The Stripping of the Altars

Eamon Duffy. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580, Second Edition. (Yale University Press: 1992).

Examples of medieval traditions: Corpus Cristi processions, St. Katherine, St. Clement’s (13).
It was believed that blessed candlemas candles protect during thunder storms and against spirits that afflict with sickness and bad weather (hail) (17).
Simple piety like burning a candle before our Lady could be saving (16). [This is profound. The action is intrinsically linked to the inner disposition. No dichotomy here.]
It was believed witches could pervert holy things to evil ends (18).
Candlemas processions enacted Mary’s journey up to Jerusalem and her offering (19). [We have to embody, retell, reenact what we seek to memorialize and socialize. Modern rational reducing mind hates this, wants to abstract everything.]
Lay people will find a way to internalize and participate in liturgy (20-21). It was modernist assumptions that went mad with “active participation.” This is parochial and condescending.
Was the Reformation ultimately a dumb modernist leveling of society? Are we all midwit scholars? We completely discount the full-body, five-sense reality of experience for a reductionistic, exclusively “rational” focus. People understood religion very deeply in the Middle Ages (35).
Examples of processions and bonfires on pp. 38-39. Fasts found on page 41.
Feast and Sunday pattern: fast sundown Saturday night til after Mass; sing Matins, go to Mass, then Evensong Sunday night (42).
The Lady Fast: whatever day Lady Day falls on: fast on that weekday throughout the year (41).
Cisio-Janus was a mnemonic device to remember the major feasts (49).
Suppression of plays by the Protestants was disastrous for lay understanding. Shows again the stupidity of egalitarian rational reductionism (68).
Rogationtide processions were meant to drive out evil spirits that created division and caused sickness and to bring good weather and fertile fields (136).
The authorities were mad that parishioners had “superstition” of not doing things on saint’s days. The Reformation ripped it all up for profit (162).
Rituals to secure saintly intercessions: candles, fasting, feast days (179, 183). Solidarity with saints via suffering on page 180.
The Reformation was a modernist redirecting of resources away from religion to business and elites (191).
St. Walstan: how else would something in a flesh-and-blood world work than the cult of the saints? Striking example: saints take on suffering but dole out mercy. This is the path of true strength (203).
Not totally important who really composed these old prayers or stories; it’s latent, unexamined modernism which causes us to doubt it. Like people not believing the Bible unless corroborated by archaeology (238).
Charlemagne legend and prayer:“Omnipotens + Dominus + Christus”; incantatory aspect of the Names of God (274). [These “spells” are pointing to the deeper reality behind the words. We see then that the Protestant issue with them was not an issue with their non-Christianness but with their non-modernness.]
Reformers hated Rogationtide prayers and Gospels that were read to the fields for fertility (279).
Spirits were understood to be more active in the air during storms. There are valuable prayers used with candlemass candles and holy water and INRI for use during storms (282-283).
Malleus Maleficarum draws on St. Thomas to legitimate “magical practices” (285).
Social amity of Catholicism: the experience of it is a difference of degree, not kind (298).
The king and Cromwell and Latimer slyly introduced support for radicals just like today. Top-down subversion always (389, 407).
Reformation/Modernism: religious practices “didactic and symbolic” rather than “apotropaic” (394). Key difference might have been nominalism: only what the mind believes matters. No objective enchantment. This was affirmed in the Church of England’s first convocations (the Ten Articles) (394).
Rationalism always goes hand in hand with big business and slavery to productivity: immediately they started abolishing holy days and permitting work on them (394).
The Reformers sought to debunk shrines and images much like the New Atheists (403, 409).
The whole thrust of the reform is the destruction of objective spiritual power, which is defined away as superstition or magic (411).
The core idea of Nominalism—Protestantism—Enlightenment Rationalism is that things are the assemblage of elements and their unities are arbitrary. We could’ve classified everything differently. In Protestantism things lose their intrinsic power and only have what significance the mind gives them. “It doesn’t have power. Your mind/belief gives it power.” This is dis-enchantment. Apotropaic power is denied: it’s symbolic/didactic ONLY! It’s all in the mind. Eventually the Enlightenment turns the mind into nothing but bouncing atoms as well.
It was believed the tolling of a consecrated bell routed evil spirits (444).
It was mostly the sacramental, magical aspect that the Reformation targeted (468).
The removal of the cult of the dead may be a reason genealogy has become so obscure. Only religions like Mormonism that force remembrance seem to care (cf. 494). The reformation was a movement toward a sole focus on the new, the now only.
The Reformers even demonically mocked the dead (495). This can be seen as a movement toward individualism.
Cardinal Pole understood that it was in doing and being, in ritual, that man entered into mysteries, not chiefly through rational apprehension or disputation (530-2).
The profanity of Protestantism was evident in the Elizabethan visitations that were making sure sacred objects were destroyed, defaced, or put to profane use—turned into benches, etc. (573)