ll councils to assemble and the Tridentine canonsto become the lifeblood of a reborn Catholicism. "The Catholic Reformation," pp. 1-4. TWO APPROACHES TO THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION The concept of the Counter-Reformation as essentially `reactionary'and backward-looking has tended to obscure, and certainly to obstruct, anyattempt to synthesise the many ways in which it was, in effect, theevolutionary adaptation of the Catholic religion and of the CatholicChurch to new forces both in the spiritual and in the material order. Theconcept of `baroque' has only partial application here and does not coverenough ground to serve as a complete expression of the new correlationbetween Catholicism and the post-medieval world. On the other hand, therehas been an insufficient liaison between the historians of the Chruch andthe historians of religion -- between the ecclesiastical historians properand all those authors who in the last fifty years or so have done so muchto explore, map nd illuminate something that for a Christian believer, isbasic to the inner life of the Church, and should surely therefore bebasic to Church history, namely the history of spirituality -- devotion,prayer, mysticism. In this there may lie the way to a new and perhaps more fruitfulmode of ecclesiastical history -- the two aspects representing a kind ofmysterious body-soul relationship within the Church....
