Challenges of Modernity: Society, Religion and Culture in the 19th Century

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  Tento kurz byl podpořen z projektu: Zvýšení kvality vzdělávání na UK a jeho relevance pro potřeby trhu práce
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  The course Challenges of Modernity: Society, Religion and Culture in the 19th Century is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

  Introduction into the online programme Challenges of Modernity: Society, Religion and Culture in the 19^th Century

  Welcome to the course handbook! It will tell you what the content of the course is, what tutoring assistance we can provide, what you need to know to go through this course on-line, and what expectations it can meet.

  At a 1991 symposium of the Hussite Theological Faculty called The Church and Society, Richard Georg Plaschka said we need to start viewing the national images of European history through the lenses of faith and research (Národní sebeuvědomění, pochopení dějin, perspektiva víry. In: Církev a společnost. Sborník ze symposia UK HTF, Praha 1992, p. 10 and onwards). We study the history of the last century's European churches in the post-totalitarian era from this perspective.

  The forms of religiosity in European society in the 19^th century may seem chaotic. In history, churches and Christian spiritual schools of thought have always been part of the social, political, and cultural spheres of life. This course aims to introduce the changes of Christian religiosity in all its aspects – theological, intellectual, social, political, global, and cultural – in Western and Central Europe. Each of the topics will include an introduction to the societal developments in the 19^th century and the changes to Christian religiosity, as well as a description of its main sources and types. The central question addressed by the course is to what extent and in what form Christian religiosity, culture, and society underwent changes during the modern era of the 19^th century, and to what extent it remained unchanged, despite all the major political, economic, and technological changes in society. Another important goal is to use the course reading to illustrate the diverse spectrum of approaches and methods utilised in the study of religiosity, society, and culture.  

  Registration requirements

  Knowing general and cultural history to an extent equal to having studied a humanities bachelor's programme.

  Course completion requirements

  To complete the course, the student must write an essay on a topic from the first half of the 19^th century and a final paper on a topic from the second half of the 19^th century. The course includes a final exam, which consists of discussing the final paper.

   

  Thematic structure of the course

  Topic 1 Christianity and modernity

  Topic 2 Churches and national identity, nationalism

  Topic 3 Christianity in Czechia

  

   

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    Each lesson on the course is tied to the previous lessons, with the expectation that the students have mastered the subject matter of the previous lessons. The structure and system of the course is designed to guide the students’ learning process and partially also their pace through the lessons’ composition. The technology used in the course is also meant to facilitate optimal communication between the tutor and the student. The tutor trusts in the students’ ability to learn independently and continuously evaluates their learning process and their progress.

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  Topic 1 Christianity and modernity

  

  Topic goal:

  The first topic aims to give the students an overview of major historical moments and the key issues of Christianity and modernity in the 19^th century. It introduces papacy as an institution in conflict with the modern state and forms of governance and one that employs different forms of managing the Church in this time. It reflects theology as a form of revolt against the thinking of the Enlightenment which emphasized rationality. For most of the 19^th century, this institution has viewed Christian life as a journey that is only possible in a world of order, a society of stable structure, independent of the individual. The lessons will explain the emergence of new religious groups and sects and confessional revivalism (the Great Awakening movements) in the life of churches. Christian culture is explored as a possible answer to the specificity of modern times. The 19^th century also saw an increase in social sentiments, which in turn brought upon new Christian social organizations. The topic will also introduce and evaluate Biblical hermeneutics and the main models of Bible interpretation. We will flesh out the limits of the period interpretation of the Bible, as well as the ways people in this period could and strived to understand the Bible. In this topic, we will also focus on aspects of religious transformation in urban and rural areas at the end of the 19^th century.

  Students will gain the ability to reflect the diversity and mutual dependency of the different forms and dynamics of the changes in the historical development of the Church. The course will provide them with a basic overview of the topic and a common point of reference for future study. Students should understand the role of different Christian denominations in the context of social, economic, and cultural changes in society. They will learn about how the thinking around these issues developed, about the main approaches, schools of thought, and figures in the field, and about some organised structures (associations, interest groups), which provided space for the work of Christian denominations in the 19^th century. Students should also be aware of the societal influence of each denomination model and the main differences between models.

   

  Subtopics:

  1. 1. Basic terms and concepts for the description of society and the role of Christian religiosity and culture

     2. Catholicism (papacy, Catholic revivalism)

     3. Theology – a revolt against the Enlightenment; Biblical hermeneutics

     4. Christian social sentiments

     5. Structure and organisation of the Christian denominational life

     6. Religious transformation in the city and in the country

        Topic chapters

        Chapter 1: What is Christianity?

        Chapter 2: Modernity in the history of Christianity

        Chapter 3: Papacy in the 19^th century

        Chapter 4: The development of the role of the Roman Catholic Church in 19^th century Europe

        Chapter 5: The development of papal care for the church in the 19^th century

        Chapter 6: The shifts in papal care for the church in the 19^th century

        Chapter 7: New directions of Bible study in the 19^th century

        Chapter 8: The search for new direction in Protestant churches in the 19^th century; new movements; revivalism

        Chapter 9: Roman Catholic revivalist efforts in the 19^th century

         

        Chapter 1: What is Christianity?

        Christianity (Christian - christianos (lat.), χριστιανός (gre.); a monotheistic, dynamically missionary and universalist religion. It is based around the personality, life, and work of Jesus (Christ) from Nazareth in Galilee, seen by Christians as the Son of God, Saviour, and Teacher. Jesus' title, Christ, is derived from the Hebrew term Messiah-Anointed, Christos in Greek.  A more accurate translation would therefore be Jesus who is the Christ. Historically, Christianity originated in ancient Palestine, the geographical and historical site of Jesus' life and work. It started as a reform school of Judaism. The beginnings of Christianity are described in the New Testament, which together with the Judaic Old Testament comprises the Holy Scripture – the Bible, Christianity's sacred text. After Christ died on the cross, his followers formed the first Christian circles (communities), led by his closest apprentices – the apostles. Some of these original communities carried out missionary work in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The expanding, diversifying Christianity gradually began to divide into several streams. At the end of the 1^st century A.D., Christians still saw themselves as originating from Judaism. However, their life was for the most part no longer centred around the Jewish historical memory and ritual life. Christianity had embarked on its centuries-long journey through history.

        One becomes Christian by undergoing christening, by confession of faith, and by following a certain way of life. Today, Christianity is the most widespread religion in the world.

        Chapter 2: Modernity in the history of Christianity

        The journey of Christianity through the millennia and countless cultures and civilization models includes the development, maintenance, and loss of its historical memory. Christianity, like any religion, also includes a stable element of movement towards modernization. At its beginning, Christianity was formed and functioned as a diverse movement, with no framework of authority and legal support and no confessions of faith refined by catechism, cultivated by centuries of struggle. It was not unified or organised in a sophisticated way. However, it was formed by dynamic theological discussions between the first generations of Christ’s followers and apprentices – both men and women. Throughout several generations, it gradually became a religion whose evangelists and missionaries set off across all the ethnic and social boundaries of the Roman Empire, and even beyond its borders. The modernization element of movement through history saw individual Christian communities and their religious authorities come to terms with the religious, social, cultural, and political signs of the times. This process was recorded by dialogue between Christian communities and by creating written recordings of fixed historical memory.

        In the history of 19^th century European, Christianity had to come to terms with many historical, political, cultural, and social limits – like in the previous centuries. It was accessible to the people of a certain time, with certain social traditions. It did not exist in a context where social groups where equal, but in a complex, diverse society, fuelled by a number of social, national, and religious conflicts. Individuals who accepted Christianity only internalised those parts of the Christian message that they could understand and accept in their lives. Based on this, they built their religious structures, as well as states and regions. Even the clergy and church hierarchy were influenced by the spirit and rhythm of their time. The influence Christianity exercised over the ethics, thoughts, and lives of 19^th century Europeans was very changeable.

        European Christians experienced their specific religiosity while interacting with their cultures’ traditions and historical memories, which meant they did not – and could not – live Christianity based on abstract religious forms. They always lived wholly in a specific historically dependent realization of their religion. For that reason, they also did not form abstract institutions around their churches, but instead always built their specific forms, anchored in their environments, cultures, and historical memories. Only then could they create living Christianity and influence their time and space.

        European Christianity in the 19^th century therefore also included a complex coexistence of different cultures, denominations, and languages on one continent. This is not to be taken for granted: it was a great act of civilization by our ancestors.

        Chapter 3: Papacy in the 19^th century

        The papacy entered the 19^th century in a position much different from the one it had in Europe several decades before that. In an era of technological, industrial, and political revolution, its role was exercised through the activities of personalities creatively connected to it and to the gradually changing European social reality. A premonition of this situation was the death of Pius VI in 1799. The Pope died after being forcibly moved into exile in France. The period of wars around the French Revolution, which climaxed with Napoleon Bonaparte, ended in 1814–1815 at the Congress of Vienna. The Congress influenced the development of European Christianity for several decades to follow, alongside the political, cultural, and spiritual position the papacy assumed in it. 

        At first, the French Revolution mainly influenced the Roman Catholics in France. Later, it affected its development in multiple European countries, as well as the lives of millions of European Catholics in France, Spain, Germany, the Danubian Monarchy, Italy, Ireland, and elsewhere. It also played its part in the emergence of other denominations outside of France.

        A catalyst for the revolution was France’s disastrous economic situation. In 1789, King Louis XVI called the Estates-General, for the first time since 1614 (representatives of the clergy, the nobility, and the Third Estate – the commoners). They were supposed to set up the country’s taxation system to allow for a more effective solution of the kingdom’s economic crisis. The Third Estate rejected the King’s taxation reform model and declared its revolutionary demands for significant political, economic, and religious reform in the kingdom. It claimed to speak for the French nation and gained the support of parts of the clergy and nobility. The Estates-General formed into a National Assembly. At this stage, the politicians of the revolution strived for a major reform of the country's political system and the formation of a constitutional monarchy. The symbol of the first stage of the revolution was the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. The Parisian fortress served as the royal political prison. Politically, the revolution was sealed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen on 27 August 1789.

        In religion, the revolution’s starting premise was that the Roman Catholic Church would give up its privileged position over the French people and become a part of it. Revolutionary politicians criticised the Church's riches and privileges. It abolished them and ended the supremacy of the clergy and land-owners privileged by birth. This created the necessary conditions for the redistribution of the Church's wealth in society, in favour of the revolutionary state and the Third Estate. On 2 November 1789, two thirds of the deputies of the National Assembly voted in favour of seizing the Church's assets. The revolutionary state ensured pay for the clergy, as well as financing for the Church's activities. In February 1790, revolutionary legislation abolished monasteries. On 12 July 1790, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was adopted, lowering the number of dioceses in France from 135 to 83, changing the number of parishes and the pay of clergy, abolishing the stole system of payments for sacraments and church services, and democratizing the Church’s institutional life. Bishops and parish priests were to be elected at citizens’ assemblies and held accountable by faithful citizens.

        However, the secularization of church assets and the revolutionary political changes to religious life caused discontent for many believers. Therefore, at the end of 1790, the National Assembly issued decrees, requiring bishops and clergymen, like other civil servants, to swear an oath on the constitution. Only some of the clergy decided to take this step and Pope Pius VI reacted by denouncing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and forbidding bishops and priests from taking the oath. For many years, this separated a large proportion of the Church from the revolutionary state. After the Pope's statement, the National Convention, the body appointed as government by the National Assembly in the fall of 1792, declared that the state is above the Church and guarantees that religion will abide by the law.

        In the following, radical stage of the revolution, the Convention abandoned traditional Christianity, and in the spring of 1794, it established an obligation for citizens of the state to worship the Supreme Being in its cult. A new revolutionary calendar was created for this, with many holidays. After the revolutionary period, the Roman Catholic Church entered the period of Napoleon Bonaparte's reign, supported by the Concordat system of Church institutions in France. On 15 July 1801, the First Consul of France Napoleon Bonaparte and Pope Pius VII established a Concordat. While this did not mean that Roman Catholic Christianity would become a state religion, it was recognized as the religion of the majority of French citizens. The Pope accepted the secularisation of Church assets in the previous years, during the revolution, while Napoleon guaranteed pay for the French clergy and financial support for the Church. The Concordat ensured the support of the Church for Napoleon. Fifty-nine bishops connected with the revolution had to give up their positions and 92 bishops recognised by Rome also resigned at Pius VII’s orders. New bishops were appointed to 60 French dioceses; almost half of them being the original bishops. Some of the remaining original bishops retained some share in the church governance of the country for the following years.

        In the beginning of the 19^th century, the secularisation process connected to the French Revolution later also affected the lands and assets of the Roman Catholic Church in the Empire. Napoleon Bonaparte seized Imperial territories on the left bank of the Rhine for France. In 1803, he compensated the secular Imperial princes for their losses with the lands of the ecclesiastical Imperial principalities. This affected the ecclesiastical electorates of Cologne, Trier, and Mainz, the lands of the rich Archdiocese of Salzburg, and many abbeys and Imperial monasteries. Over three million believers in the Empire were subordinate to the secular nobility. This significantly limited the Church's social, pastoral, and educational activities, and contributed to a deepening of the crisis of the Empire and its speedy end. Even though, after the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna reinstated the Papal States in Central Italy, the Church never regained the secularised assets in Germany. For the next half century, the Papal States kept developing. Pope Leo XII’s (1823–1829) authoritarian centralist government limited the political power of Roman Catholic laymen and political discourse in general. This course continued under the reign of Pius VIII (1829–1830) and Gregory XVI (1831–1846), causing an increase in the brutality of  interventions of the papal police against the Italian national revolutionary movement led by Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872), and an uprising in several regions of the state (1831). The Curia only managed to defeat the uprising with military assistance from abroad (Austria). All this showed that the political system of the Papal States was dysfunctional and unsustainable and could only prolong its existence with foreign aid. In 1832, Gregory XVI published the Mirari vos encyclical, condemning liberalism, as represented by the French Catholic priest and theologian Félicite de Lamennais (1782–1854).

        From a European, not only Italian, political perspective, the revolutionary year of 1848 was fuelled by the growing political unrest of the 1840s and the long-lasting economic crisis in several European states. The 1848 developments caused a domino effect: the collapse of the Holy Alliance political system, set up at the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna. After the revolution at the Apennine Peninsula, the question of Italy’s national unification became relevant. There were several political scenarios for that – some more conservative and some more radical. The role they ascribed to the Pope in this unification process differed – sometimes it was greater, sometimes smaller and sometimes none at all. In the State of the Church, 1848 gave rise to thinking about civil liberties, rooted in nationalism, liberal constitutionalism, and democratism, as well as a political search for solutions to social issues.

        At the beginning of his pontificate, the following Pope Pius IX (1846–1878) seemed to be a moderate liberal, initially reacting positively to urgent contemporary social issues. In the spring of 1848, after revolutions started in France and Germany, he, aware that his three predecessors were not popular, promised to issue a constitution defining the State of the Church and approved the freedom of the press and of assembly, and the right of suffrage for laymen. This at first ingratiated him with the more conservative stream of the Italian national unification movement, which saw the liberal-acting Pope as a figure who could spearhead the Italian unification process. The main representative of this stream was the politician Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–1852). Mazzini's more radical (and influential) stream did not trust the Pope’s liberal attitudes and expected his politics to follow in the footsteps of his authoritarian predecessors who employed a plethora of methods to stop the unification of Italy. At first, Pius IX supported the Piedmont military operation against Austria and gained the sympathy of some Italian political liberals for a short time. As revolution quickly spread across the Apennine Peninsula and as Piedmont continued its fight with Austria to liberate the occupied territories in northern Italy, the Pope assumed a more neutral position towards this struggle and quickly lost his reputation as a liberal.

        The dynamic course of the revolution in Italy also resulted in more radical demands for democratization by many citizens of the State of the Church. Pius IX was unwilling to accept the extent of these demands. In November1848, the prime minister of the State of the Church, Count Pellegrino Rossi was assassinated. The Pope's palace was occupied by revolutionaries and Pius IX escaped into exile to the Kingdom of Naples. The Legislative Assembly in Rome deposed the Pope and established a republic in January 1849. Pius IX was only reinstated to the throne in the summer of 1849 by external powers: the French, Spanish, Austrian, and Neapolitan armies. These increasingly radical revolutionary attitudes and his negative personal experience made Pius IX afraid of a revolution and its impact on the form and position of the Roman Catholic Church within the State of the Church and all of Europe. The Pope returned to the authoritarian, absolutist tradition of government promoted by his predecessors, but he was unable to stop or delay the onset of political liberalism and the Italian national unification movement. Many provinces of the State of the Church decided to join other Italian states. The papal army was defeated by Commander Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882), whose political and military efforts helped prepare the ground for the final unification of Italy. In the 1866 Austro-Prussian War, most of Italy stood on the side of Prussia. Austria's defeat in this war drastically limited its influence in the north of the Apennine Peninsula and positively impacted the unification process in Italy. The remainder of the State of the Church including Rome was defended by French troops, which fended off an attack by Garibaldi’s armies on the city in 1867. After the start of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, these troops had to give up the defence of Rome and the city was occupied by Piedmont troops in the September of the same year. In 1861, politicians of the Italian unification process had appointed Rome as the future capital of Italy and its occupation gave them the opportunity to carry out this plan. Pius IX did not leave the city and refused a political agreement with the Italian state, which would have allowed him to freely act as a spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church. He declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican and lived there for the rest of his life. The decline of the State of the Church significantly limited the Pope’s ability to enact his influence as a statesman in Europe and in the world.

        The revolutions in Europe were gradually defeated in 1849, but the question of how states would be organized afterwards remained. A new Holy Alliance was unfeasible. After 1849, some European governments gave in to the demands of 1848, mainly to those that were liberal-economic. Many European governments realised that purely repressive measures fan the flames of opposition against rulers and governments attempting to develop the state in a stable way. Both liberal and conservative powers in European politics in the 2^nd half of the 19^th century had to cope with the legacy of 1848; they were its heirs and interpreters in their historical memories. In the papacy, this is also true for the last year of Pius IX’s pontificate, but it mainly holds for the pontificate of Leo XIII (1878–1903).

        Chapter 4: The development of the role of the Roman Catholic Church in 19^th century Europe

        The Roman Catholic Church was never a calm confessional space, subject to an ideal development, governed by the authority of Pope, superior to obedient bishops and secular rulers. Its position in 19^th century Europe underwent a number of shifts and was subject to complex political constructs. In the last two decades of the 18^th century, the French revolution started this process and heavily impacted the life of this church for the century to come.

        French Roman Catholic priests who remained loyal to the Pope rejected the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) in 1792, seeing it as a product of social anarchy threatening to destroy the traditional, God-ordained pre-revolutionary structure of the state. The principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity of all citizens disturbed the monarchist model of society and the church structure connected to it. In their view, this caused a crisis in the church. Even priests on the side of the revolution generally only accepted the demand for balancing the social differences in the believers’ liturgic and sacral lives and the church’s pastoral practices, without going much further in their ideas about the position of the church in the country. They saw liberating the entire confessional space in the state as akin to the destruction of the social and religious order (which they saw as dangerous), since it exceeded the limits of their imagination. The pro-revolutionary part of the Roman Catholic clergy supported liberty, equality, and fraternity by willingly accepting poverty in the style of early Christianity. However, they still maintained the Church hierarchy of the past. The secularisation motives of revolutionary legislators took both groups of clergy into account – both the pro- and the anti-revolutionary one – and built specific models of the church and its relationship to the state based on that. The anti-revolutionary part of the clergy completely rejected the revolutionary legislation as it would result in the destruction of the Church and society, while the pro-revolutionary priests tried to limit the secularisation impact of many laws. The general concept of revolutionary citizenship with its virtues and obligations could not always satisfy the Christian conscience of the pro-revolutionary priests and laymen – even though laymen were later given a real share in decision-making in their parishes and dioceses. 

        This conflict between specific tradition and Catholic conscience formed by the revolution was connected to French historical and national memory – and it was never entirely relatable for the Roman Catholic clergy and laymen in other European states affected by the revolution. The anti-revolutionary part of the Roman Catholic Church had almost no ability to achieve confessional renewal and modernization. Even the pro-revolutionary part of the church, swept up by the tumultuous development of the revolutionary state, proved incapable of any thoughtful, deep renovation of the contemporary church. 

        The Holy Alliance, formed by the statesmen of the Congress of Vienna after Napoleon's fall, did not restore the pre-1789 ‘Christian civilisation’. Following the wishes of conservative liberals, it gave rise to a Europe with a stabilized social order, supported by confessions and fear of the disturbance caused by modern revolutions. It allowed the Roman Catholic Church to re-establish most of the traditional forms of its influence over society. It also prepared the way for concordats between states where the majority of citizens were Catholic, and Rome, allowing for a diplomatic and political harmony between secular and Church power (Bavaria 1817, Kingdom of Naples 1818, the Netherlands 1827). In multi-denominational countries, it created conditions protecting the rights of the Roman Catholic Church. While the Church got social guarantees for its influence and its institutions seemingly functioned smoothly, this process was accompanied by discussions between conservative and reformist theologians. Especially the latter were aware of the growing gap between secularised society and living Christian faith. At this time, many clergymen and laymen set off on the thorny path of confronting the Church with the ideals of liberalism, different forms of socialism, and democratism – often with grave consequences. These efforts resonated with the political expectations of many Europeans in the 1830 and 1848 revolutions, which rekindled the memories of the religious struggle in 1789 and the following years. 

        The 1848 revolutions brought marked change to the political life of a major part of Europe. Citizens who used to be barred by their governments from taking part in the political decision-making process finally had the opportunity. Politics gained new tools, such as elections, civil liberties, and the activities of liberal, conservative, and radical political organizations exercising their freedom of assembly. Women had not yet been granted the right to vote, but they were able to partake of many civil liberties. In 1848, liberal and republican politicians in many multinational European states prioritised the goals of their individual nations in their political efforts. The revolutionary year therefore also caused an increase in nationalist political conflicts. Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary politicians had the ability to harness ethnic, denominational, and religious hatred between nations.   

        When the revolutions were defeated, politicians who wanted to move the Roman Catholic Church into a better position in society had to face difficult challenges. This can be illustrated by the political development in France where an authoritarian government came into power in 1849–1850. 1848 brought universal suffrage for all men in the country, which was limited in 1850–1851, but later renewed. After Louis Napoleon was elected president (1849), right wing politicians pushed the (Falloux) education law through the National Assembly. The law established Roman Catholic schools in the country and gave the clergy a share of power and oversight over education in the country.  Louis Napoleon’s political regime strived to enlist the Church’s support and provided its own support in turn – in the following years it aided the Church in many of its interests in society.

        The ideals of liberalism, different forms of socialism, and democratism did not disappear from the Roman Catholic Church in the 2^nd half of the 19^th century. They did, however, mirror the realities of Europe's dynamic industrial and technological development from before 1848. The 1815–1848 model of a unified, though denominationally varied, Christian European civilisation was questioned more and more, under the pressure of different secularisation trends. The Europe of many centuries when God and man, Heaven and Hell, the living and the dead coexisted was fading away for good. Some theologians and Church authorities slowly realised that the secularisation process was driven not only by powerful political movements, but also social ones and that the Church needed to react to their development and rise. They also came to the realisation that secularisation was affecting all levels of the Church to a different extent – most notably its life in big city parishes, and some rural ones. The Church saw liberalism’s ethical individualism and the progressing gap between the natural sciences and the humanities as the evils of secularisation.

        As many racial theories and theories of evolution gained more influence in society, the idea of the Church, the traditional rhythm of the church year dictating life in Europe, and its almost unchangeable structures came under scrutiny. Concepts such as evolution, historicity, the unpredictability of history or modernization posed a challenge not only to traditional theological terminology, but to the Church as a whole. Thinking about them put new demands on clergymen and laymen, and on theologians and church leaders. It brought new obstacles to their efforts to specify the extent and meaning of the freedom of the church in the ideological conflicts of the 2^nd half of the 19^th century. This development in the Church uncovered many old paths of its historical memory as its tradition was being reinterpreted. This was fuelled by the works of many authors: Social scientists (Herbert Spencer) writing about how natural sciences and the humanities can be used to study the processes of social development; natural scientists (Charles Darwin) describing the connection between the evolution of different species and humankind; and philosophers (Henri Bergson) elaborating on the creative unpredictability of evolution and existence. The concepts of doctrine and liberty became the cornerstones of the reinterpretation of Church traditions. The fathers of the First Vatican Council clearly established that Church doctrine stands above the revelation and freedom of individual Christians. Many people in the swiftly secularising Europe did not accept nor understand the rigid, binding Council solutions as historically convincing.  The Council Fathers' work could not retain the Christian civilisation of the past, but it aimed to guarantee an institutional framework for the Roman Catholic Church’s influence in Europe. However, the premature and hurried suspension of the Council clearly showed this work had limits. Pius IX became a prisoner in the Vatican, but much more importantly, he was held hostage by ideals of the world and the Church which functioned in the Europe of the past, not of the future. During his pontificate, he mostly reacted to social issues with criticism (Sylabus, 1864), without giving any deeper thought to possible solutions. This clearly showed that as the numbers of believers in the Roman Catholic Church dwindled, so did its influence over important topics in societal life.

        The last decades of the 19^th century brought many changes to the Roman Catholic Church in Europe. Leo XIII (1878–1903), the new Pope, had the ability to react to many political, social, and cultural changes on the continent.  He no longer felt like a prisoner in the Vatican and, alongside the Curia, he set off on the difficult path of finding a new place for the Church in a world significantly shaped by secularisation and laicization.  He suppressed the battle waged by the Roman Catholic Church Curia against European secularisation and led the Church on a path of tolerance and openness towards modernity. He was a Pope whose tolerance towards society of the end of the 19^th century also included human and civil liberties. He was therefore able to interpret the documents of the First Vatican Council with much more flexibility and historical imagination than his predecessor and his encyclicals addressed some of the great issues of his time. He made important statements on socialism and communism (Quod apostolici muneris, 1878), the modern state (Diuturnum illud, 1881, Immortale Dei, 1885), and the social issues of the period (Rerum novarum, 1891).

        Chapter 5: The development of papal care for the Church in the 19^th century

        The Popes of the 19^th century engaged not only with European and global politics, but also with leading the Church. The complex organism of the Papal Curia, strongly connected to the past, underwent many changes in this century, in order to truly encompass the mission of the Church in society. Leading figures of the Church were slow and reluctant to abandon the certainty of the Christian civilisation model and strived to keep many of its features even at a time that was growing ever more distant from it. Despite that, they also managed to lend an ear to the voice of their time and react to it in setting up their pastoral and social influence.

        To react to what believers truly needed when it came to the Pope’s care for the Church, the papacy had to start to develop theology and canon law with the new knowledge that had built up over the centuries. Although in the 18^th century, theology lost its status as queen of all sciences (confirmed most of all by the French Encyclopédie 1758–1777), it kept utilising the new findings of modern sciences about humankind in this and the following centuries. The Church, whose elites saw it mainly as the guardian of tradition, entered a stage of its development when it needed to see its tradition in an increasingly complex historical context. Theologians and Church historians took part in composing a number of editions of lesser-known or entirely forgotten ancient, medieval, and early modern sources, forging an understanding of them in the Church and in society. Many scholars returned in their studies to the apostolic period of the Church (living in poverty and truthful confession; its emerging episcopate rooted in collegiality). A number of the scholars whose works the papacy drew from gradually re-evaluated and expanded their understanding of the meaning of the early Church in Christianity's complicated history. This process of scholarly study slowly created the right conditions in the leading institutions of the Church, in order to re-evaluate some of the cornerstones of Christian tradition. 

        At this time, Roman Catholic scholars frequently had to react to unsettling hypotheses and revolutionary evaluations of different stages of the Church tradition, expressed by their colleagues of different denominations – or by those pushing the limits of contemporary denominations. Different fields of theology were under pressure from scholars who were no longer limited by the ideological boundaries of science set up by the Church Magisterium. Even Roman Catholic scholars whose innovative views meant they were rejected by the Church could keep disseminating their works and opinions beyond the borders of the Church and thus contribute to the ongoing Church debate on the topics they were studying. During the 19^th century, the Roman Catholic Church underwent a complicated and diverse process of reinterpretation of Church tradition. This wasn’t always symbolized by harmony and solidarity, but Church scholars and leaders took part in it, even despite great conflicts. This process gave rise to the theological and legal basis of the forms of papal care for the Church in the 19^th century. Despite the Church Magisterium’s limiting interventions, this lay down the conditions for debates about these forms of care in the 20^th century. If it hadn't been for these battles about the interpretation of revelation and tradition in the 19^th century Roman Catholic Church, the Second Vatican Council would never have happened.

        Leo XIII’s pontificate completed the Magisterium’s journey to an understanding of the Roman Catholic revelation, tradition, theory, and practice shaped by Neo-Scholasticism. The Pope was aware that the 19^th century’s optimistic faith in progress had its limits. He understood that, under certain conditions, this ‘faith’ could replace living Christianity for the people of his time. The Enlightenment drastically limited the study of scholasticism, which was only gradually revived after the mid-19^th century. Even before that, the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment created a desire to return to the spiritual elements of the Middle Ages in the Church. The Pope did not see this openness to Neo-Scholasticism, mainly based on Thomas Aquinas’ system (the Aeterni Patris encyclical – 1879), as idealisation or inefficient rigidity, doomed to conserve a specific period in Europe’s history. It was a much more complex manifestation of the Roman Catholic Church’s development in the 19^th century and its purpose was to support its dynamic intellectual, liturgic, and sacral life. We must keep in mind that this openness to Neo-Scholasticism based on Leo XIII’s system actually meant a gradual acceptance of the European medieval period, in a situation where the early apostolic Church dominated the debate of Roman Catholic scholars. The Pope strived for real, deep, and multifaceted knowledge of medieval politics, culture, and thinking in the Roman Catholic Church. This openness was partly also motivated by the growing understanding of the Byzantine ideological and political space. 

        The interest in the Scripture, the Biblical world, and early Christianity in the Roman Catholic Church was also connected to the development of Biblical and Oriental archaeology and geography, textual criticism of Biblical writing, and the knowledge of Hellenist philosophical and religious thinking and culture. Other quickly developing fields included Egyptology, ethnology, general and cultural anthropology, Religious Studies, ancient history, and the study of Oriental languages and cultures. This development was spurred on by Napoleon Bonaparte's expedition into Egypt, as well as the colonial expansion of powerful European states. It was then consolidated by the results of archaeological study in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Syria – findings of literary sources older than the Scripture, containing thematically connected stories (the great flood, the meaning of human life). The story of Jesus was given interpretations unrelated to the traditional Roman Catholic exegesis of the Scripture. The most influential ones in Europe were created most importantly by the German Protestant theologian David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874, Das Leben Jesus) and the French liberal theologian and Religious Studies scholar Ernest Renan (1823–1892, Vie de Jesus). They, alongside many other scholars and authors, started asking which elements of the Scripture corresponded to contemporary scientific knowledge – and which did not. This caused a relativization of the revelation, which gradually influenced the lives of believers in all European denominations, including Roman Catholics. Church leaders and scholars reacted to this, one by one. In 1893, Leo XIII’s encyclical Providentissimus Deus supported Biblical studies and set up a framework for them. In 1902, they were fully institutionalised when the Pope founded the Commissio Pontificia de Re Biblica. In 1890, the École biblique et archéologique française was founded in Jerusalem, at the impulse of Marie-Joseph Lagrange (1855–1938), a leading scholar. Leo XIII tried to create a time and space for the scientific community of his Church and to let them deal with important issues of Bible study on their own. At the onset of the 20^th century, his successor Pius X decided to intervene from a position of power, perhaps too harshly, which suspended this discussion for some time, but failed to stop it fully.

        Chapter 6: The shifts in papal care for the church in the 19^th century

        As the global transport network developed during the 19^th century (with the steam engine, railways, and ships), Rome was connected with continents and lands beyond the sea. This allowed Popes and the Curia to strengthen their influence in distant territories of the Roman Catholic Church. During his pontificate, Pius IX renewed the episcopal hierarchy in England in 1850, and in Holland in 1853 (29 archdioceses and 132 dioceses). Pope Leo XIII established 248 dioceses during his pontificate.

        Global and European demographic development in the 19^th century mainly consisted of population explosion, urbanisation, and migration waves. This influenced the development of the Roman Catholic Church in its global territories and the 19^th century papacy had to react by creating new archdioceses and dioceses as spiritual administration centres for the Church, as well as confirming its lower level centres in big cities and densely populated areas. The papacy had to deal with these great organizational challenges at a time when the economic power of the Church had been limited in many places by the confiscation of land in the 18^th century and the first half of the 19^th century. While the secularising states took over some of the responsibilities for the economic care of the Church, these largely consisted of providing pay for the clergy and financing the maintenance of some Church buildings. Any Church activities outside of these limits had to find new sources of income. 

        In the 19^th century, Popes were facing the difficult task of supporting Catholic university education in Rome. In some European countries, the secularisation process also meant removing the Church influence from state education (France, Prussia). In these countries, the Curia strived to create Catholic university education capable of competing with state universities and providing higher education to local clergy. In 1875, Catholic Institutes were founded in France. They ensured a good quality education and some scholars who taught at them (led by their desire to harmonise theology and modern science) did not always promote ideas acceptable to the Curia.

        The Church therefore embarked on a path of creating parallel social structures. At the same time, the papacy supported social work in many congregations (including those newly founded), widespread missionary activity on distant continents, and intense catechism and pastoral activities within the Church. This was a reaction to many possibilities of how society would develop in Europe and on other continents in the 19^th century. The papacy adapted its systems and the focus of many monastic Church institutions. In the social space unshaped by the state, cities, and municipalities, the Church founded a number of schools and institutions for handicapped children and adults and for people on the fringes of society. Even many political and cultural figures generally unsupportive of the Church appreciated the social effects of these activities (aimed to mitigate the impact of the industrial revolution) as positive. 

        In the 19^th century, the papacy also had to revive many monastic orders affected by secularisation in the 18^th and the beginning of the 19^th century. The most visible example of this process was when Pius VII restored the Society of Jesus in 1814. The papacy also supported congregations founded in the 19^th century. Examples include the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate supported by Leo XII in 1826; the Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus – Dehonians in 1888; and the Society of the Divine Savior – Salvatorians in 1885. The papacy also supported the volunteer Society of St. Vincent de Paul, founded in 1833, on the impulse of Antoine-Fréderic Ozanam, and active in social work. Papacy-supported women's congregations also played an important role in the Roman Catholic Church's educational and social work in the 19^th century. With the Pope’s support, the members of these congregations founded schools and social institutions on several continents, as well as asylums, nurseries, houses for mentally and physically ill people, hospitals, societies for educating workers, sanatoriums, and kitchens for the poor and homeless. Thanks to papal care, the century of technological development and great increase in both wealth and poverty, also became a century of social work, provided by the Church to many of those in need.

        Chapter 7: New directions of Bible study in the 19^th century

        In the 18^th century, European Protestant churches started focusing on relativizing the revelations, Scripture, and tradition, while trying to form a new understanding of the paths to revelation offered by reason and experience (Johann G. Herder, Imanuel Kant) and to internalize the Christian experience of revelation (pietism). The measure of revelation was now the individual. Many Enlightenment scholars criticised the Scripture and dogmas, following the demands of reason and knowledge, and fighting against the traditional, confessional and limited understanding of Christianity. The moralism and individualism of the 18^th century brought a different way of thinking about the principles of Christian liberties and doctrine, and the relations between the Church and the state. Church and social life was to be revived based on ethical theological parameters of revitalisation. This was the legacy that the 18^th century bequeathed to the 19^th century.

        The scholarly foundations of modern thought about the Bible were laid by the French Catholic Biblical studies scholar Richard Simon (1638–1712), who focused on how the books of the Bible were created – especially the Pentateuch, and on the literary genres of the Bible. Jean Astruc (1684–1766) was another prominent scholar focused on the historicity of the Pentateuch. Voltaire (1694–1778), who was very influential in Europe, brought radical contemporary interpretations of the Scripture. As an author and journalist, he found a number of errors and contradictions in the world of the Bible, but he did not seek them using serious, scientific exegesis methods.  

        The German Protestant Enlightenment also gave great scholarly figures to the field of Bible interpretation; especially Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791) who was active at the Georg-August University in Göttingen. Michalis used the methods of philology, archaeology, and history in Biblical studies and he laid the foundations of scientific exegesis of the Old Testament for the German Enlightenment. Although his methods were innovative, he was connected with traditional, orthodox Lutheran theology all of his life. Another German Biblical studies scholar, Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791), was less limited by this theology. He clearly realized that the Old and New Testament canon had undergone a complex development and he promoted using the methods of Biblical criticism to understand and interpret it.

        Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827), a scholar at the universities of Göttingen and Jena, also became an important figure of critical Old Testament interpretation in German Protestant science. He was a student of Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791). He introduced the myth into the scholarly interpretation of the Scripture, as an interpretation of events connected with the time when specific God-inspired texts were written. He attempted to describe the connection between Old Testament writings and the social and religious space they had originated in. His goal was not to strip Biblical texts of their meaning as revelation, but to point out the contextual and historical phenomena that influenced their writing and interpretation. 

        The Tübingen School originated with the Protestant theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), influenced by contemporary German philosophy, most importantly Hegel. He became a significant interpreter of the New Testament and he saw two important lines of development in 2^nd century Christianity: the Petrine Jewish Christianity and the Pauline Pagan Christianity. The first branch led Christians on a path to redemption through faith and deed (Judaism and its Testament), while the second guided them towards justification through faith (limiting or even renouncing the influence of the Jewish Testament). He saw Jewish and Pagan Christianity as increasingly mutually inimical early Christian branches. He presented his views in his work Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ (1845, 1866/7). In it, he evaluated how close or far different New Testament texts were to each of these two lines. He attempted to establish a chronology of when each text became part of the New Testament, assessing the Acts of the Apostles as a late New Testament text, together with the Gospel of John. He saw the Gospel of Lucas as closer to the Pauline Pagan Christianity. Although Baur’s hypotheses were refuted by further Scriptural research, his work introduced a number of scholarly topics for future generations. Further study proved that the conflict between the two branches of early Christianity was less severe than Baur thought.

        Baur's student, David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) also left an important mark on Biblical study. As a young man, he wrote The Life of Jesus (1835), a work influenced by the German scholars Hegel and Schleiermacher. It made him quite famous, while at the same time barring the doors to academia for him, and it influenced the interpretation of Biblical writing in Europe for decades to come. In The Life of Jesus, the author asked whether the New Testament books described real historical events surrounding Christ. Strauss' conclusion was that these events were mythical; using the language of myth to describe Christian truths and he divided the mythical from the historical Jesus. His work was renounced by many Protestant and Catholic Biblical studies scholars. Further study of the New Testament disproved Strauss' theory of myth and established the gospels as important sources of information on the life of Jesus. Strauss himself wrote another controversial book – the two-volume Christian Doctrine in Its Historical Development and Its Struggle against Modern Science, published in 1840–41. They, as well as his later books on the life of Christ, also provoked more excitement and debate.

        The French scholar and oriental languages expert Ernest Renan (1823–1892) also included a number of elements of the Tübingen School and German classical philosophy into his works, created in an environment related to the Roman Catholic Church. After his studies in the seminary, he decided to abandon the path to priesthood and focused on studying oriental languages instead. He took part in an archaeological expedition to the Middle East and in 1862 he started teaching at the Collège de France. A year later, he published his Life of Jesus; the first book of the eight-volume series Origins of Christianity, finished in 1883. In it, Jesus is depicted as an exceptional and charismatic man, radicalized by John the Baptist and divinized by his apprentices and followers. Despite being a popularized reconstruction of the Biblical and Roman world, rather than a work of science, the series had a significant effect on the contemporary understanding of the Biblical world.

         In the 2^nd half of the 19^th century, the German Protestant theologian Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) started studying the history of Israel. In 1878, he published his History of Israel, introducing new ways of dating the Pentateuch based on source hypotheses and questioning whether Moses was really the author (using the method of literary analysis of Biblical writing). Based on these views, he also re-evaluated many other periods in Jewish history. He did so at a time when the number of researchers focused on the ancient society and religion of the Middle East was growing only slowly. However, subsequent findings of these researchers drastically limited the validity of Wellhausen's hypotheses. 

        In Protestant circles at the end of the 19^th century, new approaches of Biblical study gave rise to Hermann Gunkel’s (1862–1932) influential critical method of history, form, and work, which also focused on the influence of myth in the Scripture.

        Significant Catholic works of Biblical study at the end of the 19^th century included publications by Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) and Marie-Joseph Lagrange (1855–1938). Loisy was influenced by E. Renan and Protestant Biblical study of the 19^th century. He drew inspiration from the French founder of Catholic Biblical criticism, Richard Simon (1638–1712). Loisy graduated from the Institut Catholique and later became a professor there. At the turn of the century, he focused on the canonical history of the Old and New Testament and on the history of Old Testament texts and translations. In 1890, Lagrange founded a Biblical school in Jerusalem, a significant centre for archaeological research in Palestine. Both scholars brought the topic of revelation development in the Old and New Testaments into Biblical study and they both focused on the Biblical image of the world and the context in which it was formed, addressing the conflicts between the Bible and science in the late 19^th century.  

          

        Chapter 8: The search for new direction in Protestant churches in the 19^th century; new movements; revivalism

        During the 19^th century, European Protestants set off on the difficult and thorny path of connecting traditional Christianity and modern education. Protestant Churches were in danger of losing contact with contemporary science and culture. People on the highest levels of their hierarchy harboured grave concerns about modernity and tended to persecute church scholars trying to develop a deep and understanding relationship to the modernization ideologies of the 19^th century. The modern understanding of history and nature in the church reflected a number of contradictions between science and traditional faith. Modernized theology and history aimed to make reformed churches accountable to science, which confronted Christianity with the issue of truthfulness. Scholars in these churches were able to consider these contradictions, overcome them, and incorporate their results in their religious lives and knowledge, often at great personal cost. They accepted the great conceptual impulses of the century as a challenge, spurring them onwards to a truthful scholarly and personal life in their church. These new horizons also made many 19^th century Protestant theologians and historians realize that the ecclesiastical space can accept and regulate new scientific knowledge – but it needs time and educated people to do that. They also realized that Christians are always born into a specific period, with all its strengths and weaknesses, and that they take part in revelation to fill and transform the time that has been given to them.

        In Protestant theology, the 19^th century pushed the limits of historical memory. Most Protestant theologians tried not to renounce historicity, as they saw this would lead their church into passivity and a ghetto. They strived to truly understand the church's mission to bring Christ’s gospel to the world. However, theological fields were in danger of becoming mostly historically oriented. In many cases, the ongoing secularisation process led them to produce denominationally limited apologia of Christianity. The historization of theology, and its deeper focus on apologia, were a reaction to a period that was growing distant to its Christian roots and made it necessary to struggle to coin a new understanding and a new mission of Christianity in the world. The courage to live in an untried, uncertain, and unstable world became an inherent part of many Protestant Christians’ lifestyles in the 19^th century. But despite that, Protestant churches lost some of the social elites, because they were reluctant to embrace new paths of thought and behaviour. 

        Anti-clericalism, an animosity towards churches, became increasingly more influential in the secularising 19^th century society. It didn’t always mean a rejection of all that is Christian, but mostly focused on some elements of church life. Throughout the centuries, anti-clericalism became more organized and political parties included it in their agendas.

        Industrial progress gave churches many new opportunities. The industrial revolution gave work to millions of European men, women, and children, leading them out of the country into manufacturing and factory hubs. It turned the rural family into a worker family, with only very limited social security. The first social security system came only at the very end of the 19^th century, and even then, it applied only to a very small number of workers. While in the country, the sick, widows, and orphans from poor families would be taken care of by their relatives, the industrial environment left them unsupported and in poverty. The poor masses kept growing in the cities and the church and church-related organizations started caring for them. Despite ongoing secularisation, education of the poor and social and charity work done by these organisations became a significant 19^th century phenomena. Churches, despite being gradually restricted in the public space, worked in a field neglected by the state.

        The educational and social work of Protestant churches in the 19^th century was quite universal. Their social work in the cities and in the country included caring for children and minors, for young working-class girls, for the sick and alcoholics, for pilgrims and the homeless, for migrants, students, sailors, and believers in the missions. Women played a significant part in it, as churches allowed them to surpass their mainly working class or farming roots, get an education, and work as teachers, caretakers, missionaries, nurses, and later also as doctors. At first, women generally worked assisting men, but later they entered a number of previously male professions. They founded schools and social institutions and managed them with skill, providing education to tens of thousands of young women and making medical care accessible for men, women, and children on most continents. They also did a great deal of work in educating new generations to continue these activities, founding church schools focused on social work and publishing church magazines to popularize it and make it more scholarly.

        The search for new directions in the Protestant environment is connected to the revivalist Evangelical movement. In the 19^th century, its important representative was Charles G. Finney (1792–1875). He was connected to the Presbyterian (Calvinist) and Congregationalist environment in America. In 1835 he became a professor at Oberlin College in Ohio and in 1851–1866 he served as its rector. Under his leadership, the school played an important role in protecting slaves before and during the US Civil War. While traditional Calvinism accentuates that man is entirely subordinate to God’s actions and law, he preferred to emphasize human collaboration with God in the process of awakening to redemption. He focused on the concept of free will in this process. God opens an individual’s ability to see what is right and wrong in their life, but the individual freely decides to walk the path of good or evil. In his theology, Finney drastically limited the classical teachings of original sin. He saw sin as a purely psychological and biological phenomenon, removable through evangelisation, pastoral activity, and education. He saw these as means to repress the human tendency to sin and indulgence and to support responsible, moral decision-making.

        The American Evangelical movement was also strongly influenced by the Princeton theological school. Almost since its establishment in 1811, the theological seminary at Princeton was represented by the figure of Professor Charles Hodge (1797–1878), a traditional Calvinist. In the 19^th century, theologians of this school tended to abandon traditional Calvinism and focus on Evangelical theology. These included Breckenrindge Warfield (1851–1921), an alumnus of Princeton and the University of Leipzig. He drew on the Calvinist orthodoxy concept of the Bible as the infallible, God-inspired Word, in which the words of the Scripture are the words of God. He tried to defend the infallibility of the Bible from the criticism of contemporary secular science. He was influenced by scholarly interpretations of the Scripture and the development of Biblical studies and started seeing the Scripture as the work of God and humankind, forged out of revelation and the ability of contemporary human writers to comprehend it. He retained an orthodox, reformed understanding of the Scripture as an authority and standard for church life revealed by God, while understanding much of the history and ideological context in which it was written. He managed to fully avoid the primitive fundamentalism typical of folk Evangelism. 

        The Evangelical movement in Europe was also shaped by Peter Taylor Forsyth (1848–1921). He studied theology at the universities in Aberdeen and Göttingen, and at Hackney College in London and then worked as a Congregationalist priest. Hackney College also retained him as a teacher. His studies and theology focused on divine revelation in the Scripture, using the methods and findings of Biblical studies and archaeology. He thought that the Biblical revelation culminated in Christ and the Cross and contributed to theologians’ debate about the balance between divinity and humanity in Christ. In this debate, he held the view that Christ incarnate first partly deactivated his divinity in the process of kenosis (self-emptying). Jesus’ moral struggle throughout his life gradually reactivated his divinity in a process called plerosis (self-fulfilling). His Christological views first drew a great deal of theological criticism, which argued that Christ could not mechanically limit his divinity to enhance his humanity. Some critics also accused Forsyth of psychologizing Christ’s humanity and divinity. Forsyth’s Christology was influenced by contemporary conflicts between Evangelical theology, reformation orthodoxy, and liberalism.

        Chapter 9: Roman Catholic revivalist efforts in the 19^th century

        The Roman Catholic Church in the 19^th century was also deeply influenced by its broad revivalist movement. This in turn enhanced the Christian life of its believers and the Church’s social work. Catholic revivalist efforts were tied to the development of spirituality in the Church that followed in the centuries after the Council of Trent. However, they were also not separate from the influences of Protestant Europe. Their goals included transforming and restoring Christianity in personal, family, as well as institutionalized life in the Church.

        In the first two decades of the 19^th century, the Napoleonic Wars had a marked influence on the experiences and values of European Roman Catholic believers.  The lives of many were affected by hardship, the lack of social security, and a drastic shift in the values of humanity. Believers in this period set out on new journeys with the Church, helped by the diocese clergy, as well as a number of new monastic congregations. The Protestant revivalist movement was influenced by contemporary conflicts between Evangelical theology, reformation orthodoxy, and liberalism. The Roman Catholic revivalist movement was born in the decades of Romanticism, but it reached beyond its temporal and ideological borders. However, it also had its defenders of Catholic orthodoxy, as well as its theological liberals. Figures with diverse theological views and life stories influenced the revivalist and restorative efforts in the Church. At first, these no doubt included Austrian and Bavarian Roman Catholics focused on revivalist action, who emphasized piety, human solidarity, and fraternity: for example the theologian, teacher, and Bishop of Regensburg, Johann Michael Sailer (1751–1832); or Schelling's friend, doctor, philosopher, and theologian Franz von Baader (1765–1841). In the following decades, other important figures were the Salesian teacher John Bosco (1815–1888), as well as a convert from the Anglican Church and theologian, John H. Newman (1801–1890), Saint Theresia of Lisieux (1873–1897), as well as the socially aware scholar, first persecuted and later revered by the Church, Antonio Rosimini (1797–1855). In a broader perspective, the only thing this revivalism has in common is the desire of these prominent figures to elevate their Christian life beyond the bounds of social secularisation and the defence of the Church’s position connected to it, and the limits of contemporary politics.  

  

  • Select activity Christianity and modernity-questions

    

    Christianity and modernity-questions Buch

     Chapter 1: What is Christianity?

    Reading questions:

    1. What is the significance of Jesus Christ for the creation of Christianity?

    2. What is Christianity?

    3. How does one become a Christian?

     Chapter 2: Modernity in the history of Christianity

    Reading questions:

    1. What, in your opinion, is the modernization element of Christianity?

    2. How did the early forms of Christianity develop?

    3. What is the difference between concrete and abstract Christianity?

     Chapter 3: Papacy in the 19^th century

    Reading questions:

    1. How did the French Revolution pre-determine the situation of the papacy in the 19^th century?

    2. In which ways did the Congress of Vienna influence European Christianity and the political, cultural, and spiritual role the papacy had in it?

    3. What was the 1801 Concordat between Napoleon Bonaparte and Pope Pius VII?

    4. Did the 19^th century papacy use all the tools available to it to develop the Roman Catholic Church?

     Chapter 4: The development of the role of the Roman Catholic Church in 19^th century Europe

    Reading questions:

    1. How did the French Revolution influence the political position of the Roman Catholic Church in 19^th century Europe?

    2. Do you know of any Concordats between states with a predominantly Catholic population and Rome in the 19^th century?

    3. What impact did the 1848 revolution have on the Roman Catholic Church in Europe?

     Chapter 5: The development of papal care for the church in the 19^th century

    Reading questions:

    1.  Did the Roman Catholic Church in the 19^th century assume the role of a guardian of tradition?

    2. How was the understanding of church tradition in the Roman Catholic Church restructured in the 19^th century?

    3. Did Leo XIII’s pontificate provide a new way of understanding the revelation, tradition, theory, and practice of the Roman Catholic Church? 

     Chapter 6: The shifts in papal care for the church in the 19^th century.

    Reading questions:

    1. What were the demographic, economic, and ideological developments in 19^th century Europe and in the Roman Catholic Church? 

    2. What effects did the establishment of Catholic universities in Rome and Europe have?

    3. What was the restoration of the Society of Jesus in 1814 and which new Roman Catholic congregations were founded in the 19^th century?

     Chapter 7: New directions of Bible study in the 19^th century

    Reading questions:

    1. How was the revelation, Scripture, and tradition relativized in the 18^th century? What were the new attempts to understand the paths of reason and experience to the revelation?

    2. What were the new streams of modern thought on the Bible in the Protestant environment?

    3. What were the new streams of modern thought on the Bible in the Roman Catholic environment?

     Chapter 8: The search for new direction in Protestant churches in the 19^th century; new movements; revivalism

    Reading questions:

    1. Was secularisation connected to the Protestant churches’ search for new options in the 19^th century?

    2. What was the main modernization element of Protestant theology in the 19^th century?

    3. Were women successful in making an impact on the new paths of Protestant churches in the 19^th century?

     Chapter 9: Roman Catholic revivalist efforts in the 19^th century

    Reading questions:

    1. What caused the restoration efforts in the Roman Catholic Church in the 19^th century?

    2. Do you know any major representatives of these efforts?

    3. How was revivalism connected to secularisation in the Roman Catholic Church in the 19^th century?

  • Select activity Literature:

    

    Literature: Buch

    Chapter 1: What is Christianity?

    Literature:

    Pelikan, Jaroslav; Hotchkiss, Valerie (ed.). Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press (2003).

    Chadwick, William Owen. A History of Christianity. New York: St. Martin's Press (1998).

     

     Chapter 2: Modernity in the history of Christianity

    Literature:

    Pelikan, Jaroslav; Hotchkiss, Valerie (ed.). Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press (2003).

    Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Volume 5: Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture since 1700. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1990).

    Burke, Peter. Religion and Secularisation. In: The New Cambridge Modern History, XIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1979), s. 293 – 317.

    Rauscher, Anton (Hrgb.). Säkularisierung und Säkularisation vor 1800. München, Ferdinand Schöningh (1976).

    Langner, Albrecht (Hrgb.). Säkularisation und Säkularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert.  München, Ferdinand Schöningh (1978).

    Maier, Hans. Revolution und Kirche. Studien zur Frühgeschichte der christlichen Demokratie 1789-1901. Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Rombach (1965).

    Kann, Robert A. Die Restauration als Phänomen in der Geschichte. Wien: Styria verlag (1974).

    Lexikon:

    Gründler, Johannes. Lexikon der Christlichen Kirchen und Sekten I., II.  Wien – Freiburg - Basel: Herder (1961).

    Historical Atlas:

    Historical Atlas of the World. New Jersey, Hammond-Union (1999), p. 29-32, 34-36.

     

           Chapter 3: Papacy in the 19^th century

    Literature:

    Chadwick, William Owen. The Popes and European Revolution.  Oxford: Clarendon Press (1981).

    Chadwick, William Owen. A History of the Popes 1830–1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press (2003).

    Gilley, Sheridan and Stanley, Brian (edd.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Volume 8, World Christianities c. 1815 - c. 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005).

    Burke, Peter. Religion and Secularisation. In: The New Cambridge Modern History, XIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1979), s. 293 – 317.

    Historical Atlas:

    Historical Atlas of the World. New Jersey, Hammond-Union (1999), p. 29-32, 34-36. 

     

     Chapter 4: The development of the role of the Roman Catholic Church in 19^th century Europe

    Literature:

    Atkin, Nicholas and Tallett, Frank. Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750. New York-London:  Oxford University Press (2004).

    Gilley, Sheridan and Stanley, Brian (edd.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Volume 8, World Christianities c. 1815 - c. 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005).

    Jedin, Hubert (Ed). History of the Church. 8. The Church in the Age of Liberalism; 9. The Church in the industrial Age. New York: Crossroad + London: Burns & Oates (1980-82).

    Burke, Peter. Religion and Secularisation. In: The New Cambridge Modern History, XIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1979), s. 293 – 317.

    Historical Atlas:

    Historical Atlas of the World. New Jersey, Hammond-Union (1999), p. 29-32, 34-36.

     

     Chapter 5: The development of papal care for the church in the 19^th century

    Literature:

    Chadwick, William Owen. The Popes and European Revolution.  Oxford: Clarendon Press (1981).

    Chadwick, William Owen. A History of the Popes 1830–1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press (2003).

    Atkin, Nicholas and Tallett, Frank. Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750. New York-London:  Oxford University Press (2004).

    Gilley, Sheridan and Stanley, Brian (edd.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Volume 8, World Christianities c. 1815 - c. 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005).

    Jedin, Hubert (Ed). History of the Church. 8. The Church in the Age of Liberalism; 9. The Church in the industrial Age. New York: Crossroad + London: Burns & Oates (1980-82).

    Burke, Peter. Religion and Secularisation. In: The New Cambridge Modern History, XIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1979), s. 293 – 317. 

     

    Chapter 6: The shifts in papal care for the church in the 19^th century.

    Literature:

    Chadwick, William Owen. The Popes and European Revolution.  Oxford: Clarendon Press (1981).

    Chadwick, William Owen. A History of the Popes 1830–1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press (2003).

    Atkin, Nicholas and Tallett, Frank. Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750. New York-London:  Oxford University Press (2004).

    Gilley, Sheridan and Stanley, Brian (edd.). The Cambridge History of Christianity. Volume 8, World Christianities c. 1815 - c. 1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005).

    Jedin, Hubert (Ed). History of the Church. 8. The Church in the Age of Liberalism; 9. The Church in the industrial Age. New York: Crossroad + London: Burns & Oates (1980-82).

    Burke, Peter. Religion and Secularisation. In: The New Cambridge Modern History, XIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1979), s. 293 – 317.

    Historical Atlas:

    Atlas zur Kirchengeschichte. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder (2004), p. 98-99. 

     

     Chapter 7: New directions of Bible study in the 19^th century

    Literature:

    Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, Valley Forge: Judson Press (1973).

    Rogerson, John W. Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany. Philadelphia: Fortress Press (1984).

    Hauser, Alan J. and Watson, Duane F. (edd.) A History of Biblical Interpretation, volume 3: The Enlightenment through the Nineteenth Century. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans (2017).

    Reventlow, Henning Lothar Gert Count. History of Biblical Interpretation, Vol. 4: From the Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature (2010).  

     

     Chapter 8: The search for new direction in Protestant churches in the 19^th century; new movements; revivalism

    Literature:

    Carwardine, Richard J. Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865.  Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press (2006).

    Robbins, Keith, ed. Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany and America, c. 1750–c. 1950. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

    Jedin, Hubert (Ed). History of the Church. 8. The Church in the Age of Liberalism; 9. The Church in the industrial Age. New York: Crossroad + London: Burns & Oates (1980-82).

    Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, Valley Forge: Judson Press (1973).

    Burke, Peter. Religion and Secularisation. In: The New Cambridge Modern History, XIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1979), s. 293 – 317.

    Chadwick, William Owen. The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century Cambridge: University Press (1975).

    Lexikon:

    Gründler, Johannes. Lexikon der Christlichen Kirchen und Sekten I., II.  Wien – Freiburg - Basel: Herder (1961).

    Historical Atlas:

    Atlas zur Kirchengeschichte. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder (2004), p. 100-105.  

     

     Chapter 9: Roman Catholic revivalist efforts in the 19^th century

    Literature:

    Atkin, Nicholas and Tallett, Frank. Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750. New York-London:  Oxford University Press (2004).

    Jedin, Hubert (Ed). History of the Church. 8. The Church in the Age of Liberalism; 9. The Church in the industrial Age. New York: Crossroad + London: Burns & Oates (1980-82).

    Burke, Peter. Religion and Secularisation. In: The New Cambridge Modern History, XIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1979), s. 293 – 317.

    Chadwick, William Owen. The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century Cambridge: University Press (1975).

     

  • Select activity Reflection and disscusion:

    

    Reflection and disscusion: Buch

    Chapter 1: What is Christianity?

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. Jesus Christ and the origins of Christianity.

    2. The relation between the spread of Christianity and the missions.

     Chapter 2: Modernity in the history of Christianity

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. Christians in European nations; their cultures’ traditions, and historical memory.

    2. The influence of Christianity in societies divided by a number of social, national, and religious conflicts. 

    3. How to enact a Christian coexistence of different cultures, denominations, and languages in Europe?

     Chapter 3: Papacy in the 19^th century

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII. 

    2. The 19th century papacy and political liberalism in Italy and other European states.

    3. The development of the Papal States from the Congress of Vienna up to its decline.

     Chapter 4: The development of the role of the Roman Catholic Church in 19^th century Europe

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. The Holy Alliance, formed by the statesmen of the Congress of Vienna and the restoration of the pre-1789 ‘Christian civilisation’. 

    2. The influence of ethnic, denominational, and religious hatred on 19^th century European nations.   

    3. The defeat of the 1848 revolutions and the development of the Roman Catholic Church in late 19^th century Europe.

     Chapter 5: The development of papal care for the church in the 19^th century

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. Roman Catholic scholars and the remodelled understanding of Church tradition.

    2. The development of Biblical and Oriental archaeology and geography, textual criticism of Biblical writing, philosophical and religious knowledge, and the Hellenist culture in the 19^th century.

     Chapter 6: The shifts in papal care for the church in the 19^th century.

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. New opportunities for extending the papal influence into distant territories of the Roman Catholic Church? 

    2. European secularisation and the shifts in how the papacy cared for the Church in the 19^th century.

     Chapter 7: New directions of Bible study in the 19^th century

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. The most important figures of Bible interpretation in the 19^th century.

    2. The end of the 19^th century and new attitudes of European science to the Bible.

     Chapter 8: The search for new direction in Protestant churches in the 19^th century; new movements; revivalism

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. Great figures of the Revivalist Evangelical movement of Protestant churches in the 19^th century.

    2. Revivalist theology of the revelation.

     

     Chapter 9: Roman Catholic revivalist efforts in the 19^th century

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. The main levels of the restoration of the Roman Catholic Church in the 19^th century.

    2. The papacy and the restoration of the Roman Catholic Church in the 19^th century.

     

• Select section Topic 2 Churches and national identity, nationalism

  Topic 2 Churches and national identity, nationalism

  

  The aim of the second topic is to provide students with an overview of the fundamental historical moments and key issues for the connected development of churches and nationalism in the 19th century and selected significant examples of this development. It shows how Christianity spread through different parts of Central and Western Europe, and describes the relationship of the Church and the state, using the example of France; the position of the Church in Italy and the Risorgimento; the role of different denominations in the establishment of national systems; and their influence on the rise of nationalism. The dominance of Protestantism and its denominational policy is illustrated using the examples of Switzerland and Holland. Students will gain the ability to reflect the diversity and mutual dependency of the different forms and dynamics of the changes in the historical development of the Church. The course will provide students a basic overview of the topic and a common point of reference for future study. 

  Other goals of studying this topic include:

  (a) To realize the significance of nationalism in 19th century Christianity.

  (b) To be able to define the term ‘national identity’ in 19th century Christianity.

  (c) To understand how nationalism developed and the role Christianity played in it.

  (d) To reflect on the importance of technological, economic, and political changes in society and in 19th century Christianity.

  (e) To comprehend the impact of nationalism on the development of church organizations and associations. 

  Chapters:

  Chapter 1: Nationalism as part of the history of 19th century Christianity  

  Chapter 2: Denominations and nationalism

  Chapter 3: Catholicism in France and Italy; Ireland and the Irish diaspora

  Chapter 4: Christianity and Germany

  Chapter 5: Christianity in England

  Chapter 6: The dominance of Protestantism in Switzerland and Holland

  Chapter 7: The crisis of German and French historical universalism and optimism and European nationalism in the late 19th century

   

  Chapter 1: Nationalism as part of the history of 19th century Christianity

  The New Testament interpreted the universal mission of Christianity as follows: ‘Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you’ (Mt 28, 19). This connects the missionary universalism and dynamism of the early Church with faithfulness to the teachings of Christ, giving rise to a dynamic religious community with open cultural, ethnic, and historical memory. It is accessible to men, women, and children of many nationalities and professions, including slaves. This universalism has historical roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but it has been influenced by many other spheres of civilisation. It is connected to specific Christian communities (congregations) and their faithfulness to Christ. In a large part of the Christian world, national churches developed throughout the centuries. 

  The modern form of European nationalism emerged with the French Revolution of 1789. 19th century Europe can be seen as a continent whose modern states and denominations were significantly influenced by nationalism. At the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), the national principle did not play a dominant role in how the political leaders set up the new order in Europe, but many of them already saw it as an undeniable part of their states’ societies. During the 19th century, it became more and more obvious that individuals who belonged to one nation in a given state were connected by culture (a set of language, thinking, and models of behaviour and communication) and that individuals could not take part in national unity without being brought up to do so and without later willingly to decide to accept their rights and obligations. In the political lives of most 19th century European states, nationalism was rooted in the basic idea that a state's political and national life must achieve a certain balance, using a number of mechanisms of power. The 1830 revolutions set up an expectation of significant social reforms in Europe. These also included a growing realization that nations have their rights and obligations. In that year, Europe was divided into states which dynamically promoted liberal policy and constitutional monarchy principles (Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain) on one side, and conservative states (the Danubian Monarchy, Russia, major parts of Germany and Italy). Liberalism aimed to solidify its political position in Europe and gradually became the main political direction for European states and nations. Although the radical and liberal revolutions of 1848 were defeated in Europe, the victory of the conservatives was accompanied with a gradual weakening of the Viennese system of European security. Different states started looking for ways of revising the European system from 1815, which had been further shaken by the Crimean War of 1853–1856. Several powerful European states were forced to participate in this war – apart from Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Britain, these most notably included France. More than ever before, European governments and rulers started taking nationalist political interests into account (for example in France, where Napoleon III promoted a policy of national interest, emphasizing European national self-determination).

  In many cases, not all individuals of a certain nationality lived within the political borders of one state in 19th century Europe. Many European states were multinational and, due to a complicated history, not all nationalities were equal in their political and civic rights. The theoretical principles of nationalism clashed with the complex historical reality, which also influenced the development of different European denominations.

  Nationalism became an important feature in the history of 19th century Christianity. It was one of the integrating forces, which connected Christians and the organism of society and reflected their identification with the national community. The intellectual and leading elites of European denominations gradually learned to accept nationalism as an important part of their journey to the modern world. This showed in the Church's leadership and educational institutions and in the different approaches to making nationalism serve the denominations. The intellectual and leading elites of European denominations strived to understand the cultural and ethnic components of the contemporary nationalism and to find rules for using it to strengthen the denominations’ social position. These rules often drastically differed from the ones which prevailed in the largely agrarian, feudal states in the previous centuries. 

  Even in a single denomination, the approaches to nationalism often differed by state. A typical example is the contrast between the reformed Calvinism in France and the more traditional one in Hungary. On the Balkan Peninsula, Orthodoxy in connection with nationalism helped preserve the social and historical memory of the local nations, which spent several centuries under the occupation of the Ottoman Empire. The development of the Russian state in the 19th century was also influenced by the connection of Orthodoxy and nationalism and many former Russian politicians, statesmen, theologians, philosophers, and authors focused on it.

  A faith focusing on God in a national environment, using nationalist arguments, can be valid, but it might also not be. It may be valid when the faith still takes the general scope of Christianity into account and looks for common ground with other national forms of Christianity. However, it loses validity if it becomes a mere political ideology; when it enforces national and political obedience; when it corrupts the history of both society and churches; when it attempts to eliminate and delete parts of the society and church which played a significant role in the historical process. Christians, including theologians and church historians, have a duty to see and spread the truth, even if they are to bear ideological consequences in society and the church. Nobody can take this responsibility away from them: no group of people, no denomination, no religion. In the national environment, faith can be, and has been for centuries, a tool for social and religious integration. However, many had to fight for this integration in 19th century churches.

   Chapter 2: Denominations and nationalism

  The development of European Christianity between the 15th and 17th century was significantly impacted by the Reformation. It reinstated European Christianity as a creative force, establishing it as a formative social power of the modern age. 

  The Roman Catholic Church also gained much from this process. The reform of the Council of Trent reacted to the Reformation impulses and made the Church into a powerful denomination in Europe and the world. All the denominations that emerged from this process of European confessionalization in the 16th and 17th centuries gained formative power in new early modern states. The 1848 Peace of Westphalia firmly put the decision-making power in Europe into the hands of secular rulers, even against the Pope's will. The Thirty Years’ War limited the influence that the clergy and denominational leaders could exert on European political life. In the late 17th century and during the 18th century, European secular rulers dealt with national problems with regard to contemporary denominational structures, but without including the clergy into the decision-making process. Their decisions were becoming more and more secularised.

  The modern secularisation of the 19th century was a consequence of the shared history of the denominationally differentiated Christianity and it was largely influenced by modern European states. 

  In the 19th century, nationalism developed in a dynamically secularising Europe. In the early 19th century, denominations still developed based on a shared historical memory of the Christianization of medieval Europe and the confessionalization of the early modern Europe. In the second half of the 19th century, secularization and dechristianization started becoming more and more influential in denominational development. The forces of dechristianization, desacralization, and demythologization worked against rechristianization, sacralization and mythologization, battling for strategic points in both the public and the private sphere. These processes also impacted how the perception of denominations developed and what influence they had over issues of European nationalism.

  Different denominations of 19th century Christianity in Europe worked both on a more universal level and on the level of national churches. These national churches worked with their specific confessional foundations to gather believers in mass, teach them, and guide them through pastoral services. In the beginning of the century, some European states were monodenominational, while others had multiple denominations, based on previous developments. These systems then changed and developed throughout the century, based on important political and social events.  

  Chapter 3: Catholicism in France and Italy; Ireland and the Irish diaspora

  

  Italy At the Apennine Peninsula, a number of reforms inspired by the 1789 Enlightenment took place in the Austrian Lombardy, Tuscany, and the Kingdom of Naples. The French Revolution also affected the politics and religion on the Peninsula; its ideals and principles mostly impacted the young generation. Corsica, an island which was historically Italian and where Italian was the first language, became a French territory in 1768. Some of the local politicians aimed to use the island to disseminate revolutionary ideals in Italy, to prepare the ground for a future revolution on the peninsula. After several years of the revolution, the peninsula welcomed the young General Napoleon Bonaparte as a liberator in 1796. He influenced the establishment of the Cisalpine Republic in Central and Northern Italy, which existed for two years. It was a formally independent state, in reality under French military control, and its Constitution was a copy of the French one from the third year of the revolution. Its growth was limited, partly because the Third Estate was not very developed in most of the republic. Although the republic ceased to exist, its political principles remained rooted in Italian historical memory: especially the political experience in state governance, and the reality of political freedoms for the press and different groups. The citizens of two other republics – the Roman Republic and the Parthenopean Republic, in Central and Southern Italy – had the same experience. In 1800, Napoleon, as the First Consul and then Emperor, rearranged the politics of the peninsula, founding most importantly the Italian Republic, which he later transformed into the Kingdom of Italy in 1802. 

  The Congress of Vienna after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1814–1815, re-established the state borders at the peninsula using the principle of legitimacy. The House of Savoy returned to Piedmont and Sardinia; the Bourbons regained Naples and Sicily; the House of Lorraine once again took up the reign in Tuscany; and the State of the Church was restored. The governments of the restored states had to face strong liberal opposition, which was strengthened in 1796–1814. Italian nationalism developed as well, undergoing a revival. The societies of the Italian states were full of expectation of new, radical political change. That was most strongly embodied in 1848. In this year, Italy saw a number of revolutionary shifts in several states, which largely also included a broad spectrum of people from the city and the country. After the 1848 revolutions were defeated, the fight for Italian independence and freedom was delayed for many years – but the next two decades proved it could not be stopped. 

  It took a long and complicated process before the leading and intellectual elites of the Roman Catholic Church could accept the modern denominational differentiation of Europe as positive. In the 19th century, it was still mostly seen as a schismatic failure, leading to secularisation and social decline. Popes, Pius IX (1846–1878) most of all, were suspicious towards nationalism connected with political liberalism, seeing it as one of the uncontrollable forces of their time which limited their secular power. The papacy had a negative experience with the Italian, and broader European nationalism, and fostered many reservations and concerns. It took a long time before these elites learned to accept the diversity of Christian faith, culture, and way of life as an offer of freedom, which Christianity had embodied from the very beginning. And it took just as long for them to see and accept nationalism as part of this diversity.

  Despite these concerns of the Roman Catholic Church leadership, nationalism formed the thinking of many laymen and clergymen in France, Italy, Ireland, and other European states in the 19th century. It also strongly influenced the anti-Catholic and anti-clerical political liberalism.

  Nationalism found more understanding in the Catholic intellectual environment when its scholars connected it to the transcendence of European national history. Catholicism gradually found one of the ways to experience human and civic rights in the values of nationalism, as well as an approach to human dignity based on many political and professional organizations in modern European states. However, the first Pope who showed greater understanding for these values was Leo XIII (1878–1903). He realized that the life of the Roman Catholic Church could not stand outside of the boundaries of the period and that it could accept all of its manifestations, including nationalism, and make them into a tool to influence the social and political life of Europe. In the late 16th and the early 17th century, the theologians and teachers of the Society of Jesus managed to harness humanism to serve the goals of the Roman Catholic Church, and nationalism was to serve the same purpose in the 19th century. Pius IX's Syllabus rejected all the main features of political liberalism, but the reception of nationalism became a part of Leo XIII’s model of social reconstruction and it reflected his pontificate’s orientation to this world and its social struggles. For centuries, the Church dabbled in politics, economy, science, and the arts, and under this Pope's rule, it once again took up the social challenges of its time and showed that its work was not limited to the metaphysical and that faith did not have to be isolated from modernity.

  Ireland: Irish history was full of political turmoil from the beginning of the 19th century. In the 1780s, Great Britain and Ireland gradually became a free trade zone. After the parliaments of the two countries were merged, they passed the Acts of Union in 1800 and in the January of 1801, Ireland became part of the United Kingdom, subordinate to the parliament in Westminster. Irish interests were represented by 100 Members of Parliament, while the British had 558.  From this moment on, Irish political, social and religious problems depended on the solutions that British MPs preferred. Ireland struggled with a number of major social and religious problems: Population growth, which undermined Ireland's social stability (there had not been any land reform that would have fulfilled the needs of landless tenants); growing tensions between Catholics and Anglicans; and Catholic efforts to have more political power. In 1823, politician Daniel O’Connell (1775–1847) founded the Catholic Association and gained the support of many Irish laymen and clergymen. While Catholics were not yet represented in the Parliament in the 1826 election, Roman Catholic voters connected to the association voted for Protestant MPs who were on their side and won in four counties. In 1828, O’Connell was elected as an MP in County Clare. In 1829, the Parliament passed a bill that removed a number of political restrictions for Catholics and ensured equality. After the Whigs and their allies won the majority in the Parliament, they also passed a reform of the Irish denominational life in 1833, limiting the numbers of Irish archbishops and bishops, and changing the system of church financing.

  O’Connell, with liberal support, won suffrage for poor Irish citizens. However, O'Connell had to start being more tactical in his political efforts. He wanted the union between Ireland and Britain to be abolished, lost the support of many voters, and ultimately died in 1847.  During the last years of his life, a group called Young Ireland was established within this movement and started presenting its political and religious views in a weekly newspaper, The Nation. Its chief editor was the Roman Catholic Charles Gavan Duffy (1816–1903), supported by the Protestant lawyer Thomas O. Davis (1814–1845) and the Unitarian John Mitchel (1815–1875). They promoted a unified Irish nation, despite all denominational and social differences. They wanted Ireland to leave the union with Britain and to address the social turmoil of the country through land reform. Although they were not successful in the short term, they helped bring about a revival for Irish Catholics and other denominations. While O’Connell was still alive, they opposed him, suffered persecution from the government and had to go into exile. In the long run, however, they influenced the Irish throughout the entire 19th century.  

  The social instability in Ireland was exacerbated by several years of bad harvests and the famine of 1845–1850, which caused many casualties and an emigration wave. The population of the island declined by two million. This major social crisis also had an impact on the religious situation in the country and it gave rise to a more modern Ireland with a large diaspora abroad.

  The revolutionary tradition of the Young Ireland group was picked up in 1858 by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), also known as Fenians. This conspiratorial organization worked for Irish independence and the separation of church and state and gained many supporters. Its goals were nationalist, not socially constructive. The IRB was largely layman dominated, with the support of some Catholic clergymen. Most of the Catholic clergy in the country kept their distance from the organization, concerned that it would be too radical and socially destructive.  Although Fenians were persecuted, they managed to revive their leadership several times. Their activities influenced the British politician William E. Gladstone (1868–1874). In the effort to solve the national and political tensions in Ireland, his first government proposed a bill in 1869, which stripped the Irish Anglican church (Church of Ireland) of its privileged position and made it equal to the Roman Catholic Church before the law. In 1870, this was followed by a land act which was an attempt to resolve the social tensions between landlords and tenants. Both acts influenced the social and denominational development in Ireland up till the end of the 19th century. 

  In the 19th century, Ireland therefore became a country headed towards greater political autonomy. The Roman Catholic part of the national historical memory also played a role in this, with its emphasis on the unique development of the Irish church and society. The Church helped mobilize social forces which gradually got out of London’s control.

     Chapter 4: Christianity and Germany

  After the Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries, German nationalism in the German parts of the empire gained new political and religious influence. This was reflected in the life story of Martin Luther and his Bible (NT 1522, OT 1534), as well as the stories of other Reformation theologians and politicians. The conflicts between the Imperial denominations and their schools of thought were important catalysts of 18th century Enlightenment. Enlightenment came as a result of the effort to create a denominational life in the Empire which followed the path of reformed Christianity, outside of medieval bounds – tolerant, but also critical towards the sources of revelation and tradition. The trust in potentiality and the possibilities of human knowledge and reason brought about an effort to overcome the traditional authorities of social and church life. Unlike the French Enlightenment, its German brand emerged in a less radical form, with a broad and thorough effort to influence both social and denominational life.

  Under French rule over the European continent (1789–1815), social and ecclesiastical development in Germany was significantly influenced by forces from outside of its borders. Great figures of cultural and political life were intrigued by the ideals of the French Revolution (Johann Ch. F. Schiller (1759–1805), Friedrich W. J. Schelling (1775–1854) and others) but abandoned them when the Jacobin Terror disillusioned them. Nationalism became more and more prevalent in many German states due to the Enlightenment, emerging liberalism, and military defeats in battles with Napoleon Bonaparte in 1805–1806.

  In the beginning of the 19th century, the secularisation process connected to the French Revolution later also significantly affected the lands and assets of the Roman Catholic Church in the Empire. Napoleon Bonaparte seized Imperial territories on the left bank of the Rhine for France. In 1803, he compensated the secular Imperial princes for these losses with the lands of the ecclesiastical Imperial principalities. Only the territories of the Teutonic Order, the Knights Hospitaller and the diocese of Regensburg remained. This abolished the ecclesiastical electorates of Cologne, Trier, and Mainz, powerful in the Middle Ages, the lands of nineteen archdioceses and dioceses (including the Archdiocese of Salzburg), 44 Imperial abbeys and almost two hundred Imperial monasteries. Over three million believers in the Empire in territories amounting to 90,000 km² became subordinate to secular nobility. This change to the political and territorial structure of the Empire as a conglomeration of ecclesiastical and secular territories contributed to deepening its crisis and ultimately to its speedy end. It decreased the income of the Roman Catholic Church by 21 million gulden annually and significantly curtailed its social, pastoral, and educational activities.

  Nationalism and liberalism retained its influence over the developments in Germany even after 1815. Between 1815–1848, representatives of these schools of thought in different German states generally agreed on their demands: parliamentary and civil liberties enshrined in a constitution. Socialism also gained more and more political impact. These three ideologies formed the denominational development in Germany. German nationalist schools also generally supported the struggle for emancipation in the oppressed nations of Europe (Poland, Greece). In this, German nationalism was connected to the European nationalist stream which strived to liberate the oppressed peoples on the continent.

  After the Congress of Vienna of 1814 and 1815, the Holy Roman Empire was replaced by the German Confederation to maintain the balance of power in Europe. This was another way for the Congress of Vienna to enforce a new order in Europe which lasted up to the late 19th century. Between 1815 and the foundation of the German Empire in 1871, nationalist values played a major role in the unification of Germany. Up to 1871, most Germans lived in small, politically insignificant states. Although the German culture was one of the most developed in Europe, it lacked in political backing, which helped nationalism grow. The unification of Germany massively increased the political confidence of the nation (and its denominations), which would later decide to spread its culture by force in several moments of history. The unification was also followed by a boom in the industry, finance, and transport networks – especially railways and steamboats on rivers and the sea. The unified Germany abolished tariffs between states and established a single currency and Imperial bank.

  In 1870 a Catholic Centre Party emerged in the Prussian Parliament. A year later, it became the strongest party in the Reichstag. The German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898) was afraid of a strong Catholic political party, as an opposition force standing against the new Protestant state led by Prussia. He was afraid the Centre Party politicians would ally with France and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and thus started a battle between the German state and the Roman Catholic Church (Kulturkampf). It began when he closed down a department of the Ministry of Culture which dealt with Roman Catholic issues. At the end of 1871, the Pulpit Law came into force. This law forbade the clergy from commenting on matters of the state in their sermons. Before, the pulpit had generally been seen as an important part of the public arena. Any violation of this law could result in a prison sentence and removal from office. Another law from the spring of 1872 transferred the power over church education to the state in Prussia. In the very same year, the Reichstag banned the Society of Jesus on German territory and kept limiting the activities of other Roman Catholic orders, allowing only those active in social and charity work. The state controlled the appointment of clergymen (since 1873) who first had to study at state-controlled universities and pass state exams. In 1875, civil marriage was placed above church marriage. The state stopped providing financial support to the Catholic Church and made it impossible to appoint bishops and priests in many dioceses and parishes.  Some priests were imprisoned or exiled. Despite this sustained pressure, Centre Party politicians gained considerably more votes in the following elections. The party won 91 seats in the Reichstag, proving the Kulturkampf to be unsuccessful. In 1878, the conservative Pope Pius IX died. The new Pope Leo XIII sought new ways to overcome the Kulturkampf policy. Many of the German anti-Church laws were rescinded or their scope was limited. The measures that remained generally corresponded to the secularisation developments in the country – meaning mainly civil marriage and state oversight over education. The Pulpit Law also remained in force to protect the state, and the Society of Jesus remained banned (until 1917). After the Kulturkampf passed, the Centre Party played an important role in the political system of the German Empire. It moved from the opposition to a major constitutive force of the state, winning 105 seats in the Reichstag in 1907.

  Another important point in the religious development of the country was the establishment of the Old Catholic Church. The First Vatican Council's declaration of the Pope's infallibility caused a strong negative reaction in the Roman Catholic Church in Germany. At assemblies of priests and laymen, scholars and theologians such as Ignaz von Döllinger (1799–1890) or  Joseph Hubert Reinkens (1821–1896) spoke out against the dogma. They argued that the new dogma went against the nature of the original Church and started looking for ways to maintain its original, pre-Council character. In the September of 1872, this process culminated in the founding of the Old Catholic Church in Cologne. Its bishop was the Wroclaw theologian Joseph Hubert Reinkens. Professor Döllinger remained in the Roman Catholic Church in the end. The Old Catholic Church continued to develop and create its own hierarchy and structure. In the 1870s, it expanded to France, Italy, and Switzerland. During the German Kulturkampf in the 1870s, the German state allowed its Old Catholics to partake of Roman Catholic assets. In 1889, Old Catholic churches were unified in the Union of Utrecht. This Dutch church separated from the Roman Catholic Church in the beginning of the 18th century, after Rome rejected its hierarchy for being too Jansenist. 

  Chapter 5: Christianity in England

  The liberal form of English nationalism in the 18th century defended parliamentarism against absolutism. In the 16th and 17th centuries, overseas trade developed, and the country underwent a complex denominational development, which gave nationalism more political and religious influence. Its journey through the country’s history was also impacted by two major events of the late 18th century: the British wars with the American colonies of 1775–1783 and the French Revolution of 1789–1799. After the Peace of Paris (1783), Britain gave up its American colonies, save for Canada, thus effectively preparing the ground for future political developments in the American Confederation and in its Christian churches. Despite the revolution in France, it maintained its political position as a supreme naval power and an influential player on the continent. However, the revolution had an undeniable political and ideological influence over Britain’s development and in the first decades of the 19th century it affected radicals and conservatives alike. 

  Britain gained primacy in Europe when it came to population growth, industrial, agricultural, and trade development, and the rise of the middle class. Despite that, traditional Anglicanism and monarchism maintained a strong influence over English social and church life until the 1820s. Their values gradually changed the fiscally militant 18th century country (governed by strong governments and oriented on reforms and repression) into a more effective state, governed by competent central civil servants.  Between 1816–1846, the newly emergent ‘minimalist state considerably lightened the tax burden on the population. Dynamically entrepreneurial gentry was at the forefront of society and the Anglican church, as well as industry, trade, and agriculture, colonial and military politics, science, and culture. Parliamentarism made the British aristocracy much more politically active in church and society than its continental counterparts.  While the Anglican Church’s position in society was not as strong as that of the Roman Catholic Church for example in pre-1789 France, it was the dominant denominational force in a country which was asserting itself as a global economic and military power. After the Congress of Vienna, it was more than apparent that the social institutions and the antiquated structure of the Anglican Church from the previous centuries could not keep up with the dynamic societal development. 

  In the early 19th century, all levels of British society gained a new political awareness. It was linked to growing literacy in the middle and lower classes and the commercialized culture aimed at them. New associations were founded across society and denominations and played a major part in constituting the new public sphere as authorities who often stood in opposition to traditional political and church powers. The newspaper market was flooded with cheaper periodicals and everybody who had the time could enter debates on many political, cultural, and confessional topics. This development contributed to the creation of new forms of religious influence in the public sphere. Many associations both aimed to modernize the church and society and defend traditional social values. This phase of denominational development in England was rife with discussion on contemporary ethical problems.

  In this, the middle class became a force which helped reform British social and political life and establish a new voting system (1832), which corresponded to population trends. Between 1831–1833, the number of English and Welsh voters grew from 435 to 653 thousand. The reformist legislation was brought about by the country's radical political liberalists, which enabled the creation of new national political parties, cut the number of members of parliament from the aristocracy, and gradually extended suffrage to poorer citizens. It also completely barred the monarch from composing governments based on their will, although they did retain a great deal of influence over choosing the prime minister and Cabinet members. However, the House of Lords forced them to respect the election results. The old world in which the monarch and aristocracy had unlimited power was a thing of the past.

  In 1867, a new reform of the voting law was passed. Even the conservatives realized that extending suffrage to the working class would not necessarily mean a loss for them, as workers were patriotic and had undergone a religious education. In 1884, the voting system was modified further, extending suffrage to even poorer citizens. In Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, the pace of the reforms corresponded to the countries’ respective political, denominational, and social conditions.

  These reforms were gradually reflected in the life of the Anglican Church, as many Anglican clergymen and laymen had been discontenting with its situation since the 18th century. In 1836, the government reacted to the demands of these dissenters by transferring the Anglican clergy's power to record births, marriages, and deaths to civil authorities. The London University was founded to provide education to non-conformists. The reforms also impacted British Roman Catholics and stabilized their civil and political position.

  During the long reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901), the political, economic, and cultural rise of Britain had a significant effect on the development of its churches. Social modernization and the rise of the Empire broadened the political and denominational horizons of British believers and forced them to extend their historical memories. The Anglican Church, as well as others, gained an intellectual class connected to the active middle classes. Folk intellectuals became an important part of the church life.

  Between 1811–1861, the population of Britain doubled in size, but the economy lagged behind. The average working week in industrial agglomerations reached 56–65 hours between 1856–1873. As work productivity grew after 1873, working hours were gradually decreased to 9 per day. Despite that, worker wages slowly rose. Most workers could regularly save small amounts of money and did not have to rely on the legal protection granted to them by the Poor Law. Three quarters of working-class children between five and fifteen years of age partly or fully attended Methodist and Anglican Sunday schools. Thanks to the activity of Methodist and partly also Anglican clergy and laymen, the continuity of the Christian faith was maintained in big industrial agglomerations, despite the country's turbulent industrial development.

   Chapter 6: The dominance of Protestantism in Switzerland and Holland

  Switzerland: The societal and church development of Switzerland was affected by the French Revolution of 1789–1799 and the visions of Napoleon Bonaparte, who did not want a strong Swiss state. After his fall, Switzerland entered a period of restoration in 1815, when the country's borders became a definitive part of the map of Europe. The integrity of canton territories was guaranteed by the Federal Treaty, but not enshrined in the Constitution. Swiss conservative restoration governments gradually tried to unify the country on an administrative level. However, in 1815 the country’s economic development was halted for decades because of different currencies and limitations in the cantons. Despite that, Switzerland gradually became a modern industrialized country with a social and charitable policy based on associations. There were many active associations in the restored state, focused on music, arts, sports, and scholarly pursuits. They helped form a political culture in society and the church, as well as nationalist activities. Associations helped to build the Swiss national awareness. 

  The French July Revolution of 1830 also influenced Swiss politics. In 1830–1831, the country population of many cantons organized assemblies demanding a democratization of the country's political life and a limit on the influence of urban patrician families and the aristocracy. These assemblies propelled the state into a new period of regeneration, led by the rural elites: farmers, teachers, pastors, and lawyers. Liberal politicians of the regeneration movement demanded that the power of the patrician class – the rich urban population and aristocrats – in the canton governments and parliaments be curbed and called for enfranchising the broader population. They based these demands on Swiss political tradition and garnered wider societal support, which the canton governments had to take seriously. Political life in the cantons was structured based on their new constitutions. These generally limited the suffrage to rich and educated citizens, who, however, in the end elected councils that represented the wider population and ensured its fundamental rights. As more citizens took part in canton political activities, the understanding of national issues in the cantons and in the Swiss Confederation as a whole also developed. It influenced the life of Swiss churches and their education and social activities. The final goal of the regeneration policy was a democratized Switzerland.

  In the first half of the 1840s, canton governments dealt with denominational issues based on either conservative or liberal and radical policies. In 1844, the liberal Catholic head of the Wettingen seminary Augustin Keller proposed to close down eight monasteries in the Aargau Canton and confiscate their assets. This measure was later contested as a violation of the 1815 Federal Treaty and four women’s monasteries were restored. The men’s monasteries remained closed. On the other hand, the position of the Society of Jesus in church education grew stronger (theological faculty, seminary) in the Lutzen Canton. The aforementioned Augustin Keller suggested banning the Society of Jesus in Switzerland. He argued that the order was dangerous for a denominationally diverse state. In 1830–1831 Switzerland set off on the path to a unified state with many civil rights, under the leadership of liberal politicians. This provoked a reaction from the political and social conservatives in many cantons. 

  Voluntary civic associations were founded in radical-led cantons, with the aim to resist the pressure of conservative Catholic cantons and to promote a centralized federation model. To defend their autonomy in the Swiss Federation and their political and religious values, Catholic cantons founded the association Sonderbund. In the November of 1847, a war broke out between the two sides and in the end, the radicals won. As the country developed, liberal and radical politicians gained more influence over the country’s development at the expense of the conservatives. In the September of 1848, the Swiss Constitution came into force as the cornerstone of the country’s legislation. It transferred many of the canton government’s rights and obligations to the Federal Council and federal institution. From a union of cantons connected by the 1815 treaty, Switzerland turned into a modern federal state, with centralized government administration. In 1848, the state removed economic barriers between cantons and carved out a share of European industrialization. In the following years, the freedom of confession was enshrined in the constitution (1869) and social legislation was passed. Churches and their many charities also played a positive role in the country's social work. These organizations were often led by women. In the 1870s and the 1880s, the position of the central government was strengthened, and Switzerland firmly assumed its neutral position in Europe. At the same time, the state’s central liberal policy aimed to unify the Swiss as one nation. This effort was disrupted by social democrats and Roman Catholics.  

  The liberal- and radical-led state had to deal with its defeated Catholic opposition. Catholic conservatives stepped to the side-lines, but they never accepted the state’s 1848 political programme. Instead, they formed Catholic associations (such as the Pius Association founded in 1857, at Ignaz von Ah’s behest), founded magazines (Vaterland), and gradually mobilized their political potential. In 1889 they were allowed to establish their own university in Freiburg im Üechtland. After the First Vatican Council of 1869–1870 declared the Pope infallible in matters of faith and morality, the discord between the Catholic Church and the state in Switzerland was exacerbated. The Church was represented by the Bishop of Basel Eugène Lachat and the Assistant Bishop of Geneva Gaspard Mermillod. The state supported the new Old Catholic Church and cut diplomatic ties with the Vatican.

  The Netherlands: In the last quarter of the 18th century, both Northern and Southern Netherlands experienced a rise in nationalism and attempts to curb the power of the authoritarian governments in both parts of the country. The country was also directly affected by the French Revolution of 1789–1799, as it was quite close to its centres. Both parts of the country were occupied by France in 1794 and 1795. While the Southern Netherlands was annexed at the same time, the northern part of the country was not – until 1810. Both parts of the country used this time to partially modernize their political structures, although they were affected by the wartime economic crisis. After Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated, the north of the Netherlands was reformed into a constitutional monarchy led by King William I (+1843), an enlightened but authoritarian ruler, at the end of 1813. The King respected the independence of the judiciary and a limited freedom of the press, but he strived to rule without being too limited by the will of the parliament. In 1814, his monarchy was connected with Southern Netherlands as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, governed by the King and a bicameral parliament, which was partly elected and partly appointed by the monarch. After the Congress of Vienna, European powers saw the country as a dam to stop any potential future French military expansion. The kingdom did declare a freedom of confession, but the denominational differences between the north and the south stood in the way of its unity. Belgian Roman Catholics were afraid of the effect the Protestant Netherlands would have on their Catholic education system, while liberals were concerned about limitations on the freedom of the press and arrests of some journalists (Louis de Potter (1786–1859)). In 1825, William I, prompted by Belgian liberals and Netherlandish politicians, closed down all Belgian Catholic schools, which caused an uproar among the Catholic population. In the revolutionary May of 1830, the King allowed these schools to be reopened. Major social unrest caused the state to divide into two parts in the very same year, after the secession of the southern provinces. The independent Kingdom of Belgium was established with Leopold I (+1865) as its ruler. Great Britain supported the monarchy and guaranteed Belgian independence for the future. William I only accepted the independence of Belgium in 1839 by signing the Treaty of London. In 1840 he abdicated, to be succeeded by his son William II (1840–1849). Both these small parliamentary democracies set off on their journey through the 19th century, aiming to enter the ranks of developed and industrial European countries, without any major military ambitions on the continent.

  The Belgian constitution was amongst the most liberal ones in Europe. Between 1847–1884, the Kingdom of Belgium was steered mainly by liberals, but partly also by politically active Catholics. These two political forces were able to cooperate on many political issues, though they also clashed on some (education). In the 19th century, Belgium underwent industrialization and the industrial revolution had an extremely strong effect on the country – in fact, only Britain embraced the process more intensely. Marked differences, however, arose between Belgium’s two territories: the francophone Wallonia with its industrialization centres (engineering, textile industry, mining for fuel) and the coastal Flanders with its agricultural enterprises. These differences impacted the political and denominational life of the population and the nationalism of both the Walloons and the Flemish. The Roman Catholic influence over schools also manifested in a variety of political tensions and impacted the development of political parties. In 1846, a liberal party aiming to limit the power of the clergy in schools was founded.

  In the Northern Netherlands, the industry, agriculture, and maritime trade also flourished, and liberals enjoyed the main share in it. Johan Rudolf Thorbecke (1798–1872) was the main Netherlandish representative of political liberalism. As prime minister, he believed that government ministers should primarily be accountable to the parliament, not the King, and he is known as the founding father of parliamentary democracy in the Netherlands. After 1848, William II accepted the constitutional model of government. During the reign of his successor, William III (1849–1890), the Papal Curia strived to restore the episcopal hierarchy in the country – the first attempt came in 1853. The King supported the Protestants who were against this step, even though J. R. Thorbecke tried in vain to persuade him that it was necessary to enshrine the Catholics’ right to freely develop their church structures in the Constitution. The next prime minister was the more conservative Floris van Hall (1791–1866), but he also failed to change the state policy on Catholics in any meaningful way. Liberals, such as Dirk Donker Curtius (1792–1864) and others, also influenced the development of Calvinism and issues of the freedom of confession and speech in churches. Netherlandish Calvinism was also strongly impacted by the Réveil (Revival) group, which strived to revive faith. The political development in the Netherlands also included the rise of socialist and worker parties, as well as social legislation, extending voting rights to poorer citizens (men), the introduction of an income tax, and the establishment of new political parties and associations connected to them. The development of social legislation was preceded by a dynamic boost of denominational social work and schooling after 1880.  Both Calvinists and Catholics built their own primary, secondary, higher, and university education systems, connected with church activities in social affairs, health, association, union, and political work. This formed blocks of connected organization activities, formed by denominations and political parties, which focused on the education, family and social life, and work of the churches’ believers and the state’s citizens. Society was gradually divided into Protestant, Catholic, socialist, and liberal political blocks, which encompassed the majority of the population. The population of the country also slowly grew, and so did the number of workers in industry and agriculture. In 1877 the liberal Jan Kappeyne van de Coppello (1822–1895) pushed through a more modern voting law, which extended suffrage to poor male citizens. The liberals’ attempts to limit the influence that churches had over the country’s school system provoked an anti-liberal response led by politicians connected to churches (the Calvinist politician Abraham Kuyper [1837–1920]), the Roman Catholic Herman Schaepman [1844–1903]). In 1879, the anti-liberalist Anti-Revolutionary Party was formed, as a counterweight to the social democrats who formed a party the year before that.

   A similar system of denominational and political blocks was established in Belgium, where the active parties were mainly Roman Catholics and socialists. This system connected the majority of citizens with many political, social, cultural, and church organizations. It politicized society along denominational lines and brought about the rise of political parties. In the last decades of the 19th century, Belgian society underwent a partial democratization of societal life, which culminated when universal suffrage for all men was passed in 1893. This was accompanied by King Leopold II’s (1865–1909) colonization policies in Africa (the Belgian Congo). The country was governed by Catholic parties from 1884 up to the First World War. In 1898, Dutch was made equal with French, which had been dominant as an official language and the language used in schools. Dutch also gradually started being used as a parallel language in the country’s higher and university education.

  The development of the 19th century Southern Netherlands/Belgium was significantly affected by nationalism. Catholic parties accentuated Flemish nationalist demands, while liberalism and socialism strived to overcome the national tensions in the country. 

   

  Chapter 7: The crisis of German and French historical universalism and optimism and European nationalism in the late 19th century

   

       The development of 19th century European nationalism was influenced by contemporary historical universalism and optimism – and its crisis, in the last decades of the century. Although contemporary historical sciences claimed to be objective, the works by many European historians pandered to their states’ nationalist interests to a varying extent. This publication will only briefly introduce some figures and stories of German and French historiography in the 19th century, which are relevant to our topic.

       In German, historical universalism and optimism were represented by historians such as Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), Johann Gustav Droysen (1808–1884), and many others. They believed that a historian’s work is entirely dependent on their sources and that they first have to overcome their subjective knowledge and clearly delimit the analysed facts. A historian, in their opinion, must first create an image of facts and the connections between them, in order to describe the state of things and subsequent changes, and thus determine how history unfolded. Many of these historians expected that the auxiliary sciences of history would progress further in the future, creating a new heuristic and a new, deeper and more comprehensive concept of history.

       The paradigm this generation of German historians used to analyse history was gradually overcome – partly although through their own work. The shifts in the understanding of history and historicity were inseparably connected to the growing influence of nationalist political and historical models, and technological and scientific progress. German historians had to react to many issues in the context of historical thinking and research.

       The crisis of German historical universalism and optimism started in the last decades of the 19th century, mainly as a crisis of optimism. More and more historians were sceptical towards the work of the previous two scholarly generations (historian and theologian Ernst Troeltsch [1865–1923], historian and philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey [1833–1911] etc.) and their criticism grew more forceful. A significant critical figure was the German historian Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915), who was also one of the most criticised historians of his time. His approach to history reduced the importance of politics and economy and emphasised psychology and ethics, as a reaction to a historiography focused mainly on legal history and national economy. All of these figures influenced the development of German political nationalism, as well as theologians in the main German denominations.

       French historiography underwent a similarly complex process in the 19th century. It had three stages: a romanticist one, a universalist, optimist and positivist one, and a third one symbolised by a crisis of optimism and positivism. Romanticist historiography mainly focused on the freedom of the individual in history, while optimist-positivist historiography mainly collected facts on the historical process and then interpreted them. The third stage of French historiography reacted to the ongoing crisis of positivism in the last decades of the 19th century.

       The first stage reacted to the political and nationalist impulses brought about by the French Revolution and the Imperial period, and later the liberalist Restoration. The Restoration years (1820–30) gave rise to great French historians, such as Francois P. G. Guizot (1787–1874), Augustine Thierry (1795–1856), Jules Michelet (1798–1874), and many others

       They were succeeded by a generation of optimist-positivist historians. While romanticism saw freedom and national and patriotic sentiments as the foundation of all intellectualism, this new historiography emphasised truth as the key element of everything. Positivism aimed to find this truth using objective and scientific methods, so that it corresponded to specific realities. From the 1850s onwards, positivism became the guiding principle of French science, philosophy, literature, and the arts. The three great historians of this period, Ernest Renan (1823–1892), Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) and Numa D. Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889), all used a similar historical method and subscribed to the same cult of historical truth. Fustel de Coulanges saw religion as the work of humanity, motivated by contemporary political, cultural, and nationalist ideals. He believed that political institutions (family, community, class) were founded on the religious and nationalist concept of ancestors as protectors of society and understood history as a science of fact, not speculation.

       In the third stage of French historiography of the 19th century, the views of historians and their ‘schools’ became more differentiated, as a result of the crisis of positivist historiography. Important French historians of this period include Albert Sorel (1842–1906), Ernest Denis (1849–1921) a Charles Seignobos (1854–1942). This generation did not experience the peace and detachment that the search for the truth brought the positivist generation and historians such as Renan, Taine, and Fustel de Coulanges. Their works were fuelled by a national crisis (France was defeated by Germany) and French nationalism.

          Particularly, E. Denis was a member of this generation, which whose life story unfolded in quite a complex way. First, he studied at the École normale supérieure – an institution that also produced H. Taine and Fustel de Coulanges – where he learned of the positivist method. Denis aimed not only to ascertain facts, but also to uncover the ideological causes for specific events (including those motivated by nationalism). While looking for the underlying sources of facts and explaining events through motivating factors, Denis was looking for the intrinsic value and overall meaning of this information. His historical method also bore traces of psychological causalism and fatalism and he often pronounced judgements on the psychological, national, and moral dimensions of the depicted events.

       Another historian of this period was Charles Seignobos. He studied history under Foustel de Coulanges at the École normale supérieure and later in the German Göttingen. His quest was to find the limits of historical knowledge and he engaged in a dialogue between history and other social sciences – especially sociology and psychology. He worked with a number of questions which were taken over by 20th century historiography. Seignobos promoted strictly logical and objectivist positivism and focused on the medieval and modern history of Europe. He reduced history to the study of people in society and in their relationships and focused on individuals and their actions, including their religious, political, cultural, and national motivations.

       The abovementioned French scholars became more and more sceptical towards the methods and results of the previous two generations. They influenced both the development of French political nationalism and the theologians of the main French denominations.

       Many German and French historians also presented criticism of historical universalism and optimism at the first global congress of historians at the Hague in 1898.

  • Select activity Churches and national identity, nationalism-questions

    

    Churches and national identity, nationalism-questions Buch

     Chapter 1: Nationalism as part of the history of 19^th century Christianity  

    Reading questions:

    1. What was the significance of the nationalist principle in Europe at the Congress of Vienna and after it?

    2.  What were the major events in the development of European Christianity and nationalist issues in the 19^th century?

    3. How did 19^th century nationalism impact the development of the main European states?  

     Chapter 2: Denominations and nationalism

    Reading questions:

    1. What was the connection between 19^th century secularisation and the denominational differentiation of Christianity?

    2. What was the dechristianization, desacralization, and demythologization of Europe in the 19^th century?

    3. What was the rechristianization, sacralization, and mythologization of Europe in the 19^th century? 

     Chapter 3: Catholicism in France and Italy; Ireland and the Irish diaspora

    Reading questions:

    1. What was the political and religious development at the Apennine Peninsula during the French Revolution and after it?

    2. What significance did Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII have for modern Italian political nationalism?

    3. What social and religious problems did Ireland struggle with in the 19^th century? 

     Chapter 4: Christianity and Germany

    Reading questions:

    1. How important was the Enlightenment for German nationalism in the 19^th century?

    2. What do you know about the development of nationalism and liberalism in 19^th century Germany? 

    3. What was the Kulturkampf in Germany? 

     Chapter 5: Christianity in England

    Reading questions:

    1. How was England impacted by political nationalism in the 18^th century?

    2. How was England impacted by political nationalism in the 19^th century?

    3. What was the connection between denominational development and nationalism in 19^th century England?

     Chapter 6: The dominance of Protestantism in Switzerland and Holland

    Reading questions:

    1. How did politics in Switzerland develop during the French Revolution, under Napoleon Bonaparte, and after 1815?

    2. What was the denominational development in 19^th century Switzerland?

    3. In what direction did societal and denominational development in the Northern and Southern Netherlands go in the 19^th century? 

     Chapter 7: The crisis of German and French historical universalism and optimism and European nationalism in the late 19^th century

    Reading questions:

    1. How did the historical universalism and optimism of the 19^th century influence the development of European nationalism?

    2. Did Leopold von Ranke and Johann Gustav Droysen help shift the contemporary approach to the study of history?

    3. Was the crisis of German historical universalism also a crisis of its optimism?

    4. Was the crisis of French historical universalism also a crisis of its optimism?

  • Select activity Literature:

    

    Literature: Buch

    Chapter 1: Nationalism as part of the history of 19^th century Christianity  

    Literature:

    Lemberg, Eugen. Nationalismus I., II., München: Rowohlt (1964).

    Schwedhelm, Karl. Propheten des Nationalismus. München: List Verlag (1969).

    Burke, Peter. Religion and Secularisation. In: The New Cambridge Modern History, XIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1979), s. 293 – 317.

    Rapport, Michael. Nineteenth Century Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2005).

    Lexikon:

    Gründler, Johannes. Lexikon der Christlichen Kirchen und Sekten I., II.  Wien – Freiburg - Basel: Herder (1961).

    Historical Atlas:

    Historical Atlas of the World. New Jersey, Hammond-Union (1999), p. 29-32, 34-36.

      

     Chapter 2: Denominations and nationalism

    Literature:

    Lemberg, Eugen. Nationalismus I., II., München: Rowohlt (1964).

    McLeod, Hugh. Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789–1989. Oxford: Oxford University Press, (1997).

    Rapport, Michael. Nineteenth Century Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2005).

    Langner, Albrecht (Hrgb.). Katholizismus, nationaler Gedanke und Evropa seit 1800.  München, Ferdinand Schöningh (1985).

    Burke, Peter. Religion and Secularisation. In: The New Cambridge Modern History, XIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1979), s. 293 – 317.

    Chadwick, William Owen. The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century Cambridge: University Press (1975).

    Lexikon:

    Gründler, Johannes. Lexikon der Christlichen Kirchen und Sekten I., II.  Wien – Freiburg - Basel: Herder (1961).

      

     Chapter 3: Catholicism in France and Italy; Ireland and the Irish diaspora

    Literature:

    Atkin, Nicholas and Tallett, Frank. Priests, Prelates and People: A History of European Catholicism since 1750. New York-London:  Oxford University Press (2004).

    Gibson, Ralph. A Social History of French Catholicism 1789–1914. London and New York, Routledge (1989).

    Furet, François. La Révolution Tome 2: 1814-1880, Paris: Hachette 1997.  

    Langner, Albrecht (Hrgb.). Katholizismus, nationaler Gedanke und Evropa seit 1800.  München, Ferdinand Schöningh (1985).

    McLeod, Hugh. Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789–1989. Oxford: Oxford University Press, (1997).

    Jedin, Hubert (ed.). History of the Church. 8. The Church in the Age of Liberalism; 9. The Church in the industrial Age. New York: Crossroad + London: Burns & Oates (1980-82).

    Propyläen Weltgeschichte 8. Band Das Neunzehnte Jahrhundert. Berlin/Frankfurt/Main: Propyläen Verlag (1991).

    Historical Atlas:

    Atlas zur Kirchengeschichte. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder (2004), p. 97.

      

     Chapter 4: Christianity and Germany

    Literature:

    Hope, Nicholas. German and Scandinavian Protestantism 1700-1918.  Oxford: Oxford University Press (1999).

    Jedin, Hubert (Ed). History of the Church. 8. The Church in the Age of Liberalism; 9. The Church in the industrial Age. New York: Crossroad + London: Burns & Oates (1980-82).

    Rauscher, Anton (Hrgb.). Deutscher Katholizismus und Revolution im frühen 19. Jahrhundert.  München, Ferdinand Schöningh (1975).

    Rauscher, Anton (Hrgb.). Entwicklungslinien des deutschen Katholizismus.  München, Ferdinand Schöningh (1973).

    Rauscher, Anton (Hrgb.). Probleme des Konfessionalismus in Deutschland seit 1800.  München, Ferdinand Schöningh (1984).

    Langner, Albrecht (Hrgb.). Katholizismus, nationaler Gedanke und Evropa seit 1800.  München, Ferdinand Schöningh (1985).

    Franz-Willing, Georg. Kulturkampf gestern und heute. Eine Säkularbetrachtung 1871-1971. München, Calwey (1971).

    Propyläen Weltgeschichte 8. Band Das Neunzehnte Jahrhundert. Berlin/Frankfurt/Main: Propyläen Verlag (1991).

    Lexikon:

    Gründler, Johannes. Lexikon der Christlichen Kirchen und Sekten I., II.  Wien – Freiburg - Basel: Herder (1961).

    Historical Atlas:

    Atlas zur Kirchengeschichte. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder (2004), p.97.

      

     Chapter 5: Christianity in England

    Literature:

    Chadwick, William Owen. The Victorian Church. London: A & C Black (1966, 1970).

    Rosman, Doreen. The Evolution of the English Churches, 1500-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2003).

    Bebbington, David W. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Routledge (2003).

    Davies, Rupert E. - George, Raymond - Rupp, Gordon. A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain. Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers (2017).

    Crawley, Charles W. (ed.). The New Cambridge Modern History Volume 9 War and Peace In An Age of Upheaval 1793–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1965).

    Bury, John P. T. (ed.). The New Cambridge Modern History: Vol. 10: The Zenith of European Power, 1830–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1964).

    Hinsley, Francis H. (ed.). The New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 11, Material Progress and World-Wide Problems 1870–1898. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1979).

    Lexikon:

    Gründler, Johannes. Lexikon der Christlichen Kirchen und Sekten I., II.  Wien – Freiburg - Basel: Herder (1961).

    Historical Atlas:

    Atlas zur Kirchengeschichte. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder (2004), p. 111.

      

     Chapter 6: The dominance of Protestantism in Switzerland and Holland

    Literature:

    Lerner, Marc H. A laboratory of liberty: the transformation of political culture in Republican Switzerland, 1750-1848. Leiden: Brill (2011).

    Meyer, Helmut - Felder, Pierre - Wacker, Jean Claude. Vom Ancien Régime bis zur Gegenwart: Die Schweiz und ihre Geschichte. Zürich, LKZ (2005).

    Hooker, Mark T. The History of Holland. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press (1999).

    Schama, Simon. Patriots and Liberators. Revolution in the Netherlands 1780 – 1813. London: Collins (1977).

    Propyläen Weltgeschichte 8. Band Das Neunzehnte Jahrhundert. Berlin/Frankfurt/Main: Propyläen Verlag (1991).

    Lexikon:

    Gründler, Johannes. Lexikon der Christlichen Kirchen und Sekten I., II.  Wien – Freiburg - Basel: Herder (1961).

      

     Chapter 7: The crisis of German and French historical universalism and optimism and European nationalism in the late 19^th century

    Literature:

    Beiser, Frederick C. The German Historicist Tradition, Oxford: University Press (2011).

    Iggers, Georg G. The German conception of history. The national tradition of historical thought from Herder to the present. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press (1968).

    Orr, Linda. Headless History: Nineteenth-Century French Historiography of the Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press (1990).

  • Select activity Reflection and discussion:

    

    Reflection and discussion: Buch

    Chapter 1: Nationalism as part of the history of 19^th century Christianity  

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. Universalism and nationalism in the European Christian tradition.

    2. Political liberalism and nationalism.

     

     Chapter 2: Denominations and nationalism

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. The confessionalization of Europe in the 16^th and 17^th centuries and the foundation of early modern states. 

    2. Secularisation and nationalism.

     

     Chapter 3: Catholicism in France and Italy; Ireland and the Irish diaspora

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. The experience 19^th century papacy had with Italian and European nationalism.

    2. The Irish politician Daniel O’Connell.

     

     Chapter 4: Christianity and Germany

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. The foundation of the Old Catholic Church in Germany.

    2. The German reformation in the 16^th and 17^th centuries and German nationalism.

     

     Chapter 5: Christianity in England

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. Societal modernization, the rise of the Empire, and the broader perspective of the population’s political and denominational experience. 

    2. The social angle in English societal and denominational modernization.

     

     Chapter 6: The dominance of Protestantism in Switzerland and Holland

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. The differences in the denominational structure between the Northern and Southern Netherlands in the 19^th century.

    2. The differences in societal structure between the Northern and Southern Netherlands in the 19^th century.

     

     Chapter 7: The crisis of German and French historical universalism and optimism and European nationalism in the late 19^th century

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. The development phases of French 19^th century historiography.

    2. The crisis of European historicism and the beginnings of 20^th century historiography.

     

• Select section Topic 3 Christianity in Czechia

  Topic 3 Christianity in Czechia

  

  Topic goal: The aim of this thematic chapter is to introduce the development of Christianity in 19th century Czechia. We will interpret the development of Christian denominations in the context of the National Revival process and the coexistence of Czechs and Germans in the country. The goal of this topic is for the students to understand the influence Christianity had on the development of nationalism for both these nationalities and the role different denominations played in making the national models more open or closed. We will also interpret the role Christian denominations played in the struggle for social and civil liberties and a more just social system. Our interpretation of each subtopic will focus on the elements of continuity and discontinuity in the development of the church and we will apply comparative methods. Students will gain the ability to reflect on the diversity and mutual dependency of the different forms and dynamics of the changes in the historical development of the Church. The course will provide students with a basic overview of the topic and a common point of reference for future study.

  Other goals of studying this topic include:

  (a) to understand the religious identity in Bohemia and Moravia;

  (b) to identify Christianity at the intersection of Czech and German political and social life;

  (c) to focus on pre-ecumenical activities in the Czech and German denominational space.

  Chapters:

   Chapter 1: The roots of the situation of Christianity in the Czech lands at the beginning of the 19th century

   Chapter 2: Nationalism as part of the history of 19th century Christianity in the Czech lands

   Chapter 3: Nationalism and the Czech and German forms of Christianity

   Chapter 4: Jan Hus and the Hussite movement in the Czech national consciousness during the 19th century

   Chapter 5: The two motives of the development of Czech national identity at the end of the 19th century

   Chapter 6: The Roman Catholic Church

   Chapter 7: The end of the 19th century and Catholic modernism

   Chapter 8: Germans in the Roman Catholic Church in Czechia

   Chapter 9: Lutherans and Reformists

   

  Chapter 1: The roots of the situation of Christianity in the Czech lands at the beginning of the 19th century

  For many historians, the long 19th century starts in 1789, with the French Revolution. The statesmen and politicians who were active in it gradually reset the religious and denominational situation in France. We may ask whether, from the point of view of denominational structure, the long 19th century in the Czech lands had not already started in 1781, when Emperor Joseph II issued his Patent of Toleration. Whether we accept this or not, this Patent was a very important cause for the situation Christianity found itself in in the Czech lands at the beginning of the 19th century. The Patent of Toleration is an inseparable part of a longer chain of other patents and decrees, which enacted the religious, political, and cultural goals of Josephinism. It overcame the anti-reformation model where only one denomination was legal. The Roman Catholic Church retained its position as a state, public religion, while the tolerated churches (the Augsburg and Helvetic-Reformed churches) were still marginalized.  In the January of 1782, regulations on how to register with the tolerated denominations were issued. In 1784, an independent reformed church organization was permitted in Bohemia. It was led by a superintendent and divided into three administration districts (Prague, Chrudim, Poděbrady). The organisation was supervised by a consistory in Vienna. The Augsburg church was also granted a system with an independent superintendent and two administration districts – one German and the other Czech. The Viennese Consistory of the Augsburg Confession supervised the organization. In 1781, the Roman Catholic Church judicial system in the country was also significantly limited. The clergy lost its special legal standing in societal life and family law was partially exempted from the Church jurisdiction. In the same year, a new code of procedure ensured equality before the law to all groups of citizens. Despite the Emperor’s and the government’s centralization efforts, the extension of civil rights in the country prepared the ground for a rise in national self-determination within the empire.

  During Bach’s neo-absolutism (1851–1859), laws encompassing all spheres of social life in the empire were passed, with the goal to strengthen the centralized state. In 1855, the Danubian Monarchy signed a Concordat with the Roman Papal Curia, which ensured many rights and liberties to the Roman Catholic Church. However, these did not limit the liberties of non-Catholics, which had been enshrined in the law since 1851. The Concordat ensured a number of liberties to the monarchy’s Roman Catholics and limited state supervision over the Church.

  After A. Bach’s fall, the religious freedom for the tolerated non-Catholics was ensured by a special Protestant law from 8th April 1861, RGBI. no. 41/1861. It made evangelical churches equal to the Roman Catholic Church in the Austrian part of the monarchy and guaranteed freedom of cult for both the Protestant churches. This law changed the system of denomination tolerance from the enlightened-absolutist state (with the Roman Catholic Church as a state religion) into a system of legal recognition for churches.

  In the December of 1867, the Austrian constitution was issued as the Basic Law on the General Rights of Nationals RGBI. no. 142, from 21 December 1867. Its Article 15 states that ‘every Church and religious society recognized by the law has the right to joint public religious practice, arranges and administers its internal affairs autonomously (...) but is like every society subject to the general laws of the land.’  The denominational system was replaced with a more modern and period-appropriate legal model, which saw churches and religious societies recognized by the law as public service corporations under state protection and supervision. Churches and religious societies were obliged to present their organization code and catechism principles to the Ministry for Cultus and Education. When they were recognized by the law, their power only extended to their members.

  In 1870, after the Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus was issued at the First Vatican Council, the monarchy’s government, with Franz Joseph I’s permission, decided to terminate the 1855 Concordat with Rome. The legal reasoning for the termination was that the contracting party underwent a substantial change because of the results of the First Vatican Council, which constituted serious grounds for termination. The relationship between Roman Catholics and the state was to be regulated by new laws. The Pope did not accept the unilateral termination of the Concordat. In the spring of 1874, three new laws entered into force in the empire, to regulate the relationship between the state and churches (no. 50, 51, 68). They remained in force until the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. They placed the Roman Catholic Church under stricter state supervision and created the conditions for the formation of Austro-Catholicism. This complicated legislative development in the monarchy created the legal framework for the development of the national approach to the region’s denominations. 

   

  Chapter 2: Nationalism as part of the history of 19^th century Christianity in Czechia

  The term ‘nation’ became common in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. At first it referred to a group of people connected by birth (not only blood ties) with a specific space in Europe. Examples include the university nations or merchant nations in big European trade centres. Writing and the use of Europe’s national languages as cultural languages became important for the development of European national cultures.

  Nations gained more political significance in the 18^th century. The thinkers of early modern nationalism include Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) or Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Herder became aware of the relationship between the people (Volk) and the nation (Nation). He understood the basic principles of ethnogenesis and its result – the political emancipation of specific nations – and influenced the Czech National Revival.

  The French Revolution helped the establishment of 19^th century nations, mostly by connecting it to the formation of modern society. The revolution had a major impact on political and ideological life in the 19^th century – monarchist, democratic, and totalitarian. That, in turn, influenced European nationalism in this century.

  For many decades, a prominent theory on the origin of nationalism was the contrast theory. It saw enlightenment and the revolution that came from it as a rationalist movement which promoted individual civil liberties and strict equality of all nations and races. Based on this theory, 19^th century nationalism was born as a reaction to the revolutionary unification of Europe, which aimed to secure national life with its continuity with the past and political, cultural, and religious traditions of the previous centuries. The proponents of contrast theory pointed out that the different forms of resistance against the French exhibited by Europeans were more influenced by their loyalty to the Church and their ruling dynasties than by abstract nationalist ideals.

  However, contrast theory did not consider the fact that modern nationalism was one of the results and consequences of this revolution, which primarily emphasized collective civil rights embodied in the everyday lives of citizens. This inevitably meant they would be embodied in the politics and societies of European nations (which was later proven by the European conquests of Napoleon Bonaparte). Nineteenth century nationalism identified this collective embodiment, introduced into political life by the revolution, with the will of specific nations. 

  Despite that, the nationalist principle played no major role at the Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic wars. However, some of the rulers who congregated there were already aware that nationalism would be a more significant topic in the internal and international politics of European states in the future.

  In Bohemia, nationalism first became relevant in the cultural and ideological spheres, but later spread to political issues and the civic activities of local nations – especially Czechs and Germans. For millennia, Czech statehood and culture was built in a territory surrounded by German (Bavaria, Saxony, Austria) or Germanized (Silesia) countries. The Czech nation had a very close connection to the German culture and language. In the first decades of the 19^th century, Czechs lived in a linguistic reality where German was the language of the aristocracy, the educated and the urban elite and their salons. German was spoken in high society, at state offices, in economic institutions and higher culture (theatre), as well as in higher and university education. Czech nationalism first went through a cultural and linguistic stage, and later a political one.

  The national conflicts between Czechs and Germans kept growing throughout the 19^th century and formed a set of social and religious relations created by nationalist strife and enmity. The Hapsburg Monarchy, a state that had developed for centuries, gradually started regulating the coexistence of its nations by constitutions and legislation. Its rulers and bureaucracy strived to tame the growing nationalist conflicts in the state and turn them into a bearable rivalry. However, national conflicts brought a number of social crises into the monarchy. The conflict between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia was amongst the most difficult ones, as it was based on deep-rooted nationalist stereotypes.

  Most Czechs started seeing their nationalist demands as a way to criticise class privileges and to promote civil rights. Both the right and the left wing used nationalism in the process of the transformation of the absolutist state. The nationalization of politics was connected to the modernization of society in Bohemia. The politicization of religion helped open up the sphere of influence for different denominations. The political influence of these issues grew throughout the 19^th century and mostly impacted party ideologies, which used the nation to realize specific nationalist policies. 

  In an empire ruled by a specific dynasty and a specific religion, this also had an effect on the denominational structures. Nationalism became important for the history of Christianity in Bohemia in the 19^th century and it became part of specific denominational discourse. It is impossible to study Christianity in this period and this area without knowing the genesis and exodus of nationalism.

  The roots of nationalism and Christianity in 19^th century Bohemia are connected to the country’s past political, social, cultural, and religious development and the transformations of its national and religious identity. While 19^th century Czech society was undergoing the process of secularisation, the separation of society into autonomous religious and secular parts was not finalized. Nationalism as part of 19^th century modernity did not become a tool and manifestation of secularisation, as was the case with the 20^th century anti-religious national secularism. Quite to the contrary, it had a complex effect on the growing influence of religion in society and it helped the creation of new groups and activities in churches. In Christianity, nationalism influenced the catechism, ethics, the approach to mass and sacrament, folk spirituality, the development of church structures, and social work. It must be noted that secularization came about earlier than the social changes in modern Europe. It had travelled alongside Christianity since the Middle Ages, brought about mostly by the tensions between secular and papal power in the West. It is therefore a completely legitimate manifestation of Western Christianity. The French Revolution was a breakthrough for secularisation of Europe, because it partly transferred the power to deal with religious issues from the church to the state. 

  In the first half of the 19^th century, the important Roman Catholic reformist theologian, philosopher, and mathematician Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) formed many important reflections on Czech-German relations. He saw the Czech nation (in the meaning of böhmische Nation) as composed of two linguistic groups: Czechs and Germans. He saw the growing social and cultural division and mutual hatred between them as dangerous for their future societal and denominational coexistence in the Czech lands.

  In the 1830s and the early 1840s, the government and the Roman Catholic Church continued in their conservative interventions into the monarchy’s social life – including the life in Bohemia and Moravia. This caused a backlash from liberals and radicals who were aware that these interventions only served to strengthen nationalist movements in the monarchy and could cause a major state crisis. They also realized that the number of people supporting folk nationalism in the empire’s society was growing – which included Bohemia and Moravia. Liberal and radical politicians were becoming more and more attentive to the fact that the government’s attempts to use the authority of the Roman Catholic Church as a shield did not have a strong effect in society. Their concerns were revealed to be true in the revolutionary year of 1848, with its political attempts to change the position of different denominations and churches in the monarchy.

  The Czech intellectual and political environment became aware of the revolutionary attempts in 1848–1849 to establish a German national state and saw them as a major change in the political organization of Germans in Europe, which had major effects on their societal position in the Czech lands. The Czech historian and politician František Palacký (1798–1876) rejected the Grossdeutsch unification vision of the Frankfurt national parliament, since he believed it went against the historical relationship between the Czech states and the Empire and the political orientation of Czechs in the Danubian Monarchy. He did so as a historian, whose historiography was focused predominantly on the Czech nation and who supplied his readers with great figures, events, and deeds and presented the friends and foes of the nation’s history to them. His work on Czech history up to the year 1526 appealed to the nation’s morals and to the future development and perspective of the nation.

  After the 1848–1849 revolution, political events divided Czechs and Germans in the Czech lands even more. Between 1848–1914, the national problem was reopened time and again. The political situation in the heart of Europe developed new facets after a united German national state was founded. The Czech-German relations in Bohemia and Moravia gradually worsened in the second half of the 19^th century. Czechs constituted roughly two thirds of the population in Bohemia, while Germans were about one third; in Moravia it was three quarters and one quarter respectively (Bohemia 1846: Czechs 2.6 million, Germans 1.7 million; 1900: Czechs 4.0 mil., Germans 2.3 mil.; Moravia 1846: Czechs 1.3 mil., Germans 0.5 mil.; 1900: Czechs 1.7 mil., Germans 0.7 mil.).

  At the end of the 1850s, the growing national division between Czechs and Germans was also visible in their participation in the 1859 anniversary celebrations of the German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). The German celebrations in Bohemia were clearly full of vivid memories the revolutionary years 1848–1849 and turned into a proclamation of German linguistic and cultural unity, while the Czech world felt strong anti-Schiller tensions and honoured the author Josef Jungmann (1773–1847) instead. Jungmann was in turn celebrated as a promoter of Czech linguistic and cultural unity. 

  Czechs were gradually catching up with the Germans in the industrialization of the Czech lands and the capital and turned out to be very economically and culturally competitive. Between 1861–1888, the German influence over the governance of Prague declined considerably. In the fall of 1882, the last five German members of the city council resigned from their posts, which contributed to the marginalization of the German face of the city. All this helped fan the national fears of the German population in Prague and the Czech lands.

  The growing power of the Czech national democratic movement showed in the 1860s, when Czechs called dozens of meetings as a reaction to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. The historian Jaroslav Goll coined their name ‘People’s camps’, connected to the Czech Hussite tradition.

  The concerns of the German population in the Czech lands were also exacerbated by the rapid development of Czech associations and magazines after 1860. From this year onwards, an increasingly complex network of Czech associations started forming in predominantly Czech towns. Prominent examples included the Měšťanská beseda (Municipal Association) in Prague, aimed at the urban and intellectual elites, and the Občansko-řemeslnická beseda (Civic Crafts Association), aimed at craftsmen and small businessmen. The biggest and most politically influential Czech national organization was Sokol, an association founded in 1862 and focused on physical education and tourism. In 1871, there were 49 Sokol units in Bohemia and Moravia; in 1897 it was 460. Successful magazines and newspapers included Národní listy (The National Newspaper) and Národní politika (National Politics), as well as the Old Czech magazines Národ (Nation) and Pokrok (Progress) and the German-language Politik.

  In 1896, a leading German historian, Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) commented on the significance of Czechs in the cultural development of Europe by calling them the apostles of barbarism. He was refuted by the Czech historian Josef Pekař (1870–1937). At this time, the differences between both nations in the Czech lands had already become insurmountable.

  While the Czech and German parts of society were economically, culturally, and religiously disconnected, they never became completely separate.

  The sciences and political activities of the 19^th century were becoming more and more influenced by information about the two nations’ specific lives in the context of territorial, linguistic, economic, historical, cultural, and religious issues. Various models of what a nation is were formed and it became obvious that the successive generations of each nation store in their memories the collective consciousness of generational continuity: a shared past and an ideal future with national goals. Primordialism, which became very influential, saw the nation as a community that lasts millennia, maintains an unchangeable basic national identity, and undergoes different stages of national advancement and decline. A nation could be activated and woken by revivalist and nationalist activity. 

  On the other side of the spectrum of models was the instrumentalist approach, which connected the nation and its meaning in society with the vibrant social life of the end of the 18^th century and of the 19^th century. This approach saw nationalism as a product of modern thinking; a reflection of societal interests, impacted both by ideologization, but also by civic responsibility; potentially heading toward the nation as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious community.

  As nationalism became more differentiated and its different branches intersected, the scholarly understanding of its connection to specific political and ideological forces in society grew, as did the understanding of the historical memory of the different branches. The 19^th century in Central Europe was inseparably tied to the growing faith in science and social progress. People believed progress would overcome any social and religious limits and create opportunities for empowered education for both sexes. The faith in science and its growing influence affected Christianity, fuelled the religious insecurity of many believers, and even weakened the faith of many Christians.

  19^th century churches were therefore not immune to national tensions. From the beginning of the century, nationalism gradually became more powerful within them. Churches reacted to the secularisation processes in society by defending traditional values, questioning the power the state had over the church, and attempting to control the social dialogue about church-state relations and the problems of modern society. Nationalism became one of the tools that allowed them take part in the processes of modern development. Nationalism influenced several generations of Czech and German Christians in the form of specific battles for every school and school child; for every civil servant and language-based process in state and legal offices; for the language of religious services; and for the structure of denominational family life. Christianity could not be exempt from the structure of ideological, political, and economic relations in society.

  Churches reacted to the formation of civil society by creating more opportunities for layman activity and by fostering more understanding for political organizations. In the second half of the 19^th century, Czech churches became more accepting of political and awareness-raising activities and many organizations focusing on it were established. Churches strived to connect the religious, social, and political dimensions of civic life, in order to maintain their mission, even in the secularizing society and culture of the 19^th century: to be a space of congregation for believers; to mythologize their historical memories; to bring mercy and  justification to them; to interpret truth. Church hierarchy could only guarantee that as long as they retained their authority over the interpretation of religious tradition (from conservative to liberal). 

  Nationalism in Czech 19^th century Christianity was connected to the activities of many church and social groups and individuals connected to national movements. These groups saw the nation as a body striving for political self-determination, inseparable from modern society. The Czech national movement underwent complex political development in the 19^th century, with several twists. Nationalism was accompanied with the liberalization and democratization of Czech cultural and political life and impacted the development of the Czech national identity. At the end of the century, it was also affected by the movement for universal suffrage and the women’s and workers’ movements, which also had an effect on the country’s denominational environment. The process of nation formation was therefore inseparable from contemporary Christianity.

  Chapter 3: Nationalism and the Czech and German forms of Christianity

  As mentioned above, nationalism was not a matter of accident in the 19^th century Czech lands. Czech territory was connected to the social, denominational, and national coexistence of Czechs and Germans. A non-negligible part of the population was made up of Jews. In the second half of the century, these nations, with different degrees of development, gained an ever-stronger political life. Between 1780–1840, the number of people in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia grew by 60%, up to six million. Bohemia also advanced thanks to industrialization, the development of industry, and agriculture.

  Politically, Czechs were one of the many nations within the Hapsburg Monarchy, but economically, Czech society progressed from undeveloped to advanced throughout the 19^th century. Many Czechs abandoned small agricultural businesses and focused on industrial small- and large-scale production, trade, transport, insurance, and banking. Many also helped develop modern forms of agriculture. For most of the century, the economic power of the Czechs lay in growing agricultural, industrial and trade entrepreneurship. As the nation grew stronger, it accumulated capital and Czech enterprises tried to gain influence both within the monarchy and outside of it. At the end of the 19^th century, the progress of Czech society had influenced all its social classes, bringing them closer to the developed states and nations of Europe. Psychologically, Czechs gradually became a modern nation, increasingly hostile towards the Hapsburg Monarchy and the ruling dynasty; they expected a political push for a Czech national state. They were abandoning the German lifestyle and trying to create their own. Their Christianity was also a part of this process.

  Czech and German Christianity in the 19^th century were based in differing political and social contexts and connected to the structure of powers in both these nations. Nation-forming processes are connected to territorial social and economic forces and they can take centuries to unfold. They also include the development of national regions, ideals, symbols, and slogans. 19^th century nationalism, liberalism, and socialism considerably sped up this process. The stories of Czech and German Christianity in the country illustrate this as well. The aristocracy in the Czech lands generally underestimated the significance of Czech nationalism in the pre-revolutionary period, with some exceptions (Count Leopold Thun).

   The revolutionary year of 1848 was a milestone in the coexistence of Czechs and Germans in the Czech lands. At first, the fall of Metternich’s absolutism and the prospect of a constitution in the monarchy and the abolishment of censorship prompted attempts (mainly from the German side) to harmonize the political and cultural goals of the two nations. In the end, these were in vain – mainly because of differing political and national interests. In the revolutionary years, the Czech side strongly demanded linguistic and civic equality of both nationalities in the civil services and in schools. This imbued the national differences between Czechs and Germans with passionate hatred.

  To conclude: The revolutionary years caused a final separation between the two nations in the Czech lands and brought about the question of the Czech-German coexistence. It affected many of the two nations’ politicians, intellectuals and church figures for years to come. The political activities and ideological growth of both nations in the Czech lands in the late 19^th century were affected by the Greater and Lesser Germany solutions to Central Europe, the different approaches to the Slavic question, and the political models of federalization and centralization of the monarchy.  After the end of Bach’s neo-absolutism (1851–1859), political parties gained power and social legislation was passed, which meant political parties of both nations could start dealing with the Czech-German question. The denominational lives of both nations took place in the context of this social modernization.

  Chapter 4: Jan Hus and the Hussite movement in the Czech national consciousness in the 19^th century

        Hus and the Czech reformation had a major impact on the Czech national consciousness in the 19^th century. Even Czech Enlightenment scholars and educated Czech non-Catholics were interested in Hus and the Hussite movement. The former included for example the historian František Martin Pelcl (1734–1801) and theologians Kašpar Royko (1744–1819) and Augustin Zitte (1752–1785). Representatives of the latter are for example the preacher of the Bohemian Bethlehem Church in Berlin Jan Teofil Elsner (1717–1782) and his successors. Czech reformists in this period primarily saw Hus as a martyr and the founder of the Reformation tradition in the country.

       Enlightenment historiography, guided by the ideal of tolerance, also saw Hus as an inspirational figure, with his ethics and his spirituality, and believed that his struggle initiated the emancipation of individual, society, and church on the path to the age of reason.

       Late 18^th century historiography revised the study of Hus, which was in an unsatisfactory state. It refuted myth with source-based facts. As the knowledge of Hus’s life, teachings, and the thoughts of his followers grew, it became a testing ground for the newly formed and rising Czech nationalism and reformist tendencies in the church in the early 19^th century.

       This awakening of the slumbering Hussite movement happened in the same period in which national revivalism grew stronger. However, only František Palacký (1798–1876) managed to turn the Hussite movement into an important part of Czech and European history. Palacký, a historian and politician, built his historical philosophy around the Hussite movement. He saw it as the highest point of Czech national history; the embodiment of Czech democratism, anti-authoritarianism and open-mindedness. His interpretation of the history of the Czech nation was based on his work in archives located both in the Czech lands and abroad, connected to romanticism, and anchored in the Enlightenment.

     This father of Czech historiography depicted the nation’s history as a dramatic construct. Palacký presented contrasting periods of growth and catastrophe; eras that he evaluated positively and negative ones. In it, he centred Hus’s struggle and the following two centuries of Czech reformation as the most important period in the nation’s history, which imbued the entire subsequent development of Czech society with something that determined its course and remained highly influential.

      Palacký’s opinion of Master Jan Hus and the Hussite movement was largely predetermined by his stay in Bratislava in his youth. His work laid the foundations for the immense project of Czech Hussitology. His main contributions were publishing the documents from Paris and Basel on the history of the Council of Basel and his communication with Czech Hussites (1857).

       Palacký also published a selection of documents on the life and teachings of Master Jan Hus (1869), preparing the original sources for further study of Hus’s struggle for a more truthful Church. As a father of Czech historiography, he also collected a selection of extracts from documents and other sources on the history of the Hussite Wars and the rule of George of Poděbrady (1860).

       The third and fourth volume of Palacký’s monumental History are dedicated to Hus and the Hussite movement. They concentrate not only on describing events, but also on characterizing people and providing an innovative and clarifying analysis of the different streams of the Hussite movement.

      When it came to the historical meaning of the Czech reformation, Palacký did not shy away from conflicts with German and Austrian historians. In 1868, he published a German defence of his interpretation of Hus’s struggle and the Hussite movement titled Die Geschichte des Hussitenthums und Profesor Constantin Höfler, reacting to the theories of the Prague University professor Constantin Höfler.

        Palacký’s interpretation of the Hussite movement became an integral part of his political programme and reflected his own life story. It was rooted in the way the two previous Revivalist generations accepted Hus and the Hussite movement, and therefore connected with the path of Czech society in the early 19^th century.  Palacký offered this society an image of Hus and the Hussite movement which helped it in the fight for national emancipation. He provided a rich historical panorama, which gave his contemporaries an opportunity to understand how Hussite ideologies developed from their very beginnings, to their climax and their maturity. He presented the Hussite movement in three more or less equal stages: the pre-Hussite time which culminated in the figure of Hus; the Hussite revolution itself; and then the maturing of the movement under the rule of George of Poděbrady. This division of the Hussite movement also became typical for his successors and their work.

       Since Palacký was based in the Enlightenment and romanticism, he strived to find the deepest roots of the movement – though they later turned out to be largely made up. He believed the Hussite movement to be a huge, predominantly Czech national movement, based on the roots of eternal Slavic democratism; it was aimed against feudalism, which was genetically tied to Germanism; and it anticipated the great reformations of Europe and the ideals of modern revolutions.

       Palacký’s concept of history became an important part of the Czech political and national programme in 1848 and it was key for the work of his successors, such as Václav Vladivoj Tomek (1818–1905). He initiated a positivist phase in Czech historiography.

       After Palacký’s phase of modern Czech Hussitology, a phase represented by V. V. Tomek, Antonín Gindely (1829–1892), Josef Kalousek (1838–1915) and others followed This historiography represented by Tomek and Gindely was connected to contemporary European positivism, because it also emphasised a truthful representation of facts, a broad and innovative spectrum of sources, a rejection of metaphysical constructions’, and a preference to analytical work over the synthetic. 

    V. V. Tomek was the first professor of Austrian history at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles-Ferdinand University and from 1882 he also became the first rector of its Czech part. He was also inseparably tied to Czech Hussitologic scholarship. The cornerstones of his interpretation of Hus and the Hussite movement were laid even before he became a university professor. Like Palacký, he also believed the Hussite movement to be one of the greatest periods in Czech history – how the Czech nation truly impacted the history of Europe. He started studying it in 1835 and two years later, he published his first article ‘Bratrstva táborského zkáza’ (The Destruction of the Tábor Brotherhood) in the Květy (Blossoms) journal.

       This article was more of a popular history work, but later the young historian learned more about the works of František Palacký and many important original sources and went on to publish an excerpt from the Czech translation of Vavřinec z Březové’s chronicle in the Czech Museum’s journal. In 1848, he followed this by publishing an overview of Czech Utraquism from 1415 until after the Battle of White Mountain, once again in the Czech Museum’s journal. He also focused on Hus and the Hussite movement in works that spanned longer periods of Czech history. In 1842 it was his Krátký všeobecný dějepis (A Short General History); in 1843 he published Děje země české (Events of the Czech Lands). In these publications, he claimed that Hus’s fight and the Hussite movement itself stemmed from the moral decay of the contemporary Church. He also made a clear distinction between the people’s part of the movement and its leaders – especially Jan Žižka, whom he sets above all others, especially the Tábor camp, towards which Tomek is quite distant.

       After Hus, Tomek sees Žižka as the main figure of the Hussite movement. He interprets Žižka as a state-forming defendant of a constructive political order – whereas Palacký describes Žižka as the fanatical force of a young revolution.

       Tomek’s interpretation of Žižka can shed some light on the underlying reasons of his split with Palacký and his support towards the pro-government part of Czech society after 1848. Tomek’s defence of Žižka’s constructive state-forming traits found a concrete shape in the political context of the historian’s life. Tomek’s conservative political opinions in the period of Bach’s neo-absolutism helped him achieve his position as a professor of Austrian history at the Charles-Ferdinand University. 

       Žižka as a constructive symbol of the Hussite period was his answer to the development of Czech society in the 1860s and 70s. He was an example of someone whose thorough political and military work aimed to build the Czech national community against the strong and dynamic German pressure.

       While Czech society accepted Palacký’s interpretation of the Hussite movement, which emphasized the People’s Camps as a representation of Old Czech democratism, it rejected his depiction of Žižka. Instead, it preferred Tomek’s image of Žižka which was more suitable for the national emancipation work.

       Tomek only accepted Hus insofar as he could connect him to the reformatory (not reformative) potential of medieval Catholicism. Tomek favoured Žižka, George of Poděbrady, and Jan of Rokycany because they had statesman-like profiles and they harnessed the revolutionary dynamic in the land, turning it into a calmer development. The Hussite movement as such was often seen as negative by Tomek; as a movement which led the religious life in Czech church and society into decline.

       Other former 19^th century Czech historians of the Hussite movement include the first biographer of Palacký Josef Kalousek (1838–1915). He made his mark in the history of the Czech study of Hus and the Hussite movement in 1881, with his study O historii kalicha v dobách předhusitských (On the History of the Chalice in Pre-Hussite Times). In it, he was critical towards the Russian Slavophiles’ overly conclusive theories on the direct relation between the Hussite movement’s and the Cyril and Methodius tradition’s interpretations of the chalice. He provided evidence documenting that the Hussite communion under both kinds is not automatically equal to similar orthodox practices. As a liberal Catholic, Kalousek regretted that the cultural and spiritual unity of the medieval Church and society had been broken. He connected the major spiritual and political crisis of the late medieval Church and society with the struggle of the two denominations, which threatened to destroy the great cultural and spiritual legacy of the past. Like Tomek, he also believed that Hus’s secession and the following religious movement was negative in many ways. He did not conduct any broad political, spiritual, and cultural analyses of late medieval Europe, with its many social and religious crises and he therefore reduced Hus’s struggle against the traditional church to a conflict between different theological interpretations of the church and church-state relations.

       Similarly to Tomek, Kalousek also believed that White Mountain was a direct consequence of the Czech reformation and its rise. He interpreted the denominational battles of contemporary Christianity through his lenses as a liberal thinker, who saw faith as an example of individual religious convictions, rather than public political power.

      Both Tomek’s and Kalousek’s views on the conflict between the traditional church and the Czech reformation grew quite far apart from the views of their teacher František Palacký. The gradual shift of Kalousek’s view on the relations between the traditional church and the reformation were also inspired by the rise and development of contemporary Czech liberalism.

       In 1869 and 1902, J. Kalousek repeatedly called for a revision of Hus’s trial and wanted to include even the Roman Catholic Church. In 1869, this possibly also included the Prague Archbishop of the time, Friedrich Joseph Prince zu Schwarzenberg. However, the atmosphere of the time was focused on other political problems and overshadowed Kalousek’s initiatives. Despite that, a part of the 1870s and ‘80s Czech urban society accepted many of Tomek’s ideas about Hus and the Hussite movement. 

       Tomek’s and Kalousek’s work weakened the image of the great struggle led by Hus and the Hussite movement, as depicted by Palacký, and reduced it to a mundane political conflict in society and between the churches and nations of Bohemia and Moravia.

       At the end of the 19^th century, Professor Václav Novotný (1869–1932) became another influential historian in Czech Hussitology.  He centred his scholarly work around the Hussite movement and early Czech history. At university, he studied under Jaroslav Goll (1846–1929) and V. V. Tomek and his precision and emphasis on sober facts represent a type of historical study that developed from the 18^th century Enlightenment historiography towards positivism.

       In 1891, Novotný became Tomek’s assistant in his search for sources while Tomek was writing his life’s work Dějepis města Prahy (History of the City of Prague). In 1898 he was granted the degree of Docent of Czech History. He only started lecturing at the university in 1899, because he spent ten months on a scholarship, studying at the Vatican archives in Rome.

       The first part of Novotný’s work as a Hussitologist was finished after he published his Listy Husovy (Hus’s Documents) in the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences in 1898. He then based his subsequent research and publication activities on this work for more than the next three decades. His work on Hus and the Hussite movement always avoided shortcuts in the effort to understand Hus’s life and work. Novotný saw Hus as an important Czech and European intellectual and politician; a figure who significantly contributed to the political, scientific, national, and spiritual formation of Europe, just like John Wycliffe, Martin Luther, and Jean Calvin.

   

  Chapter 5: The two motives of the development of Czech national identity at the end of the 19^th century

      The formation of the Czech national identity was also influenced by the deepening relations between the Czech lands and France in the late 19^th century. In 1889, the Alliance Française mapped all translations from French to Czech, which clearly showed that French culture had influenced the Czech lands. Czech Francophiles expected that France would support the national movement and function as a counterweight for the strong German influence on politics, culture, and the economy in the country. At the turn of the century, a new generation of Francophiles came to the table.

       The development of the Czech national identity at the end of the 19^th century was also inspired by the idea of university extensions, quite popular in Europe. From 1894, professors T. G. Masaryk, O. Hostinský and F. Drtina promoted it at the university in Prague.  They shared their ideals with Czech society in the journal Naše doba (Our Time). František Drtina mainly studied philosophy and pedagogy and in 1894 he had a long exposé in the first volume of Naše doba about university extensions at English universities. He appealed on Czech scientific institutions, the National Museum, the Czech Academy of Science and Art, and most importantly the Prague university to start organising extensions.

       The university extension programme entered into force in 1898 after the ministry in Vienna passed the statutes of the University Committee for Organizing Popular Lectures. The courses started on 15^th April 1899. The lecture plan was organized by a special committee, which included scholars from many academic fields.

       The long 19^th century only ended with the First World War. Before its start, the university extensions had become an inherent part of the Czech national awareness-raising campaign. The goal of the lectures was to popularize the research of Prague university teachers in broader Czech society. The lectures therefore took place in the evening, both as individual talks and as cycles. Lists of lectures were always available beforehand in selected printed media. At first, only scholars, professors, and docents of the university in Prague led the lectures, but soon the activity was extended outside of Prague. In the beginning of the 20^th century, the professors and docents of the polytechnic colleges in Prague and Brno joined in, again with the aim to popularize their fields. One of the results of this broadly targeted activity was that it managed to address Czech denominations.

       It must also be said that the Deutsche Universität Prag and German polytechnic colleges in Prague and Brno also engaged in rich extension activities at the end of the 19^th century, as part of the programme of building the German national identity. These activities were not limited to Prague, but also took place in Bohemian and Moravian regions with German-speaking populations. The most important towns that hosted lectures outside of Prague and Brno included Liberec (Reichenberg), Jablonec nad Nisou (Gablonz an der Neiße), Opava (Troppau) and others.

   

  Chapter 6: The Roman Catholic Church

  The Czech denominational environment was traditionally dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, which was not united, but instead divided along national lines, to Czech and German branches, and subjected to regional religious specificities and changes over time. Different groups of Christians in the Church interpreted its teachings and its intersections with the political and social spheres of church life and expressed their political opinions on the religious reality of the lives of Czechs or Germans in the country. This cemented the ideological, liturgic, and sacral foundations of the differences in the lives of these groups. Both nations influenced each other in this one church, which presented a dynamic social environment. They each presented a specific religious, cultural and social dynamic to the outside and other national groups could then label it as successful or unsuccessful; positive or negative. This label was thus one of the results of the national interaction and conflicts between Czechs and Germans in Roman Catholic Christianity in the Czech lands.

  Czech historical tradition: From the Middle Ages, Czechs worshipped St. Wenceslas and other Czech saints.  They saw St. Wenceslas as their patron and eternal political ruler. After the Battle of White Mountain, he also became the patron saint of the nation, its language, and its historical memory. Czech 17^th and 18^th century nationalism was influenced by the cult of St. Wenceslas. This Christianity saw national saints as a guarantee of God’s favour for the nation in times of hardship. As the 19^th century began, there was a marked change. In the process of secularisation, Czechs started paying respect not to the Czech heaven with its saints, but also the nation. National historical memory and tradition also became subject to this new perspective. Mainly thanks to writers and journalists, they started emphasizing the Hussite tradition and the rejection of the post-White Mountain period for being a time of national decline. Great figures of Czech history were respected and almost uncritically worshipped.

  Society and churches also became more inclined toward the Hussite tradition after the Napoleonic Wars, which also affected Central Europe. The majority of Czechs supported the ruling dynasty and its wars. At that time, Vienna supported the discourse that emphasized Hus and Žižka as warriors, since it was seen as a manifestation of Czech national mobilization and determination to fight for the monarchy. Figures including the Premonstratensian author and scholar Jan Bohumír Dlabač (1758–1820) and priest and poet Antonín J. Puchmajer (1769–1820) found a way to celebrate the Hussite fighting spirit and Jan Žižka as a defender from foreign aggression in the Catholic environment – although they never forgot to mention the fallacy of the Utraquist theology. This laid the foundations for the growing influence of the Hussite tradition in pre-1848 Czech society. In that revolutionary year, this tradition tied into the dynamics of the national struggle and became very influential in society and the church for decades to come. In 1850–1851 the third, Hussite volume of František Palacký’s History was published, and the Hussite movement turned into a symbol of the struggle for Czech national emancipation within the monarchy. In the post-revolutionary monarchy (Bach’s neo-absolutism), the government rejected this interpretation of the Hussite tradition, because it was radically nationalist and potentially revolutionary. After the fall of A. Bach and the onset of dualism in the monarchy at the end of the 1860s (1868), many major Czech political and citizens’ meetings took place at Hussite memorial sites. It became clear that the Hussite tradition as the cornerstone of Czech history (Palacký) would become the main line of thinking in Czech national emancipation and nationalism. The 2^nd half of the 19^th century in the Czech lands was connected with a strong stereotype of the Hapsburgs as oppressors of the Czech national emancipation effort. 

  This development also changed the perception and depiction of Catholic priests. The liturgic, preaching, sacral, and pastoral sphere of their activity receded into the background and emphasis was put mainly on their work as shepherds and educators of the nation. Czech literature and journalism coined the typical image of a patriotic revivalist priest. At first, the future poet and journalist Karel Havlíček Borovský (1821–1856) also decided to pursue this career and shortly studied theology.

  While the majority of Czechs, including Czech intellectuals remained Catholic, formalized faith became an important part of contemporary religious life. Society also in part became critical towards the Catholic Church, its priests, monks, and its history (K. H. Borovský, later Josef S. Machar (1864–1942)) The criticism was directed against the clericalism of the institution, rather than its theology and ecclesiology and referred to some parts of the Czech history, especially the Hussite tradition. In the last decades of the 19^th century, Czech journalism found more and more voices which underestimated the importance of the clergy in the national emancipation process. These contributed to the genesis and exodus of political Catholicism and its attempts to influence the intellectuals of the nation and industrial and agricultural workers.

  Catholic authors, journalists, and politicians reacted to this by trying to find ways to strengthen the authority of Catholicism in society. They warned of the national liberal modernization and believed it would strip the nation of some of its Christian roots and tradition. Many Catholic intellectuals actively strived to defend, revive and strengthen this tradition in society.

       In the late 19^th century, Central and Eastern Europe increasingly became the ground where Slavic national life unfolded. From the Enlightenment onwards, the dynamic potential of nationalist ideals became unquestionable, even in Slavic churches.  In Bohemia and Moravia, some Roman Catholic theologians and bishops tried to connect the progress of Czech nationalism with the Cyril and Methodius tradition and ideals of Slavic (Catholic) solidarity.

       Examples of this effort in the second half of the 19^th century include not only the rise of Catholic associations, but also Czech Roman Catholic magazines. For example, the Prague volumes of sermons from the Kazatelé slovanští (Slavic Preachers) collection, published by the provost of Vyšehrad Václav Štulec (1814–1887) and the priest Antonín Mužík (+1877), clearly allude to nationalism and the European nature of Slavs in the context of contemporary Catholic Cyril and Methodius solidarity.

       In the late 19^th century, the Czech Roman Catholic environment attempted to find new approaches to the Central European Cyril and Methodius tradition, as illustrated by the Vlasť (Homeland) journal published by Tomáš Škrdlo (1853–1913) or the Prague magazine Method. Method was focused on Christian art and published by Ferdinand J. Lehner (1837–1914) from 1875 onwards. Even the conservative Vlasť gradually made space for the theological and artistic creativity of Slavic nations, especially in its literary section. Moderate sermons celebrating Cyril and Methodius Day were regularly published in the Czechoslovak clergy journal Rádce duchovní (Spiritual Advisor), published by the Vyšehrad canon Josef Burian (1854–1922), as well as the abovementioned Kazatelé slovanští.

       In general, these revivalist programmes in the church did not strive for denominational confrontation with non-Catholics, but preferred determined pastoral, scholarly, and social work in Czech society. It aimed to focus the Christian life of clergymen and laymen primarily on Christ and the Holy Trinity, the Eucharist, mass, and sacraments. It emphasised nationalism connected with Czech history. The omnipresent nationalist and apologetic argumentation of the publisher of these magazines was connected with the development of political Catholicism in late 19^th century Bohemia and Moravia.

   

   Chapter 7: The end of the 19^th century and Catholic modernism

      In the beginning of the 20^th century, Freethought became an important force in the secularisation process in Bohemia and Europe. Between the world wars, it disrupted the connection between the church institutions and their standards and the traditional forms of Christianity. The reaction of churches to its activities varied. The Roman Catholic Church generally rejected it, while the Evangelical environment was divided between rejection and acceptance.

       In Bohemia, the conditions for the establishment of an institutional movement of the so-called Freethinkers were formed at the end of the 19^th century. In 1904, the movement was institutionalized – first in the Augustin Smetana association and then in the Czech part of the international organization of citizens without creed, Freethought. In 1907, Prague hosted the organization’s international congress.

       Freethought was never a fully ideologically unified organization. In the Czech environment, it included a number of different streams and diverse figures (František Krejčí (1858–1934), František Loskot (1870–1932), Otakar Kunstovný (1884–1945) etc.). For some members, it became a gateway into the radical left, radical nationalism, or atheism, while for others it opened the doors to non-denominational religiosity. In the Czech lands, it published a number of magazines, including Volná myšlenka (Freethought), Havlíček, Volná škola (Free School), etc.

        At the end of the 19^th century, Catholic modernists from the Bohemian and Moravian Roman Catholic Church began to focus on Christian revivalism. In the context of Roman Catholic theology in the Czech lands, their work presented a serious appeal to their denomination, which developed in modern Czech society and in the context of its national constants and variables.

     The work of Catholic modernists in the Czech lands was influenced by a very specific denominational and political context, which formed their nationalism, beyond the scope of contemporary national self-awareness.

       In the 19^th century, nation became one of the key concepts of historiography. Based on that, many historians tried to confront the nation with its great moments, figures, and deeds. Historiography became a matter of national experience and Christians of many denominations took part in it. The father of modern Czech historiography František Palacký saw the rise of national consciousness as a counterweight to the modern European scholarship. 

       As suggested above, 1848 was a major milestone for Czech nationalism. In this year, B. Bolzano’s student František S. Náhlovský (1807–1853) issued a reformist programme in the Roman Catholic Church, as a reaction to the changing perception of national issues and denominations.  Influenced by Náhlovský, Catholic modernism also took this change into account in its historical worldview focused on salvation. Apart from the abovementioned František Loskot, this movement was not represented by any truly significant historians who would be able to document and interpret the impulses of Palacký and his followers. At first, this great task was taken up by artists and theologians (Karel Dostál-Lutinov (1871–1923), Ludvík Sigismund Bouška (1867–1942) and others), not always for the better.

       The main Czech Catholic modernist focused on history was ThDr. PhDr. František Loskot (1870–1932). His life and work were markedly influenced by his understanding of Czech and European reformation. After he studied theology in Hradec Králové and Berlin, he continued on to history and philosophy at the Charles University Faculty of Arts, studying under J. Goll, J. Kalousek, V. Novotný, J. Pekař, J. Šusta, F. Drtina, and T. G. Masaryk. In 1909, J. Kalousek and J. Pekař accepted his thesis topic focused on Konrád Waldhauser. After his successful thesis defence and the rigorosum examination, he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy on 23 June 1911. He then studied in Paris from November 1911 until March 1912, visiting Alfred Loisy’s (1857–1940) lectures at the Collège de France. He also met Loisy (at that time he had already gained some distance from the Roman Catholic Church) for personal discussions on specific historical and theological topics.

       Loskot was the only Czech Catholic modernist to truly realize that historiography played an important national and political role in the development of Czech society in the 19^th century. He knew he was living his Christian life in a specific place, in the history of a specific nation. Czech history became a challenge for him and to answer it, he used his theological and philosophical education. He believed in the need to understand the changing position of the Church in history, but also, in a narrower sense, our own place in it. The development of Czech and European historiography in the 19^th and early 20^th century also influenced his understanding of Czech history. He especially drew from the works of František Palacký and his successors.  Loskot’s works on the predecessor of the Czech Reformation reflected on topics which were part of Palacký’s legacy, as well as the ‘school’ of Professor Jaroslav Goll and many of his students. His writings on the predecessors of Hus aimed to follow the ideal model of historical monographs of late 19^th century historiography. He was also influenced by his reformist work as a Catholic modernist in the church and inspired by some historians from Goll’s school. In his subsequent work as a journalist and scholar, Loskot also provided an historical perspective for a number of topics relevant for Catholic modernists in the church. He published his work on Hus’s predecessors through the Freethought publishing house, as he was an active Freethinker for many years and the movement helped him in some ways. Late in his life, during the Great Depression, Loskot drifted towards the radical left. Like many other Czech inter-war intellectuals, he expected it to provide more humane solutions to the social and societal problems of his time.

        Loskot and other Catholic modernists did not want human freedom to be directed toward the shallow, violent destruction of traditional Christianity. They believed that Catholic reformism was a great challenge for the institution of the Church, which lived and worked in modern society. They searched for new, functional ways for the Church to work, and new norms of service and order. This showed they, as priests, individuals, and often also scholars strived for constructive Christian freedom and mature citizenship in the Kingdom of God.

       Catholic modernists thought that Czech society could became one of the most secular societies in Europe and so they focused on the position of religion in Czech society at the end of the 19^th century. They wanted to document the change in the relationship Czech society had to mainly Roman Catholic Christianity, and the sources and processes of this change – though they often did so in an imperfect manner.

       In the Czech lands, Catholic modernism was a theologically, culturally, spiritually, and politically divided ideological current, which developed at an intersection with contemporary philosophy and historical research based on politics, which influenced a number of figures in the Church and beyond it, albeit with different intensity and at different times. It imbued the civic nationalism of many Czech Roman Catholics with apologetic features. They saw modernism as a specific contemporary expression of the constant reformative movement in the Roman Catholic Church. Nationalism, then, was an inherent part of the realization of this movement and it was supposed to be capable of spiritual, cultural, and political dialogue and multicultural and multireligious understanding. Their reformist work in the church was drastically limited in 1907, when the anti-modernist encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis by Pope Pius X (1903–1914) was published.

       On 08 January 1920, the Czechoslovak Hussite Church was founded, reflecting the crisis of Roman Catholicism and the efforts to reform Czech Christianity in the 19^th century and to form the religiosity in inter-war Czechoslovak society. It developed as part of the radical wing of the Czechoslovak Catholic Clergy Union and it elaborated on some parts of its radical modernist and revivalist programme. Its foundation was fuelled not only by reformist theological and national features and the broadening secularisation process affecting Czech Catholic clergy and laymen, but also most importantly by the establishment of the new Czechoslovak state in 1918 as part of the new political order of Central Europe. The circumstances in which it was founded affected the church’s theology, social orientation, and orders.

       In January 1920, two former Czech university historians Josef Šusta (1874–1945) and Josef Pekař (1870–1937) commented on the foundation of this church in influential Czech media.  On the 11^th of January, Professor Šusta published his article ‘Nová církev’ (New Church) in the magazine Venkov (The Country), while Professor Pekař published his ‘O nové Církvi československé’ (On the New Czechoslovak Church) in Národní politika (National Politics). Both these historians believed that post-war political Catholicism and the Roman Catholic Church had an important place in contemporary Czechoslovak political and religious life. Neither of them thought that the establishment of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church was a very good step. In the following years, their reservations towards this church and its representatives and theologians continued.

       However, not all leading Czech historians were as harsh toward the Czechoslovak Hussite Church. The abovementioned Hussitologist, Professor Václav Novotný was more open to it, as illustrated by his lecture Hus a my (Hus and We), which was part of the ceremonial commemoration of Jan Hus at the Old Town Hall on 05 July 1923. He later allowed the church to publish it in its journal Český Zápas (Czech Struggle) and as a separate brochure.

   

  Chapter 8: Germans in the Roman Catholic Church in Czechia

  After a significant Catholic Enlightenment period, the early 19^th century brought conservative state absolutism and Church restoration (from Pope Leo XII to Pius IX). Despite that, Enlightenment had born its fruit in the pre-1848 Czech lands in the form of Bolzanism, which was well accepted by some Czech and German clergymen, laymen, and bishops. In 1848, it even brought a programme of Roman Catholic Church reform influenced by Bernard Bolzano’s thoughts [František Náhlovský (1807–1853)]. Enlightened local patriotism which connected Czechs and Germans was gradually limited, as clergy and laymen became more polarized along nationalist lines, and some of them also more hostile towards Bach’s centralist neo-absolutism in Vienna.

  In 1849, the first Episcopal Conference of Austria took the side of neo-absolutism and rejected nationalism in the monarchy as a destructive force. That prepared the way for the Concordat between Vienna and Rome in 1855. While the Archbishop of Prague, Cardinal Friedrich Schwarzenberg (1850–1885) attempted restoration in his archdiocese, his efforts were in vain (in the context of decades of growing anti-clerical liberalism, combined with narrow-minded conservatism within the Church). Many Catholics also distanced themselves from the Church after the First Vatican Council (1870). In Northern Bohemia, it contributed to the expansion of the Old Catholic Church with a centre in Varnsdorf. Many German Roman Catholics also crossed over to atheism and pan-German nationalism. The Church lost many middle-class intellectuals, especially teachers and secondary school professors. The numbers of its believers in the rural environment also declined and so did its influence over part of society. At the same time, fewer secondary school students were becoming interested in careers in the Church. The situation in the Roman Catholic Church in the Czech lands also worsened because nationalist conflicts between its believers became more frequent.

  In 1882, the formerly nationally unified university in Prague was divided into a Czech and a German part.  In 1891, the university’s theological faculty was divided as well. This made the education of priests nationality-based and the Roman Catholic Church in the Czech lands stopped being a space for dialogue of both nations, even in this sphere of social and church life.

  Until 1848, Czech-German associations were active in the Roman Catholic Church, but after the revolutionary period they became divided based on nationality. By organizing these associations, the Church tried to offset the anti-clerical atmosphere in society. The People’s Association Movement (Volksbundbewegung) with its journeyman associations (Kolpingsvereine) became quite important. Its goal was to provide religious, social, political, and professional education to its members and focused also on the young generation. The division of the university also affected the development of Czech and German Catholic student associations. In 1885, the German Catholic student union Ferdinandea was founded. At the end of the 19^th century, a German Catholic teachers’ association in Austria was established as well. The Catholic German physical education movement was also growing. We must also mention German civic associations in the Czech lands, which strived to build historical memory and form school education. In 1862, the Association for German History in the Czech Lands was founded, followed by the German Education Association in 1880.

  In the last decades of the 19^th century, the Bohemian and Moravian German Roman Catholic lower and middle classes started encountering the Christian social movement ideals, which emphasized a connection between social and national emancipation and the Roman Catholic Church. In Austria, this happened later than in Germany. In the Hapsburg Monarchy, this movement was mainly organized by the social reformer, politician, and journalists Karl von Vogelsang (1818–1890), who promoted the ideas of class-based social structure, which would ensure a stable social position to the middle class. As a Christian critic of capitalism, he rejected boundless political and economic liberalism and strived to reach a peaceful social settlement between employers and employees, pursuing legislative changes. He published his views in a number of magazines – especially in the Vaterland journal, which he founded. In Bohemia, his political programme influenced German Roman Catholic aristocrats, the clergy, the middle class, and some urban and agricultural workers. His views were spread even further by the North Bohemian priest and journalist Ambros Opitz (1846–1907, from Varnsdorf), who opposed liberalism, Marxism, and the Away from Rome movement, as well as the moral theologian Franz Schindler (1847–1922).

  Vogelsang’s younger political colleagues and followers included for example Karl Lueger (1844–1910). They promoted changes to the country’s social legislation and limits to unrestrained limited and shaped Christian social party politics at the end of the 19^th century. The Christian Social Party (Christlichsoziale Partei) led by Lueger found its supporters in Bohemia and Moravia. This movement received a strong impulse in the form of the socially influential 1891 encyclical Rerum novarum by Leo XIII.  The first Christian social association was founded in Vienna in 1892, thanks to Leopold Kunschak (1871–1953), first a saddler and later a journalist and politician, and originally a German from Moravia. This example was later taken up by emerging associations in Bohemia. In 1897, A. Opits founded the Christian Social Association for German Bohemia (Christlichsozialer Verband für Deutschböhmen) in Northern Bohemia.

  The Old Catholic Church: The Old Catholic Church was founded in the Hapsburg Monarchy by a government decree from 8 October 1877, which recognized its religious congregations in Varnsdorf, Vienna, and Ried. The Prague congregation was only founded by the Austrian Old Catholic synod in 1900, as a filial congregation for Bohemia. It became a founding point for the future Bohemian Old Catholic Church. In Northern Bohemia, Varnsdorf was the main meeting place for mainly German Old Catholics. The church’s clergy and laymen followed the tradition of the reformist Enlightenment Catholicism connected to the episcopal seminary in Litoměřice. The first Varnsdorf Old Catholic priest Anton Nittel (1826–1907) studied at secondary school under the dean of Česká Lípa Anton Krombholz (1790–1869), a follower of B. Bolzano.

  Chapter 9: Lutherans and Reformists

  After Protestants became tolerated (1781), the Lutheran church had 19 congregations in 1784 – 9 in Bohemia, 10 in Moravia. The Reformed church had 54 congregations – 36 in Bohemia, 18 in Moravia. Each had about 70,000 believers and they were part of the Austrian Lutheran and Reformed churches, respectively. The highest supervisory body in charge of these churches was the Viennese High Council for Churches, appointed by the Emperor. While German Protestants in the Czech lands were mainly Lutheran, the Czechs were predominantly Reformists. 

  German Reformed congregations were quite scarce. The German Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession was more significant in Western Bohemia around the town of Aš. In other Czech regions, it mostly represented around 4-5% of the population. At the end of the 19^th century, it had almost 150 parishes, filial congregations, and centres for service. In the late 19^th century, the movement Away from Rome helped bring believers into this church, as it motivated believers to leave the Roman Catholic Church.

  Czech evangelical churches, led by first and second-generation pastors, underwent a peaceful development until 1848. There were more or less no major conflicts between Lutheran and Reformed congregations. From 1813, the grammar school in Těšín (founded in 1810 as a Latin school) played a part in educating future clergymen of both nationalities from both denominations. Theology was also taught at Hungarian and German theological institutes (the university of Jena), which influenced a number of evangelical priests, teachers, and authors, most importantly Jan Blahoslav Benedikti (1796–1847), Jan Kollár (1793–1852), and Pavel Josef Šafařík (1795–1861). Their studies in Germany allowed them to understand the development and options of local nationalism and influenced their thinking. In 1821, an evangelical theological institute opened in Vienna and most students of evangelical theology from the Czech lands started going there instead. The revolutionary period of 1848 brought Protestant demands for equal rights with Roman Catholics, autonomy of their church structures, and a merger of both churches established by the Tolerance Patent. Protestants became more distrustful towards the hierarchical, politically restorationist, and pro-Hapsburg policy of Roman Catholic elites in the monarchy, and more interested in reformist Bolzanism. In 1868–1869, there was an unsuccessful attempt to connect both the abovementioned denominations. This was a time when they were developing dynamically, as nationalist politics were on the rise in the Czech lands after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise. In 1880, the 260,000 Lutherans in the western part of the monarchy included 32,000 Czechs, while the 120,000 Reformists comprised of 109,000 Czechs.

  Czech evangelical churches also had to deal with a rise of nationalism throughout the century, especially after the Protestant Patent of 1861. This also influenced the life of individual congregations and the struggle for Protestant schooling. Some reactions then tried to limit the narrowly defined political and social Czech nationalism. For example, Jan Karafiát (1846–1929), a Czech Reformist priest, published his brochure on Master Jan Hus in 1872, speaking out against the nationalist understanding of the reformer’s life and work, and presenting him as a breakthrough theologian instead. He also reviewed the Biblical translations of the Unity of the Brethren. Reformed evangelicals gradually grew distant from the religious indifference of Young Czech liberalism, and some Lutheran theologians, such as Karel E. Lány (1838–1903), followed, supporting Old Czechs instead.

  The School Law of May 1868 significantly changed school-church relations and limited the Protestant churches’ efforts to establish their own schools. The highest level of supervision and management of all schooling was transferred to the state and its institutions. Both the tolerated churches also issued new agendas – Reformists in 1877 and Lutherans in 1889 – and catechisms, and strived to rethink their church structures.

  Both churches developed their ecumenical relations in Europe; Reformists formed connections with Swiss and Scottish Calvinists, while Lutherans focused on German Lutheran churches. They strengthened their exegetic Biblical and theological work in connection to contemporary theological currents. They connected Czech and European ideological influences and theologians, historians, clergymen, and laymen of both churches became more capable to link their development after 1781 to the Czech Reformation history of the 15th and 16th centuries. While Jan Karafiát and many of his peers prioritized the normative sources of European reformation over the ideological value of Czech reformation, the following generation managed to appreciate Czech reformation better. They did so in a situation when Czech Protestantism became more strongly connected with nationalism, felt an urgent need to limit its connection to Czech political liberalism, and welcomed Masaryk’s political party. At the end of the Hapsburg period, historian Ferdinand Hrejsa (1867–1953) gave this new struggle an ideological form, by understanding Confessio Bohemica (1575) as the ideological culmination of Czech reformation. This also prepared the ground for the unification of both Tolerance-based churches in the December of 1918.

  Conclusion:

       Years ago, Professor Amedeo Molnár described the nature of the church as a confessional community (O České konfesi z roku 1575. Křesťanská revue, no. 40 2-1973, p. 34.) Churches always gave the best testimony of themselves when they were threatened by a specific danger, internal or external. In the 19^th century, European nations’ nationalism influenced the religiosity of European society in its confessional communities and its manifestations of church existence.

       The 19^th century was the so-called long century; a period in European history, which was completely transformed in 1914–1918, into a wholly different period of the continent’s development. It was carried by the accelerating process of social transformation, which impacted European denominations. It caused a rise of human intellectual capacity on many levels, and the complexity and differentiation of social and denominational structure increased. The modernization of societal development and the struggle for maintaining many social traditions was reflected in the lives of Christians of all European churches. Ideas on social processes in the 18^th and 19^th centuries were significantly influenced by thinkers from Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) to Henri Bergson (1859–1941), as well as many Christian philosophers.    

       The postmodern world was built on the idea of different cultures and historical structures coexisting. Compared to the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, this was a major change to our understanding of nationalism and its social and denominational significance. Our focus on the 19^th century in this course was therefore meaningful. The course dealt with the context of the social and denominational changes in the 19^th century and it should merely guide you in your further studies.

  

   

  • Select activity Christianity in Czechia-questions

    

    Christianity in Czechia-questions Buch

    Chapter 1: The roots of the situation of Christianity in the Czech lands at the beginning of the 19^th century

    Reading questions:

    1. How did Emperor Joseph II’s 1781 Patent of Toleration influence the denominational structure in Bohemia?

    2. How did the religious freedom of tolerated non-Catholics in Bohemia develop during Bach’s neo-absolutism and after it?

    3. What was the 1855 Concordat between the Danubian Monarchy and Rome and how did their relations develop after its end?  

     Chapter 2: Nationalism as part of the history of 19^th century Christianity in the Czech lands

    Reading questions:

    1. What does the term ‘nation’ mean?

    2. How did the political significance of the nation develop in the 18th century?

    3. How did cultural and political nationalism develop in the Czech lands? 

     Chapter 3: Nationalism and the Czech and German forms of Christianity

    Reading questions:

    1. What was the Czechs’ social and political position in the Hapsburg Empire?

    2. What form did Czech and German Christianity have in 19^th century Czech lands?

    3. Was 1848 a breaking point for the coexistence of Czechs and Germans in the Czech lands?

     Chapter 4: Jan Hus and the Hussite movement in the Czech national consciousness during the 19^th century

    Reading questions:

     1. How did Hus influence the Czech national consciousness in the 18^th century?

    2. How did Hus influence the Czech national consciousness in the 19^th century?

    3. How did Jan Žižka influence the Czech national consciousness in the 19^th century? 

     Chapter 5: The two motives of the development of Czech national identity at the end of the 19^th century  

    Reading questions:

    1. What traces did French culture leave in Bohemia in the late 19^th century?

    2. How was the development of the Czech national identity in the late 19^th century influenced by the idea of university extensions?

    3. Did German universities in the Czech lands engage in university extensions in the late 19^th century? 

     Chapter 6: The Roman Catholic Church

    Reading questions:

    1. What form did the national interaction and conflicts between Czechs and Germans in Roman Catholic Christianity in the Czech lands take?

    2. What are the traditions of Czech history?

    3. Was there any connection between the formalization of faith and the liberal modernizing national perspective of Czech Christianity?

     Chapter 7: The end of the 19^th century and Catholic modernism

    Reading questions:

    1. How did Freethought contribute to the separation of Czech society and the traditional forms of Christianity?

    2. Do you know the roots of Catholic modernism in the 19^th century?

    3. What were the main principles and goals of Catholic modernism? 

     Chapter 8: Germans in the Roman Catholic Church in the Czech lands

    Reading questions:

    1. What do you know about the local patriotism of the Enlightenment and the nationalist polarization of the clergymen and laymen of the Roman Catholic Church in the Czech lands?

    2. How did the 1882 division of the university in Prague into Czech and German parts impact the Roman Catholic Church? 

    3. What can you say about the growth of the Old Catholic Church in Northern Bohemia, centred around Varnsdorf? 

     Chapter 9: Lutherans and Reformists

    Reading questions:

    1. What can you say about Czech and German Lutherans in the Czech lands in the 19^th century?

    2. What can you say about Czech and German Reformists in the Czech lands in the 19^th century?

    3. What were the manifestations of nationalism in Czech Evangelical churches in the 19^th century?

     

     

  • Select activity Literature:

    

    Literature: Buch

     

    Chapter 1: The roots of the situation of Christianity in the Czech lands at the beginning of the 19^th century

    Literature:

    Černušák, Tomáš et al. The Papacy and the Czech Lands. A History of Mutual Relations. Rome-Prague:  Institute of History - Instituto Storico Ceco di Roma (2016), Pp. 209-266.

    Thomson, S. Harrison. Czechoslovakia in European History. Princeton: Princeton University Press (1943).

    Polišenský, Josef V. History of Czechoslovakia in outline. Praha: Bohemia International, 1991.

    Pánek, Jaroslav - Tůma, Oldřich (ed.). A History of the Czech Lands. Praha: Karolinum (2009).

    Winter, Eduard. Tausend Jahre Geisteskampf im Sudetenraum. Das religiöse Ringen zweier Völker. München: Aufstieg Verlag (1970).

    Kořalka, Jiří. Tschechen und Deutschland im langen 19. Jahrhundert. Dresden: Thelem (2018).

    Bosl, Karl. Böhmen und seine Nachbarn. Gesellschaft, Politik und Kultur in Mitteleuropa.
    München, Wien: Collegium Carolinum (1976).

    Říčan, Rudolf. Das Reich Gottes in den böhmischen Ländern. Geschichte des tschechischen Protestantismus. Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk (1957).

    Reingrabner, Gustav. Protestanten in Österreich. Geschichte und Dokumentation. Wien: Böhlau (1981).

    Hanke, Gerhard. Das Zeitalter des Zentralismus (1740-1848). In: Bosl, Karl (Hrsg. ). Handbuch der Geschichte der böhmischen Länder, Bd. 2: Die böhmischen Länder von der Hochblüte der Ständeherrschaft bis zum Erwachen eines modernen Nationalbewußtseins. Stuttgart: Collegium Carolinum (1974), pp. 413-645.

    Lexikon:

    Gründler, Johannes. Lexikon der Christlichen Kirchen und Sekten I., II.  Wien – Freiburg - Basel: Herder (1961).

    Historical Atlas:

    Historical Atlas of the World. New Jersey, Hammond-Union (1999), p. 31-32.

    Atlas zur Kirchengeschichte. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder (2004), p. 95-96.

      

     Chapter 2: Nationalism as part of the history of 19^th century Christianity in the Czech lands

    Literature:

    Černušák, Tomáš et al. The Papacy and the Czech Lands. A History of Mutual Relations. Rome-Prague:  Institute of History - Instituto Storico Ceco di Roma (2016), Pp. 209-266.

    Kořalka, Jiří. Tschechen und Deutschland im langen 19. Jahrhundert. Dresden: Thelem (2018).

    Prinz, Friedrich. Böhmen und Mähren. Berlin: Siedler (1993). (Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas).

    Prinz, Friedrich. Geschichte Böhmens 1848 – 1948. München: Langen – Müller (1988).

    Urban, Otto. Die tschechische Gesellschaft 1848 - 1918. I. - II. Wien: Böhlau (1994).

    Plaschka, Richard Georg. Einleitung. In: Die tschechische Gesellschaft 1848 - 1918. I. Wien: Böhlau (1994), s. 15–28.

    Polišenský, Josef V. Aristocrats and the Crowd in the Revolutionary Year 1848. A Contribution to the History of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Albany: State University of New York Press (1980).

    Taylor, Alan J. P. The Habsburg monarchy, 1809–1918: a history of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary. London: Penguin Books (1990).

    Winter, Eduard. Romantismus, Restauration und Frühliberalismus im österreichischen Vormärz, Wien: Europa Verlag (1968).

    Winter, Eduard. Frühliberalismus in der Donaumonarchie. Religiöse, nationale und wissenschaftliche Strömungen von 1790–1868, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag (1968).

    Winter, Eduard. Revolution, Neuabsolutismus und Liberalismus in der Donaumonarchie, Wien: Europa Verlag (1969).

    Lexikon:

    Gründler, Johannes. Lexikon der Christlichen Kirchen und Sekten I., II.  Wien – Freiburg - Basel: Herder (1961).

      

     Chapter 3: Nationalism and the Czech and German forms of Christianity

    Literature:

    Kořalka, Jiří. Tschechen und Deutschland im langen 19. Jahrhundert. Dresden: Thelem (2018).

    Prinz, Friedrich. Böhmen und Mähren. Berlin: Siedler (1993). (Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas).

    Prinz, Friedrich. Geschichte Böhmens 1848 – 1948. München: Langen – Müller (1988).

    Urban, Otto. Die tschechische Gesellschaft 1848 - 1918. I. - II. Wien: Böhlau (1994).

    Plaschka, Richard Georg. Einleitung. In: Die tschechische Gesellschaft 1848 - 1918. I. Wien: Böhlau (1994), s. 15–28.

    Polišenský, Josef V. Aristocrats and the Crowd in the Revolutionary Year 1848. A Contribution to the History of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Albany: State University of New York Press (1980).

    Winter, Eduard. Romantismus, Restauration und Frühliberalismus im österreichischen Vormärz, Wien: Europa Verlag (1968).

    Winter, Eduard. Frühliberalismus in der Donaumonarchie. Religiöse, nationale und wissenschaftliche Strömungen von 1790–1868, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag (1968).

    Winter, Eduard. Revolution, Neuabsolutismus und Liberalismus in der Donaumonarchie, Wien: Europa Verlag (1969).

    Winter, Eduard. Ketzerschicksale. Düsseldorf, Albatros Verlag (2002), s. 292 – 402.

    Lexikon:

    Gründler, Johannes. Lexikon der Christlichen Kirchen und Sekten I., II.  Wien – Freiburg - Basel: Herder (1961).

      

     Chapter 4: Jan Hus and the Hussite movement in the Czech national consciousness during the 19^th century

    Literature:

    Brock, Peter – Skilling, H. Gordon (edd.). The Czech Renacence of the Nineteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (1970).

    Fudge, Thomas A. The State of Hussite Historiography. Mediaevistik, Vol. 7 (1994), pp. 93-117.

    Pynsent, Robert B. - Kolankiewicz,  George - Winters, Stanley B. (edd.). T. G. Masaryk (1850-1937): Vol. 1. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (1990). Pp. 88-113.

    Kořalka, Jiří. František Palacký (1798 - 1876): der Historiker der Tschechen im österreichischen Vielvölkerstaat. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (2007).

    Kořalka, Jiří. Historiography of the Countries of Eastern Europe: Czechoslovakia. In: The American Historical Review, Volume 97, Issue 4, October 1992, Pages 1026–1040.

    Skilling, Harold G. T. G. Masaryk. Basingstoke: Macmillan (1994).

    Schwarz, Karl W. Von Mathesius bis Masaryk: Über den Protestantismus in den böhmischen Ländern zwischen Asch/Aš und Teschen/Těšín/Cieszyn. Prag: Karolinum (2019).

    Masaryk, Tomáš G. The Meaning of Czech History. Edited and with an introduction by René Wellek. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press (1974).

      

     Chapter 5: The two motives of the development of Czech national identity at the end of the 19^th century

    Literature:

    Kavka, František - Petráň, Josef (edited). History of Charles University 2. (1802-1990). Prague: Karolinum (2001).

    Reznikow, Stéphane. Francophilie et identité tchèque (1848-1914). Paris : Honore Champion (2002).

      

     Chapter 6: The Roman Catholic Church

    Literature:

     Winter, Eduard. Tausend Jahre Geisteskampf im Sudetenraum. Das religiöse Ringen zweier Völker. München: Aufstieg Verlag (1970).

    Pánek, Jaroslav - Tůma, Oldřich (ed.). A History of the Czech Lands. Praha: Karolinum (2009).

    Černušák, Tomáš et al. The Papacy and the Czech Lands. A History of Mutual Relations. Rome-Prague:  Institute of History - Instituto Storico Ceco di Roma (2016), Pp. 209-266.

      

     Chapter 7: The end of the 19^th century and Catholic modernism

    Literature:

    Hofrichter, Peter. Modernismus in Österreich, Böhmen und Möhren. In: Der Modernismus. Beiträge zu seiner Erforschung, Wien: Styria, (1974), Pp. 175-197.

    Weiss, Otto. Modernismus oder Modernismen. Anmerkungen zur heutigen Modernismusdiskussion. In: Živý odkaz modernismu, Z. Kučera, J. Kořalka, J. B. Lášek (edd.), Brno: L. Marek (2003).

    Weiss, Otto. Aufklärung – Modernismus – Postmoderne. Das Ringen der katholischen Theologie um eine zeitgemäße Glaubensverantwortung. Regensburg: Pustet (2017).

    Černušák, Tomáš et al. The Papacy and the Czech Lands. A History of Mutual Relations. Rome-Prague:  Institute of History - Instituto Storico Ceco di Roma (2016), Pp. 233-266.

    Fasora, Lukas – Hanus, Jiri – Malir, Jiri (edd.). Secularization and the Working Class: The Czech Lands and Central Europe in the 19th Century. Eugene (Oregon): Wipf and Stock Publishers (2011).

     

     Chapter 8: Germans in the Roman Catholic Church in the Czech lands

    Literature:

    Černušák, Tomáš et al. The Papacy and the Czech Lands. A History of Mutual Relations. Rome-Prague:  Institute of History - Instituto Storico Ceco di Roma (2016), Pp. 209-266.

    Winter, Eduard. Tausend Jahre Geisteskampf im Sudetenraum. Das religiöse Ringen zweier Völker. München: Aufstieg Verlag (1970).

    Winter, Eduard. Romantismus, Restauration und Frühliberalismus im österreichischen Vormärz, Wien: Europa Verlag (1968).

    Winter, Eduard. Frühliberalismus in der Donaumonarchie. Religiöse, nationale und wissenschaftliche Strömungen von 1790–1868, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag (1968).

    Winter, Eduard. Revolution, Neuabsolutismus und Liberalismus in der Donaumonarchie, Wien: Europa Verlag (1969).

    Winter, Eduard. Ketzerschicksale. Düsseldorf, Albatros Verlag (2002), s. 292 – 402.

     

    Old Catholic Church

    Conzemius, Victor. Katholizismus ohne Rom. Die Altkatholische Kirchengemeinschaft. Zürich Einsiedeln Köln: Benziger (1969). 

    Flügel, Christian. Die Utrechter Union und die Geschichte ihrer Kirchen; Norderstedt: Verlag Books on Demand (2006).

    Küry, Urs. Die Altkatholische Kirche. Ihre Geschichte, ihre Lehre, ihr Anliegen. Frankfurt am Main: Evangelisches Verlagswerk (1982).

    Halama, Christian. Altkatholiken in Österreich. Geschichte und Bestandsaufnahme. Wien Köln Weimar: Böhlau (2008).

    Historical Atlas:

    Atlas zur Kirchengeschichte. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder (2004), p. 111.

      

     Chapter 9: Lutherans and Reformists

    Literature:

    Říčan, Rudolf. Das Reich Gottes in den böhmischen Ländern. Geschichte des tschechischen Protestantismus. Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk (1957).

    Reingrabner, Gustav. Protestanten in Österreich. Geschichte und Dokumentation. Wien: Böhlau (1981).

    Schwarz, Karl W. Von Mathesius bis Masaryk: Über den Protestantismus in den böhmischen Ländern zwischen Asch/Aš und Teschen/Těšín/Cieszyn. Prag: Karolinum (2019).

    Kaplan, Benjamin J. Divided by Faith. Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (2007).

    Brock, Peter – Skilling, H. Gordon (edd.). The Czech Renacence of the Nineteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press (1970).

    Lexikon:

    Gründler, Johannes. Lexikon der Christlichen Kirchen und Sekten I., II.  Wien – Freiburg - Basel: Herder (1961).

  • Select activity Reflection and discussion:

    

    Reflection and discussion: Buch

    Chapter 1: The roots of the situation of Christianity in the Czech lands at the beginning of the 19^th century

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. 1781 and the limitation of the Roman Catholic Church judicial system in the country.

    2. The 1781 Patent of Toleration and the anti-Reformation denominational model of only one official denomination.

     

     Chapter 2: Nationalism as part of the history of 19^th century Christianity in the Czech lands

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. Contrast theory (on the origin of nationalism). Primordialism.

    2. Czechs and the German culture and language.

     

     Chapter 3: Nationalism and the Czech and German forms of Christianity

    Topics for the reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. The development of Christianity in 19^th century Czech lands in the context of the National Revival process and the coexistence of Czechs and Germans in the country.

    2. The activities of Christian denominations in the fight for civil liberties and a more just social order.

     

     Chapter 4: Jan Hus and the Hussite movement in the Czech national consciousness during the 19^th century

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. Hus, Žižka, and the rise and development of Czech political liberalism in the 19^th century.

    2. Appeals for a review of the trial of Hus in the 19^th century and at the beginning of the 20th century.

     

     Chapter 5: The two motives of the development of Czech national identity at the end of the 19^th century  

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. New attitudes to the popularization of science in the late 19^th century Czech lands

    2. The expectations of Czech Francophiles towards France.

     

     Chapter 6: The Roman Catholic Church  

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. Central Europe as a space for Slavic national life and the Roman Catholic Church in the late 19^th century.

    2. Political Catholicism in the late 19^th century Czech lands.

     

     Chapter 7: The end of the 19^th century and Catholic modernism

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. ThDr. PhDr. František Loskot and the study of the history of the Czech and European reformation.

    2. Catholic modernism and the reforms of the Roman Catholic Church in the 19^th century.

     

     Chapter 8: Germans in the Roman Catholic Church in the Czech lands

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. Czech-German associations in the Roman Catholic Church before the year 1848 and after it.

    2. The Christian social movement in the Hapsburg Monarchy.

     

     Chapter 9: Lutherans and Reformists

    Topics for reading, reflection, and discussion:

    1. The School Law of May 1868 and the Evangelical churches’ struggle for their own schools.

    2. The connection of Czech and European ideological influences in the life of 19^th century Evangelical churches in the Czech lands.

     

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