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.)

Priscillian of Avila
Chapter 24: Priscillian of Avila Among the letters falsely attributed to Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage (executed in 258), there is one — emanating from Novatian’s partisans, that is to say, from the Christians loyal to the New Prophecy and hostile to the lapsi — that attests to the presence in Spain of Christian communities of the Montanist tendency, the ardor of which Novatian had revived in the fire of imperial persecution. In 254, an African council convened under the egis of Cyprian provided his support to the Novatians who, in Lerida, Leon and Astorga, rejected the ministers suspected of abjuration during Dece’s repressions. Thus, with the Constantinian turn, the Catholic ecclesiatical faction that acceded to powe... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Quarrels About Prophets and Apostles: Jochanaan, Theudas/Jude/Thomas, Jacob, Simon-Peter, Barnabas, Saul/Paul
Chapter 10: Quarrels about Prophets and Apostles: Jochanaan, Theudas/Jude/Thomas, Jacob, Simon-Peter, Barnabas, Saul/Paul If history hasn’t preserved the least trace of someone named Jesus, on the other hand, his inventors and worshipers — disguised [travestis] in the course of time as brothers, companions, witnesses, disciples or apostles — easily revealed themselves at random to the witnesses of the First Century. So it goes with John the Baptist, Thomas, Jacob the Just, Simon Cephas and Barnabas. Paradoxically, concerning Paul, the best known, upon whom the biographers spread themselves with the greatest gullibility, there remains nearly nothing that hasn’t been reduced to the authenticity of short notes taken fro... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

A Nation Sacrificed to History
Chapter 1: A Nation Sacrificed to History Singularly and paradoxically destined, like the Jewish people: the Books or Biblia, which under the name Bible founded the Hebraic mythology, which, raised up by the elective glory of a unique God, aspired to reign over all of humanity. Invested with an eternal and universal truth, each person entered into the design only to lend him or herself to YHWH, at the cost of an effacement in time and space, of which no nation offers such an unhappy example. Born within a Statist centralism that rallied [together] the nomads, hastily sedentarized on newly conquered territories, the arrogance of the God of the holy wars — by a cruel irony — would not cease to puff itself up with the wind of proph... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Simon of Samaria and Gnostic Radicality
Chapter 6: Simon of Samaria and Gnostic Radicality Stripped of the lies and calumnies in which the Judeo-Christian and Catholic traditions have clothed him, like a habit of derision, Simon of Samaria evokes the thinkers who, as much as Heraclitus or Lucrecius, has irresistibly inscribed himself in the modernity of each epoch. A Hellenized Samaritan, born — according to the heresiologues — in the outskirts of Getta, in the course of the last years of the First Century before the Christian era, Simon was without doubt a philosopher and doctor in the manner of Paracles, whom he resembled in the care with which he interdependently approached the microcosm and the macrocosm, the body of man and the totality of the world. The rare fra... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Ironists and Sceptics
Chapter 44: Ironists and Skeptics That the most radical work of the Sixteenth Century (and well beyond), The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, inscribed itself outside of all theological context indicates quite well the disuse of the discourse of God. Religious language, over which the Church and the [various] orthodoxies claimed to exercise control, ceded place to the ideological language in which the changing economy — turning the liberties of yesterday into the constraints of tomorrow — extinguished the blazes that it ceaselessly lit. If it is true that the principle “He who controls meaning controls the world” has been verified, ecclesiastical power, which conceived no other revolt against it than that of those w... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)