Was there a second session of the Council of Nicaea? To that question – first posed and affirmatively answered by Otto Seeck – there have been numerous responses, mostly in the form of bald assertions of one kind or another. Occasionally there have been lengthier discussions of the matter, but with no emerging consensus, and it is still the case that opposite views continue to surface in discussions of the aftermath of the first ecumenical council. Furthermore, among the statements accepting or rejecting the fact of a second session, it is regularly unclear whether the problem at issue is that of a reassembly at Nicaea of all the bishops who had gathered there in 325, a reassembly of these same bishops at some other unspecified place, or a reunion somewhere of only some of those who had participated at the major gathering.

‘We have been placed in such a position’, wrote Pope Gregory VII at the beginning of his pontificate, ‘that we are compelled willy-nilly to announce truth and justice to all peoples, especially Christians, according to the Word of the Lord, “Cry aloud and do not cease; lift up your voice like a trumpet and announce to my people their sins” (Isaiah lviii. I), and elsewhere, “If you do not announce to the evildoer his iniquity, I shall seek his soul at your hand” (Ezekiel iii. 18). Again the prophet says, “Cursed be the man who holds back his sword from blood” (Jeremiah xlviii. 10); that is, the word of preaching from the rebuke of carnal men.’ These prophetic texts recur throughout the Register of Gregory VII, defining that obligation of rebuking evil-doers which the pope considered to be a primary duty of his office. Gregory VII was the most energetic propagandist of his reforming programme for the extirpation of simony and clerical marriage. His letters were intended to provide their recipients with anctoritates demonstrating the righteousness of the Gregorian cause.

As the fieriest champion of the Radical Reformation Thomas Müntzer remains an enigma. A spate of recent works has greatly increased our knowledge of the development of his theology and of his contribution to the Peasants' War in central Germany, but they have failed to resolve the precise relationship between his theological convictions and his involvement in social revolution. A profusion of Marxist writings, above all from East Germany, has stressed the objective function of his religious radicalism in promoting and legitimating mass rebellion in Saxony and Thuringia at the expense of its subjective intention, whilst the bulk of Western scholarship, in particular Walter Elliger's massive though scarcely definitive biography, has emphasised the primacy of his theological vision, to which social and political concerns were at best subordinate or tangential.

The century from the calling of the Council of Trent to the conclusion of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle stands out as one of the most creative in the pastoral history of Christian Europe. The great number of new apostolic orders, the devotional flowering in France which tamed and domesticated the mysticism of Spain for everyman, the renovation of the parish and the priestly life aspired to by Carlo Borromeo, Pierre Berulle and Vincent de Paul are all aspects of a transformation which is the spiritual face of the baroque. The practice of confession stands somewhere near the centre of this transformation. From an annual social rite concerned essentially with the restoration of peace and the guaranteeing of restitution, it became a monthly or even weekly private rite of reconciliation of the penitent with God. It became, too, the focus for the direction of souls which was now seen, supremely in the work of Francis de Sales, as a central part of the work of the priest. The Salesian tradition was to dominate the flood of devotional manuals published in every European language in the seventeenth century, and in it the practice of confession was developed beyond the juridical and canonical framework of Trent, and turned into a subtle and highly personal instrument of spiritual direction.

It has been maintained by E. R. Norman that:

…the social attitudes of the Church have derived from the surrounding intellectual and political culture, and not, as Christians themselves always seem to assume, from theological learning. The theologians have always managed to reinterpret their sources in ways which have somehow made their version of Christianity correspond almost exactly to the values of their class and generation. Thus theological scholarship justified the structural social obligations of the eighteenth century world; thus it provided a Christian basis for Political Economy… [my italics]

‘Out with history,’ Kierkegaard wrote in an 1848 journal entry, ‘in with the situation of contemporaneity’, he continued. ‘This is the criterion: as I judge anything contemporaneously, so am I judged. All this chatter afterwards is an illusion.’ In this entry, as in many others, Kierkegaard put forward his own concept of ‘contemporaneity’, while simultaneously levelling criticism both at the historicist impulse in nineteenth-century philosophy and theology and his contemporaries in Copenhagen. In numerous other entries he condemns his intellectual colleagues for envying his genius, failing to respect his worth and for subjecting him to endless abuse.