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Astronomical unit | History | History
The book On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, which is ascribed to Aristarchus, says the distance to the Sun is 18 to 20 times the distance to the Moon, whereas the true ratio is about . The latter estimate was based on the angle between the half-moon and the Sun, which he estimated as (the true value being close to ). Depending on the distance that Albert van Helden assumes Aristarchus used for the distance to the Moon, his calculated distance to the Sun would fall between and Earth radii.
Hipparchus gave an estimate of the distance of Earth from the Sun, quoted by Pappus as equal to 490 Earth radii. According to the conjectural reconstructions of Noel Swerdlow and G. J. Toomer, this was derived from his assumption of a "least perceptible" solar parallax of .
A Chinese mathematical treatise, the Zhoubi Suanjing (), shows how the distance to the Sun can be computed geometrically, using the different lengths of the noontime shadows observed at three places li apart and the assumption that Earth is flat.
According to Eusebius in the Praeparatio evangelica (Book XV, Chapter 53), Eratosthenes found the distance to the Sun to be "σταδιων μυριαδας τετρακοσιας και οκτωκισμυριας" (literally myriads ten hundreds and eighty thousands of stadia, where in the Greek text the numerals myriads, ten hundreds and eighty thousands are all accusative plural, while stadia is the genitive plural of stadion.) This has been translated either as () stadia (1903 translation by Edwin Hamilton Gifford), or as () stadia (edition of Édouard des Places, dated 1974–1991). Using the Greek stadium of 185 to 190 metres, the former translation comes to to , which is far too low, whereas the second translation comes to 148.7 to 152.8 billion metres (accurate within 2%).
Distance to the Sunestimated by Estimate In auPercentage error Solarparallax Earthradii Aristarchus – – – −98.9% to −98% Archimedes −57.4% Hipparchus −97.9% Posidonius −57.4% Ptolemy 2′ 50″ −94.8% Godefroy Wendelin −40.3% Jeremiah Horrocks −40.3% Christiaan Huygens +6.8% Cassini & Richer −7.5% Flamsteed −7.5% Jérôme Lalande +2.3% Simon Newcomb −0.06% Arthur Hinks −0.15% H. Spencer Jones +0.05% Modern astronomy
In the 2nd century CE, Ptolemy estimated the mean distance of the Sun as times Earth's radius. To determine this value, Ptolemy started by measuring the Moon's parallax, finding what amounted to a horizontal lunar parallax of 1° 26′, which was much too large. He then derived a maximum lunar distance of Earth radii. Because of cancelling errors in his parallax figure, his theory of the Moon's orbit, and other factors, this figure was approximately correct.van Helden 1985, pp. 16–19.Ptolemy's Almagest, translated and annotated by G. J. Toomer, London: Duckworth, 1984, p. 251. . He then measured the apparent sizes of the Sun and the Moon and concluded that the apparent diameter of the Sun was equal to the apparent diameter of the Moon at the Moon's greatest distance, and from records of lunar eclipses, he estimated this apparent diameter, as well as the apparent diameter of the shadow cone of Earth traversed by the Moon during a lunar eclipse. Given these data, the distance of the Sun from Earth can be trigonometrically computed to be Earth radii. This gives a ratio of solar to lunar distance of approximately 19, matching Aristarchus's figure. Although Ptolemy's procedure is theoretically workable, it is very sensitive to small changes in the data, so much so that changing a measurement by a few per cent can make the solar distance infinite.
After Greek astronomy was transmitted to the medieval Islamic world, astronomers made some changes to Ptolemy's cosmological model, but did not greatly change his estimate of the Earth–Sun distance. For example, in his introduction to Ptolemaic astronomy, al-Farghānī gave a mean solar distance of Earth radii, whereas in his zij, al-Battānī used a mean solar distance of Earth radii. Subsequent astronomers, such as al-Bīrūnī, used similar values.van Helden 1985, pp. 29–33. Later in Europe, Copernicus and Tycho Brahe also used comparable figures ( and Earth radii), and so Ptolemy's approximate Earth–Sun distance survived through the 16th century.van Helden 1985, pp. 41–53.
Johannes Kepler was the first to realize that Ptolemy's estimate must be significantly too low (according to Kepler, at least by a factor of three) in his Rudolphine Tables (1627). Kepler's laws of planetary motion allowed astronomers to calculate the relative distances of the planets from the Sun, and rekindled interest in measuring the absolute value for Earth (which could then be applied to the other planets). The invention of the telescope allowed far more accurate measurements of angles than is possible with the naked eye. Flemish astronomer Godefroy Wendelin repeated Aristarchus’ measurements in 1635, and found that Ptolemy's value was too low by a factor of at least eleven.
A somewhat more accurate estimate can be obtained by observing the transit of Venus. – provides an extended historical discussion of the transit of Venus method. By measuring the transit in two different locations, one can accurately calculate the parallax of Venus and from the relative distance of Earth and Venus from the Sun, the solar parallax (which cannot be measured directly due to the brightness of the Sun). Jeremiah Horrocks had attempted to produce an estimate based on his observation of the 1639 transit (published in 1662), giving a solar parallax of , similar to Wendelin's figure. The solar parallax is related to the Earth–Sun distance as measured in Earth radii by
The smaller the solar parallax, the greater the distance between the Sun and Earth: a solar parallax of is equivalent to an Earth–Sun distance of Earth radii.
Christiaan Huygens believed that the distance was even greater: by comparing the apparent sizes of Venus and Mars, he estimated a value of about Earth radii, equivalent to a solar parallax of . Although Huygens' estimate is remarkably close to modern values, it is often discounted by historians of astronomy because of the many unproven (and incorrect) assumptions he had to make for his method to work; the accuracy of his value seems to be based more on luck than good measurement, with his various errors cancelling each other out.
thumb|right|Transits of Venus across the face of the Sun were, for a long time, the best method of measuring the astronomical unit, despite the difficulties (here, the so-called "black drop effect") and the rarity of observations.
Jean Richer and Giovanni Domenico Cassini measured the parallax of Mars between Paris and Cayenne in French Guiana when Mars was at its closest to Earth in 1672. They arrived at a figure for the solar parallax of , equivalent to an Earth–Sun distance of about Earth radii. They were also the first astronomers to have access to an accurate and reliable value for the radius of Earth, which had been measured by their colleague Jean Picard in 1669 as toises. This same year saw another estimate for the astronomical unit by John Flamsteed, which accomplished it alone by measuring the martian diurnal parallax.Van Helden, A. (2010). Measuring the universe: cosmic dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley. University of Chicago Press. Ch. 12. Another colleague, Ole Rømer, discovered the finite speed of light in 1676: the speed was so great that it was usually quoted as the time required for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth, or "light time per unit distance", a convention that is still followed by astronomers today.
A better method for observing Venus transits was devised by James Gregory and published in his Optica Promata (1663). It was strongly advocated by Edmond Halley and was applied to the transits of Venus observed in 1761 and 1769, and then again in 1874 and 1882. Transits of Venus occur in pairs, but less than one pair every century, and observing the transits in 1761 and 1769 was an unprecedented international scientific operation including observations by James Cook and Charles Green from Tahiti. Despite the Seven Years' War, dozens of astronomers were dispatched to observing points around the world at great expense and personal danger: several of them died in the endeavour. The various results were collated by Jérôme Lalande to give a figure for the solar parallax of . Karl Rudolph Powalky had made an estimate of in 1864.
Date Method A/Gm Uncertainty 1895 aberration 1941 parallax 1964 radar 1976 telemetry 2009 telemetry
Another method involved determining the constant of aberration. Simon Newcomb gave great weight to this method when deriving his widely accepted value of for the solar parallax (close to the modern value of ), although Newcomb also used data from the transits of Venus. Newcomb also collaborated with A. A. Michelson to measure the speed of light with Earth-based equipment; combined with the constant of aberration (which is related to the light time per unit distance), this gave the first direct measurement of the Earth–Sun distance in metres. Newcomb's value for the solar parallax (and for the constant of aberration and the Gaussian gravitational constant) were incorporated into the first international system of astronomical constants in 1896,Conférence internationale des étoiles fondamentales, Paris, 18–21 May 1896 which remained in place for the calculation of ephemerides until 1964. The name "astronomical unit" appears first to have been used in 1903."astronomical unit", Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary
The discovery of the near-Earth asteroid 433 Eros and its passage near Earth in 1900–1901 allowed a considerable improvement in parallax measurement. Another international project to measure the parallax of 433 Eros was undertaken in 1930–1931.
Direct radar measurements of the distances to Venus and Mars became available in the early 1960s. Along with improved measurements of the speed of light, these showed that Newcomb's values for the solar parallax and the constant of aberration were inconsistent with one another. |
Astronomical unit | Developments | Developments
thumb|The astronomical unit is used as the baseline of the triangle to measure stellar parallaxes (distances in the image are not to scale)
The unit distance (the value of the astronomical unit in metres) can be expressed in terms of other astronomical constants:
where is the Newtonian constant of gravitation, is the solar mass, is the numerical value of Gaussian gravitational constant and is the time period of one day.
The Sun is constantly losing mass by radiating away energy, so the orbits of the planets are steadily expanding outward from the Sun. This has led to calls to abandon the astronomical unit as a unit of measurement.
As the speed of light has an exact defined value in SI units and the Gaussian gravitational constant is fixed in the astronomical system of units, measuring the light time per unit distance is exactly equivalent to measuring the product × in SI units. Hence, it is possible to construct ephemerides entirely in SI units, which is increasingly becoming the norm.
A 2004 analysis of radiometric measurements in the inner Solar System suggested that the secular increase in the unit distance was much larger than can be accounted for by solar radiation, + metres per century.
The measurements of the secular variations of the astronomical unit are not confirmed by other authors and are quite controversial.
Furthermore, since 2010, the astronomical unit has not been estimated by the planetary ephemerides. |
Astronomical unit | Examples | Examples
The following table contains some distances given in astronomical units. It includes some examples with distances that are normally not given in astronomical units, because they are either too short or far too long. Distances normally change over time. Examples are listed by increasing distance.
Object or length Length ordistancein au Range Comment and reference point Refs Light-second — Distance light travels in one second — Lunar distance — Average distance from Earth (which the Apollo missions took about 3 days to travel) —Solar radius — Radius of the Sun (, , a hundred times the radius of Earth or ten times the average radius of Jupiter) — Light-minute — Distance light travels in one minute — Mercury — Average distance from the Sun — Venus — Average distance from the Sun —Earth —Average distance of Earth's orbit from the Sun (sunlight travels for 8 minutes and 19 seconds before reaching Earth) — Mars — Average distance from the Sun — Jupiter — Average distance from the Sun — Light-hour — Distance light travels in one hour — Saturn — Average distance from the Sun — Uranus — Average distance from the Sun — Kuiper belt — Inner edge begins at approximately 30 au Neptune — Average distance from the Sun — Eris — Average distance from the Sun —Voyager 2 — Distance from the Sun in October 2024 Voyager Mission Status. Voyager 1 — Distance from the Sun in October 2024 Light-day —Distance light travels in one day — Light-year — Distance light travels in one Julian year (365.25 days) — Oort cloud ± Distance of the outer limit of Oort cloud from the Sun (estimated, corresponds to 1.2 light-years) — Parsec — One parsec. The parsec is defined in terms of the astronomical unit, is used to measure distances beyond the scope of the Solar System and is about 3.26 light-years: 1 pc = 1 au/tan(1″) Proxima Centauri ± 126 Distance to the nearest star to the Solar System — Galactic Centre of the Milky Way — Distance from the Sun to the centre of the Milky Way — Note: Figures in this table are generally rounded estimates, often rough estimates, and may considerably differ from other sources. Table also includes other units of length for comparison. |
Astronomical unit | See also | See also
Orders of magnitude (length) |
Astronomical unit | References | References |
Astronomical unit | Further reading | Further reading
|
Astronomical unit | External links | External links
The IAU and astronomical units, archived 10 Mar 2025
Recommendations concerning Units (HTML version of the IAU Style Manual), archived 16 Feb 2007
Chasing Venus, Observing the Transits of Venus
Transit of Venus
Category:Celestial mechanics
Unit
Category:Units of length |
Astronomical unit | Table of Content | Short description, History of symbol usage, Development of unit definition, Usage and significance, History, Developments, Examples, See also, References, Further reading, External links |
Artist | Short description | 250px|thumb|A painter at work at St Justinian, Wales, 2021
An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The most common usage (in both everyday speech and academic discourse) refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only.
However, the term is also often used in the entertainment business to refer to musicians and other performers. Artiste (French) is a variant used in English in this context, but this use has become rare. The use of the term "artist" to describe writers is valid, but less common, and mostly restricted to contexts such as critics' reviews; "author" is generally used instead. |
Artist | Dictionary definitions | Dictionary definitions
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the older, broader meanings of the word "artist":
A learned person or Master of Arts
One who pursues a practical science, traditionally medicine, astrology, alchemy, chemistry
A follower of a pursuit in which skill comes by study or practice
A follower of a manual art, such as a mechanic
One who makes their craft a fine art
One who cultivates one of the fine arts – traditionally the arts presided over by the muses |
Artist | History of the term | History of the term
thumb|250px|Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Goethe in the Roman Campagna, 1787 – portrait of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a German author known for his works of poetry, drama, and prose, on philosophy, the visual arts, and science
The Greek word , often translated as "art", implies mastery of any sort of craft. The adjectival Latin form of the word, ,Oxford English Dictionary s.v. technic became the source of the English words technique, technology, and technical.
In Greek culture, each of the nine Muses oversaw a different field of human creation:
Calliope (the 'beautiful of speech'): chief of the muses and muse of epic or heroic poetry
Clio (the 'glorious one'): muse of history
Erato (the 'amorous one'): muse of love or erotic poetry, lyrics, and marriage songs
Euterpe (the 'well-pleasing'): muse of music and lyric poetry
Melpomene (the 'chanting one'): muse of tragedy
Polyhymnia or Polymnia (the '[singer] of many hymns'): muse of sacred song, oratory, lyric, singing, and rhetoric
Terpsichore (the '[one who] delights in dance'): muse of choral song and dance
Thalia (the 'blossoming one'): muse of comedy and bucolic poetry
Urania (the 'celestial one'): muse of astronomy
No muse was identified with the visual arts of painting and sculpture. In ancient Greece, sculptors and painters were held in low regard, the work often performed by slaves and mostly regarded as mere manual labour.In Our Time: The Artist BBC Radio 4, TX 28 March 2002
The word art derives from the Latin "" (stem art-), which, although literally defined means "skill method" or "technique", also conveys a connotation of beauty.
During the Middle Ages the word artist already existed in some countries such as Italy, but the meaning was something resembling craftsman, while the word artisan was still unknown. An artist was someone able to do a work better than others, so the skilled excellency was underlined, rather than the activity field. In this period, some "artisanal" products (such as textiles) were much more precious and expensive than paintings or sculptures.
The first division into major and minor arts dates back at least to the works of Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472): De re aedificatoria, De statua, De pictura, which focused on the importance of the intellectual skills of the artist rather than the manual skills (even if in other forms of art there was a project behind).P.Galloni, Il sacro artefice. Mitologie degli artigiani medievali, Laterza, Bari, 1998
With the academies in Europe (second half of 16th century) the gap between fine and applied arts was definitely set.
Many contemporary definitions of "artist" and "art" are highly contingent on culture, resisting aesthetic prescription; in the same way, the features constituting beauty and the beautiful cannot be standardized easily without moving into kitsch. |
Artist | Training and employment | Training and employment
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies many visual artists as either craft artists or fine artists. A craft artist makes handmade functional works of art, such as pottery or clothing. A fine artist makes paintings, illustrations (such as book illustrations or medical illustrations), sculptures, or similar artistic works primarily for their aesthetic value.
The main source of skill for both craft artists and fine artists is long-term repetition and practice. Many fine artists have studied their art form at university, and some have a master's degree in fine arts. Artists may also study on their own or receive on-the-job training from an experienced artist.
The number of available jobs as an artist is increasing more slowly than in other fields. About half of US artists are self-employed. Others work in a variety of industries. For example, a pottery manufacturer will employ craft artists, and book publishers will hire illustrators.
In the US, fine artists have a median income of approximately US$50,000 per year, and craft artists have a median income of approximately US$33,000 per year. This compares to US$61,000 for all art-related fields, including related jobs such as graphic designers, multimedia artists, animators, and fashion designers. Many artists work part-time as artists and hold a second job. |
Artist | See also | See also
Art history
Arts by region
Artist in Residence
Humanities
List of painters by name
List of painters
List of photographers
List of composers
List of sculptors
Mathematics and art
Starving artist
Tattoo artist
Tortured artist |
Artist | References | References |
Artist | Works cited | Works cited
P.Galloni, Il sacro artefice. Mitologie degli artigiani medievali, Laterza, Bari, 1998
C. T. Onions (1991). The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Clarendon Press Oxford. |
Artist | External links | External links
Category:Aesthetics
Category:Art occupations
Category:Artisans
Category:Arts-related lists
Category:Humanities occupations |
Artist | Table of Content | Short description, Dictionary definitions, History of the term, Training and employment, See also, References, Works cited, External links |
Actaeon | Short description | thumb|Diana and Actaeon by Titian (1556–59)
In Greek mythology, Actaeon (; Aktaiōn)He was sometimes called Actaeus (), as in the poetic fragment quoted at Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.4.4: "then [they] killed Actaeus at Zeus's instigation", was the son of the priestly herdsman Aristaeus and Autonoe in Boeotia, and a famous Theban hero. Through his mother he was a member of the ruling House of Cadmus. Like Achilles, in a later generation, he was trained by the centaur Chiron.
He fell to the fatal wrath of Artemis (later his myth was attached to her Roman counterpart Diana), but the surviving details of his transgression vary: "the only certainty is in what Aktaion suffered, his pathos, and what Artemis did: the hunter became the hunted; he was transformed into a stag, and his raging hounds, struck with a 'wolf's frenzy' (Lyssa), tore him apart as they would a stag."Walter Burkert, Homo Necans (1972), translated by Peter Bing (University of California Press) 1983, p 111.
The many depictions both in ancient art and in the Renaissance and post-Renaissance art normally show either the moment of transgression and transformation, or his death by his own hounds. |
Actaeon | Story | Story
thumb|Actaeon, sculpture group in the cascade at Caserta|left
Among others, John Heath has observed, "The unalterable kernel of the tale was a hunter's transformation into a deer and his death in the jaws of his hunting dogs. But authors were free to suggest different motives for his death."Heath, "The Failure of Orpheus", Transactions of the American Philological Association 124 (1994:163-196) p. 194. In the version that was offered by the Hellenistic poet Callimachus,Callimachus, Hymn v. which has become the standard setting, Artemis was bathing in the woodsCallimachus gives no site: a glen in the foothills of Mount Cithaeron near Boeotian Orchomenus, is the site according to Euripides, Bacchae 1290-92, a spring sanctuary near Plataea is specified elsewhere. when the hunter Actaeon stumbled across her, thus seeing her naked. He stopped and stared, amazed at her ravishing beauty. Once seen, Artemis got revenge on Actaeon: she forbade him speech – if he tried to speak, he would be changed into a stag – for the unlucky profanation of her virginity's mystery.
thumb|The Transformation of Actaeon, etching by Jean Mignon, 430 x 574 mm, 1550s?, without its very elaborate frame. Actaeon is shown three times, finally being killed by his hounds.
with frame
Upon hearing the call of his hunting party, he cried out to them and immediately transformed. At this, he fled deep into the woods, and doing so he came upon a pond and, seeing his reflection, groaned. His own hounds then turned upon him and pursued him, not recognizing him. In an endeavour to save himself, he raised his eyes (and would have raised his arms, had he had them) toward Mount Olympus. The gods did not heed his desperation, and he was torn to pieces. An element of the earlier myth made Actaeon the familiar hunting companion of Artemis, no stranger. In an embroidered extension of the myth, the hounds were so upset with their master's death, that Chiron made a statue so lifelike that the hounds thought it was Actaeon.Fragmentary sources for the narrative of Actaeon's hounds are noted in Lamar Ronald Lacy, "Aktaion and a Lost 'Bath of Artemis'" The Journal of Hellenic Studies 110 (1990:26–42) p. 30 note 32, p. 31 note 37.
There are various other versions of his transgression: The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and pseudo-Apollodoran Bibliotheke state that his offense was that he was a rival of Zeus for Semele, his mother's sister,Thus potentially endangering the future birth of Dionysus, had he been successful. Pausanias referred (9.2.3) to a lost poem by Stesichoros also expressing this motif. The progressive destruction of the House of Cadmus to make way for the advent of Dionysus can be followed in the myths of its individual members: Actaeon, Semele, Ino and Melicertes, and Pentheus. whereas in Euripides' Bacchae he has boasted that he is a better hunter than Artemis:This mytheme would link him with Agamemnon and Orion (Lacy 1990).
Look at Actaeon's wretched fate
who by the man-eating hounds he had raised,
was torn apart, better at hunting
than Artemis he had boasted to be, in the meadows.
thumb|right|In François Clouet's Bath of Diana (1558–59) Actaeon's passing on horseback at left and mauling as a stag at right is incidental to the three female nudes.
Further materials, including fragments that belong with the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and at least four Attic tragedies, including a Toxotides of Aeschylus, have been lost.Lacy 1990, emphasizing that the central core is lost, covers the literary fragments, pp 26-27 and copious notes. Diodorus Siculus (4.81.4), in a variant of Actaeon's hubris that has been largely ignored, has it that Actaeon wanted to marry Artemis. Other authors say the hounds were Artemis' own; some lost elaborations of the myth seem to have given them all names and narrated their wanderings after his loss. A number of ancient Greek vases depicting the metamorphosis and death of Actaeon include the goddess Lyssa in the scene, infecting his dogs with rabies and setting them against him.
According to the Latin version of the story told by the Roman OvidOvid, Metamorphoses iii.131; see also pseudo-Apollodorus' Bibliotheke iii. 4 having accidentally seen Diana (Artemis) on Mount Cithaeron while she was bathing, he was changed by her into a stag, and pursued and killed by his fifty hounds. This version also appears in Callimachus' Fifth Hymn, as a mythical parallel to the blinding of Tiresias after he sees Athena bathing.
The literary testimony of Actaeon's myth is largely lost, but Lamar Ronald Lacy,Lacy, "Aktaion and a Lost 'Bath of Artemis'" The Journal of Hellenic Studies 110 (1990:26-42). deconstructing the myth elements in what survives and supplementing it by iconographic evidence in late vase-painting, made a plausible reconstruction of an ancient Actaeon myth that Greek poets may have inherited and subjected to expansion and dismemberment. His reconstruction opposes a too-pat consensus that has an archaic Actaeon aspiring to Semele,Pausanias (ix.2.3) reports that "Stesichorus of Himera says that the goddess cast a deer-skin round Actaeon to make sure that his hounds would kill him, so as to prevent his taking Semele to wife"; the lines of Stesichorus have not survived. a classical Actaeon boasting of his hunting prowess and a Hellenistic Actaeon glimpsing Artemis' bath.Lacy 1990:27f. Lacy identifies the site of Actaeon's transgression as a spring sacred to Artemis at Plataea where Actaeon was a hero archegetes ("hero-founder")Plutarch. Aristeides, 11.3 & 4. The righteous hunter, the companion of Artemis, seeing her bathing naked in the spring, was moved to try to make himself her consort, as Diodorus Siculus noted, and was punished, in part for transgressing the hunter's "ritually enforced deference to Artemis" (Lacy 1990:42). |
Actaeon | Names of dogs | Names of dogs
+List of Actaeon's dogsDogsSourceConsortsSourceApollodorusApollodorus, 3.4.4.OvidOvid's Metamorphoses (Book III, 206–235)HyginusHyginus Fabulae 181ApollodorusOvidHyginusOvidIn this list, Hyginus fails to correctly differentiate between masculine and feminine namesSee the Index nominum in R. J. Tarrant (2004) P. Ovidi Nasonis Metamorphoses, Oxford, pp. 503-534Other authorOvidOther authorAcamas✓Aello (Storm)✓✓Aethon✓Alce (Stout)✓✓Agrius✓Agre (Chaser)✓✓Amarynthus✓Arcena✓Arcas?Arethusa✓Argiodus (Towser)✓✓Argo✓Asbolos (Sooty)✓✓Aura?Balius (Dappled)✓Canace (Barker)✓✓Borax✓Chediaetros*✓Bores✓Cyllo✓Boreas✓Dinomache✓Charops✓Dioxippe✓Corus✓Echione✓Cyllopodes✓Gorgo✓Cyprius?Harpyia (Harpy)✓✓✓Dorceus (Quicksight)✓✓Lachne (Bristle)✓✓Draco✓Lacaena✓Dromas (Racer)✓✓Leaena✓Dromius✓Lycisca (Wolfet)✓✓Echnobas?Lynceste✓Elion?Melanchaetes (Blackmane)✓✓Gnosius?Nape (Wildwood)✓✓Eudromus✓Ocydrome✓Haemon✓Ocypete✓Harpalicus✓Oresitrophos (Rover)✓✓Harpalos (Snap)✓✓Orias✓Hylactor (Babbler)✓✓Oxyrhoe✓Hylaeus (Woodranger)✓✓Poemenis (Shepherdess)✓✓Ichneus✓Sagnos*Ichnobates (Tracer)✓✓Sticte (Spot)✓✓Labros (Wildtooth)✓✓Theriope✓Lacon✓✓Theriphone✓Ladon✓✓Therodamas (Savage)✓✓Laelaps (Hunter)✓✓Therodanapis?Lampus✓Urania✓Leon✓Volatos*✓Leucon (Blanche)✓✓Number1131520Lynceus✓✓Machimus✓Melampus (Blackfoot)✓✓✓Melaneus (Blackcoat)✓✓Obrimus✓Ocydromus✓Ocythous✓Omargus✓Nebrophonos (Killbuck)✓✓Oribasos (Surefoot)✓✓Pachylus✓Pamphagos (Glutton)✓✓Pterelas (Wingfoot)✓✓Spartus✓Stilbon✓Syrus✓Theron (Tempest)✓✓Thoos (Quickfoot)✓✓Tigris (Tiger)✓✓Zephyrus✓Number6222726
thumbnail|Volterra, Italy. Etruscan cinerary urn; Actaeon torn by the dogs of Diana, Volterra. Brooklyn Museum Archives, Goodyear Archival Collection
Notes:
Names of dogs were verified to correspond to the list given in Ovid's text where the names were already transliterated.Ovid. Metamorphoses, 3 for the exact names of the dogs
? = Seven listed names of dogs in Hyginus' Fabulae, was probably misread or misinterpreted by later authors because it does not correspond to the exact numbers and names given by Ovid:
Arcas signifies Arcadia, place of origin of three dogs namely Pamphagos, Dorceus and Oribasus
Cyprius means Cyprus, where the dogs Lysisca and Harpalos originated
Gnosius can be read as Knossus in Crete, which signify that Ichnobates was a Knossian breed of dog
Echnobas, Elion, Aura and Therodanapis were probably place names or adjectives defining the characteristics of dogs |
Actaeon | The "bed of Actaeon" | The "bed of Actaeon"
In the second century AD, the traveller Pausanias was shown a spring on the road in Attica leading to Plataea from Eleutherae, just beyond Megara "and a little farther on a rock. It is called the bed of Actaeon, for it is said that he slept thereon when weary with hunting and that into this spring he looked while Artemis was bathing in it."
"As to Actæon there is a tradition at Orchomenus, that a spectre which sat on a stone injured their land. And when they consulted the oracle at Delphi, the god bade them bury in the ground whatever remains they could find of Actæon: he also bade them to make a brazen copy of the spectre and fasten it with iron to the stone. This I have myself seen, and they annually offer funeral rites to Actæon." |
Actaeon | Parallels in Akkadian and Ugarit poems | Parallels in Akkadian and Ugarit poems
In the standard version of the Epic of Gilgamesh (tablet vi) there is a parallel, in the series of examples Gilgamesh gives Ishtar of her mistreatment of her serial lovers:
You loved the herdsman, shepherd and chief shepherd Who was always heaping up the glowing ashes for you, And cooked ewe-lambs for you every day. But you hit him and turned him into a wolf, His own herd-boys hunt him down
And his dogs tear at his haunches."Gilgamesh VI" in Myths from Mesopotamia... a new translation by Stephanie Dalley, rev. ed.2000:79; note 60, p. 129: "This metamorphosis has been compared to the Greek myth of Actaeon." Actaeon, torn apart by dogs incited by Artemis, finds another Near Eastern parallel in the Ugaritic hero Aqht, torn apart by eagles incited by Anath who wanted his hunting bow.The comparison is made in Michael C. Astour, Hellenosemitica: an ethnic and cultural study of West Semitic impact on Mycenaean Greece (Leiden:Brill, 1965).
The virginal Artemis of classical times is not directly comparable to Ishtar of the many lovers, but the mytheme of Artemis shooting Orion, was linked to her punishment of Actaeon by T.C.W. Stinton;<ref>Stinton "Euripides and the Judgement of Paris" (London, 1965:45 note 14) reprinted in Stinton, Collected Papers on Greek Tragedy (London, 1990:51 note 14).</ref> the Greek context of the mortal's reproach to the amorous goddess is translated to the episode of Anchises and Aphrodite.Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Daphnis too was a herdsman loved by a goddess and punished by her: see Theocritus' First Idyll.Jasper Griffin, "Theocritus, the Iliad, and the East", The American Journal of Philology 113.2 (Summer 1992:189-211) esp. pp 205f.
Symbolism regarding Actaeon
In Greek Mythology, Actaeon is widely thought to symbolize ritual human sacrifice in attempt to please a God or Goddess: the dogs symbolize the sacrificers and Actaeon symbolizes the sacrifice.
Actaeon may symbolize human curiosity or irreverence.
The myth is seen by Jungian psychologist Wolfgang Giegerich as a symbol of spiritual transformation and/or enlightenment.Wolfgang Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life, (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2001)
Actaeon often symbolizes a cuckold, as when he is turned into a stag, he becomes "horned".Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed, 2010, s.v. This is alluded to in Shakespeare's Merry Wives, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and others.John Stephen Farmer, [ Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present], 1903, s.v., p. 15.Gordon Williams, [ A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature], 2001, , p. 8-9.
Cultural depictions
thumb|Death of Actaeon by Titian
thumb|Actaeon by Paul Manship
thumb|Vasiliy Ryabchenko, The Death of Actaeon, oil on canvas, 1988
The two main scenes are Actaeon surprising Artemis/Diana, and his death. In classical art Actaeon is normally shown as fully human, even as his hounds are killing him (sometimes he has small horns), but in Renaissance art he is often given a deer's head with antlers even in the scene with Diana, and by the time he is killed he has at the least this head, and has often completely transformed into the shape of a deer.
Aeschylus and other tragic poets made use of the story, which was a favourite subject in ancient works of art.
There is a well-known small marble group in the British Museum illustrative of the story, in gallery 83/84.
Two paintings by the 16th century painter Titian (Death of Actaeon and Diana and Actaeon).Actéon, an operatic pastorale by Marc-Antoine Charpentier.
Percy Bysshe Shelley suggests a parallel between his alter-ego and Actaeon in his elegy for John Keats, Adonais, stanza 31 ('[he] had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness/ Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray/ .../ And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,/ Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.')
The aria "Oft she visits this lone mountain" from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, first performed in 1689 or earlier.
Giordano Bruno, Gli Eroici Furori.
In canto V of Giambattista Marino's poem the protagonist goes to theater to see a tragedy representing the myth of Actaeon. This episode foreshadows the protagonist's violent death at the end of the book.
In Act I Scene 2 of Jacques Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, Actaeon is Diana (Artemis)'s lover, and it is Jupiter who turns him into a stag, which puts Diana off hunting. His story is relinquished at this point, in favour of the other plots.
Ted Hughes wrote a version of the story in his Tales from Ovid.
Diane and Actéon Pas de Deux from Marius Petipa's ballet, Le Roi Candaule, to the music by Riccardo Drigo and Cesare Pugni, later incorporated into the second act of La Esmeralda (ballet).
In Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, Orsino compares his unrequited love for Olivia to the fate of Actaeon. "O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first, Methought she purged the air of pestilence, That instant was I turned into a hart, and my desires like fell and cruel hounds e'er since pursue me." Act 1 Scene 1.
In Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II, courtier Piers Gaveston seeks to entertain his lover, King Edward II of England, by presenting a play based on the Actaeon myth. In Gaveston's version, Diane is played by a naked boy holding an olive branch to hide his loins, and it is the boy-Diane who transforms Actaeon into a hart and lets him be devoured by the hounds. Thus, Gaveston's (and Marlowe's) interpretation adds a strong element of homoeroticism, absent from the original myth.
Paul Manship in 1925 created a set of copper statute of Diane and Actaeon, which in the Luce Lunder Smithsonian Institution.
French based collective LFKs and his film/theatre director, writer and visual artist Jean Michel Bruyere produced a series of 600 shorts and "medium" films, an interactive 360° installation, Si poteris narrare licet ("if you are able to speak of it, then you may do so")What Is Contemporary Art? Terry Smith. 10 August 2012. University of Chicago Press. p. 173-81, 186 in 2002, a 3D 360° installation La Dispersion du Fils (from 2008 to 2016) and an outdoor performance, Une Brutalité pastorale (2000) all about the myth of Diana and Actaeon.
In Matthew Barney's 2019 movie Redoubt set in the Sawtooth Mountains of the U.S. state of Idaho and an accompanying traveling art exhibition originating at the Yale University Art Gallery the myth is retold by the visual artist and filmmaker via avenues of his own design.
Seamus Heaney's collection North contains an aisling concerning the myth of Diana and Actaeon.
Royal House of Thebes family tree
Notes
ReferencesThe Oxford Classical Dictionary, s.v. "Actaeon".
Ovid, Metamorphoses, 3.138ff.
Euripides, Bacchae'', 337–340.
Diodorus Siculus, 4.81.4. |
Actaeon | External links | External links
The Warburg Institute Iconographic Database (ca 260 images of Actaeon)
Category:Deaths due to dog attacks
Category:Mythological Greek archers
Category:Metamorphoses characters
Category:Metamorphoses into animals in Greek mythology
Category:Deeds of Artemis
Category:Deeds of Zeus
Category:Dogs in art
Category:Inanna
Category:Anat
Category:Mythological deer
Category:Mythological hunters |
Actaeon | Table of Content | Short description, Story, Names of dogs, The "bed of Actaeon", Parallels in Akkadian and Ugarit poems, External links |
Anglicanism | Short description | Anglicanism, also known as Episcopalianism in some countries, is a Western Christian tradition which developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. It is one of the largest branches of Christianity, with around 110 million adherents worldwide . Most are members of national or regional ecclesiastical provinces of the international Anglican Communion, one of the largest Christian bodies in the world, and the world's third-largest Christian communion. When united churches in the Anglican Communion and the breakaway Continuing Anglican movement were not counted, there were an estimated 97.4 million Anglicans worldwide in 2020.
Adherents of Anglicanism are called Anglicans; they are also called Episcopalians in some countries. The provinces within the Anglican Communion are in full communion with the See of Canterbury and thus with the archbishop of Canterbury, whom the communion refers to as its (Latin, 'first among equals'). The archbishop calls the decennial Lambeth Conference, chairs the meeting of primates, and is the president of the Anglican Consultative Council.Anglican Communion official website. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church by F. L. Cross (Editor), E. A. Livingstone (editor) Oxford University Press, US; 3rd edition, p. 65 (13 March 1997) Some churches that are not part of the Anglican Communion or recognised by it also call themselves Anglican, including those that are within the Continuing Anglican movement and Anglican realignment.
Anglicans base their Christian faith on the Bible, traditions of the apostolic church, apostolic succession ("historic episcopate"), and the writings of the Church Fathers, as well as historically, the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion and The Books of Homilies. Anglicanism forms a branch of Western Christianity, having definitively declared its independence from the Holy See at the time of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement. Many of the Anglican formularies of the mid-16th century correspond closely to those of historical Protestantism. These reforms were understood by one of those most responsible for them, Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, and others as navigating a middle way between Catholicism and two of the emerging Protestant traditions, namely Lutheranism and Calvinism.
In the first half of the 17th century, the Church of England and the associated Church of Ireland were presented by some Anglican divines as comprising a distinct Christian tradition, with theologies, structures, and forms of worship representing a different kind of middle way, or via media, originally between Lutheranism and Calvinism, and later between Protestantism and Catholicism – a perspective that came to be highly influential in later theories of Anglican identity and expressed in the description of Anglicanism as "catholic and reformed". The degree of distinction between Protestant and Catholic tendencies within Anglicanism is routinely a matter of debate both within specific Anglican churches and the Anglican Communion. The Book of Common Prayer is unique to Anglicanism, the collection of services in one prayer book used for centuries. The book is acknowledged as a principal tie that binds the Anglican Communion as a liturgical tradition.
After the American Revolution, Anglican congregations in the United States and British North America (which would later form the basis for the modern country of Canada) were each reconstituted into autonomous churches with their own bishops and self-governing structures; these were known as the American Episcopal Church and the Church of England in the Dominion of Canada. Through the expansion of the British Empire and the activity of Christian missions, this model was adopted as the model for many newly formed churches, especially in Africa, Australasia, and the Asia-Pacific. In the 19th century, the term Anglicanism was coined to describe the common religious tradition of these churches and also that of the Scottish Episcopal Church, which, though originating earlier within the Church of Scotland, had come to be recognised as sharing this common identity. |
Anglicanism | Terminology | Terminology
thumb|Jesus supporting an English flag and staff in the crook of his right arm depicted in a stained glass window in Rochester Cathedral in Rochester, Kent, England
The word Anglican originates in , a phrase from Magna Carta dated 15 June 1215, meaning 'the English Church shall be free'. Adherents of Anglicanism are called Anglicans. As an adjective, Anglican is used to describe the people, institutions, churches, liturgical traditions, and theological concepts developed by the Church of England.
As a noun, an Anglican is a church member in the Anglican Communion. The word is also used by followers of separated groups that have left the communion or have been founded separately from it. The word originally referred only to the teachings and rites of Christians throughout the world in communion with the see of Canterbury but has come to sometimes be extended to any church following those traditions or rites rather than actual membership in the Anglican Communion.
Although the term Anglican is found referring to the Church of England as far back as the 16th century, its use did not become general until the latter half of the 19th century. In British parliamentary legislation referring to the English Established Church, there is no need for a description; it is simply the Church of England, though the word Protestant is used in many legal acts specifying the succession to the Crown and qualifications for office. When the Union with Ireland Act created the United Church of England and Ireland, it is specified that it shall be one "Protestant Episcopal Church", thereby distinguishing its form of church government from the Presbyterian polity that prevails in the Church of Scotland.Union with Ireland Act 1800, s. 1, art. 5.
The word Episcopal ("of or pertaining to bishops") is preferred in the title of the Episcopal Church (the province of the Anglican Communion covering the United States) and the Scottish Episcopal Church, though the full name of the former is The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Elsewhere, however, the term Anglican Church came to be preferred as it distinguished these churches from others that maintain an episcopal polity. |
Anglicanism | Definition | Definition
In its structures, theology, and forms of worship, Anglicanism emerged as a distinct Christian tradition representing a middle ground between Lutheran and Reformed varieties of Protestantism; after the Oxford Movement, Anglicanism has often been characterized as representing a via media ('middle way') between Protestantism as a whole, and Catholicism.
The faith of Anglicans is founded in the Scriptures and the Gospels, the traditions of the Apostolic Church, the historical episcopate, the first four ecumenical councils, and the early Church Fathers, especially those active during the five initial centuries of Christianity, according to the quinquasaecularist principle proposed by the English bishop Lancelot Andrewes and the Lutheran dissident Georg Calixtus.
Anglicans understand the Old and New Testaments as "containing all things necessary for salvation" and as being the rule and ultimate standard of faith. Reason and tradition are seen as valuable means to interpret scripture (a position first formulated in detail by Richard Hooker), but there is no full mutual agreement among Anglicans about exactly how scripture, reason, and tradition interact (or ought to interact) with each other. Anglicans understand the Apostles' Creed as the baptismal symbol and the Nicene Creed as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.
Anglicans believe the catholic and apostolic faith is revealed in Holy Scripture and the ecumenical creeds (Apostles', Nicene and Athanasian) and interpret these in light of the Christian tradition of the historic church, scholarship, reason, and experience. Anglicans celebrate the traditional sacraments, with special emphasis being given to the Eucharist, also called Holy Communion, the Lord's Supper, or the Mass. The Eucharist is central to worship for most Anglicans as a communal offering of prayer and praise in which the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are proclaimed through prayer, reading of the Bible, singing, giving God thanks over the bread and wine for the innumerable benefits obtained through the passion of Christ; the breaking of the bread, the blessing of the cup, and the partaking of the body and blood of Christ as instituted at the Last Supper. The consecrated bread and wine, which are considered by Anglican formularies to be the true body and blood of Christ in a spiritual manner and as outward symbols of an inner grace given by Christ which to the repentant convey forgiveness and cleansing from sin. While many Anglicans celebrate the Eucharist in similar ways to the predominant Latin Catholic tradition, a considerable degree of liturgical freedom is permitted, and worship styles range from simple to elaborate.
Unique to Anglicanism is the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), the collection of services which worshippers in most Anglican churches have used for centuries. It was called common prayer originally because it was intended for use in all Church of England churches, which had previously followed differing local liturgies. The term was kept when the church became international because all Anglicans used to share in its use around the world. In 1549, the first Book of Common Prayer was compiled by Thomas Cranmer, the then archbishop of Canterbury. While it has since undergone many revisions and Anglican churches in different countries have developed other service books, the BCP is still acknowledged as one of the ties that bind Anglicans together. |
Anglicanism | Identity | Identity |
Anglicanism | Early history | Early history
thumb|Saint Alban is venerated as the first-recorded British Christian martyr
thumb|Augustine of Canterbury, the first archbishop of Canterbury
According to legend, the founding of Christianity in Britain is commonly attributed to Joseph of Arimathea and is commemorated at Glastonbury Abbey. Many of the early Church Fathers wrote of the presence of Christianity in Roman Britain, with Tertullian stating "those parts of Britain into which the Roman arms had never penetrated were become subject to Christ". Saint Alban, who was executed in AD 209, is the first Christian martyr in the British Isles. For this reason he is venerated as the British protomartyr. The historian Heinrich Zimmer writes that "Just as Britain was a part of the Roman Empire, so the British Church formed (during the fourth century) a branch of the Catholic Church of the West; and during the whole of that century, from the Council of Arles (316) onward, took part in all proceedings concerning the Church."
After Roman troops withdrew from Britain, the "absence of Roman military and governmental influence and overall decline of Roman imperial political power enabled Britain and the surrounding isles to develop distinctively from the rest of the West. A new culture emerged around the Irish Sea among the Celtic peoples with Celtic Christianity at its core. What resulted was a form of Christianity distinct from Rome in many traditions and practices."
The historian Charles Thomas, in addition to the Celticist Heinrich Zimmer, writes that the distinction between sub-Roman and post-Roman Insular Christianity, also known as Celtic Christianity, began to become apparent around AD 475, with the Celtic churches allowing married clergy, observing Lent and Easter according to their own calendar, and having a different tonsure; moreover, like the Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox churches, the Celtic churches operated independently of the Pope's authority, as a result of their isolated development in the British Isles.
In what is known as the Gregorian mission, Pope Gregory I sent Augustine of Canterbury to the British Isles in AD 596, with the purpose of evangelising the pagans there (who were largely Anglo-Saxons), as well as to reconcile the Celtic churches in the British Isles to the See of Rome. In Kent, Augustine persuaded the Anglo-Saxon king "Æthelberht and his people to accept Christianity". Augustine, on two occasions, "met in conference with members of the Celtic episcopacy, but no understanding was reached between them".
Eventually, the "Christian Church of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria convened the Synod of Whitby in 663/664 to decide whether to follow Celtic or Roman usages". This meeting, with King Oswiu as the final decision maker, "led to the acceptance of Roman usage elsewhere in England and brought the English Church into close contact with the Continent". As a result of assuming Roman usages, the Celtic Church surrendered its independence, and, from this point on, the Church in England "was no longer purely Celtic, but became Anglo-Roman-Celtic". The theologian Christopher L. Webber writes that "Although "the Roman form of Christianity became the dominant influence in Britain as in all of western Europe, Anglican Christianity has continued to have a distinctive quality because of its Celtic heritage."
Following the Synod of Whitby, tensions between Rome and the English king would gradually escalate, due in part to royal assertions that it was the custom of England for the king to exercise authority over the Church. In the late 1000s, William the Conqueror (William I) refused to swear fealty to the Pope citing English tradition, controlled appointments to ecclesiastical offices (a power historically reserved to the Pope) and forbade papal legates to enter England without royal permission. In 1164, under Henry II, the Constitutions of Clarendon, citing English custom, required royal assent for excommunications and mandated that ecclesiastical court appeals terminate with the king rather than the Pope. The Magna Carta in 1215, asserting that "the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired" would be annulled by Pope Innocent III, but reissued in both 1216 and 1225. Under Edward I, in 1279, the Statute of Mortmain required royal approval to grant or transfer land to the Church. Additionally, Edward I would reject Pope Boniface VIII's bull Clericis Laicos which forbade secular taxation of clergy. Per the king's orders, non-compliant clergy were punished by law and church property was seized. The 1351 Statute of Provisors, under Edward III, prohibited papal appointments to English benefices, reserving the power for the king. The 1353 Statute of Praemunire prohibited appeals to papal courts for either ecclesiastical or temporal matters. To date, neither the Statute of Provisors nor the Statute of Praemunire has been repealed. In 1401, Henry IV's statute De Heretico Comburendo would transfer heresy trials from ecclesiastical to secular courts, further cementing the tradition of English kings claiming authority over English ecclesiastical matters. English delegates to the Councils of Pisa (1409), Constance (1414–1418), and Basel (1431–1445) would voice support for conciliarism in an attempt to limit the powers of the Pope over-against the bishops of the Church.
thumb|King's College Chapel, Cambridge, Great East Window.
The Church in England remained united with Rome until the English Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534, declaring King Henry VIII the “Supreme Head” of the Church of England. This act culminated centuries of English monarchs asserting authority over ecclesiastical matters, from William I's refusal of papal fealty (1070s) to the Statutes of Provisors (1351) and Praemunire (1353). Henry and his theologians, including Thomas Cranmer, cited these historical customs to justify royal supremacy, arguing that the crown traditionally governed the Church. The immediate catalyst was Henry's need to annul his 24-year marriage to Catherine of Aragon, which he believed was invalid based on biblical prohibitions (Leviticus 20:21) and the lack of a male heir, seen as divine judgment. When Pope Clement VII, under pressure from Emperor Charles V, refused the annulment, Henry acted to resolve the issue domestically, supported by legislative steps like the Submission of the Clergy (1534) and Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533). The break with Rome reflected a mix of theological conviction, historical precedent, and political necessity, fulfilling a longstanding English desire for ecclesiastical autonomy while addressing immediate dynastic concerns. This laid the foundation for the development of Anglicanism as a distinct national church.
The English Church under Henry VIII continued to maintain Catholic doctrines and liturgical celebrations of the sacraments despite its separation from Rome. With little exception, Henry VIII allowed no changes during his lifetime. Under King Edward VI (1547–1553), however, the church in England first began to undergo what is known as the English Reformation, in the course of which it acquired a number of characteristics that would subsequently become recognised as constituting its distinctive "Anglican" identity. |
Anglicanism | Development | Development
left|thumb|Queen Elizabeth I revived the Church of England in 1559 and established a uniform faith and practice; she took the title "Supreme Governor"
With the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559, the Protestant identity of the English and Irish churches was affirmed by means of parliamentary legislation which mandated allegiance and loyalty to the English Crown in all their members. The Elizabethan church began to develop distinct religious traditions, assimilating some of the theology of Reformed churches with the services in the Book of Common Prayer (which drew extensively on the Sarum Rite native to England), under the leadership and organisation of a continuing episcopate. Over the years, these traditions themselves came to command adherence and loyalty. The Elizabethan Settlement stopped the radical Protestant tendencies under Edward VI by combining the more radical elements of the 1552 prayer book with the conservative "Catholic" 1549 prayer book into the 1559 Book of Common Prayer. From then on, Protestantism was in a "state of arrested development", regardless of the attempts to detach the Church of England from its "idiosyncratic anchorage in the medieval past" by various groups which tried to push it towards a more Reformed theology and governance in the years 1560–1660.
Although two important constitutive elements of what later would emerge as Anglicanism were present in 1559 – scripture, the historic episcopate, the Book of Common Prayer, the teachings of the First Four Ecumenical Councils as the yardstick of catholicity, the teaching of the Church Fathers and Catholic bishops, and informed reason – neither the laypeople nor the clergy perceived themselves as Anglicans at the beginning of Elizabeth I's reign, as there was no such identity. Neither does the term via media appear until the 1627 to describe a church which refused to identify itself definitely as Catholic or Protestant, or as both, "and had decided in the end that this is virtue rather than a handicap".Diarmid MacCullough, The Later Reformation in England, 1990, pp. 142, 171–172
thumb|New College Chapel, Oxford
Historical studies on the period 1560–1660 written before the late 1960s tended to project the predominant conformist spirituality and doctrine of the 1660s on the ecclesiastical situation one hundred years before, and there was also a tendency to take polemically binary partitions of reality claimed by contestants studied (such as the dichotomies Protestant-"Popish" or "Laudian"-"Puritan") at face value. Since the late 1960s, these interpretations have been criticised. Studies on the subject written during the last forty-five years have, however, not reached any consensus on how to interpret this period in English church history. The extent to which one or several positions concerning doctrine and spirituality existed alongside the more well-known and articulate Puritan movement and the Durham House Party, and the exact extent of continental Calvinism among the English elite and among the ordinary churchgoers from the 1560s to the 1620s are subjects of current and ongoing debate.
In 1662, under King Charles II, a revised Book of Common Prayer was produced, which was acceptable to high churchmen as well as some Puritans and is still considered authoritative to this day. In so far as Anglicans derived their identity from both parliamentary legislation and ecclesiastical tradition, a crisis of identity could result wherever secular and religious loyalties came into conflict – and such a crisis indeed occurred in 1776 with the United States Declaration of Independence, most of whose signatories were, at least nominally, Anglican. For these American patriots, even the forms of Anglican services were in doubt, since the Prayer Book rites of Matins, Evensong, and Holy Communion all included specific prayers for the British royal family. Consequently, the conclusion of the War of Independence eventually resulted in the creation of two new Anglican churches, the Episcopal Church in the United States in those states that had achieved independence; and in the 1830s, the Church of England in Canada became independent from the Church of England in those North American colonies which had remained under British control and to which many Loyalist churchmen had migrated.
Reluctantly, legislation was passed in the British Parliament (the Consecration of Bishops Abroad Act 1786) to allow bishops to be consecrated for an American church outside of allegiance to the British Crown (since no dioceses had ever been established in the former American colonies). Both in the United States and in Canada, the new Anglican churches developed novel models of self-government, collective decision-making, and self-supported financing; that would be consistent with separation of religious and secular identities.
In the following century, two further factors acted to accelerate the development of a distinct Anglican identity. From 1828 and 1829, Dissenters and Catholics could be elected to the House of Commons, which consequently ceased to be a body drawn purely from the established churches of Scotland, England, and Ireland; but which nevertheless, over the following ten years, engaged in extensive reforming legislation affecting the interests of the English and Irish churches; which, by the Acts of Union of 1800, had been reconstituted as the United Church of England and Ireland (a union which was dissolved in 1871). The propriety of this legislation was bitterly contested by the Oxford Movement (Tractarians), who in response developed a vision of Anglicanism as religious tradition deriving ultimately from the ecumenical councils of the patristic church. Those within the Church of England opposed to the Tractarians, and to their revived ritual practices, introduced a stream of bills in parliament aimed to control innovations in worship. This only made the dilemma more acute, with consequent continual litigation in the secular and ecclesiastical courts.
Over the same period, Anglican churches engaged vigorously in Christian missions, resulting in the creation, by the end of the century, of over ninety colonial bishoprics, which gradually coalesced into new self-governing churches on the Canadian and American models. However, the case of John Colenso, Bishop of Natal, reinstated in 1865 by the English Judicial Committee of the Privy Council over the heads of the Church in South Africa, demonstrated acutely that the extension of episcopacy had to be accompanied by a recognised Anglican ecclesiology of ecclesiastical authority, distinct from secular power.
Consequently, at the instigation of the bishops of Canada and South Africa, the first Lambeth Conference was called in 1867; to be followed by further conferences in 1878 and 1888, and thereafter at ten-year intervals. The various papers and declarations of successive Lambeth Conferences have served to frame the continued Anglican debate on identity, especially as relating to the possibility of ecumenical discussion with other churches. This ecumenical aspiration became much more of a possibility, as other denominational groups rapidly followed the example of the Anglican Communion in founding their own transnational alliances: the Alliance of Reformed Churches, the Ecumenical Methodist Council, the International Congregational Council, and the Baptist World Alliance. |
Anglicanism | Theories | Theories
Anglicanism was seen as a middle way, or via media, between two branches of Protestantism, Lutheranism and Reformed Christianity. In their rejection of absolute parliamentary authority, the Tractarians, especially John Henry Newman, looked back to the writings of 17th-century Anglican divines, finding in these texts the idea of the English church as a via media between the Protestant and Catholic traditions. This view was associated – especially in the writings of Edward Bouverie Pusey – with the theory of Anglicanism as one of three "branches" (alongside the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches) historically arising out of the common tradition of the earliest ecumenical councils. Newman himself subsequently rejected his theory of the via media, as essentially historicist and static and hence unable to accommodate any dynamic development within the church. Nevertheless, the aspiration to ground Anglican identity in the writings of the 17th-century divines and in faithfulness to the traditions of the Church Fathers reflects a continuing theme of Anglican ecclesiology, most recently in the writings of Henry Robert McAdoo.
The Tractarian formulation of the theory of the via media between Protestantism and Catholicism was essentially a party platform, and not acceptable to Anglicans outside the confines of the Oxford Movement. However, this theory of the via media was reworked in the ecclesiological writings of Frederick Denison Maurice, in a more dynamic form that became widely influential. Both Maurice and Newman saw the Church of England of their day as sorely deficient in faith; but whereas Newman had looked back to a distant past when the light of faith might have appeared to burn brighter, Maurice looked forward to the possibility of a brighter revelation of faith in the future. Maurice saw the Protestant and Catholic strands within the Church of England as contrary but complementary, both maintaining elements of the true church, but incomplete without the other; such that a true catholic and evangelical church might come into being by a union of opposites.
Central to Maurice's perspective was his belief that the collective elements of family, nation, and church represented a divine order of structures through which God unfolds his continuing work of creation. Hence, for Maurice, the Protestant tradition had maintained the elements of national distinction which were amongst the marks of the true universal church, but which had been lost within contemporary Catholicism in the internationalism of centralised papal authority. Within the coming universal church that Maurice foresaw, national churches would each maintain the six signs of catholicity: baptism, Eucharist, the creeds, Scripture, an episcopal ministry, and a fixed liturgy (which could take a variety of forms in accordance with divinely ordained distinctions in national characteristics). This vision of a becoming universal church as a congregation of autonomous national churches proved highly congenial in Anglican circles; and Maurice's six signs were adapted to form the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1888.
In the latter decades of the 20th century, Maurice's theory, and the various strands of Anglican thought that derived from it, have been criticised by Stephen Sykes, who argues that the terms Protestant and Catholic as used in these approaches are synthetic constructs denoting ecclesiastic identities unacceptable to those to whom the labels are applied. Hence, the Catholic Church does not regard itself as a party or strand within the universal church – but rather identifies itself as the universal church. Moreover, Sykes criticises the proposition, implicit in theories of via media, that there is no distinctive body of Anglican doctrines, other than those of the universal church; accusing this of being an excuse not to undertake systematic doctrine at all.
Contrariwise, Sykes notes a high degree of commonality in Anglican liturgical forms and in the doctrinal understandings expressed within those liturgies. He proposes that Anglican identity might rather be found within a shared consistent pattern of prescriptive liturgies, established and maintained through canon law, and embodying both a historic deposit of formal statements of doctrine, and also framing the regular reading and proclamation of scripture. Sykes nevertheless agrees with those heirs of Maurice who emphasise the incompleteness of Anglicanism as a positive feature, and quotes with qualified approval the words of Michael Ramsey: |
Anglicanism | Doctrine | Doctrine |
Anglicanism | "Catholic and reformed" | "Catholic and reformed"
The distinction between Reformed and Catholic, and the coherence of the two, is a matter of debate within the Anglican Communion. The Oxford Movement of the mid-19th century revived and extended doctrinal, liturgical, and pastoral practices similar to those of Roman Catholicism. This extends beyond the ceremony of high church services to even more theologically significant territory, such as sacramental theology (see Anglican sacraments). While Anglo-Catholic practices, particularly liturgical ones, have become more common within the tradition over the last century, there are also places where practices and beliefs resonate more closely with the evangelical movements of the 1730s (see Sydney Anglicanism). |
Anglicanism | Guiding principles | Guiding principles
thumb|Richard Hooker (1554–1600), one of the most influential figures in shaping Anglican theology and self-identity
For high-church Anglicans, doctrine is neither established by a magisterium, nor derived from the theology of an eponymous founder (such as Calvinism), nor summed up in a confession of faith beyond the ecumenical creeds, such as the Lutheran Book of Concord. For them, the earliest Anglican theological documents are its prayer books, which they see as the products of profound theological reflection, compromise, and synthesis. They emphasise the Book of Common Prayer as a key expression of Anglican doctrine. The principle of looking to the prayer books as a guide to the parameters of belief and practice is called by the Latin name lex orandi, lex credendi ("the law of prayer is the law of belief").
Within the prayer books are the fundamentals of Anglican doctrine: the Apostles' and Nicene creeds, the Athanasian Creed (now rarely used), the scriptures (via the lectionary), the sacraments, daily prayer, the catechism, and apostolic succession in the context of the historic threefold ministry. For some low-church and evangelical Anglicans, the 16th-century Reformed Thirty-Nine Articles form the basis of doctrine. |
Anglicanism | Distinctives of Anglican belief | Distinctives of Anglican belief
The Thirty-Nine Articles played a significant role in Anglican doctrine and practice. Following the passing of the 1604 canons, all Anglican clergy had to formally subscribe to the articles. Today, however, the articles are no longer binding, but are seen as a historical document which has played a significant role in the shaping of Anglican identity. The degree to which each of the articles has remained influential varies.
On the doctrine of justification, for example, there is a wide range of beliefs within the Anglican Communion, with some Anglo-Catholics arguing for a faith with good works and the sacraments. At the same time, however, some evangelical Anglicans ascribe to the Reformed emphasis on sola fide ("faith alone") in their doctrine of justification (see Sydney Anglicanism). Still other Anglicans adopt a nuanced view of justification, taking elements from the early Church Fathers, Catholicism, Protestantism, liberal theology, and latitudinarian thought.
Arguably, the most influential of the original articles has been Article VI on the "sufficiency of scripture", which says that "Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation." This article has informed Anglican biblical exegesis and hermeneutics since earliest times.
Anglicans look for authority in their "standard divines" (see below). Historically, the most influential of these – apart from Cranmer – has been the 16th-century cleric and theologian Richard Hooker, who after 1660 was increasingly portrayed as the founding father of Anglicanism. Hooker's description of Anglican authority as being derived primarily from scripture, informed by reason (the intellect and the experience of God) and tradition (the practices and beliefs of the historical church), has influenced Anglican self-identity and doctrinal reflection perhaps more powerfully than any other formula. The analogy of the "three-legged stool" of scripture, reason, and tradition is often incorrectly attributed to Hooker. Rather, Hooker's description is a hierarchy of authority, with scripture as foundational and reason and tradition as vitally important, but secondary, authorities.
Finally, the extension of Anglicanism into non-English cultures, the growing diversity of prayer books, and the increasing interest in ecumenical dialogue have led to further reflection on the parameters of Anglican identity. Many Anglicans look to the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1888 as the sine qua non of communal identity. In brief, the quadrilateral's four points are the scriptures as containing all things necessary to salvation; the creeds (specifically, the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds) as the sufficient statement of Christian faith; the dominical sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion; and the historic episcopate. |
Anglicanism | Divines{{anchor | Divines
thumb|Thomas Cranmer, author of the first two editions of the Book of Common Prayer
Within the Anglican tradition, "divines" are clergy of the Church of England whose theological writings have been considered standards for faith, doctrine, worship, and spirituality, and whose influence has permeated the Anglican Communion in varying degrees through the years. While there is no authoritative list of these Anglican divines, there are some whose names would likely be found on most lists – those who are commemorated in lesser feasts of the Anglican churches and those whose works are frequently anthologised.
The corpus produced by Anglican divines is diverse. What they have in common is a commitment to the faith as conveyed by scripture and the Book of Common Prayer, thus regarding prayer and theology in a manner akin to that of the Apostolic Fathers. On the whole, Anglican divines view the via media of Anglicanism not as a compromise, but as "a positive position, witnessing to the universality of God and God's kingdom working through the fallible, earthly ecclesia Anglicana".
These theologians regard scripture as interpreted through tradition and reason as authoritative in matters concerning salvation. Reason and tradition, indeed, are extant in and presupposed by scripture, thus implying co-operation between God and humanity, God and nature, and between the sacred and secular. Faith is thus regarded as incarnational and authority as dispersed.
Amongst the early Anglican divines of the 16th and 17th centuries, the names of Thomas Cranmer, John Jewel, Matthew Parker, Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes, and Jeremy Taylor predominate. The influential character of Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity cannot be overestimated. Published in 1593 and subsequently, Hooker's eight-volume work is primarily a treatise on church-state relations, but it deals comprehensively with issues of biblical interpretation, soteriology, ethics, and sanctification. Throughout the work, Hooker makes clear that theology involves prayer and is concerned with ultimate issues and that theology is relevant to the social mission of the church.
The 17th century saw the rise of two important movements in Anglicanism: Cambridge Platonism, with its mystical understanding of reason as the "candle of the Lord", and the evangelical revival, with its emphasis on the personal experience of the Holy Spirit. The Cambridge Platonist movement evolved into a school called Latitudinarianism, which emphasised reason as the barometer of discernment and took a stance of indifference towards doctrinal and ecclesiological differences.
The evangelical revival, influenced by such figures as John Wesley and Charles Simeon, re-emphasised the importance of justification through faith and the consequent importance of personal conversion. Some in this movement, such as Wesley and George Whitefield, took the message to the United States, influencing the First Great Awakening and creating an Anglo-American movement called Methodism that would eventually break away, structurally, from the Anglican churches after the American Revolution.
By the 19th century, there was a renewed interest in pre-Reformation English religious thought and practice. Theologians such as John Keble, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and John Henry Newman had widespread influence in the realm of polemics, homiletics and theological and devotional works, not least because they largely repudiated the old high-church tradition and replaced it with a dynamic appeal to antiquity which looked beyond the Reformers and Anglican formularies. Their work is largely credited with the development of the Oxford Movement, which sought to reassert Catholic identity and practice in Anglicanism.
In contrast to this movement, clergy such as the Bishop of Liverpool, J. C. Ryle, sought to uphold the distinctly Reformed identity of the Church of England. He was not a servant of the status quo, but argued for a lively religion which emphasised grace, holy and charitable living, and the plain use of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (interpreted in a partisan evangelical way) without additional rituals. Frederick Denison Maurice, through such works as The Kingdom of Christ, played a pivotal role in inaugurating another movement, Christian socialism. In this, Maurice transformed Hooker's emphasis on the incarnational nature of Anglican spirituality to an imperative for social justice.
In the 19th century, Anglican biblical scholarship began to assume a distinct character, represented by the so-called "Cambridge triumvirate" of Joseph Lightfoot, F. J. A. Hort, and Brooke Foss Westcott. Their orientation is best summed up by Westcott's observation that "Life which Christ is and which Christ communicates, the life which fills our whole beings as we realise its capacities, is active fellowship with God."
The earlier part of the 20th century is marked by Charles Gore, with his emphasis on natural revelation, and William Temple's focus on Christianity and society, while, from outside England, Robert Leighton, Archbishop of Glasgow, and several clergy from the United States have been suggested, such as William Porcher DuBose, John Henry Hobart (1775–1830, Bishop of New York 1816–30), William Meade, Phillips Brooks, and Charles Brent. |
Anglicanism | Churchmanship | Churchmanship
thumb|An eastward-facing Solemn High Mass, a Catholic liturgical phenomenon which reemerged in Anglicanism following the Catholic Revival of the 19th century
Churchmanship can be defined as the manifestation of theology in the realms of liturgy, piety and, to some extent, spirituality. Anglican diversity in this respect has tended to reflect the diversity in the tradition's Reformed and Catholic identity. Different individuals, groups, parishes, dioceses and provinces may identify more closely with one or the other, or some mixture of the two.
The range of Anglican belief and practice became particularly divisive during the 19th century, when some clergy were disciplined and even imprisoned on charges of introducing illegal ritual while, at the same time, others were criticised for engaging in public worship services with ministers of Reformed churches. Resistance to the growing acceptance and restoration of traditional Catholic ceremonial by the mainstream of Anglicanism ultimately led to the formation of small breakaway churches such as the Free Church of England in England (1844) and the Reformed Episcopal Church in North America (1873).Accessed 9 November 2010.
Anglo-Catholic (and some broad-church) Anglicans celebrate public liturgy in ways that understand worship to be something very special and of utmost importance. Vestments are worn by the clergy, sung settings are often used, and incense may be used. Nowadays, in most Anglican churches, the Eucharist is celebrated in a manner similar to the usage of Roman Catholics and some Lutherans, though, in many churches, more traditional, "pre–Vatican II" models of worship are common (e.g., an "eastward orientation" at the altar). Whilst many Anglo-Catholics derive much of their liturgical practice from that of the pre-Reformation English church, others more closely follow traditional Roman Catholic practices.
The Eucharist may sometimes be celebrated in the form known as High Mass, with a priest, deacon and subdeacon (usually actually a layman) dressed in traditional vestments, with incense and sanctus bells and prayers adapted from the Roman Missal or other sources by the celebrant. Such churches may also have forms of eucharistic adoration such as Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. In terms of personal piety, some Anglicans may recite the Rosary and Angelus, be involved in a devotional society dedicated to "Our Lady" (the Blessed Virgin Mary) and seek the intercession of the saints.
In recent decades, the prayer books of several provinces have, out of deference to a greater agreement with Eastern Conciliarism (and a perceived greater respect accorded Anglicanism by Eastern Orthodoxy than by Roman Catholicism), instituted a number of historically Eastern and Oriental Orthodox elements in their liturgies, including introduction of the Trisagion and deletion of the filioque clause from the Nicene Creed.
For their part, those evangelical (and some broad-church) Anglicans who emphasise the more Protestant aspects of the Church stress the Reformation theme of salvation by grace through faith. They emphasise the two dominical sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, viewing the other five as "lesser rites". Some evangelical Anglicans may even tend to take the inerrancy of scripture literally, adopting the view of Article VI that it contains all things necessary to salvation in an explicit sense. Worship in churches influenced by these principles tends to be significantly less elaborate, with greater emphasis on the Liturgy of the Word (the reading of the scriptures, the sermon, and the intercessory prayers).
The Order for Holy Communion may be celebrated bi-weekly or monthly (in preference to the daily offices), by priests attired in choir habit, or more regular clothes, rather than Eucharistic vestments. Ceremony may be in keeping with their view of the provisions of the 17th-century Puritans – being a Reformed interpretation of the Ornaments Rubric – no candles, no incense, no bells, and a minimum of manual actions by the presiding celebrant (such as touching the elements at the Words of Institution).
In the early 21st century, there has been a growth of charismatic worship among Anglicans. Both Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals have been affected by this movement such that it is not uncommon to find typically charismatic postures, music, and other themes evident during the services of otherwise Anglo-Catholic or evangelical parishes.
The spectrum of Anglican beliefs and practice is too large to be fit into these labels. Many Anglicans locate themselves somewhere in the spectrum of the broad-church tradition and consider themselves an amalgam of evangelical and Catholic. Such Anglicans stress that Anglicanism is the via media (middle way) between the two major strains of Western Christianity and that Anglicanism is like a "bridge" between the two strains. |
Anglicanism | Sacramental doctrine and practice | Sacramental doctrine and practice
In accord with its prevailing self-identity as a via media or "middle path" of Western Christianity, Anglican sacramental theology expresses elements in keeping with its status as being both a church in the Catholic tradition as well as a Reformed church. With respect to sacramental theology, the Catholic heritage is perhaps most strongly asserted in the importance Anglicanism places on the sacraments as a means of grace, sanctification, and salvation, as expressed in the church's liturgy and doctrine.
Of the seven sacraments, all Anglicans recognise Baptism and the Eucharist as being directly instituted by Christ. The other five – Confession/Absolution, Matrimony, Confirmation, Holy Orders (also called Ordination), and Anointing of the Sick (also called Unction) – are regarded variously as full sacraments by Anglo-Catholics and many high church and some broad-church Anglicans, but merely as "sacramental rites" by other broad-church and low-church Anglicans, especially evangelicals associated with Reform UK and the Diocese of Sydney. |
Anglicanism | Eucharistic theology | Eucharistic theology
Anglican eucharistic theology is divergent in practice, reflecting the essential comprehensiveness of the tradition. A few low-church Anglicans take a strictly memorialist (Zwinglian) view of the sacrament. In other words, they see Holy Communion as a memorial to Christ's suffering, and participation in the Eucharist as both a re-enactment of the Last Supper and a foreshadowing of the heavenly banquet – the fulfilment of the eucharistic promise.
Other low-church Anglicans believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist but deny that the presence of Christ is carnal or is necessarily localised in the bread and wine. Despite explicit criticism in the Thirty-Nine Articles, many high-church or Anglo-Catholic Anglicans hold, more or less, the Catholic view of the real presence as expressed in the doctrine of transubstantiation, seeing the Eucharist as a liturgical representation of Christ's atoning sacrifice with the elements actually transformed into Christ's body and blood.
The majority of Anglicans, however, have in common a belief in the real presence, defined in one way or another. To that extent, they are in the company of the continental reformer Martin Luther and Calvin rather than Ulrich Zwingli. The Catechism of the American BCP of 1976 repeats the standard Anglican view ("The outward and visible sign in the Eucharist is the bread and wine"..."The inward and spiritual grace in the Holy Communion is the Body and Blood of Christ given to his people, and received by faith") without further definition. It should be remembered that Anglicanism has no official doctrine on this matter, believing it is wiser to leave the Presence a mystery. The faithful can believe privately whatever explanation they favour, be it transubstantiation, consubstantiation, receptionism, or virtualism (the two most congenial to Anglicans for centuries until the Oxford Movement), each of which espouses belief in the real presence in one way or another, or memorialism, which has never been an option with Anglicans.
A famous Anglican aphorism regarding Christ's presence in the sacrament, commonly misattributed to Queen Elizabeth I, is first found in print in a poem by John Donne:
He was the word that spake it,
He took the bread and brake it:
And what that word did make it,
I do believe and take it.
An Anglican position on the eucharistic sacrifice ("Sacrifice of the Mass") was expressed in the response Saepius officio of the archbishops of Canterbury and York to Pope Leo XIII's papal encyclical Apostolicae curae: viz. that the Prayer Book contained a strong sacrificial theology. Later revisions of the Prayer Book influenced by the Scottish Canon of 1764 first adopted by the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1789 made this assertion quite evident: "we do make and celebrate before thy Divine Majesty with these thy holy gifts, which we now offer unto thee, the memorial thy Son has commanded us to make", which is repeated in the 1929 English BCP and included in such words or others such as "present" or "show forth" in subsequent revisions.
Anglican and Roman Catholic representatives declared that they had "substantial agreement on the doctrine of the Eucharist" in the Windsor Statement on Eucharistic Doctrine by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Consultation (1971) and the Elucidation of the ARCIC Windsor Statement (1979). The final response (1991) to these documents by the Vatican made it plain that it did not consider the degree of agreement reached to be satisfactory. |
Anglicanism | Practices | Practices
In Anglicanism there is a distinction between liturgy, which is the formal public and communal worship of the church, and personal prayer and devotion, which may be public or private. Liturgy is regulated by the prayer books and consists of the Eucharist (some call it Holy Communion or Mass), the other six sacraments, and the daily offices such as Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer. |
Anglicanism | ''Book of Common Prayer'' | Book of Common Prayer
thumb|The 1596 Book of Common Prayer
The Book of Common Prayer (BCP) is the foundational prayer book of Anglicanism. The original book of 1549 (revised in 1552) was one of the instruments of the English Reformation, replacing the various "uses" or rites in Latin that had been used in different parts of the country with a single compact volume in the language of the people, so that "now from henceforth all the Realm shall have but one use". Suppressed under Queen Mary I, it was revised in 1559, and then again in 1662, after the Restoration of Charles II. This version was made mandatory in England and Wales by the Act of Uniformity and was in standard use until the mid-20th century.
With British colonial expansion from the 17th century onwards, Anglican churches were planted around the globe. These churches at first used and then revised the Book of Common Prayer until they, like their parent church, produced prayer books which took into account the developments in liturgical study and practice in the 19th and 20th centuries, which come under the general heading of the Liturgical Movement. |
Anglicanism | Worship | Worship
thumb|The 1962 and 1959 editions of the Anglican Church of Canada's Book of Common Prayer.
Anglican worship services are open to all visitors. Anglican worship originates principally in the reforms of Thomas Cranmer, who aimed to create a set order of service like that of the pre-Reformation church but less complex in its seasonal variety and said in English rather than Latin. This use of a set order of service is not unlike the Catholic tradition. Traditionally, the pattern was that laid out in the Book of Common Prayer. Although many Anglican churches now use a wide range of modern service books written in the local language, the structures of the Book of Common Prayer are largely retained. Churches which call themselves Anglican will have identified themselves so because they use some form or variant of the Book of Common Prayer in the shaping of their worship.
Anglican worship, however, is as diverse as Anglican theology. A contemporary "low church" service may differ little from the worship of many mainstream non-Anglican Protestant churches. The service is constructed around a sermon focused on Biblical exposition and opened with one or more Bible readings and closed by a series of prayers (both set and extemporised) and hymns or songs. A "high church" or Anglo-Catholic service, by contrast, is usually a more formal liturgy celebrated by clergy in distinctive vestments and may be almost indistinguishable from a Roman Catholic service, often resembling the "pre–Vatican II" Tridentine rite.
Between these extremes are a variety of styles of worship, often involving a robed choir and the use of the organ to accompany the singing and to provide music before and after the service. Anglican churches tend to have pews or chairs, and it is usual for the congregation to kneel for some prayers but to stand for hymns and other parts of the service such as the Gloria, Collect, Gospel reading, Creed and either the Preface or all of the Eucharistic Prayer. Anglicans may genuflect or cross themselves in the same way as Roman Catholics.
thumb|Church of St Mary the Virgin, Bury
Other more traditional Anglicans tend to follow the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and retain the use of the King James Bible. This is typical in many Anglican cathedrals and particularly in royal peculiars such as the Savoy Chapel and the Queen's Chapel. These Anglican church services include classical music instead of songs, hymns from the New English Hymnal (usually excluding modern hymns such as "Lord of the Dance"), and are generally non-evangelical and formal in practice. Until the mid-20th century the main Sunday service was typically Morning Prayer, but the Eucharist has once again become the standard form of Sunday worship in most Anglican churches; this again is similar to Roman Catholic practice. Other common Sunday services include an early morning Eucharist without music, an abbreviated Eucharist following a service of morning prayer, and a service of Evening Prayer, often called "Evensong" when sung, usually celebrated between 3:00 and 6:00 pm. The late-evening service of Compline was revived in parish use in the early 20th century. Many Anglican churches will also have daily morning and evening prayer, and some have midweek or even daily celebration of the Eucharist.
An Anglican service (whether or not a Eucharist) will include readings from the Bible that are generally taken from a standardised lectionary, which provides for much of the Bible (and some passages from the Apocrypha) to be read out loud in the church over a cycle of one, two, or three years (depending on which eucharistic and office lectionaries are used, respectively). The sermon (or homily) is typically about ten to twenty minutes in length, often comparably short to sermons in evangelical churches. Even in the most informal Anglican services, it is common for set prayers such as the weekly Collect to be read. There are also set forms for intercessory prayer, though this is now more often extemporaneous. In high and Anglo-Catholic churches there are generally prayers for the dead. Although Anglican public worship is usually ordered according to the canonically approved services, in practice many Anglican churches use forms of service outside these norms. Liberal churches may use freely structured or experimental forms of worship, including patterns borrowed from ecumenical traditions such as those of the Taizé Community or the Iona Community.
Anglo-Catholic parishes might use the modern Roman Catholic liturgy of the Mass or more traditional forms, such as the Tridentine Mass (which is translated into English in the English Missal), the Anglican Missal, or, less commonly, the Sarum Rite. Catholic devotions such as the Rosary, Angelus, and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament are also common among Anglo-Catholics. |
Anglicanism | Eucharistic discipline | Eucharistic discipline
Only baptised persons are eligible to receive communion, although in many churches communion is restricted to those who have not only been baptised but also confirmed. In many Anglican provinces, however, all baptised Christians are now often invited to receive communion and some dioceses have regularised a system for admitting baptised young people to communion before they are confirmed.
The discipline of fasting before communion is practised by some Anglicans. Most Anglican priests require the presence of at least one other person for the celebration of the Eucharist (referring back to Christ's statement in Matthew 18:20, "When two or more are gathered in my name, I will be in the midst of them."), though some Anglo-Catholic priests (like Roman Catholic priests) may say private Masses. As in the Roman Catholic Church, it is a canonical requirement to use fermented wine for communion.
Unlike in Roman Catholicism, the consecrated bread and wine are normally offered to the congregation at a eucharistic service ("communion in both kinds"). This practice is becoming more frequent in the Roman Catholic Church as well, especially through the Neocatechumenal Way. In some churches, the sacrament is reserved in a tabernacle or aumbry with a lighted candle or lamp nearby. In Anglican churches, only a priest or a bishop may be the celebrant at the Eucharist. |
Anglicanism | Divine office | Divine office
thumb|Evensong at York Minster in York, England
All Anglican prayer books contain offices for Morning Prayer (Matins) and Evening Prayer (Evensong). In the original Book of Common Prayer, these were derived from combinations of the ancient monastic offices of Matins and Lauds; and Vespers and Compline, respectively. The prayer offices have an important place in Anglican history.
Prior to the Catholic revival of the 19th century, which eventually restored the Eucharist as the principal Sunday liturgy, and especially during the 18th century, a morning service combining Matins, the Litany, and ante-Communion comprised the usual expression of common worship, while Matins and Evensong were sung daily in cathedrals and some collegiate chapels. This nurtured a tradition of distinctive Anglican chant applied to the canticles and psalms used at the offices (although plainsong is often used as well).
In some official and many unofficial Anglican service books, these offices are supplemented by other offices such as the Little Hours of Prime and prayer during the day such as (Terce, Sext, None, and Compline). Some Anglican monastic communities have a Daily Office based on that of the Book of Common Prayer but with additional antiphons and canticles, etc., for specific days of the week, specific psalms, etc. See, for example, Order of the Holy Cross and Order of St Helena, editors, A Monastic Breviary (Wilton, Conn.: Morehouse-Barlow, 1976). The All Saints Sisters of the Poor, with convents in Catonsville, Maryland, and elsewhere, use an elaborated version of the Anglican Daily Office. The Society of St. Francis publishes Celebrating Common Prayer, which has become especially popular for use among Anglicans.
In England, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and some other Anglican provinces, the modern prayer books contain four offices:
Morning Prayer, corresponding to Matins, Lauds and Prime;
Prayer During the Day, roughly corresponding to the combination of Terce, Sext, and None (Noonday Prayer in the USA);
Evening Prayer, corresponding to Vespers (and Compline);
Compline.
In addition, most prayer books include a section of prayers and devotions for family use. In the US, these offices are further supplemented by an "Order of Worship for the Evening", a prelude to or an abbreviated form of Evensong, partly derived from Orthodox prayers. In the United Kingdom, the publication of Daily Prayer, the third volume of Common Worship, was published in 2005. It retains the services for Morning and Evening Prayer and Compline and includes a section entitled "Prayer during the Day". A New Zealand Prayer Book of 1989 provides different outlines for Matins and Evensong on each day of the week, as well as "Midday Prayer", "Night Prayer" and "Family Prayer".
Some Anglicans who pray the office on daily basis use the present Divine Office of the Roman Catholic Church. In many cities, especially in England, Anglican and Roman Catholic priests and lay people often meet several times a week to pray the office in common. A small but enthusiastic minority use the Anglican Breviary, or other translations and adaptations of the pre–Vatican II Roman Rite and Sarum Rite, along with supplemental material from cognate western sources, to provide such things as a common of Octaves, a common of Holy Women, and other additional material. Others may privately use idiosyncratic forms borrowed from a wide range of Christian traditions. |
Anglicanism | {{anchor | "Quires and Places where they sing"
In the late medieval period, many English cathedrals and monasteries had established small choirs of trained lay clerks and boy choristers to perform polyphonic settings of the Mass in their Lady chapels. Although these "Lady Masses" were discontinued at the Reformation, the associated musical tradition was maintained in the Elizabethan Settlement through the establishment of choral foundations for daily singing of the Divine Office by expanded choirs of men and boys. This resulted from an explicit addition by Elizabeth herself to the injunctions accompanying the 1559 Book of Common Prayer (that had itself made no mention of choral worship) by which existing choral foundations and choir schools were instructed to be continued, and their endowments secured. Consequently, some thirty-four cathedrals, collegiate churches, and royal chapels maintained paid establishments of lay singing men and choristers in the late 16th century.
All save four of these have – with interruptions during the Commonwealth and the COVID-19 pandemic – continued daily choral prayer and praise to this day. In the Offices of Matins and Evensong in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, these choral establishments are specified as "Quires and Places where they sing".
For nearly three centuries, this round of daily professional choral worship represented a tradition entirely distinct from that embodied in the intoning of Parish Clerks, and the singing of "west gallery choirs" which commonly accompanied weekly worship in English parish churches. In 1841, the rebuilt Leeds Parish Church established a surpliced choir to accompany parish services, drawing explicitly on the musical traditions of the ancient choral foundations. Over the next century, the Leeds example proved immensely popular and influential for choirs in cathedrals, parish churches, and schools throughout the Anglican communion. More or less extensively adapted, this choral tradition also became the direct inspiration for robed choirs leading congregational worship in a wide range of Christian denominations.
In 1719, the cathedral choirs of Gloucester, Hereford, and Worcester combined to establish the annual Three Choirs Festival, the precursor for the multitude of summer music festivals since. By the 20th century, the choral tradition had become for many the most accessible face of worldwide Anglicanism – especially as promoted through the regular broadcasting of choral evensong by the BBC; and also in the annual televising of the festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge. Composers closely concerned with this tradition include Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Charles Villiers Stanford, and Benjamin Britten. A number of important 20th-century works by non-Anglican composers were originally commissioned for the Anglican choral tradition – for example, the Chichester Psalms of Leonard Bernstein and the Nunc dimittis of Arvo Pärt. |
Anglicanism | Communion | Communion |
Anglicanism | Principles of governance | Principles of governance
Contrary to popular misconception, the British monarch is not the constitutional "head" of the Church of England but is, in law, the church's "supreme governor", nor does the monarch have any role in provinces outside England. The role of the crown in the Church of England is practically limited to the appointment of bishops, including the archbishop of Canterbury, and even this role is limited, as the church presents the government with a short list of candidates from which to choose. This process is accomplished through collaboration with and consent of ecclesial representatives (see Ecclesiastical Commissioners). Although the monarch has no constitutional role in Anglican churches in other parts of the world, the prayer books of several countries where the monarch is head of state contain prayers for him or her as sovereign.
A characteristic of Anglicanism is that it has no international juridical authority. All forty-two provinces of the Anglican Communion are autonomous, each with their own primate and governing structure. These provinces may take the form of national churches (such as in Canada, Uganda or Japan) or a collection of nations (such as the West Indies, Central Africa or South Asia), or geographical regions (such as Vanuatu and Solomon Islands) etc. Within these provinces there may exist subdivisions, called ecclesiastical provinces, under the jurisdiction of a metropolitan archbishop.
All provinces of the Anglican Communion consist of dioceses, each under the jurisdiction of a bishop. In the Anglican tradition, bishops must be consecrated according to the strictures of apostolic succession, which Anglicans consider one of the marks of catholicity. Apart from bishops, there are two other orders of ordained ministry: deacon and priest.
No requirement is made for clerical celibacy, though many Anglo-Catholic priests have traditionally been bachelors. Because of innovations that occurred at various points after the latter half of the 20th century, women may be ordained as deacons in almost all provinces, as priests in most and as bishops in many. Anglican religious orders and communities, suppressed in England during the Reformation, have re-emerged, especially since the mid-19th century, and now have an international presence and influence.
Government in the Anglican Communion is synodical, consisting of three houses of laity (usually elected parish representatives), clergy and bishops. National, provincial and diocesan synods maintain different scopes of authority, depending on their canons and constitutions. Anglicanism is not congregational in its polity: it is the diocese, not the parish church, which is the smallest unit of authority in the church. (See Episcopal polity). |
Anglicanism | Archbishop of Canterbury | Archbishop of Canterbury
thumb|The coat of arms of the episcopal see of Canterbury
The archbishop of Canterbury has a precedence of honour over the other primates of the Anglican Communion, and for a province to be considered a part of the communion means specifically to be in full communion with the see of Canterbury – though this principle is currently subject to considerable debate, especially among those in the so-called Global South, including American Anglicans. The archbishop is, therefore, recognised as ("first amongst equals"), even though he does not exercise any direct authority in any province outside England, of which he is chief primate. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012, was the first archbishop appointed from outside the Church of England since the Reformation: he was formerly the archbishop of Wales.
As "spiritual head" of the communion, the archbishop of Canterbury maintains a certain moral authority and has the right to determine which churches will be in communion with his see. He hosts and chairs the Lambeth Conferences of Anglican Communion bishops and decides who will be invited to them. He also hosts and chairs the Anglican Communion Primates' Meeting and is responsible for the invitations to it. He acts as president of the secretariat of the Anglican Communion Office and its deliberative body, the Anglican Consultative Council. |
Anglicanism | Conferences | Conferences
The Anglican Communion has no international juridical organisation. All international bodies are consultative and collaborative, and their resolutions are not legally binding on the autonomous provinces of the communion. There are three international bodies of note.
The Lambeth Conference is the oldest international consultation. It was first convened by Archbishop Charles Longley in 1867 as a vehicle for bishops of the communion to "discuss matters of practical interest, and pronounce what we deem expedient in resolutions which may serve as safe guides to future action". Since then, it has been held roughly every ten years. Invitation is by the archbishop of Canterbury.
The Anglican Consultative Council was created by a 1968 Lambeth Conference resolution and meets biennially. The council consists of representative bishops, clergy and laity chosen by the forty-two provinces. The body has a permanent secretariat, the Anglican Communion Office, of which the archbishop of Canterbury is president.
The Anglican Communion Primates' Meeting is the most recent manifestation of international consultation and deliberation, having been first convened by Archbishop Donald Coggan in 1978 as a forum for "leisurely thought, prayer and deep consultation". |
Anglicanism | Ordained ministry | Ordained ministry
Like the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches, the Anglican Communion maintains the threefold ministry of deacons, presbyters (usually called "priests"), and bishops.
thumb|The Chair of St Augustine (the episcopal throne in Canterbury Cathedral, Kent), seat of the archbishop of Canterbury in his role as head of the Anglican Communion |
Anglicanism | Episcopate | Episcopate
Bishops, who possess the fullness of Christian priesthood, are the successors of the apostles. Primates, archbishops, and metropolitans are all bishops and members of the historical episcopate who derive their authority through apostolic succession – an unbroken line of bishops that can be traced back to the 12 apostles of Jesus. |
Anglicanism | Priesthood | Priesthood
Bishops are assisted by priests and deacons. Most ordained ministers in the Anglican Communion are priests, who usually work in parishes within a diocese. Priests are in charge of the spiritual life of parishes and are usually called the rector or vicar. A curate (or, more correctly, an "assistant curate") is a priest or deacon who assists the parish priest. Non-parochial priests may earn their living by any vocation, although employment by educational institutions or charitable organisations is most common. Priests also serve as chaplains of hospitals, schools, prisons, and in the armed forces.
An archdeacon is a priest or deacon responsible for administration of an archdeaconry, which is often the name given to the principal subdivisions of a diocese. An archdeacon represents the diocesan bishop in his or her archdeaconry. In the Church of England, the position of archdeacon can only be held by someone in priestly orders who has been ordained for at least six years. In some other parts of the Anglican Communion, the position can also be held by deacons. In parts of the Anglican Communion where women cannot be ordained as priests or bishops but can be ordained as deacons, the position of archdeacon is effectively the most senior office to which an ordained woman can be appointed.
A dean is a priest who is the principal cleric of a cathedral or other collegiate church and the head of the chapter of canons. If the cathedral or collegiate church has its own parish, the dean is usually also rector of the parish. However, in the Church of Ireland, the roles are often separated, and most cathedrals in the Church of England do not have associated parishes. In the Church in Wales, however, most cathedrals are parish churches and their deans are now also vicars of their parishes.
The Anglican Communion recognises Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox ordinations as valid. Outside the Anglican Communion, Anglican ordinations (at least of male priests) are recognised by the Old Catholic Church, Porvoo Communion Lutherans, and various Independent Catholic churches. |
Anglicanism | Diaconate | Diaconate
In Anglican churches, deacons often work directly in ministry to the marginalised inside and outside the church: the poor, the sick, the hungry, the imprisoned. Unlike Orthodox and most Roman Catholic deacons who may be married only before ordination, deacons are permitted to marry freely both before and after ordination, as are priests. Most deacons are preparing for priesthood and usually only remain as deacons for about a year before being ordained priests. However, there are some deacons who remain so.
Many provinces of the Anglican Communion ordain both men and women as deacons. Many of those provinces that ordain women to the priesthood previously allowed them to be ordained only to the diaconate. The effect of this was the creation of a large and overwhelmingly female diaconate for a time, as most men proceeded to be ordained priest after a short time as a deacon.
Deacons, in some dioceses, can be granted licences to solemnise matrimony, usually under the instruction of their parish priest and bishop. They sometimes officiate at Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament in churches which have this service. Deacons are not permitted to preside at the Eucharist (but can lead worship with the distribution of already consecrated communion where this is permitted), absolve sins, or pronounce a blessing. It is the prohibition against deacons pronouncing blessings that leads some to believe that deacons cannot solemnise matrimony. |
Anglicanism | Laity | Laity
All baptised members of the church are called Christian faithful, truly equal in dignity and in the work to build the church. Some non-ordained people also have a formal public ministry, often on a full-time and long-term basis – such as lay readers (also known as readers), churchwardens, vergers, and sextons. Other lay positions include acolytes (male or female, often children), lay eucharistic ministers (also known as chalice bearers), and lay eucharistic visitors (who deliver consecrated bread and wine to "shut-ins" or members of the parish who are unable to leave home or hospital to attend the Eucharist). Lay people also serve on the parish altar guild (preparing the altar and caring for its candles, linens, flowers, etc.), in the choir and as cantors, as ushers and greeters, and on the church council (called the "vestry" in some countries), which is the governing body of a parish. |
Anglicanism | Religious orders | Religious orders
A small yet influential aspect of Anglicanism is its religious orders and communities. Shortly after the beginning of the Catholic Revival in the Church of England, there was a renewal of interest in re-establishing religious and monastic orders and communities. One of Henry VIII's earliest acts was their dissolution and seizure of their assets. In 1841, Marian Rebecca Hughes became the first woman to take the vows of religion in communion with the Province of Canterbury since the Reformation.
In 1848, Priscilla Lydia Sellon became the superior of the Society of the Most Holy Trinity at Devonport, Plymouth, the first organised religious order. Sellon is called "the restorer, after three centuries, of the religious life in the Church of England". For the next one hundred years, religious orders for both men and women proliferated throughout the world, becoming a numerically small but disproportionately influential feature of global Anglicanism.
Anglican religious life at one time boasted hundreds of orders and communities, and thousands of religious. An important aspect of Anglican religious life is that most communities of both men and women lived their lives consecrated to God under the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, or, in Benedictine communities, Stability, Conversion of Life, and Obedience, by practising a mixed life of reciting the full eight services of the Breviary in choir, along with a daily Eucharist, plus service to the poor. The mixed life, combining aspects of the contemplative orders and the active orders, remains to this day a hallmark of Anglican religious life. Another distinctive feature of Anglican religious life is the existence of some mixed-gender communities.
Since the 1960s, there has been a sharp decline in the number of professed religious in most parts of the Anglican Communion, especially in North America, Europe, and Australia. Many once large and international communities have been reduced to a single convent or monastery with memberships of elderly men or women. In the last few decades of the 20th century, novices have for most communities been few and far between. Some orders and communities have already become extinct. There are, however, still thousands of Anglican religious working today in approximately 200 communities around the world, and religious life in many parts of the Communion – especially in developing nations – flourishes.
The most significant growth has been in the Melanesian countries of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea. The Melanesian Brotherhood, founded at Tabalia, Guadalcanal, in 1925 by Ini Kopuria, is now the largest Anglican Community in the world, with over 450 brothers in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom. The Sisters of the Church, started by Mother Emily Ayckbowm in England in 1870, has more sisters in the Solomons than all their other communities. The Community of the Sisters of Melanesia, started in 1980 by Sister Nesta Tiboe, is a growing community of women in the Solomon Islands.
The Society of Saint Francis, founded as a union of various Franciscan orders in the 1920s, has experienced great growth in the Solomon Islands. Other communities of religious have been started by Anglicans in Papua New Guinea and in Vanuatu. Most Melanesian Anglican religious are in their early to mid-20s. Vows may be temporary, and it is generally assumed that brothers, at least, will leave and marry in due course, making the average age 40 to 50 years younger than their brothers and sisters in other countries. Growth of religious orders, especially for women, is marked in certain parts of Africa. |
Anglicanism | Worldwide distribution | Worldwide distribution
thumb|A world map showing the provinces of the Anglican Communion (blue). Shown are the Churches in full communion with the Anglican Church: The Nordic Lutheran churches of the Porvoo Communion (green), and the Old Catholic Churches in the Utrecht Union (red).|228x228px
Anglicanism represents the third largest Christian communion in the world, after the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. The number of Anglicans in the world is over 85 million . The 11 provinces in Africa saw growth in the last two decades. They now include 36.7 million members, more Anglicans than there are in England. England remains the largest single Anglican province, with 26 million members. In most industrialised countries, church attendance has decreased since the 19th century. Anglicanism's presence in the rest of the world is due to large-scale emigration, the establishment of expatriate communities, or the work of missionaries.
The Church of England has been a church of missionaries since the 17th century, when the Church first left English shores with colonists who founded what would become the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, and established Anglican churches. For example, an Anglican chaplain, Robert Wolfall, with Martin Frobisher's Arctic expedition, celebrated the Eucharist in 1578 in Frobisher Bay.
The first Anglican church in the Americas was built at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. By the 18th century, missionaries worked to establish Anglican churches in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The great Church of England missionary societies were founded; for example, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in 1698, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) in 1701, and the Church Mission Society (CMS) in 1799. In the 19th century, social-oriented evangelism with societies were founded and developed, including the Church Pastoral Aid Society (CPAS) in 1836, Mission to Seafarers in 1856, Girls' Friendly Society (GFS) in 1875, Mothers' Union in 1876, and Church Army in 1882, all carrying out a personal form of evangelism.
In the 20th century, the Church of England developed new forms of evangelism, including the Alpha course in 1990, which was developed and propagated from Holy Trinity Brompton Church in London. In the 21st century, there has been renewed effort to reach children and youth. Fresh expressions is a Church of England missionary initiative to youth begun in 2005, and has ministries at a skate parkLegacy XS Youth Centre & Skatepark, St. George's, Benfleet through the efforts of St George's Church, Benfleet, Essex, the Diocese of Chelmsford, or youth groups with evocative names, like the C.L.A.W (Christ Little Angels – Whatever!) youth group at Coventry Cathedral. For those who prefer not to actually visit a brick and mortar church, there are Internet ministries, such as the Diocese of Oxford's online Anglican i-Church, which was founded on the web in 2005. |
Anglicanism | Ecumenism | Ecumenism
Anglican interest in ecumenical dialogue can be traced back to the time of the Reformation and dialogues with both Orthodox and Lutheran churches in the 16th century. In the 19th century, with the rise of the Oxford Movement, there arose greater concern for reunion of the churches of "Catholic confession". This desire to work towards full communion with other denominations led to the development of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, approved by the third Lambeth Conference of 1888. The four points (the sufficiency of scripture, the historic creeds, the two dominical sacraments, and the historic episcopate) were proposed as a basis for discussion, although they have frequently been taken as a non-negotiable bottom-line for any form of reunion. |
Anglicanism | Theological diversity | Theological diversity
thumb|The high altar at Lichfield Cathedral
Anglicanism in general has always sought a balance between the emphases of Catholicism and Protestantism, while tolerating a range of expressions of evangelicalism and ceremony. Clergy and laity from all Anglican churchmanship traditions have been active in the formation of the Continuing movement.
While there are high church, broad-church and low-church Continuing Anglicans, many Continuing churches are Anglo-Catholic with highly ceremonial liturgical practices. Others belong to a more evangelical or low-church tradition and tend to support the Thirty-nine Articles and simpler worship services. Morning Prayer, for instance, is often used instead of the Holy Eucharist for Sunday worship services, although this is not necessarily true of all low-church parishes.
Most Continuing churches in the United States reject the 1979 revision of the Book of Common Prayer by the Episcopal Church and use the 1928 version for their services instead. In addition, Anglo-Catholic bodies may use the Anglican Missal, Anglican Service Book or English Missal when celebrating Mass. |
Anglicanism | Internal conflict | Internal conflict
A changing focus on social issues after the World War II led to Lambeth Conference resolutions countenancing contraception and the remarriage of divorced persons. Eventually, most provinces approved the ordination of women. In more recent years, some jurisdictions have permitted the ordination of people in same-sex relationships and authorised rites for the blessing of same-sex unions (see Homosexuality and Anglicanism). "The more liberal provinces that are open to changing Church doctrine on marriage in order to allow for same-sex unions include Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, Scotland, South India, South Africa, the US and Wales", while the more conservative provinces are primarily located in the Global South.
The lack of social consensus among and within provinces of diverse cultural traditions has resulted in considerable conflict and even schism concerning some or all of these developments, as was the case in the Anglican realignment. More conservative elements within and outside of Anglicanism (primarily African churches and factions within North American Anglicanism) have opposed these changes, while some liberal and moderate Anglicans see this opposition as representing a new fundamentalism within Anglicanism and "believe a split is inevitable and preferable to continued infighting and paralysis." Some Anglicans opposed to various liberalising changes, in particular the ordination of women, have become Roman Catholics or Orthodox. Others have, at various times, joined the Continuing Anglican movement or departed for non-Anglican evangelical churches. |
Anglicanism | Continuum | Continuum
The term "Continuing Anglicanism" refers to a number of church bodies which have formed outside of the Anglican Communion in the belief that traditional forms of Anglican faith, worship, and order have been unacceptably revised or abandoned within some Anglican Communion churches in recent decades. They therefore claim that they are "continuing" traditional Anglicanism.
The modern Continuing Anglican movement principally dates to the Congress of St. Louis, held in the United States in 1977, where participants rejected changes that had been made in the Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayer and also the Episcopal Church's approval of the ordination of women to the priesthood. More recent changes in the North American churches of the Anglican Communion, such as the introduction of same-sex marriage rites and the ordination of gay and lesbian people to the priesthood and episcopate, have created further separations.
Continuing churches have generally been formed by people who have left the Anglican Communion. The original Anglican churches are charged by the Continuing Anglicans with being greatly compromised by secular cultural standards and liberal theology. Many Continuing Anglicans believe that the faith of some churches in communion with the archbishop of Canterbury has become unorthodox and therefore have not sought to also be in communion with him. The original continuing parishes in the United States were found mainly in metropolitan areas. Since the late 1990s, a number have appeared in smaller communities, often as a result of a division in the town's existing Episcopal churches. The 2007–08 Directory of Traditional Anglican and Episcopal Parishes, published by the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen, contained information on over 900 parishes affiliated with either the Continuing Anglican churches or the Anglican realignment movement, a more recent wave of Anglicans withdrawing from the Anglican Communion's North American provinces. |
Anglicanism | Social activism | Social activism
A concern for social justice can be traced to very early Anglican beliefs, relating to an intertwined theology of God, nature, and humanity. The Anglican theologian Richard Hooker wrote in his book The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine that "God hath created nothing simply for itself, but each thing in all things, and of every thing each part in other have such interest, that in the whole world nothing is found whereunto any thing created can say, 'I need thee not.'" Such statements demonstrate a theological Anglican interest in social activism, which has historically appeared in movements such as evangelical Anglican William Wilberforce’s campaign against slavery in the 18th century, or 19th century issues concerning industrialisation. |
Anglicanism | Working conditions and Christian socialism | Working conditions and Christian socialism
Lord Shaftesbury, a devout evangelical, campaigned to improve the conditions in factories, in mines, for chimney sweeps, and for the education of the very poor. For years, he was chairman of the Ragged School Board.J. Wesley Bready, Lord Shaftesbury and social-industrial progress (1927). Frederick Denison Maurice was a leading figure advocating reform, founding so-called "producer's co-operatives" and the Working Men's College. His work was instrumental in the establishment of the Christian socialist movement, although he himself was not in any real sense a socialist but "a Tory paternalist with the unusual desire to theorize his acceptance of the traditional obligation to help the poor", influenced Anglo-Catholics such as Charles Gore, who wrote that "the principle of the incarnation is denied unless the Christian spirit can be allowed to concern itself with everything that interests and touches human life." Anglican focus on labour issues culminated in the work of William Temple in the 1930s and 1940s." |
Anglicanism | Pacifism | Pacifism
A question of whether or not Christianity is a pacifist religion has remained a matter of debate for Anglicans. The leading Anglican spokesman for pacifist ideas, from 1914 to 1945, was Ernest Barnes, bishop of Birmingham from 1924 to 1953. He opposed both world wars.Stephen Parker, "'Blessed are the Pacifists': E. W. Barnes of Birmingham and Pacifism, 1914–45", Midland History 34#2 (2009) 204–219. In 1937, the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship emerged as a distinct reform organisation, seeking to make pacifism a clearly defined part of Anglican theology. The group rapidly gained popularity amongst Anglican intellectuals, including Vera Brittain, Evelyn Underhill, and the former British political leader George Lansbury. Furthermore, Dick Sheppard, who during the 1930s was one of Britain's most famous Anglican priests due to his landmark sermon broadcasts for BBC Radio, founded the Peace Pledge Union, a secular pacifist organisation for the non-religious that gained considerable support throughout the 1930s.
Whilst never actively endorsed by Anglican churches, many Anglicans unofficially have adopted the Augustinian "Just War" doctrine. The Anglican Pacifist Fellowship remains highly active throughout the Anglican world. It rejects this doctrine of "just war" and seeks to reform the Church by reintroducing the pacifism inherent in the beliefs of many of the earliest Christians and present in their interpretation of Christ's Sermon on the Mount. The principles of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship are often formulated as a statement of belief that "Jesus' teaching is incompatible with the waging of war ... that a Christian church should never support or justify war ... [and] that our Christian witness should include opposing the waging or justifying of war."
Confusing the matter was that the 37th Article of Religion in the Book of Common Prayer states that "it is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars." Therefore, the Lambeth Council in the modern era has sought to provide a clearer position by repudiating modern war and developed a statement that has been affirmed at each subsequent meeting of the council.
This statement was strongly reasserted when "the 67th General Convention of the Episcopal Church reaffirms the statement made by the Anglican Bishops assembled at Lambeth in 1978 and adopted by the 66th General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 1979, calling "Christian people everywhere ... to engage themselves in non-violent action for justice and peace and to support others so engaged, recognising that such action will be controversial and may be personally very costly... this General Convention, in obedience to this call, urges all members of this Church to support by prayer and by such other means as they deem appropriate, those who engaged in such non-violent action, and particularly those who suffer for conscience' sake as a result; and be it further Resolved, that this General Convention calls upon all members of this Church seriously to consider the implications for their own lives of this call to resist war and work for peace for their own lives." |
Anglicanism | Opposition to apartheid | Opposition to apartheid
thumb|Bishop Desmond Tutu making a speech in Los Angeles, 1986
The focus on other social issues became increasingly diffuse after World War II. The growing independence and strength of Anglican churches in the Global South brought new emphasis to issues of global poverty, the inequitable distribution of resources, and the lingering effects of colonialism. In this regard, figures such as Desmond Tutu and Ted Scott were instrumental in mobilising Anglicans worldwide against the apartheid policies of South Africa. |
Anglicanism | Abortion and euthanasia | Abortion and euthanasia
While individual Anglicans and member churches within the Communion differ in practice over the circumstances in which abortion should or should not be permitted, Lambeth Conference resolutions have consistently held to a conservative view on the issue. The 1930 Conference, the first to be held since the initial legalisation of abortion in Europe (in Russia in 1920), stated: "The Conference further records its abhorrence of the sinful practice of abortion."
The 1958 Conference's Family in Contemporary Society report affirmed the following position on abortion and was commended by the 1968 Conference:
The subsequent Lambeth Conference, in 1978, made no change to this position and commended the need for "programmes at diocesan level, involving both men and women ... to emphasise the sacredness of all human life, the moral issues inherent in clinical abortion, and the possible implications of genetic engineering."
In the context of debates around and proposals for the legalisation of euthanasia and assisted suicide, the 1998 Conference affirmed that "life is God-given and has intrinsic sanctity, significance and worth". |
Anglicanism | Ordinariates within the Roman Catholic Church | Ordinariates within the Roman Catholic Church
On 4 November 2009, Pope Benedict XVI issued an apostolic constitution, Anglicanorum Coetibus, to allow groups of former Anglicans to enter into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church as members of personal ordinariates. 20 October 2009 announcement of the imminent constitution mentioned:
Pope Benedict XVI approved, within the apostolic constitution, a canonical structure that provides for personal ordinariates which will allow former Anglicans to enter full communion with the Roman Catholic Church while preserving elements of distinctive Anglican spiritual patrimony.
For each personal ordinariate, the ordinary may be a former Anglican bishop or priest. It was expected that provision would be made to allow the retention of aspects of Anglican liturgy. |
Anglicanism | Notes | Notes |
Anglicanism | References | References |
Anglicanism | Citations | Citations |
Anglicanism | Sources | Sources
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Anglicanism | Further reading | Further reading
Buchanan, Colin. Historical Dictionary of Anglicanism (2nd ed. 2015) excerpt
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Anglicanism | External links | External links
Anglican Communion website
What it means to be an Anglican article
Anglican History website
Anglicans Online website
Online Anglican resources
Category:Christian denominations founded in Great Britain
Category:Protestant denominations established in the 16th century |
Anglicanism | Table of Content | Short description, Terminology, Definition, Identity, Early history, Development, Theories, Doctrine, "Catholic and reformed", Guiding principles, Distinctives of Anglican belief, Divines{{anchor, Churchmanship, Sacramental doctrine and practice, Eucharistic theology, Practices, ''Book of Common Prayer'', Worship, Eucharistic discipline, Divine office, {{anchor, Communion, Principles of governance, Archbishop of Canterbury, Conferences, Ordained ministry, Episcopate, Priesthood, Diaconate, Laity, Religious orders, Worldwide distribution, Ecumenism, Theological diversity, Internal conflict, Continuum, Social activism, Working conditions and Christian socialism, Pacifism, Opposition to apartheid, Abortion and euthanasia, Ordinariates within the Roman Catholic Church, Notes, References, Citations, Sources, Further reading, External links |
Athens | short description | Athens ( ) is the capital and largest city of Greece. A significant coastal urban area in the Mediterranean, Athens is also the capital of the Attica region and is the southernmost capital on the European mainland. With its urban area's population numbering over 3.6 million, it is the eighth-largest urban area in the European Union (EU). The Municipality of Athens (also City of Athens), which constitutes a small administrative unit of the entire urban area, had a population of 643,452 (2021) within its official limits, and a land area of .
Athens is one of the world's oldest cities, with its recorded history spanning over 3,400 years,Vinie Daily, Athens, the city in your pocket, p. 6. and its earliest human presence beginning somewhere between the 11th and 7th millennia BC. According to Greek mythology the city was named after Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom, but modern scholars generally agree that the goddess took her name after the city. Classical Athens was one of the most powerful city-states in ancient Greece. It was a centre for democracy, the arts, education and philosophy, and was highly influential throughout the European continent, particularly in Ancient Rome.Encarta Ancient Greece from the Internet Archive– Retrieved on 28 February 2012. Archived 31 October 2009. For this reason it is often regarded as the cradle of Western civilisation and the birthplace of democracy in its own right independently from the rest of Greece.BBC History on Greek Democracy – Accessed on 26 January 2007
In modern times Athens is a large cosmopolitan metropolis and central to economic, financial, industrial, maritime, political and cultural life in Greece. It is a Beta (+) –
status global city according to the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, and is one of the biggest economic centres in Southeast Europe. It also has a large financial sector, and its port Piraeus is both the second-busiest passenger port in Europe and the thirteenth-largest container port in the world. The Athens metropolitan area extends beyond its administrative municipal city limits as well as its urban agglomeration, with a population of 3,638,281 (2021) over an area of .
The heritage of the Classical Era is still evident in the city, represented by ancient monuments, and works of art, the most famous of all being the Parthenon, considered a key landmark of early Western culture. The city also retains Roman, Byzantine and a smaller number of Ottoman monuments, while its historical urban core features elements of continuity through its millennia of history. Athens contains two World Heritage Sites recognised by UNESCO: the Acropolis of Athens and the medieval Daphni Monastery. Athens is also home to several museums and cultural institutions, such as the National Archeological Museum, featuring the world's largest collection of ancient Greek antiquities, the Acropolis Museum, the Museum of Cycladic Art, the Benaki Museum and the Byzantine and Christian Museum. Athens was the host city of the first modern-day Olympic Games in 1896, and 108 years later it hosted the 2004 Summer Olympics, making it one of five cities to have hosted the Summer Olympics on multiple occasions. |
Athens | Etymology and names | Etymology and names
In Ancient Greek the name of the city was (Athênai, in Classical Attic), which is a plural word. In earlier Greek, such as Homeric Greek, the name had been current in the singular form though, as (Athḗnē).As for example in Od.7.80 It was possibly rendered in the plural later on, like those of (Thêbai) and (Μukênai). The root of the word is probably not of Greek or Indo-European origin, and is possibly a remnant of the Pre-Greek substrate of Attica. In classical antiquity it was debated whether Athens took its name from its patron goddess Athena (Attic , Athēnâ, Ionic , Athḗnē, and Doric , Athā́nā) or Athena took her name from the city. Modern scholars now generally agree that the goddess takes her name from the city, because the ending -ene is common in names of locations, but rare for personal names.
According to the ancient Athenian founding myth, Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, competed against Poseidon, the God of the Seas, for patronage of the yet-unnamed city; they agreed that whoever gave the Athenians the better gift would become their patron and appointed Cecrops, the king of Athens, as the judge. According to the account given by Pseudo-Apollodorus, Poseidon struck the ground with his trident and a salt water spring welled up. In an alternative version of the myth from Virgil's poem Georgics, Poseidon instead gave the Athenians the first horse. In both versions, Athena offered the Athenians the first domesticated olive tree. Cecrops accepted this gift and declared Athena the patron goddess of Athens. Eight different etymologies, now commonly rejected, have been proposed since the 17th century. Christian Lobeck proposed as the root of the name the word (áthos) or (ánthos) meaning "flower", to denote Athens as the "flowering city". Ludwig von Döderlein proposed the stem of the verb , stem θη- (tháō, thē-, "to suck") to denote Athens as having fertile soil.Great Greek Encyclopedia, vol. II, Athens 1927, p. 30. Athenians were called cicada-wearers () because they used to wear pins of golden cicadas. A symbol of being autochthonous (earth-born), because the legendary founder of Athens, Erechtheus was an autochthon or of being musicians, because the cicada is a "musician" insect. In classical literature the city was sometimes referred to as the City of the Violet Crown, first documented in Pindar's ἰοστέφανοι Ἀθᾶναι (iostéphanoi Athânai), or as (tò kleinòn ásty, "the glorious city").
During the medieval period, the name of the city was rendered once again in the singular as . Variant names included Setines, Satine, and Astines, all derivations involving false splitting of prepositional phrases. King Alphonse X of Castile gives the pseudo-etymology 'the one without death/ignorance'.'General Storia' (Global History) In Ottoman Turkish, it was called Ātīnā,Osmanlı Yer Adları, Ankara 2017, s.v. full text and in modern Turkish, it is Atina. |
Athens | History | History |
Athens | Antiquity | Antiquity
The oldest known human presence in Athens is the Cave of Schist, which has been dated to between the 11th and 7th millennia BC. Athens has been continuously inhabited for at least 5,000 years (3000 BC).S. Immerwahr, The Athenian Agora XIII: the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, Princeton 1971 By 1400 BC, the settlement had become an important centre of the Mycenaean civilisation, and the Acropolis was the site of a major Mycenaean fortress, whose remains can be recognised from sections of the characteristic Cyclopean walls.Iakovides, S. 1962. 'E mykenaïke akropolis ton Athenon'. Athens. Unlike other Mycenaean centres, such as Mycenae and Pylos, it is not known whether Athens suffered destruction in about 1200 BC, an event often attributed to a Dorian invasion, and the Athenians always maintained that they were pure Ionians with no Dorian element. However, Athens, like many other Bronze Age settlements, went into economic decline for around 150 years afterwards. Iron Age burials, in the Kerameikos and other locations, are often richly provided for and demonstrate that from 900 BC onwards Athens was one of the leading centres of trade and prosperity in the region.Osborne, R. 1996, 2009. Greece in the Making 1200–479 BC.
By the sixth century BC, widespread social unrest led to the reforms of Solon. These would pave the way for the eventual introduction of democracy by Cleisthenes in 508 BC. Athens had by this time become a significant naval power with a large fleet, and helped the rebellion of the Ionian cities against Persian rule. In the ensuing Greco-Persian Wars Athens, together with Sparta, led the coalition of Greek states that would eventually repel the Persians, defeating them decisively at Marathon in 490 BC, and crucially at Salamis in 480 BC. However, this did not prevent Athens from being captured and sacked twice by the Persians within one year, after a heroic but ultimately failed resistance at Thermopylae by Spartans and other Greeks led by King Leonidas, after both Boeotia and Attica fell to the Persians.
thumb|Delian League under the leadership of Athens before the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC
The decades that followed became known as the Golden Age of Athenian democracy, during which time Athens became the leading city of Ancient Greece, with its cultural achievements laying the foundations for Western civilization. The playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides flourished in Athens during this time, as did the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the physician Hippocrates, and the philosopher Socrates. Guided by Pericles, who promoted the arts and fostered democracy, Athens embarked on an ambitious building program that saw the construction of the Acropolis of Athens (including the Parthenon), as well as empire-building via the Delian League. Originally intended as an association of Greek city-states to continue the fight against the Persians, the league soon turned into a vehicle for Athens's own imperial ambitions. The resulting tensions brought about the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), in which Athens was defeated by its rival Sparta.Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.20, 404/3
thumb|The Parthenon on the Acropolis hill of Athens, dedicated to Athena Parthenos
By the mid-4th century BC the northern Greek kingdom of Macedon was becoming dominant in Athenian affairs. In 338 BC the armies of Philip II defeated an alliance of some of the Greek city-states including Athens and Thebes at the Battle of Chaeronea. Later, under Rome, Athens was given the status of a free city because of its widely admired schools. In the second century AD, the Roman emperor Hadrian, himself an Athenian citizen,Kouremenos, Anna (2022). "'The City of Hadrian and not of Theseus': A Cultural History of Hadrian's Arch". In A. Kouremenos (ed.) The Province of Achaea in the 2nd century CE: The Past Present. London: Routledge. https://www.academia.edu/43746490/_2022_The_City_of_Hadrian_and_not_of_Theseus_a_cultural_history_of_Hadrians_Arch ordered the construction of a library, a gymnasium, an aqueduct which is still in use, several temples and sanctuaries, a bridge and financed the completion of the Temple of Olympian Zeus.
In the early 4th century AD the Eastern Roman Empire began to be governed from Constantinople, and with the construction and expansion of the imperial city, many of Athens's works of art were taken by the emperors to adorn it. The Empire became Christianised, and the use of Latin declined in favour of exclusive use of Greek; in the Roman imperial period, both languages had been used. In the later Roman period, Athens was ruled by the emperors continuing until the 13th century, its citizens identifying themselves as citizens of the Roman Empire ("Rhomaioi"). The conversion of the empire from paganism to Christianity greatly affected Athens, resulting in reduced reverence for the city. Ancient monuments such as the Parthenon, Erechtheion and the Hephaisteion (Theseion) were converted into churches. As the empire became increasingly anti-pagan, Athens became a provincial town and experienced fluctuating fortunes.
The city remained an important centre of learning, especially of Neoplatonism—with notable pupils including Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil of Caesarea and the Roman emperor Julian ()—and consequently a centre of paganism. Christian items do not appear in the archaeological record until the early 5th century. The sack of the city by the Herules in 267 and by the Visigoths under their king Alaric I () in 396, however, dealt a heavy blow to the city's fabric and fortunes, and Athens was henceforth confined to a small fortified area that embraced a fraction of the ancient city. The emperor Justinian I () banned the teaching of philosophy by pagans in 529,Alan Cameron, "The Last Days of the Academy at Athens," in A. Cameron, Wandering Poets and Other Essays on Late Greek Literature and Philosophy, 2016, (Oxford University Press: Oxford), pp. 205–246 an event whose impact on the city is much debated, but is generally taken to mark the end of the ancient history of Athens. Athens was sacked by the Slavs in 582, but remained in imperial hands thereafter, as highlighted by the visit of the emperor Constans II () in 662/3 and its inclusion in the Theme of Hellas. |
Athens | Middle Ages | Middle Ages
thumb|The Daphni Monastery, an 11th-century Byzantine monastery northwest of central Athens, is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The city was threatened by Saracen raids in the 8th–9th centuries—in 896, Athens was raided and possibly occupied for a short period, an event which left some archaeological remains and elements of Arabic ornamentation in contemporary buildings—but there is also evidence of a mosque existing in the city at the time. In the great dispute over Byzantine Iconoclasm, Athens is commonly held to have supported the iconophile position, chiefly due to the role played by Empress Irene of Athens in the ending of the first period of Iconoclasm at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. A few years later, another Athenian, Theophano, became empress as the wife of Staurakios (r. 811–812).
Invasion of the empire by the Turks after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, and the ensuing civil wars, largely passed the region by and Athens continued its provincial existence unharmed. When the Byzantine Empire was rescued by the resolute leadership of the three Komnenos emperors Alexios, John and Manuel, Attica and the rest of Greece prospered. Archaeological evidence tells us that the medieval town experienced a period of rapid and sustained growth, starting in the 11th century and continuing until the end of the 12th century.
thumb|Photograph of the Frankish Tower of the Acropolis of Athens in 1874 (the year before it was demolished) with the ruins of the Propylaea and view west over the Athenian plain towards Mount Aigaleo
The Agora (marketplace) had been deserted since late antiquity, began to be built over, and soon the town became an important centre for the production of soaps and dyes. The growth of the town attracted the Venetians, and various other traders who frequented the ports of the Aegean, to Athens. This interest in trade appears to have further increased the economic prosperity of the town.
The 11th and 12th centuries were the Golden Age of Byzantine art in Athens. Almost all of the most important Middle Byzantine churches in and around Athens were built during these two centuries, and this reflects the growth of the town in general. However, this medieval prosperity was not to last. In 1204, the Fourth Crusade conquered Athens and the city was not recovered from the Latins before it was taken by the Ottoman Turks. It did not become Greek in government again until the 19th century.
From 1204 until 1458, Athens was ruled by Latins in three separate periods, following the Crusades. The "Latins", or "Franks", were western Europeans and followers of the Latin Church brought to the Eastern Mediterranean during the Crusades. Along with rest of Byzantine Greece, Athens was part of the series of feudal fiefs, similar to the Crusader states established in Syria and on Cyprus after the First Crusade. This period is known as the Frankokratia. |
Athens | Ottoman Athens | Ottoman Athens
thumb|Tzistarakis Mosque, an Ottoman mosque, built in 1759, in Monastiraki Square
thumb|right|The second Parthenon mosque in the ruined Parthenon, which was destroyed by a Venetian bombardment in 1687, depicted by Pierre Peytier in the 1830s
The first Ottoman attack on Athens, which involved a short-lived occupation of the town, came in 1397, under the Ottoman generals Yaqub Pasha and Timurtash. Finally, in 1458, Athens was captured by the Ottomans under the personal leadership of Sultan Mehmed II. As the Ottoman Sultan rode into the city, he was greatly struck by the beauty of its ancient monuments and issued a firman (imperial edict) forbidding their looting or destruction, on pain of death. The Parthenon was converted into the main mosque of the city.
Under Ottoman rule, Athens was denuded of any importance and its population severely declined, leaving it as a "small country town" (Franz Babinger). From the early 17th century, Athens came under the jurisdiction of the Kizlar Agha, the chief black eunuch of the Sultan's harem. The city had originally been granted by Sultan Ahmed I () to Basilica, one of his favourite concubines, who hailed from the city, in response of complaints of maladministration by the local governors. After her death, Athens came under the purview of the Kizlar Agha.
The Turks began a practice of storing gunpowder and explosives in the Parthenon and Propylaea. In 1640, a lightning bolt struck the Propylaea, causing its destruction. In 1687, during the Morean War, the Acropolis was besieged by the Venetians under Francesco Morosini, and the temple of Athena Nike was dismantled by the Ottomans to fortify the Parthenon. A shot fired during the bombardment of the Acropolis caused a powder magazine in the Parthenon to explode (26 September), and the building was severely damaged, giving it largely the appearance it has today. The Venetian occupation of Athens lasted for six months, and both the Venetians and the Ottomans participated in the looting of the Parthenon. One of its western pediments was removed, causing even more damage to the structure. During the Venetian occupation, the two mosques of the city were converted into Catholic and Protestant churches, but on 9 April 1688 the Venetians abandoned Athens again to the Ottomans. |
Athens | Modern history | Modern history
thumb|The Entry of King Otto of Greece into Athens by Peter von Hess, 1839
In 1822 a Greek insurgency captured the city, but it fell to the Ottomans again in 1826 (though Acropolis held till June 1827). Again the ancient monuments suffered badly. The Ottoman forces remained in possession until March 1833, when they withdrew.
Following the Greek War of Independence and the establishment of the Greek Kingdom, Athens was chosen to replace Nafplio as the second capital of the newly independent Greek state in 1834, largely because of historical and sentimental reasons. At the time, after the extensive destruction it had suffered during the war of independence, it was reduced to a town of about 4,000 people (less than half its earlier population) in a loose swarm of houses along the foot of the Acropolis. The first King of Greece, King Otto of Bavaria, commissioned the architects Stamatios Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubert to design a modern city plan fit for the capital of a state.
thumb|The Olympic Flame at the opening ceremony of the 2004 Summer Olympics
The first modern city plan consisted of a triangle defined by the Acropolis, the ancient cemetery of Kerameikos and the new palace of the Bavarian king (now housing the Greek Parliament), so as to highlight the continuity between modern and ancient Athens. Neoclassicism, the international style of this epoch, was the architectural style through which Bavarian, French and Greek architects such as Hansen, Klenze, Boulanger or Kaftantzoglou designed the first important public buildings of the new capital. In 1896, Athens hosted the first modern Olympic Games. During the 1920s a number of Greek refugees, expelled from Asia Minor after the Greco-Turkish War and Population exchange between Greece and Turkey, swelled Athens's population; nevertheless it was mostly after World War II and the Civil War ended, during the 1950s and 1960s, that the population of the city experienced its great boom.
In the 1980s it became evident that smog from factories and an ever-increasing fleet of cars, as well as a lack of adequate free space due to congestion, had evolved into the city's most important challenge. The Acropolis of Athens was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, for its group of Ancient Greek monumental ruins, including architectural masterpieces such as the Parthenon. A series of anti-pollution measures taken by the city's authorities in the 1990s, combined with a substantial improvement of the city's infrastructure (including the Attiki Odos motorway, the expansion of the Athens Metro, and the new Athens International Airport), considerably alleviated pollution and transformed Athens into a much more functional city. Athens hosted the 2004 Summer Olympics. Further urban improvements began in the 2020s along the coastal zone, including the Hellenikon Park development and the Faliro Delta upgrade, adding to the Stavros Niarchos Centre. |
Athens | Geography<!--'Athens Basin' and 'Attica Basin' redirect here--> | Geography
right|thumb|The Athens Urban Area within the Attica Basin, seen from space
Athens sprawls across the central plain of Attica that is often referred to as the Athens Basin or the Attica Basin (). The basin is bounded by four large mountains: Mount Aigaleo to the west, Mount Parnitha to the north, Mount Pentelicus to the northeast and Mount Hymettus to the east. Beyond Mount Aegaleo lies the Thriasian plain, which forms an extension of the central plain to the west. The Saronic Gulf lies to the southwest. Mount Parnitha is the tallest of the four mountains (), and has been declared a national park. The Athens urban area spreads over from Agios Stefanos in the north to Varkiza in the south. The city is located in the north temperate zone, 38 degrees north of the equator.
Athens is built around a large number of hills. Lycabettus is one of the tallest hills of the city proper and provides a view of the entire Attica Basin. The meteorology of Athens is deemed to be one of the most complex in the world because its mountains cause a temperature inversion phenomenon which, along with the Greek government's difficulties controlling industrial pollution, was responsible for the air pollution problems the city has faced. This issue is not unique to Athens; for instance, Los Angeles and Mexico City also suffer from similar atmospheric inversion problems.
The Cephissus river, the Ilisos and the Eridanos stream are the historical rivers of Athens. |
Athens | Environment | Environment
thumb|Smog in Athens
By the late 1970s the pollution of Athens had become so destructive that according to the then Greek Minister of Culture, Constantine Trypanis, "...the carved details on the five the caryatids of the Erechtheum had seriously degenerated, while the face of the horseman on the Parthenon's west side was all but obliterated." A series of measures taken by the authorities of the city throughout the 1990s resulted in the improvement of air quality; the appearance of smog (or nefos as the Athenians used to call it) has become less common.
Measures taken by the Greek authorities throughout the 1990s have improved the quality of air over the Attica Basin. Nevertheless, air pollution still remains an issue for Athens, particularly during the hottest summer days. In late June 2007, the Attica region experienced a number of brush fires, including a blaze that burned a significant portion of a large forested national park in Mount Parnitha, considered critical to maintaining a better air quality in Athens all year round. Damage to the park has led to worries over a stalling in the improvement of air quality in the city.
The major waste management efforts undertaken in the last decade (particularly the plant built on the small island of Psytalia) have greatly improved water quality in the Saronic Gulf, and the coastal waters of Athens are now accessible again to swimmers. |
Athens | Parks and zoos | Parks and zoos
thumb|The Pedion tou Areos park
alt=|thumb|The entrance of the National Gardens, commissioned by Queen Amalia in 1838 and completed by 1840
Parnitha National Park is punctuated by well-marked paths, gorges, springs, torrents and caves dotting the protected area. Hiking and mountain-biking in all four mountains are popular outdoor activities for residents of the city. The National Garden of Athens was completed in 1840 and is a green refuge of 15.5 hectares in the centre of the Greek capital. It is to be found between the Parliament and Zappeion buildings, the latter of which maintains its own garden of seven hectares. Parts of the City Centre have been redeveloped under a masterplan called the Unification of Archeological Sites of Athens, which has also gathered funding from the EU to help enhance the project. The landmark Dionysiou Areopagitou Street has been pedestrianised, forming a scenic route. The route starts from the Temple of Olympian Zeus at Vasilissis Olgas Avenue, continues under the southern slopes of the Acropolis near Plaka, and finishes just beyond the Temple of Hephaestus in Thiseio. The route in its entirety provides visitors with views of the Parthenon and the Agora (the meeting point of ancient Athenians), away from the busy City Centre.
The hills of Athens also provide green space. Lycabettus, Philopappos hill and the area around it, including Pnyx and Ardettos hill, are planted with pines and other trees, with the character of a small forest rather than typical metropolitan parkland. Also to be found is the Pedion tou Areos (Field of Mars) of 27.7 hectares, near the National Archaeological Museum. Athens' largest zoo is the Attica Zoological Park, a private zoo located in the suburb of Spata. The zoo is home to around 2000 animals representing 400 species, and is open 365 days a year. Smaller zoos exist within public gardens or parks, such as the zoo within the National Garden of Athens. |
Athens | Climate | Climate
thumb|Sunrise in Athens
Athens has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate (Köppen climate classification: Csa). The climate in Athens can be considered warmer than some cities that are similar or even less distant from the equator such as Seoul, Melbourne, Buenos Aires and Cape Town. According to the meteorological station near the city centre which is operated by the National Observatory of Athens, the downtown area has simple mean annual temperature of while parts of the urban agglomeration may reach up to , being affected by the urban heat island effect. Athens receives about of precipitation per year, largely concentrated during the colder half of the year with the remaining rainfall falling sparsely, mainly during thunderstorms. Fog is rare in the city centre, but somewhat more frequent in areas to the east, close to mount Hymettus.
The southern section of the Athens metropolitan area (i.e., Elliniko, Athens Riviera) lies in the transitional zone between Mediterranean (Csa) and hot semi-arid climate (BSh), with its port-city of Piraeus being the most extreme example, receiving just per year. The areas to the south generally see less extreme temperature variations as their climate is moderated by the Saronic gulf. The northern part of the city (i.e., Kifissia), owing to its higher elevation, features moderately lower temperatures and slightly increased precipitation year-round. The generally dry climate of the Athens basin compared to the precipitation amounts seen in a typical Mediterranean climate is due to the rain shadow effect caused by the Pindus mountain range and the Dirfys and Parnitha mountains, substantially drying the westerly and northerly winds respectively.
thumb|Snowfall in Athens on 16 February 2021
Snowfall is not very common. It usually does not cause heavy disruption to daily life, in contrast to the northern parts of the city, where blizzards occur on a somewhat more regular basis. The most recent examples include the snowstorms of 16 February 2021 and 24 January 2022, when the entire urban area was blanketed in snow.
Athens may get particularly hot in the summer, owing partly to the strong urban heat island effect characterizing the city. In fact, Athens has been referred to as the hottest city in mainland Europe, and is the first city in Europe to appoint a chief heat officer to deal with severe heat waves. Temperatures of 47.5°C have been reported in several locations of the metropolitan area, including within the urban agglomeration. Metropolitan Athens was until 2021 the holder of the World Meteorological Organization record for the highest temperature ever recorded in Europe with which was recorded in the areas of Elefsina and Tatoi on 10 July 1977. |
Athens | Administration<!--'Athens City Centre', 'Athens City Center', 'Athens city centre', 'Athens city center', 'City of Athens', 'Municipality of Athens', 'Athens Municipality', 'Athens municipality' redirect here--> | Administration
thumb|Athens City Hall
thumb|Old Royal Palace
Athens became the capital of Greece in 1834, following Nafplion, which was the provisional capital from 1829. The municipality (city) of Athens is also the capital of the Attica region. The term Athens can refer either to the municipality of Athens, to Greater Athens or urban area, or to the entire Athens Metropolitan Area.
The large city centre () of the Greek capital falls directly within the Municipality of Athens (), which is the largest in population size in Greece and forms the core of the Athens urban area, followed by the Municipality of Piraeus, which forms a significant city centre on its own within the Athens urban area and it is the second largest in population size within it. |
Athens | Athens Urban Area<!--'Athens Urban Area', 'Athens urban area', 'Urban Area of the Capital', and 'Greater Athens' redirect here--> | Athens Urban Area
The Athens Urban Area (), also known as Urban Area of the Capital () or Greater Athens (), today consists of 40 municipalities: 35 of them divided in four regional units (Central Athens, North Athens, West Athens, South Athens), and a further 5 municipalities which make up the regional unit of Piraeus. The Athens urban area spans over , with a population of 3,059,764 people as of 2021.
+ Athens Urban AreaRegional units:Central Athens:400px |
Athens | Athens metropolitan area | Athens metropolitan area
thumb|Athens metropolitan area
The Athens metropolitan area spans within the Attica region and includes a total of 58 municipalities, which are organised in seven regional units (those outlined above, along with East Attica and West Attica), having reached a population of 3,638,281 according to the 2021 census. Athens and Piraeus municipalities serve as the two metropolitan centres of the Athens Metropolitan Area. There are also some inter-municipal centres serving specific areas. For example, Kifissia and Glyfada serve as inter-municipal centres for northern and southern suburbs respectively.
alt=|thumb|View of Vila Atlantis, in Kifissia, designed by Ernst Ziller
alt=|thumb|A beach in the southern suburb of Alimos – one of the many beaches on the southern coast of Athens
The Athens Metropolitan Area consists of 58 densely populated municipalities, sprawling around the Municipality of Athens (the City Centre) in virtually all directions. For the Athenians, all the urban municipalities surrounding the City Centre are called suburbs. According to their geographic location in relation to the City of Athens, the suburbs are divided into four zones; the northern suburbs (including Agios Stefanos, Dionysos, Ekali, Nea Erythraia, Kifissia, Kryoneri, Maroussi, Pefki, Lykovrysi, Metamorfosi, Nea Ionia, Nea Filadelfeia, Irakleio, Vrilissia, Melissia, Penteli, Chalandri, Agia Paraskevi, Gerakas, Pallini, Galatsi, Psychiko and Filothei); the southern suburbs (including Alimos, Nea Smyrni, Moschato, Tavros, Agios Ioannis Renti, Kallithea, Piraeus, Agios Dimitrios, Palaio Faliro, Elliniko, Glyfada, Lagonisi, Saronida, Argyroupoli, Ilioupoli, Varkiza, Voula, Vari and Vouliagmeni); the eastern suburbs (including Zografou, Dafni, Vyronas, Kaisariani, Cholargos and Papagou); and the western suburbs (including Peristeri, Ilion, Egaleo, Koridallos, Agia Varvara, Keratsini, Perama, Nikaia, Drapetsona, Chaidari, Petroupoli, Agioi Anargyroi, Ano Liosia, Aspropyrgos, Eleusina, Acharnes and Kamatero).
The Athens city coastline, extending from the major commercial port of Piraeus to the southernmost suburb of Varkiza for some , is also connected to the City Centre by tram.
In the northern suburb of Maroussi, the upgraded main Olympic Complex (known by its Greek acronym OAKA) dominates the skyline. The area has been redeveloped according to a design by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, with steel arches, landscaped gardens, fountains, futuristic glass, and a landmark new blue glass roof which was added to the main stadium. A second Olympic complex, next to the sea at the beach of Palaio Faliro, also features modern stadia, shops and an elevated esplanade. Work is underway to transform the grounds of the old Athens Airport – named Elliniko – in the southern suburbs, into one of the largest landscaped parks in Europe, to be named the Hellenikon Metropolitan Park.
Many of the southern suburbs (such as Alimos, Palaio Faliro, Elliniko, Glyfada, Voula, Vouliagmeni and Varkiza) known as the Athens Riviera, host a number of sandy beaches, most of which are operated by the Greek National Tourism Organisation and require an entrance fee. Casinos operate on both Mount Parnitha (Regency Casino Mont Parnes), some from downtown Athens (accessible by car or cable car), and the nearby town of Loutraki (accessible by car via the Athens – Corinth National Highway, or the Athens Suburban Railway). |
Athens | Twin towns – sister cities | Twin towns – sister cities
The concept of a partner city is used under different names in different countries, but they mean the same thing, that two cities in different countries assist each other as partners. Athens has quite a number of partners, whether as a "twin", a "sister", or a "partner." |
Athens | Demographics | Demographics
thumb|Athens population distribution
The Municipality of Athens has an official population of 643,452 people (in 2021). According to the 2021 Population and Housing Census, The four regional units that make up the former Athens prefecture have a combined population of 2,611,713 . They together with the regional unit of Piraeus (sometimes referred to as Greater Piraeus) make up the dense Athens Urban Area or Greater Athens which reaches a total population of 3,059,764 inhabitants (in 2021).
The municipality (centre) of Athens is the most populous in Greece, with a population of 643,452 people (in 2021) and an area of , forming the core of the Athens Urban Area within the Attica Basin. The incumbent Mayor of Athens is Charis Doukas of PASOK. The municipality is divided into seven municipal districts which are mainly used for administrative purposes.
For the Athenians the most popular way of dividing the downtown is through its neighbourhoods such as Pagkrati, Ampelokipoi, Goudi, Exarcheia, Patisia, Ilisia, Petralona, Plaka, Anafiotika, Koukaki, Kolonaki and Kypseli, each with its own distinct history and characteristics.
Romani people are concentrated in Acharnes, Ano Liosia, Agia Varvara, Zefeiri and Kamatero.
There is a large Albanian community in Athens. |
Athens | Metropolitan Area | Metropolitan Area
The Athens Metropolitan Area, with an area of and inhabited by 3,744,059 people in 2021, consists of the Athens Urban Area with the addition of the towns and villages of East and West Attica, which surround the dense urban area of the Greek capital. It actually sprawls over the whole peninsula of Attica, which is the best part of the region of Attica, excluding the islands.
Classification of regional units within Greater Athens, Athens Urban Area and Athens Metropolitan Area Regional unit Population (2021) Land Area (km2)Area Central Athens 1,002,212 87.4 Former Athens prefecture 2,611,713364.2 km2 Athens Urban Area or Greater Athens 3,059,764414.6 km2 Athens Metropolitan Area 3,744,0592931.6 km2 North Athens 601,163 140.7 South Athens 529,455 69.4 West Athens 478,883 66.7 Piraeus 448,051 50.4 Piraeus regional unit448,05150.4 km2 East Attica 518,755 1,513 West Attica 165,540 1,004 |
Athens | Safety | Safety
Athens ranks in the lowest percentage for the risk on frequency and severity of terrorist attacks according to the EU Global Terrorism Database (EIU 2007–2016 calculations). The city also ranked 35th in Digital Security, 21st on Health Security, 29th on Infrastructure Security and 41st on Personal Security globally in a 2017 The Economist Intelligence Unit report. It also ranks as a very safe city (39th globally out of 162 cities overall) on the ranking of the safest and most dangerous countries. As November 2024 the crime index from Numbeo places Athens at 55.40 (moderate), while its safety index is at 44.60.Crime in Athens According to a Mercer 2019 Quality of Living Survey, Athens ranks 89th on the Mercer Quality of Living Survey ranking. |
Athens | Economy | Economy
thumb|OTE headquarters in Marousi, the largest technology company in Greece
thumb|The National Bank of Greece is the largest Greek bank by total assets.
alt=|thumb|Ermou street, the main commercial street of Athens
Athens is the financial capital of Greece. According to data from 2014, Athens as a metropolitan economic area produced US$130 billion as GDP in PPP, which consists of nearly half of the production for the whole country. Athens was ranked 102nd in that year's list of global economic metropolises, while GDP per capita for the same year was 32,000 US dollars.
Athens is one of the major economic centres in south-eastern Europe and is considered a regional economic power. The port of Piraeus, where big investments by COSCO have already been delivered during the recent decade, the completion of the new Cargo Centre in Thriasion, the expansion of the Athens Metro and the Athens Tram, as well as the Hellenikon metropolitan park redevelopment in Elliniko and other urban projects, are the economic landmarks of the upcoming years.
Prominent Greek companies such as Hellas Sat, Hellenic Aerospace Industry, Mytilineos Holdings, Titan Cement, Hellenic Petroleum, Papadopoulos E.J., Folli Follie, Jumbo S.A., OPAP, and Cosmote have their headquarters in the metropolitan area of Athens. Multinational companies such as Ericsson, Sony, Siemens, Motorola, Samsung, Microsoft, Teleperformance, Novartis, Mondelez and Coca-Cola also have their regional research and development headquarters in the city. The banking sector is represented by National Bank of Greece, Alpha Bank, Eurobank, and Piraeus Bank, while the Bank of Greece is also situated in the City Centre. The Athens Stock Exchange was severely hit by the Greek government-debt crisis and the decision of the government to proceed into capital controls during summer 2015. As a whole the economy of Athens and Greece was strongly affected, while data showed a change from long recession to growth of 1.4% from 2017 onwards.
Tourism is also a leading contributor to the economy of the city, as one of Europe's top destinations for city-break tourism, and also the gateway for excursions to both the islands and other parts of the mainland. Greece attracted 26.5 million visitors in 2015, 30.1 million visitors in 2017, and over 33 million in 2018, making Greece one of the most visited countries in Europe and the world, and contributing 18% to the country's GDP. Athens welcomed more than 5 million tourists in 2018, and 1.4 million were "city-breakers"; this was an increase by over a million city-breakers since 2013. |
Athens | Tourism | Tourism
thumb|Monastiraki Square bustling with tourists during peak season
Athens has been a destination for travellers since antiquity. Over the 2000s, the city's infrastructure and social amenities have improved, in part because of its successful bid to stage the 2004 Olympic Games.
The Greek Government, aided by the EU, has funded major infrastructure projects such as the state-of-the-art Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport, the expansion of the Athens Metro system, and the new Attiki Odos Motorway.
In recent years, Athens has become more dynamic with the addition of numerous new bars and cafés and a growing presence of street art and graffiti, enhancing its urban edge and adding more touristic options alongside the city's archaeological sites and museums. |
Athens | Transport | Transport
thumb|Athens railways network (Metro, Suburban Railway and Tram)
Athens is the country's major transportation hub. The city has Greece's largest airport and its largest port; Piraeus, too, is the largest container transport port in the Mediterranean, and the largest passenger port in Europe.
Athens is a major national hub for Intercity (Ktel) and international buses, as well as for domestic and international rail transport. Public transport is serviced by a variety of transportation means, making up the country's largest mass transit system. Transport for Athens operates a large bus and trolleybus fleet, the city's Metro, a Suburban Railway service and a tram network, connecting the southern suburbs to the city centre. |
Athens | Bus transport | Bus transport
OSY () (Odikes Sygkoinonies S.A.), a subsidiary company of OASA (Athens urban transport organisation), is the main operator of buses and trolleybuses in Athens. As of 2017, its network consists of around 322 bus lines, spanning the Athens Metropolitan Area, and making up a fleet of 2,375 buses and trolleybuses. Of those 2,375, 619 buses run on compressed natural gas, making up the largest fleet of natural gas-powered buses in Europe, and 354 are electric-powered (trolleybuses). All of the 354 trolleybuses are equipped to run on diesel in case of power failure.
International links are provided by a number of private companies. National and regional bus links are provided by KTEL from two InterCity Bus Terminals; Kifissos Bus Terminal A and Liosion Bus Terminal B, both located in the north-western part of the city. Kifissos provides connections towards Peloponnese, North Greece, West Greece and some Ionian Islands, whereas Liosion is used for most of Central Greece. Both of these terminals will be replaced by a new Intercity Bus Terminal under construction in Eleonas due to be completed by 2027. |
Athens | Railways | Railways
Athens is the hub of the country's national railway system (OSE), connecting the capital with major cities across Greece and abroad (Istanbul, Sofia, Belgrade and Bucharest).
thumb|Suburban rail (Proastiakos)
The Athens Suburban Railway, referred to as the Proastiakos, connects Athens International Airport to the city of Kiato, west of Athens, via Larissa station, the city's central rail station and the port of Piraeus. The length of Athens's commuter rail network extends to , and is expected to stretch to by 2010.
thumb|Athens Metro train (third generation stock)
The Athens Metro is operated by STASY S.A. () (Statheres Sygkoinonies S.A.), a subsidiary company of OASA (Athens urban transport organisation), which provides public transport throughout the Athens Urban Area. While its main purpose is transport, it also houses Greek artifacts found during the construction of the system. The Athens Metro runs three metro lines, namely Line 1 (Green Line), Line 2 (Red Line) and Line 3 (Blue Line) lines, of which the first was constructed in 1869, and the other two largely during the 1990s, with the initial new sections opened in January 2000. Line 1 mostly runs at ground level and the other two (Line 2 & 3) routes run entirely underground. A fleet of 42 trains, using 252 carriages, operates on the network, with a daily occupancy of 1,353,000 passengers."Homepage – The Company – Attiko Metro S.A." Attiko Metro S.A. Archived from the original on 3 December 2010. Retrieved 2 June 2014.
Line 1 (Green Line) serves 24 stations, and is the oldest line of the Athens metro network. It runs from Piraeus station to Kifissia station and covers a distance of . There are transfer connections with the Blue Line 3 at Monastiraki station and with the Red Line 2 at Omonia and Attiki stations. Line 2 (Red Line) runs from Anthoupoli station to Elliniko station and covers a distance of . The line connects the western suburbs of Athens with the southeast suburbs, passing through the centre of Athens. The Red Line has transfer connections with the Green Line 1 at Attiki and Omonia stations. There are also transfer connections with the Blue Line 3 at Syntagma station and with the tram at Syntagma, Syngrou Fix and Neos Kosmos stations. Line 3 (Blue Line) runs from Dimotiko Theatro station, through the central Monastiraki and Syntagma stations to Doukissis Plakentias avenue in the northeastern suburb of Halandri. It then ascends to ground level and continues to Athens International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos using the suburban railway infrastructure, extending its total length to . The spring 2007 extension from Monastiraki westwards to Egaleo connected some of the main night life hubs of the city, namely those of Gazi (Kerameikos station) with Psirri (Monastiraki station) and the city centre (Syntagma station).The new stations Maniatika, Piraeus and Dimotiko Theatro, were completed on 10 October 2022, connecting the biggest port of Greece, the Port of Piraeus, with Athens International Airport, the biggest airport of Greece.
alt=|thumb|Vehicle of the Athens Tram
The Athens Tram is operated by STASY S.A. (Statheres Sygkoinonies S.A.), a subsidiary company of Transport for Athens (OASA). It has a fleet of 35 Sirio type vehicles and 25 Alstom Citadis type vehicles which serve 48 stations, employ 345 people with an average daily occupancy of 65,000 passengers. The tram network spans a total length of and covers ten Athenian suburbs. The network runs from Syntagma Square to the southwestern suburb of Palaio Faliro, where the line splits in two branches; the first runs along the Athens coastline toward the southern suburb of Voula, while the other heads toward Piraeus. The network covers the majority of the Athens coastline. |
Athens | Athens International Airport | Athens International Airport
alt=|thumb|Athens International Airport
Athens is served by the Athens International Airport (ATH), located near the town of Spata, in the eastern Messoghia plain, some east of the centre of Athens. The airport, awarded the "European Airport of the Year 2004" Award, is intended as an expandable hub for air travel in southeastern Europe and was constructed in 51 months, costing 2.2 billion euros. It employs a staff of 14,000. |
Athens | Ferry | Ferry
The Port of Piraeus is the largest port in Greece and one of the largest in Europe. Rafina and Lavrio act as alternative ports of Athens, connects the city with numerous Greek islands of the Aegean Sea, Evia while also serving the cruise ships that arrive. |
Athens | Motorways | Motorways
thumb|Aerial view of an A6 interchange north of Athens
Two main motorways of Greece begin in Athens, namely the A1/E75, heading north towards Greece's second largest city, Thessaloniki; and the border crossing of Evzones and the A8/E94 heading west, towards Greece's third largest city, Patras, which incorporated the GR-8A. Before their completion much of the road traffic used the GR-1 and the GR-8.
Athens' Metropolitan Area is served by the Attiki Odos toll motorway network: its main section, the A6, extends from the western industrial suburb of Elefsina to Athens International Airport; while two beltways, namely the Aigaleo Beltway (A65) and the Hymettus Beltway (A62) serve parts of western and eastern Athens respectively. The span of the Attiki Odos in all its length is , making it the largest metropolitan motorway network in all of Greece. |
Athens | Education | Education
alt=|thumb|Facade of the Academy of Athens
thumb|University of Athens
thumb|The National Library of Greece
Located on Panepistimiou Street, the old campus of the University of Athens, the National Library, and the Athens Academy form the "Athens Trilogy" built in the mid-19th century. The largest and oldest university in Athens is the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Most of the functions of NKUA along National Technical University of Athens have been transferred to a campus in the eastern suburb of Zografou. The National Technical University of Athens old campus is located on Patision Street.
The University of West Attica is the second largest university in Athens. The seat of the university is located in the western area of Athens, where the philosophers of Ancient Athens delivered lectures. All the activities of UNIWA are carried out in the modern infrastructure of the three University Campuses within the metropolitan region of Athens (Egaleo Park, Ancient Olive Groove and Athens), which offer modern teaching and research spaces, entertainment and support facilities for all students. Other universities that lie within Athens are the Athens University of Economics and Business, the Panteion University, the Agricultural University of Athens and the University of Piraeus.
There are overall ten state-supported Institutions of Higher (or Tertiary) education located in the Athens Urban Area, these are by chronological order: Athens School of Fine Arts (1837), National Technical University of Athens (1837), National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (1837), Agricultural University of Athens (1920), Athens University of Economics and Business (1920), Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (1927), University of Piraeus (1938), Harokopio University of Athens (1990), School of Pedagogical and Technological Education (2002), University of West Attica (2018). There are also several other private colleges, as they called formally in Greece, as the establishment of private universities is prohibited by the constitution. Many of them are accredited by a foreign state or university such as the American College of Greece and the Athens Campus of the University of Indianapolis. |
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