The Resistance to Christianity : The Heresies at the Origins of the 18th Century

Bibliographical References
Bibliographical References Aegerter, E., Joachim de Flore. L’Evangile eternal, Paris, 1928. Aeneas Silvius, Piccolomini (Pius II), De hortu et historia Bohemorum, in Omnia Opera, Basle, 1551. Aland, Kurt, Bibliographie zur Geschicte des Pietismus, Berlin-New York, 1972. — , Augustin und der Montanismus in Kirchengeschichtliche Entwuerfe, Guetersloh, 1960. Albert le Grand, Determinatio de novo spiritu; in Haupt (see below). Alexandrian, Histoire de la philosophie occulte, Paris, 1983. Alfaric, P., Le probleme de Jesus, Paris, 1965. Allier, R., “Les freres du libre-esprit,” in Religions et Societes, Paris, 1905. Alphandery, P., De quelques faits de prophetisme dans les sec... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 48 : The End of the Divine Right
Chapter 48: The End of the Divine Right In the profusion of its diverse tendencies, the triumph of Protestantism — in which the economic mechanisms that chaotically governed historical evolution burst the skin of the God that had clothed them in his myth — put an end to the notion of repressive orthodoxy and, consequently, the existence of “heresy.” The sects gave the [Greek] word hairesis the neutral meanings of “choice” and “option.” They entered into the currents of opinions that soon claimed, with Destutt of Tracy and Benjamin Constant, the name “ideologies.” The decapitation of Louis XVI, monarch of divine right, removed from God the ecclesiastical head at which — like a monstrous cephalopod — were articulated the secular arms that were tasked with imposing his writs of mandamus. The jubilation that, around the end of the [Eighteenth] century, brought down the churches... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 47 : Pietists, Visionaries and Quietists
Chapter 47: Pietists, Visionaries and Quietists The Pietists Born from the preaching of the Lutherian pastor Philippe-Jacob Spener (1635–1705), Pietism proceeded from the tradition of Johannes Denck, for whom faith — or its absence, because only private conviction was important — did not bother with sacraments, priests or pastors, nor even with the allegedly sacred texts. Under German and English Pietism, there also smoldered the thought of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), the shoemaker from Gorlitz (in Silesia), whose doctrine was part of the Hermetic tradition and the subtle alchemy of individual experience. Without entering into an analysis of a rich and dense conception, it is possible to emphasize the point at which Pietism’s God, dissolved into nature, more perfectly annihilated the idea of God than atheism, which was content to reduce God to a social function presented everywhere in the exercise of power and aut... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 46 : The Jansenists
Chapter 46: The Jansenists While Holland and England, both of which acclimated themselves to the formal freedoms of the bourgeois revolution, engendered a multitude of sects whose language — still taking on theological artifices — less and less dissimulated their ideological texture, the Catholic countries, which were prey to the distraction of the Counter-Reformation, once again found in monarchal and pontifical absolutism the guarantee of a Catholicism that was restored to its temporal and spiritual powers. Indulging in the Constantinian parody of the divine right, Louis XIV persisted in dissimulating — under the pomp of a Church in which Bossuet enjoyed Lully — the pusillanimities of a tormented nature, corroded by the sourness of prestige. The sun, with which (in the manner of the mediocre ones) he claimed to crown himself, only dispensed its light upon the courtiers of literature and the arts, apt to dilute their genius... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 45 : Levellers, Diggers and Ranters
Chapter 45: Levelers, Diggers and Ranters By decapitating King Charles , the English Revolution removed God from public affairs. Cromwell’s instauration of a new republic, which was profitable for the interests of the small landowners and the bourgeoisie, revived (with the breath of freedom) the fire of working-class insurrection that had not ceased to smolder since the days of John Ball. More than anywhere else, the legends of Robin Hood and the beloved brigand had, in England, illustrated the idea — widely held, all things considered — that robbing the rich so as to soften the misfortunes of the poor restored the natural obligations of solidarity. The development of Protestantism as the ideology of emerging modern capitalism broke the old structure of the religious myth, at the same time that the barriers and walls raised everywhere by feudalism and the predominance of the agrarian economy ceded place to the free circulation of commodi... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Philosophy Against the Church
Chapter 28: Philosophy against the Church The elaboration of a theological system that reviewed the diverse privileges of the Church was nourished by Greek philosophy, from which Justin, Valentine, and Clement of Alexandria solicited aid in re-founding the monotheism of the Hebrew creator God upon rationality. Although interminable theological controversies had germinated, over the course of the centuries, on the uniquely Catholic dunghill of the trinity, predestination, free will, grace and occasional accusations of heresy — as in the cases of Abelard and Gilbert de la Porree — , these quarrels did not exceed the framework of othodoxy and, in any case, hardly threatened the foundations of the faith propagated under Rome’s... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Communalist Prophets
Chapter 27: The Communalist Prophets The Sixth Century brought to the Western populations [of Europe] a slight amelioration of the conditions of life, which demographic growth soon condemned to precarity. While the development of the cities introduced the air of liberty in the confined atmosphere of an agrarian system that was socially frozen according to the three orders of Rathier of Verona — soldiers, priests and farmers — , the economic growth of the towns, little by little, began to absorb the excess of manual labor produced by the countryside. The swarming beggars, fomenting riots that were easily manipulated in the most diverse ways, were a common fund of laborers for those who learned to play the roles of lord or archbis... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Marcion and the Hellenization of Christianity
Chapter 11: Marcion and the Hellenization of Christianity Despite two centuries and an accusation of heresy that separated him from the State religion, Marcion might well pass for the true father of the Catholic Church, a father maladroitly abandoned to the world, a runt that only his enemies brought to maturity. Missionary zeal; the eagerness to found communities; the hope for divine authority, the investment of which he would receive in Rome; the monarchal organization of the ekklesiai; virulent anti-Semitism; the conception of a Christianity purified of its Judaism; a theology inspired by Greek thought: these compose a great many of the fundamental traits of the future Catholic Church. With Marcion, Christianity — scorning historic... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Novatian, the Apostate Clergy and the Anti-Montanist Reaction
Chapter 18: Novatian, the Apostate Clergy and the Anti-Montanist Reaction The breath of popular Christianity stirred up the pyres in which the faithful were consumed and which nourished the resentment of the crowds accustomed to pogroms and hunting for Jews. The imperial power would impute, according to custom, responsibility for the disorders not to the executioners, but the victims. The State’s persecutions triggered cunningly fomented lynchings, which indiscriminately struck all of the partisans of a God who was hostile to the other divinities. In 202 — contrary to the wishes (or so one says) of his wife, Julia Mammea, who was favorable to the new religion — Septime Severe promulgated an edict that prohibited proselytis... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Victory of the Reformers and the Birth of the Protestant Churches
Chapter 38: The Victory of the Reformers and the Birth of the Protestant Churches That which is called the Reformation and saw the emergence of schismatic churches around Martin Luther and John Calvin did not add any fundamental novelty to the program of the reformers who, from the Eleventh Century on, fought against the temporal interests of Rome’s clergy. Commonly accepted among historians, the idea of Catholicism’s control over the people of Europe was contradicted from the moment that one distanced oneself from the power of the laws imposed by the princes and the ecclesiastical authority, with its grid of parishes, confessors, priests, inquisitors and preachers who propagated guilt, horror of sexuality, the Satanism of women... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)