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.)

Foreword On the shore where two thousand years of the Christian era have washed up, the rising tide of the commodity has not left standing a single traditional value of the past. By ruining the mass ideologies that had prematurely celebrated the collapse of the religious edifice, this tide — at a time when the State plays God in the conduct of [terrestrial] affairs — can it not ineluctably push towards the annihilation of the remains of a Church whose mysteries were socialized by The Council of the Vatican II? The indifference that one today feels towards the beliefs governed by rituals performed by the Party or the ecclesiastical bureaucracy awakens, from the inside out, an interest that no longer supports an obsolete worry, no... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Three Local Christianities: Edessa and Bardesane, Alexandria and Origen, Antioch and Paul of Samosate
Chapter 17: Three Local Christianities: Edessa and Bardesane, Alexandria and Origen, Antioch and Paul of Samosate While the New Prophecy would, for the first time and despite the dissent of a minority of the bishops, concretize the project of a Christianity that wished to conquer the Greco-Roman Empire and ended up unifying the rival churches, there were three cities in which the oldest Judeo-Christian traditions guarded their particularities and perpetuated their privileges as ancient communities. Such was the case with Edessa, Alexandria and Antioch, the fortresses of Esseno-Nazarenism. Bardesane Of Edessa Starting from the First Century, Edessa was a hub of Christian expansion. “The structure of the archaic Christianity of Edessa,&... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Donat and the Circoncellions
Chapter 20: Donat and the Circoncellions From the moment that Constantine agreed to support the Christian communities in 313, he took hold of the Church and treated it as an instrument of his State power. To the bishops he recognized, he accorded the license to promulgate sentences under imperial protection [caution]. His politics of great works (in Rome, Saint Peter, Saint John of Lateran and Saint Agnes; in Jerusalem, Saint Sepulcre), which honored a faith that he openly mocked if it did not cement his own absolutism, aroused the reprobation of a popular Christianity that had been impregnated by asceticism and martyrdom ever since the end of the Second Century. An old contention opposed the party of the tortured, the Christians who remain... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Baptist Movement of the Samaritan Messiah Dusis/Dosithea
Chapter 5: The Baptist Movement of the Samaritan Messiah Dusis/Dosithea Shadow and Light from Samaria If Samaria constitited an object of scandal for Judea, its neighbor to the south, it was because of Samaria’s ancient cults that entered into the project of religious and national[ist] resistance, which was resolved to impede the invasion-politics of Yahwehism and its terrible God, avenger and warrior. These same Samaritans still tolerated an archaic form of YHWH, close to El, the Father, and the angelic plurality contained in the form of Elohim. Holding the sanctuary of Sichem on Mount Garizim as the only true temple, Samaritanism did not admit any other sacred scriptures than the Torah or Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bibl... (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.)