But in the meantime, there has been some fic in the fandom posted!

Holding His Space (2503 words) by felisnocturna
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF, 18th Century CE Frederician RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf/Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great
Characters: Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great
Additional Tags: Protectiveness, Domestic, Character Study
Summary:

Five times Fredersdorf has to stay behind - and one time Friedrich doesn't leave.

Using People (3392 words) by prinzsorgenfrei
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great/Hans Hermann von Katte
Characters: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Hans Hermann von Katte
Additional Tags: Fluff, Idiots in Love, reading plays aloud while gazing into each others eyes
Summary:

Friedrich had started to talk to him because he had thought of him as a bit of a ditz.
And now here he was. Here he was months later, bundled up in this very same man’s blankets with a cup of hot coffee in front of him, its scent mixing with that of Katte’s French perfume.
_
Fluffy One Shot about one traitorous Crown Prince and the sycophant he accidentally fell for.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I mean... lower-c catholic just means "universal," and until very recently was a word people still said in the Creeds even in Protestant churches.

Yeah, I thought about talking about lower-c catholic, but then decided it would open this whole other can of worms I didn't have time for. :P But now that we're here and I have the day off work...

If you look at Isidore of Seville, 7th century author of the Etymologies, and instrumental in converting the Visigoths of Spain from Arianism to Catholicism, he's got an explicit definition of "catholic" that is our lower-c "catholic" and an implicit definition that is pretty close to (but not quite) our upper-c "Catholic."

When he defines "catholic", he gives the "general, universal" definition. But when he starts defining heresies, he says, "These sects are not Catholic:" and he lists almost 70 sects, including the Arians, Donatists, Nicolaitists, Severians, Manichaeans, and Nazarenes. He also says the Visigoths "became Catholic," by which he means they were one of those non-Catholic sects before.

If you look the bull that excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople in 1054 and kind of accidentally triggered the schism, it uses the word "Catholic." If you asked the authors, I'm sure their explicit definition would be our lower-c sense. But implicitly, it defines Catholicism by saying they're excommunicating this guy and his followers because the excommunicates are harming the Catholic faith by being like the: Arians, Donatists, Nicolaitists, Severians, Pneumatomachoi, Manichaeans, and Nazarenes.

In other words, the authors of this bull are joining Isidore of Seville in using "Catholic" to mean "not subscribing to beliefs that we of Rome think are heresies."

Now, does this mean the so-called heretics automatically agree? No, now you've got one side going, "We are catholic and orthodox and you are not," and the other side going, "No, we are catholic and orthodox and you are not!" (Lower-o "orthodox" is used both by Isidore of Seville and the authors of the 1054 bull of excommunication.) The schism wasn't automatic or immediate, either, so it's not like everyone promptly divided them by consensus into upper-C Catholic for one and upper-O Orthodox for the other.

But while the capital-C usage hadn't evolved in quite the same sense that we have it today, and they weren't making a distinction between upper and lower c orthographically (as far as I know)...it's so close to contemporary usage and there's so much continuity between the 11th century institution and meaning of the term and the current institution and meaning of the term that I'm comfortable using it for this period. Though qualifying it with something like "Roman", "Western", or "Latin" would be even safer.

Edited Date: 2022-11-05 12:11 am (UTC)

From:

cahn

Heh. Well, I mean... the holy small-c catholic and apostolic church hasn't included Arians since the first few centuries AD, regardless of whether or not you're large-C Catholic or not. :) The theology for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is Arianesque -- not exactly the same, buuuut no to the "same in essence" bit, no to the Trinity as is put forth in the creeds -- and this is a reasonably large reason why other Christian faiths do not consider us Christian. (Members of my faith, who by and large do not understand things like creeds and heresies except to say we don't do creeds (which I always think is hilarious given that we have Articles of Faith, which... guys...), are always baffled by this, because we believe in Christ, so... we must be Christian!)

But yeah, I reckon if you have and accept the hierarchical organization with a Pope and so on, I'm not going to quibble with calling you the large-C Catholic church :) I guess the thing that's actually sort of amazing is that everyone these days (except I reckon the Eastern Orthodox? I don't know much about them) considers both Catholics and Protestants members of the catholic church, to the best of my knowledge. (Of course, they both accept the Creeds.)

From:

luzula

In 18th century English books I see the word "papist", and I have never seen it in anything modern! But an Irish friend told me the word was in fact alive and well and is used as a slur against Catholics in Ireland…

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Heh. Well, I mean... the holy small-c catholic and apostolic church hasn't included Arians since the first few centuries AD,

Agreed, but it's also not just acceptance or lack thereof of the creeds that the early writers were using as their basis to reject other sects as "non-Catholic." The Donatists accepted the same creeds and held the same theological beliefs as the "Catholics", but did not accept the authority of the state church, and were thus considered not catholic/Catholic by their opponents. (Who wrote with a lowercase c, at last as far as I know without checking the manuscripts, but that's how it's transcribed in Latin by modern editors.) As for whether the Donatists considered themselves catholic/Catholic, I don't have proof, but I would be surprised if they didn't.

The curious historical linguist in me has now prompted me to check three more sources:

1. Otto von Freising, since I'm reading his bio and he's writing only a century after the East-West Schism.
2. The Oxford English Dictionary.
3. One of the books I own on early Christianity and read a few years ago.

Otto von Freising, as far as I can tell from flipping through:

- Uses "catholic" (which the English translators render with a capital C) mostly in the "catholic and apostolic church" or "orthodox catholic faith" sense, and in fact most of his usages that I saw were prefaced with "orthodox".

- Mostly uses "Roman church" to talk about his own church and distinguish it from the Greek church.

- Does use "Roman Catholic" once that I saw.

- Points out that the Armenians were calling their religious leader "Catholic" too.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives as one of the several definitions of the word "Catholic":

Designating the ancient Christian Church before the Great Schism between Eastern and Western Churches in the 11th cent., or any Church standing in historical continuity with it claiming shared doctrine, system, and practice.

With a note:

The designation was assumed by the Western or Latin Church after the Great Schism in distinction to Eastern or Orthodox (this continues in historical writing). It was claimed as its exclusive designation by the Latin Church that remained under the Roman obedience after the Reformation in the 16th cent. (cf. sense A. 5). It has also been used to include the Anglican Church regarded as a continuation of both the ancient and Latin Churches (cf. Anglo-Catholic adj. 1). The implied sense is ‘the Church or Churches which now truly represent the ancient undivided Church of Christendom’.

Emphasis mine. Basically: the more alternatives arise, the more the definition gets narrowed to "Us and not you, and now not you, and now also not you either." And that last sentence in the note is exactly why you have Armenians and Greeks and Anglicans and so forth continuing to call themselves "Catholic" long after the Romans have decided to exclude them.

A New History of Early Christianity says:

The word Catholic derives from the Greek for 'universal'. Strictly speaking, historians use it of both eastern and western churches before the formal split between them in 1054, from when it was used only of the western church.

Which is consistent with what I've encountered in my reading.

Salon: the place where you make one casual remark, and people are still having an in-depth discussion of technicalities a month later. ;)