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.)

The Phallic and Fusional Cults
Chapter 7: The phallic and fusional cults The conquest of the lands of Canaan by the Hebrew invaders began by Judaizing and thereby honoring the agrarian cults among the vanguished so as to better strike to prohibit and defame their persistent practice. The same for the rites of adoration of the Serpent, in which the symbolic participates in phallic power and, at the same time, the mysteries of fecundation. Despite the danger that certain species present, the serprent evokes by the grace of its movements the dance of love, to which the bodies of the lovers surrender themselves. Doesn’t the allegory of salvation — the caduceus in which two serpents intertwine — conserve the memory of the force of life inherent in pleasure a... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Fraticelles
Chapter 35: The Fraticelles The name “Fraticelles” (from the Italian fraticelli, sometimes translated in French as frerots or the “kid brothers”) designated the radical dissidents of the “Spiritual” faction that, in the Franciscan order, opposed to the “Conventual” or orthodox wing the strict vocation of poverty, as prescribed by Francis of Assisi. Although John XXII applied the term to the Spirituals as a form of polemical malignity, he never seriously attacked the Fraticelles, who were blemished with the same spirit of freedom as the Beghards, Beguines, apostolics and Dolcinists. Respectful for the original directives of Franciscanism, the Spirituals extolled — in addition to absolute ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Christs and Reformers: Popular Resistance to the Institutional Church
Chapter 26: Christs and Reformers: Popular Resistance to the Institutional Church By confirming the personal and temporal authority of the lax priests, bishops and collaborators, against whom Tertullian, Hippolyte, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Novatian, Donat and those faithful to popular Christianity had rebelled, the Church loosed upon the world — with the mission of circumventing kings, lords and worldly owners — a horde of clerics who were most often avid and unscrupulous. The intention of Gregoire of Tours’ Historia Francorum was to draft an devastating affidavit concerning clerical morals in Sixth Century Gaul. With rare exceptions, the men in question were merely debauched parish priests and dignitaries, looters a... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Movement of the Free-Spirit
Chapter 31: The Movement of the Free-Spirit Contrary to the religious system that captured beings and things so as to “bind” them, following the meaning of religio, to a temporal power that draws its justification from a celestial transcendance, the movement of the Free-Spirit from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries designated an ensemble of options that were more individual than collective and were determined to privilege relations with the earth, the body, desire and the flux of life that nature ceaselessly regenerates. Only the theses of Simon of Samaria, reported by the Elenchos, belongs to this effort that discovers in natural irreligiosity the primary matter of desire, which must be refined to attain a veritable h... (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.)