Existentialism does not solve the unsolvable, and it cannot destroy reason or logic. This week in religion history: The existentialist view of Christianity
Canadian Press | 13/05/05 | Last Updated: 13/05/04 3:48 PM ET
Christian existentialist writer Søren Kierkegaard began his existence 200 years ago this week.
May 5614: The Persians seized Jerusalem and captured the True Holy Cross that St. Helena had placed there after finding it. It was years before the Christians recaptured it.
1045: Pope Gregory VI was elected the 148th successor of Peter. He was credited with forming the first pontifical army.
1474: The cornerstone was laid in Oxford, England for Magdalen College, named after Mary Magdalene. It’s part of Oxford University.
1553: Erasmus Alberus, German theologian, reformer, humanist and poet, who helped lead Protestant Reformation, died. The German Protestant hymnal retains several of his hymns.
1813: Christian existentialist writer Søren Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. (Happy 200th birthday!) Regarding his approach to religion, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states:
For Kierkegaard Christian faith is not a matter of regurgitating church dogma. It is a matter of individual subjective passion, which cannot be mediated by the clergy or by human artefacts. Faith is the most important task to be achieved by a human being, because only on the basis of faith does an individual have a chance to become a true self. This self is the life-work which God judges for eternity.
Christian dogma, according to Kierkegaard, embodies paradoxes which are offensive to reason. The central paradox is the assertion that the eternal, infinite, transcendent God simultaneously became incarnated as a temporal, finite, human being (Jesus). There are two possible attitudes we can adopt to this assertion, viz. we can have faith, or we can take offense. What we cannot do, according to Kierkegaard, is believe by virtue of reason. If we choose faith we must suspend our reason in order to believe in something higher than reason. In fact we must believe by virtue of the absurd.
Moses with the Ten Commandments
2001: Pope John Paul II became the first pope to visit Syria, where President Bashar Assad asked him to take the Arabs’ side in their dispute with Israel, referring to what Assad described as Jewish persecution of Jesus Christ.
May 61491 BC: Moses began his ascent up Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments around this date, according to some accounts.
878: The Christian king of Wessex, Alfred the Great, defeated the pagan Viking warlord Guthrum at the Battle of Ethandun, ensuring that Christianity would survive in England.
1210: The magnificent cathedral in Rheims in France was destroyed by fire. Arson was suspected but never proven. Exactly one year later, in 1211, the cornerstone was laid for the complete reconstruction of the cathedral.
1312: Pope Clement V closed the Council of Vienne in which the Church abolished the Knights Templar and ordered that all their property be turned over to the Hospitallers who were the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.
1527: Spanish and German Imperial troops sacked Rome, ending the Renaissance.
1536: King Henry VIII, ordered Bibles be placed in every church in England.
1542: St. Francis Xavier arrived in Goa, India in his quest to bring the faith to the Far East.
1638: Cornelius Jansen, Dutch Roman Catholic theologian and founder of Jansenism, died. He was imbued with the idea of reforming Christian life along the lines of a return to St. Augustine. Jansenism’s fundamental purpose was a return of people to greater personal holiness, hence the mystical turn of Jansenist writings.
1708: Francois de Laval, the first bishop of New France, died at 85.
1967: Zakir Hussain was elected first Muslim president of predominantly Hindu India.
Pope John Paul II with Syrian Grand Mufti Sheikh Ahmed Kaftaro in a Damascus mosque in 2001.
2001: Pope John Paul II prayed at a mosque in Damascus, Syria. He was the first leader of the Catholic Church to pray in an Islamic house of worship.
May 71274: During the Council of Lyons in France, the Eastern and Western churches were briefly reconciled.
1355: 1,200 Jews in Toledo, Spain, were killed by Count Henry of Trastamara.
1574: Pope Innocent X was born Giambattista Pamfili in Rome. He advised the Russian czar to emancipate the serfs and disapproved of the Treaty of Westphalia because it put a large number of cities under Protestant control.
2012: William Swinimer’s father — not wanting him to participate in discussions about religious tolerance and freedom of expression that his school was having — had him sent home. Swinimer had just (briefly) returned to classes following a one week suspension for repeatedly wearing a pro-Jesus T-shirt that his school had deemed potentially offensive. The local school board ruled during his suspension that Swinimer should be allowed to wear the shirt.
May 8615: Pope St. Boniface IV, who sanctioned moral and material improvements for the lower clergy, died. He also consecrated the pagan temple of Agrippa, called the Pantheon, to the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints, thus instituting All Saints Day on Nov. 1.
1521: Roman Catholic Jesuit priest St. Peter Canisius, known as the Hammer of Protestantism, was born in Nijmegen, Holland. He led the Counter-Reformation in German lands.
May 91092: Lincoln Cathedral in England was consecrated.
1265: The Italian poet Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy, was born.
1460: Witch burnings were held in the courtyard of the episcopal palace in Utrecht in the Netherlands.
1939: The Roman Catholic Church beatified for the first time an aboriginal American, Kateri Tekakwitha.
1969: A revised Roman Catholic calendar of church feasts dropped more than 200 saints and added non-European saints.
2009: Pope Benedict XVI expressed regret over a speech he made three years earlier that many Muslims deemed insulting to the Prophet Muhammad.
May 101267: The Catholic church in Vienna ordered all Jews to wear a distinctive garb.
1278: Jews in England were imprisoned on charges of coining.
1525: Church reformer John Pistorius was arrested in The Hague, Netherlands.
1559: Scottish Protestants under John Knox rose up against the regent Mary of Guise, mother of Mary, Queen of Scots.
1886: German neo-Orthodox theologian and author Karl Barth was born in Basel, Switzerland.
1908: The first Mother’s Day observance took place during church services in Grafton, W. Va., and Philadelphia.
1992: The Bible Land Museum opened in Jerusalem.
A scene from Tel Aviv.
May 111189: Emperor Frederik I Barbarossa and 100,000 crusaders left Regensburg in southern Germany for the Holy Land.
1610: Italian Matteo Ricci, a renowned Christian missionary in China, died.
1676: Beggars were told that they needed permission from priests to beg in Montreal and Quebec City.
1816: The American Bible Society was founded in New York.
1921: Tel Aviv was declared the first all-Jewish municipality.
1960: Israeli security forces captured Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Argentina. An SS lieutenant-colonel, he was chief of the Jewish office of the Gestapo during the Second World War and implemented the Final Solution which aimed at the total extermination of European Jewry. He was put on trial in Israel, found guilty and executed in 1962, the only time Israel has carried out a death sentence.
2010: In his most thorough admission of the church’s guilt in the clerical sex abuse scandal, Pope Benedict XVI said the greatest persecution of the institution “is born from the sins within the church,” and not from a campaign by outsiders.
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