The Resistance to Christianity

The Heresies at the Origins of the 18th Century

1993

People :

Author : Raoul Vaneigem

Sections (TOC) :

• Translator's Introduction
      2,929 Words; 19,008 Characters

• Foreword
      3,745 Words; 24,199 Characters

• Chapter 1 : A Nation Sacrificed to History
      6,363 Words; 40,908 Characters

• Chapter 2 : Diaspora and Anti-Semitism
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• Chapter 3 : The Judean Sects
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• Chapter 4 : The Men of the Community, or the Essenes
      6,767 Words; 43,779 Characters

• Chapter 5 : The Baptist Movement of the Samaritan Messiah Dusis/Dosithea
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• Chapter 6 : Simon of Samaria and Gnostic Radicality
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• Chapter 7 : The Phallic and Fusional Cults
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• Chapter 8 : Three Esseno-Christian Christs: Seth, Melchizedek, and Joshua/Jesus
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• Chapter 9 : The Messianic Sects of Joshua/Jesus: Nazarenes, Ebionites, Elchasaites
      1,514 Words; 9,823 Characters

• Chapter 10 : Quarrels About Prophets and Apostles: Jochanaan, Theudas/Jude/Thomas, Jacob, Simon-Peter, Barnabas, Saul/Paul
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• Chapter 11 : Marcion and the Hellenization of Christianity
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• Chapter 12 : The Inventors of a Christian Theology: Basilides, Valentine, Ptolemy
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• Chapter 13 : Marcos and the Hellenization of Jewish Hermeticism
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• Chapter 14 : Carpocratus, Epiphanius and the Tradition of Simon of Samaria
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• Chapter 15 : The New Prophecy and the Development of Popular Christianity
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• Chapter 16 : Tatian and the Fabrication of the New Testament
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• Chapter 17 : Three Local Christianities: Edessa and Bardesane, Alexandria and Origen, Antioch and Paul of Samosate
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• Chapter 18 : Novatian, the Apostate Clergy and the Anti-Montanist Reaction
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• Chapter 19 : Arianism and the Church of Rome
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• Chapter 20 : Donat and the Circoncellions
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• Chapter 21 : The Spirituals, Also Called Messalians or Euchites
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• Chapter 22 : Monophysites and Dyophysites
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• Chapter 23 : Pelagius and Augustine, or the Conception of Free Will and Predestination
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• Chapter 24 : Priscillian of Avila
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• Chapter 25 : Paulicians and Bogomiles
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• Chapter 26 : Christs and Reformers: Popular Resistance to the Institutional Church
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• Chapter 27 : The Communalist Prophets
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• Chapter 28 : Philosophy Against the Church
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• Chapter 29 : The Cathars
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• Chapter 30 : The Vaudois and the Adepts of Voluntary Poverty
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• Chapter 31 : The Movement of the Free-Spirit
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• Chapter 32 : Beghards and Beguines
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• Chapter 33 : The Millenarianists
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• Chapter 34 : The Flagellants
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• Chapter 35 : The Fraticelles
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• Chapter 36 : The Eastern Reformers: The Hussites and Taborites
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• Chapter 37 : The Men of Intelligence and the Pikarti of Bohemia
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• Chapter 38 : The Victory of the Reformers and the Birth of the Protestant Churches
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• Chapter 39 : The Dissidents from Lutheranism and Calvinism
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• Chapter 40 : The Alumbrados of Spain
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• Chapter 41 : The Spiritual Libertines
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• Chapter 42 : The Anabaptists
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• Chapter 43 : The Individualist Messiahs: David Joris, Nicolas Frey, Hendrik Niclaes
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• Chapter 44 : Ironists and Sceptics
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• Chapter 45 : Levellers, Diggers and Ranters
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• Chapter 46 : The Jansenists
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• Chapter 47 : Pietists, Visionaries and Quietists
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• Chapter 48 : The End of the Divine Right
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• Bibliographical References
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Sections (Content) :

• Translator's Introduction

Translator’s Introduction

It’s unfortunate that the author of this remarkable book, Raoul Vaneigem, did not take the time to write a concise and easily understandable “Foreword.” Instead, as the reader will see, he dashed off something that only a few people — those who have already had the good fortune to read The Movement of the Free Spirit, which covers some of the same ground — would be able to fully understand. In addition, this chaotic, confusing and cavalier “Foreword” discusses the events and possibilities of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, while the book itself covers a period that, with the exception of the last section of the last chapter, ends with the Eighteenth Century (1793, to be exact). As a result, it is possible that very few readers will move beyond the “Foreword” and try to read the many chapters that follow it. And, of course, that would be a great shame.

Indeed, the “Foreword” to this book is so inadequate to the task at hand that we considered either supplementing it or replacing it entirely with the two short texts that introduce the English translation of The Movement of the Free Spirit (New York: Zone Books, 1994). But we decided against such interventions: Vaneigem certainly had his reasons for writing such a text. As he explains in the first chapter of The Movement of the Free Spirit,

As he analyzed the reproduction and self-destruction of commodities Marx never asked himself how far his personal behavior obeyed economic reflexes. His critique is the product of an intellectualism that reproduces the power of the mind over the body; it is the work of a lasting influence of God on the material world.

Vaneigem also detects “intellectualism” — that is, a lack of traces of his own “personal behavior” and the “lasting influence of God” — in his own work. He writes in the “Introduction” to The Movement of the Free Spirit that

This stubborn determination not to let anything take precedence over the will to live, to reject at whatever cost even the most imperative calls of survival, first took shape in my books The Revolution of Everyday Life and The Book of Pleasures. The latter was needed to clarify and correct the former, to remove the intellectual cast that won it high esteem from people incapable of putting its lessons into practice but who, instead, used them as a consoling alibi for their own premature aging.

And so, to counter the “intellectualist” cast and reception of The Movement of the Free Spirit, Vaneigem saddled The Resistance to Christianity with a “Foreword” that would discourage certain (many?) readers from misusing it or even reading it in the first place. This certainly explains the curious last sentence in his “Foreword”: “If it is, finally, necessary to furnish an excuse for a style of writing in which one hardly finds the care that I give to the books that are not too far removed from the line of my life, I would like simply to say that each matter has been given the treatment that it suggests.” Fortunately for us, this is as far as the parallelism between the two sets of books goes. While The Revolution of Everyday Life (written between 1963 and 1965, and published in 1967) is an excellent book, The Book of Pleasures (1979) is a piece of crap; but both The Movement of the Free Spirit and The Resistance to Christianity are superb, indeed, much better than The Revolution of Everyday Life.

Let there be no mistake: The Resistance to Christianity is a scholarly work, even more so than The Movement of the Free Spirit. In his “defense” of “the cursory character” of The Movement of the Free Spirit, Vaneigem refers to “the sheer number of texts that had to be uncovered and translated.” But if its predecessor was “cursory” or incomplete (it is in fact neither), then The Resistance to Christianity is exhaustive, even definitive. Not only does it incorporate the ground covered by its predecessor — that is, the resistance to Christianity (the “heresies”) of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance — but it also extends this ground in both directions: forward into the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, and all the way back to the Seventh Century B.C.E. Like its predecessor, The Resistance to Christianity demonstrates an astonishing erudition: trained in Latin as a student, its author also calls upon works written in English, Italian, Dutch, German and, of course, French.

Vaneigem’s motivations for reiterating the (best parts of the) material contained in The Movement of the Free Spirit were two-fold: he couldn’t very well get to the Enlightenment without going through the Renaissance; and he couldn’t simply refer his readers to The Movement of the Free Spirit, because — at least in its French version — the book wasn’t reprinted by its original publisher after the first edition, which was hardcover only and appears to have been quite limited. Indeed, French-language readers had to wait until 2005 for the book to be reprinted. (Thanks to a 1998 reprint as a paperback, the English translation has never gone out of print.)

• Foreword

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 matter if it is apologetic or denigrating, but quite simply is curiosity preoccupied with its own pleasure and taking pride in the game of discovering what the official truths were so zealous to bury under the ultima ratio[1] of their dogmatic canon.

Can one imagine that Christianity, cleansed of the sacred apparatus by the great waters of affairism,[2] might escape from the crusher that has, in less than a half-century, dashed nationalism, liberalism, socialism, fascism and communism on the sacrificial rocks, while the generations watch with a mix of fascination and terror?

Now that it no longer subsists on the shipwrecks of yore and the sea that been spread out and weakly agitated by the smirk of derision, Christianity is a kind of archaeology that suits the objects bristling with a gangue of holiness; inspiring respect or profanation, they now hardly solicit — I wouldn’t say impartiality — but the naive indiscretion of a discoverer who has been denuded of both prejudices and cunning.

In the same way that it is now permitted to examine the birth, development and decline of Bolshevism without exposing oneself to accusations of materialism, spiritualism, Marxism, revisionism, Stalinism or Trotskyism — which today feigns to smile and be satisfied with the price of blood — one can focus on the Christian religion, which has been washed of the reputation and praises of theology and philosophy, on this archaic affrontery staged as a trompe-l’oeil in which the God of some and the non-God of the others meet in the heavens, their ideas at the same point in flight, at the same [level of] abstraction of corporeal and earthy reality.

With the feeling for the preeminence of the living mingles an astonishment that, for the candide[3], feels like the desire to know why and by which channels the world of ideas has so often required its book of flesh to be slashed in the heart for chimerical horizons.

• Chapter 1 : 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 prophet-ism to the extent that the temporal power of the Hebrews, far from seizing the world so as to propagate obedience in it to YHWH, would succumb under the blows of the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, and would find itself extirpated from the very places in which it had been established over the course of nearly two millennia.

That a nation unanimously placed its lot in the hands of a God and [yet] everywhere and for so long experienced hostility, hate, scorn — its strange specificity doesn’t lie in this. But what surprises is the fact that this nation kept faith, confidence and accredited a deity that was quite the contrary to it.

Situating themselves in a mythical history, the temporal aspect of which was only the shadow of a divine will, the Jews have undergone it as a malediction to which they subscribed by advancing a historical exclusion that they only brought forth in the Twentieth Century by obliterating the religious under the trademark of social preoccupations. Today, few believers deny that the army and the cooperative system offered to Israel are better guarantees than YHWH.

It’s about time. Vilified, oppressed, massacred, imprisoned in the ghettos, they had not ceased to interpret the nightmare in an exegetical way. The malediction confirmed their status as the Chosen People; it conferred upon them — through the water, fire and blood of sacrifice and redemption, the ordeal and salvation, expiation and redemption — an existence that was thus metaphysical, sub specie aeternitatis.[16]

Expelled from Palestine in 135, after the collapse of their last insurrection, the Jews would be cast aside at the same time that their religion would be taken up by Christianity (which issued from Judaism), the political career of which would emerge in the Fourth Century under a Catholicism that conducted pogroms.

• Chapter 2 : Diaspora and Anti-Semitism

Chapter 2: Diaspora and Anti-Semitism

While the Hebrew word galout (exile) was used in a theological perspective and implied an eschatology of uprooting and return, the Greek term diaspora referred to an historical phenomenon: the dispersion of the Jews across the world.

In the beginning, the Jews of Judea and Samaria were chased from Palestine by a conjuration of violence and political constraints. In 722 [B.C.E.], Israel, the Kingdom of the North, fell to the power of Babylon; in 586 [B.C.E.], the Kingdom of Judea succumbed in its turn.

A part of the population submitted to deportation, drawing from its unhappiness the hope of a return under the leadership of a hero chosen by God so as to help his people, sanctified by ordeals.

The realities of the situation, however, had the upper hand over the tortuous designs of Providence. Many exiled Jews — little concerned with regaining their homeland because they were lodged in comfortable places — created communities, practiced their cult, instaurated among them a politics of mutual assistance in which the affluent supported the poorest.

Thus, the first Diaspora began as a voluntary movement of dispersion. It accented itself after the conquest by Alexander, when Palestine — inserted into the Greek world — participated in its intense commercial activity. The Jews thus propagated themselves in regions that were subjected to Ptolemy and the Seleucideans, of whom they were the subjects.

To the communities long since installed in Egypt and Babylon were added those of Syria, Asia Minor, and soon the entire Greco-Roman Empire.

The second Diaspora extended from the Second Century before the Christian era to the beginning of 135 [C.E.], when Hadrian’s crushing of the revolt of Bar Kochba marked the beginning of a third and dramatic exodus. The flame of persecution, revived by the relapses of Judaism that were embodied by the Greco-Roman Christians of the Second Century and the Catholics of the Fourth Century, would consume the Jews all the way to the Twentieth Century.

In the course of the Second Century before the Christian era, the Asmonean dynasty cemented diplomatic relations with Rome, where the Jewish communities were multiplying.

“One would not easily find,” wrote Strabon, who lived from 58(?) to 25(?) B.C.E., “a spot on the inhabited world that hasn’t given asylum to these people and that isn’t mastered by them.” And Agrippa, in a letter to Caligula, wrote: “Jerusalem is the metropolis not only of the country of Judea, but of many others due to the colonies that it has sent out, according to the occasion, in neighboring countries, [including] Egypt, Phenicia, many parts of Asia, as far away as Bythinia, equally in Europe, Thessaly, Beotia and Macedonia.”[25]

As in the majority of the great towns of South Gaul, there were Jews in Lyon, where, mixed with Christians of the New Prophecy, they were the victims of the pogroms of 177.

The statuettes in baked earth that caricatured Jews with circumcised phalluses — which attest to the presence in Treves, around 275, of a quite ancient community — were intended to stir up anti-Semitism.

The Jewish implantations in the towns explains the urban character of Judeo-Christianity and the Hellenized and de-judaicized Christianities that succeded them. Thus the insulting qualification goyim, which designated non-Jews (nonbelievers), would be applied to the anti-Semitic Christians of the Second Century because of the towns’ scorn for the conservatism of the countryside, through the use of terms such as pagani, “peasants,” “hicks,” “bumpkins,” and, in French, pagans. (Without scruple, historians have adopted the scorn that monotheism nourished with respect to polytheism, by speaking of pagans and paganism.)

Among the population of the Roman Empire, Jews constituted 7 to 10 percent of the total, [which was] around six million people, a number that exceeded the number of inhabitants in Judea.

In the First Century of the Christian era, the Jewish colony in Rome numbered 40,000 to 50,000 people; it possessed fifteen synagogues in which there often grew rival sects, Sadduceans, Pharisaians, Essenes, Nazarenes, Ebionites, Naasenes, Sethians and converts to Judaism from all nationalities, a diversity in which the Zealot movement and its terroristic struggle against the Romans would introduce trouble.

For six centuries, the propagation of Judaism appeared to be a form of conquest. In a difference from future epochs, which were headed for a decrease, a very active proselytism multiplied the adepts among the dominant classes as well as in the disadvantaged milieus. Excited by monotheistic intransigence, by incessant nationalistic and extremist revolts, the hostility of the State was accentuated under Tiberias and culminated in the sacking of Jerusalem in 70 and the annihiliation of the Jewish nation in 135.

Nevertheless, four centuries later, the political principle of monotheism — “One God, One State, One Nation” — would seduce Roman power at the end of a long evolution that would see the Jews despoiled of the sacred texts by the Greco-Roman Christianities, which were themselves for the most part excluded from the Roman and Byzantine Churches, whose reign began in Nicaea in 325 [C.E.]

Jewish Proselytism and Anti-Semitism

The Bible of the Septante [the Seventy], the Greek version of the sacred texts, formed the iron lance of Jewish proselytism in the Greco-Roman Empire. It responded to a will for opening to the world of the goyim; Pharisaism expressed it first, before pitting itself against the modernism of certain Judeo-Christian sects that, not content to reject the sacrifices and priests of the Temple (as Essenism did), put into question the hairsplitting rituals of Mosaic law and especially circumcision, which was a major obstacle to conversion.

Jewish orthodoxy wasn’t deceived; it held the Greek translation to be a betrayal of the spirit and the letter [of the law].

With the Bible of the Septante, a civilization dominated by commercial capitalism seized hold of an agrarian civilization, which was walled up in its immobility and its mythical thought. Here began the despoilation of the Jewish nation’s sacred writings. Did not the apologist Justin affirm around 160 that these texts had ceased to belong to the Jews because they were no longer comprehended by them? For the first time, Adonai became Kyrios, the Savior; Joshua was transformed into Jesus; and Messiah became Christos, Christ.

To the extent that Hellenized Judaism distanced itself from the Judean tradition — a tendency that anti-Judean Essenism clearly prepared — Pharisaism, the only orthodox Jewish sect that survived the disaster of 70 [C.E.] — to engage a movement of falling back on the traditional biblical corpus, the Talmud. Attacked from all sides, the Pharisian community took refuge in a defensive attitude; it surrounded itself with dogmatic ramparts, but not without opening the great window of Kabbalah for the cosmic visions of Gnosticism.

Hellenized Judaism was easily rooted in Samaria, where the old refusal of YHWH still smoldered. From the Kingdom of the North would radiate the Baptist Dunstan/Dosithee, Nazorism, Essenism, and the philosophy of Simon, “father of all heresies.”

Alexandria, the hot-bed of erudition and curious spirits, possessed an important Jewish colony. Greek anti-Semitism occasionally released upon it ferocious pogroms. It was a crucible in which mixed and clashed the most diverse opinions. Here there gushed — alongside a powerful Hermetic current that brewed the mysteries of Egypt — apologetic texts such as the Letter from Atistee, the Fourth Book of the Maccabees, Flavius Joseph’s Against Apius, the work of Philo (who lived around 20 [B.C.E.] to 50 [C.E.]), in which Judaic faith absorbed Greek wisdom and was absorbed by it.

Even if Philo kept to the heart of Jerusalem, a metropolis and spiritual homeland, his conception and language were Greek. Philosopher of the Diaspora, he threw the seeds of Judaism on the foreign soils where there abounded the stones of anti-Semitism and where anti-Judean Essenism had already been confused with Judeo-Christianity.

From the beginning of the First Century, the idea of a renewed and Mosaic-law-renewing Judaism coincided with the dynamism of a market in full expansion, where the racketeering of the Diaspora assisted and by turns competed with the places of Greek and Roman business.

“For a merchant,” Josy Eisenberg wrote, “to be or become Jewish is the assurance of easily establishing business relations in a number of countries, to benefit from a warm welcome and great hospitality. For the poor, belonging to Judaism can represent the guarantee of assistance and regular aid [...] There are in Alexandria shipowners and bankers of great Jewish fortunes. But to consider the entirety of the Empire, the Jewish population includes a majority of people of small means. There are many slaves among them. To Rome, neither the Trastevere nieghborhood, nor those of the Capere Port and Subure can pass for distinguished. What one most often reproaches the Jews for is not being sewn from gold, but rather being in tatters and sordid.”[26]

Around the beginning of the Third Century, the historian Dion Cassius (155–235 [C.E.]) asked himself about the phenomenon of Jewish expansion: “From whence comes this denomination? I do not know; but it comes from all men, even those issued from other peoples, who follow the law of the Jews. This species even exists among the Romans. Many times repressed, they have always mended their forces and ended up conquering the right to freely practice their customs.” For Dion Cassius — and this two hundred years after the supposed birth of Christianity — no notable difference existed between Pharisaians and Marcionite Christians, Christians of the New Prophecy, Valentinian Christians, Naasseans, Sethians and Gnostics of all types.

The discredit that attached to many of the ancient and modern cults that were practiced in the Empire, the honors rendered to God as well as to despots, which offered the spectacle of the Jews’ degeneration and flavored their bloody caprices with their usual powerlessness to impose a politics coherent with the State, a derision contrasting with the protestations of austerity and patriotic grandeur — all [of this] incited nostalgia for a unity in which religious faith seconded the fervor of the citizenry, the charm of mystery allied with calculating reason, thereby ordering a new marriage of the heavens and earth, uniting audacious and mercantile modernity with the prudent virtues of agrarian conservatism.

Jewish monotheism exactly proposed the principle of a unity founded on a community practice dominated by solidarity. The businessmen as well as the poor classes of the towns discovered a communal interest. The high birth-rate — justified by the fact that not having children “reduces the image of God” — , after having favored emigration from Palestine, worked in favor of the rapid demographic growth of the Jewish colonies, of which the social and economic power grew.

“Even in the masses,” noted Flavius Joseph in the First Century, “there had long been a vivid desire for our religion, and there isn’t a single Greek or barbarian town into which has not penetrated the practice of the Seventh Day [the Sabbath], during which one rests and observes fasting and the usage of candles, and many of our alimentary prescriptions.”[27]

It is, nevertheless, on the reef of complex rituals that the proselytism of the Jews would run aground. Their intransigence proceeded from a conservatism that was irreconciliable with the Greco-Roman mindset. The history of Judeo-Christian and early Christian sects articulated itself according to the incessant visions of Jewish monotheism and Messianism, as dictated by the nostalgia for a State-ified God, strong with obedience from the nations.

Attractive due to its unitary doctrine, the Jewish religion irritated [others] by its intolerance and fanaticism. The destruction of the monuments of other cults in the name of YHWH’s disapproval of idolatry stirred up scandal and the racial hatred of the pogroms.

From the First Century onwards, everywhere that Jewish communities installed themselves, incidents and conflicts did not delay in exploding.

In 19 [C.E.], Tiberias, who reigned from 14 to 38, took as pretext the troubles in Rome caused by “three extravagant devoted Jews and a great woman converted to Judaism” to prohibit the Judaic cult in Rome and the entirety of Italy. Following Mommsen, “those who did not consent to publicly repudiate their faith and throw the sacred vessels into the fire were chased from Italy, unless one did not judge them suitable for military service; they were thus incorporated into the disciplined companies, but their religious scruples led a great number of them [to be brought] before the counsels of war.”[28]

Rome, which had up to 19 observed with respect to Judaism the tolerance applied to other religions, suddenly used anti-Semitism as a distraction from the real or imaginary menace that the frequency of Palestinian rebellions propagated in the Latium [central Italy]. Without doubt, the repression inaugurated by Tiberias was not foreign to the decision of the evangelical novelists to situate the historical existence of Jesus under his reign.

When Gaius, Tiberias’ successor, stirred up the great pogrom in Alexandria in 38, Philo did not hesitate in his In Flaccum to castigate the passivity of Flaccus and Roman power, which had favored the Greek party, superior in numbers to the Jews.

In a letter dated 41, Emperor Claudius threatened the Jews of Alexandria with chastisement if they did not renounce their subversive schemes. He accused them of “fomenting a communal nuisance to the entire universe.”

In 49, this same Claudius chased the Jews from Rome because they had provoked trouble there. In 64, taking the burning of Rome as a pretext, Nero organized a pogrom that official Catholic history would later present as the first persecution of the Christians.

Hatred for the Jews grew after the insurrection in Palestine, which ended the long guerrilla warfare of the Zealots. “In the neighboring Greek towns — Damascus, Cesarea, Askelon, Skytopolis, Nippos and Gadava — the Greeks massacred the Jews. In Damascus 10,500 to 18,000 Jews were put to death.”[29]

Other pogroms would take place in Alexandria, Antiochus and Pella. All of the persecutions of the First Century, which the Catholics registered in their martyrologies with a view towards accrediting their long history, were in fact pogroms. The refusal to “sacrifice to the idols,” so frequently recalled in hagiographical legends, belonged properly to Jewish religious obstinacy. By 38, Philo of Alexandria would intercede with the Emperor in favor of the Jews who refused to render homage to his statue. Up to the Third Century, the catacombs would serve as the sepulcher and refuge of the Jews and several truly Naasean Gnostics, whom the imperial power hemmed in without distinction.

• Chapter 3 : The Judean Sects

Chapter 3: The Judean Sects

Originally the term “sects” did not carry any perjorative connotation. It designated certain political and religions factions in the general population.

Alexander and Greek domination confirmed the existence of a Samaritan sect, which issued from the separation between the kingdoms of the North and the South. Hellenization encouraged this sect by allowing it to build a temple distinct from the one in Jerusalem. Its members only knew and only recognized the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) and the Book of Joshua/Jesus, in which a sermon by Origen, written in the first half of the Third Century, revealed its influence on the mythic genesis of the Messianic Savior. The Samaritan Bible differed from the Masoretic text, was established latter, and was close to the manuscripts discovered at Qumran.

The Sadduceans

One believes that the sect of the Sadduceans appeared about 300 years before the Christian era. This sect inscribed itself in the political line of Yahwehist centralism. Pre-dating the exile (586–536 [B.C.E.]), but actually drafted in the Fourth Century [B.C.E.], the Book of Ezekiel describes priests who conformed to the Sadducean belief in the Son of Sadoq (or Tsadoq). Combining the role of prophet and the function of the sacerdote, Ezekiel unified in the same ministry two religious attitudes that had often been opposed: the popular agitator and the temple functionary.

A priest who claimed to have ordained Solomon (Kings 1, 38), Tsadoq evoked the idea of justice according to the Semitic practice of wordplay known as themoura, “a Kabbalistic practice by which, on the basis of a logical table of permutations, one replaces one Hebraic letter with another. When applied to Biblical texts, these replacements permit one to multiply the hidden meaning (or what is held to be such).”[36]

Here, the key word is tsedeq, “justice,” which was used by the Judeo-Christian sect of Melchizedek, Melchitsedeq. One finds it in the Essene cult of the Master of Justice, and in the name they conferred upon themselves, “Sons of Tsadoq,” and in the quality of “Just(ness),” ascribed to Jacob, who was later held to be an apostle by the Christian and Catholic evangelical legends.

Sadduceaism comforts the unitary doctrine of the State and monotheism. A sacerdotal ruling class, the Sadducean party built the Temple of Jerusalem, which formed the axis of its temporal power and the privilged space in which God manifested the will to guide his people. High functionaries of the divine judgment, the Sadduceans devoted themselves especially to quarrels concerning precedence and rivalries for power.

Charged with accomplishing the sacrifices of the Temple, and with watching over the observance of the rites with which YHWH folds [plie] everyday existence, the Sadduceans were hardly different in mindset from the Prince-Bishops of the Middle Ages and the Rennaissance who, living in opulence and debauchery, only protested their faith so as to better assure the prerogatives of the Church and its sacred authority.

Good wardens, the Sadduceans assimilated revolt into change, and apostasy into prophetic proclamations. All the more attached to their privileges, which they prided themselves on and allowed them access to an all-powerful God, the Sadduceans didn’t hesitate to collaborate with the invaders or to ferociously repress the Jews who didn’t accommodate themselves.

The Pharisaians treated the Sadduceans like they were Epicureans, which the Pharisians thought to be an insulting term. The Christians accused the Sadduceans of not believing in anything, a reproach that — by a malicious turn of events — Celse and his contemporaries addressed to the Christians, with whom (as late as the Second Century) they still confused with the Orthodox Jews who had disappeared in the aftermath of 70 [C.E.]. The Sadduceans, it is true, rejected the three great Pharisaian doctrines that were later reprized by the Christians: the expectation of a Messiah; the immortality of the soul, and — evoked for the first time in the Book of Daniel in 165 [B.C.E.] — the resurrection of the body.

The Sadduceans’ support of Antiochus IV Epiphane’s politics of Hellenization and the pillaging of the Temple and the massacre of the factions hostile to the Greek party, followed two years later by the instauration in Jerusalem of the cult of the Olympian Jupiter, revived a popular nationalist and religious upheaval that was led by a certain Mattathias. The movement partook of great prophetic agitations that required a strict obedience to Mosiac law by everyone.

Killed in 166 [B.C.E.], Mattathias was succeded by his son, Juda, surnamed Maccabee. Under his lead, the rebellion grew and in 164 [B.C.E.] forced Antiochus IV Epiphane to abrogate the measures taken against religion. Despite the amnesty and the reestablishment of the cult, Juda pursued the combat against the occupiers. As his prosecution also struck the partisans of Hellenism, his fanaticism alienated him from a faction of the Jews sensible to the freedoms of Greek thought and the cogency of rational critique. The death of Juda in 160 [B.C.E.], during the course of combat, brought forth a pitiless repression.

The ascension to power by Jean Hyrcan the First (134–104 [B.C.E.]) marked the beginning of the Asmonean dynasty. Hyrcan made himself idious to the Samaritans by seizing their country. He destroyed the Temple on Mount Garizim; he annexed Idum to the south of Judea and Judaized cosmopolitan Galilee. His son Aristobule succeeded him, but died a year later, in 103 [B.C.E.]. His widow married Alexander Jannee (103–76 [B.C.E.]), who arrogated for himself the title of king.

According to Flavius Joseph, a new party intervened in the quarrel between pontifical and monarchial power — the old quarrel between the temporal and the spiritual. Pharisaism confronted the Sadducean sect, which thanks to an alliance with the despots of the day had maintained in its privileges.

The Pharisians pronounced themselves against the attribution of the royal title to Alexander Jannee. He soon therefater crucified 800 Pharisians; the throats of their women and children were cut before his eyes.

From the same tormented matrix would come a third sect, that of the Sons of Tsadoq, or the Men of the Community, whom the Greeks called the “Essenes.” Hostile to the Sadduceans and to the Pharisians, they also showed a violent opposition to Jerusalem, the Temple and the practice of sacrifices.

Collaborators with all of the occupiers of Palestine, the Sadduceans did not survive the war of the Zealots, which ended with the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 [C.E.]. At the end of the First Century, only the Pharisians possessed a monopoly on Jewish orthodoxy.[37]

The Pharisians

The Hebraic term peroushim means “separated, placed apart,” an allusion to the schism that would, in 163 [B.C.E.], lead to nationalist and holy war against the Greek occupiers by Mattathias and his son, Juda Maccabee. Better known by their Hellenized name “Pharisians,” these sectarians extolled the strict observance of Mosaic law and opposed Sadducean hypocrisy with working-class fervor.

Vituperating the dissolute morals of the sacerdotal caste, Pharisaism — precursor of a reform movement that castigated the morals of the Roman Church — celebrated the virtues of esthetic morality, emphasized the importance of solidarity, encouraged piety and rallied a crowd of oppressed people, whose feelings of frustration, disorder and envy it channeled.

In its struggle against Sadducean domination, Pharisaism disposed of two institutional weapons that proved its power of organization: the Rabbinat and an assembly of the faithful, or synagogue, the model for future churches.

Whatever his trade, the rabbi (“my master”), a secular pedagogue, dispensed religious instruction among the working classes. After the defeat of 70 [C.E.] and the disappearance of Sadduceanism, there were rabbis who imposed modernity on the Jewish religion, fixed the canon of sacred texts, defended orthodoxy, condemned the heresies of the minim (dualists or Gnostics) and the noisrim or Nazarenes.

The “synagogues,” from the Greek synagoge, “meeting,” designated the houses of priests, studies and meetings. The Essenes would imitate the synagogues by calling theirs “communities,” in Greek ekklesiai, or, in French, “church” for the place, and “Church” for the assembly.

When bloody repression by Alexander Jannee put them down in 100 [B.C.E.], a large number of Pharisians would leave Judea and go to Galilee. There they were rivals with the Nazarenes in the second half of the First Century before the Christian era. In the cities of the Diaspora, their influence would not cease to grow before the great anti-Semitic waves of 70 and 135.

When Pompei seized Jerusalem in 63 [B.C.E.], thereby inaugurating a Roman domination that would perpetuate itself until 324, the Pharisians chose to collaborate with the occupiers.

In the same period, under the pontificate of Jean Hyran II, a dissident Rabbi, the head of an Essene community and known by the name Master of Justice, was put to death with the consent of the Pharisians, if not their instigation. The Essenes vowed against the Pharisians a hatred equal to that which they heaped upon [accablent] the Sadduceans and Judaism in general. Not only would the execution of the Christ or Essene Messiah lend its dramatic aura to the crucification of Jesus as reported by the evangelical legends, but it would also accredit the opinion of a death reclaimed by the Pharisians.

• Chapter 4 : The Men of the Community, or the Essenes

Chapter 4: The Men of the Community, or the Essenes

Only Flavius Joseph and Philo of Alexandria designate the essenoi or essaoi (from the Hebrew esah’, “counsel” or “party,” and which Dupont-Sommer[47] translates as “congregation” or “men of the community,”) as a Jewish dissidence, hostile to the two sects dominating Judea and the Diaspora: Sadduceism and Pharisaism.

Hadot does not exclude the influence of the Aramaic word ossio, “doctor,” which justifies the appellation Therapeutes, or the “doctors of the soul” whom Philo takes to be an Essene sect located not far from Alexandria.

If one can judge from the manuscripts discovered at Qumran, they called themselves “Men of the Community,” “Counsel of God,” “Counsel of the Community,” “Sons of Sadoq” (or Tsadoq, Sons of the Just, or Sons of Justice). In a general way, they called themselves the “Loyal,” or the “Pious,” in Hebrew chasse (the Syrian hasaya, which means “pious” or “holy,” is phonetically similar to “Essene”). “The eastern door of Jerusalem, which overlooked the country of the Essenes, conserved the name Bab Essahioun, which seems to recall the name of this mysterious community.”[48]

According to Qumranian texts from a later date, the Essenes formed the sect of the “New Alliance,” a formula that Marcion — in all probability inspired by the Christian Jew Saul — would translate as “New Testament” so as to oppose it to the ancient one, and with a success that cannot be denied.

In two centuries of existence, Essenism — the expansion of which followed the Diaspora — did not fail to borrow from diverse streams and to embrace many doctrines. Philo speaks of the “Therapeutes” from Lake Mareotis. In certain texts, the Men of the Community identify themselves with the ebbyonim, the “poor,” because there was good reason to reproach the Judeo-Christian sect of the Ebionists, who were close to or rivals with the Nazarenes, and who seemed to oppose themselves to the rebym, the “many,” a term used by Saul/Paul to designate his disciples.

History of the Sect

Taking exception to the hypothesis that fixes the origin of Essene dissidence under the Asmoneans Jonathan and Simon, Dupont-Sommer situates it under Alexander Jannee (103–76 [B.C.E.]) instead.

The opposition to the monarchal pretentions of the great priest Alexander Jannee incited the leader of the Essenes to withdraw into the desert with his partisans, just as Moses did.

We know through Flavius Joseph that Aristobule the First, successor to the great priest Jean Hyran, his father, would add the title of king to that of great priest. A year later, in 103 [B.C.E.], his brother Alexander Jannee succeded him and did not disavow the bold initiative: he took the title of king. Of the three great Jewish parties, only the Essene party was strongly opposed to this innovation.[49]

The resolution to leave Jerusalem and enter the desert is evoked in The Rule of the War of the Sons of the Light Against the Sons of Darkness.

Where was the community located? The historian Dion Chrysostome (around 42 to 125) speaks of Essenes living near Sodom. For Saulcy, Qumran would be Gomorrah.[50] Doresse is content to affirm: “Sodom and Gomorrah count among the places in which their colonies were established.”[51]

In the Writings of Damascus, the first master of the sect carried the title of priest. He issued from the sacerdotal family of Gemul and his dissidence derived, at the origin at least, from a power struggle in the Sadducean caste, mythically attached to Sadoq, great priest under Solomon.

His title referred back to the sacred notion of justice, to those just people or saints whom God designated as his chosen, and whom Jacob would perpetuate in Christianity. It was also a reference to the destiny of Melchizedek, a secondary biblical personage, elevated by the symbolic consonance of this name (tsedek, “justice”) to the dignity of Messiah among certain Essenes. The fragments derived from midrashim, reprized in the notes attributed to Saul/Paul, again attest to the veneration shown with respect to an alter ego of the Master of Justice.

Around 100 [B.C.E.] there developed in Qumran a Jewish sect that dissented from Sadduceanism and was hostile to the Pharisians, whom Alexander Jannee persecuted. Upon the death of the monarch and great priest, his widow, Alexandra (76–77), occupied the throne and set up her son Hyran II as the sovereign pontiff.

Upon the death of Alexandra, a war opposed Hyran II (67–63) to his brother Aristobule II. The Pharisians arranged themselves on the side of the former, while the Sadduceans chose the latter.

Around 65 [B.C.E.] the persecution of Hyran II fell upon the Essenes who had taken refuge in Damascus, the holy city of which the Hebrew name (DMS) means “sanctuary.”[52] Its mythical foundation is attributed to Seth, Son of Man (that is to say, Son of Adam), whose importance — emphasized in the Qumran manuscripts, as in the texts discovered at Nag-Hammadi — demonstrated the existence of the sects holding Seth to be the Messiah. The Writings of Damascus situated the event a little before the arrival of Pompei in Judea in 63 [B.C.E.].

Bewteen 65 and 63 [B.C.E.] a drama exploded, the eschatological consequences of which surpass the history of the Essenes: the putting to death of the Master of Justice, who was, according to the Commentary of Habacuc, “the priest that God had placed in the (House of Juda) so as to explain all of the words of his servants, the prophets.” Is it Onias the Just, put to death in the camp of Hyran II, as suggested by Dupont-Sommers? (According to J.M. Rosenstiehl,[53] the ancient kernel of the Apocalypse of Elie dates from the epoch of Hyran II. A king who is not anointed persecutes the virgin Tabitha, who is the Community of Qumran, but the Anointed One, the Messiah, comes to deliver her and leads her to terrestrial paradise. The return of Henoch evokes that of the Master of Justice.)

Whatever the case, the Qumran texts thenceforth opposed the veneration of its victim, the “Last Priest” or the “Messiah of the Spirit,” to the execration of the despot or the “Impious Priest.” Philonenko sees in the martrying of Esaie a transposition of the history of the sect and the sacrificial execution of its Messiah.[54]

When Pompei seized Jerusalem and razed the Temple in 63 [B.C.E.], the Essenes propagated the rumor of a just punishment inflicted by God on the Judeans, guilty of the death of the Messiah. This scenario, which colored anti-Judaism with anti-Semitism, would in the Second Century enter into the romanesque elaboration of the death of Jesus.

Little by little, the Men of the Community regained the region of the Dead Sea, not without leaving important colonies in the cities of the Diaspora and in Damascus, the sanctuary city in which the legendary biography of Saul/Paul situated the ilumination of the prophet and his revelation of the Messiah.

The invasion of Parthes, which ravaged the Qumran region between 40 and 38 [B.C.E.], and an earthquake ruined a secular community of which the numerical importance was attested by the architectural developments of the buildings, the development of culture, the irrigation system and the cemetery, in which [both] men and women reposed.

The tolerant attitude of Herod (37 [B.C.E.] — 4 [C.E.]) favored the Essenes’ freedom of movement. They furrowed the roads that, from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, ran parallel to the Jordan River. Here they manifested an important Baptist movement. Is it necessary to see an evolved Essenism, stripped of its elitism, or the perpetuation of the teachings of the Messiah called Dunstan/Dosithee, crucified, in the Nazareanism implanted in Judea, Galilee and Samaria well before the Christian era?

From 4 [B.C.E.] on, the guerrilla war against Rome provoked a new flow of people into Qumran. It is more than probable that a faction of Essenism furnished doctrinal weapons to the Zealot movement. At Masada there were Essenes for whom The Rule of the War of the Sons of the Light Against the Sons of Darkness syncretized eschalatological combat and national[ist] warfare.

In 68, Qumran was devastated by the Decima Legio Pretensis, the elite military horde sent by the Romans to crush the Jewish insurrection. The development of Essenism was not broken; beginning with the divine punishment that fell upon Jerusalem and the Temple, which they never ceased to execrate, the Men of the Community showed themselves on the great day of the diaspora to be who they had always been: Messianic Jews expecting the imminent return of their Kyrios, their Savior; enlightened ones whom the Greeks at the beginning of the Second Century called chrestianoi or christianoi, that is to say, quite simply Messianists and not, as the historians have falsely suggested, disciples of a unique Christ.

Contrary to what Renan affirms, Christianity is not an Essenism that succeeded; it is nothing other than the ensemble of Essene sects, encircled by the general term Judeo-Christian, and opposed to Pharisaism.

Spared from Roman repression, the Pharisians tightened their ranks, fell back upon a rigorous canonicity concretized by the Talmud and its commentaries. They fought two heresies: the nosrim or Nazarenes, preoccupied with the reform of Mosaic law, and the minim or Gnostics, “those who know,” in whom the range of the dualists was extended, opposing the Good God and YHWH to the Simonian doctrine of individual salvation through the creation of self.

Monachism and Ecclesiastic Organization

Essenism evolved a great deal in two centuries. If its archaic form of the monastic type had not disappeared from the hermitages and Coptic monasteries founded by Pacome and Macaire around 251, under the persecution of Dece, then the doctrine would have taken more modern colorations that were expressed by Ebionism, Nazareanism, the Epistle attributed to Barnabas, the teachings of Saul/Paul, nay, the Elchasaitism of the Homelies of Peter attributed to Clement, not to mention the Henochians, Melchisedechians and Sethians.

The excavations at Qumran have extracted a square building, flanked by a tower that was perhaps intended to watch for the return of the Messiah, who was put to death around 63 [B.C.E.].

[In the building there was found] a system of feeder channels (a torrent at the beginning), seven bathing pools endowed with stairways and several round basins, reserved for the baptism of neophytes and purifying ablutions.

Dedicated to the cult and to meetings, this monastery did not shelter the members of the Community, who were lodged in the neighborhood. A meeting hall served [as a place for] the reading and exegesis of biblical texts, rewritten and revised without scruple by the sectarians, who were convinced that they were the only ones to hold the truth. Did not they praise their Christ for having revealed to them the meaning of the Scriptures, thus elevating them to the status of chosen by God, saints, “perfect ones”?

Here [in the monastery] were also celebrated the sacred banquets of “Holy Communions,” ritual meals of bread and wine (or water) by which the faithful communed with the presence of God (the Catholic eucharist would be inspired by it, as well as by the symbolism of the Flesh and the Blood, borrowed from the Phrygian cult of Attis).

According to the estimates, the average population of Qumran increased to around 200 people. Its autocratic system was founded on agriculture, abandoned to the care of neophytes, while the Perfect Ones devoted themselves to the praise of the Savior, the singing of hymns and the exegesis of sacred texts. Flavius Joseph estimated at 4,000 the number of Essenes repatriated to Alexandria (where Philo knew them by the name “Therapeutes”), Damascus, Greece, Asia Minor and Italy.

The cemeteries have delivered up the skeletons of men and women, probably the wives of the converts assigned to labor activities, who had been accorded the right to marry with the goal of procreating. They interred their dead with their heads facing north, which was different from other Jews, whom they considered to be nonbelievers: they judged themselves to be the only representatives of the true Israel. In the same execration, they dismissed the Sadduceans and the Pharisians, who were deemed guilty of spilling the blood of the Messiah. Refusing the sacrifices made under the egis of the Great Priest, they called for divine vengeance upon the Temple, the object of infamy rebuilt by Herod.

As for Jerusalem, they nourished the ambition to deliver it from the Jews who, by their doctrines, had impiously profaned the holiness of the place. Among many attempts effectuated in this regard, there was the tumult stirred up by Theudas/Thomas and his 4,000 “poor people” (ebbyonim) who participated quite well in the Essene spirit.

The apportionment of time equally distinguished them from their coreligionists. The only true observers of Mosaic law, they claimed to hold their calendar to be a divine revelation. Different from the Judean calendar, theirs was solar, not lunar.

According to the indications that Ezechiel advocated, the year was divided into four trimesters and into months of 30 or 31 days, with the result that festivals fell on fixed dates. Easter echoed Wednesday 14 Nizan, two days before the Easter celebrated in Jerusalem.[55]

Such is the calendar to which the evangelical novel of Joshua/Jesus referred, and would later be adopted by Catholic orthodoxy when — appropriating the control of time in its turn — it would arbitrarily anchor at a zero point the beginning of the Christian era.

The Essenes replaced the sacrifices of the Temple with the sacrifice of the body: mortification extinguished the fire of the desires and stoked the ardor of the spirit, to which their miserable existence reduced itself. Their frantic asceticism nourished the ordinary misogyny of patriarchal peoples and pushed it to the state of neurosis. The Qumran manuscripts include a poem against women, the source of all the troubles and perditions of man.[56]

The Rule of the War proscribes sexual relations and excludes from the [ranks of the] Enlightened Ones the woman, the young man, and the impure, understood to be he who has ejaculated.[57]

A much more recent text, issued from Damascus, tolerates the makeshift of marriage, but with the sole goal of procreating and perpetuating the sect.

Scorn for women runs like a counter-point through all of the partitions of Christianity. The Essene or Nazarean Saul/Paul only tolerated their presence in the ecclesiastical assemblies on the condition that they keep quiet; the Marcionites, Elchasaites, Montanists and Catholics all treated them like they were impure beasts. To support [the idea] that this is quite ordinary, according to the prejudicies of the times, would be ignorant of the facts that, at the same time, the schools — nay, the sects — recognized in women and love that which excites the invaluable privilege of creating life and saving humanity. This was the case with Simon of Samaria, certain Naassenes and the Barbelites.

No doubt Pliny the Elder was right to paint a portrait of the Essenes that little accorded with a “people without women, without love, without money.” Love was travestied by the adoration of God and clannish solidarity. As far as the absence of money, which was the result of an autocratic economy, it was (as among the Ebionites) a voluntary poverty; much latter, its fantasm would haunt the collectivist and millenarian dreams that — taking root during crises of economic and social transformation — would demand a return to an egalitarian, fraternal, disinterested Christianity, which would be a cathartic prelude to the reign of the holy.

Essenism is the True Original Christianity

In the Eighteenth Century, the erudite Bernard de Montfaucon stirred up a polemic on the subject of the Therapeutes as described by Philo of Alexandria. To Montfaucon, they were a Christian sect, which he proved with serious argumentation.[58] His critics retorted that other Jewish milieu presented the same singularities. Both were right: the Therapeutes were both Jewish and Christian. Until the beginning of the Second Century, the only form of Christianity — that is, before Marcion took exception to it in the name of a Greek Christianity — was inscribed in the framework of a reformed and anti-Judean Judaism.

Essenism united all of the traits of primitive Christianity: it was baptist, believed in a Messiah, founded the Churches and was marked by the duality of roads, Light and Darkness, nay, by the duality of the Demiurge and the Good God.

• Chapter 5 : 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 Bible) and the Book of Joshua, which Hellenization, soon implanted in Samaria, propagated under the name Book of Jesus (thus would Origen cite it around 250).

The hatred between Judeans and Samaritans was exacerbated by the destruction of Sichem under the reign of Jean Hyran, Asmonean prince and Great Priest of Jerusalem (135–105 [B.C.E.]).

On the other hand, Hellenization, badly accepted in Judea, encountered a better welcome in Samaria. It is true that the Canaanean and Philistinian substrata, quite long-lived, were not foreign to an Achean implantation, at the time of the migrations of the Second Millennium before the Christian era. The persistance of cultural forms issued from the Magna Mater, allied with the audacious critiques of Greek philosophy, introduced into the closed universe of the gods a quite corrosive mixture, of which the teachings of Simon and Barbelite practices offered singular examples, that is, when one discovered them underneath the silence and the calumnies accumulated by the Church’s work of eradication and by its complacent historians.

This light of Samaria badly accommodated the sparkling and virtuous road chosen by Essenism. Nevertheless, perhaps it clears up the birth of dissident sects, such as the still poorly-known Sethians, whom the Messiah-Son of Man would frequently encounter in the Qumranian manuscripts.

Between Judea and Galilee, Samaria extended to the rivers of the Dead Sea, where the original kernel of Essenism was established. These places were propitious for the implicit constitution of a front hostile to the Temple, to Jerusalem, to Judean beliefs, nay, to the law of Moses.[77]

Did not Essene dualism draw its origin from the Samaritan distinction between YHWH and his angelic constituent, Elohim? In any case, the heresy of the “two celestial powers” — a veritable crime against the unique God in the eyes of Jewish orthodoxy and condemned by the Books of Henoch — was surreptitiously dropped into it, in the confrontation between the Good Angels and the Bad Angels.

Such a doctrine even impregnated the thought of the very Pharisian Philo of Alexandria, when he opposed the beneficial power of Theos, the Good God, to the punitive function with which the Kyrios or Savoir (the translation of Adonia, the equivalent of the Tetragrammaton YHWH) charged himself. Marcion restrained himself from making precise the divergence between the God of the Jews, creator of a bad world, and the Good God that de-Judaized Christianity would substitute for YHWH as the creator of a world in which the Good would realize itself through the intervention of the Messiah-Redeemer.

But the relation between Essenism and Samaritanism, which here includes the diversity of the tendencies that they nourished, discovered in Dusis/Dosithea a Messianic figure, the importance of whom few researchers have emphasized .

The Messiah Dusis/Dunstan/Dosithea

In the Fourteenth Century, the Samaritan chronicler Abu’l Fath spoke of a certain Dusis or Dunstan around whom were united a messianist and baptist group that he called the Dunstanites at the time of the crisis engendered by the destruction of the Temple at Garizim by Hyran II.

Was a second expansion of Dunstanism manifested by a new eschatological prophet named Dosithea, as Isser suggests?[78] He would have had as his successor a prophet named Aulianah.

But the name Dosithea, Dosi-theos, which refers back to Dusis and means “God gave him,” recalls Dusis’s quality as an Angel-Messiah. No doubt he also established a rapprochment with another Messiah, come from Galilee: Hanina Ben Dosa, that is to say, son of Dusis.[79]

Dositheaism seems to have assumed in Hellenized form the ancient Dunstanite movement, which was a baptist and messianic movement that resulted from a schism within Samaritanism.[80]

As in Essene dissidence, Dusis’s schism was accompanied by a re-casting of the calendar: the adepts attributed 30 days to each month. A century later, the Elchasaites — anecdotally translating the scorn they felt for Saul (assimilated by Dosithea and Simon) — reported that Dosithea founded a sect of thirty men and a woman named the Moon [la Lune], who was prostituted in a brothel in Tire and who was the mistress of the prophet before throwing herself in the arms of Simon.

In the Sixth Century, Bishop Euloge encountered in Alexandria Samaritan groups that still reproached Dosithea for having altered a great many sacred texts. Abu’l Fath shares the indignation with the rest.

In truth, if the prophet Dunstanite rewrote the sacred messages — as the Essenes, Nazarenes, Marcionites, Anti-Marcionites and Catholics did — this was because Moses spoke through his voice, he was entitled to revise the law and adapt it to his divine truth.

Did not Dusis’s disciples go further in the critique of Judean and Mosaic doctrine? This is the hypothesis advanced by Fossum.[81] Dosithea — the Hellenized version of Dusis — rejected the prophets accepted by the Jewish canon, called for the reform of Mosaic law and even extolled the abolition of religious duties.

All the milieus that were preoccupied with Judaism debated the observance and the questioning of the rituals claimed to have been prescribed by Moses. The Hellenization of Judeo-Christianity after 140 did not take place on any other terrain. The rejection of the prophets was announced by Marcion.

As for the irreligious attitude, it corresponds to the philosophy of Simon of Samaria, whom the heresiologues communally characterized as the disciple of Dosithea and the father of all heresies. But the amalgam of Dosithea and Simon appears to have come from the same polemical vein as the identification of Saul with Simon, which was made by the partisans of the churches of Jacob and Simon-Peter.

The Dositheans participated in the general reform movement that, through Essenism, Ebionism, Nazareanism and Paulinism, would end in the Hellenized Christianity of the Marcionites and Anti-Marcionites of the Second Century.

According to Abu’l Fath, the Dositheans were called “the children of the Apostle,” the apostle being Moses.[82]

At the hinge of this era, officially decreed to be Christian, many were the apostles and their children. It would be necessary to efface the memory, to have a conjuration of ecclesiastical interests impose the symbolic power of Joshua, leading the nations toward the mythical beyond of the Jordan, under the redemptive name “God has saved, saves, will save” — a conjuration much later obliterated in its turn by the fabrication of a historical Jesis.

In Dosithea, Christian historicism wanted to make a disciple of Jesus named Nathaniel — which corresponds to Dositheos, God gave him.[83]

The novels devoted to Jesus abound in traits of this type, in which reality, travestied and put on stage, works to the glory of the principal person. Mythical heroes thus dominate beings and symbols from which, in fact, the legend proceeds.

Dusis preceded, announced and prepared the effervescence — limited until the Zealot movement gave it a growing audience — in which messiahs, apostles, prophets, enlightened ones and charlatans carved out a popular reputation by extolling the reform, rebirth or abolition of Judean conservatism.

Like Essenism, Dositheism or Dunstanism was a baptist, messianic and reformist movement. Baptism occupied a primordial place in it. Prayers were practiced in [bodies of] water, such as bathing pools [piscines] or the Jordan, so fertile symbolically.

The erudite blinders on the researchers exploring (with the Church’s prejudices) an epoch in which the Church founded its assizes have hardly permitted them to disentangle what has reconciled and distinguished the baptist and Samaritan current of Dunstan/Dositheo (born around 135 [B.C.E.]), Essenism (around 100), Nazareanism (around 50) and the Johannism of Jochanaan/John the Baptist, all of whom were attached to a great ascetic rigor and scorn for the body, the world, women and life.

But there is something more troubling: Dusis is also a cricified and resuscitated Messiah.

The Annals of Abu’l Fath cite a group called the saduqay, which affirmed: “Men will know the resurrection because Dusis is dead due to a shameful death and Levy was stoned to death; because if Dusis was really dead, then all of the just men of the earth would be dead.”

Reserved for slaves and common criminals, the “shameful death” meant execution on the cross. The idea that Dusis, raised to heaven, had not been struck [down] by a real death prevails — when applied to Jesus — in all of the Christianities of the first three centuries, nay, beyond, up to what Catholicism condemned under the name of “Docetism.”

Incarnated as the Spirit of God and the reincarnation of Moses in a terrestrial existence marked by redemptive suffering, Dusis did not fail to evoke the syncretic Messiah of the Judeo-Christian Elchasaites, who expressed themselves around 110 in the Homelies of Peter: “There is only one true prophet: he who since Adam has been incarnated in the patriarchs Henoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and who, at the end, finds his rest by incarnating himself as Jesus.”[84]

As the Master of Justice, Dusis — suffering and glorious Messiah — assured his faithful an eternal survival, a resurrection according to the spirit. Dusis, the Master of Justice, Dosithea, Jochanaan, Jacob and Simon-Peter: do they not trace the line of the syncretisms successively hostile to Yahwehist syncretism, and that an ecumenism of diverse tendencies would — after the “apocalypse” of 70 — be unified according to the myth of Joshua the Gatherer?

It would not be without interest to note that Levy, disciple of Dusis, put to death by stoning, found himself in the novels of Jesus under the traits of Levy the Publican, alias Matthew, to whom are attributed a secret Gospel and a Gospel consecrated by the Catholic canon.

Close to the Johanite, Ebionite and Nazarean sects, Dositheism was opposed, on the other hand, to the Naassenes. The saduqay of whom Abu’l Fath spoke actually taught that “the Serprent would govern the life of creatures up to the day of the resurrection.”[85] They identified the Serprent with the Cosmocrat, the Demiurge, the Bad God ruling the world, as opposed to the Naassenes, for whom NHS, the Serprent, revealed the road to salvation. The Naassenes, it is true, were sometimes repelled by asceticism and chastity, which was uniformly preached by Esseno-Christianity.

Would not the hostility to Yahwehism engender in Dostheism the identification of YHWH with the Demiurge that Marcion would preside over? In a midrash from the Third or Fourth Century, the Samaritan Marqua evoked an ancient tradition in which YHWH revealed himself as the supreme destroyer. He also reported a trait of which one finds traces in the evangelical legends: “At midnight, YHWH destroyed all the first-born of Egypt.”[86]

The exegetes of the New Testament betrayed a certain embarrassment when they were faced with the lie that attributed to Herod the massive extermination known as the “massacre of the innocents.” All things considered, to impute to a perfectly bloody Jewish king a heinous crime that Marcionism would count as one of a number of angry manifestations of the God of Israel — this expresses well the will, on the part of the fabricators of the Gospels, to give to symbols and abstractions an anecdotal and historical character.

• Chapter 6 : 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 fragments of his last oeuvre suffice to suggest a radical will in the precise sense of the term: that which attaches itself to the root of beings and things. Issued from Greek rationality, his analysis undertook to render to the materia prima of the body (from which the mythical visions of the Pentateuch issued) that which the Hebraic religion had snatched from the luxury of desires so as to transpose them — through a catholic and castrating function — into the domain of the spirit.

• Chapter 7 : 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 and in its slow reptation? More than any other mythology, the Bible changed the serpent into an object of abjection, terror and evil.

I would like to conjecture that the religious spirit that substituted itself for an analogical and totemic approach to the serpent — which in a certain way removed from it the perils of venom and strangulation — emphasized to the point of hyperbole a danger of death that instead issued from the anathema hurled against this part of life and pleasure, so hostile to the power of the Spirit and its priests.

The Hebrews annexed the cult of the serprent into their gestating monotheistic syncretism in the form of the seraphim (the “seraphins,” much later changed into angels).

In Deuteronomy (8, 15), nahash seraph designates the burning serpents that murder people in the desert. Numbers (21, 6) speaks of nahashim seraphim. If the word seraph is applied to serpents, it is because of an idea of a “burning bite,” because the root of the word in Semitic [languages] is the verb “to burn” and, more precisely, in Jeremiah (7, 31), the act of burning infants on the altar of Baal.[113]

Fecundation and expiating sacrifice of the new-born, infant or animal, inscribed themselves in the essence of the religions: the production of lives reduced to the force of work implies the destruction or the repression of nonproductive libidinal energy.

The serpent (nahash, NHS) plays a predominantly sexual role in Genesis. It is condemned sexually, as is well illustrated by a Talmudic tradition (Aboda Zara, 22 b): “When the serprent possessed Eve, he inoculated her with filth.”[114] And Genesis is no less explicit in the resolution of Adam (3, 20) to call his wife Hawwah (Eve), playing on the word hayah, which expresses the idea of life and is similar to the Aramaic hivyah, “serpent.” Much later, Clement of Alexandria would remark that, “if one thickens a little the pronunciation of the name of the first woman, one would evoke in Jewish ears the name of the female of the serpent species.”[115]

Sexual initiation, with its lascivity or art of caresses, originally depended on the privileges of the woman. The patriarch, whom the violation of the earth by the agriculture of labors had carried to an absolute power, treated women in the same spirit of exploitation. The lascivious and feminine undulation of exuberant life fell under prohibition, while he erected himself under the sign of the power of the phallic “plowshare,” symbolized by the bronze serpents that Moses held erect in the desert, carriers of a mortified life — serpents whose venom impregnated women and nature, both condemned to produce until exhausted.

This serpent, triumph and terror of virile politics, would be transformed in Hebraic mythology into Satan. Alan Rowe has shown the importance of the cult of the serpent at Beth-Shan, where he led a campaign of excavations. Beth-Shan would not be other than the House of the Serpent-God and Shahan the divinified serpent. He remarks that shahan read backwards is nahash, the root NHS expressing in its diverse permutations the idea of the serpent in all of the Semitic languages.[116]

It was the archaic cult of the serpent — at the same time proscribed and recuperated by Judaism — that connected the sects that, owing to their encounter with the Judeo- and Hellenized Christianities, strove to integrate it into their salvational myths, influencing certain tendencies before falling under the condemnation of the New Prophecy and Catholicism.

The Naassenes or Ophites

The late and rudimentary study of the history of the Naassenes left one in ignorance concerning the Messianic groups — active between Judaic antiquity and the appearance in Egypt, and particularly in Alexandria — that speculated upon the redemptive nature of the Serpent or NHS (nahas).

The Naassenism of Alexandria perhaps constituted a syncretism that brought together Jewish, Phoenician, Egyptian and Greek elements. The Phoenicians gave to the serpent the name Agathodaimon, “beneficent being” (the apotropaic meaning is not obvious). The Egyptians translated Agathodaimon as kneph, which one finds in the knouphis (coiled serpents) of amulettes or abraxas. The contribution of the old Ophidian cult of the Greeks would lend to Naassenism the belated name Ophitism.[117]

When Nazareanism gained importance towards the end of the First Century, the Naassenes, in a statement from their ecumenical assembly, did not reject the integration of the name Joshua/Jesus into the diverse [list of] names of their Ophis-Christos, their Serpent-Messiah: Kneph, Agathodaimon, NHS, Abrasax.

Around 230–250, the concurrent character of Jesus and the Ophis-Christos worried Origen and made him indignant. Blaming a Naassene prophet named Euphrates, he judged it useful to make this precise: “The Ophites are not Christians, they are the greatest adversaries of Christ.”

Moreover, the confusion between Christians and Naassenes proceeded from a tardy evolution, as Fossum remarks: “The serpent is transformed into a redeemer as much as the God of the Old Testament was found to be degraded into a harmful Demiurge, devoid of wisdom, named Ialdabaoth, who doesn’t know that there is a God beyond him.”[118]

Whatever the case, in the First Century Naassenism entered into the quarrel of Messiahs who agitated the religious milieu from all sides. Despite the revisions and rewritings, the Canonical Gospel attributed to John (*) retained, as did the Apocryphal Gospel attributed to Thomas, traces of a fundamental writing belonging to the Naassene current in which Iesous-Christos was substituted for Ophis-Christos.

(*) “And in the same way that Moses would raise the Serpent in the desert, likewise it was necessary that the Son of Man was raised so that whomever believed in him had eternal life” (Gospel attributed to John, 3, 14–15).[119]

In the necessity in which it found itself falsifying history so as to demonstrate its antiquity, the Church would advance the idea that the Naassenes were inspired by Jesus so as to make NHS a suffering and redeeming Messiah. But beyond the fact that Naassenism greatly preceded Christianity, the Church was not even constrained to draw its inspiration from the martrydom of the Master of Justice or Dusis. Because the primary nature of the seraphims that are closest to God is the serpent, as the Book of Henoch (20, 7; 61, 10; 71, 7) calls it. It wanted to reveal to Adam and Eve the pleasure in and knowledge of the union in which divine immortality dwells, and this is why the jealous God punished it, nailed it to the ground or, according to certain texts attributed to Moses, to the Tree of Life on which its skin hung, crucified.

The Gospel of Truth, discovered at Nag-Hammadi, still tells the history of the Garden of Eden from a Naassene point of view: the principle of divine wisdom — equal to that of Sophia, the Angel-Messiah or the pneuma — proposed to offer knowledge to Adam and Eve. The Jealous God prohibited them access to gnosis and, expelling them from Paradise, condemned them to a mortal destiny.

NHS, the serpent of knowledge and pleasure — in the manner of the Kundalini, which wakes the body to its potential richness — introduced into the human being, male and female, the vital breath, which was called the pneuma or the Spirit in the religious groups.

From what the Serpent-God penetrated into Eve and into Adam, which was insufficient for immortality, certain people have inferred that the Naassenes practiced coupling in a sexual indifferentiation that symbolically recreated the original androgyny. Perhaps it was to them that the remark sometimes attributed to Simon of Samaria was addressed: “All earth is earth, and it does not matter where one sows seeds [seme].”

No doubt there existed a diversity of sects in Naassenism, since certain tendencies extolled asceticism and thus embraced Esseno-Christianity, as much as others practiced sexual liberty in the name of the fusion of man, woman and world, entwined in NHS.

The invocation of a primordial erotic entity was expressed in a representation that was frequently engraved on the talismatic stones or amulettes in the form of a cameo, to which one gave the name abraxas by deformation of the name of power, Abrasax.

It was a tutelary God with the head of a rooster and legs in the form of serpents. Armed with a shield and a whip, it repelled hostile forces and erected itself phallically in the interior of an oval that symbolized the sex [organs] of the woman. Solar at the head and terrestrial in the ophimorphic legs that formed the support of sexual power, it was a God of fusion, the invocation of whom was modeled on the “song of the seven vowels”[120] that corresponded to the seven spheres that the initiate, elevated by amorous ecstasy, had to cross to attain the Great Power.

It is thus possible that, among the Naassenes, there developed the idea of salvation through sexual enthusiasm, quite close to Tantrism and dressed in a religious travesty of Simon’s thought.

The idea that the Logos, in the manner of a serpent that coils in the form of a circle — thus forming the ouroboros or serpent that bites its own tail and often figured on the abraxas — , descended to matter and returned to God, from whom it issued, suggested to the Naassenes an interpretation of Genesis that imitated Simon:

The Ocean that flows in circles from high to low and low to high, and the Jordan that descends and resumes its course, are the images of a single and same Logos that moves itself and constitutes the most intimate essence of the living world. Another symbol of this process is that of the serpent, naas or ophis, in the form of the serpent that bites its tail, thus figuring the cycle of becoming, the Hen to Pan. The serpent is the only object of their cult. ‘It is the humid element (the Ocean and the Jordan); without it, no being in the world could constitute itself, immortal or mortal, animate or inanimate. All is subject to it; it is good; it contains in a single horn, as in the horn of a bull (Deuteronomy, 33, 17), the beauty of all beings and it gives the grace of youth to each creature according to its own nature; because it impregnates all things “in the manner of the river that flows from Eden and divides itself into four branches”’ (Genesis, 2, 10; Elenchos, V, 9 12–15). Eden, from whence flows the river — this is the brain of man, the celestial spheres are the membranes that envelop the brain. The paradise that crosses the river is the head of man. The four branches in which it divides itself: the Pison, the Geon, the Tigres and the Euphrates, are sight, sound, breath and mouth. From the mouth comes prayer, the Logos as much as word; through the mouth comes nourishment, the spiritual nourishment obtained by prayer: ‘It gladdens, nourishes and forms the pneumatic, the perfect man.’[121]

According to the Elenchos (as always), which seems to refer to a Christianized Naassenism — because this is radically divergent from the philosophy of Simon — , the Naassenes divided man “into three parts, of which the first is spiritual, the second psychical, and the third terrestrial. It is through knowledge of this man that knowledge of God begins: the knowledge of man, they say, is the beginning of perfection; the knowledge of God is the consummation” (Elenchos, V, 6, 4–7). And the author of the Elenchos adds, accrediting a connection between the Naassenes and the Nazarenes: “Such are the capital points of the many doctrines that Jacob, the brother of the Savior, transmitted to Mariamne.”

Who was Mariamne? Not the Jewish Queen, wife of Herod who was put to death at the age of 90 (she lived from 60 [B.C.E.] to 29 [C.E.]), but another name for the Jewish Achamoth, the Greek Sophia, who would become Myriam-Marie, Virgin and Mother of the Savior in the evangelical novels about Jesus.

It was Mariamne, issued from the antique Magma Mater, whom the Naassenes placed above Chaos. She engendered the Son of Man (Adam), of whom NHS was one of the incarnations, to save the men of the bad world in which the Demiurge holds them prisoner, at least according to the Ophites, whose doctrines are reported by the Elenchos. (Celse speaks of Christians drawing their origin from Mariamne [Origen, Contra Celsum, V, 63].)

The work of the Demiurge produced corruption and death. Then the Ophis-Christos, born to the Virgin Mariaumne, intervened:

‘Thus no one can be saved, nor rise again, without the Son, that is to say, the Serpent. In the same way that he supplied from above the imprints of the Father, likewise, inversely, he carried back from down here the imprints of the awakened Father and reprized the traits of the Father’ (Elenchos, V, 17, 78). The entire cycle is conceived as a natural cycle, one might say almost physical. The superior Logos attracts the spiritual element of matter: ‘As the Napitha attracts to itself all parts of fire, or rather as it aims to attract iron and only iron, as the beak of the falcon of the sea attracts gold but only gold, as amber attracts the scraps of paper; thus the Serpent brings back from the world, at the exclusion of everything else, the perfect race formed in the image of the Father and likewise of his essence, such that it had been sent by him down here.’[122]

Perates, Cainites, Nicolaites, Koukeens

The phenomenon of the proliferation of the sects didn’t only touch Esseno-Baptism, but also characterized the great religious currents issued from other sources, Judean or Samaritan. Naassenism was divided into rival groups, communities or Churches. In the doctrinal confusion of the first two centuries of the Christian era, the fundamental consent proceeded less from the name and nature of the Messiah — NHS, Seth, Joshua, Dusis, Adam, Sophia, Barbelo, etc. — than a behavior marked by asceticism and the renunciation of or surrender to the pleasures of love, or the repression of constrained desires.

The aggressive remarks in the Elenchos in fact reveal a constant: “The priests and the guardians of this doctrine were those whom one would call, at first, the Naassenes, from the Hebrew word naas, which means ‘serpent’; thereafter, they also called themselves Gnostics, claiming to only know the depths. They divided themselves in many sects so as to form a multiple heresy that in fact, in reality, was only one heresy, because it is the same thing that they designate with different names, with the result that rivalries have profited at the expense [progres] of the doctrine” (Elenchos, V, 3, 3–4).

Koukeens, Phibionites, Stratiotics, Levitics, Perates, Cainites, Nicolaites — so many mysterious names and local designations of groups anchored with their particularities to a communal faith or the fantasmatic fruits of the heresiologues, who were always anxious to exhibit the chaos of the heterodoxies so as to underline the unity of the “true” belief in a “true” Messiah.

The preeminence of a saving Mother Goddess and a fusional cult of the phallic serpent brought a kind of unity to Naassenism, which was prey to behavioral variations that went from Essene abstinence to the creative love extolled by Simon of Samaria.

According to the Book of the Scolies by the Syrian heresiologue Bar-Konal, this was the poetic cosmogony of the Koukeens:

God was born from the sea situated on the Earth of Light, which they call the Lively Sea. The Sea of Light and the Earth are more ancient than God.

When God was born from the Lively Sea, he sat on the waters, looked at them, and in them saw his own image. He extended his hand, seized (the image), seized it as a companion, was in love with it and would engender with it a crowd of gods and goddesses.

The idea of a God in love with his reflection, with his Spirit, with his Wisdom or Sophia, was not foreign to Judeo-Christian speculations on the nature of the Angelos-Christos.

The position of the Nicolaites appeared closer to Essenism:

The Darkness (the abyss and the waters), rejected by the unengendered Spirit, rises up, furious, to attack it; this struggle produces a kind of matrix that, for the Spirit, engenders four Eons, which engender fourteen more; after which the ‘right’ and ‘left,’ light and darkness, are formed. One of the superior powers emanates from the Spirit, Barbelo, the Celestial Sea, engendered the bad entity (Ialdabaoth or Sabaoth), creator of this lower world; but, repenting, it used its beauty to create salvation, from the inferior cosmos.[123]

A rumor has it that the Nicolaites, a name that comes from a Bishop Nicolas, the governor of their community, were made the object of a polemic to which the Greek text of the Apocalypse attributed to John bears witness. If one remembers that a person with the same name, John, took for himself a Gospel originally derived from a Naassene midrash, it is not improbable that, at the end of the First Century — while the Judeo-Christian philosophers such as Cerinthe, Satornil and the partisans of Saul/Paul confronted each other in Ephesus, Antiochus, Pergame, Alexandria and Corinthe — a program of Esseno-Christian reunification that exluded the old forms of Naassenism was added to the text of the Jewish original. The text of the Revelations (2, 6, and 15–16) notably attacks the Nicolaites who were influential in Ephesus and Pergame, where they seemed to have striven to reconcile Naassenism and Essenism.

In all probability, the Perates constituted a later branch of the Naassenes. In his study of WAW, the Hebraic letter that symbolizes the Messiah, Dupont-Sommers derives their name from the Greek word paratai, the “traversers,” those who cross the waters of corruption.[124] Perhaps they were confused with the Cainites, who, according to the Elenchos, estimated that the serpent was “the sign with which God marked Cain to prevent him from being killed by those who encountered him” (V, 15).

In North Africa, the Naassenes of the Cainite type rallied many adepts around a prophetess named Quintilla. These adepts professed the existence of two divinities. As with Marcion much later, their Demuirge identified himself with YHWH. Cain, as much as the Serpent, is YHWH’s expiatory victory: “The serpent is Cain, whom the God of this world did not agree to offer [as a sacrifice], whereas he agreed to the bloody sacrifice of Abel, because the master of this world pleases himself with blood.”[125]

It is possible that the Cainites of North Africa, who were eventually absorbed by the Christianity of the New Prophecy (which was particularly influential in Carthage around 160–170), were convinced to give to their redeemer the generic name of the God who saves, Joshua/Jesus.

The sect of the Perates, which was perhaps contemporary with [the collation of] the Elenchos, which included them for a long time, witnessed [the birth of] a late and Hellenized Naassenism.

The author of the Elenchos cites two prophets, bishops or founders of communities: Euphrates the Perate and Kelbes the Karystian.

They gave themselves the name Perates because they believed that no creature can escape the destiny that waits for all engendered beings from their birth. Because what is engendered must necessarily corrupt itself [...] We are the only ones to know the necessary laws concerning generation and the road by which man entered the world; the only ones to know exactly how to walk in it and have the power to cross corruption [...] Death seized the Egyptians in the Red Sea with their chariots; the Egyptians are all those who are in ignorance — that is to say, all those who have not received gnosis. The exodus [sortie] from Egypt was the exodus from the body; because the body, according to them, is a little Egypt; to cross the Red Sea is to traverse the waters of corruption, that is to say, Chronos; being from the other side of the Red Sea is to be an upstart [parvenue] from the other side of generation; to arrive in the desert is to find oneself outside of generation, there where the god of perdition and the God of salvation find each other at the same time. The gods of perdition are the stars, which impose on other engendered beings the fatality of a variable generation (Elenchos, V, 16, 1 and 4).[126]

The interpretation that Simon of Samaria applied to the texts of the Bible finds itself here, but made from within the scorn for the body that is common to [all] the religions.

The Redeeming and Perfect Serpent was opposed to the serpents that inoculate [with] death.

It isn’t only the Logos as primordial power issued from the Father who is the Serpent; the diverse powers that rule the terrestrial world are all serpents. Moses called the stars the serpents of the desert, which bite and kill those who want to cross the Red Sea. Also Moses showed to the children of Israel who had been bitten by the serpents in the desert the true and perfect Serpent; those who have faith in him would not be bitten in the desert, that is to say, by the powers. Thus, no one can save nor defend those who left Egypt, that is to say, from the body and this world, if it isn’t the Perfect Serpent that is filled with all plentitude. Those who put in him his hope would not be destroyed by the Serpents of the desert, that is to say, by the gods of generation. This is what is written in the book of Moses. The Serpent is the power that was attached to Moses, the Virgin who changes into a serpent. (*) The serpents of the magicians of Egypt, that is to say, the gods of perdition, resisted the power of Moses. But his rod [verge] overcame them and destroyed them all. The serpent that embraces the universe is the wise Logos of Eve. It is the mystery of Eden; it is the sign with which God marked Cain to prevent him from being killed by anyone who encountered him. The serpent is Cain whom the God of this world would not agree to offer, whereas he agreed to the bloody sacrifice of Abel, because the master of this world takes pleasure in blood. It is the serpent that, in the last days, in the time of Herod, appeared in a human form () in the image of Joseph, who was sold by the hands of his brothers and who was only dressed in a mottled robe. He is in the image of Esau, whose robe received benediction, although he was absent, and who did not receive the blind benediction, but enriched himself from beyond without receiving anything from the blind, whose face Jacob saw ‘as a man sees the face of God’ (Genesis, 33, 10). It is of the serpent that it is said: ‘Like Nemrod the Giant, hunter for the Eternal’ (Genesis, 10, 9). He had many adversaries, and also there were great numbers of serpents who would bite the children of Israel in the desert and whose bites were cured by the Perfect Serpent that Moses would raise in the midst of them [...] It is in his image that the bronze serpent was elevated by Moses in the desert. () He is the only one for whom the celestial constellation is visible everywhere. It is the great ‘beginning’ of which Scripture speaks. It is of him that it is said: In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was at the side of God and the Logos was God. It was in the beginning at the side of God, all was made by Him and nothing was made without him. What was made by him is life. (*) It is by him that Eve was made, Eve is life. This Eve is ‘the mother of all the living’ (Genesis, 3, 20), nature is common to all, that is to say, the mother of the gods and the angels, the immortals and the mortals, beings without reason and beings endowed with reason (***) (Elenchos, V, 16, 6 sq.).

(*) The serpent as principle of pleasure — defined as perdition by the Perates — was vanquished by the phallic symbolism of the staff of commandment.

(**) The Serpent incarnated in human form is evoked in the Semitic substrata of the Gospel attributed to John, before it — like Melchizedek, Seth or the Master of Justice — assumed the name Joshua/Jesus. The image of the crucified Serpent would be perpetuated in alchemical representations.

(***) Cf. the text of the Gospel attributed to John: “And as Moses raised a serpent in the desert, thus it is necessary that the Son of Man be raised” (3, 14).

(****) Which one finds in the same Gospel (1, 1–3). The Apocryphon of John also shared in this Naassenean or Peratean literature.

(*****) Eve as the principle of life and universal mother was also accredited by the Barbelites.

Facing the Logos, like the serpent standing up straight, matter curls upon itself; it was figured under the symbol of water, which one also encounters among the Naassenes:

Corruption is water and nothing destroys the cosmos as rapidly as water; water extends itself under the spherical form of the world. It is Chronos (understood to be the external planetary sphere of Saturn, that which encloses all the others). It is a power the color of water and, from this power, that is to say, from Chronos, no creature can escape, because it is thanks to Chronos that all creatures incur corruption and no generation has a place that doesn’t have Chronos as an obstacle along its route. It is the meaning of the verse of poetry concerning the gods. ‘I can attest to the earth, the vault of the heavens that cover it and the deadly waters of the Styx. It is the sermon of the immortals gods’ (Odyssey, V, 184 sq.).

The Elenchos quotes a fragment of a Perate hymn:

I am the voice of the awakening in the eternal night. I now begin to deliver the power to control the veils of chaos. The power of the abysmal clay that takes and carries the mold of the eternal and silent humidity; the entire power, always in movement, of the aqueous convulsions that carry what is in repose, retain what flickers, liberate what comes, relieve what reposes, destroy what believes, the loyal guardian of the trace of the airs, she that enjoys what is poured on the order of the twelve eyes, that reveals the Seal to the power that rules the places of the invisible water, the power that has been called the sea. This power, which ignorance has called Chronos, Chronos who was enchained when he closed the trickle of the thick and nebulous, obscene and dark Tartar [River] (Elenchos V, 14, 1–2).

The syncretism of the Perates was not content with harmonizing the Greek and Hebraic mythologies; it incorporated into its doctrine of salvation an astrological speculation, also present in Essenism, as in the Christianities of Bardesane and Priscilla.

The universe and the individual knew an experience subjected to astral influences that the Perates identified with the power of the Archons, agents of the Demiurge. The art of the Serpent-Logos consisted in escaping from it.

In the same way that the stars tend towards the center of the world so as to move away again, thus the entire Creation moves away from its center, the Divinity, so as to make its return. The fall is designated by the left side of circular movement; ascension is on the right side. The heavens themselves offer a great fresco of the combat between the Logos, the Good and Perfect Serpent, and the master of this world, the Bad Serpent. The Logos is figured by the constellation of the Dragon; it has on the right and left sides of its head the Crown and the Lyre. Before the Dragon is kneeling the ‘pitiful’ man, the constellation of Hercules, who touches the end of the right foot of the Dragon. Behind him, the Bad Master of the world, the constellation of the Serpent, approaches so as to ravish the Crown, but the Serpent Eater [Serpentaire] encloses it and prevents it from touching it (Elenchos, V, 16, 14–16).

(The theme of the two serpents is evoked in the Book of Isaiah, 27,1.)

Still later, Ephiphane of Salamine brought to those whom he called “Ophites” a eucharist in honor of the Serpent-Redeemer. Certain sects practice it to this day.

They pile bread on the table; they summon a serpent that they elevate as a sacred animal. One opens the cage, the serpent comes out, gains the table, unfolds itself among the bread and, they say, transforms itself into the Eucharist. Then they break the bread upon which the serpent has crawled and distribute the parts to the communicants. Each one kisses the serpent on the mouth, because the serpent was tamed by the incantation and they prostrate themselves before an identical animal. It is by the serpent, they say, that they send a hymn to the Father on high. Such is their manner of celebrating their mysteries (Epiphanius, Panarion, XXXVII, 5).

From the serpent of the lustful temptation to the Ophis-Christos, passing through the phallic and magic rod of Hermes-Trismegist, the ancient totemism of the animal that coils, interwines, wriggles, penetrates, unites and ejaculates venom or life was spiritualized and entered into religious stereotypes without losing its ambiguous nature.

Uprooted from its original androgyny — which certain Naassenian groups hostile to puritanism celebrated — the ophis was made Redeemer Messiah and Destroyer Messiah, Virgin of iron and terror who reigns over nature, the beasts and women, so as to impose on the world the order of pure renunciation, incarnated in Jesus, and the order of pure repression, incarnated in Satan, the alter ego of the Messiah.

Perhaps it was also through the bias of the Ophis-Christos that the cult of Hermes-Logos that the Greeks called agathephoros, carrier of good (as the agathodaimon), and that offered itself to the popular veneration of the erect phallus, succumbed to a kind of castration.

Whatever it was, Essene asceticism invaded the Greco-Roman world, propagated in it the frenzied taste for continence, mortification and the martryed body, under the antagonistic species of Marcionism and Montanism.

But as much as the rod of Moses was substituted for the “golden staff of Hermes,” the rites of sexual fusion undertook a vivacity sometimes less clandestine than one would suppose, since Epiphanius of Salamis would encounter the Barbelites, who called themselves “Christians,” thereby restoring to the word its sense of “messianist.” Their Messiah did not call himself Jesus, but Barbelo.

At the end of the Fourth Century, Priscilla of Avila would not judge it useless to make it still more precise: “God is not Armaziel, Mariaumne, Joel, Balsamus, nor Barbilon, he is the Christ Jesus” (Corpus eccles. latin., XVIII, 29). Mariaumne was the Mother-Spirit-Sophia-Virgin and Mother of the Naassenes. Barbilon was Barbelo, the spermatophagic and redeeming divinity of the Barbelites.

Justin the Gnostic and the Book of Baruch

Towards the end of the Second Century, Justin the Gnostic — a Greek who was familiar with the Jewish texts and the master of an esoteric school in which instruction was dispensed under the seal of the secret — drafted the Book of Baruch, of which the Elenchos conserved extracts. (It isn’t impossible that Justin frequented the milieu of Kabbalistic Jews who, under the cover of Pharisian obedience, perpetuated and amplified the gnosis of the Hermetic groups of Egypt and Asia Minor.)

The Book of Baruch offers an example of Judeo-Greek syncretism, quite different from that of Justin’s contemporary, Marcion, elaborated by being based on Saul/Paul.

Justin refers to a myth, reported by Herodotus, according to which Heracles made love with a being who was half-young woman, half-serpent, who gave him three children. He drew from this a trinitarian theology:

‘There are three unengendered Principles of the All’: two are masculine, one is feminine. The first masculine principle is called the Good; he is the only one to carry the name and he possesses a universal presence; the second is called the Father of all things, he is deprived of prescience, unknowable and invisible. The feminine principle is also deprived of prescience, it is irascible, it has a double spirit and a double body and absolutely resembles the being from the myth of Herodotus, a young woman up to the sex[ual organs], a serpent above. This young woman also calls herself Eden and Israel. Such are the Principles of the All, the Roots and the sources from which all existence issues; there aren’t any others. The Father saw this half-woman, Eden, fell in love with her, ignorant that she was from the future. This Father calls himself Elohim. Eden fell in love with Elohim, and desire united them in the pleasure of love. From this union, the Father had twelve angels. Here are the names of the twelve angels of the Father: Michael, Amen, Baruch, Gabriel, Esaddea ... (the seven other names are missing from the manuscripts). The names of the maternal angels born to Eden are the following: Babel, Achamoth, Naas, Bel, Belias, Satan, Sael, Adonea, Kanithan, Pharaoth, Karkamenos, and Lathen. Of the twenty-four angels, some (the angels of the Father) serve the Father and do his bidding; the maternal angels serve Eden. The ensemble of these angels form the Paradise of which Moses spoke: God planted a garden towards the East (Genesis, 2, 8), that is to say, opposite Eden, so that Eden would always be able to see Paradise, to know the angels. The angels are allegorically named the trees of this paradise: the Tree of Life is Baruch, the third of the paternal angels; the Tree of the Science of Good and Evil is Naas, the third of the maternal angels. It is thus, he says, that it is necessary to explain the words of Moses; Moses veiled his expression because everyone wasn’t capable of comprehending the truth. When Paradise was constituted by the love of Elohim and Eden, the angels of Elohim prayed a little to the most noble of the earth, that is to say, not the beastial parties of Eden, but the noble regions of the earth, those that are placed below the sex and are similar to man and they made man. The beastial parties serve the savage beasts and the other animals. They made man as a symbol of the amorous union of Elohim and Eden, and they mirrored their powers in him, Eden the soul and Elohim the pneuma. Here is how Adam is like the seal, the pledge of the love and eternal symbol of the wedding of Eden and Elohim. Moreover, Eve was made, as Moses wrote, for being an image and a symbol, so as to conserve in her the imprint of Eden for all eternity. And likewise in the image that Eve is, Eden deposited the soul and Elohim the pneuma. The commandment: ‘Increase and multiply, and fill the world’ (Genesis, 1, 28), that is to say, Eden. Such is the meaning of the Scripture. At his marriage, Eden gave to Elohim all of his power by way of fortune. It is to the example of this first marriage that women, to this day, still give a dowry to their spouses, loyal in this way to the divine law of the first parents, observed the first time by Eden with regard to Elohim. When all was created as Moses describes it, the heavens and the earth and all the creatures that it contained, the twelve angels of the Mother divided themselves into ‘four principles’ and each of these four parties bore the name of a river: Pison, Gihon, Tigress and Euphrates, as it was written by Moses. The dozen angels, distributed among the four groups, wandered the world in every sense and were invested with a lieutenance over the Cosmos by Eden. They never remained in the same place, but, as in a round, they made the rounds, changing place without cease and, at regular intervals, ceding the places that had been attributed to them.

When Pison ruled over a region, famine, distress and tribulations made their appearance, because this group of angels bring with them a period of avarice. Moreover, each part of the world is the theater of plagues and sicknesses that follow the power and nature of the groups that dominate it. This deluge of evil, which varies with the group that dominates, ceaselessly enlaces the universe in its inexhaustable wave, following the decree of Eden. Here is how this fatality of evil is instaurated. After having constructed and fashioned the world through his love affairs, Elohim wanted to regain the superior regions of the heavens to see that nothing was missing from his creation and he took with him his respective angels; because his nature carried him towards the High but wanted to leave Eden here below, because Eden, being earth, did not want to accompany the ascension of her spouse. Reaching to the frontiers of the heavens, Elohim saw a light more powerful than the one he had created; he said, ‘Open for me the doors so that I may enter and praise the Savior; because I have believed in the Savior’ (deformed citation of Psalms, 118, 19). From the heart of the light, a voice responded: ‘Here is the door to the Savior, the just can pass through it’ (ibid., 20). As soon as the door opened, and the Father (Elohim) entered among the Good without his angels and he saw what the eyes do not see, what the ears can not hear and what the heart of man can not conceive. Then to Good said to him: ‘Sit on my right’ (Psalms, 110, 1). But the Father said to the Good: ‘Savior, let me destroy the Cosmos that I created; because my pneuma remains imprisoned in man. I would like to reclaim it.’ The Good responded: ‘Now that you are close to me, you can no longer do evil; by your reciprocal love, you and Eden, you made the world; thus leave Eden to enjoy the creation for as long as it pleases her; as for you, remain close to me.’ Seeing herself abandoned by Elohim, Eden cried to assemble around herself her own angels and dressed herself splendidly in the hope that Elohim would again fall in love with her and re-descend towards her. But Elohim, who found himself under the authority of the Good, did not descend towards Eden. Then the one [Eden] commanded Babel, who is Aphrodite, to provoke the adulterous and divorced men; she had been separated from Elohim: she wanted that the pneuma that dwells in man be tortured by sad separations and suffer, as she herself did from the fact of her abandonment. And Eden gave to Naas, her third angel, a great power and the mission to punish in all ways the pneuma of Elohim that lives in men; she thus punished Elohim in his pneuma because he had abandoned his wife, despite giving his word. The Father Elohim would send Baruch, his third angel, to aid the pneuma that resides in every man. Upon his arrival, Baruch would place himself in the midst of the angels of Eden, that is to say, the milieu of Paradise (because Paradise is the angels in their milieu) and command to the men: ‘You can eat from all the Trees of Paradise, but you can not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad,’ which is the serpent, that is to say, you will obey the other eleven angels of Eden, because they carry the passions, they do not carry injustice. The serpent approached Eve, seduced her and committed adultery with her, which is contrary to the Law; then he approached Adam and committed the act of pederasty with him, which is also against the Law. It was from that moment that adultery and pederasty existed. It was from then that evil and good have ruled over men; the two have the same origin, the Father, Elohim. Actually, by elevating himself toward the Good, the Father showed the way to those who would like to climb; by descending toward Eden, he was at the origin of evil for the pneuma that is in man. Baruch was thus sent to Moses and, thanks to Moses, he apprized the children of Israel of the means of returning to the Good. But the third angel of Eden, Naas, who, by the soul issued from Eden, lived by Moses as in all other men, suffocated the prescriptions of Baruch to his own profit. This is why, on the one hand, the soul is subjected to the pneuma and, on the other hand, the pneuma is subjected to the soul. Because the soul is Eden; the pneuma is Elohim; the one and the other find themselves among all the other human beings, men and women. Then Baruch, sent to the prophets so that the pneuma that lives in man could hear the prophets, tore himself away from the bad works of the body, as the Father Elohim had done. This time, Naas, with the help of the soul that, with the pneuma of the Father, lives in man, led the prophets astray; all let themselves to be bribed and they did not obey the words that Elohim had confided to Baruch. Finally, Elohim chose a prophet from the milieu of the uncircumcised and he sent him to combat the twelve angels of Eden and to deliver the Father from the twelve bad angels of the creation. They were the twelve labors of Hercules, labors that he accomplished in order, from the first to the last, by fighting the lion, the hydra, the wild boar, etc. They are here, the names that strangers to the faith have given to the angels to express metaphorically the particular activity of each of the angels of the sea. While he seemed to have succeeded in putting them all down, he banded together with Omphalos, who is none other than Babel, Aphrodite; the one who seduced Hercules and disrobed him of his power, which consisted in the commandments that Elohim had confided to Baruch and she, in exchange, dressed him in her robe, that is to say, in the power of Eden, the power of below. Thus miscarrying the prophetic mission and the labors of Hercules. Finally, in the days of King Herod, Baruch was once again sent here-below by Elohim (Elenchos, V).

The following offers a typical example of interpolation. At the earliest, it dates from the Fourth Century, since Nazareth didn’t exist before that.

Having come to Nazareth, he found there Jesus, the Son of Joseph and Mary, a child of twelve years, occupied with tending his sheep; he revealed to him all of the history of Eden and Elohim since the beginning, thus the future, and he said to him: ‘All the prophets who have come before you have let themselves be seduced; thus tasked [you are] Jesus, Son of Man, with not letting yourself be seduced, but to announce the Word to men, communicate to them the message touching upon the Father and the Good, then climb toward the Good and sit you there, at the side of Elohim, our Father to all.’ Jesus obeyed the angel and said: ‘Savior, I will do all this,’ and he began to preach. Naas also wanted to seduce him but he escaped, because Jesus was loyal to Baruch. Furious with not being able to lead Jesus astray, Naas crucified him. But Jesus would leave on the cross the body of Eden and climbed toward the Good. He said to Eden: ‘Woman, take your son,’ that is to say, the psychical man and the terrestrial man. Then he remitted his pneuma between the hands of the Father and he elevated himself toward the Good (Elenchos, V, 26).

It is with pertinence that Leisegang detected in Justin and his mythology the echoes of an amorous torment, hypostasized as a cosmic drama. I leave the word to the exegetes. Their sympathy for the vindictive man and his antipathy for women accords with the sentimental interest that is witnessed in Justin, showing quite well the sensual origin of all hairesis, of all choices that are supposedly religious or ideological.

The amorous desire and its satisfaction: such is the key to the origin of the world. The disillusions of love and the vengeance that follows them, such is the secret of all evil and egotism that exists on the earth. The entire history of the world and humanity must become a love story. We look for ourselves, we find ourselves, we separate, we torture ourselves, then, finally, faced with a more acute pain, we renounce: here is the eternal mystery of love with the contradiction, intrinsic to love, that makes us desire to be delivered from women and the feminine. All this marks a fine intelligence of the essential differences that separate man and woman. The tragedy of the destiny of the universe begins with the amorous impulse that carries its Creator to quit the domain of the Good. By descending toward Eden, who watches for him, Elohim is charged with the first fault, into which entered a free decision and, at the same time, a natural instinct. If one considers that he left his woman, that he did not descend from the heavens to return to her, that he repented of the consequences of his love and wanted to destroy all that issued from his, his guilt is enormous. Though his conduct had a good appearance, from the angle of the earth, a frightful infidelity was much less culpable than the conduct and the vengeance of Eden, in which she found a partial justification. One thinks of a remark by Nietzsche: ‘That man fears the woman who loves: she will not recoil before any sacrifice, and all the rest will appear to her as without value. That man fears the woman who hates: because man in the depths of his heart is malicious; but the woman is bad’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. G. Bianquis, Paris, Aubier, 1946, p. 153). Eden is malicious: she implements all to thwart the ceaselessly renewed efforts by Elohim to efface the evil issued from him; efforts that will end after millennia of perserverance. Also sympathy is shared between Eden and Elohim. The sadness of God before the fatal consequences of his love and the distress of the deceived woman both aim to awake the sympathy and emotions of the man who, in his poor little existence, lets himself engage in this tragedy of love and have the experience. That Elohim finally realized salvation at the cost of laborious efforts, and that Eden, bent on saying no and impeding the work of the Good, found her tragic end in an eternal abandonment and is no more than a de-spiritualized cadaver: this is the response to the sentiment of justice, which demands the most severe punishment for irreconcilable hatred.[127]

The Adepts of Barbelo

Around 335, the young Epiphanius of Salamis, the future master-thinker of the Church and the author of a list denouncing the heresies, Panarion kata pason ton aireseon (“Medicine against all the heresies”), adhered to a sect that still called itself “Christian,” in the Greek sense of “Messianic.”

Its Christ or Messiah, named Barbelo, who was a modern emanation of the ancient Goddess-Mother, revealed herself under the traits of a Sophia whom would be the exaltation, not of the pneuma in the spiritual sense, but of the breath of life, the sensual power of the body.

Tormented by guilt, and later on converted to the frenzies of asceticism, Epiphanius overwhelmed his first coreligionists with the same indignant rage with which Augustin of Hippone repudiated the Manicheanism of which he had been a zealous partisan.

Among the books that propagated the Barbelite doctrine, Epiphanius cites the Book of Ialdabaoth, the Apocalypse of Adam, the Gospel of Eve, the Book of Seth, the Book of Noria, the Prophecies of Barkabbas (cited by Basilides), the Ascension of Elie, the Nativity of Mary, the Gospel of the Apostles, the Great and Small Interrogations of Mary, the Gospel of Philippe and the Gospel of Perfection.

Several hypotheses have been put forth concerning the name of the Goddess. For Leisegang, it derived from the Hebrew Barbhe Eloha, “in four is God,” an allusion to the divine tetrad, not the tetragrammaton YHWH, but the ancient Semitic celestial group: El the Father, the Mother, his wife, their sons and daughter, who became Father, feminine pneuma, Son, Messiah or Christ. Others see in it a deformation of baal Belo or the cult of the divinity Bel, issued from the rites of fecundity and light, still vital in Samaria despite the Yahwehist implantation, nay, an emancipation from Anath. In the Book of Baruch by Justin the Gnostic, the entity Babbel is identified with Aphrodite.

According to the report made by Epiphanius: “They adore a certain Barbelo who lives, they say, in the eighth heaven and who issued from the Father. She is, according to some, the mother of Ialdabaoth, according to others, the mother of Sabaoth. Her son exercises over the seventh heaven a tyrannical authority and says to her subjects: ‘I am the Eternal and there isn’t any other; there isn’t any other God except for me’” (Panarion, XXV, 2 sq.).

The tyrannical Eternal is none other than YHWH, the God of the Judeans, identified by anti-Judean Jewish gnosis and then by Hellenic gnosis with the Demiurge, the bloody God, popularized under the name Ialdabaoth or Sabaoth; he presides over the destinies of the irremediably bad world. That YHWH-Ialdabaoth was the son of the Goddess-Mother here recalls the eviction of the cults of the Woman and Mother by the patriarchy that acceded to power with neolithic agriculture.

By understanding such words, Barbelite mythology says, the mother of the divine despot decided to save humanity from the miserable lot to which God reduced it. How did she resolve to restore the power that an odious son has stripped away? By ruse and seduction. She presented herself to the Archons, the servants of the Savior, in the voluptuous majesty of her femininity and, having excited their desires, received their sperm “so as to thus restore her power, disseminated in different beings” (Panarion, XXV, 2 sq).

The faithful to Barbelo thus imitated the saving gesture of the Goddess and, with the good conscience of an offering, abandoned themselves to the pleasure of making flow — in place of the blood that so many religions shed — the sperm and the cyprine of which the emission revives the energy of the Natura Magma.

In a passage that much later would inspire the inquisitors who accused the Cathar and Vaudois ascetics of debauchery, Epiphanius reports the use of a sign of recognition, attested to by the Messalians, Beghards and Beguines, and which — before the hedonist fashion of sexual liberties of the Twentieth Century — was long perpetuated among the young people, who indicated, by a caress in the palm of the hand, the imperious character of their desire:

They have, from men to women and from women to men, a sign of recognition that consists, when they give their hands so as to greet each other, in practicing a kind of tickling in the palm of the hand if the new-comer belongs to their religion. As soon as they recognize each other, they have a banquet. They serve delicious food, eat meat and drink wine, even the poor ones. When they have banqueted well, and have, if I may say so, filled their veins with a surplus of power, they move on to debauchery. The man leaves his place at the side of his woman by saying to her: ‘Raise yourself and accomplish the love feast [agape] with the brother.’

The Christian Churches claiming Thomas for themselves allowed an amorous relation between Jesus and Salome: “Salome said: ‘Who are you, man; from whom do you (issue) to be on top of my bed and to have eaten at my table?’” (Logion, 65, the Hidden Words that Jesus the Living said to Didyne Jude Thomas, popularly known under the title Gospel of Thomas). In the same order of ideas, the First Epistle attributed to John (3, 9) declares: “Whomever is born from God does not commit sin, because the sperm of God lives in him; and he can not sin because he is born from God. From this one can recognize the children of God and the children of the Devil.”

The man and the woman take care to receive the sperm between their hands and they pledge it to the Goddess-Mother so that she can fortify life in the world and also in them.

The sect frequented by Epiphanius offers an example of an archaic belief of the orgiastic type that was degraded by successive syncretisms; even the Christianity erected since Nicaea as the religion of the State was impregnated by the currents in which it was at first formulated before being decanted as a political and theological doctrine. Many tendencies fundamentally hostile to Christianity would survive by adapting themselves with more or less flexibility to the norms imposed by Rome (the recuperation of the Celtic or Slavic mythologies, incorporated into the cult of the saints is in this regard exemplary, as Robert Graves has shown).[128]

In the case of the Barbelites, tardily denounced by Epiphanius, perhaps communion of the Christian type replaced the homage formerly rendered to the “breath of life,” such that it strongly expressed amorous pleasure. As Leisegang recalls, “the word pneuma is immediately tied to the evocation of a spermatic, genesic [genesique] matter. At the beginning, the pneuma had absolutely nothing to do with spirit; it was the ‘wind,’ is was a ‘hot air.’ The conception following which it is a pneuma-wind, and not a pneuma-spirit, which engenders human life, is encountered in the Greek tradition...”[129]

In the idea of a sperma, generator of life, of a substance that creates man and the world, is not absent from the Greek translation of “Spirit” by pneuma, such as it appears in the Old and New Testaments, but, little by little, it obliterated the most unacceptable elements for a society dominated by religion: the act of self-creation, the creation of the world and aleatorily of the child that conceals in its substance the amorous union of man and woman. The masked reality ironically resurgent among the few playful stoics and the voluntarily castrated Origen under the traits of the logos spermatikos became, in Saint-Sulpician imagery, the language of fire in the Pentecost.

As for the Barbelites, man and woman possessed in their own semen the pneuma, the breath of God. And the individual approaches the divine essence all the more that he or she irradiates from his or her spermatic power and the dispensation of a fusional orgasm.

“To unite oneself with God,” Leisegang specifies, “one must mix and melt one’s semen with the generating substance of the All. Salvation consists in removing one’s semen from terrestrial destination and leading it back to the celestial source of all semen.”[130]

Here is what Epiphanius of Salamis reports about the group in which was an adept:

They offer to the Father, to the Nature of the All, what they have in their hands by saying: ‘We offer to you this gift, the body of the Christ.’ Then they eat it and commune in their own ignominy, by saying: ‘Here is the body of the Christ, here is the Easter for which our bodies suffer and are constrained to confess the passion of the Christ.’ They moreover do it with the menses of the woman. They gather the blood of impurity and commune in the same way. And they say: ‘Here is the blood of the Christ.’ When they read in the Revelations ‘I see a tree that has twelve times the fruit of the year, and it says to me: it is the tree of life,’ they allegorically interpret it as the flux of menstrual blood of the woman.

Epiphanius did not understand or didn’t want to understand that the Christ, the Messiah of the Barbelites, is not Joshua/Jesus, but Barbelo, whom Priscilla would call Barbilon.

When Barbelo gave birth to the odious breed of the Eternal — YHWH-Ialdabaoth-Sabaoth (also called Kalakau) — she revoked her status as mother so as to be celebrated as the woman impregnated by the pleasure and love that she dispenses. Also the Barbelites resorted to a form of voluntary interruption of pregnancy, which didn’t lack salt:

When one among them, by surprise, has let his semen penetrate too early and the woman is pregnant, listen to what they make still more abominable. They extirpate the embryo as soon as they can seize it with their fingers, they take this runt, crush it in a kind of mortar, mix in it honey, pepper and different condiments, as well as perfumed oils, so as to conjure up distaste, then they reunite themselves [...] and each communes with his fingers in this runt paste. The human meal completed, they conclude with this prayer to God: ‘We have not allowed the Archon of voluptuousness to play with us, but we have corrected the error of the Father.’ This is, to their eyes, the perfect Easter [...] Then, in their meetings, they enter into ecstasy, they smear their hands with [...] their seminal emmissions, they extend them and, their hands thus sullied and their bodies entirely naked, they pray to obtain through this action free access to God. Men and women, they polish their bodies day and night with salves, baths and spices, and they devote themselves to sleep and drinking. They curse someone who is fasting by saying: ‘It is not necessary to abstain, because fasting is the work of the Archon that created Eon. (*) It is, on the conrary, necessary to nourish oneself so that bodies are powerful and capable of carrying fruit in their time’ (**) (Panarion, XXVI, 4–5).

(*) That is to say, the God who created the world (the Eon). The expression “Eon” is frequently found in the letters presumed to have been written by Paul, but the translators unfailingly made it their duty to render it as “world,” “century,” or “epoch,” so as to avoid the Gnostic connotation.

(**) The Gospel of the Egyptians also justifies the refusal to engender children: “And Marie-Salome demanded of the Savior: ‘Master, when will the reign of Death end?’ And Jesus responded: ‘When you women no longer make babies... When you have deposed the garments of shame and ignominy, when the two become one, when the male and the female become one, when there is no longer man or woman, that’s when the reign of Death will end...’ Salome responded: ‘Have I thus done well, Master, by not being a mother?’ And Jesus said: ‘Eat all the fruits, but from what is bitter (maternity), do not eat anything’” (quoted by Clement of Alexandria, Stromates, III, IX, 66, and by the Second Epistle to the Church of Corinthe attributed to Clement).

In what it presents of the most radical, the Barbelite doctrine was related to the teachings of Simon of Samaria: the body is the earth of which the creative power merits the exclusive attention of men. The goal is the fusion of the me and the world, but, whereas Simon identified the consciousnesness of pleasure and the consciousness of self-creation, the Barbelites, obeying the religious solicitation, ended in a mystical vision of pleasure that, in the last instance, is an homage to the soma of the Spirit and the divine.

Barbelo, orgiastic Goddess and sucker of the universal sperm, turns — as in Tantrism — the pleasures of life into a celestial duty, voluptuousness into ritual obligation. Therefore the ignoble is not sensuality consumed as communion in sperm and abnormal excitability [erethisme], but the amorous exaltation is travestied as an ejaculation of the sacred.

The Barbelite religion fomented a theology quite anterior to that which Catholicism would impose after Nicaea.

Two forces were opposed: the Good God, of whom Barbelo is the emanation, and the God who created the bad world. By the road of orgasm, Barbelo led man back to the Kingdom of Light, from which the Demiurge was exiled so as to enthralled it to its odious authority.

In the beginning was the Darkness, the Abysss and the Water; the pneuma was among them and separated one from the other. But the Darkness became angry and grumbled about the Spirit; it advanced but the pneuma seized it and impregnated a being by the name of metra (matrix). Once born, this being was impregnated by the same pneuma. From the matrix came four Eons, from the four Eons came fourteen others and there was a left and a right matrix, Light and Darkness. Much later, after all those who preceded it, there appeared a deformed Eon; this united with the metra that manifested itself in the heights and it is from this frightful Eon that originally came the Gods, angels, demons and the seven spirits (Panarion, XXV, 5).

The Book of Noria — who is no longer a daughter of Adam, as among the Ophites, but the wife of Noah — recounts that Noria did not enter the Ark, because she wanted to kill the Creator of this world with the rest of humanity: because she did not serve this Creator but the superior powers and Barbelo, the enemy of the Archon. Three times Noria set fire to the Ark; from which it is necessary to conclude that ‘what was stolen from the Mother of the heights by the Archon who created this world and the other gods, angels and demons, we must gather together from the power that is in the body, by means of the seminal emissions of man and woman’ (Panarion, XXVI, 1, 8–9).

It is in the Gospel of Eve that the fusional aspiration of the Barbelites appears with an astonishing poetry, this identity of the me and the world that offers in the flash of pleasure the irradiating presence of love:

I hold myself on a high mountain and I see a man of great stature and another, reduced [rabougri] (it is a question of the Good God and Barbelo, shriveled and decreased by the fear of its power), and I heard as a voice of thunder, and I advanced so as to listen and it said to me:

I am you and you are me
and where you are, I am,
and in all things I am inseminated.
And if you want it, you can gather me together
And if you gather me together, you gather yourself together, as well

(Panarion, XXVI, 3, 11).

• Chapter 8 : Three Esseno-Christian Christs: Seth, Melchizedek, and Joshua/Jesus

Chapter 8: Three Esseno-Christian Christs: Seth, Melchizedek, and Joshua/Jesus

The diverse sects of the movement that was given the general name of Essenism inscribed at the top rank of their preoccupations — which were conferred a dramatic reality by the Zealot movement — the question of the Messiah, the envoy in whom God would confide the care of leading the people towards a promised new earth.

Due to their collaboration with the [Roman] occupiers, the Pharisians disapproved of Messianic speculations, and in particular those that, hoping for the reincarnation of Adam or one of his sons, claimed that the first man was a partner of God and took part in the creation of the world. For them, no Messiah — infatuated with some power — could arrogate any right or function exclusively reserved for Adonai, the Savior, the Creator. Adam chose evil and the Pharisians stigmatized as minim (Gnostic) anyone who affirmed that Adam repented, chose God and was saved, as the Epistula apostolorum claims.

“There existed Jewish traditions about Adam that represented him as the Vise-Regent of God, installed like a king in a sphere beyond the world and imposing his domination on the entirety of creation. Several rabbis perceived the danger of contradiction and attempted to check the most perilous of these positions.”[131] Soon there was a struggle between rabbis and groups that claimed to valorize Adam as the essence of the Messiah, nay, as the Father of the Messiah who was called the Son of Man.

Many Essene factions supported the thesis of an Adam seated on God’s right [hand], redeemer of the human genre and, at the same time, Co-Regent of God, which was a proposition that was inadmissible to Yahwehist monotheism, but that shows through in certain letters [claimed to be] by Saul/Paul.

The Letter to the Colossians (1, 15) makes the Christ a preexisting agent of God in the creation. “The Messiah is called ‘Image of God’ and ‘The Head of the Body,’ which originally signified the entire universe (the ‘Church’ is almost surely an addition to destroy the parallelism between the hymn and the couched [presentee] cosmic vision).”[132] This is an example of one of a number of falsifications of the letters of Saul/Paul by his copyists and translators. These falsifications were intended to make the reader forget that Saul had already belonged to Jewish Gnosticism.

Nevertheless, the name of the Messiah varied according to the sects; therefore the name was precisely what conferred power to the community or Church. A fragment from an apocryphal Book of Daniel discovered at Qumran insists on the expectation of a savior delegated by God and carrying the Name: “He will be called the Son of the Great God and by his Name he will be named. He will be greeted as the Son of God, one will call him the Son of the Most-High.”[133]

The quarrel about the secret name of the Son of God: is Adam reincarnated or the son of Adam, the Son of Man? The Testament of Abraham, a text of Jewish origin from the First Century after the Christian era, describes Adam crowned in the heavens. Such is also the vision of Saul/Paul in the second Letter to the Corinthians (22–23), which evokes the presence of Adam in Paradise or the third heaven.

The Apocalypse of Adam, another text from the First Century of Judaic origin, discovered at Nag-Hammadi (Nag-Hammadi Library, V), contains the revelation of the future destiny of the Adamites, offered by Adam to his son, Seth.

For Fossum, “Adam was the first manifestation of the True Prophet.”[134] Adam possessed the spirit of God, which brought knowledge (gnosis) of all things, past and future (Homelies of Peter, III, 17). The cycle of Adamic legend constituted the axis of Jewish speculations that turned around the nature of the Messiah. It originally explained the theme of the descent and ascension of the savior.[135]

According to the Poimandres, the celestial Adam was made in the form and image of God, a formulation that Saul/Paul took up when he assured [his readers] that Jesus was in the form of God.[136]

The Messiah Seth

The new Adam and Son of Man that the Ebionites and Nazarenes would baptize with the name Joshua, was, for certain Essenes, the third son of Adam, Seth. The important Sethian literature discovered at Nag-Hammadi proves that the vogue for religious syncretism didn’t hesitate to absorb the doctrines of other sects, such as the Naassenes (certain Sethians estimated that the savior had triumphed over the creator by assuming the form of a serpent) and the Cainites, Seth’s brother, and the sectarians attached to Joshua (the Gospel of the Egyptians expresses the equivalence between Seth and Joshua/Jesus). The collection at Nag-Hammadi includes a great number of Sethian works, sometimes indistinct from each other, due to the successive syncretic waves of works by Naassenes, Barbelites and Joshua/Jesus Christians: the Three Pillars of Seth, the Epistle from Eugnoste (which became Sophia Jesus), the Paraphrase of Sem (Seth), in which the mediating Spirit intervenes in the primordial struggle between Light and Darkness.[137]

Seth was born to Adam and the Virgin, Eve. Their descendants are the “spiritual,” “pneumatic” or “perfect” Sons of the Light, who extoll asceticism and the stimulation [l’exacerbation] of the spirit at the expense of the body.

According to Sethian mythology — such that it is able to disentangle itself from the writings at Nag-Hammadi — Ialdabaoth (the God of Genesis) created a bad world. Nevertheless, in the man that he produced was perpetuated a celestial gleam that, aspiring to return to the superior place from which it issued, shows the road to salvation. Like Sophia, Barbelo and Naas, Seth is the Messiah of the Good God, superior to Ialdabaoth.

The Sethians divided history into four periods: the age of Adam, the age of Seth, the age of the first Sethians, and the present, in which the Sethians prepared the return of their Messiah. After the end of time, the Faithful, the Sons of the Light, would enter a plerome superior to the places created by the Demiurge. Because “their kingdom isn’t of this world.” Come from elsewhere, “allogenes,” as they would say, they would return to the side of the Father, in a universe illuminated by four entities: Hermozel, Oroiael, Daveithe and Eleleth (in the same way that the Judeo-Christians selected four angels: Michael, Raphael, Bagriel and Ouriel, the Catholics would place four canonical gospels under four symbols that doubled the names Mark, Matthew, Luke and John: the eagle, the lion, the bull and the man).

The Messiah Seth announces the return to the “other world.” The race of Seth, Puech says of Seth’s sons and their descendants, are “another” race, a foreign or strange race in the strong senses of the terms.[138] (Strounsa thinks that the famous Elisha ben Abuya — who was condemned by Jewish orthodoxy at the beginning of the Second Century because he rejected the Talmud and therefore became aher, “other,” “stranger/foreigner,” “allogene” — was a member of the Sethians.[139] Sperma eteron translates zera aher.) This idea was shared by other Christian sects, including those devoted to Joshua/Jesus, whose adepts, to the great scandal of the Greeks and Romans — for whom all of the religions assumed their meaning in the citizen cult of the State — displayed the greatest scorn for death and for the punishments because they were assured of re-joining the true kingdom of light (and such was still the profession of faith of Justin the Apologist, condemned to death around 165).

The Elenchos quotes from extracts from a Sethian cosmogony, in which (as among the Naassenes) one perceives a religious recuperation of the attempt of Simon of Samaria to bring back to the [human] body the mythological inspiration of the Pentateuch. The cosmos is in the image of the belly of a pregnant woman:

In the matrix, the innummerable imprints gave birth to the infinite multitudes of living beings. This infinite variety that bloomed in the form of different beings born under the heavens was inseminated with the odorous effluvium of the Pneuma that came from on high with its light and it was mixed with it. From the water surged a first-born principle, a powerful wind, impetuous, the first cause of all existence; because the wind makes the waters boil and raises them up in waves. Therefore the formation of the waves resembled the effort of the matrix to deliver itself from man or the spirit as soon as it was excited and heated by the shock of the Pneuma. (*) When this wave raised by the wind was elevated above the waters, it conceived and, conforming to its nature, received the fruit of the woman, it retained the light disseminated from on high with the odorous effluvium of the Pneuma, that is to say, the Spirit assumed various forms that are the Perfect God, descended from on high, from the Light and the unengendered Pneuma in human nature as in a temple, born from water by the impulse of nature and the movement of the wind, combined and mixed with the body, as salt impregnates things and the light impregnates darkness, aspiring to be free from the body that is powerless to find salvation or issue. Because what had been mixed was only a completely small glimmer, a kind of fragment separated from the luminous radiance that was introduced into the corporeal world in multiple forms and that ‘retained from the depths of the great waters’ (Psalm 29, 3), as the Psalm says. The light from on high thus had only a thought and a care: how the Spirit was to be delivered from a shameful death and the dark body, delivered from his father below, the wind that raised the whirlpooling unleashed waves, and engendered the Spirit, his perfect son but of a difference essence. Because it was a ray of this perfect light descended from on high, imprisoned in the dark waters, frightening, bitter and impure, it was the luminous Pneuma that was carried beyond the waters (Genesis, 1, 2). Thus, when the raised waves of water conceived the fruit of the woman, they retained under all sorts of forms — such as the belly of a pregnant woman — the disseminating light, as one establishes it among all living beings. The impetuous and terrible wind, [with] its whirlpools like serpents, like winged serpents, steered it off course. (**) It is through this wind, that is to say, through the serpent, that creation began, all things having begun their generation at the same time. Thus, when the Light and the Pneuma were received in the chaotic matrix, which was impure and the source of corruption, the serpent, the wind of darkness, the First-Born of the waters, penetrated it and engendered man, and the impure matrix neither loved nor knew another form. The Logos from on high issued from the Light, being similar to the serpent, deceived it by this resemblance and penetrated into the impure matrix so as to break the bonds that enclosed the Perfect Spirit that had been engendered by the First-Born of the water, the serpent, the wind, the beast of the impure matrix. Such was the form of the slave; such was the necessity that obliged the Logos of God to descend into the womb of a virgin. But it did not suffice that the Perfect Man, the Logos, penetrated into the womb of a virgin and appeased in the darkness the sorrows of childbirth. After he entered into the shameful mysteries of the womb, he washed and drank from the gushing living water that must exhaust anyone who wants to divest himself of the form of the slave and assume the celestial garment (Elenchos, V, 19–22). (***)

(*) By an action inverse to that of Simon and his Cosmo-Somatism, the sperma (sperm) becomes pneuma (spirit); the coupling of man and woman that creates the world gives place to religious allegory, to spiritualization. The Sethians called themselves Pneumatics, in opposition to the Hylics, sons of Cain, and the Psychics, sons of Abel.

(**) The winged serpents are the seraphim (seraphins). As among certain Naassenes of the ascetic tendency, the Redeeming Serpent is opposed to the Serpent of Lust. Here the matrix is impure, which is the inverse of the Simonian conception.

(***) It would suffice for the sects devoted to Joshua/Jesus to translate the myth into a legend of virginal birth, embellished as a familial saga. Likewise, the triad Light, Pneuma and Darkness, alias the Father, the Mother (or the feminine Spirit, the Sophia/Wisdom) and the Son, would engender the future Arian and Catholic speculations on the Trinity.

The library of Nah-Hammadi surrendered a Sethian text, entitled the Epistle of Eugnoste, in which are clearly expressed the ideas that the Joshua/Jesus sects of the Second and Third Centuries would not have any scruples about exploiting and recuperating in the name of their mythic heroes.

In the Infinite appeared the Father, produced by himself; he produced an androgynous man, the masculine name of whom is lost to us, but whose feminine name is Sophia-Pansophos. The immortal man himself created a great Eon with the gods and archangels: he is called: God of Gods and King of Kings; he is the Faith of the beings who produce themselves; he possesses an intelligence, an intention (ennoia), a thought ... like the primordial being. The first celestial man, uniting with his Sophia, produced an androgynous son; the son is the first engendering Father, the Son of Man, whom one also calls: Adam of the Light. He created in his turn an Eon peopled by a multitude of angels that one names: the Ecclesia of the Luminous Saints. He united with his Sophia and produced a great androgynous light that is, in his masculine name, the Savior, the Creator of all things, and, in his feminine name, Sophia, generator of all, whom one also calls Pistis.[140]

To affirm that the Messianic sects had deformed the dogmatic message of Jesus and his apostles is to suppose that this orthodoxy had existed in the First Century and was still babbling on [balbutiante] in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries. With a strange complacency with respect to ecclesiastical falsification, many historians have preferred to ignore the stratification of successive syncretims that — drawing upon the doctrines of the Sethians, Naassenes, Barbelites, Elchasaites, Nazarenes and others — ended up, under the name of Joshua, offering to the federated power of the bishops a shield and a universality that was required by their political project of conquest and empire.

The Epistle of Eugnoste was thus cut out and recomposed on the model of a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples, so as to adopt the title Sophia of Jesus.[141] The prologue to the Canonical Gospel attributed to John was also inspired by Sethian texts.

The Messiah Melchizedek

The Epistle to the Hebrews, attributed to Saul/Paul by the Catholics, to Barnabas by Tertuillien and to Apollos by Luther, linked the priesthood of the Messiah Joshua-Jesus to the priesthood of Melchizedek. According to Fitzmeyer, it was addressed to the Essenes.[142]

Who was Melchizedek? For biblical mythology and orthodox Jews, he was a person of little importance, a Priest-King of Salem (Jerusalem). But the Essene texts treat him with veneration and credit him — as well as Adam and Seth (with whom he was sometimes confused) — with the vocation of Messiah.

Cave 11 at Qumran revealed a midrash in which Melchizedek is held as the announcer of the Good News (otherwise called the Gospels) and is none other than the Messiah for whom salvation will come.[143] Hero of the battle of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness, he would vanquish Belial, the master of evil (“He who announces the Good News is the Messiah”).

Moreover, Melchizedek finds himself associated with Michael, head of the angels. Other characteristics that complete the sketch of the figure of the Archangel Michael will be of great consequence for christo-angelology. One gave to Melchizedek the name Michael and it is to him that one connects Psalm 11/1 and 4. He is invested with a cosmogonical function: he is the maintainer of the universe. According to Henoch, 69/14 sq: “God desposited into the hands of Michael the Secret Name by which the heavens were suspended before the world was created and for eternity; the Name by which the earth was created upon the waters and by which the profound secrets of the mountain became the beautiful waters.”[144]

Furthermore, the Zohar makes this precise: “Everywhere you find mentioned Michael, who is the first of the angels, the Shekhina is understood.”[145] Therefore, the Shekhina (or Achamoth) is none other than the Spirit, feminine in Hebrew, figured under the traits of Sophia, Mariaumne, Myriam and Mary.

The Books of Henoch, dear to the Essenes, call Melchizedek the Son of Man, according to the Book of Daniel, which would adopt the sects devoted to Joshua/Jesus so as to qualify their Messiah.[146]

Stacked up from the Second Century before the Christian era to the First Century that inaugurated it, the texts of Henoch (in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries) existed in three manuscript versions, Greek, Ethiopian and Slavic. One can distinguish an orthodox Jewish redaction, in which YHWH punishes the two hundred watchers or egregores, and an Esseno-Christian redaction, in which God, judging their fault to be pardonable, reconciles himself with them, which is a softening that — like the salvation accorded to Adam and the Serpent by the Sethians and Naassenes — suggests the appearance of a God of kindness who opposes his mercy to the intransigence of the God of Israel.

The miraculous birth of Melchizedek in Henoch announces that of Joshua-Jesus: he is engendered by a woman, without the intervention of a carnal father (the woman is the Spirit, the Shekhina/Achamoth/Sophia, Mariaumne/Myriam and, much later, the Virgin Mary). Following the Epistle to the Hebrews (7, 16), the Messiah endowed with the name Jesus “was not made according to the law of carnal order.”

Finally, Melchizedek, whose name [as we have seen] contains an allusion to justice (tsedeq), participated in the Essene thematic of the Master of Justice. The Testiment of Levy says: “And then the Savior will raise up a New Priest to whom all the words of the Savior will be revealed, and he will exercise a judgment of truth on the earth during a multitude of days.”

A manuscript from Nag-Hammadi pushes the identification much further; it evokes celestial messengers who assign to Melchizedek his future role as Great-Priest and predicts for him a destiny of Messiah condemned to undergo torments so as to triumph over death.

At the end of the Second Century, the devotes of Melchizedek would disapprove of Theodote Trapezetes, with whom they nevertheless shared the belief in an angel-messiah, an angelos-christos. They estimated that it was Melchizedek and not Joshua-Jesus who was the superior angel. The quarrel would reappear in the Fourth Century with Arius, who, far from being an innovator, remained loyal to the old angelo-christology, which was permitted by the ensemble of the Christian sects until the second half of the Second Century.

Werner shows that Arius interpreted the Epistle to the Hebrews as proof of angelo-christology (Jesus as angel of the Savior), and was inspired by the argumentation of the followers of Melchizedek who, drawing from the same Epistle, reached the conclusion that the Christ, as far as his essence and rank, was not above but below the celestial angel Melchizedek.[147]

Joshua/Jesus, Unknown Prophet and Syncretic Messiah

The creature whose crucified body and spirit of sacrifice have dominated two thousand years of an inhuman civilization pushed abstinence and abnegation so completely that he left no traces of his passage through history.

Historians, philosophers, authors, polygraphs — no one in the First Century heard the heroes of the evangelical novels speak. Pliny the Elder (instructed in the existence of the Nazarenes, nevertheless), Justin of Tiberiade, Juvenal, Martial, Dion Chrysostome, Philon of Alexandria, Petrone — all knew nothing of this man.

Flavius Joseph, attentive observer of a war of the Jews in which he collaborated with the Romans, cites Theudas, Jacob and Simon, sons of Juda of Gamala. But the least echo of the exemplary gesture of a New Joshua, named Jesus by the Greeks, never reached him; perhaps there was a copyist who, in the Slavic version of the Twelfth Century, interpolated information about Jesus, the absence of which struck him as inadmissible to a contemporary historian. The patriarch of Constantinople, Photios, made a show of honesty, if not naivete, in this regard. Commenting on the Chronicles of the Kings of the Jews, credited to Justin of Tiberiade (he had a copy of the manuscript, which no longer exists), Photios — in his Myriobyblion (108), a collection of analyzes of 279 different texts read by him — is indignant about the silence concerning Jesus, though the author [of the Chronicles of the Kings of the Jews] lived several kilometers from Caphernaum, a celebrated city in the sacred geography of the Church.[148]

The Qumran manuscripts know Seth, Melchizedek, and the Master of Justice. They know nothing of Jesus, unless “Jesus” is an identikit [portrait-robot] Messiah and a script [texte] plagiarized by The Sermon on the Mount.

As for the Letter attributed to Barnabas, a Judeo-Christian text [written at the] end of the First or the beginning of the Second Century that extols the abandonment of Mosaic law, not in the spirit, but in the letter (circumcision of the heart must replace circumcision of the sex[ual organ]), Jesus is none other than Joshua, son of Noun. Around 230–250, Origen, in a sermon on Joshua/Jesus, celebrated the intemporal and exemplary glory of the biblical Joshua whom he calls Jesus.

In 135 (and not between 80 and 90), the Pharisian convention condemned the heresy of the noisrim or Nazarenes, but knew nothing of a community-head named Jesus.

One must wait until the beginning of the Second Century to find an allusion to the chrestianoi, otherwise known as the Messianists (Chrestos or Christos translates the Hebrew word Messiah). Around 111, a letter from Pliny to Trajan asks the emperor about the fate to reserve for the chrestianoi — according to all probability, the Elchasites — who “assemble before the dawn to sing hymns to the Messiah as to a God” (Christo quasi Deo).

In the same epoch, Tactitus, in his Annals and, a little later, Suetone, speak not of a Jesus but of a Chrestos, the cause of agitation under Nero. Therefore, there existed at the same time a quite historical Chrestos, who preoccupied Emperor Hadrian and aroused the disapproval of Greco-Roman [public] opinion: the nationalist Messiah, Bar Kochba, hero of the last insurrection of the Jewish people.

Tactitus and Suetone were not unaware that the Rome of Claudius and Nero had repressed many agitations of Jewish Messianism then led by the Zealot movement. The Elchasite behavior described by Pliny in his letter to Trajan, who was lenient, did not justify the repulsion felt by Tacitus and Suetone: their injurious commentaries inspired even more insults addressed to the Jewish religion as well as the contemporary rise of anti-Semitism.

Around 160, the Christ or Messiah of a Christian such as Justin the Apologist was not a historical individual. He was a God incarnated in the form of a man, martyred on earth and returned to the divine essence of which he was the emanation (this is the doctrine of the angelos-christos that Catholicism would condemn much later under the name Docetism). The irony is that this conjecture about a prophet born from a man and a woman [originally] emanated from a Jew. Justin reports in his Dialogue with the Jew Tryphon:

Those who affirm that the Christ was a man, and that he was anointed and became the Christ by election, seem to me much closer to the truth than your doctrine. Because we [are] the Jews, we expect the Christ in so far as he is a man born from man and Elie will come to anoint him when he has come. But if the one of whom you speak avers to be the Christ, one must conclude that he is a man born from man. Nevertheless, since Elie did not come to anoint him, I do not believe that he is the Christ.[149]

Martha of Chambrun-Ruspoli, who cites Justin, adds: “It is perhaps so as to respond to this argument that we read in the Gospels that Elie will return in the person of John the Baptist.”[150]

And Tryphon still objected: “You Christians follow vain rumors, you have invented a Christ in the way you inconsiderately sacrifice your lives.”[151]

How can the historians, who are so little attached to the testimony of attested facts, accredit the Catholic and Roman fable of a historical Jesus, whereas he is still for Justin (a Saint and martyr, according to the Church) an angelos-christos, and who possesses neither family nor history in the letters of this Saul/Paul whom Marcion mentions for the first time.

In a challenge to the forgeries of Eusebius of Cesaree and “the Father of the Church,” the Emperor Julian, writing his Against the Galileans around 350 (it was later destroyed, except for several quotations, as a precaution), finds himself grounded in affirming: “If you can show me that one of these men is mentioned by the noted writers of the epoch — these events [supposedly] taking place under Tiberias and Claudios — then you would be right to consider me to be a perfect liar.”[152] Obviously, Julian did not belong to the long line of liars.

On the other hand, in the Fourth Century, Jerome — a saint according to the Church — exposed the truth by propagating the letters that Seneca exchanged with Paul, proving (as with the adventures imagined by the Acts of the Apostles) that the author of the epistles disposed of an historical and dogmatic existence well before Marcion’s discovery. (The question of the Gosepls that, canonical or apocryphal, are only, following Soden, kultlegende [“cult legends”] will be examined further on.)[153]

Everything happens today as if the historians, finally perceiving the enormity of the official lie, now devote themselves to evoking plausible historical Jesuses, despite the first two centuries, in which he played [the role of] angel-Messiah: a glimmer imprisoned in a body frees itself from death and returns to God. Not ignoring the character of the “pious fables” (according to Loisy, Bultmann, Guillermin and Schweitzer), or the anecdotes that exoterically translated the elements of the myth, the historians draw from New Testament, the texts of which were revised as late as the Fourth Century, information that is coupled with events from the very first decade. Brandon thus advances the idea of Jesus as a Zealot, crucified between two lestoi or brigands, from the term with which Joseph [Flavius] qualifies the anti-Roman guerrillas.[154] So as to win the good graces of Rome, the Pauline school made a pacifist into a martyr, crucified not by the Romans but by the Jews. As for Robert Amberlain, who bases himself on the crucifications of Jacob and Simon (the sons of Juda of Gamala), he infers that Jesus was their father, also a Zealot.[155]

Elements of a Forgery

The 70-odd canonical and apocryphal scriptures elaborated for the greatest glory of the Messiah Jesus illustrates in an exemplary manner a remark by Robert Graves: “The tales (are) especially explications of rituals or religious theories presented under the form of histories: a veritable compendium of instructions in the manner of the Hebraic books and possessing many points in common with them.”[156]

Such a large number of elements entered into the fabrication of a historical Jesus that accounting for them all would require several volumes and a quantity of energy that, for my part, I would prefer to invest in more passionate matters. Thus I will content myself with recalling the most obvious.

The only Jesus known in the First Century was the biblical Joshua, son of Noun, and Jesus ben Shira, whose name appears in a book of Wisdom.

The myth of Joshua carried a double eschatology: a natural salvation recalled by the River Jordan, beyond which the successor of Moses led his people, and a universal salvation because the crossing of the celestial river, or the baptismal immersion in the waves, was accomplished without striking any blows against the kingdom of the Father. The syncretism born from the Zealot opposition to the Roman occupiers did not fail to found the preoccupations of the Zealots, Essenes, and Nazarenes in a universal eschatology. The reincarnation of the Tsedeq, the Just, martryed around 63 [B.C.E.], was revived by the crucification of Jacob and Simon of Gamala, brothers or witnesses of God, according to a midrashic expression reprized by the Apocalypse attributed to John.

In Revolution in Judea [English in original], Maccoby supposes that Barrabas and Jesus were actually one person: the first, put to death as a “bandit,” politically symbolized the second. For myself, I am inclined to approach the meanings of the two names: Bar Abbas, Son of the Father, and Joshua/Jesus, “God saved, saves, will save.” This is very much like the trinity of Naassene sects that clearly evoked Kalakau or Adam, the man from on high; Saulassau, the man from below; and Zeesai, the Jordan that flows towards the high and that Adam deposed [dechu] through terrestrial suffering overcome so as to return to the Father.

It is still Joshua, the Jordan and the soul imprisoned in matter that is described by a Naassene hymn transcribed in the Elenchos:

Jesus said, regard the Father
Pursued by evil on the earth
Far from your breath, she [the Earth] truly wanders
It looks to flee from bitter chaos
and it does not know how to cross it.

In the manner of Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage who died in 258, the Catholics called Ecclesiasticus liber or Ecclesiastic the Sophia Iesou uiou Sirach (the Wisdom of Jesus, Son of Sirach), the last sapiential book to figure in the Bible of the Seventy. Written on the eve of the Maccabees’ uprising, the work enjoyed a great reputation among the Zealots.

“Whoever seizes the Law receives Wisdom.” And this “comes before him like a mother, like a virgin wife, she welcomes it; she nourishes it with the bread of prudence, she gives it the water of wisdom to drink.” As in all the Gnostic and Christian developments, this Sophia, mother, wife and virgin (all at the same time) rules at the side of God and communicates her knowledge (her gnosis) to the Sons of Israel so that they can be saved. But her remarks encompass more than just the Hebrew people. She meant to found an alliance in which God encountered Israel so as to promote the order that will permit all of humanity to accede to salvation.

Thus the Essene sects referred to a New Alliance (Novum Testamentum, in Latin), the universal message of which the Master of Justice would express through his return.

In his study of Lilith, Jacques Brill says, with pertinence, with respect to the Sophia Iesou uiou Sirach: “The author of it is represented as a child whose marvelous deeds and gestures illustrate wisdom, in the manner in which the deeds and gestures of Jesus are treated in the Gospels of Childhood.”[157]

The virgin wife and mother, the child nourished by divine wisdom — do not they offer to prophetic imaginations and commentators on community rules enough elements for an anecdotal staging that could facilitate access to simple souls? The clumsy and confused didactic of the Hebrew and Aramaic midrashim easily found among Greek authors a novelistic form that pleased the people. The Homelies of Peter, the Pastor of Hermas, the Acts, the apocryphal and canonical gospels were [all] literary fictions with apologetic pretensions.

Before the staging and imagery illustrated [certain] allegories and symbols, there might have existed other sapientaux compilations continuing [the saga of] Jesus ben Sirach. This is the case with a work discovered at Nag-Hammadi: The Hidden Words that Jesus the Living Said and Were Transcribed by Didyme Jude Thomas, which the Catholics would call the Gospel of Thomas.[158]

The idea of a Jesus who restored a Sapientale tradition opportunely doubled as the angel-messiah with a human nature. Here is expressed the figure of [Jesus as] an insurgent, an audacious thinker, a philosopher proferring the truths of biblical morality, of which Jewish orthodoxy (cramped by its sacerdotal rituals) made so little. The Sophia that is dispensed under his name serves as a guide for the leaders of the Nazarene and Ebionite communities; it also brings to them the authority of the master who reflects on his disciples, witnesses, and brothers in spirit.

Other compilations of Sapienatux remarks made by Jesus ben Sirach were propagated ever since Basilides, in the Second Century, affirmed receiving from Matthew the secret doctrines of the Savior — the name Jesus being confused with the saving role of the Sophia-Spirit. There would exist under the name Matthew, alias Levy, an apocryhphal gospel and a gospel revised according to the Catholic canon.

The hypothetical conjunction of a sage born from the book of Jesus ben Sirach and the angelos-christos named Jesus is confirmed when one finds out that, around 100–110, the Christian Gnostic Satornil of Antiochus, who was the first to found his doctrine on the name of Jesus, established a distinction between a just and wise man named Iesou, on the one hand, and, on the other other, the Messiah or Christos, the intelligence of the transcendent God who united with him at the adult age.

• Chapter 9 : The Messianic Sects of Joshua/Jesus: Nazarenes, Ebionites, Elchasaites

Chapter 9: the Messianic sects of Joshua/Jesus: Nazarenes, Ebionites, Elchasaites

At the confluence of Essenism, Samaritanism and the baptist movement of Dunstan/Dosithea, sects formed in which a certain communality of doctrine and practice didn’t exclude rivalries and struggles for power. Their conjunction, no doubt precipitated by the Zealot insurrection, ended in the consecration of a syncretic messiah invested with the secret name “God saves,” who incarnated the long line of prophets “anointed by Adonai” and persecuted for their untimely revelations.

All distinguished themselves by a rigorous asceticism; scorn for material goods, the body, women, and pleasure; recourse to the purificatory and initiating rite of baptism; the need to found of communities or Ecclesiai (Churches); propagation of a doctrine of the two roads, that of Light and that of Darkness, sometimes pushed to the cosmic opposition between a Good God and a God who created a bad world; and the expectation of a Messiah or, more exactly, his return, because (sent by the Good God) he was pitilessly put to death by the sacerdotes of the Temple of Jerusalem or their henchmen. The redemption promised by the Angel-Messiah would spread his grace to all of humanity, compensating the just and punishing the wicked.

Hostile to the Sadduceans and the Pharisians, these sects accommodated themselves to the philosophical speculations of Philo of Alexandria. His Judaic monotheism actually gave to gnosis a manner of safe-conduct that the supposed Fathers of the Church didn’t fail to use. On the other hand, with a perfect unanimity, they execrated the Great Power of life that the works of Simon of Samaria illustrated.

Nazarenes and Ebionites

Pliny the Elder, recopying reports drafted on the orders of Emperor Augustus by one of his generals, Marcus Agrippa, indicates in Book V of his Natural Histories that not far from Apamea, in Syria, Nazarenes lived in a city called Bambyx, Hierapolis or Mabog.

Marcus Agrippa died in 12 [B.C.E.]; Dubourg situates his investigations between 30 and 20 [B.C.E.]. Accounting for the lapse of time required for the installation in Syria of a sect born in Palestine, Dubourg judges plausible the presence of a Nazarene current around 50 B.C.[169]

In the beginning a priest-warrior consecrating to YHWH an existence of austerity and piety, the nazir thereafter designated a man devoted to God by a vow of “nazireat.” The word suggests a connection with “Nazoreans” or “Nazarenes”: “the observers, the conservers.”

Rallied to the rigorous faction of Judaism, hostile to the Sadduceans and the Pharisians, they inscribed themselves in the general line of Essenism, of which they perhaps formed a community or Church. The Greek authors of the Acts of the Apostles, who compiled and rewrote ancient midrashim so as to reconcile the schools of Simon/Paul and Simon Cephas, put on stage a Jewish orthodoxy that vituperated the hairesis ton nazoraion, the heresy of the Nazarenes.

The Pharisian rabbis knew them under the appelation noisrim and the declared heretics (aher, “others”), not in 90 as is often advanced, but in 135, when — from the revolt of the Messiah Bar Kochba, which they refused to join — there was born the legend of a Joshua/Jesus who was a pacifist and respectful of the Romans.

Bar Kochba stigmatized them in his letters under the name “Galileans.” In the Second Century, Hegesippe thus referred to one of the Jewish sects of his time, but for Emperor Julian (331–363), cited by Cyrille of Alexandria, “Galilean” was still a synonym for “Christian.” Moreover, several texts designated the Messiah Jesus with the word “Galilean.”

Like the other anti-Judean Jewish sects, the Nazarenes did not escape the Zealot embrace. Only their refusal to rally themselves to the troops of Bar Kochba around 133–135 exonerated them from the reproach of violence and haloed them with the pacifism thanks to which the Greco-Roman Christian communities demarked themselves from “Semitic fury.”

Issued from Jewish religious extremism, Nazarenism paradoxically opened the door to an incessant revision of the Mosaic message and law. Their midrashim, which were propagated in the assemblies of believers, prepared the coming of the Messiah that Israel invoked in the heart of the troubles of the war, correcting the prophecies of the past and adapting them to the modernity of the circumstances, forming the streams of the foreseeable torrent that would swell the Good News announced by the Hymns of the Master of Justice.

One would deceive oneself if one were to give Nazarenism a unity that contradicted the echoes of quarrels between the leaders whose names have been preserved: Theudas/Thomas the Egyptian, Jacob, Simon Cephas, John the Essene, Zacchea/Clement, Barnabas, Saul also known as Paul, and Jochanaan also known as John the Baptist.

A sect of the Ebionites, still active in the Fourth Century, certainly derived from these ebbyonim (“poor people”), laid the foundations among the Essenes for voluntary poverty, of which the Messalians, Vaudois, Beghards, Fraticelles and Apostolics would discover the perilous virtues.

The Nazarenes, or at least the tendency that Jochanaan represented as the only prophetic authority, perpetuate themselves to this very day in Mandeism, always alive between the Tigress and Euphrates. Their name means “those who save,” the “Gnostics.” They were also known as “Christians of Saint John” — meaning Jochanaan/John the Baptist. Their late doctrine, clarified by an abundant literature (Ginza or Tresor, subdivided into a Right Ginza and a Left Ginza), formed a syncretism in which were mixed Judeo-Christian, Iranian and Babylonian elements.

The Mandeans claimed for themselves Hibil (Abel), Shitil (Seth), Anosh (Henoch) and John the Baptist, and formed one of the branches of Nazarenism, which, questing for a unique Messiah, rejected the accord established by the partisans of Jacob, Simon/Peter and Saul/Paul under the name Joshua/Jesus, because, according to them, Anosh showed that Jesus was a false prophet.

Elchasaites

In the third year of Trajan’s reign, around 100–101, Nazarenism seemed to give way to a new generation of Christians: the Elchasaites. (The diversity of the names must not confuse us. The “Sampseans,” whom Hegesippe called the “Nasbotheans,” only offered variants of the expression seo ayya, otherwise known as “the Baptists.”) A sacred book was delivered to the prophet Elchasai, chief of a Christian community — which no doubt justified the inquest of Pliny the Younger, the papal legate of Bythinia — by two angels, one male, the Son of God, the other female, the Holy Spirit. The Homelies of Peter counted a number of their writings, at least in their original versions. They also constituted a Christianity different from the opinion that the Catholics of the Fourth Century tried to impose; that is why Epiphanius of Salamis — who was ironic in his Panarion, or the Box of Drugs [when he wrote]: “Not being Christians, nor Jews, nor pagans, but something of an intermediary, at base they are nothing” — showed a contrario that they were Jews, Christians and pioneers of a Greco-Roman Christianity (but the Church would attribute that role to the enemy of the Elchasaites, Saul/Paul, when it snatched him from the hands of his discoverer, Marcion).

Did not Elchasaitism, with its real or mythical prophet — Elchasai is related to the Aramaic word Ieksai, which means “Hidden Savior” — announce the great current of popular Christianity that, under the name New Prophecy, obeyed the Christ reincarnated in the prophet Montan? It isn’t easy to forge a precise opinion on the comings-and-goings of the sects, prophets and apostles when confronted with the ordinary fanaticism of received truth: the ancestors of the Mandeans took exception to Joshua/Jesus; the respective partisans of Jacob and Peter, hostile to Jochanaan also known as John the Baptist, somehow or other accorded themselves so as to thrash the imposture of Saul/Paul, whose disciples held Peter to be a traitor and renegade. The faithful to Jude/Thomas triumphed at Edessa, but without attracting a unanimous veneration, because certain people dressed him in the role of Judas. Add to this the fact that Elchasaitism, which was hostile to Marcion and active in Rome with Alcibiade of Apamea, witnessed the birth of Mani, the future founder of a religion and the clear inspiration for the dogmas of Marcion.[170] Mani, raised in an Elchasaite community, reprized the Samaritan titles “Unique Envoy” and “True Prophet.” The “Unique Envoy” was an old Judeo-Samaritan name for the principal agent of God (“He who is designated the Envoy of God received the Spirit of God,” Isaiah, 61, 6). This was also the status of the Master of Justice and Joshua/Jesus. All the inspired prophets — Elchasai as much as Montan — can claim him. One understands that Catholicism accorded exclusivity to Jesus, the only “True Messiah,” and that it prohibited all competition under the pain of death.

• Chapter 10 : 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 from the letters that sheltered the catch-alls of the Marcionites and anti-Marcionites, before being washed, purged and re-sharpened several times according to the rectified line of the Fourth Century.

Jochanaan, Called John The Baptist

In his Jewish Antiquities, drafted around 95, Flavius Joseph speaks of a preacher named John:

He was a man of fortune who incited the Jews to the practices of virtue, justice for all and piety to God so that they could receive baptism. Actually, God considered baptism to be agreeable if it served not to pardon certain faults, but to purify the body, after the soul was purified by justice. (*) Around John were assembled many people who, having heard of him, had reached the greatest excitation (XVIII, 116–118).

(*) Cf. the Master of Justice, Jacob the Just, Tsadoq, Melchitsedeq.

The Greek version of the War of the Jews (written around 90) doesn’t mention Jochanaan. Two Slavic versions, written much later and unreliable, return to this person. One reads in the first version:

By this time there lived among the Jews a man of strange costume; he applied to his body the hides of animals everywhere he wasn’t covered by his own fur. In his face, he was similar to a savage.

He went to the Jews and summoned them to freedom, saying: ‘God sent me so that I can show you the Road of the Law, by which you can deliver yourselves from many powerful people. And over you will not reign a mortal, but the Very High who sent me.’

And when the people heard, they rejoiced. And he was followed all over Judea, the region in the vicinity of Jerusalem. And he did nothing other than plunge them into the waves of the Jordan and dismissed them by saying to them that they should renounce the[ir] bad works and that he would give them a king who would emancipate them and submit to them all who were not submitted to them but who would not be submitted to anyone.

Some blasphemed, others believed him. And as he had been led before Archelaus and as the doctors of the Law had been assembled, they asked him who he was and where he had just been. He responded to them: ‘I am a man, the Spirit of God has led me and I feed upon reeds, roots and carob.’

They threw themselves upon him to torture him if he did not renounce his words and acts, but he said: ‘It is for you to renounce your abominable works and to become devoted to the Savior of your God.’

And Simon, originally an Essene scribe, arose in anger and said: ‘We read divine books every day. But you, who come from the forest like a beast, you dare to instruct us and seduce the crowd with inflammatory discourse.’ He hurried to torment him physically. But he punished them by saying: ‘I will not reveal to you the mystery that lives in you, since you haven’t wanted it. Through this will come on you an inexpressible unhappiness, and it will be your fault.’

After having spoken thus, he went to the other bank of the Jordan and, [the others] no longer daring to molest him, he continued to act as before.

The second Slavic version has Herod intervening.

Alone, this man whom one has called a savage came before him (Herod) in anger and said to him: ‘Why have you taken the woman of your brother, infamous one? Since your brother is dead due to a pitiless death, you too will be bankrupted by the false spirit [celeste]. The decree of God will not be lifted, but you will perish miserably in a strange country. Because you do not uphold [suscites] the line of your brother but you satisfy your carnal passion, since he already had four children.’

From what Herod heard, he became angry and ordained the beating and hunting of him. But he did not cease accusing Herod everywhere that he found himself, until Herod seized him and ordered him to be slaughtered.

His character was strange and his life wasn’t human. He lived like a spirit without flesh. His lips never knew bread. Even at Easter, he didn’t eat unleavened bread, saying that this was given as a souvenir of God, who delivered his people from servitude, as a consolation because the road was sad. As far as wine and the intoxicating drinks, he didn’t even let them near him. And he had a horror of [eating] any animal. He disapproved of all infractions and for him it was necessary to make usage of carob.

Fanatic of anti-Nature, ascetic moralist, hysterical and religiously extreme imprecator, Jochanaan inscribed himself in a current that hasn’t ceased, up to today, to oppose to the freedom of life a system of corporeal and spiritual occlusion that propagates morbidity and death. Such dispositions accorded, depending on the circumstances, with the resentment of the disinherited, nay, all power subjected to Roman colonization that [in response] erected its God as an intemporal machine of war against the imperialist violence of the West.

According to the Slavic manuscripts, his rage at the people of the Temple did not spare the masters of the country. Presented to Archelaus, ethnarque of Judea, Samaria and Idumea from 4 [B.C.E.] to 5 [C.E.] and subsequently banished, he would succumb much later (according to the version in the evangelical legends) to the blows of Herod Antipas, tetrarque of Galilee from 4 [B.C.E.] to 38 [C.E.].

It [the news] raged along the Jordan that Joshua, a conqueror, a miracle-worker, a maker of miracles (he stopped the sun) and leader of the Jewish people, had crossed, [thereby] surpassing a limit that was inseparably terrestrial and celestial.

As in Essenism, his baptism symbolically liberated the soul from the “stain of the body” and consecrated a penitential choice, the renunciation of the goods of the earth and the mortification of the flesh. The least pleasures horrified this man-saint and he execrated the animals, whose sexual liberty annoyed his aggressive chastity. If he covered himself with animal skins, it was to resemble a certain Esau, of whom Genesis (25, 25–26) speaks.

The hostility of the Sadduceans and Pharisians did not rally to him the adhesion of the Essene factions, because a Man of the Community named Simon (so celebrated that [Flavius] Joseph cites him) violently took him aside, manifesting the animosity that reigned between the saints, or perfect ones, devoted to prayer and study, and the preachers of voluntary poverty, or ebbyonim, the Ebionites. Here it must have been a question of rival currents of Essenism, because Simon would not have seated himself among his worst enemies, that is, the sacerdotal aristocracy of the Temple.

Therefore, the hostility to John the Baptist remained vivid among the Nazarenes-Elchasaites, from whom emanated the Homelies of Peter. For the Elchasaites, John the Baptist incarnated the Messiah’s adversary. A syzygy was situated within the antagonism between the Light Jesus and the Dark Jesus, the Son of Man and the road of salvation, and Jochanaan, the Son of Woman, and the road of evil.

In the encounter of the Essenism of the communities — of which agriculture assured the subsistence through various meats and wine, and allowed the neophytes to marry and satiate themselves in the design of procreation, that is, a sexuality reduced to the coitus of circumstance — the wandering prophets extolled absolute dispossession, and continence without reserve; they stigmatized the “laxity” of their coreligionists.

Mandeism (from manda, “gnosis”), another sect issued from Essenism, held John the Baptist as its founding apostle, and took exception to the false messiah Jesus, professed an equal scorn for the Jews and the sectarians of the impostor “denounced by Anosh” (Henoch).

In the heart of Nazarenism, contradictory midrashim re-traced the complexities of the quarrel of the prophets. The echo of these Hebrew and Aramaic texts (today disappeared) clearly resounds, even in the late canonical Gospels that translated into Greek writings the allegorical and Semitic meanings of which escaped their redactors.

In the Gospel attributed to Luke, John the Baptist is not the simple precursor of Jesus, but the announcer of the end of time and the imminent kingdom of God. The works placed under the names of Mark and Matthew present John the Baptist as equal in importance to Jesus, whom he baptized. He recruited his partisans from among the Jochanaanites and only acceded to the first rank of the mythological scene once his master was decapitated. Herod, moreover, saw in Jesus the reincarnation of John the Baptist.

On the other hand, the Gospel attributed to John reduced his role to a congruous share. He is neither prophet nor Elie, but only “the voice that cries out in the desert”; not the Light, but a witness to the Light.

From whence comes the question: did not the John proposed as the author of a Gospel that, at the beginning, was Gnostic (Naassene or Sethian) — did not he procede from John the Essene whom Flavius Joseph mentions? As far as the Revelations, which was a Jewish text transcribed into Greek and also attributed to a certain John: it cites neither Jesus nor Jochanaan, but evokes two “witnesses of God” in struggle against the Beast, that is to say, Rome. Put to death, they remained three days without burial, then resuscitated and rose to the heavens. Therefore, there existed, according to Joseph, two Jewish and anti-Judean chiefs who were victims of the Roman occupation: Jacob and Simon, sons of Juda of Gamala, mythical witnesses of the Angel-Messiah summoned to lead the Just to final victory, despite the terrestrial failure of 70, and to conquer the world in the name of a God more powerful than the bloody and boastful God YHWH.

Theudas/Jude/Thomas

In 45, in his Jewish Antiquities (XX, 97–98) Flavius Joseph cited the tumult incited by the “magician” Thomas, a qualifier frequently synonymous with “Egyptian” due to the great vogue for Hermeticism in Upper Egypt. (*)

Fadus being governor of Judea, a magician by the name of Thuedas persuaded a great crowd to take their riches with them and follow him to the Jordan. He said that he was a prophet and that, after he had divided it by command, the river would permit them to pass easily. By speaking thus he deceived much of the world. But Fadus didn’t let him enjoy this folly. He sent against him a troop of cavalry, which attacked them spontaneously and killed a great many, and took many of the survivors and captured Theudas himself and, after decapitating him, sent the head to Jerusalem.

(*) On the other hand, there is no trace — other than a composite novel entitled Acts of the Apostles — of an agitator by the name of Etienne, who speculated on the Torah, invented midrashim, rose up against the people of the Temple, and claimed to be a Just man, cruelly persecuted, who would return to the earth [after death]. This “imaginary Etienne”[171] fits a portrait that could have included the majority of the Essene preachers, all of whom modeled themselves on the Master of Justice in the midst of a “messianic agitation (that) soon began and didn’t end until Bar Kochba.”[172]

The Talmud identifies the Theudas mentioned by Joseph with Ben Stada, who promised his partisans he’d destroy the walls of Jerusalem as Joshua had destroyed those of Jericho.[173]

Theudas also enjoyed the posthumous privilege of having furnished at least two recruits to the evangelical legends of the apostles. Because Theudas or Thaddeus corresponds to Juda or Judas, who is none other than Thomas. There’s no Mystery as to why the acts and gospels call him the “twin bother of Jesus,” since Thaddeus, Jude and Thomas [all] mean “twin,” from which comes the double of the Greek translators, who were unaware of the original meaning of the name and surnamed Thomas “didyme” (didumos, “twin”).

While the Nazarene disciples of Jacob and Simon-Peter implanted themselves in Antioch, those loyal to Theudas/Thomas propagated themselves in Edessa, where their communities founded a specific [kind of] Christianity before entering the syncretic wave of the years 90–100. At the beginning, each sect expressed the truth of its quest for a unique messiah by putting themselves under the patronage of an elder, a witness or a “brother” of the Savior. The unification of the Judeo-Christian current would engender the legend of the apostles initially united around the Savior, Adonai, descended to the earth (later there would be divergences, doubts and betrayals).

By guaranteeing the separation of the waters of the River Jordan to the crowd of his partisans, Theudas/Jude/Thomas identified himself with Joshua. His crossing transmuted the waters of death into the waters of life. Whatever they had been at the time, in the mythic and messianic spirit of the epoch, Joshua and Thomas are mentioned in the Acts of Thomas (the manuscript dates from the Sixth Century and no doubt transcribes a much older text): “Jesus then appeared under the form of Thomas and sat on the bed.”

Thomas/Thuedas probably had something to do with the Gospel of the Egyptians, in which the will to asceticism common to all of Esseno-Baptism expressed itself violently: “Jesus came to abolish the works of women, generation, and by this [he came to] abolish the death that carries away all placed in the world.” (Beyond the Christian milieu, the idea also existed in several Hermetic groups of Alexandria. According to the Poimandres, 18, love is the cause of death. Asclepius supported the contrary thesis.)

The same spirit was encountered in a text discovered at Nah-Hammadi and popularized under the arbitrary name Gospel according to Thomas.[174]

This work has points in common with the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Acts of Peter, the Acts of Philippe, the canonical gospels, Naassene, Sethian and Henochian doctrines (logion 11), Essenism (monachos does not mean monk but the “perfect man,” as in the texts from Qumran), Marcion (logion 32), Theodotus and Heracleon (logion 144), and the Recognitiones, a Latin and later version of the Homelies of Peter, I, 84 (logion 39).[175]

The text includes 118 logia, or remarks attributed to Joshua/Jesus, put onstage in the form of brief dialogues between Jacob, Thomas and Simon-Peter. Imprinted by a number of Semitisms, the text seems to be a collection of rewritten, translated and arranged midrashim. It manifestly inspired the authors of the canonical gospels, who purged it of doctrinal archaisms and strengthened its ascetic rigor.

In a reversal of the real that is the very inhuman essence of religion, the condemnation of desire and pleasure ended in the identification of the Holy Spirit with a mother who gives life, whereas women bring into the world children who engender death. (This is the sense, that is to say, the meaning of the mistake by which Jesus is called “the Living” in the work attributed to Thomas.) The Adamism of a return to Paradise implies a total de-fleshing [decharnement] of sexuality. In Paradise, man is neither male nor female, but identical to the putatively asexual child. Scarcely can it eat of the forbidden fruit of voluptuousness, and so its primitive unity disappears, producing a man who is different from the woman. Only a spiritual androgyny — as pure spirit of a body without desire or impulses — will render to it the disincarnated unicity from which it procedes. The same speculation is illustrated in the Gospel of the Egyptians. Catholicism would condemn as heretical the frenzied asceticism devoted to Jude/Thomas as late as the Third Century (this is perhaps the reason that the evangelical novels recognized by the Church execrated the double of the Good Thomas: the informer Judas).[176]

Jacob

In his Ecclesiastical History (II, I, 3–4), Eusebius of Cesarea cites an extract from the Hypotyposes of Titus Flavius Clemens, known as Clement of Alexandria, who was born around 150 and died around 210. Clement was a Christian philosopher classified among the orthodox by the Catholics, but whom the patriarch and theologian Photios (820–855) judged to be impious and heretical in many of his opinions.

A commentator on biblical texts, Clement belonged to anti-Marcionite Christian Gnosticism, like the Christians of the New Prochecy and its disciple, Origen. He drew his referneces from the Epistle of Jude, the Epistle of Barnabas, and the Apocalypse of Peter, which much later were condemned as apocryphal, because Clement didn’t know the canons that still didn’t exist when he was alive; of course, his future copyists were careful to mitigate his legitimate misrecognitions by adding antedated citations.

For him, gnosis allowed one to discover the typography of the celestial dwellings, inhabited by the cohorts of hierarchically arranged angels. It revealed to him the superimposed or successive worlds through which the soul elevates itself so as to attain the supreme repose. And Joshua/Jesus was none other than an informed guide [guide averti] in a spiritual adventure.

According to the extract produced by Eusebius, Clement declares: “The Savior, after his resurrection, brings gnosis to Jacob the Just, to John and to Peter; they will [then] give it to the 70, of whom Barnabas was one.” (This suffices for Eusebius to consecrate Jacob the “bishop of the Church of Jerusalem.”)

In another work, the Stromates, in which he attempts to reconcile Greek philosophy and Jewish prophetism, he called the true gnosis Christian, in a move different from that of Irenaeus who, vituperating the Christian Gnostics Marcion and Valentin, judged gnosis and the teachings of Jesus to be irreconciliable. Clement refers to the “true tradition rightfully issued from the apostle-saints Peter, Jacob, John and Paul, transmitted from father to son,” composing a list of ancient masters in which were unified, under the cover of a will to unity, two antagonistic currents: that of Saul/Paul and that of Jacob and Peter.

Jacob, in whom the Master of Justice was [re]incarnated, played a role of the highest rank in the works at Nag-Hammadi: Here are the hidden words that Jesus the Living said and were transmitted by Didyme Jude Thomas: “The disciples said to Jesus: ‘We know that you will leave us; who above us will (then) be the (most) grand?’ Jesus said to them: ‘There where you will be, render yourselves to Jacob the Just, because of whom the heavens and the earth were produced’” (logion 13).[177]

[The phrase] “because of whom the heavens and earth were produced” designates Jacob as nothing less than the co-creator of the universe, at the same level as Adam and Jesus, who is furthermore his “brother.” This remark, borrowed from a midrash that claimed the authority of Jacob, illustrates quite well how the acts of legitimation of the Church — which, depending on the circumstances, erected the master as the auxilliary or right arm of God — were collected, collated, and harmonized to the extent that the (initially disunited) Nazarene Churches federated and formed accords among themselves. Thus, there would appear — engendered by a community inspired by a Levy/Matthew — a work entitled The Secret Words (*) that the Savior said to Judas Thomas and that I, Matthew, wrote down while I heard them speak, one to another, sometimes called Gospel according to Matthew.[178] The pious lies by virtue of which the local churches invented witnesses or brothers of the Messiah (**) would pass for an inadmissable naivete in the eyes of the redactors of the New Testament, who would take the precaution of borrowing the falsification or, more exactly, the myth of the colors of historical probability, effacing the original documents, which were assessed with [possessing] vulgar aberrations.

(*) Saul/Paul also speaks of a vision in the course of which he heard “the ineffable words that no one is permitted to repeat.”

(**) The abbeys of the Middle Ages didn’t proceed in any other fashion when they invented a patron saint and exhibited relics so as to attract the faithful, crowds and alms.

All things considered, the figure of Jacob didn’t connect exclusively to Judeo-Christianity, since the Naassenes — according to the Elenchos (V, 7) — kept in their teachings “the principle points of the doctrine that Jacob, brother of the Savior, transmitted to Mariamne.” Here the Savior was NHS, the Redeemer Serpent, and Mariamne corresponds to Myriam/Mary. It is also under the name Jacob that, after the Second Century, the Proto-Gospel of Jacob, a recitation of the childhood of the Christ Jesus and the story of Mary and Joseph (the carpenter) would be propagated.

The original specificity of the Christianity and Church of Jacob was perpetuated in Nestorianism, which was condemned as a heresy and [yet] exists to this day in the Jacobite Churches.

Jacob, prophet and Messiah, would assume the roles of witness, brother, and apostle of Joshua/Jesus to the extent that the diverse currents of Esseno-Christianity, nay, Sethian, Naassene and Barvelite messianisms, little by little resembled and regrouped their patrons or founders within the apostolic cohort of the Savior.

A fragment from the Judeo-Christian Hegesippe (end of the Second Century), transcribed by Eusebius of Cesarea, describes Jacob the Just as an ascetic “sanctified in the womb of his mother,” a trait applied to Jesus and that accounts for the mythical slide of Jacob (the Messiah of an Essene community) into Jesus (the syncretic Messiah of the first Churches, perhaps federated by Elchasai).

Like Dunstan, Jochanaan, the Servant celebrated by Esaie and other spawn of the Master of Justice, Jacob did not eat meat, and never shaved, did his hair, nor washed. He dedicated all of his time to prayer. Hegesippe called him “rampart of the people,” because “those who have faith resemble Jacob.”

Among the Elchasaites, Jacob passed for the true founder of their community. The primitive text of the Homelies of Peter presents itself as a letter from Clement, alias Zachea, to Jacob.

History has preserved traces of [various] Jacobs tied to Messianic agitation and whom the ahistorical spirit of the midrashim easily united in an identification rendered plausible by the common fronts of Zealotism and Essenism. According to Flavius Joseph (Judaic Antiquities XX, V, 2), Jacob of Gamala, son of Juda and brother of Simon, was crucified around 45, under Alexandrer-Tiberias, who succeded Caspius Fadus (responsible for the execution several months earlier of Theudas/Thomas) as procurator of Judea.

The first Jacob, a Zealot, was doubled by another, either Nazarene or Ebionite. The Talmud and a midrash set themselves against a Christian Jew named Jacob of Kepher Schanya (or Maia Simai), who was accused of contesting the orthodox rituals prescribed by Deuteronomy. Interrogating Rabbi Eliezer on a point of doctrine, he was invited to answer and advance an interpretation drawn from Micah (2, 7), which emphasized the solicitude of God in the interests of men. Eliezer rallied to Jacob’s explication and thus drew upon himself the reproach of complacency with respect to Nazarenism.

Simon-Peter

Named governor of Bythinia in 111, Pliny the Younger solicited directives from Emperor Trajan on the conduct to adopt with respect to the chrestianoi, whose behaviors had aroused unfavorable reactions among the inhabitants (Letters X, 96–97). Oscar Cullmann has shown that the incriminated Christian sect was that of the Elchasaites, whose doctrine synthesized the teachings of Nazarenism and Ebionism, if not other Messianistic sects.[179] Their ideas were expressed in an ensemble of texts that were revised many times and for a long time were held as orthodox by virtue of Clement’s name, under whom they had been organized. Indeed, Clement (the “Soft”) — a translation of Zachea from the Bible — passed as the third Pope of Rome in the official histories of Catholicism. Rejected much later by the Church, these writings would be re-baptized Pseudo-Clementines by the historians who were, all things considered, not eager to deny the aberrant conjecture concerning the epoch in which this Roman pontificate lived.

Under the name of Clement, a fictive person invented by Ireneaus and consecrated by Eusebius,[180] the Pope of Rome and successor to Peter, a text that distinguished three states was thus propagated. The Homelies [of Peter] or the Epistle of Clement to Jacob proposed the Greek revision of an old midrash placed under the name of Zachea. A Greek development, called the Anagnossos, was translated and revised under the title Recognitiones (“Recognitions”) by Rufin, a notorious forger and censor of the works of Origen. Finally, the Epithome represents the Catholic version (amputated from the text of the Homelies), which would reappear much later under the title Summary of the Predictions of Peter by Clement.

The Hebraic source has disappeared, but the primitive kernel, extracted by Cullmann, explicitly reveals the central theme of the speculations advanced by the author: “From the true prophet and the intelligence of the law according to the teachings of the Mosaic tradition.” Cullmann summarizes it thus:

The world with its sins and errors is compared to a house that is filled with smoke. The men who find themselves inside search in vain for the truth, which doesn’t know how to enter. Only the true prophet, by opening the door, can give it to them. The prophet is the Christ, entered for the first time into the world in the person of Adam, anointed by the sap of the tree of life. For all beings God made a prototype: for the angels, an angel; for the spirits a spirit; for men a man who is Adam-Jesus. Adam is without sin, despite certain mendacious passages in the Scriptures. Adam, the true prophet, announced the world to come. By contrast, Eve, who was inferior to him as the moon is inferior to the sun, was custodian of the present world as the prototype of the prophets born from women, whereas Adam was the ‘Son of Man.’ The feminine principle leads the men of the first generation astray from the road of truth. Their depravity manifests itself especially in the practice of sacrifices. But since the beginning of the world, the true prophet hasn’t ceased to travel through the centuries, changing name and form. He was incarnated in Henoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. Moses renewed the eternal law that Adam had already promulgated, but, at the same time, by authorizing sacrifices, Moses made — to the hardening of the Jews — a concession that placed a curb on the most serious excesses: sacrifices must be offered to God only, and in a unique place. But this permission was only provisional. The true prophet finally reaches his apparent repose in the Christ. He puts an end to sacrifices and replaces them with baptism. Also, during the Jewish War, only the baptists were saved. Before dying, the true prophet chose twelve apostles, and, in the manner of Moses, charged 72 doctors of the law with transmitting the truth. By abolishing sacrifices, the Christ doesn’t abolish the law, but that which was not part of the primitive law. He announces that, until the heavens and the earth have passed, not an iota or a trait of the Law will fall.[181]

The author (or authors) of the Homelies inscribed themselves in the reformist current that was more or less critical of the biblical texts and Mosaic law. They not only eliminated the prophets who represented feminine principles, but also certain important parts of the Pentateuch. Of course, the Elchasaites, in conformity with the Essenian matrix, rejected the sacrifices of the Temple. “When the Law was put in writing, it was subjected to a certain number of additions that contained errors against the unique God” (Homelies, II, 38). This agrument recalls those of the Dunstanites or Dositheans. Jacob, their prophet, mytically presided with the authority of a church to which Peter himself was obliged to render an account.

As far as the defense of the unique God, it inscribed itself in the polemic of the two Gods and their respective natures. Was it necessary in 140, in the manner of Marcion, and perhaps in that of Saul, enemy of the Elchasaites, to postulate the existence of a Good and Christian God radically different from YHWH, the creator-god of a bad world, a bloody God who betrayed his people, a Demiurge who was master of a deplorable universe? Or rallying to the Elchasaite thesis, from which would in fact be born the God of Ireneaus, Tertullien and then the Catholics and the Protestants: “God kills with his left hand, that is to say, through the ministry of the Bad that, by temperment, takes pleasure in tormenting the impious. But he saves and makes good with his right hand, that is to say, through the ministry of the Good, which was created for rejoicing in the heaping up of good works by the just and saving them” (Homelies, XX, 3)?

Finally, the Elchasaites, having entered into the general quarrel about the “true messiah,” were perhaps the first to produce — with Saul/Paul and Satornil — the ecumenical name Joshua/Jesus.

In the manner of the various Christianities of the first two centuries, the Elchasaites’ conception of the Messiah was that of the angelos-christos. He had been created like one of the archangels — in the same way that Michael is also Melchitsedeq. “To all beings, God gave a prototype: to angels an angel, to the spirits a spirit, to men a man who was Adam-Jesus. Adam was without sin, despite certain mendacious passages in the Scriptures.”[182]

Elchasaite Christianity believed in the successive reincarnations of the Messiah, who had “since the origin of the world changed his form and name, and thus reappears ceaselessly and ceaselessly in the world” (Homelies, III, 10).

No doubt he is manifested by the voice of Elchasai as he prophesized a half-century later through the mouth of Montanus in the popular Christianity of the New Prophecy, born in Phyrgia, in the immediate neighborhood of the Bythinia of Pliny and the Elchasaites.

But the means of preventing other enlightened ones from obeying the revelation of the Messiah? The two great enemies of Elchasaitism — much like those of Montanism and Tertullien — also [with]held the message of the Christ.

Cullmann did not detect in the primitive text of the Homleies a charge made against Marcion, which was refuted instead by a subsequent copyist who revised the text. On the other hand, as Baur has demonstrated, the hostility manifested with respect to Simon the “Magician” in fact aimed at Saul/Paul, held to be a false prophet.

Nevertheless, the authors of the Homelies did not know any of the letters by Paul, nor the text of the New Testament invested by Marcion. They simply preached the good news, a gospel, taking exception to that of Saul, the founder of competing churches.

According to the Homelies (II, 17), “[first there is] the gospel of the lie, preached by the seducer, then comes the gospel of truth, after the destruction of the holy place.”

Which holy place? Jerusalem and the Temple? But Essenism never ceased demanding the annihilation of the city consecrated to the “impious priest.” Isn’t it rather a matter of Qumran, or Damascus, that is to say, DMS, the sanctuary, towards which Paul traveled, according to this legend, when he had [received] the revelation of the Messiah? (Unless the allusion is to after 135.)

If Saul/Paul is treated as a false witness to the Savior, his notes stigmatize his adversaries as “false brothers.” Between the different communities invested with the divine message, harmony decidedly did not reign.

Towards the end of the Second Century and more surely in the Fourth Century, the monarchal churches — aiming to reconcile themselves with the good graces of imperial power — would efface from their histories the divergences between the partisans of Jacob and Peter and the disciples of Saul/Paul. Simon-Peter and Paul, finally reconciled, would sit as patron-saints of Rome, in which they had never set their feet.

Nevertheless, the hatred for the “impostor” would never completely disappear from the disparagement of the Christian edifice by Catholicism. A manuscript discovered by Schlomo Pines, which illustrates the opinions of a Jewish community from Syria in the Fifth Century, accuses Paul of Tarse with having falsified the teachings of the Messiah. The false prophet rejected the Torah with the intent of attracting to himself the favors of Rome, and of acquiring power and influence, all for his own profit. Flattering the anti-Semitism of the Romans, he would be the true one responsible for the destruction of the Temple in 70. And the text, caught up in the polemical whirlpool of the Fifth Century — an epoch in which the Church invented the legend of “Paul, apostle to the gentiles,” winning over the Empire to Christian convictions — rebels against the idea: “His Christianity is only pure Romanism; rather than converting the Romans into Christians, he converted the Christians into Romans.”[183]

Elsewhere the manuscript denounces the impostures and contradictions of the canonical gospels and only accords credit to the original Gospel, drafted in Hebrew. The community, claiming the authority of Jacob and Peter for itself exclusively, would be maintained up until the Twentieth Century, according to the Jewish philosopher Saadia Gaon.

Perhaps it was from the same milieu that came a kind of “novel about Paul” that thrashed the official novel of the Acts of the Apostles. Epiphany of Salamine (438–496) echoed it in his Panarion (30, 16, 6–9):

They affirmed that he was Greek. According to them, he went to Jerusalem and, after having lived there a certain amount of time, he gave in to an inextinguishable passion for the daughter of the priest. It was for this reason that he was proselytized and circumcised. But when he was shown out by the young woman, he was so enraged that he committed libels against circumcision, the Sabbath and the Law.

• Chapter 11 : 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 historical truth — arrogated for itself a Hellenic genesis propagated by the myth of Paul, “apostle to the Gentiles.” And today, many historians still brazenly ratify the act of birth from Greek origins.

Marcion’s talent was that of a businessman. Due to the events of his time, he understood that Christianity renounced any possible future if it didn’t break all ties with Judaism, which was disapproved of in the Greco-Roman world because of the endemic state of insurrection in Palestine and [the cities of] the Diaspora.

In 115, the Jews destroyed the temple of Zeus in Cyrene. An agitator named Luknas or Andre (a name annexed by the apostolic legends) took power and was acclaimed King of the Jews. Andre called for the destruction of all the monuments of idolatry before the arrival of the Day of the Savior. The rumor was propagated that insurgents ate their enemies and bathed [s’oignent] in their blood. The massacre of non-Jews struck good Greek and Roman consciences with horror; one possessed a letter — emanating from the mother of a general sent to put down the rioters — in which she prayed that her son would not be “roasted by the Jews.” One knows how the violent acts of tumults of this type nourished — over the course of two thousand years of religious criminality — the grievances of Catholic, Protestant, Byzantine and atheist mobs that unleashed their pogroms against peaceful ghettos.

The same year, the insurrection of the Jews of Alexandria spread to the Delta and Thebaide, and gained in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia and Chypre. In their holy war against the goyim, the Jews destroyed Salamine. Around 117, Trajan moved to end the revolts. Ten thousand Jews were executed.[202]

Nevertheless, Simeon Bar Kochba took up arms in 132 and fought against Rome. In 135, he was beaten and killed in his fortress at Bethar. The Jewish nation was banned by Greco-Roman “civilization,” in which nobility of thought so easily accommodated itself to the circus games.

Well before the new insurrection, the Judeo-Christians had — unlike the Essenes of the First Century — distanced themselves from the holy war. They refused to give their cooperation to the Messiah Bar Kochba: one of their letters condemned the attitude of the “Galileans.” Thenceforth, the Christians would accentuate what separated them from the Jews: the profession of pacifist faith; nonviolence; the virtue of sacrifice; the rejection of the Jewish ritual observances and circumcision (all the more because Hadrian, basing himself on the Roman law that prohibited corporeal mutilations, formally prohibited it).

After 135, the persecution pitilessly struck the Jewish communities. Rabbi Hannaniah was burned alive; Rabbi Akiba was skinned alive. In his Contra Celsum, Origen would recall the great massacres of the “circumcised.” Even if this Christian refused the cult of idols and abstained from offering sacrifices to the Emperor, he loudly claimed his Greek or Roman citizenship and proclaimed his difference from the Jews in an absolute manner.

The anti-Judaic reforms of Marcion survived in the disorder propagated by the political embrace at the heart of the Judeo-Christian churches that were prey to struggles for influence. They advocated an ecclesiatical politics centered upon Rome and strong from its rupture with “Jewry.” The rare biographical elements confirm this.

Marcion would have been born in the last years of the First Century in Sinope, on the Pont Euxin (around 95 or 100, according to Harnack[203]).

Marcion soon entered into conflict with the Judeo-Christian communities. His father, the Episcope of an Ekklesia, hunted him for having supported opinions hostile to the faith that were, no doubt, inspired by Saul and his disciples. Marcion went to Asia Minor, where he clashed with the local Christian churches, which appear to have been Elchasaite.

A rich ship-owner, Marcion had the practical intelligence of a businessman. His rationality, seduced by Greek philosophy, felt repugnance for the analogic spirit of the midrashim and the play of Hebrew words that the Greek translations reduced to absurdities. The bloody and inhuman character of the biblical texts furnished him an argument that was opportunely confirmed by the violence of the Jewish revolts. In place of the larval dualism of the Esseno-Christians, Marcion substituted the irreconcilable character of YHWH, God-creator of a world of war and misery, and a Good God to whom the schools of Jacob, Simon-Cephas, Thomas, Clement and Saul/Paul referred.

Marcion bet upon anti-Judaism, hostility for the people of the Temple, for Jerusalem, for the Pharisians and for the murderers of the Master of Justice. He supported his doctrine with the help of peremptory reasons, promises of a beautiful future in the Church, but, at the moment of struggle, he insulted the voluntary poverty of the communities: he offered 200,000 sesterces to the Roman Churches so as to subject them to his authority, with an eye on an international federation.

Marcion was the first to comprehend that Rome, constituting the center of a civilization that was proposed as an example for the whole world, was the axis of gravitation from which Christianity, purged of its barbarity, hoped to radiate a “universal” glory (the word catholicon comes into play towards the end of the Second Century and was popularized in the Fifth. Tertullien would avow: “The Hermetic tradition of Marcion has filled the universe.”)

Around 140, in the Roman city in which the churches — still Judeo-Christian — were torn by rivalries for power (according to the contemporary novel by Hermas, The Pastor), Marcion met Cerdan, disciple of Satornil of Antioch. He composed two works, which were lost or destroyed by the Church.

The Apostolicon is nothing other than a compilation of letters attributed to Saul, Romanized into Paulus. The Evangelion expounds the Good News, the unique Gospel, that of Paul, to which both the Marcionites and the anti-Marcionites referred. Basing himself on the letters that he re-copied and rewrote by stripping them of their Semitisms, Marcion thus drafted the evangelical message of Paul.

Resch believes the canonical Gospel attributed to Mark to be the work of Marcion, which was then corrected by the anti-Marcionites.[204] He notes that Jesus’ childhood is not mentioned in it, that the staging of the remarks or logia doesn’t break with the conception of an angelos-christos incarnated in a being of wisdom, that is, an emanation of the Sophia.

In the reaction against Marcion, anti-Marcionite prologues would be added to the Gospels attributed to Mark, Luke and Matthew. Conceived to combat the idea of the Angel-Messiah, they borrowed the traits of a historical Roman person for the allegorical material. The Montanist propagandistic accounts of Pilate, Paul and Peter (the Gospel of Nicodeme, the Acts of Paul and Thecle, the Apocalypse of Peter, etc) contributed to the eventful decor of the drama.

Marcion died around 165, after an adventurous life, in which the journeys of Paul probably represent the antedated marking out [jalonnement]. Did he not derive his apostolic legitimacy, everywhere that he presented himself, on the simple assertion that Paul was present several generations previously?

His disciple Apelle followed his work to Rome and Alexandria. He demonstrated the absurdity of the biblical texts in his Syllogisms (lost). He seemed, however, to have broken with the Marcionite doctrine of the two Gods. He admitted only one, a good one, the creator of the angelic world, from which would escape a perverse angel, the Demiurge that inclined all things towards evil. Apelle resembled the Christianity of the New Prophecy: he gave to Jesus not a simple human appearance, but a real body and the mission to correct the unfortunate work of the Demiurge. His Revelations (lost, if it is in fact not the apocalypse of Paul or Peter) re-transcribed the visions of a prophetess called Philomena. A polemic would oppose her to Rhodon, disciple of Tatian.

• Chapter 12 : The Inventors of a Christian Theology: Basilides, Valentine, Ptolemy

Chapter 12: The Inventors of a Christian Theology: Basilides, Valentine, Ptolemy

In the crucible of Alexandria, the expectation of a Savior who would untangle the obscure roads of the destiny of humanity produced such disparate developments as ancient Egyptian wisdom, Greek thought, eastern magic and the Hebrew myths.

From opposite directions, Philo of Alexandria and Simon of Samaria projected the shadow of an absent person who carved into Judeo-Christian asceticism the aspiration of man to save himself.

Against Nazarenism and Elchasaitism, which were forms of Essenism that had been offered up to Greek modernity, there was the will to emancipate oneself from the Gods, which was celebrated by men such as Lucrecius of Rome, Simon of Samaria, Carpocratus of Alexandria and his son, Epiphane. Between these two extremes, various schools, sects, secret or Hermetic societies and inner circles of magicians and sorcerers intermingled and cooked up (for their own uses and according to the rules of existence that they advocated) an astonishing luxuriance of concepts, visions and representations in which the internal and external worlds were coupled (beyond or on this side of the best and the worst) by the most extravagant imaginations.

Here was born — in the daily interpretations of the infernal and paradisical universes, which were rhythmed by riots, pogroms and social struggles — a theology that successive pruning, rational readjustments and polemical reasoning would transform into a dogmatic edifice shakily built upon nebulous foundations [assises], which the Church would not cease to sure up through the combined action of bribed thinkers and State terrorism.

When modern historians refuse to follow Eusebius of Cesarea, for whom the Catholic Church had illuminated the world from the beginning of the Christian era, thereby arousing the envy of Satan and his henchmen,(*) perhaps they are attempting to extract from the various philosophical and moral systems that were hastily assembled under the heading of “gnosis” the ideas and opinions from which the dogmatic writings of the New Testament and the theses of Nicaea were born.

(*) “The Churches had already illuminated the whole world, such as the radiant stars and the faith in our Lord and Savior that flourishes in all humanity, when the devil, who is the enemy of good and truth and does not cease to hamper the salvation of men, turned all of his artifices against the Church [...] He left no stone unturned in his attempts to make the impostors and the seducers, who had usurped the name of our religion, fail into the abyss of corruption [along with] the faithful who were attracted to them ... “ (Eusebius of Cesarea, Ecclesiastic History, IV, 7).

Basilides Of Alexandria

To this day, all we know of Basilides comes from Eusebius’s diatribes, which take into account an ancient refutation made to a certain Agrippa Caster by Irenaeus, who was so hostile to Valentine that he stuffed all the Gnostics into his sack of malice towards his adversaries, that is to say, into the Elenchos, whose author is determined to demonstrate that gnosis came from Greek philosophy.

What can one divine of Basilides’ existence? A contemporary of Carpocratus, he led a Pythagorean school — he conserved Pythagoras’ theory of metempsychosis — that was adapted to the tastes of the time in Alexandria. Basilide’s renown peaked around 125 or 135. His son Isidore continued his teachings.

Basilides’ syncretism encompassed the Judaic elements of Elchasaitism and Naassenism, perhaps due to Philo’s influence.

Basilides referred to Barkabbas and Barkoph, the presumed sons of Noah and brothers of the Noria attested to in Naassene, Sethian and Barbelite writings. Clement of Alexandria (who lived between 150 and 215) took him to be the master of a certain Glauius, “disciple of Peter,” that is to say, an Elchasaite or Nazarene Christian. Many of his moral considerations would later enter into the remarks that the Gospels attributed to Luke and Matthew would attribute to Jesus.

Basilides’ morality attempted to trace, through a just moderation, a median route between the extreme asceticism of the Judeo-Christians and the sexual liberty of Carpocratus and the Barbelites. He didn’t fail to evoke Pelagius’s thesis. Nothing establishes whether the adversary of Augustin [actually] knew the Alexandrian philosopher.

Basilides supposed than man had a will to perfection that was apt to assure his salvation as a spiritual being. According to the relation of each to his sexual impulses, Basilide distinguished three categories of individuals: those who have no attraction to women, the eunuchs and the men of desire whose merit was vanguishing their passions, thereby permitting the triumph of the spirit over the body:

Certain men have an innate natural aversion to women; if they conduct themselves in conformity with this natural disposition (through abstention from sexual relations), they will do well not to marry. They are eunuchs from birth. The forced eunuchs, the ascetics of the trestle who only dominate themselves so as to attract praise, are those who mutilate themselves and have been rendered eunuchs by accident or by force. They are eunuchs by force and not by virtue of a rational resolution. Those who have rendered themselves eunuchs because of the eternal kingdom, have made this decision due to the natural consequences of marriage, because they dread what the preoccupation with subsistence involves.[211]

For the third category, Basilides — the enemy of an obsessive abstinence and the ferocity that it involves — extolled the virtues of intermittant relief and assuagement, submitted nevertheless to the regulations of the will and the spirit:

Do not throw your soul in the fire by resisting the fear of lacking continence day and night, because a soul that exhausts itself in an uninterrupted resistance cuts itself off from hope. Thus, take for yourself — as I have told you quite clearly — a woman of temperment, so as to not be diverted from the grace of God. And when you have extinguished the fire of desire through the seminal effusion, pray in good conscience. But if (...) you desire not to act perfectly in the future, but simply so as not to fall, get married. (*) However, if such [a man] is young or poor or weak, and follows the counsel of the Master, he should not get married. He should not separate himself from his brother, but says: I am going to a sanctuary, nothing more can happen to me. He keeps a distrust of himself, and he says: brother, lay your hands on me so that I do not sin, and he will obtain spiritual and sensible help. It will suffice that he wants to do good for him to do so. Many times it happens that we say with our lips that we do not want to sin, whereas our thoughts persist in sinning. Such a person can not do what he would like, uniquely through fear of incurring punishment. There are in human nature things that happen by necessity and by nature, and things that are simply natural. Thus clothes are necessary as well as natural. But the pleasures of love are only natural, we are not constrained by them.[212]

(*) This remark would be reprized, no doubt in an anti-Marcionite sense, in the first Epistle to the Corinthians (7, 9), attributed to Saul/Paul: “Better to marry than to burn.”

The responsibility of the individual in the choice of a virtuous morality extends to suffering or experiencing misfortune; they are punishments for faults. The sense of guilt and the identification of nature as the source of contamination [souillure] and impurity proceeds from a Judaic vision that Christianity inherited. Even the child is guilty of power.

I say that all those who have incurred this affliction have received this good turn thanks to He who leads all with gentleness, because they have sinned, but their faults remain hidden. If in fact one had grievances against them for anything else, it would be that they do not suffer this pain in the capacity of prevaricators, for the bad actions that they have committed; they are not outrageous, like adulterers and assassins; but because they are Christians, He summons them to suffering, which consoles them, with the result that they imagine themselves not suffering. Some have incurred suffering without having sinned at all, but this is very rare. And still he doesn’t fall under the blow of suffering because a cunning power has set traps for him, but it is necessary to envision his pain as that of a child who suffers, though, apparently, it has not sinned (...) It is an advantage for the child who has not sinned or, at the very least, has not committed any sin of action, but still carries the disposition to sin within him, to fall into suffering and undergo many misfortunes; likewise, no man, even those who are perfect and have committed no sins of action, falls into suffering and suffers in the same way that the child does. He carries within himself the disposition to sin; if he has not sinned, this is because he has not had the occasion, with the result that there is no place to inscribe innocence to his credit. Whoever has the intention of committing adultery is an adulterer, even if he has not committed the act; whoever has the intention to committ murder is a murderer, even if he hasn’t executed it. It is the same with the innocent [child] of whom I spoke; when I see him suffering without having done anything evil, I say that he is bad, because he has the intention of committing sin. Either that or impute the evil to Providence. Perhaps you will not keep my words in mind and you will think to get me into trouble by misquoting me and saying: this one or that one there has sinned because he suffers; I would respond, if you permitted me to do so: he hasn’t sinned, he resembles the child who must suffer. If you insist with more vehemence, I will tell you: whatever man you show me, he will still be a man; only God is not a man. No one is free from contamination, as has been said.(*)[213]

(*) The Book of Job, 14, 4. Such ideas nourished the letters attributed to Saul/Paul.

A fragment attributed to Isidore, son of Basilides, expounds a theory that Catholicism would later adopt on the question of free will:

When you have convinced someone that the soul is not simple, that it is the force that is inherent in him that gives birth to the worst passions, the bad people can say nothing better than this: I was forced, I was pulled in, I acted despite myself, I did such an act against my will, whereas he himself has in fact inclined his desires towards evil and has not struggled against the powers of the matter that is inherent in him. We must show ourselves to be the masters of the inferior part of our natures by using our reason.

To found in the cosmos his morality of the “perfect,” the “pneumatic” or “man according to the spirit,” Basilides appealed to a cosmogony, many elements of which filtered into future theological quarrels. Leisegang justly establishes a connection between the idea of a superior God (Basilide) and the conception known under the name of Denys the Areopagite.[214]

Basilides:

There was a time in which nothing existed; this nothing was not one of the existing things but, to speak clearly, without any detour, without any kind of artifice, absolutely nothing existed. When I say, ‘existed,’ I am not affirming that the nothing ‘existed,’ but to make what I mean to say understood, to know that absolutely nothing existed.[215]

Pseudo-Denys:

We go higher, we now say that this cause (God) is neither soul, nor intelligence; that it possesses neither imagination, nor opinion, nor reason, nor intelligence; that it can neither express nor conceive; that it has neither number, nor order, nor grandeur, nor smallness, neither equality nor inequality, nor similitude; that it does not see, that it does not remain immobile nor does it die; that it neither keeps calm, nor possesses power; that is neither power nor light; that it does not live nor is it life; that it is neither essence, nor perpetuity, nor time; that it is not intelligible; that it is neither science, nor truth, nor royalty, nor wisdom, nor [the] One, nor unity, nor deity, nor good nor spirit in any sense that we might understand; neither filiation, nor paternity, nor anything that is accessible to our knowledge, nor to the knowledge of any other being; that no one knows it such as it is, and that it itself does not know any being; that it completely escapes reasoning, naming and knowing; that it is neither darkness nor light, nor error, nor truth; that it absolutely can not affirm anything nor deny anything; that when we pose affirmations or negations that apply to realities that are inferior to it, we neither affirm nor deny anything, because all affirmations remain on this side of the unique and perfect cause of all things, [and] because all negations reside on this side of the unique and perfect cause of all things, because all negations reside on this side of the transcendence of He who is naturally [simplement] stripped of all and situated beyond everything.[216]

Therefore, from this God — who is all-being and all nonbeing, and Sige, pure Silence (the disciples of Basilides were apparently required to be silent for five years) — ejaculates a seed from which three entities were born. The first was the Son of God, consubstantial with his Father, and the term used by Basilide is the famous homoousios around which the quarrel of Arianism and the break with Byzantium would be organized. The Son is thus of the same nature as his Father. The second birth was that of the pneuma, the Spirit, the flash of God plunged into matter that aspires to return to its celestial kingdom. And the third, the veritable scrapings of the divine sperm, is none other than the earth, the body, matter, fortunately clarified [eclairee] by the pneumatic, spiritual flash.

The pneuma frolicked between two spaces: the inferior cosmos, our universe, and a hypercosmos. Therefore, the pneuma, by raising itself up and believing that it attained the highest place, made itself the Lord (archon), created a son who appeared so beautiful to him that he placed him on his right. He then conceived the Ogdoade, or the eighth heaven, in which he reigned over the celestial creatures.

When the ethereal beings were ordered to rise, still issued from the Logos Spermaticos that produced the divine nothingness, a second archon was summoned to rule over the other seven heavens or Hebdomade. The archon of Hebdomade is he who spoke to Moses and identified himself with the Demiurge. His creation multiplied the material and spiritual traps that the pneumatics had to overcome to regain the Pneuma, co-regent with the Lord of Ogdoade.

In the same way that sin entered the world because the first archon claimed a power than wasn’t part of its nature, the sin of man resides in the will to power that incites him to surpass the limits of his nature.

Extreme asceticism and license depends upon sin, because they both set themselves aside from the just milieu in which Epicurean morality thrived.

Much later Irenaeus would present a version of Basilides’ theology, to which would be joined the fragments of the legend of Jesus:

From the unengendered Father, Nous was engendered first; from Nous was engendered the Logos; from the Logos Phronesis, Phronesis Sophia, Sophia and Dynamos [were engendered] the Virtues, the Powers and the Angels whom he named the first ones, and it was by them that the first heaven was created. From this came other angels who made a second heaven similar to the first. From these angels proceeded [still] others, in their turn and in the same fashion, in the image of the superior angels, and these angels formed a third heaven. From this third heaven was born a fourth, and thus there followed, in an analogous fashion, the Princes, Angels and 365 heavens. It is from this number of heavens that the year also has 365 days. The last heaven, the one that we see, is filled by the angels who made everything that is in the world. They shared the earth and all the people who are on it. Their leader is the God of the Jews. This last one, because he wanted the other people to be subjected to his people, that is to say, to the Jews, the other princes raised themselves up against him and paralyzed his plans. This was why the other people were animated by hostile sentiments with respect to his people. But having seen their corruption, the unengendered and innumerable Father sent his unique Son, Nous, who is called Christ, to deliver those who believe in him from the domination of those who made the world. He would manifest himself as a man on the earth to their people and accomplish the powers. But it wasn’t he who suffered, it was a certain Simon of Cyrene who was forced to carry his cross to its place. He was crucified by error and unconsciously, after which he was changed by Jesus so that he would be taken for him. Jesus took the form of Simon and mocked them, because he remained nearby. He was the incorporeal power and the unengendered Nous; this is why he transformed himself at will, and he thus returned to he who had sent him, mocking those who had not kept him back and he was invisible to all. Those who knew this were delivered from the Prince and Creator of this world. It isn’t the crucified one who must confess, but he who was crucified in appearance, that is to say, Jesus, who had been sent by the Father to, by this action, destroy the works of those who had made the world. Thus the one who confessed the crucified man was a slave to the power of those who created the world of bodies; on the contrary, the others were free; they knew how the unengendered Father had spared them all. But the redemption only extended to the soul, because the body can only dissolve itself in conformity with its nature... Likewise with the prophecies of their leaders who had made the world, the Law, in particular, of he who had made the people leave Egypt. Sacrifices to the gods had to be condemned and held as nothing, but one could take part in them without scruple; [one] was likewise indifferent to any action and the exercise of any voluptuousness. They likewise practiced magic, the evocation of ghosts and all of the other magic tricks; they invented all sorts of names for angels, and put some in the first heaven and some in the second, and they applied themselves to distinguishing the names, principles, angels and powers of their (...) 365 heavens. It was thus, for example, that the world to which the Savior descended and from which he ascended was called Kaulakau. In the manner of Kaulakau, he who knew all the angels and their origin became invisible and ungraspable to all the angels and the powers. Just as the Christ was unknown to all, they must not be recognized by anyone, they are invisible and unknowable to all, whereas they know all the beings and can cross them all. ‘You, who know all, but no one knows you!’ — such is their formula [...] Few people are capable of this knowledge, one in a thousand, ten in six thousand. They are no longer Jews, they say, and only Christians. (*) It is forbidden to reveal their secrets, one must keep them in silence. They determined the site of the 365 heavens as if they were mathematicians. They borrowed their theories and applied them to the particular requirements of their doctrine. Their leader is Abraxas; the numeric value of this name is 365.[217]

(*) They constituted a branch from the Esseno-Christian bush, but a Hellenized branch, different from Marcionism, although the absence of women from their cosmogony confirms their tendency towards asceticism.

Disentangled from the Christianity of the 180s, in which Irenaeus disguised the Basilideans, their syncretism suggested — due to the importance given to Abrasax and magic carvings, called abraxas — a connection to the cult of Mithras, from which the sects devoted to Joshua/Jesus borrowed the image of a solar divinity. It is probable that Basilide facilitated the exchange between Mithraism and Christianity.

The importance of magic, on the other hand, appears unquestionable. Bonner studied the talismans that bear representations of Abrasax, the angipede divinity with the head of a rooster, thus uniting the sun and the earth, light and darkness, male and female.[218]

Based on the reports concerning Abrasax and Mithras:

Jerome (*) notes that Basilides designated his all-powerful God with the magic name Abraxas; by adding the respective numerical values of each Greek letter in this name, one can obtain the number of circles that the ‘Sun’ describes in the course of a year; this is the same god as Mithras, [because] this name, although formed with different letters, totals the same numerical value:

A-B-R-A-S-A-X
1+2+100+1+60+1+200 = 365

M-I-T-H-R-A-S
40+5+10+9+100+1+200 = 365

From then on, the meaning of the 365 heavens is clear. Just as the circuit of the seven planets distinguishes seven heavens, each circle of the sun-form describes a heaven, that is to say, a spherical envelop traced [dessinee] by the circle. Therefore, each day the circle traveled is slightly different from than that of the preceding day, and it is thus that, following the Egyptian calculations, which count months of thirty days each, there are three-hundred-sixty circles or heavens. The five other circles echo the planets, except for the sun and the moon, which are assigned particular roles, and also echo the leap [intercalaire] week of five days, which is the same thing, since the days of the week carry the names of the planets. The sun is Helios, and Mithras-Abraxas is the Archon who embraces the totality of the solar circle as a unity. Mithras and Helios are in a father-son relationship. Mithras is the Great God; Helios is his Logos, thanks to which he developed himself, created the world; and he played the role of mediator between man and God. He had the same function as the Christos-Logos; see the ‘liturgy of Mithras’ and the speech of Emperor Julian about King Helios.[219]

(*) Jerome, In Amos III (P.L., XXV, col. 1018 D).

According to Basilides, the Great Archon had a son, the Christ of Ogdoade. The Hebdomade then had his Archon and he, in his turn, [had] a son, also a Christ, the solar Christ, the simultaneously divine and human counterpart to the superior Christ of the Ogdoade.

Thus Abrasax became the prototype of the Christos-Helios and the time that he governs.

Abraxas, like Mithras, designates the God who unites in himself the power of the seven planets, because his name is composed of seven letters. These seven letters have the total value of 365; it follows that he contains within him 365 partial or subaltern gods. As temporal grandeur, he contains everything in a year or each year that the world sees; he is the Eon, the Eternity. Each partial god presides over one day. An echo of this belief subsisted in the calendar of the Catholic Church, in which each day carries the name of a saint, the king of that day. The Christian gods had simply taken the place of the pagan gods.[220]

Valentine And The Valentinians

In a letter to the consul Servianus, Emperor Hadrian (117–138) gave an idea of the confusion of messianic sects then called “Christian”:

Hadrian Augustus to the consul Servianus, salut! I have found in Egypt, about which you boasted to me, only a fundamentally frivolous nation, inconstant, at the beck-and-call of the first quack [cancan] who comes along. The adorers of Serapis are Christians and those who call themselves Christian bishops adore Serapis. It is impossible to find in Egypt an archisynagogue, a Samaritan or a Christian priest who is not an astrologist, a forecaster or a charlatan as well. When the patriarch comes to Egypt, some implore him to adore Serapis, others to adore the Christ. They only have a single God. He is adored by Christians, Jews and all the other peoples.[221]

It was from the microcosm of Alexandria that Valentine came; along with Philo and Basilides, he was the father of speculative theology. Evading the troubles and repressions of the last war of the Jews, he went to Rome, where he stayed from 136 to 140; [while there] he crossed paths with the Judeo-Christians, whom the Pastor of Hermas deplored for their dissension; Marcion and his Pauline Churches; the disciples of Carpocratus, for whom hedonism traced out the road of salvation; and the mobs of bishops and leaders of Christian sects of uncertain doctrines, satisfying their appetites for domination everywhere possible.

A brilliant rhetorician, a poet, and the author of letters and essays, Valentine only shared with Christianity a certain propensity to asceticism and references to a redeemer, the Christ-Logos or a spiritual entity charged with guiding souls towards the kingdom of the ineffable and good God. He was the author of the treatise Of the Three Natures (lost) and the Gospel of Truth, discovered at Nag-Hammadi.

Did Valentine prophesize in the manner of Elchasai or, twenty years later, Montanus, Priscilla and Maximilia, the initiators of the New Prophecy? Nothing permits one to be assured; but note the importance accorded to ecstasy in a later report made by Epiphanius of Salamis:

An indestructable spirit, I salute the indestructables. I announce to you unspeakable mysteries, inexpressible and supra-celestial, which can not grasp the Powers, nor the Dominations, nor the subordinated Forces, nor any composed being, but which are only manifested in the thought of the Immutable (Panarion, XXXI, 5, 1–2).

The Valentinian theological system developed the cosmogenesis of Basilides into a complexity that evokes tortuous scholastic discourse. According to the Gospel of Truth, the divine world or Plerome (which expresses well the modern term “totality”) is founded on a duality: the Ineffable, the male principle, and Silence, the female principle. From their coupling was born a second duality and from it [came] a quaternary principle, the whole forming the Ogdoade (2+2+4=8). There were eleven couples of Eons (entities, powers, forces), men and women designed this amorous adventure of creation, which was as foreign to Judaism as it was to Catholicism. The total was 8 + 22, that is 30 Eons, of which the last one, the youngest, is none other than Sophia. Relegated to the place furthest away from the primordial duality, Sophia is engrossed with desire and revolt, and engenders the Demiurge, the God of Genesis and the world.

By striving to separate its desire from the obscurity that reigns beyond the Plerome, Sophia abandons in flesh a fragment of spirit and soul. So as to save the spirit imprisoned in matter, the celestial Messiah sends the Christ Jesus to teach men the nature and destiny of their souls, with the result that, crossing the threshold of death, he returns to his place of origin.

Platonism, which is inherent in the idea of a world that imperfectly reflects the primordial Eon, explains through which bias Valentine’s theology prefigured the simplified and desexualized version of Catholic dogma, but also announced the quibbles of the theologians from Arianism to Jansenism.

As for Jesus, if he is no longer Joshua — because Valentine’s Christianity wanted to be purely Greek — then he remains the descendant of Sophia, pneuma or Spirit, here designated by the term Logos.

In a poem, Valentine illustrated another remark, which the Elenchos [mistakenly] ascribed to him (VI, 42, 2): “Valentine claims that he saw a new-born, he asked it who he was; the baby responded that he was the Logos.” This manner of proceeding, on the part of the author of the Elenchos, illustrates well the anecdotal reduction of a philosophical discourse. Here is the poem, retranscibed by the Elenchos (VI, 36, 7):

I see in the ether everything mixed in the pneuma,
I see in the spirit the pneuma carrying the totality:
The flesh suspended by the soul,
The soul carried away by the air,
The air suspended from the ether,
The fruits coming from the abyss,
A small child emerging from the matrix.

It was in reaction against such conceptions that the gospels recounted the childhood of Jesus, his escapades, and his family. They principally derived from popular Christianity, a Christianity that rejected the abstractions and elitism of the Valentinians, because they required exemplary legends to support their martrys and faith, pistis. The New Prophecy, carrying even further the simplicity of Elchasaitism, condemned speculations about the Savior, Sophia, the Good God and the bad world, which were incomprehensible to the humble people. In his Stromates (II, 3), Clement of Alexandria wasn’t deceived when he wrote: “The Valentinians attribute to us the faith of the simple people; as for them, they claim to possess gnosis, because they are saved by nature, they have the advantage of superior semen; they say that this gnosis is extremely far from faith; according to them the pneumatic is separate from the psychic.”

Clement was also a philosopher but, in the manner of Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyon, he adhered (if not directly) to the New Prophecy, at least to the fervent movement that it inspired and that would only later alienate his excessive taste for martyrdom and aggressive puritanism. Irenaeus would take up the pen against “so-called gnosis,” while Clement identified gnosis with the Christian faith, but both chose, against a Hellenization of Christianity that assimilated it little by little into a renewal of Greek philosophy, the social and nonviolent embrace — in the churches and under the authority of the bishops — of poor and rich people, for whom the mythical and ecumenical spirit described a Jesus for the first time stripped of his angelism and portayed as an agitator: the one who chased the merchants from the Temple, healed the unfortunate, incurred the betrayal of his friends, submitted to an infamous death and resuscitated in glory in the kingdom of the heavens, according to the hopes of the Montanist martyrs. (Clement would write a homely on the question Which rich man can be saved? in which he extolled the collaboration of the classes in the detachment from the goods of this world. An echo of this would be retained by the composition of the Gospel attributed to Matthew towards the end of the Second Century.)

Nevertheless, the future theological corpus of the Church would come from Valentine. The Tripartite Treatise discovered at Nag-Hammadi reveals a trinitary conception of God, composed of the Father, the Son and the Ekklesia (in the sense of “mystical communities of the faithful” illustrated by Hermas). According to Tertullian, the same conception can be found in the works of Heracleon, a disciple of Valentine. Theodotus, also a Valentinian, spoke of the Father, the Son and the Pneuma-Spirit, more than a century and a half before Nicaea.

The Treatise on the Resurrection (Nag-Hammadi), which is of Valentinian origin, supports a doctrine according to which “the resurrection of the believer has already happened” and that exhorted the Christians to live like they had already been resurrected. The New Prophecy fought against a similar assertion and two letters placed with impugnity under the name of Paul, the Epistles to Timothy, undertook to combat the Valentinian argument.

The pneumatics or Perfect Ones thus attempted to accede to the state of pure spirit. Their conception of Jesus responded to their aspirations, as the son of a carpenter, the friend of the poor, corresponded to the populism of Montan.

According to Clement,[222] the Valentinians believed that Jesus “ate and drank, but did not evacuate. The power of his continence was such that food did not spoil in him, because there was no corruption in him.” Perhaps the Barbelites and the Carpocratics were not wrong to make fun of such a concordance between spiritual asceticism and constipation.

The uncorruptable Logos thus becomes the principle of eternity: “You are immortal since the beginning, you are children of eternal life, and you want to experience death so as to exhaust it and dissolve it, and death will die in you and through you. Because when you dissolve the Cosmos without being dissolved yourself, you dominate creation and all corruption.”[223] Admirable remarks, if they did not involve a perspective that is radically hostile to life, because it implies a spiritualization in which the body and its desires are reduced to precisely nothing.

Valentinianism did not exclude a relationship with Hermeticism, especially as developed by Mark. A certain Monoime — in all probability a symbolic name, like Allogene or Autogene — based himself on the iota of Iesou and was inspired by Plato and Pythagoras when he argued, as quoted by the Elenchos (VIII, 14): “The roots, the octahedron, the tetrahedron and all similar figures of which fire, air, water and earth are composed, come from the numbers enclosed in the simple stroke [trait] of the iota, which is the Perfect Son of the Perfect Man.” Such doctrines would flourish among the doctors of Kaballah and among the learned men of the Renaissance, such as Marsile Ficin. According themselves poorly with the political will of the bishops and their flocks to push Jesus toward the steps of the Imperial Palace, they only encountered condemnation and scorn.

Ptolemy

Ptolemy occupies a particular position in the Valentinian school. He is known through a Letter to Flora that Epiphanius retranscribed in his Panarion, not without garnishing it with quotations from the canonical Gospels with the care of a Catholic to ratify the ancient age of a dogma that distorted [the thought of] the perverse and heretical Ptolemy.

Confronted with the variety of doctrines that composed Christianity in the second half of the Second Century, Flora had lost the light of the Spirit. Marcionism and anti-Marcionism were then agitating the Christian, Jewish and Greco-Roman milieus.

Ptolemy esteemed himself so much better prepared to suggest a philosophical surpassing of the two positions that he confessed his past adherence to Marcionism: “Me, who had been gratified from the knowledge of the two Gods.”[224]

More than two centuries after the birth of Essenism, the problem of Mosaic law continued to nourish speculations in the milieus preoccupied with the choice of a religious route.

My dear sister Flora. Until now, few people have understood the Law given by Moses, because they did not exactly know the legislator, nor his commandments. This will be quite clear to you, I think, when you have understood the contradictory opinions running within it. Some say that it was given by God the Father; others, on the opposite side, maintain that it was established by the Adversary of God, the corruptor-devil, in the same way that they also attribute to him the creation of the world, affirming that it is he who is the Father and the creator of this universe. Both positions are entirely in error, mutually contradictory and neither of the two camps have grasped the truth of the subject.[225]

Ptolemy distinguished three iterations [etats] in Mosaic Law: a Law of God, a Law of the Jews, and a revision according to the Spirit (the pneuma), which founded Christianity.

The Law of God, pure and free of all inferior alloy, is the Decalogue, the ten commandments divided into two tablets, which prohibit what is necessary to avoid and commands what must be done; these commandments, no doubt pure, were still imperfect and clamored for completion by the Savior.

The Law mixed with Injustice was given for vengeance and talion against those who committed injustice and ordained the tearing out of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and to punish murder with murder. Because he who commits an injustice in the second place isn’t less injust than the first; there is only a difference in the order, the work is the same. Moreover, the commandment is and remains just, decreed because of the weakness of the addressees in the case of a transgression of the pure Law. It only hinders he who is not in accord with nature nor with the goodness of the Father of All. Perhaps this presciption responds to its goal, but it only explains itself through a necessity. Because he who does not want a single murder be committed by decreeing ‘You will not kill at all,’ and who ordered the killing of a murderer in reprisal, has given a second law; and by distinguishing two kinds of murderers, he who has prohibited all murder hasn’t seen that he has been devoured by necessity. This is why the Son sent into the world by God abrogated this part of the Law, in full knowledge that it was also the Law of God; because he placed it in the Old Testament, along with the other commandments, when he said: ’God said: He who curses his father and mother must be killed.’

Finally, there is the typical part of the Law, instituted in the image of the pneumatic laws par excellence: I understand it to be the presciption relative to sacrifices, circumcision, the Sabbath, fasting, Easter, unleavened bread, etc. All these practices, being only images and symbols, have received another meaning, the truth manifested for the first time. They have been abolished in outward form and their corporeal application, but they have been restored in their pneumatic meaning; the words remain the same, [but] their content has changed. Thus the Savior ordered us to offer sacrifices, not sacrifices of animals bereft of reason or aroma, but sacrifices of hymns, praises, acts of grace, charity and benevolence towards the next person. Likewise, we are to practice circumcision, not that of the corporeal foreskin, but that of the pneumatic heart. The Savior requires fasting, not corporeal fasting, but pneumatic fasting, which consists in abstaining from all evil. We nevertheless observe outward fasting, because it can be of some profit to the soul, if it is practiced with discernment, if one doesn’t observe it so as to imitate others or by routine or because it is the day of fasting, as if a day could be fixed for that. One practices it at the same time that one recalls true fasting, so that those who still can not observe this practice have the reminiscence, thanks to outward fasting. Likewise, the Easter lamb and the unleavened bread are images, as displayed by the Apostle Paul. ‘The Christ, our Easter, has been immolated,’ he says, and ‘so that you know what is unleavened; do not participate in the leaven (what you call leaven is evil), but so that you know a new dough.’

Thus, the part that is uncontestably the Law of God is divided into three parts. One was accomplished by the Savior, because the commandments — ‘you will not kill at all, you will not commit adultery, you will not make false oaths’ — are included in the defense against anger, coveting, and swearing. The second part was totally abolished. The commandment ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ which is mixed with injustice and itself contains a work of injustice, was abolished by the contrary commandments of the Savior, because the contraries were mutually exclusive.

Finally, it [the Law of God] divides into a part that is transposed and transformed from the corporeal to the pneumatic; the symbolic part that is given to the image of the laws par excellence. Because the images and symbols that represent other things have a value as long as the truth does not appear; now that the truth is here, one must make works of the truth, not works of the image. This is also what the Apostle Paul and his disciples displayed; they alluded to the symbolic part, as I have said, with respect to the image of Easter and the unleavened bread, and to the part of the Law mixed with injustice, when he said: ‘The Law of the Commandments has become obsolete through a new teaching’ (Ephesians, 2, 15); and he alluded to the part not mixed with evil when he said: ‘The Law is holy and the Commandments are holy, just and good.’[226]

If these citations from Paul participated more in Judeo-Christian revisionism than in the revisionism of Marcion, the end of the letter sketches out a return to monotheism. Thanks to the instigation of Augustin of Hippone and his thesis of the weakness of man, Catholicism would develop the Ptolemian explication of the evil introduced into the world.

As much as this is possible in a short space, I think I have sufficiently shown you the intrusion into the Law of a legislation of human origin, as well as the division of the Law of God itself into three parts. It remains for me to say what is good about this God who established the Law. But this as well I believe I have already shown you by what preceded, if you were paying attention. Because if this Law was not instituted by the perfect God himself, as I have said, nor by the devil (which isn’t even permitted to say), then the legislator must be a third, in addition to the others. It is the Demiurge and the creator of this whole world and all that it contains. It is different from the other two essences, an intermediary between the two; one rightly gives to it the name of Intermediary. And if the perfect God is good by essence, which is true — because our Savior said that there is only one good God, his Father, whom he manifests — and if the God of contrary essence is bad, wicked and characterized by injustice, then the one who stands between the two, being neither good, nor bad, nor injust, can be called just, because he judges in conformity with justice. On the one hand, this God would be inferior to the perfect God, beneath his justice, since he is engendered and not unengendered (a single one is unengendered, the Father from whom all things come, because all things depend on him, each in their own way); on the other hand, he would be greater and more powerful than the Adversary. He would thus be, by nature, of a different essence and a different nature than the essence of the two others. The essence of the Adversary is corruption and darkness — because it is material and of multiple forms — whereas the unengendered essence of the All is uncorruptable and light itself, simple and homogenuous. The essence of the Demiurge gives birth to a double virtue, but it is only, in itself, the image of the Good God. Now, do not worry about how the unique and simple principle of all things (which we confess and we believe), how an unengendered, uncorruptible and good principle has come from the essences of corruption and the Intermediary, which are of dissimilar essence, whereas it is in the nature of good to engender and produce beings that are similar and of the same substance.[227]

Ptolemy then announced in his letter-preamble to a Christian [rite of] initiation that Flora had to elevate herself to a superior degree of instruction. His status as leader of a community or bishop, legitimized by a claimed apostolic filiation, authorized him to advise such instruction as this:

Because, if it pleases God, you will later learn the origin and the birth of the natures, when you are worthy of the tradition of the apostles, a tradition that I have also received through succession and I can confirm these words through the instruction of our Savior.

I am not worn out, my sister Flora, from having said this in many words. I said to you clearly that I would be short, but I have nevertheless treated the subject exhaustively. These remarks can help you further on, if after having received the fecund seeds, like the beautiful and good earth, you will one day bear their fruit.[228]

Thus an elitist Christianity that substitutes the refinement of a philosophical tradition for the crude matter of Hebraic mythology penetrated into the aristocratic and cultivated milieus of the Empire. Upon this Christianity of ecolatres, which would be the source of the future Catholic theology, there was suddenly unfurled a wild Christianity, fanatical and popular, which turned the misery and resentment of the disinherited classes into virtues of renunciation and sacrifice. Its program inscribed itself in the remark, hostile to the “pneumatics,” loaned to the Jesus of the no-accounts [laisses-pour-compte]: “Happy are the poor of spirit.”

The Pistis Sophia

A late text (from the Third Century), the Pistis Sophia forms a passably embroiled, esoteric novel in which the remarks seem to obey a concern with according two antithetical notions: pistis (faith) and gnosis (knowledge). Leisegang summarizes it as follows:

One is in the twelfth year after the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus recounts for his disciples, united on the Mount of Olives, his voyage across the world of the Eons and the Archons, whose power he had broken. In the course of his ascension, he encountered Pistis Sophia, whose adventures he described at great length. In the beginning, she dwelled in the thirteenth Eon; the desire for the superior world of the light made her raise her eyes towards the light of the heights. She thus drew upon herself the hatred of the Archons of the Twelve Eons; it is necessary to understand by this [reference] the masters of the heaven of the permanent ones, who correspond to the twelve signs of the Zodiac. It is between this heaven and the domain of the light, in the intermediary place, beyond the world limited by the heaven of the stars, which Sophia inhabits. A false light attracted her towards the world and she became stuck in matter. Desperate, she addressed thirteen prayers of contrition to the light of the heights and implored that she be saved from the snares of her enemies. When she arrived at the ninth prayer of contrition, Jesus was sent into the chaotic world on the orders of the first mystery. He transported Sophia from the Chaos to a place secluded from the world. Pistis Sophia then addressed to God a suite of hymns of thanks, because he saved her from her distress. Finally, Jesus ascended and led Pistis Sophia — that is to say, the emanations of the Great Invisible — and their unengendered and their auto-engendered and their engendered and their stars and their odd ones [impairs] and their archons and their powers and their lords and their archangels and their angels and their decans and their liturgies and all the dwellings of their spheres and all the orders of each one of them. And Jesus did not tell his disciples about the extensions of the emanations from the Treasury nor their orders, and he did not tell them about the guardian who is at each of the doors to the Treasury of Light, and he did not tell them about the place of the Twin Savior who is the Child of the Child, and he did not tell them about the place of the three Amens, the places in which the five trees grow, nor anything about the place and the extension of the seven other Amens, that is to say, the seven voices. And Jesus did not tell his disciples what kind are the five parasites, nor where they are placed; he did not tell them in which fashion the Great Light is deployed, nor in which places it is placed; he did not tell them about the five regions, nor anything concerning the first commandment, but only spoke to them in general, teaching them that they exist; he did not speak of their extension nor the order of their places... It is a swallowed world that reveals itself to us in this indefatigable enumeration of supra-terrestrial entities, celestial regions and magic symbols; a world in which the first readers of the book must find themselves perfectly at ease among the Eons, decans, liturgies, archons and angels, the innumerable mysteries and their places.[229]

• Chapter 13 : Marcos and the Hellenization of Jewish Hermeticism

Chapter 13: Marcos and the Hellenization of Jewish Hermeticism

Irenaeus vituperated the Hermeticist Marc (or Marcos) in his Refutation of So-Called Gnosis, [thereby] unveiling his sympathies for the contemporary movement of the New Prophecy, many faithful people of which perished in the pogroms of Lyon in 177. He made fun of the favors that the aristocracy lavished upon him [Marcos], “the dames of the robe bordered with purple” (a privilege of the senatorial classes) and their propensity to the pleasures of love. True or false, this anecdote — so often plagiarized by Inquisitorial reports — translated the reprobation of popular Christianity for the “sins of the flesh”:

One of our deacons from Asia, badly taken with him, welcomed him into his house. As his wife was nicely made, the charlatan seduced her body and soul, and she followed him for a long time. Finally, and not without difficulty, the brothers converted her. She did not cease being penitent and cried about the outrage that the charlatan caused her.[230]

Breaking with gematria — interpretation from the numbering of the Hebrew letters — Marcos belonged to the Jewish milieu of Palestine or the Diaspora. He frequented Alexandria, where he was subjected to the influence of Philo, Basilides, Carpocratus and Asia Minor, which was the birthplace of Elchasaitism and so-called “Montanism,” and Gaul, where Irenaeus combated it.

Marcos renewed the feminine nature of the Spirit (Achamoth or Sophia). This was the meaning of the [rite of] initiation that he practiced, although Irenaeus’ report does not exclude an erotic usage of prophetism, taken up by the faithful of Montan: “After having introduced the germ of Light into the woman that he initiated, he declared to her: See, grace has descended upon you. Open your mouth and prophetize! If she stammered that she didn’t know how to prophesize, he made invocations and repeated: Open your mouth, say anything, you will prophesize.”[231] It is pleasing to recall here the original identity of the pneuma and the sperma, and the orgiastic character of the vocal modulations ascribed to the prophetesses of the past.

According to the Elenchos, Marcos reproduced the miracles that the fairytales of Montanist propaganda diffused concerning the Jesus who passed from angelos-christos to the Zorro for the poor. Before the faithful, he transformed water into wine, poured it into a small goblet that he decanted into a large one miraculously filled to the brim. His prietesses then administered the beverage in the guise of communion.

When the Church of the Fourth Century raged against the New Prophecy and its puritanism (which was called “Encratism”), its polemic would calumniously maintain the confusion between Montanism, which accorded certain sacerdotal functions to devoted women, who were sanctified by their virginity, and the cult of Marcos, in which women incarnated the spirit that impregnated bodies with love, a practice that the Church only perceived in terms of “license,” “debauchery,” and “fornication.”

Due to a natural malediction, fanaticism never resists the temptation to expound — by saving it from annihilation — the doctrines that are the object of its execration. Irenaeus thus surrendered precise information about the teachings of Marcos, which were the meeting point between Pythagorean mysticism and Jewish Kabbalah.

The Sige of which Basilides spoke, the Silence of the Nothing-God, had (according to Marcos) deposited in himself, as in a matrix, the germ of the Tetrad or Quarternary. In Hebrew, tetrad or quarternary is kolorbas, which the heresiologues transformed into a certain Colorbase, a disciple of Marcos.

The tetrad, an emanation of the Ineffable God, descended from the invisible places in the form of a woman. She revealed to him her proper essence and the genesis of the All.[232]

In the beginning, when the Apator — unconceivable, without essence, neither male nor female — wanted to render his ungraspable nature graspable, and to render his invisible nature visible, he opened his mouth and emitted the Word (Logos), equal to himself. The Logos placed itself before him and showed him its essence, because it was the visible manifestation of the Invisible. The pronunciation of the name took place in the following manner: he said the first word of his name, this being

A P X H
1 2 3 4

It was composed of four letters. Then he pronounced the second word that was also formed from four letters. Then came the third, which contained ten letters. The following one contained twelve. The pronunciation of the whole name included thirty letters and four words. Each of these elements has its particular letters, its own particular character, its particular pronunciation, its particular aspect and none of them know the figure of the word of which it is only an element, not even the pronunciation of its neighbor; through its own sound, it imagines itself to pronounce the All. Because each of them takes the sound that is its own for the All, whereas it is only a part of the All, and it does not cease to resonate until, in its emission, it reaches the last letter of the last element. After it, the restoration of the All will take place when the All is a single letter and will be the single and self-same emission of the voice; following the Marcosians, the image of the pronunciation would be represented by the Amen that we say together. The sounds form the substanceless and unengendered Eon; they are the forms that the Lord calls angels and that uninterruptedly see the face of the Father. The common and expressible names of the letter-elements are Eons, Logoi, Roots, Sperma, Pleromes and Fruits. As far as their individual and particular names, they are — following Marcos — contained in the name of the Ekklesia. The last sign of the last letter of these elements makes its proper voice heard; the sound of this voice will go out and engender — in the image of the letters — its proper elements; it is from this that the things of our world have been made and that have engendered those that came before them. The letter itself, of which the sound follows the echo from below, was reprized on high by its proper syllable so as to complete the entire name; as far as the sound, it remained below, rejected from the beyond. The element itself, from which the sign is descended with its pronunciation, is composed of thirty letters and each of these thirty letters contains in itself other letters, thanks to which the name of this letter is determined; and these last letters, in their turn, are designated by other letters and so on, with the result that their multitude extends to infinity, because each one is spelled in its turn with letters. The following example will make what one means to say better understood: the letter Delta contains five letters. These letters in their turn are spelled by means of other letters and so forth. Thus if the structure of the Delta already decomposes into an infinity of parts, with each letter engendering others in their turn and relaying others, how much more vast would be the ocean of letters of this primordial Element. And if a unique letter is in fact infinite, you see the abyss full of letters of the entire name — following the Sige of Marcos — of the Propator. The Propator, aware of his incomprehensibility, gave to the elements that Marcos called Eons the faculty of making each one reecho its own pronunciation, a single one being incapable of expressing the All.

Then comes the evocation of the Naked Truth, in which each part of the body corresponds to letters, themselves adjoined to the twelve signs of the Zodaic, the twelve planets, the twelve hours, and the twelve masters (the Archons) of the entities or tutelary powers (daimon):

After having revealed this, the Tetraktys said to him: I want to show you Aletheia herself; because I have made her descend from the dwellings on high so that you can see her naked and so that you can remark her beauty, so that you can even hear her speak and so that you can admire her wisdom. Look on high:

her head A
her neck B Y
her shoulders and her hands T X
her bosom D Q
her diaphram E T
her belly Z T
her sex H E
her thighs O P
her knees I N
her legs K O
her ankles A E
her feet M N

The ancient tradition, probably issued from the Jewish milieu in Alexandria in the First Century, enlightened the remark reprized in the Apocalypse attributed to John: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, said the Lord God, He who is, He who was and He who will be, the All-Powerful.” (Dubourg has indicated the Hebraic origin of the formula “He who has been, is, will be” as follows: “The Hebrew verbs are not conjugated in the past, present or future (...) but to the accomplished or unaccomplished.”[233] For example, the accomplished form of the verb to say [MR] means: he says/has said/will say, completely, absolutely; the unaccomplished form [Y’MR] means it is/was/will be in the process of saying.)

The entirety of the correspondances between the letters and the Eons constitute the Plerome. By grasping an Eon in its globality, magic allows action upon the universe. (Manuscript 44 at Nag-Hammadi consequently contains an invocation of the vowels. The “symphonia” or song of the seven vowels, each of which each represents a planet, allows, through its combinations, the expression of the harmony of the celestial spheres and the action on the stars. [Charles] Fourier would expound a similar conception. The universe, conceived as language, loans its meaning to Kabbalistic and magical investigations.)

By annexing the Logos Jesus, the syncretism of Marcos defined itself as a Christianity and perhaps reveals why an agreement existed in Alexandria and Antioch, towards the end of the First Century or the beginning of the Second, between the schools of Satornil of Cerinthe, Peter, Jacob, Thomas and Saul concerning the secret name of the Messiah, the biblical Joshua erected as a symbol of revised Judaism.

Its Hellenized version probably refers to the same calculations that intrigued the esoteric circles to which Essenism gave the tone (cf. the horoscope of the Messiah, the interpretation of the letter Waw or Episemon, the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet):

When the Tetraktys said these words, Aletheia looked at him and opened her mouth to pronounce a word (Logos). This Word became a name and the name is that which we know and say: Christ Jesus. This name pronounced, she immediately returned to a profound silence. As Marcos expected her to say more, the Tetraktys advanced to speak again: Have you thus considered as so insignificant the Word that you have heard from the mouth of Aletheia? It is not a question here of the name that you know and believe that you have possessed for a long time. You have only known the sound; you are not aware of all its virtue. Because IHEOYE is an insignificant name to all; it is composed of six letters and it is invoked by all of the appeals.

The three primordial elements, which compose three pairs of powers (Pater and Aletheia, Logos and Zoe, Anthropos and Ekklesia) and that together yield the number 6, and from which proceed the twenty-four letters, if one multiplies them by four, that is to say, by the Logos of the Ineffable Tetrad, yields the same number as the letters — that is to say, twenty-four. These twenty-four elements belong to the Unnamable. They are carried by the six powers so as to produce the resemblance of the Invisible. The images of the images of these elements are the three doubled letters that count double, as six letters; so, by virtue of the analogy, one adds them to the twenty-four letters and one obtains the number 30. As the fruit of this calculation and this economy, there appears in the resemblance of an image he who, after six days, climbed the mountain as fourth and became sixth, who redescended and was retained in the Hebdomade, being himself the Ogdoade and possessing in him the complete number of the elements. This number was revealed by the descent of the dove when he came to be baptized. The dove is the omega = 800 and the alpha = 1, because its numeric value is 801.

It was for the same reason that Moses said that man was formed on the sixth day (the name IHEOYE is composed of six letters); this is also why the salutary economy of the Passion was accomplished on the sixth day; it was the preparation by which the last man appeared for the regeneration of the first. The beginning and the end of this economy of salvation was the sixth hour, the hour at which he was nailed to the wood. Because the Perfect Nous, knowing that the number 6 contains in itself the virtue of creation and regeneration, manifested to the sons of the light, by the episemon that appeared in him, the regeneration that is worked by him [...]

As far as Jesus, here is his ineffable origin: from the Tetrad, Mother of All, came the second Tetrad in the manner of a daughter; thus the Ogdoade was formed; from it came the Decade. This was the origin of the number 18. Thus the Decade, come to join with the Ogdoade and multiplying it by ten, would engender the number 80, and the number 80, multiplied again by 10, produces the number 800, with the result that the total of the letters, allying the Ogdoade with the Decade, is 8, 80, 800, which is Jesus, because the name Jesus has the numerical value of 888:

I H E O Y E
10 8 200 70 400 200 = 888[234]

• Chapter 14 : Carpocratus, Epiphanius and the Tradition of Simon of Samaria

Chapter 14: Carpocratus, Epiphanius and the Tradition of Simon of Samaria

In the encounter with the generally ascetic Christian current, which was propagated in the Second Century by gnostic esotericism and by the pistis of the New Prophecy, the teachings of Carpocratus and his son Epiphanius inscribed themselves in a line of life that only Simon of Samaria knew how to trace in thin strokes on the tormented grays of the era.

Carpocratus’ biography remains obscure. Origen confused him with Harpocratus, son of Isis and Osiris, a solar god under Greco-Roman domination, often represented in the magic papyrus seated on a lotus, the male principle penetrating the feminine principle so as to impregnate her with his light. Carpocratus taught at Alexandria and wed Alexandreia. Their son, Epiphanius, who died at the age of 17 in 138, was interred on his island of birth, Cephalonia. Around 155 or 156, a philospher named Marcellina taught the doctrines of the father and the son in Rome.

Clement of Alexandria had the merit of retranscribing a short extract by Epiphanius on justice:

Justice consists in a community of equality. A single heaven deploys itself and embraces the entire earth within its circumference, the night shows all of the stars equally; as for the sun, author of the day and father of the night, God makes it shine on the earth from on high, equally for all the beings who can see. They see it all in common, because he makes no exception for the rich, the beggar or the sovereign, dumb or wise, female or male, free man or slave. The brute animals themselves have no difficulty in seeing the sun, because God has poured the light of the sun on all creatures from on high, as a communal good, and he proves his justice to the good as well as to the wicked; thus no one possesses more, nor steals from the next so as to double his own share of light. The sun makes the pastures grow for the communal enjoyment of all the animals and his justice is distributed among all, in common and in equality. It is for such a life that the species of the cow was made, as well as each individual cow, that of the pigs as well as each individual pig, that of the sheep as well as each sheep, and so on. Because justice manifests itself in them under the form of a community.

Moreover, all is spread out in equality for the species following the principle of community; nourishment is spread out for the beasts that graze, for all equally, and without being ruled by law; on the contrary, nourishment is provided by the liberality of the Master for all in conformity with his justice. Even concerning generation, there are no written laws; because these would be false laws. The animals procreate and engender in the same fashion, and practice a community that was inculcated in them through justice. The Creator and Father of All gives sight to them all in common, and his legislation consists exclusively in the justice issued from him. He does not make a distinction between men and women, reasonable and without reason, one being and another. With equality and communally he shares sight and he gives it equally to all, through a single and self-same commandment. As far as the laws, which do not punish men who are ignorant of them, there are those who have learned them so as to act against the law. Because particular laws fragment and destroy communion with divine law. Do you not understand the word of the Apostle: ‘I have only known sin through the law’? By this, the Apostle meant that mine and yours only entered the world through the laws and that this was the end of all community. Because what remains in common for those who neither enjoy property nor goods, not even marriage? And yet God created for all, communally, the vineyards do hunt the sparrows nor the thieves, and likewise the cereals and other fruits. But it was from that day that the community was no longer composed in the sense of equality and was deformed by the Law, which produces the thief who steals animals and fruit. God created all for the communal pleasure of mankind, he united man and woman for a communal intercourse [commerce], and he likewise coupled all the living beings to manifest his justice as community in equality. But those who were born thanks to this have denied their own origin from the community that reconciles mankind. They say: ‘He who marries her must guard her,’ whereas all can share her, as the example of all the other living beings shows.

[And yet] Epiphanius still teaches in proper terms that “God placed in male beings a powerful and impetuous desire to propagate the species, and no law, no custom, can exclude it from the world, because it is the institution of God. Thus the words of the legislator: ‘You must not covet’ (Exodus, 20, 17, and Deuteronomy, 5, 21) are ridiculous and still more ridiculous is what follows: ‘the goods of your neighbor,’ because the same God who gave to man the desire destined to couple beings with a view towards generation [also] ordained the destruction of desire, although he did not take it from any living being. But the most laughable of all is ‘the woman of your neighbor,’ because this reduces the force of community to separation.”[235]

Epiphanius’ text, which is of an astonishing modernity, participated in a thought and a behavior that was radically hostile to Stoic, Epicurean and Christian morality.

Carpocratus and Epiphanius both belonged to a Greek milieu that rejected Judaism. In the same way that Simon of Samaria restored the spirit of the Pentateuch and Genesis, in particular, to the body, Epiphanius mocked the biblical commandments, the notions of sin and guilt. The Law of Moses fomented crime for the same reason that prohibition engenders transgression.

Thereafter, either quotations from Paul were recovered from the ordinary revisions made by the heresiologues, who added canonical extracts to them so as to blunt the dissent of doctrines that had nothing to do with Christianity, but who nevertheless annexed the Messiah Joshua, as well as Serapis, Seth, Abrasax and Harpocrates into their own syncretism; or these quotations referred back to a Paul who was completely different from the image that Marcion and his successive manipulators presented, that is, a Saul/Paul whose teachings would [in turn] justify the use of the name of Simon [of Samaria], whose doctrines had been travestied by the Elchasaites living under the rule of Trajan.

Written when Epiphanius was 15 or 16 years old, the work of the young man whom Jacques Lacarriere has called the Gnostic Rimbaud links social equality to the free exercise of desire. His critique of property goes beyond the Rousseauist conception, and one had to wait until [Charles] Fourier and the radicality of individual anarchy, with its principle “We only group ourselves according to affinities,” for there to be an echo of the precocious genius of Epiphanius of Cephalonia.

I do not see why Marcellina, a disciple of Carpocratus and Epiphanius who taught in Rome around 160, would have decorated his school, in the words of Irenaeus, “with painted icons enhanced with gold, representing Jesus, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle,”[236] unless it wasn’t simply an occasion for the Bishop of Lyon to condemn the Christians who preferred Greek philosophy to the Bible.

On the other hand, it is probable that the community founded on the liberty of desire drew the idea that “the soul must be tested before death” from Pythagorean theory, because, “for Epiphanius, desire is the expression of the first will of God and nature.”[237] And according to Simon, desire is to be identified with fire, the principle of creation and the principle of passion; there is nothing that can limit it in the unity of the macrocosm and the microcosm.

Epiphanius applied his conception of justice to mankind, the animals and the plants. The living perpetuates itself by changing form. Irenaeus interpreted this theory, which seemed strange and odious to him, in terms of magic and metempsychosis:

They also practice magic, incantations, amorous love potions and love feasts, the invocation of the spirits of the dead and the spirits from dreams, and other forms of necromancy, claiming that they have power over the princes and creators of this world and over the market in all creatures of this world. At this point, they have so loosened the bridle on aberration that they claim to have complete freedom to commit any act that pleases them, impious or atheist; although it is human opinion that makes all the difference between a good act and a bad one. The soul, they say, must — through a migration of one body into another — exhaust all forms of life and possible action, if it did not do so in its first life. We do not dare to say, nor hear, nor even think about nor believe that such things take place in our towns; but their writings teach that, before death, the soul must be completely tested until the final rest.[238]

A line by Irenaeus stands out: “It is faith and love that saves; the rest is indifferent and only human opinion distinguishes between good and evil.”

According to Simon’s Megale Apophasis, faith in oneself and love lead to the Great Power, which resides in each person and moves the world. What is astonishing is the fact that, in a letter by Paul, the theme of faith and love gives birth to an enthusiastic development that explodes with misogyny and ascetic harshness, which is attested to everywhere in the epistolary works of the man who, successor to Moses, stole the title of Apostle from him: “When I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, if I lack love, I am merely resonating metal, a resounding cymbal. When I have the gift of prophecy, the science of all mysteries and all knowledge (gnosis), when I have the most complete faith, that which moves mountains, if I lack love, then I am nothing. When I give all my belongings (to those who are starving), when I surrender my body (like a slave, so as to have pride), if I lack love, then I have gained nothing. Love takes patience, love renders service, it is not jealous, it is not breast-plated, it does not inflate with pride, it makes nothing of ugliness, it does not seek its own interest, it does not become irritated, it does not rejoice in injustice, but finds its own joy in truth. It protects all, it believes all, it endures all. Love will never disappear [...]” (Epistle to the Corinthians, I, 13).[239] Which anti-Marcionite, capable of penetrating into the labyrinths [ces auberges espagnoles] of Paul’s epistles, brough forth this fragment of Carpocratic doctrine and inserted it into a Christian perspective?

• Chapter 15 : The New Prophecy and the Development of Popular Christianity

Chapter 15: The New Prophecy and the Development of Popular Christianity

Born under the pressure [l’impulsion] of the Zealot guerrilla war and the struggle against Greco-Roman oppression, the messianism of the First Century participated exclusively in a Judaisim that was on the road to reformation, hostile to the Sadduceans and the Pharisians.

The sects that speculated on the secret name of the Messiah did not agree with those devoted to Joshua in the 80s and 90s, who developed a philosophical and esoteric doctrine that was hardly propitious for wide distribution. The Elchasaite Christians, who aroused the suspicions of the governor of Bythinia, Pliny the Younger, offered the very first example of a Christianity implanted in less firm milieus. They practiced social aid to widows, orphans, and the disinherited; imitating the prescriptions of honor in the Pharisian communities, they prayed to and celebrated the God-Messiah (christo quasi Deo, in the words of a letter by Pliny).

Their numerical importance still had not yet aroused the distrust of the authorities, beyond Bythinia, neighboring region to Phrygia, where the cults of Attis and Mithras were still dominant. Here was the first de-Judaized and exoteric Christianity, a mass Christianity — of a kind to tickle the Saint-Sulpician imaginations of people like Sienkiewicz and tutti quanti — that rejuvenated, a century later, the martyrs of the New Prophecy so as to throw them into Nero’s lion’s den.

It isn’t useless to insist upon it: the Church behaved towards the various Christianities from which it issued like Stalin, who excluded from history the first Bolsheviks by erecting Lenin as a holy apostle. The true Christianity, that which gave a historical existence to Jesus, invented Mary, Joseph, the Child, the popular agitator, the enemy of the Jews, the good thief put to death under [the reign of] Tiberias, the re-grouper of the apostles of rival churches, and the first references to Pontius Pilate: the Christianity that engendered new thinkers, who — incurring the names Phrygian heresy, Montanism, Pepuzism, Encratism — would be excommunicated from the Church by Tertullian in the Fourth Century.

While the Marcionite Churches brandished the authority of the Apostle Paul with the support of programmatic letters and clashed with the traditional Judeo-Christian communities, the Christianity preached by the prophet Montanus became successful in Phrygia and soon after in North Africa, Palestine, and Asia Minor, and then turned towards Rome and won over Gaul.

Montan addressed himself to the disinherited, slaves, artisans and rich people who had renounced their goods, and no longer to the exegetes versed in the interpretation of mythological writings, or to the biblical rats that nibbled on words so as to nourish their ascendancy over a handful of disciples.

The important thing was no longer gnosis, knowledge, learning that disentangled the obscure roads leading to salvation, but faith, the pistis, the desire [le sentiment] to belong to the army of the Christ, the disposition to sacrifice one’s life for him as he sacrificed his life for the profit of mankind, whatever nation or social class to which they belonged.

The movement that was propagated under the name New Prophecy countersigned the birth of a veritable, modern Christianity, stripped of its Judaity, a Christianity that took exception to gnostic intellectuality and [instead] taught the principles that remained long-lived until the decline of Catholicism and Protestantism: sacrifice, the renunciation of the goods of this world, voluntary poverty, the taste for martyrs, the consecration of suffering, chastity, virginity, abstinence and misogyny, the execration of pleasure and the repression of desire.

Although variously received according to the region and the [local] church — the Marcionites and the pneumatics scorned it, the bishops who were tolerated by the imperial power dreaded its ostentatious pretensions to martyrdom — the New Prophecy attracted a large membership and, for the very first time [in the history of Christianity], organized a powerful federation of churches, in which the rival obediences to Cephas, Jacob, Thomas, Clement, Saul/Paul, nay, even certain fringes of Naassenism and Sethianism, were subsumed. [Ironically,] this was the evangelical Christianity about which various millenarians and apostolics — strugging against the Church of Rome, which had been born in the corruption of temporal power and would remain power and corruption — had dreamed.

• Chapter 16 : Tatian and the Fabrication of the New Testament

Chapter 16: Tatian and the Fabrication of the New Testament

Born in Syria around 120, Tatian posthumously became one of the founders of the Church due to his extremism in matters of asceticism. Irenaeus attacked him because, “like Marcion and Satornil, he called marriage a corruption and debauchery. He maintained that Adam was not saved.”[256]

Converted to Christianity, and a disciple of Justin in Rome, Tatian was exposed to the attacks of Crescentius, Justin’s accuser. Teaching Christianity in Rome around 172–173, he professed the anti-Marcionism of his master and transmitted it to his disciple, Rhodon. Then he left for the East and founded schools while the New Prophecy took off. One supposes that he died at the end of that decade.

Tatian’s single known work falls under the heading of the apologetic. His Speech to the Greeks opposed Christianity to Greek philosophy in general and the Stoics in particular. In it he developed ideas shared by Tertullian and the new popular current. His profession of monotheist faith contradicted accusations of dualism, which were often made about him by the Catholics. On the other hand, his idea of the Christ had not evolved since Justin: “The celestial Logos, spirit born from the Father and reason issued from the reasonable power — in imitation of the Father who engendered him — made man in the image of immortality, so that, to the extent incorruptibility is in God, man likewise participates in the lot of God and possesses immortality. But before forming man, the Logos created the angels.”[257] The holy spirit is called the minister of God who suffered.

Tatian’s essay On Perfection, According to the Savior is lost, but Clement of Alexandria picked out of it an absolute condemnation of marriage that surpasses the Montanist spirit. The Church profited by erecting Tatian as the leader of a phantom heresy called Encratism, in which were grouped together — thanks to the Church’s Fourth Century struggle against the Donatists and the Circoncellions — the supporters of an excessive moral rigor.

No doubt there was another reason for the animosity of the Church towards Tatian. Deschner cites him as among the copyists who re-worked the letters of Paul and gave them a stylistic unity.[258]

The wave of popular Christianity engendered a general revival of the Jewish midrashim, translated somehow or other by the Judeo-Christians, and in need of being de-Judaized and explained rationally to the general public. Tatian has been credited with having harmonized (in addition to Paul’s letters) the many propagandistic texts that were passed off as the gospel preached by the Apostle, because there was only one at the time.

Nevertheless, neither Irenaeus, Tertullian, nor Clement of Alexandria mentioned the Diatessaron euaggelion, which would remain until the Fifth Century the dogmatic work par excellence of the Syrian Christian churches before being replaced by the four gospels of the Catholic Church. A Greek fragment of 14 lines recovered at Dura-Europos dates from 230 at the latest. It proposes placing end to end the fragments of the gospels attributed to Mark, Luke and Matthew. Is this the Diatessaron and, if so, is it that of Tatian? How come Tertullian, an admirer of Tatian, does not mention it? As far as the fragments by Irenaeus, they have been altered too much to offer a serious testimony concerning the canonical gospels in the Second Century.[259]

The Canonical Gospels

What aspect did Christianity present at the end of the Second Century? Although the Greeks and Romans did not distinguish it from Judaism and confused the sectarians of Jesus, the Sethians, the Naassenes, the Barbelites and other messianists, the New Prophecy implanted in the urban milieu a popular Christianity that attracted slaves, a fraction of the plebes and the petite bourgeois (thus a fringe of the aristocracy, as well), until then rather receptive to Gnostic doctrines and philosophical Chrisianity.

If the importance accorded to faith, to life according to the Christ, to asceticism, to the refusal of riches and to the vocation of martyrdom reduced Gnosticism to a marginal existence, which Christianity would nevertheless exploit in the genesis of its theology, Gnosticism was embraced by a good number of bishops and heads of communities who, since Trajan’s conventions (renewed by Hadrian), had been integrated into public life and, careful to avoid all scandal, already carried themselves as if they were future ecclesiastical bureaucrats of the triumphant Church. The ardor and fanaticism of the poor Christians embarrassed the lax bishops of the Second Century. They would form the proto-Catholic current or, more exactly, would be chosen in the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Centuries as the representatives of a back-dated orthodoxy.

Ecclesiastical reticenceincreased the number of lapsi, supplemented by the persecutions of the Third Century, whereas Montanist intransigence was perpetuated among the partisans of Novatian and, much later, Donat.

The midrashim of the Elchasaite and Judeo-Christian Churches conferred a legitimacy to particular and often rival churches: the churches of Thomas, Simon-Peter, Jacob, Saul-Paul, Clement, Philippe, Matthias... The unity imposed by the great movement of the New Prophecy collated writings of diverse origins, translated several times from the Hebrew or Aramaic, which were revised and imitated. The unusual ensemble then gave birth to a Propaganda-literature adapted to the popular brushwork [facture] of the movement. Anti-Semitism, miraculous fables and the exaltation of poverty and sacrifice little by little composed a Jesus who was better conformed to the plebian mindset. The apostles, initially the witnesses of the Lord, whose mythical authority guaranteed such and such a community, thenceforth formed a cohort charged with propagating the Christian law that was substituted for Mosaic law.

The apostles erected as saints and martyrs served as models for the exaltation of the Christians of Carthage, Scili, Lyon, Vienna and Rome.

The Acts circulated, telling of the marvelous adventures, deaths and ascensions of Peter, Paul, Barnabas, Philippe, Andrew and Jacob, who were the heroes of a saga dominated by Joshua, cut from the same cloth as the Christians who caused scandals and perished for their faith.

Justin[260] and Tertullian[261] mentioned the Acts of Pilate. (Augmented in the Fifth Century by a description of hell, the Acts would in the Eighth Century form the Gospel of Nicomede, in which the legends of Joseph of Arimathea and the Grail appeared. The Acts was originally a Montanist or pre-Montanist text that had been excluded from the canon.) Held as a saint and martyr in Syria and Egypt, Pilate still belonged to a dramaturgy in which the angelos-christos entered into a brief terrestrial existence in a historical context.

The Acts of Pilate contain the materials that would serve, in the hands of copyists less exalted and more careful with historical probability, into the fabrication of the canonical Gospels: “It was the sixth hour; an obscurity covered the entire world until the ninth hour. The sun was obscured: the veil of the temple went from on high to down below, and cut it in two. Jesus cried in a loud voice: My Father, Abi, Adasch, Ephkidon, Adonai, Sabel, Louel, Eloei, Elemas, Ablakanei, Orioth, Mioth, Ouaoth, Soun, Perineth, Jothat.”[262]

The names evoked by Jesus, which identified him with a magician or a thaumaturgist, corresponded to the Eons of power that were figured upon the abraxas or talismans of magic rituals.[263]

Tertullian’s recital in his Apologetics merits being quoted because, effacing thaumaturgical aspects, it constitued a more sober and yet very different version than that retained by the Catholic canon. The Christ was still the angelos-christos, but prey to a terrestrial drama that was perfectly understandable by the faithful who were headed towards punishment and a radiant celestial resurrection:

Thus, what comes from God is God, the Son of God, and the two make only one. Thus the spirit that comes from the spirit and the God who comes from God are different in position [la mesure], he is second in rank, not in situation, and he came from his source without being detached from it.

Thus, this ray of God, as he had always foretold, descended as a Virgin and, being incarnated in her womb, he was born man mixed with God. The flesh united with the spirit, nourished itself, grew, spoke, taught, worked — and here is the Christ. For the moment, accept this ‘fable’ (it is similar to yours), while waiting for me to show you how the Christ was tested and who were those who, in advance, circulated among you fables of this type, so as to destroy this truth.

The Jews also knew that the Christ would come, because the prophets had spoken to them. And, indeed, even today, they await his coming, and between them and us there is no greater subject of contestation than their refusal to believe that he has already come.

Because two ascensions of the Christs were announced: one that would be accomplished in the humility of the human condition; another that was expected at the end of the world [siecle], in the sublime splendor of the paternal power received and the divinity clearly manifested. Therefore, the Jews — not understanding the first — believe that the second was unique, and they hoped for it as it was clearly foretold.

By their sin, the Jews have indeed merited being unable to understand the first one: they believed it, if they understood it and they had salvation, if they believed it. They themselves say in the Scriptures that they have been deprived of wisdom, intelligence and the usage of their eyes and ears, as a punishment.

In their abasement, the Jews have thus concluded that he [Jesus] is only a man; and naturally, because of his power, they take him for a magician: actually they see him, according to his own word, chasing demons from the bodies of men, giving sight to the blind, purifying the lepers, straightening up the paralyzed, finally, making the dead come back to life, always according to his word, making the elements serve him, calming the tempests and walking on the waters, thus showing that he was [indeed] the Son previously announced by God, and born for the salvation of all, this Word of God, eternal, first-born, accompanied by his power and intelligence, having his spirit for support.

Hearing the preaching of his doctrines, which confused the doctors and notables among the Jews, who were exasperated, especially when they saw an immense multitude flocking to him: to the point that, finally, they delivered him to Pontius Pilate, who then governed Syria in the name of the Romans and, through the violence of their public approval [leur suffrages], they forced the pro-curator to surrender Jesus so as to put him on a cross. He himself had foretold that they would act thus; this would not have been much, had not the prophets also foretold it.

And yet, attached to the cross, he made many wonderful remarks about his death. Indeed, from himself he rendered his soul with his last words, foreseeing the service of the executioner; at the same moment, the day was deprived of the sun, at the moment that he marked the place of his orb. One certainly believes that this was an eclipse, and those who do not know that this wonder had also been foretold for the death of the Christ, not understanding the reason, deny it and yet you find this global accident set down in your archives.

The Jews, after having detached the body [from the cross] and after having deposited in it a sepulcher, surveilled it with great care, using a military guard: as he had foretold that he would rise from the dead on the third day, the Jews feared that his disciples, furtively removing the cadaver, would deceive their suspicions.

But on the third day, the earth suddenly trembled, the enormous rock placed on the sepulcher was set aside, the guard — struck by fright — dispersed, the disciples did not show themselves, and in the sepulcher one found nothing other than the corpse of a grave-digger.

Nevertheless, the Jewish notables, who had an interest in having people believe in a crime and in diverting people from their faith and thereby rendering them tributary and dependent upon the Jews, spread the rumor that he had been rescued by his disciples. Actually, he did not appear before the multitudes, so as to not uproot the impious from their error and so that faith, destined for a quite precise compensation, was costly to men.

But Jesus passed forty days with several disciples in Galilee, in the province of Judea, where he taught them what he had to teach them. And then, having trusted to them the mission of preaching throughout the whole earth and, enveloped in a cloud, he rose to heaven: an ascension quite a bit truer than the one your Proculus customarily attributes to Romulus.

Pilate, who was himself already a Christian in his heart, announced all of these facts relative to the Christ to Tiberius, then Ceasar. (*) The Ceasars themselves would have believed in the Christ, if the Cesars were necessary to the world or if the Ceasars had been Christians as well as Ceasars.

(*) It is no doubt from the Christian legend of Pilate that the historical staging of the trial of Jesus the agitator was drawn. The events here come under the headings of cosmic dramaturgy and hierophany.

As far as the disciples, scattered throughout the world, they obeyed the precepts of their divine Master; after seeing many suffer at the hands of Jewish persecutors, confident in the truth, they ended by spilling [semer] with joy their Christian blood in Rome, during the cruel persecutions of Nero.

But we will show you irrecusable witnesses to the Christ, even among those whom you adore. It is a great point, which I can make to oblige you to believe the Christians, even those whom you hinder from believing the Christians.

For the moment, here is the chronological history of our religion; here is, we declare, the origin of our sect and our name, with their author.

One no longer reproaches us for any infamy, one does not imagine that there is something else, because it is not permitted for anyone to lie about his religion. Indeed, by saying that one adores another thing than what one [actually] adores, one denies what one adores and one transports one’s homages to another [thing], and by transporting them, one no longer adores what one has repudiated.

Therefore we say, and we say it publicly, and we cry it aloud when we are torn and blood-stained by your tortures: ‘We adore God through the Christ.’ Believe it, [he was] a man, if you like; it is through him that God wanted to be known and adored.

To respond to the Jews, I would say that it was through Moses that they, too, learned to adore God; to the Greeks, I would say that Orpheus in Pierie, Musee in Athens, Melampus in Argos and Trophonius in Boetie bound men [to them] through initiations.[264]

At the same time that the Gnostic Gospels were being propagated, the persistence of an older Christianity — which one discovered at Nag-Hammadi and that consisted of fantastic recitals similar to those which Tertullian decanted for the use of the Greeks and Romans — gave to Jesus more and more of the traits of a historical personage similar to Apollonious of Tyane, not without recalling that he remained God in the same reality as his human nature. For the new Christian wave, Jesus was not a pure spirit. Such a belief, among others, grounds a passsage in the canonical Gospel attributed to Luke (24, 36–43).

In brief, these were the polemics and ideas of the Second Century, which — recuperating and explicating Jewish and Essene speculations about the Messiah — would end up, through additions and corrections, in the novels about Jesus, the Jesus who made people forget about Joshua (but tardily, because in 240 Origen still emphasized the omnipresence of the soldier of Moses).

Upon all those who glimpsed in the growing power of Christianity the perspective of an ascension to power, the necessity imposed itself of ordering and harmonizing the acts, letters, apocalypses and gospels that were as great in number as the rival communities.

It was the epoch in which Celse, in his True Discourse (around 180), mocked the multitude of Christian prophets, their rivalries, their lack of scruples in fabricating texts and in revising the old ones several times. (Tertullian showed where the shoe pinched when he wrote with some irritation: “One does not say that we forge our materials ourselves.”) Each church placed its gospel or sacred text under the name of a “founding father” or an apostle.

The majority of them are unknown. Nevertheless, one cites Tatian and a certain Leucius Charinus. Tertullian attributed the Acts of Paul, in which a recital of his martyrdom and the love that carried him to the young Thecla, to the zeal of an Eastern priest who dedicated a true cult to the Apostle (the text would enjoy a great popular success in its Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syrian, Armenian, Slavic and Arabic versions). The Acts of Paul participated in the Montanist fervor, in the same way that the Gospel attributed to Barthelemy, in which Jesus says, as if addressing Montan: “salvation to you, my twin, second Christ.”

On the other hand, the Ascension of Jacob, of Elchasaite origin, took to Paul warmly.

The misinterpretation of the Hebrew and Aramaic texts engendered, in the course of the cascading translations, incoherencies and bizarre aspects that were all the more perceptible in the apocryphal and canonical Gospels, which subscribed to the Hebrew mythologies through loaned words.

The Epistula apostolorum, probably issued from Asia Minor or Egypt in the second half of the Second Century, appeared as a syncretic attempt that insisted on the miracles and resurrection of Jesus. An apocalypse inscribed itself in the millenarianist preoccupations of Montanism: in the Epistula, Jesus responds to questions about the dates of the parousia and the resurrection. In it there are elements shared with the Gospel attributed to John, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Epistle of Barnabas, and Hermas’ The Pastor. In the same spirit, but without millenarianist allusion, the Acts of the Apostles, retained as canonical, reconciles the rival views of Paul and Simon-Peter in a historical novel. It corrects the Epistula, which, in the Montanist line, blamed the bishops and the priests accused of having misled the people of God, after having made apology for “Saul, who wants to be called Paul.”[265]

• Chapter 17 : 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,” Drijvers writes, “shows the existence of varied groups with diverse opinions that fought against and complained about each other.”[271]

Here, in the First Century, was implanted — at the same time that it agitated spirits in Alexandria, Antioch and Ephesus — a system of beliefs that issued from Essenism and engendered, on a foundation of local particularisms, churches that were obedient to their own laws and doctrines.

The communities or ekklesia of Edessa were placed — no doubt by the missionary activity of some disciple of Thomas — under the patronage of Jude or Thomas, mythically elected “witness” of the Lord.

Jude or Thomas’ organization navigated in the [turbulent] current of the Second Century according to the logia attributed to Joshua/Jesus and supposedly compiled by Matthew or Thomas. The churches of Edessa perpetuated a Judeo-Christianity of the Elchasaite type, no doubt evolving towards anti-Semitism without, it seems, tipping over into Marcionism or Montanism.

In Edessa in 201, the first building designed for meetings of the believers and taking the name ‘church’ was constructed. It was destroyed shortly afterwards by a flood, the sign of a singular carelessness on the part of the tutelary God.[272]

Around 180, one of the churches, led by Bishop Palut, attempted to impose its authority on all Christians. His adepts called themselves “Palutians.” The struggles for precedence among the diverse churches of Edessa would last until the Fifth Century: the Palutian faction assured themselves of power and, rallying to the theses of Nicaea, embraced Catholicism. Consequently, this faction would hasten to label as heretical the churches that had in the past shown hostility towards it.

Thus it would be the work of Bardesane or Bar Daysan, who offered an original example of one of the many syncretisms, the successive stratifications of which would compose the Christianity of the first four centuries.

Born in Edessa in 144 or 155, Bardesane belonged to the aristocracy and received a serious philosophical education before converting to the new religion in 180. (For a time, he adhered to the Valentinian school.) His vast learning also embraced astrology, ethnology and history. With his son Harmodius, he composed some 150 hymns honored by the Syrian churches.

His Dialogue on Destiny and Book of the Laws of Nations, from which his disciple Philippe compiled his teachings, did not escape the destruction ordered by the Church, although Eusebius did authorize the citation of a few extracts.[273]

When Caracalla dealt a mortal blow to the independance of Edessa in 216, Bardesane went into exile and went to Armenia, where, according to Moses of Chorene, he pursued historical research and worked for the propagation of Christianity. Thereafter his teachings accorded a growing place to the idea of liberty.

One can not exclude an encounter between Bardesane and an Indian ambassador sent by the Emperor Heliogabale around 218. One believes that he died in 222, leaving behind disciples and Christian communities that continued to exist until the Fifth Century.

Bardesane’s philosophical Christianity situated itself at an equal distance from the New Prophecy, the ascetic rigor and fantastic masochism of which he took exception to, and from an ecclesiastical current that aimed to integrate itself as a recognized authority in the social order of Rome.

If he adapted the trinitarian conception — Father-Son and Pneuma-Spirit (Spirit), which would triumph at Nicaea — from the Valentinian Theodotus, Bardesane was opposed to Marcion and he rejected the Demiurgical creation. According to Bardesane, the world was the work of a Good God, because, despite its imperfections, salvation enters into mankind’s possibilities. Thus it was incorrectly that Ephrem the Syrian denounced the influence of Bardesane on Mani, the founder of the Manichean religion. If the Bardesanites excluded from their canon the two epistles of Paul to the Corinthians, no doubt it was due to Marcionism, which presented versions anterior to the Catholic corrections.

Bardesane did not divide men into three classes, according to the common Gnostic opinion of the Second Century — hylics, psychics and pneumatics — but distinguished in each person three levels on the ladder of consciousness: the soma, the psyche, [and] the pneuma. Through the Christ, God gave the model of a gradual elevation that traces the road of salvation.

The Bardesanites obviously knew nothing of the canonical gospels, but referred to the Acts of Thomas and to the logia that composed the gospel attributed to the mythical apostle of Edessa.

Drijvers detects the influence of Philo of Alexandria, transmitted by the Jewish milieus, well implanted in Edessa.[274] The Essene and Judeo-Christian doctrine of the two roads, Light and Darkness, left traces in Bardesane’s conception of liberty.

This proceeded from a spirit of divine origin, which, uniting with the soul, descended through the seven spheres of the planets (the Hebdomade) so as to implant itself in the human body at the moment of birth. The soul submits to the influence of planetary forces, which it must wheedle [amadouer] at the time of its future ascension, the hour of birth thus determining the course of existence and distributing fortune and misfortune.

In his goodness, God nevertheless permits man to escape from the ineluctable. United with the soul, the spirit arrogates for itself the privilege of influencing circumstances. Knowledge of the horoscope intervenes in salvation in a decisive manner. Adam made bad use of such a gift and did not authorize his soul to return to the place of its divine origin, which Bardesane called the “nuptial chamber of Light.”[275] (The Gospel attributed to Philippe, from the same era, evokes the relations between redemption and koinon, “nuptial chamber,” in which the union with the Plerome, the Divine Totality or Ogdoade, takes place. The soul, the spirit and the body give birth to a quite piquant anecdotal translation: “Three walk with the Lord at the same time: Mary, his mother, his sister and Madeleine, whom one calls his companion. Because Mary is his sister, mother and companion” [Section 32].)

The coming of the Christ — still conceived as angelos-christos, not as historical founder of a religion — unveiled to the soul the road of salvation, the manner of untangling obscurity and darkness so as to vanguish the determination of the planets and to assure the soul’s final redemption. Here Bardesane expounded the theory of free will, battle-horse of the future Catholicism.

The envoy of God, Jesus filled no other mission than indicating, through the sacrifice of his flesh, the salvational road and the gnosis that taught one how to leave the obscure chaos of the body. Not an extreme asceticism, as required by the New Prophecy, but a sacrificial exercise that elevated the spirit and united it with the breath of the soul, which thereby obtained the power to vanquish the conjuration of the planetary injunctions and return to the light. He who identifies with the Christ modified the astrological laws and increased his power over the macrocosm. Such were the teachings of Bardesane. It is the thought of Simon of Samaria, inverted by its antiphysis and denatured by the Christic example. A thought that, if Christianized, did not remain any less unacceptable to ecclesiastical authority, since Bardesane entrusted the work of redemption in the hands of each person, without the help of any church.

Audi

If one believes Michael the Syrian, the Archdeacon Audi (or Audie) belonged to the Bardesanite communities at the end of the Third Century or the beginning of the Fourth. To support his legitimate authority, he produced apocalypses and the Acts of the Apostles, which the Constantinian Church — adopting the political line of the “Palutians” — would condemn as “apocryphal.”

Gregoire Bar-Hebraeus, an Arab theologian from the Seventh Century, attributed to Audi ninety-four apocalypses or revelations. Underneath a scornful and anecdotal reduction that Bar-Hebraeus imposed on Audi’s ideas, the Bardesanite doctrine of the descent and resurrection of the Spirit confronting the planetary Eons shows through: “(Audi claimed) that the Christ descended to all of the firmaments and that their inhabitants did not know him, and that his body was celestial, and that it was injured by the lance, and that it was not injured, that it was hung from the wood and that it was not hung.”[276]

Audi’s conception was not essentially different from that of Arrius, the quarrel about whom — at the same time — irritated the emerging tyranny of the Catholic, apostolic and Roman Church. Audi would reject the decisions made in Nicaea. Exiled to Scythia, he would propagate his Christianity among the Goths.[277]

Origen Of Alexandria

The fate reserved for Origen and his work unveiled the work of falsification that was accomplished by the Church after the Constantinian turn. An authentic Christian martyr and a philosopher in the service of faith, he was condemned for heresy because, despite the revisions of his doctrine, his Christology was still that of an angel-messiah and his Jesus found his source in Joshua. In addition, he had sympathies for the New Prophecy, and he devoted himself to asceticism with a disconcerting rigor, which authorized him to scorn the apostate clergy of his era — the heritage of which the Constantinian Church would claim.

Origen’s work was reduced, as if by chance, to tiny fragments and held in several large volumes, so that the zeal of Rufin and other guardians of orthodoxy could take care to reconstitute it and rectify it according to the correct dogmatic line.

Born around 185 to Christian parents in Alexandria, the city of all the doctrines, Origen was in his adolescence when his father, Leonides, surrendered to punishment in 201, then perished in the persecutions of the New Prophecy.

Origen was initiated into Neo-Platonist philosophy, which he tried to accord with Christianity. A disciple of Clement of Alexandria, he combated the work of Celse, The True Discourse, directed against the new religion. In Rome he met Hippolyte, a bishop and philosopher, to whom the Elenchos is sometimes attributed. In the same way that Hippolyte (like Tertullian and the Montanists) vituperated the laxity of another bishop of Rome, Callixte — whom many historians take for a pope — Origine, who succeeded Clement as the head of the Christian didaskale of Alexandria, entered into conflict with the bishop [named] Demetrius. It is true that Origen pushed the concern for chastity to the point of self-castration, so as to resist, without beating around the bush, the temptations of the flesh. Forced into exile in Cesarea in 231, he would die following tortures inflicted around 254 under the persecutions of Dece.

Badly noted by the clerical party of the lapsi, Origen drew upon himself — a century after his death — the displeasure of Epiphanius of Salamis, before being officially condemned by the Emperor Justinian the First, at the second Council of Constantinople in 553.

The Church reproached Origen for having neglected the historical character of Jesus-Christ, no doubt too recently invented, which the skill of Rufinus — who amended, expurgated and corrected everything that did not agree with the dogma — did not succeed in introducing.

Interpreting the Bible in an allegorical sense, Origen identified the Christ with an eternal Logos named Joshua, who returned to the Father without ceasing to be present in the spirit of the Christians. His commentaries on Jesus, son of Noun, explain that “God gave the name that is above names to Jesus-Christ our Lord. Therefore, the name that is above all names is Jesus [...] And because this name is above all names, over the generations no one has received it.” And interpreting the Bible in an allegorical sense recalls the first mention of Jesus. It is found in Exodus: “God summoned Jesus and sent him to fight against Amalec.”

In her preface to Homelies on Joshua/Jesus, Annie Jaubert emphasizes the importance of the typology of Joshua: “The reason is that this typology constituted itself precisely in opposition to Judaism. No one being greater for the Jews than Moses, prophet and legislator, the Christians had to prove that the Old Testament, through the person of Jesu Nave, had already manifested the superiority of Jesus over Moses.”[278]

How can we not infer from such reasoning the appearance of Jesus as the mythical founder of Christianity at the beginning of the Second Century, a double of Moses whom the Greco-Roman remake [English in original] would erect as a Montanist agitator and then founder of the Roman Church?

Origen actually conserved a Christianity of which the spirit was originally formed in Alexandria, in the circles of Essene, Nazarene, Philonian and Elchasaite speculations. Like Clement, he remained a Gnostic in the sense that knowledge unveiled to consciousness what the faith of the New Prophecy revealed to the body, that is, a purification in which access to salvation resides. At this price, God, in the infinity of his love, would accord a universal redemption in which the demons and the Devil himself would be saved.

Despite the calumnies of the so-called “Church Fathers,” the least limited of whom admired his erudition, Origen would be perpetuated in the works of Pseudo-Denys the Areopagite, Gregoire of Nysse, John Scot Erigene, nay, Hildegarde von Bingen and Eckhardt.

Paul Of Samosate, Bishop Of Antioch

At the beginning of the Fourth Century, in Edessa, King Abgar — converted to the religion that had recently been recognized by the State — circulated personal letters addressed to Jesus-Christ and to which he had obligingly responded. Thus Abgar reengaged for his own profit the operation engaged in by the Church so as to loan to Jesus, Paul and Peter the status of historical personages. Rejected much later as gross fakes, these letters only differed from the New Testament by their (quite elevated) degreee of improbability.

Like all of the potentates touched by the racketeering of Rome, King Abgar used Catholicism as an instrument of power. He reorganized the clergy of the city, conferred upon it a monarchal form, transformed the temples into churches, the traditional festivals into consecrations of the saints, and religiously furnished the space and time of the city, as the Church would undertake to do at the level of the Imperium Romanum.[279]

Paul of Samosate, bishop of Antioch in 260, anticipated King Abgar’s reforms by 50 years. To the authority of the governor of the Church of Antioch, he added that of the governor of the Syrian province of Commagene and secretary of finances to Queen Zenobia of Palmyra.

Personage of the first rank in the region, Paul of Samosate was on the best terms with Zenobia, and favored a Syrian nationalism that aroused the suspicions and encouraged the rebellions of his peers and ecclesiastical rivals. A synod united in Antioch deposed him in 268.

Paul of Samosate’s doctrine showed the line of uncertainty in which the debate on the nature of the Christ was still stuck. For Paul of Samosate, God engendered the Logos that could be called the Son. The Logos inspired Moses and the prophets, then Jesus, who was only a man when, during baptism, the Logos entered him and transformed him into a perfect being. From then on, he accomplished miracles, triumphed over sin in himself and all men, with the result that his death redeemed and saved all of humanity. He preexisted and judged the living and the dead.

Ironically, the synod that deposed Paul of Samosate would reject the term homoousios (consubstantial) by which he designated the identity of God and the Christ; this was the same quality that the Church would impose in the Fourth Century as the only trinitary truth.

His conception of the Trinity, it is true, took a personal turn that was not compatible with the idea that the Church would forge in the Fourth Century. According to Leontus of Byzantium, “he gave the name of Father to God, who created all things; the name of Son to himself, who was purely a man; and Spirit to the grace that resulted from the apostles.”[280]

Theodore of Mopsueste attributed to Paul of Samosate a remark, the echo of which — a thousand years later — would still reverberate among the Amaurians and the partisans of the Free Spirit: “I do not envy the Christ because he had been made God, but because such as he was made, I was made, since he is found in my nature.”[281]

The enemies of Paul of Samosate did not exaggeratedly yield to the facilities of the lie when they affirmed that, in Antioch, the psalms that were sung were less in honor of God than in his honor. Paul accorded a place for women in religious offices, but nothing permits one to affirm that this was not in the manner of the Montanists and their virginal prophetesses.

The heresiologues detected his influence in the Nestorianism of the Fifth Century and in the Paulician movement that struggled against Byzantium in the Eighth Century.

• Chapter 18 : 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 proselytism, whether Jewish or Christian. The death of the emperor suspended this repression; it was revived under Maximin, not without sporadically rekindling in the ordinary flames of the pogroms. One of them exploded in Cappadoce, at the instigation of the governor. The pogrom in Alexandria in 249 inspired increased rigor on the part of Dece. Thus he dreamed of restoring the ancient religious values and reinvogorating the unity of the Empire through the annihilation of the Jews and the Christians. A similar project revolved in the heads that the influential bishops kept on their shoulders. Little by little, a new doctrine was formed, a realistic and political Christianity: Catholicism.

Among the small number of victims of the trials begun in 250, the philosopher Origen, an adept of Montanist asceticism, died following prolonged torture.

A rescript by Valerian, promulgated against the Christians in 257, suggested not a repudiation of their cult, but sacrifices that needed to be made to the ancient gods. The edict of tolerance issued by Gallian reestablished the peace in 260. Nevertheless, the idea of a national religion pursued its course. Emperor Aurelian, penetrated by the desire to revive the brilliance of Rome, through the radiance of a universal belief, readjusted the old monotheism of the Sol invictus, the cult of the Sun King, for his own uses. Death prevented him from regilding a scepter that ecclesiastical propaganda would soon recuperate: it assimilated Jesus-Christ into the unconquered Sun. Under the ferule of the bishops who were stuck on their perogatives and on the look-out for all profitable compromises the austere Christianity of the Essenes, the Nazarenes, the Gnostics and the Marcionites, the New Prophecy prepared to prostitute itself devotedly to the State.

Starting with Galian’s edict, the exercise of Christianity was tolerated by the police and the governors. But the truce was brutally interrupted to create room for the last and bloodiest of the repressions, that of Diocletian, who from 303 to 305 pursued Christians and Manicheans in an equally crazy fury. Those who abjured — and they were many — ceased to be worried.

The edict of tolerance issued by Galere in 311 suffered a brief interruption under Maximin, but he was vanquished in 313 by Licinius, whose victory announced the triumph of Christianity as the religion of the State.

Eusebius of Cesarea, the incense-bearer of the emperor, who, through cunning and flattery, assured his credit with the court, had good reason to undertake the exaltation of the faith and the firmness of the martyrs, whom he estimated to number in the tens of thousands. Frend, a historian of the persecutions, enumerates between 2,500 and 3,000 victims in the East and 500 in the West over the course of more than a century.[282] (The catacombs of La Via Latina date from the years 320–350 or 350–370. Contrary to the assertions of the Saint Sulpician legends, no known Christian sarcophagus is anterior to the Third Century.) Priests and bishops in the vicinity of Rome thus abjured more willingly than the Easterners, who were in solidarity with the local churches, whose the hostility to Roman power would not soon be disarmed and would arouse Donatism and Arianism before provoking the schism of Byzantium.

Eusebius’s hyperbolic cult of the martyr makes one think of Stalin, who allied the glorification of the original Bolsheviks with the massacre of their survivors. Who worked more effectively for the triumph of Eusebius and the clerical bureaucracy, the net of which would be set down on the world? The lapsi, the apostates, the backsliders. As far as authentic Christianity, the party of the New Prophecy (the only holder of the palms of the martyrs), it would fall — under the name Montanism — into the trashcans of “heretical perversion.”

From the beginning of the Third Century, the tension grew between the fervent Christians, who were more attached to the law than to life, and the bishops, whose sense of reality preferred a renegade priest to a dead priest. Passing through torment, the renegade actually disposed — for the greatest glory of the Church — the leisure to exploit the work of the martyrs for edifying ends. This was an old argument in which principles ceded place to necessity. The delirious masochism of the Christians of the Second Century offered to moderate spirits, it is true, several reasons for re-seizing and re-proving many of the offerings to death. All right. But the “party of the bishops,” which was scorned by Hermas, Origen and Tertullian, employed itself — while Rome increased the amplitude of its repression — in the safeguarding of an ecclesiastical power that moderation made into a double blow by protecting itself from the furies of the police and by condemning an asceticism that was hardly compatible with Greco-Roman license.

Tertullian had already stigmatized the laxity of certain bishops and their taste for power. “Episcopatus semulatio schismatum mater est,” he wrote in his Adversus Valentinos: “The rivalry of bishops is the source of schisms.”

Callixte, one of the principal bishops of Rome between 217 and 222, drew the reprobation of another bishop, Hippolyte, sometimes identified as the author of the Elenchos. Accused of laxity because he accorded ordination to remarried priests (Tertullian and Montanism prohibited remarriage), Callixte entered into the category of heretic for the author of the Elenchos: “A Christian from another school sinned; this sin, whatever it was, was not imputed to him, they say, provided that the guilty one embraced the school of Callixte.” The school of Callixte — whom the historians take to be a pope and whose name was given to the catacombs — was, according to the Elenchos, in the hands of the henchmen of abortion: “It was then that the women, self-avowed Christians, began to make use of medications capable of preventing conception and bandages destined to make them have abortions.”[283]

Pseudo-Hippolyte did not hesitate to situate Callixte in the line of the Elchasaitism that had been born in the third year of Trajan’s rule (around 100); a certain Alcibiade possessed the Elchasaites’ sacred book. The heresy, as it appeared here and as would be confirmed later, at first circumscribed a category in which anything that opposed or contested the bishop’s authority was pushed in an opprobrious manner. Assassinated during a riot in 222, Callixte incurred the displeasure of the Elenchos for the “lax” politics that would open the doors of holiness for him. Even better, the dictionaries would consecrate Callixte the sixth Pope of Rome, although the papacy did not appear until the Seventh Century.

• Chapter 19 : Arianism and the Church of Rome

Chapter 19: Arianism and the Church of Rome

The Council of Nicaea, convened on the orders of Constantine in 325, marks the birth of orthodoxy and, consequently, heresy. The tortuous line of the dogma that would take centuries to make its immutable truths precise arrogated for itself the privilege of a rectitude that people like Eusebius, Epiphanius, Augustine, Jerome and their cohorts would extend back into the past and to Jesus, the chosen founder of the Catholic invariance.

The Church would push cynicism to the point of claiming for itself a Christianity that would condemn the following manifestations as heresies: Nazarenism, Elchasaitism, Marcionism, anti-Marcionism, Christian Gnosticism and the New Prophecy.

In the Third Century, the notion of hairesis — questionable choices, subject to polemic — became a weapon, thanks to which the bishops could defend their privileges against all contestation. In the hands of emperors, then popes, heresy would be juridically assimilated as a crime of high treason. When the popes uprooted from the declining empire the ecclesiastical authority that they had arrogated for themselves, they perpetuated in law the old Roman legislation that had once been used against the Jews and the Christians, who had been deemed “rebels” against the State and “perverts” contravening the moral order.

By imposing himself as emperor by divine right, Constantine led a political enterprise in which his predecessors had only succeeded mediocrely. The party of collaborators that the Christian lapsi constitued encountered the aims of Constantine, who — having vanquished Maximin and Licinius — wanted to consolidate the unity of the Empire. Nourished by the conception of an ecclesiastical monarchism that erected the New Jerusalem in Rome, national security [la raison d’Etat] presided over the birth of Catholicism, the triumph of which would always remain burdened by the memory of the Christianities that founded it and that it would treat as bastards and abortions.

The polemics of the first three centuries entered into the freedom of options. The Council of Nicaea defined religious truth and, from then on, inaugurated the permanence of the lie: the forgery of gospels, the falsification of writings, the destruction of heterodox works, and the fabrication of an official history to which the majority of erudite people and historians still subscribe to this day.

Constantine touched by grace? Here we go. I borrow the following lines from the Catholic, Henri Guillemin: “Constantine did not believe in ‘Jesus-Christ’ in any fashion; he was a pagan and he would only convert (if he ever did so) upon his death in 337. When he ordered the meeting at Nicaea in 325, he was only being prudent, a realist, a ‘pragmatic’ and, when faced with the growing numerical importance in his empire of the sectarians of ‘Krestos,’ he drew from this fact the consequences that imposed themselves concerning the well-being of his government.”[285]

On his death-bed, the Emperor found the true father of Catholicism: Eusebius of Cesarea.

Eusebius Of Cesarea

In his commentary on the Life of Constantine, written by Eusebius of Cesarea, Jacob Burkhardt qualifies him as the “first totally dishonest and unjust historian of ancient times.”[286]

To understand the necessity in which Eusebius fabricated an Ecclesiatical History, canonical texts and an apostolic filiation with the scattered pieces of a puzzle of three centuries, it is fitting to recall that he was, above all, the first theorist to “introduce a rational conception of imperial power into the interior of a coherent ideology and metaphysics.”[287]

For Eusebius, “the terrestrial kingdom is in the image of the celestial kingdom.” The task of the sovereign is that of the Logos: to make the law rule over the here-below. “Carrying the image of the celestial kingdom, eyes fixed on heaven, he led and governed mortals on the model of the archetype through imitation of the monarchal power (of the Logos).”[288]

Eusebius’s history of the Church logically leads to the theology that he developed and that is nothing other than the justification of the power of Constantine, the incarnation of the Logos through the grace of God, whom he is duty-bound to serve:

God the Father, whom he called the Supreme Emperor, had certainly created the world. Having created it, he enclosed it in the reins of divine wisdom, making the constraints of time and the cycle of the years submit to him. But he trusted this world, once created, to his unique son, the Word [Verbe]. Eusebius of Cesarea made of him ‘the emminent moderator of the world,’ the ‘common conserver of all things’; the Cosmos produced him so that he could govern it; ‘God entrusted him with the reins of this universe.’ ‘He received from the infinitely good Father a hereditary role’; ‘he rules what is in the interior as well as in the exterior of the vault of heaven,’ and imposes harmonization on all things.

The Logos is thus the governor of the Cosmos, the one who maintains order in creation. It produces harmony among all things, much later, added Eusebius of Cesarea. He [the Son] was not a viceroy totally exterior to the ensemble that he governed. He was the soul and spirit of the world. Indeed, Eusebius of Cesarea described his function in a characteristic passage: ‘The Divine Word [Verbe],’ he said, ‘is not composed of parts and is not constituted from contraries, but is simple and indivisible. In the same way, in a body, the parts and members, the viscera and the intestines are multiple in their assemblage, but a unique soul, a unique spirit, indivisible and incorporeal, is spread throughout the ensemble; likewise, in the universe, the world itself is one, all being combined from multiple parts, but the Divine Word, endowed with an immense and all-powerful force, unique to it, deployed in the universe, does not stray from the adventure but spreads through all things and the cause of all that is made among them.’[289]

Thenceforth, theology would furnish its privileged framework to the risks of ecclesiastical politics and imperial power, still in solidarity despite violent rivalries. Theology thus seized the two doctrines that offered neither novelty nor anything religiously shocking: Donatism and Arianism. The first inscribed itself in the line of the New Prophecy and Novatian; the second revived Gnostico-Christian speculations and the relations between God and his messiah.

Arius

Although his name was invested with a glory propagated by the artifice of an alleged Arian party, neither Arius’ life nor his works justified the celebrity with which he was gratified. Born in Libya or Alexandria in 260, he studied with Lucien of Antioch and lived in Alexandria, where he was mentioned for the first time by Peter, bishop of the city, executed in 311. He belonged to the category of priests lying in wait for honors and preeminences. The partisan of Melititius of Lycopolis, a rival of the deceased Peter, Arius acceded to the priesthood under the bisphoric of someone named Alexander. Extolling asceticism, his popularity grew among the faithful who were always receptive to the old influence of Montanism, renewed by Novatian.

In 318, Arius opposed himself to this bishop, reproaching him with having attributed an equal eternity to the Father and the Son in a sermon. For Arius, the Son was neither eternal nor equal to the Father; created according to the principle of all things, he only received his divine nature once invested with his mission as savior on earth. The first opinion was related to Jewish, Essene and Nazarene Gnosticism, according to which Adam, or the new Adam erected as the redeemer messiah, was the co-creator of the world. The second picked up from Montanism [the following]: the messiah was a man, sharing in the vicissitudes of common human existence, but the Divine Spirit was incarnated in him from birth, since he was the son of Sophia or Mary. The two [opinions] inscribed themselves in the evolution of the Christianity of the first [few] centuries.

A synod of a hundred bishops, convened around 318 or 319, excluded Arius and his partisans from the Christian community and refused him communion, which marked belonging to the congregation. He left Alexandria and went to Nicodemia, where he enjoyed the support of Bishop Eusebius, not without having written a pamphlet called Thalia (the Banquet) in verse and prose, which knew a great popular success. Alexander retorted through a detailed report on the quarrel. The hostility of Licinius to the Christians and his war against Constantine relegated the debates to the second plane of preoccupations, but once Constantine was master of the Empire (after the defeat of Licinius), he invested himself triumphantly in Constantine’s double sovereignty, spiritual and temporal, and — at the request of Arius’ friends — convened a council at Nicaea, not far from Nicomedia.

In 325, Constantine — circumvented by his councilor Hosius of Cordoue, who won Alexander over to the party of the bishop — convinced three hundred bishops to take up positions against Arius.

The credo of Nicaea resulted from an imperial opinion that was hostile to Arius’ theory, according to which “God is when the Son is not,” and “he didn’t exist before birth.” He made the Son a “true God issued from the true God and forming the same substance with the Father,” which translates the Greek term homoiousios.

Arius obeyed and renounced his doctrine. In 328, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nicaea, exiled with their friend Arius, regained their world [siecle]. In 335, the synod of Tyr rehabilitated Arius. Constantine, whose sole desire in excluding them was to assure the unity of the young universal Church, was preparing to reintegrate him into the clergy of Alexandria when the unfortunate protester died in 336. (The official Christian version of his death wanted to let fly at him the last arrow of polemical elegance by propagating the rumor that he had unexpectedly trespassed by satisfying an urgent need. Abbey Pluquet, following other heresiologues, rejoiced in such a brilliant proof of divine wrath.[290])

From an inconsistent quarrel — in which only the authority of the emperor, elevated to the dignity of pontifex maximus (pontifical sovereignty), was important — the theologians drew an enormous jumble of implications that were as thunderous as they were empty. Underneath the quibbles of this Arian party, artificially swelled so as to give importance to the negligible, there raged a power struggle between Rome and the Eastern churches, and an unceasing combat between the West and Byzantium.

From a speculative point of view, it was easy to brandish the reproach of dualism, nay, Marcion’s “two Gods” against Bishop Alexander and his thesis of the “Eternal God, the Eternal Son.” The credo of Nicaea implied a unique God so as to parry Marcionism, which the Manichean religion would claim for itself.

Upon the death of Constantine I, reconciliation seemed to rule. Nevertheless, quite soon his successor, Constant, supported the party of Nicaea, while in the East Constantine II gave his support to the Arians. After the death of Constant in 350, Constantine II, maneuvering through many councils, attempted to Arianize the West and hunt down Arius’ enemies.

Nevertheless, dissent was born from the sudden victory of Arianism. Three factions emerged: the Anomeans affirmed that the Son was not similar (anomoios) to the Father; the semi-Arians or homoiousians affirmed that the Son participated in the same substance (homoiousios) as the Father; and the homoeians that the Son was like (homoios) the Father.

In fact, doctrinal positions were only pawns on the chessboard of rival influences: Valens, emperor from 364 to 378, inclined in favor of the homoeians. Gratian and Theodose the First (*) defended Nicaea. The decrees of 380 and 381 condemned Arianism, chased its partisans from the Church and foreshadowed many executions, the first victims of orthodoxy before Priscillian. In 381, the Council of Constantinople reaffirmed the credo of Nicaea and condemned the semi-Arians, the homoiousians.

(*) Theodose imposed on all the Christians an orthodox faith to which he gave the repressive firmness that would thenceforth prevent deviation from national security [la raison d’Etat]. In the strict sense, he was the founder of Catholic orthodoxy.

With the emergence of a State religion, the episcopatus aemulatio, the path to episcopal honors (which Tertullian mocked and labeled the “mother of all schisms”), freed itself much more easily because the destiny of the martyr was no longer dreaded.

A rhetorician in Antioch and born in Sicily around 300, Aetius was a disciple of Arius before he founded the Anomean party and assured his own doctrine by discerning a dissimilarity between the Father and the Son, a dissimilarity in which the Logos or Holy Spirit was incarnated. A friend of Emperor Gallus, Aetius used certain opportunities to make his views triumph, but his fate was the opposite. Condemned to exile upon the fall of Gallus (354), he aroused the reprobation of the Council of Ancyre (358) and Constantinople (360). Summoned by Emperor Julian and named bishop, he canceled his functions upon the death of the last tolerant emperor (the one whom the Church named the Apostate because he wanted to restore religious freedom). Aetius participated in the revolt of Procope, cousin of Julian, and barely escaped capital punishment, and died soon thereafter in Constantinople, where his secretary, Eunome, would develop a doctrine according to which the Father and the Son, dissimilar in essence, were united by the same will.

Athanase, Alexander’s successor, combated the theses of Arius and Aetius, reinforced the Nicaean party and invented the Arian party in his Discourse Against the Arians; he dressed Arianism up as a power that threatened faith and made Arius the very spirit of heresy.

From theological hyperbole — in which banal power rivalries between the notables of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch and Constantinople were played out — burst forth an Arian missionary vocation that failed to carry off the palm of orthodoxy by winning the sympathy of the new rival powers in Rome.

Constantine only condemned Arius with an eye on guaranteeing the unity of the Church and the unity of the Empire. Arius threatened stability and order to the limited extent that his influence gathered the adhesion of a great number of people. Constantine was not unacquainted with the one who, exiling Arius, condemned Athanase, his principal enemey, to the same fate. Likewise, Constantine II — in the uncertainty in which orthodoxy was still situated — also put Athanase and Aetius aside. Anyone could capsize at any moment. Weakened by the edict of tolerance issued by Emperor Julian (361–363), the two parties would each know a manner of victory. The Nicaeans carried off the West; the Anomean missionaries converted the Goths, who, invading Spain and North Africa, imposed Arianism on them. As far as Byzantium, whose hostility with respect to Rome did not cease to grow, it gave its schism a theological pretext by rejecting a post-Nicaea formula that was born in Spain during the Seventh Century: “The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son,” a quarrel that was called Filioque (and of the Son).

The rivalries between Arian, anti-Arian and pseudo-Arian factions rallied a good number of individuals in search of social promotion or animated by simple opportunism. (Thus the schismatic Lucifer, the Bishop of Cagliari in Sardinia, laid the bases for an anti-Arian Church for his own profit.) Was not Acace, bishop and successor of Eusebius of Cesarea, successively Arian under Constance, Nicaean under Jovian, and Anomean under Valens? Such was the case with many.

More interesting was Aerius, priest of Pontus, ordained by Eustathe, Bishop of Sebaste, against whom he entered into conflict, reproaching him for abandoning the ascetic conduct to which he subscribed before attaining dignity.

Aerius inscribed himself in the counter-current of Nicaea and religious State-ification by advancing the opinion that no difference in rank between priest and bishop should exist. He condemned the pomp of the ceremonies multiplied by the Church and judged useless the prayers for the dead, which was a source of revenue for the clergy. According to him, Easter did away with Jewish superstition. Epiphanius of Salamis — who used a procedure that would be popular among the inquisitors of the Middle Ages, that is to say, confusion — assimilated him with the Arians, to whom he thus imputed hostile feelings for the [Church] hierarchy.

• Chapter 20 : 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 remained unshakable in their convictions [even] when faced with their executioners, and the party of the lapsi or traditores, the renegades, the traitors, who were more numerous and, due to their very pragmatism, better accustomed to accede to the clerical responsibilities thenceforth conferred by the State.

In Carthage, the bastion of Tertullianism, the most significant incident exploded, precipitated by the anti-Montanist reaction that took place underneath the goblets [la coupe] of a corrupted clergy.

During the persecution of Diocletian, which was brief but cruel (303–305), the majority of the clergy abjured. A small group of priests from Abitina (Tunisia), imprisoned in the expectation of torture, denounced the traditores. They proclaimed that only those who, following their example, remained loyal to belief would reach paradise. Their intransigence would irritate the clergy of Carthage and, in particular, the Archdeacon Caecilianus (Cecilian), much later accused of preventing other Christians from bringing food and comfort to prisoners.[291]

When Cecilian succeded the bishop of Carthage, who died in 311, the majority of the faithful reacted with indignation. A young bishop named Donatus led the movement of contestation.

Born in Numidia, Donat had already attracted attention as a young bishop in Casa Nigra by demanding, at the conclusion of the persecutions, a new baptism for the lapsed clergy. Concerning these pleas, a council of 70 bishops who met in 312 deposed Cecilian and replaced him with Majorinus, chaplain of Lucilla, a rich Spaniard executed under the reign of the collaborating bishop.

That same year, Constantine crushed his rival, Maxence, and seized North Africa, which had until then been subjected to the fallen emperor. With the sanction [jugement] of the Roman clergy, in which apostasy was dominant, he restored Cecilian to his responsibilities, allotted him an important subsidy and exempted from all taxes the clergy who obeyed the renegade.

Meanwhile, upon the death of Majorinus, Donat succeded him with the consent of Cecilian’s enemies, who sent the emperor a list of the crimes imputed to his protege. Donat went to Rome to plead his legitimacy, but Militiades, a Roman bishop whom Constantine consulted because of his African origins, took sides against him, which caused his condemnation by the emperor.

Essentially careful to unify his empire, Constantine moved from threats to conciliation. In 321, he repealed the decree of exile that struck Donat, whose influence had not ceased to grow. In 336, two-hundred and seventy bishops controlled the communities in a territory that today stretches from Tunisia to East Algeria, in which the lax party of Cecilian was in the minority. In Egypt, the Donatist bishop Melece enjoyed great popular support.

No doubt Donat benefited from the tacit tolerance of imperial power, that is, until the peasant revolt of the Circoncellions was grafted on to his movement, thereby forming its popular wing.

In 346, a commando group of Circoncellions attacked the commission sent to North Africa by the emperor. Despite their disapproval of this action, Donat and his principal partisans were exiled to Gaul, where the bishop of Casa Nigra died in 355.

The Circoncellion movement allied with religious fanaticism (hostile to the laxity of the wealthy) the demands of the disinherited of the countryside: laborers, shephards, slaves, poor peasants. Their name came from circum cellas, those who wander around the barns (cellae).

They called themselves “saints” and “fighters” (agonistes), terms issued from Essenism and Judeo-Christianity. Armed with the billy club that they called Israel, the Circoncellions attacked large property owners and functionaries, liberating slaves to whom they entrusted the task of treating their [former] masters as they had been treated in servitude. They combated the Devil in the person of his representatives: terrestrial owners, tax collectors, magistrates and anti-Donatist priests. They acted under the leadership of two men, Axide and Phasir, “duces sanctorum” (leaders of saints), who, according to Optat (340), “made owners and creditors tremble.”[292] The Circoncellions supported the cult of the martyrs and opposed the sanctification of asceticism to the lazy and hedonistic existence of the rich.

Disavowed by the Donatists, the Circoncellions could not resist the imperial army and ended up massacred around 348.

Nevertheless, Donatism would survive until 429. It rejected the principal demands of the Circoncellions, so often reprized by the [various] millenarianist movements: the reign of the saints; universal equality under the sole power of God; moratoria on debts; judgments and executions of the rich; and the suppression of slavery.

Donat, who at the beginning cautioned against the zeal of the Circoncellions in their hunt for apostates, would approve of their suppression but would not recover his credit with the emperor.

The party of the lapsi and the laxists retook the upper hand. Optat attacked his adversaries in Against the Donatists. From 399 to 415, Augustine of Hippone undertook to chase them from Carthage. Moreover, they were outlawed, starting in 411.

Thanks to one of the many ironies of history, Donatism would disappear in 429, at the same time that Roman colonization was swept by the invasion of the Vandals, who imposed as the religion of the State the very Arianism that had been condemned as heresy.

The social and political components that had assured the success of Donatism also conducted it towards its downfall. The nationalistic demands of Numidia and Mauritania uncovered motifs of satisfaction in Donat’s opposition to Rome and in his project of creating an African Catholic Church. When he demanded (according to Optat’s Against the Donatists)[293] “What has the emperor to do with the Church?” the response was doubly articulated. His Church — beyond which, as with the Church of Rome, “there was no salvation” — refused to submit to the imperial power of an emperor who was at once the head of State and the leader of the clergy. He defended the principle of national churches, independent of a central power.

But Donat also contested the preeminence of temporal power over spiritual power. Such would be the opinion of the papacy, starting from the Seventh Century. Augustine, an enemy of Donatism and a partisan of spiritual preeminence, was not deceived; he borrowed from the Donatist theologian Tychonius the doctrine of the two cities, the terrestrial city and the city of God.

On the other hand, Donat’s Montanism and Tertullianism went against the attempts of the Church of Rome to reconcile itself with a Latin aristocracy that was little inclined to asceticism and puritanism. His church wanted to be the “Virgin Church” of Tertullian, in opposition to the temporal church of the lapsi. It was to be a “closed garden,” a refuge for the people suffering for God, a place in which the perjured priests could have no part.

The Donatists did not allow — and [here] one finds again the arguments of the Elenchos against Callixte, bishop of Rome — that a dignitary who had lost his celestial existence so as to save his terrestrial life had the right to pursue his ministry. The sacraments accorded by such a bishop were deprived of value. The sacred character of the function did not accommodate itself to a forfeiture. The clergy of Rome, in which the lapsi were in the majority, thought otherwise. For them, any bishop was invested with the right to give the sacraments, even if, as a man, he showed himself unworthy of the sacredness that he distributed. This was an endemic conflict, one that clarified — from a certain angle — the very notion of heresy: provided that he did not put aside dogma, a priest, bishop or pope could surrender himself to debauchery and infamy without losing the grace that the Church accorded him, insofar as he remained an obedient son. But practicing virtue by contravening orthodoxy in his discourse brought upon him damnation in the beyond and the here-below.

Against Donat, Augustine would formulate his doctrine concerning the nature of the Church and the sacraments. Not only did he summon police repression against individuals and groups that put Catholic orthodoxy aside, he also made precise the point that the sacraments act ex opere operato,[294] through the sacred character of the [Church] official.

• Chapter 21 : The Spirituals, Also Called Messalians or Euchites

Chapter 21: The Spirituals, Also Called Messalians or Euchites

Unlike Arianism, Donatism and Monophysism — which, born from rivalries of nations and churches, might better be characterized as schisms rather than heresies — the movement of the “Spirituals,” who were called Messalians or Euchites by their adversaries, was only Christian in appearance, under which was expressed the ordinary taste for life, so easily diverted [tourne] by dereliction, leveling and destructive asceticism, or religious or political fanaticism.

By combating the rigor of the New Prophecy, as it was perpetuated by Novatian, Donat and the Circoncellions, the Church of Rome used a political wisdom of which many popes later showed themselves to be worthy inheritors. Though it was protected by its status as a unique religion, Catholicism did not win the game. Other than a minority, the Greco-Roman aristocracy was reluctant to banish from its everyday life the pleasures of the bed, the table, nay, the bloody games of the circus. Unlike the “Virgin Church” dear to Tertullian and Donat, the Catholic, apostolic and Roman Church required a strict obedience to its authority and representatives by those who accorded the sacraments and the remission of sin. In all the acommodations thus rendered possible — and the specifications of Augustine of Hippone would soon come to clarify things — nothing prevented a Roman citizen inclined towards hedonism from embracing Catholicism. Priests, bishops and popes, moreover, would only put the brakes on their ordinary debaucheries after the Sixteenth Century, that is, after the cold shower of the Reformation, which washed the Catholic stains from its primitive Christianity, the true Western Christianity, anti-Semitic and puritan: the New Prophecy.

But the anti-Montanism of the Church also expressed the voice of wisdom. The trinity, by which the Church — as much as the Spirit — mediated between God and the Son who was incarnated in the weakness and corruption of human and terrestrial nature, also filled a primordial function: it avoided the confrontation of dualism; it set right the balance between good and evil, oppression and revolt, repression [refoulement] and relief [defoulement]. The reverse of Puritanism, it was unbridled license. In this sense, the “Messalian” movement constituted the antithetical continuation of Montanism.

In his Hymns about the Heresies, which were composed between 363 and 373 in Edessa, Ephrem speaks of people who gave themselves up to a free morality under the cover of devotion. They called themselves pneumatikoi, “Spirituals.” Their adversaries called them the Messalians (from the Syrian word m’salleyane, “those who pray”) or Euchites (from the Greek euchitai).

Epiphanius of Salamis mentioned their presence in Antioch around 376 or 377. He described them as vagabonds who, refusing to possess any goods, slept in the streets of the town, men and women mixed together, rejecting all forms of work and contenting themselves with begging and praying.

Their initiator was Adelphius, but other names were linked to a current that was scattered everywhere, continued to perpetuate itself, and of which it is permitted to conjecture that it rallied together a great number of people who were drawn more by ephemeral ecstasy than by the prize of a hypothetical beyond — indeed, this current hasn’t ceased to trace its furrows underneath the prudent appearances of religious obligation. Dadoes, Sabas, Hermas, Symeon and Eustathe of Edessa have been mentioned by Photius, Michael the Syrian, Bar-Hebraeus and Philoxene of Mabbourg.

In the 380s, Flavian, patriarch of Atioch, persecuted the Spirituals and chased them into the provinces of Lycaonia and Pamphylia, where they were condemned by the bishops around 388. In 390, Flavian of Antioch went further by anathematizing all of the Messalians, despite Adephius’ attempts to defend their cause.

The persecution of the Spirituals was extended into Armenia. Letoios, bishop of Melitene, ordered the burning of monastaries into which the Messalian doctrine had penetrated. (The recidivists were condemned to having their shins sliced open.[295])

Around 405, Atticus, patriarch of Byzantium, insisted on the necessity of expelling the Messalians. Much later, Nestorius would associate himself with the struggle. In 428, the imperial police were tasked with intervening against the Spirituals and making them outlaws. In 431, the Council of Ephesus would ratify the measures previously taken, without great success, it would seem.

In the second half of the Fifth Century, the Spirituals united around Lampetius, a priest ordained around 460 by Alypius, the Bishop of Cesarea of Cappadoce. According to Theodore Barkonai, Lampetius founded in the mountanous region between Sicily and Isauria monasteries of men and women in which a joyous life was lived. (*) There were other places in Egypt where Lampetius enjoyed the protection of Alpheius, bishop of Rhinocoloura (El’Arich, near the Palestinian border). And how could they not revive the memory of Carpocratus in Alexandria? But the patriach of the city [El’Arich], either through nonchalance or sympathy, was content to demand an oral repudiation of error from the “uncultivated” people.

(*) In the Third and Fourth Centuries, the various ascetic Christianities condemned the women who lived with bishops, priests or deacons, and [worse] exercised sacramental functions, under the name “Agapete” (agapetai, “the beloved”). Relatively favorable to women, the Celtic tradition introduced the Agapetes into the new Christian cults of Ireland and Britain, in which, during the Sixth Century, there still existed monasteries composed of female hosts (cohospitae), who conferred the sacraments without, for all that, renouncing their [feminine] charms. The Arthurian legends would frequently evoke them. Around 150, The Pastor of Hermas gave an allegorical meaning to their double nature as libertines and holy “virgins.”

The actions taken at the beginning of the Sixth Century by the pariarch of Antioch, and his refutation of a work by Lampetius entitled Testament, show the persistance of the movement, which was also being fought by the Monophysite Churches of Syria.

One would find Spirituals in Constantinople towards the end of the Sixth century, grouped around a convert named Marcian, from whom came the name Marcianites, according to Maxime the Confessor.[296] Photious, author of a Fourth Century study of the Messalians, speaks of contemporary heretics with whom he was involved.

• Chapter 22 : Monophysites and Dyophysites

Chapter 22: Monophysites and Dyophysites

Three currents stood out from the tormented landscape that was presented by the ecclesiatical rivalries and quarrels of the Church, which was struggling for the recognition of its authority and preeminence. They corresponded to the two poles of imperial power: Rome and Byzantium, and the cradle of Hellenized Christianity, Alexandria.

Monophysism had more to do with schism than heresy. Born in Alexandria, this doctrine was not innovative but used old speculations on the nature of the Messiah to mark itself from Rome. After the Council of Chalcedoine, held in 451, the eastern Churches seized hold of the Jacobites of Syria and the Armenian churches, so as to constitute their dogma, which was still honored by the Egyptian Coptics. But it is also necessary to take account of the animosity that had not ceased to be manifested between Alexandria and Antioch, the city in which — from the end of the First Century — the communities devoted to Jacob and Simon-Peter had been implanted. The judgment of Tertullian was once more verified “Episcopatus aemulatio mater schismatum est.”

By rejecting Arius, the Church of Rome had defined, through the credo of Nicaea, the rudiments of Catholic dogma: the Christ was God; he formed a single substance with the Father; although he was created for all eternity by the Father, he was incarnated by descending to earth and thus became a man entirely apart [from the others]. This was the position of Tertullian and, for Rome, it defined the role of the Church most advantageously: a spiritual and temporal power; the union of the celestial kingdom and the temporal kingdom. The Church was founded by God and by “Jesus, put to death under Pontius Pilate,” whose two principal apostles, Peter and Paul, were martyred in Rome, designating by their sacrifice — according to the example of Christ — the legitimate place of the “Holy See.”

Arianism, issued from Alexandria, established a subordinate relationship between God, the creator of all things, and the Son, created as any man but invested by the divine Logos. “Did you have a son before he was born?” Arius asked of mothers and his question, ironically aimed at the Mother Church, attacked the pretension of ecclesiastical Rome to divine perpetuity.

It was still from Alexandria and Cyrille, a disciple of Athanase (Arius’ enemy), that the revolt against Rome came. The revolt grafted itself to one of the specious quarrels in which Alexandria and Antioch had engaged for centuries.

There was the unique substance of the Father, the Son and the Logos, or Spirit, but was it the nature, the physis of this Jesus who was a man entirely apart and, at the same time, the God of all eternity?

For the party of Antioch, there was a Messiah of two natures, one divine and one human. Such was the opinion of Theodore of Mopsueste (350–428), Theodoret of Cyrus, and Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople. An error, retorted the party of Alexandria: to admit two natures was to recognize two Messiahs, two persons, one the eternal Logos, the other an historical individual. Monophysites, or the supporters of a single nature, thenceforth entered into the lists of those combating the Antiochians or Dyophysites, who distinguished two natures.

Paradoxically, Monophysism derived from the hostility manifested towards Arius by Athanase of Alexandria, who insisted on the unique nature of the incarnated God-Logos. Around 370, Apollinaire of Laodicee (Latakiech, in Syria), desiring to pursue the struggle against Arianism, insisted on Athanase’s thesis and attracted the animosity of Epiphanius of Salamis, the hunter of heretics and the juridical enemy of Origen.

In 374, Epiphanius denounced Apollinaire to Damase, the Bishop of Rome: Apollinaire was condemned by a synod.

In 381, while the ecumenical council of Constantinople anathematized Arianism and Apollinaire’s theses, an adversary of Apollinaire, the Antiochian Diodore of Tarse, took the position opposite to the incriminated doctrine and decreed that the most important thing about the Christ was his human nature, his suffering, his exemplary sacrifice. He counted two natures in this Messiah, tossed about, as pretext, from one camp to the other, on the waves of a theology of power: the Word [Verbe] or Logos, Son of God, and Jesus the man, son of Mary. Thus, Theodore of Mopsueste developed the theory of Diodore.

The difficulty in which were entangled the clerics trying to legitimate their authority by fortifying it with “divine truths” precisely concerned the way that they transformed into concrete realities the purely speculative reasons that Judeo-Christian Gnosticism had maintained at the very limits of coherence: a God who drew from his eternal essence a Logos (or image) of which the flash (or reflection) preserved its imprint in human matter. From this, divine Wisdom — Sophia or Mary, feminine Spirit — gave birth to — and always from the same virginal essence — a Messiah, a savior, a redeemer, who assumed the body of a man, and thereby knew the miserable lot of mortals and, through, his exemplary sacrifice, ascended towards his Father by showing mankind the road of salvation and the ascensional route of the divine that was inside it. What spoiled and complicated the metaphysical purity of such a construction was the will or the necessity of introducing a temporal power, a legal authority.

The apologue of Sophia, the virgin, and Prunikos, the prostitute, contented itself with allegorically expressing the descent of the Spirit into matter and the deplorable fate that imposed upon it the “malediction of the flesh.” But the parthenogenesis of a young Jewish bride giving birth to a God after having welcomed a dove?!

In 423, when Theodose II named the Antiochian Nestorius to be the patriarch of Constantinople, popular Greek Christianity — dressed in the costume of the commonly invoked ancient Goddess — took up the custom of celebrating Mary as the mother of God. She was Theotokos. (In the Fourth and Fifth Centuries, the custom of offering cakes to Ceres became Christianized. One would call “Collyridians,” from the Greek word collyres, “little cakes,” the new Christians who gave to Mary offerings reserved for her archetype. Epiphanius would unleash his fury against them, no doubt due to ordinary misogyny, but also because he suspected that, under the Christian facade, the old fertility rites remained intact.)

Therefore Nestorius (381–451), the Bishop of Byzantium from 428–431, claimed for himself the Dyophysite school of Antioch. His disciples held him to be, along with Theodore of Mopsueste and Diodore of Tarse, among the “three great lights of the Church.” His political realism incited him to follow the Antiochian tradition of historical exegesis, rather than the allegorical tradition of Alexandria. Nevertheless, he clashed with the general sentiment of the Greek Catholics by rejecting the expression “mother of God” (Theotokos) in favor of Anthropotokos or Christotokos (mother of Man or mother of the Christ).

Cyrille of Alexandria, adversary of Nestorius and partisan of Apollinaire of Laodicea, quickly counter-attacked: “If the Christ is God, and Mary is his mother, would she not be the mother of God?”

The emperor convened a council at Ephesus in 431. Through a maneuver that revealed the political obedience of theological argumentation, the partisans of Cyrille, arriving first, obtained the condemnation of Nestorius. As the Theotokos, the Mother of God, Mary triumphed. Nestorius was deposed. Although a counter-council of the Nestorians replied by deposing Cyrille of Alexandria in 436, the patriach of Byzantium was banished to Petra, then in Upper Egypt, where he died. By imperial order, the ensemble of his works was burned. Nevertheless, a copy of his Bazaar of Heraclides escaped destruction. In it, he proclaimed that God could not have been born from a woman, nor that he died on the cross. This was a thesis commonly accepted by the Christian Gnostics of the Second Century and that the Church would condemn under the name “Docetism.”

The fall of Nestorius involved that of the Dyophysites Diodore of Tarse and Theodore of Mopsueste, who — held as orthodox in their era — would be posthumously placed among the camp of the heretics. Nevertheless, Diodore deployed great ingenuity by explaining that, in Mary’s uterus, the Logos built a temple for itself. This temple was Jesus the man, headed for birth and suffering, whereas the divine Logos, for its part, escaped from control by human destiny.

Likewise, Theodore insisted on the union in a single person of the nature of Man, complete in its humanity, and nature, perfect in its divinity, and the Logos-Son, consubstantial with the Father.

In 489, the school of Edessa, in which Nestorianism enjoyed a great popularity, fell under the prohibitions of Emperor Zenon. The persecution would hunt the Nestorians, whose Churches would spread everywhere in the East, Samarcande and Tartaria as far as India, even China. They have maintained themselves ever since by conserving, according to their dogma, the idea that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and not the Son, which is what the Byzantine Church affirmed. The West would only keep a trace of these doctrines, which were condemned under the name “Adoptianism,” associated with Felix of Urgel and Elipand, the Bishop of Toledo, excommunicated by the Council of Frankfurt in the Eighth Century because they maintained that God had adopted Jesus the man so as to deposit his Logos in him.

• Chapter 23 : Pelagius and Augustine, or the Conception of Free Will and Predestination

Chapter 23: Pelagius and Augustine, or the Conception of Free Will and Predestination

Thanks to the bias of Augustine of Hippone, who fought against it, the doctrine of Pelagius enriched the Catholic dogma, then in formation, with two specifications that were important to the power that they conferred upon the Church of Rome and to the incessant quarrels that it maintained over the course of the centuries.

Augustine did indeed mark the beginning of the requirement to baptize children, who were held to be impure at birth, and the advent of the theory of predestination — much later judged to be heretical, without triggering the impossible condemnation of one of the principal “fathers” of Catholicism — which he fabricated so as to direct it against his old enemy, Pelagius.

Pelagius (340?-429?), born in Britain or Ireland, no doubt retained traces of the Celtic freedom of spirit when he reached Rome around 400. A little before the fall and sacking of the city by the Goths, who were converted to Arianism (410), Pelagius and his disciple Celestius left for Carthage, where his brilliant spirit and rhetorical talents won him the friendship of Augustine of Hippone, bishop of the city. But Augustine’s authoritarianism quickly ceased tolerating the uncertainties that Pelagius’s ideas propagated concerning the function of the Church, over which the master of Carthage intended to establish absolute hegemony. (Augustine did not hesitate to retrieve from Tyconius, who was the partisan of a type of Donatism that he anathematized, the theory of a City of God that was superior to the terrestrial city, entrusted to this impermiable power, which was precisely in decline during the Roman Empire.)

Pelagius took refuge in Palestine, in which another doctrinaire Catholic, Jerome — put on his guard by Augustine’s emissaries — persecuted him and taxed his doctrine with Manicheanism, Catholicism’s religious rival, repressed everywhere with the greatest violence. (Augustine himself was a renegade from Manicheanism. He turned his vehemence against his old coreligionists by appealing to them to abide by the rigors of the law. It was from him that came the bloody repression that struck the Manicheans and, much later, the Paulicians, the Bogomiles and the Cathars.)

Acquitted by the Synod of Jerusalem in 415, Pelagius and Celestius were excommunicated two years later by Pope Innocent I. At first, Zozime, Innocent’s successor, showed sympathy towards Pelagius, but he soon pulled himself together and definitively condemned him at the Council of Carthage in 418.

To better understand Pelagius’s teachings and Augustine’s attitude, it is fitting to situate them within the anti-Montanist reaction that was conducted with firmness by the “lax” politics of the ecclesiastical majority in the West.

If the Church reconciled itself with Greco-Roman hedonism by exiling puritan rigor to the monasteries, if it kept the sacrifical perfection of the Christ as a difficultly accessible ideal, it also acquiesed without too much difficulty to the depraved morals of many priests and faithful people, provided that its authority and sacramental function was publicly privileged.

The Spirituals or “Messalians” weren’t the only ones to turn aside the duplicity of the Church and cover, with several hastily Christianized arguments, their quite common choice to obey sexual impulses and the pleasures of existence, without preoccupying themselves with obedience or guilt.

Around 380, a certain Helvidius, apparently a disciple of Auxentius (the Arian Bishop of Milan and the predecessor of Ambroise), drew down upon himself the thunderbolts of Jerome (344?-420) for having mocked the virginity of Mary and maintained that she had had other children, since the canonical gospels mention the “brothers of the Lord.” With fervor Jerome tried to show that these brothers were merely Jesus’ cousins. He was way too attached to the word “brother,” which — in the spirit of Essenism or Nazareanism — was identical to “witness,” to martus in Greek and “martyr” in French;[304] for the Judeo-Christians, the brother or witness was simply he who participates in the same sacrifice as the “Servant of the Lord,” celebrated by the Book of Isaiah.

But Helvidius’ remark is less concerned with promoting historical exegesis than finishing with the alleged superiority of virginity over the amorous relation. This was why he rejected Tertullian, Montan and all of the Christianity of the New Prophecy.

A similar doctrine can be found in Jovianian, a disciple of Ambroise, Bishop of Milan. In Rome, where his audience was large, Jovinian argued ironically that such a virgin birth was accomplished by this fantastic being named Jesus, this angelos-christos that the Gnostics and Manicheans condemned by the Church were so proud of. To the hypocritical asceticism of the faithful, Jovinian opposed the salvational inclination to the pleasures of the table, love and the benefits of life, which were real grace accorded by divine kindness. For him, the purification of baptism was sufficient to wash away all sin and to protect oneself against the traps set by a demon anxious to spoil and corrupt the gifts of God...

Condemned by Pope Sirice and by the Council of Milan, convened in 390 at the request of Ambroise, Jovinian was exiled by imperial prescription.

Among the most persistent of Jovinian’s adversaries were Jerome, the supporter of marital viginity and author of Against Jovinian, the no-less misogynist Augustine, and Pelagius.

What divergence separated Pelagius from the puritan Augustine? A certain concept of human dignity. Pelagius did not share in the conception of a fundamental ignominy of mankind, which the Bishop of Carthage had brilliantly summarized in this finding: “Inter fesces et urinam nascimur,” “We are born between shit and piss.”

The austerity of Pelagius was related to that Seneca and even to that of the Nineteenth Century atheistic moralists, nay, even the freethinkers who [today] thrash the debauchery of the clergy. Pelagius estimated that mankind makes use of a force of will that was sufficient to attain virtue and goodness. There was no need for divine aid or the mediation of the Church if one wished to follow the ethical rules that were prescribed everywhere. All virtues resides in germ-form in each individual; it was sufficient to bring these seeds to fruition if one wished to fight the temptations of evil.

One could not trace the roads of public morality any better by avoiding the detour of the Church.

The Church [according to Pilage], reduced to a congruous portion, only intervened through the sacraments, so as to guarantee the salvation of the soul when terrestrial life accomplished its destiny according to the precepts of moral law.

Our freedom was as total as that of Adam and Eve, before they misused it, thereby condemning themselves to downfall. By teaching the privileges of moral will from infancy, men would obey God’s designs, and baptism (which was not given to children at the time) simply placed the Church’s seal as a pass to eternal beautitude.

Many citizens of the Empire — including those who prized moral rigor or Stoic or Epicurean philosophy — practiced such principles without needing to give them a Christian coloration. Even among the Catholics, Theophrone of Cappadoccia said that the omniscience of God knew all that would be produced, but did not positively know it as an accomplished fact, [thus] leaving to mankind the freedom to act beyond all determinations. In the spirit of Theophrone, it was a question of reconciling the absolute power of God and human freedom, which the Church, called upon to get out of the dead-end of Augustinian predestination, would call “free will.”

And so, at the time that Pelagius was recalling the principles of a lay morality, Augustine (calculating the decline of imperial unity and his stranglehold over the West) prepared for the advent of a pontifical authority that would cover the entire world with traps, the tangled stitches of which the City of God and the terrestrial city would [combine to] ceaselessly tighten.

Augustine launched a machine of doctrinal war against Pelagius. To the freedom defended by his adversary, Augustine opposed a theory that, much later, would be regurgitated by Calvinism and Jansenism: predestination.

The fate of mankind was traced out in all eternity by God who, as absolute master, decided upon the salvation or damnation of his creatures. A terrible doctrine, which, setting human beings to fear and trembling, reduced their pride, abandonned them pantingly to the consolations of a Church that recalled their indignity to them.

To break the Pelagians’ excessive confidence in mankind, Pope Honorius subjected them, and the philosopher Julian of Eclane, to the penalties prescribed for heretics. Pelagius and Celestius died in exile, one believes, shortly thereafter.

Predestination also revealed a banality that was even more embarrassing to the Church than the freedom left in mankind’s own hands. If the fate of each being was determined according to the caprice of God, what good were the protections of the Church, the priests and the sacraments? It would take Thomas Aquinas’ laborious arguments to accord to the all-powerful divinity the freedom to choose salvation or damnation in a conscious and willful manner called “free will.”

Augustine never incurred the least reprobation; he had done too much for the grandeur and enrichment of the Church. But, in 475, the Council of Arles would condemn as a heretic one Lucida, who supported the idea that, the freedom of mankind having been annihilated by the fall into sin, each person fell under the blow of a predestination required by God and by virtue of which destiny led each, irremediably, to damnation or eternal life.

The amplified function of original sin and the impurity imputed to new-born infants gave the [Church’s] dogma a response that aimed at annihilating the hopes that Pelagius had in rendering mankind perfect. The Montanists, in their horror of nature and life (although such a repulsion had already animated Essene zeal), were the first to recommend the baptism of infants, at a time when the custom was not widespread. Augustine held up to mankind, capable of raising itself towards virtue (so says Pelagius), an inverse portrait: man was a wretched creature, imbecilic, prey to all temptations of the flesh and quite incapable of resisting them. Why? Because the original stain of the sin of Adam penetrates him from his birth. Only baptism washed him of the infamy that the Church tolerates only when it welcomed the faithful into its sanctuary.

Once the baptism of children was erected as a necessity, the new-born was consecrated to the Catholic faith from the very first hours of its life. Unbaptized children would die like animals; the others would live in repudiated errors and innocence. The profitable market in pentitence and redemption — gifts, emoluments, alms, submission — took root in the Augustinian doctrine of the intrinsic weakness of the body and the spirit.

No one had the force of character great enough to successfully resist all temptation. One sinned by pride if one estimated oneself able to thwart [all] the demoniac ruses of nature. So! Man, this miserable and negligible being, succumbed to sin — because Rome authorized him to redeem himself, to regain his salvation, not in the ways [le chef] of Augustine, but in the comforting bosom of the Church. Much later, the skillful arrangement of responsibilities and free will would establish a mathematics of salvation and damnation that would open on to the trade in indulgences and absolutions at a price.

The credit of Augustine in the matter was merited, as long as one excused his doctrinal lapses into the black ride of predestination.

• Chapter 24 : 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 power recognized everywhere the authority of the perjured priests and collaborators. (See the example of Bishop Cecilian, enemy of Donat in Carthage.) A Century later, Bishop Pacianus of Barcelona denounced penitential discipline and the rigor of the priest or bishop named Sympronianus.[305]

Priscillian’s intervention inscribed itself in the persistance of a Christian tradition with which Catholicism confirmed its break by reason of its political aims. His execution drew a bloody stroke across archaic Christianity sacrificed to national security [la raison d’Etat].

Through the argument without reply of the sword, Catholicism cut itself off from a Christianity that would not cease to haunt it during the long funeral procession of the Vaudois, apostolics, Flagellants, [and] Spiritual Franciscans, right up to the emergence of a Reformation in which the spirit of Montan and Tertullian would be reincarnated in the founding fathers of modern capitalism.

Born around 340 to a well-to-do and probably senatorial Roman family, Priscillian was in his thirties when he adhered to the Christian current that was traditionally ascetic, millenarianist and on the look-out for the second coming of the Christ.

Priscillian soon clashed with the representatives of Rome and the new tendency. Among the clerical functionaries of the emperor, two dignitaries — Ithacius, Bishop of Ossonuba (Faro) and his Metropolite, Hydatius of Emerita Augusta (Merida) — accused Priscillian of imposing on his faithful an oath of loyalty to him. He inflamed the Council of Saragossa, which in 380 convened twenty-six bishops from Spain and Portugal, and two from South Gaul. What was the exact accusation? That Priscillian, well versed in biblical exgeses, referred to texts other than the canonical ones, which had only been recently imposed. But the progress of Manicheanism, the great competiting religion, offered the “Romans” the occasion to appeal to the amalgam, which was the ordinary ingredient of such polemics. Priscillian, a perfect ascetic, declared himself favorable to celibacy for priests. It was no longer necessary to assimilate him with the disciples of Mani, against whom the neo-Novatians had, all things considered, never ceased to struggle.

That same year, Priscillian was elected Bishop of Avila. This angered Hydatius, who obtained, one after the other, the support of Ambroise, Bishop of Milan and a future saint, and an imperial rescrit that ordered the deposition of Priscillian and the banishment of the “pseudo-Bishops and Manicheans.”

Soon afterwards, Priscillian, two bishop friends and three women from his congregation went to Rome via the [province of] Aquitaine, so as to plead their case and prove their religious orthodoxy. They expressed the wish to be judged, not by a civil tribunal, but an ecclesiastical proceeding. In Milan, Ambroise refused to give them an audience. Addressing themselves to Macedonius, Ambroise’s adversary, they managed — through an intermediary — to join with Emperor Gratian, who was originally from Spain and who was convinced by their arguments, and so restored their See to Priscillian and his friend, Bishop Instantius.

Ithacius reacted by winning over Treves, where he reported the affair to Gratian. But, in August 380, Gratian was assassinated by a rival, another Spaniard, Magnus Maximus, who was acclaimed “Augustus,” although legitimate recognition of him was refused, which abandoned him to the uncertainties of usurpation.

Pressed by the desire to reconcile the sympathies of a unitary and Roman Church, Magnus Maximus took hold of the trial like it was a political tool and convened a synod in Bordeaux so as to settle the question by a veritable pontifical sovereignty. His hatred of Gratian enjoined him to demonstrate that, contrary to his predecessor, he would tolerate neither polytheism nor heresy. Priscillian, summoned to Treves with his friends, confronted the bishops of Spain and Gaul, who had been informed of the decisions of Maxime [Maximus?] beforehand.

With the exception (one says) of Martin of Tours, all condemned the Bishop of Avila, who — in his combat against the Manicheans — had reproached them for their recourse to magic and was now [in his turn] accused of Manicheanism and sorcery. Tortured, he confessed his magical powers, his role in demonaic meetings, and his custom of praying while nude. The repressive tradition of the Church would attempt to identify in the popular imagination Manicheanism and, much later, Valdeism, with rites of sorcery that easily ignited the pyres of fear and hatred.

The iniquity of the trial of Priscillian aroused the reprobation of Martin of Tours and perhaps that of Sirice, whose timid power aspired to the recognition of a pontifical title. A second chance given to Priscillian was abruptly ended by the decapitation of six people charged with “magic and immorality” in Treves between 385 and 387. Received with indignation by the Christian communities, the news suggested to Ambroise of Milan a few late regrets. The remains of Priscillian, repatriated to Gaul around 396, were the object of the veneration reserved for martyrs of the faith.

As the death of their leader did not weaken the Priscillians, Emperor Honorius would issue the rescrit of 408 against them. In 561 or 563, the Council of Braga would judge it useful to anathematize seventeen “errors” imputed to Priscillian.

It is difficult to disentangle the Priscillian doctrine from the calumnies that the Church has mixed into it over the centuries. Its basis derived from a Christianity that was dominant from the second half of the Second Century to the end of the Fourth Century, and that the Church later condemned under the names Montanism, Encratism, Novatianism and Origenism. Thus Priscillianism was unacquainted with the compiled gospels, which had been canonically enriched by arguments hostile to Arius and ascetic rigor. Priscillianism regrouped clerics and lay people in assemblies in which asceticism (and thus the cult of virginity) were exalted. If one can judge from the similar state of the Pietist congregations of the Seventeenth Century, it is probable that ecstasies, illuminations, prophetism and other forms of religious hysteria common to Puritanism were manifested in Priscillianism.

The trinitary conception of Nicaea had not reached Spain, nor the popular strata of Christianity. “Long after Nicaea, a very archaic view and an experience similar to the Trinity continued to be dominant.”[306]

According to Priscillian, Christian asceticism participated in the presence of the God-Christ. As in the prescription of Tertullian, one dreamed of exhausting the body so as to make the Spirit grow within it. As with Justin arguing against Tryphon, the Christ was nothing other than the divine Logos. The presence of God resulted more from a personal experience than rational reflection. Revelation in itself of the God-Christ permitted mankind to attain the state of perfection through the exercise of rigor. And Priscillian spoke of a nova nativitas, a new birth. Was it not his heritage that would welcome Spanish Catholicism, which — from Dominique to Queipo of Llano, passing through Ignacius and Loyola, and [possibly due to] genius loci [spirit of place], Theresa of Avila — furbished the weapons against life known as Viva la muerte[307] and Perinde ac cadaver?[308]

Is it necessary to exclude the recourse to astrology, if not magic, from a teaching that was founded on the imitation of the Christ and that conferred “quies, libertas, unitas”?[309] “The Priscillianist heretics,” Pope Gregoire affirmed, “think that all men are born under a conjunction of stars. And, to help their error, they appeal to the fact that a new star appeared when Our Lord showed himself in the flesh.”[310] Perhaps the notion of a new birth gave way to the astrological speculations that were similar to those made by Bardesanes of Edessa. As for magic, its practice was fairly widespread in the Christian milieux, as is attested by the abraxas or talismans on which the Christ replaced Seth, Ophis, Mithra, Serapis and Abrasax. The cult of the saints itself was helped by the invocations in which the sign of the cross was substituted for the song of the [seven] vowels and for gestures that translated diverse expressions.

To recognize in Priscillian the first victim of [Catholic] orthodoxy and the [universal] jurisdiction adopted in matters of heresy (and this is the way that the historians have seen him) would be to forget the massacre of the Arians and the Donatists. The novelty of Priscillian resided rather in the iniquity of the trial and in the arguments made against the accused. At Treves, the curtain was de facto raised on a long series of stagings in which the accused, condemned in advance by the judgment of the Church, entered (under the parodic sign of justice) into the circle of fire of expiatory sacrifice, by which the clergy imposed the dogma of its purity and its divine power upon the sinners.

• Chapter 25 : Paulicians and Bogomiles

Chapter 25: Paulicians and Bogomiles

The Paulicians

In the Fourth Century, Armenian Christianity offered to their neighborhoring particularities the same landscape as that of the cities of Latium and Greece, if not the entire Empire: an ancient Christianity of an ascetic spirit, a pro-Roman clerical party that was better and better structured, Marcionite communities, local churches like founded by Paul of Samosate, and archaic cults either Christianized or including the Christ in their ecumenicism: Naassenes, Barbelites, Sethians, Valentinians, and sometimes all of these beliefs confounded together. (Contrary to what the majority of historians affirm, and as the sepulcher of the Aurelii shows.)

In Armenia, the pro-Roman faction tried to free itself from Montanist Christianity, Marcionite churches and the schools of Bardesane. Epiphanius, responsible for keeping track of the resistance movements for Roman Catholicism, mentioned a sect founded by a certain Peter of Kapharbarucha, which he designated “Archontics,” the doctrine of which was propagated by Eutacte of Satala. It syncretically picked out ideas from Marcionism and Barbelism. From Marcion it took his anti-Semitism and the dualism according to which the Demiurge, creator of an odious universe, was none other than Sabaoth, God of the Jews, who resided in the seventh heaven and governed the Hebdomade. [As for the influence of the Barbelites:] for the soul to rejoin its original Mother, it must elevate itself to the eighth heaven (Ogdoade). One is unfamiliar with the type of ecstatic practice that the union established with the adept, which was no doubt introduced with the help of incantations, so as to avoid the traps set by the henchmen of the abominable Sabaoth.[311] The Archontics did not care to practice baptism or the sacraments.

In 325, the monarchs embraced Catholicism due to complacency and diplomatically imposed it on their subjects. The Roman clerical faction thus took hold of the key posts and repressed all of the isolated pockets of resistance, which were quickly indexed in the catalogs of heresies, the descriptive files that inquisitorial police officers would use until the Eighteenth Century.

The Paulicians, who appeared in the middle of the Seventh Century in Armenia, seemed to have come from Samosate, from which they were chased by persecution. Fleeing Armenia and the combined zeal of the Church and the princes, they found refuge near Coloneia, under the suzerainty of the Arab caliph. In fact, a little before 630, the Arabs had seized the Byzantine provinces of North Africa, Egypt, Palestine and Syria; they then threatened Byzantium, which was torn by internal struggles.

Although Peter of Sicily had tried to recommence the movement of Paul of Samosate, it is more credible to associate the Paulicians with Paul the Armenian who, from 699 to 718, consolidated it.

Dualists, the Paulicians did not adhere to the Manichean religion. Instead, their doctrine restored an archaic Gnostic Christianity, adapted to the Paulicians’ status as an embattled minority.

Peasants grouped in “free” agrarian communities, (*) the Paulicians became soldiers to resist any power that intended to feudalize them into tutelage. A good God supported their faith; the other, the God of Evil, was identified with Byzantine authority, which was intent on annihilating them. They did not bother with the sacraments, knew neither baptism, communion, penitence, nor marriage. They rejected fasting and Catholicism’s feast days. They execrated the cross, an instrument of punishment and death, and the cult of the saints and the icons, which perpetuated superstitious practices.

(*) The Paulician communalist model played a role in the peasant revolts in Asia Minor (820–824), which were led by Thomas the Slav.

The Paulicians’ Jesus was the angelos-christos. In the Old Testament they saw the work of the Demiurge. As for priests, they judged them to be useless, harmful and corrupt, and would not fail to kill them if the occasion presented itself.

They allowed no clergy, but accorded their trust to pastors tasked with preaching and to the didachoi or teachers who explained the sacred texts. Without tipping over into Marcion’s asceticism, the Paulicians were related to his type of primitive Christianity, which venerated the Apostle Paul and took exception to the authority of Peter.

The Paulicians began to be persecuted after their installation in Coloneia, where the bishop decimated them with the consent of the emperor. The first leader of their community, the Armenian Constantine, died at the stake in 682. His successor, Simeon, experienced the same fate in 688. But the Paulicians found among the Arabs a tolerance that was cruelly absent from the Catholics. Under the influence of Paul the Armenian, their doctrine — until then a form of Christianity that was common in 140 (except for baptism, which they refused, perhaps tardily) — took on a coloration that was more clearly hostile to the clergy and Catholicism.

Thereafter, their history is confounded with the atrocious war that Byzantium fought against them.

Ravaged by the conflict concerning the icons (726 to 843), the Empire turned its rage from away the Paulicians, so as to invest it in hostile factions, which the quarrel about the icons would set against each other. (The quarrel about these images only inflamed the endemic social war in which two factions confronted each other: the Blues, of aristocratic tendency, and the Greens, artisans mostly, often favorable to heterodoxy.)

In the spirit of Nestorius, the iconoclasts did not tolerate the figuration of the principle divinities but, unlike the Paulicians, they venerated the cross and nourished no sympathy for the signs of heresy. Moreover, the worst persecution took place on the initiative of the iconoclast Leon V (813–823). It continued under Theodora, who reestablished the cult of images.

Exterminated in Byzantium, the Paulicians asked for the help of the Arab emirs. Some of them sent the Islamic troops that harassed the imperial city. In 843, a punitive expedition from Byzantium triggered the rebellion of an officer named Corbeas, whose father, a Paulician, was impaled. He led a group of 5,000 men and founded an independent state in Temphric, where he made use of the benevolent aid of the emirs of Melitene and Tarse.

With his militia of soldier-peasants, Corbeas broke the offensive launched in 865 by Petrones, brother of the Empress Theodora. Two years later, he beat the army of Michel III. In 860, raids against Nicaea and Ephesus attested to the power of Tephric. Killed in battle in 863, Corbeas was replaced by Chrisocheir, formerly denounced by the patriach and heresiologue Photius.

The intervention of an embassador, Peter of Sicily, who had been sent among the Paulicians, was less an attempt at reconciliation than a spy mission, because, if Basile the First was defeated by Tephric in 870 or 871, the assassination by treachery of Chrisocheir in 872 caused the end of Tephric, which was sacked by Byzantium. The priests — inquisitors long before there was an Inquisition — organized the systematic massacre of the Paulicians, men, women and children. The escapees took refuge in the Balkans and Thrace, where Alexis Comnene would undertake to reduce them between 1081 and 1118.

In the Arab armies that seized Constantinople in 1453, there were Paulician Christians whose hatred of the oppressive Empire had fed the spirit of vengeance.

In 1717, in Philippopolis, there still existed a Christian community that venerated the Apostle Paul and refused to recognize the authority of Rome due to their hostility to the orthodox Church. Such believers exist today under the name “Uniats.”

The Bogomiles

“During the reign of the very-Christian Peter, there appeared on Bulgarian soil a priest named Bogomile (he who loves God); in truth, he called himself Bogunemil (he who is not loved by God). He was the first to propagate the heresy on Bulgarian soil.” Thus began the Treatise Against the Heretics, by the Unworthy Cosmas the Priest, a precious source of information about the movement that carried the name of its founder.

He who, with a complacent servility, called himself “unworthy priest” seized upon a letter sent by Theophyacte, patriach of Byzantium, to King Peter of Bulgaria (who died 969); in this letter the representatives “of a resurgent ancient heresy, a Manicheanism mixed with Paulicianism”[312] were anathematized.

In its specificity, and without precisely relying upon the Manichean religion, Bogomilism played the role of link between the Paulician communities, distant inheritors of Marcion and the Catharian beliefs that, starting in the Sixth Century, reached the Rhine Valley, Cologne, Flanders, Champagne, Northern Italy and Provence.

Initially governed by a landed, Boyar aristocracy and founded upon the Slavic rural commune, Bulgaria became feudalized in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries. Under the influence of the neighboring Byzantine Empire, its princes adopted Catholicism and, as elsewhere, imposed it on their subjects. Nothing is more false than the idea that there was a spontaneous conversion of the people to the doctrine of Rome and Byzantium. The Nazarene, Elchasaite, Marcionite, Valentinian, Montanist and Tertullianist Christianities inspired the adhesion of a growing number of the faithful; Catholicism was always propagated by the high [and mighty] on the persuasive point of a temporal sword. From 325 on, Catholicism ceased to be Christian, as Christianity ceased to be Jewish after 135. And, with greater rigor than the Jews did, Catholicism would deal with the adepts of Valdes’ voluntary poverty, with Michel of Cezene, with the apostolics who dreamed of reviving the Christianity of the New Prophecy, and with the reformers who, taking up the slack of the abhorred Church, would in their turn justify the massacre of the Anabaptists and the dissidents.

Colonized by the Byzantine clergy, Bulgaria was covered with monasteries and aimed to rid the peasantry of a “monastic vermin” that subsisted on the work of rural communities.

Bogomile’s doctrine did not bother with Manichean complexities. It professed a moderate dualism, in conformity with the antagonism of forces and the [political] interests under consideration.

God created the universe, that is to say, the seven heavens and the four elements (fire, air, water and earth). God, the resurgence of the plural God Elohim, reigned harmoniously over a cohort of angels, when one of them, Satanael, rebeled and was thrown to earth, which he separated from the water, thus creating — under the essentially divine light of the sun — the material universe and mankind. Nevertheless, Satanael included in the human body an angelic fragment, with the result that the duality of good and evil was incarnated in each person.

To aid humanity, God sent the angel Christ — still the angelos-christos. Satanael ordered that he be crucified, but the Messiah resuscitated, confounded his adversary and sent him to hell, thus exiling him from earth, which he would ceaselessly try to reconquer so as to finish his malevolent work. Thus Satanael had allies, all disposed towards restoring him to his privileges: kings, priests, the rich and the Church. Thus Bogomilism rediscovered in dualism the subversive ferment that had been propagated by the Paulicians, who were also attached to the independence and autarky of rural communities.

Hostile to the frequentation of churches, the Bogomiles called Saint Sophia the residence of demons. They mocked baptism: if water possessed such power, they remarked, then all of the animals, and especially the fish, were baptized. The rites of bread and wine were an absurd symbolism.

Without tilting into the excess of asceticism, the Bogomiles disapproved of the dissolute existence of the priests who summoned them to sanctify their souls, as Cosmas reported: “If you are saints, as you claim, why do you not live the life that Paul described to Timothy? The bishop must not have the least vise; he must marry only one woman; he must be sober, honest, correct and welcoming; he must be neither a drinker nor a quarreler, but a pleasing person who manages his house well. These priests are the inverse. They get inebriated; they steal; they give themselves up to vise in secret and there are no means to prevent them from doing so.”[313]

And Cosmas specified that, “the Bogomiles denigrate the rich; they teach their own not to submit to lords and to execrate the king. They spit upon the figure of the notables and disapprove of the Boyars and think that God shows hatred for all of those who serve the King and they teach all the serfs not to work for their lords.”[314] (To which Cosmas retorted: “All men must submit to the powers. It is not from the lords that God comes.”)

Like the Paulicians, the Bogomiles mocked the saints, the icons and the relics, which were sources of profitable commerce. In the cross they saw a simple piece of wood that they called “the enemy of God.” To them the miracles of the Christ were fables that had to be interpreted symbolically. (In the Seventeenth Century, the Englishman Thomas Woolston would die in prison for supporting this very thesis.)

Rejecting the Old Testament, which was the work of Satanael, the Bogomiles preferred a version of the Gospel attributed to John, in its ancient form as a Gnostic text.

The old Gnosticism also put its seal on the Bogomiles’ two-tiered organization: the Perfect Ones, or Christians, who were the active and intellectual kernel (those who save), and the believers, who were peasants and bourgeois for whom pistis sufficed.

The Bogomiles named consolamentum a form of sacrament through which the neophyte acceded to the staus of perfection by having the Gospel attributed to John placed on his head as a sign of the assembly’s acquiescence.

The Perfect Ones ate no meat, preached, did not work, and received no tithes. All of the believers received the consolamentum on their death-bed or at an advanced age.

Who was Bogomile? A Macedonian priest who was initially loyal to the Church of Byzantium and Rome. Revolted by the situation of the peasants, who were victims of war, the Boyars and the clergy, he broke with Catholicism and preached in the region of Skopje and in Thrace.

Cosmas contrasted Bogomile with the official doctrine: “The priests of the true faith, even if they are lazy, do not offend God,” and “It is ordered that you honor the officials, even if they are bad [...] The men of the Church are always consecrated by God.”[315]

Cosmas furnished a simple and ecumenically convincing explanation for the miseries of the world that satisfied or would satisfy the Hebrew religion, the papacy and Calvin: “Each of us must ask ourselves [...] if this is not why God put war on the earth.”[316] Such was not the opinion of Bogomile and his partisans, who were more and more numerous.

Events provided Bogomilism with a foundation that wasn’t only social, but national, as well, because, in 1018, Emperor Basile II put an end to the existence of the Bulgarian kingdom and crushed the nation under the yoke of Byzantine authority. Under the cover of the peasant uprisings, to which the nobility and the towns now gave their aid, the Bogomile influence polarized the resistance to the Empire; it invaded the cities, crossed the frontiers and reached Byzantium, despite constant and cruel persecution.

Euthyme of Acmone, who pursued the Bogomiles with a completely clerical hatred, called them fundaiagites, that is, “carriers of the double-sack,” “truly impious people who in secret serve the devil.”[317] Euthyme’s diatribes still nourished the zeal of the persecutor Alexis Comnene in the Twelfth Century.

In the Twelfth Century, the Bogomile movement was implanted in Byzantium. Anne Comnene, daughter of the emperor, left a recital that was edified by the manner in which one of the city’s Perfect Ones was captured and put to death in 1111:

A certain monk by the name of Basile excelled in the teaching of the heresy of the Bogomiles. He had twelve students whom he called his apostles, having attracted several converts, who were perverted women living bad lives that spread evil everywhere. The evil ravaged many souls with the rapidity of fire.

Certain Bogomiles were led to the palace and everything indicated that Basile was their master and the leader of the heresy. One among them, by the name of Divlati, was put in prison and interrogated so as to denounced them; at first, he did not consent to do so, but, after having been subjected to torture, he denounced Basile and the apostles that he had chosen. Then the Emperor sent many people to find him. And one [of them] discovered Satan’s Archisatrape, Basile, a man in a monk’s habit, with an emaciated face, without beard or mustache, very tall, an expert in the art of teaching heresy.

The Emperor, wishing to learn the secret mystery from him, invited Basile under a special pretext. He descended from his throne to go meet Basile, invited him to his own table, held out to him all of the sinner’s snares, and baited his fishing-hook so that it would catch this monstrous omnivore. Many times tempering his hatred and disgust for the monk, the Emperor weighed Basile down with flattery and he feigned to want to become Basile’s student and, not only he, but his brother, Isaac, as well; the Emperor affected to recognize divine revelation in each of Basile’s words and submitted himself to Basile in all things, on the condition that the wicked Basile would implore the salvation of his soul... And Basile then unveiled all of the heresy’s doctrines. But what made him do this?

The Emperor had previously ordered that a curtain be installed in the corridor between the part reserved for the women and the spot in which he found himself [alone] with the demon, so that Basile would unmask himself before everyone and reveal everything that he had been hiding in his soul. Hidden behind the curtain, one of the clerics would write down everything that was said. Suspecting nothing, this imbecile [Basile] began to preach, the Emperor played the student, and the cleric wrote down ‘the teachings’ ... But what happened then?

The Emperor drew back the curtain and snatched away his mask. He then convened the Church’s entire synod, all of the military leaders and the entire senate. An assembly was convoked, presided over by the venerated patriach of the imperial city, Nicolas Gramatik. In front of everyone, the diabolical doctrine was read aloud, and it was impossible to deny the accusations. The leader of the accused would not renounce his ideas and soon defended them openly. He declared that he was ready for the flames, to submit to the punishment of the whip and to experience a thousand deaths...

Basile, a veritable heretic, refused to repent. This was why the members of the holy synod, the most worthy monks and Nicolas himself decided that Basile deserved to be burned alive. The Emperor, who had often spoken with Basile and was convinced that he was of bad faith and would never deny his heresy, adopted this opinion [openly]. The order was given to erect a large pyre in the Hippodrome. A deep pit was dug and very tall tree trunks were piled into it and then covered with leaves, one might say [making] a thick forest. When the pyre was lit, an immense crowd entered the Hippodrome and sat on the tiers, impatient for the events to begin. The following day, a cross was erected so that the impure one had the possibility — if he feared the flames — to deny his heresy and lead himself towards the cross. In the audience there were a great number of heretics who came to watch their leader Basile...

The excited crowd gave him the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the horrible spectacle that the pyre presented; he felt the heat of the fire and saw the flames that crackled, which rose like tongues of fire up to the top of the granite obelisk that was erected in the middle of the Hippodrome.

This spectacle did not make Basile hesitate; he remained inflexible. The fire had not yet melted his iron will, no more than the Emperor’s promises did... .

Then the executioners seized Basile by his clothes, raised him up high and then threw him, completely clothed, into the pyre. The flames, which became furious (one says), swallowed the impure one without releasing any odor; the smoke remained the same [color], there only appeared in the smoke a white ray among the flames. This is how they stood up to the impious.[318]

The execution of Basile and a great number of his partisans did not hinder the progress of Bogomilism. In 1167, another Perfect One left Byzantium for Italy and France, so as to unite assemblies: the West would come to know him as “Pope Nikta.”

Despite the extermination-politics of the Serbian and Bosnian prines, the missionary activity of Bogomilism did not stop multiplying its churches: the Bulgarian Church, the Church of Dragovjit (Thrace), the Greek Church, the Patarene Church (Bosnia), the Church of Philadelphia (Serbia). Bogomilism would find popular support among those who reacted against Rome’s prohibition of the use of autochtonic languages in the liturgy, but also among fighters for independence.

The Bosnian Church, for a time recognized by the princes, was subjected to new persecutions from 1443 to 1461, and due to its hatred of Catholicism, would willingly turn towards the Turks. “This was why, when Bosnia fell under Ottoman domination, a great number of its inhabitants adopted the Muslim religion.”[319]

Meanwhile, the Bulgarian adepts, called “Bulgari” [bougres], tried to instaurate — in opposition to Rome — impossible peaceful communities, fraternal and little inclined to martyrdom, from Milan to Languedoc, and from Cologne to Flanders and Orleans.

• Chapter 26 : 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 and murderers — rivals in violence and deception with the masters of the earth — who attempted the extract the greatest possible profit from the peasants and artisans. While the purely formal reprobation of the Bishop of Tours relieved his own bad conscience — for pages he deplored the fact that conditions had not permitted him to remedy a state of affairs that he condemned from the depths of his heart — , the lay people, the monks and the priests who, sensitive to the misery of their parishioners, invested themselves in a sacred mission, of which the Church showed itself (in their eyes) to be unworthy. Their intention would end up inspiring in Rome (but only in the course of the Sixth Century) a reformist politics, the goals of which — to suppress the sale of the sacraments and the purchase of ecclesiastical offices, and to constrain the priests to celibacy — also responded to the desire to free the Church, the parishes and monasteries from their dependence upon monarchs and nobles, who were the masters of all levels of ecclesiastical denomination. The idea that ordination did not suffice to absolve the priest of the duty to lead an exemplary and “apostolic” life would only fit comfortably with the views of Rome after the Council of Trent, which came after the success of the moral campaign of the Reformation.

The Christ Of Bourges

In his chronicle of the year 591, Gregoire, Bishop of Tours, reported that an inhabitant of Bourges, exhausted in a forest, experienced a kind of traumatism or ecstasy upon seeing himself suddenly surrounded by a swarm of flies or wasps.[320] (The same phenomenon was evoked in the revelation of the peasant of Vertus. [See below.])

Living in a state of shock for two years, this man finally reached the Arles region, where, dressed in animal hides, he lived like a hermit and reserved all his time for prayer. At the end of a long period of asceticism, he claimed that he was invested with the supernatural gifts to heal and prophetize.

Wandering through Cevennes and le Gevaudan, he presented himself as the reincarnated Christ and consecrated his country in the name of Mary.

Gregoire attributes to the demon the exceptional powers that he demonstrated, and that drew to him a growing number of partisans. The man distributed to the poor gold, money and clothing (with which his wealthy believers had honored him).

The chronicler accused him of having formed and led an armed band that pillaged the towns and killed the priests. Aurelius, Bishop of Puy — before whom the army of the Christ surged — sent to him an ambassador who assassinated him through treachery. His partisans having been massacred or dispersed, Mary, subjected to torture, avowed that this Christ had resorted to diabolical proceedings so as to assure his control over the people.

Gregoire himself admitted to having met several of these saints of the Last Days, who awakened a fleeting hope among the people who, due to their miserable lot in the ordinary course of wars, pillage, torture, famine, epidemics and death, were quite naturally disposed to sedition, which was reined in by the apostolic seal of the divine.[321]

Aldebert

In 744, Winfrid, much later sanctified under the name Boniface, united in Soissons — with the approval of Pope Zacharias and the Frankish Kings Pepin and Carloman — a synod intended to break the popular movement of the monk named Aldebert.[322]

A wandering preacher, self-avowed monk and practicer of voluntary poverty, Aldebert was attacked by the Bishops of Soissons, who prohibited him from preaching in the churches.

Aldebert then erected crosses in the countryside, at the foot of which he addressed crowds seduced by his remarks. Soon his faithful built little chapels, then churches, in which he could preach.

To those who heard him, he affirmed having been invested with divine grace from the bosom of his mother. In the manner of Mary, and in the fashion reported in the gospels of the childhood [of Jesus], she placed him in the world through the right flank, by this designating him to be the second Christ. Aldebert’s privileged relationship with God was expressed in a prayer that Boniface retranscribed for the Pope’s sake. In it, Aldebert evoked the support of the angels, thanks to whom he obtained — for himself and his faithful — the grace of being fulfilled in his desires. Like King Abgar, Aldebert kept a personal letter from Jesus, from which he derived his own teachings.

The synodal report noted with disdain that the simple people and the women were neglecting to follow the priests and bishops. They seemed to follow a cult of nature that competed with the traditional trade in relics, because they deemed precious and preserved the fingernail clippings and locks of hair with which Aldebert gratified them.

Arrested and condemned by the synod of Soissons in 744, Aldebert managed to escape. The following year, another synod presided over by Boniface and King Carloman would excommunicate him but without appreciable results, because, in 745, a synod in Rome of twenty-seven bishops presided over by Pope Zacharias himself decided to declare Aldebert mad, no doubt due to the difficulty of raging against so popular a man, whose disciples had not ceased to grow. One knows nothing of his end, but in 746 an ambassador of King Pepin, who was close to the Pope, attested to the persistant vogue for the Christ in North France.

Leuthard

While the Bogomile missionaries, who were Slavic or Byzantine merchants, began to propagate their doctrine in Germany, France and Italy around 1000, the example of Leuthard — a peasant from Vertus in Champagne — is less the first manifestation of Catharism than [the most recent in] the tradition of wandering messiahs and prophets.

One day Leuthard returned from the fields, after having an illumination, (*) and decided to leave his wife and break the crucifix of his church. With a sudden eloquence, nourished by the feeling of having the word [parole] of God, he preached a return to the apostolic virtues. He enjoined his many adepts to no longer pay tithes and to accord no faith in the Old Testament.

(*) Raoul Glauber says that Leuthard (somewhat like the Messiah of Bourges) was surrounded by a swarm of bees, as attested to by folklore and tales.

Arrested in 1004 and taken before Bishop Gebuin II of Chalons (an instructed and cunning man), Leuthard became aware of the vanity of his enterprise; he found himself alone, habitually described as mad; he threw himself into a well that same year.

Leuthard’s rejection of the cross, the Old Testament and marriage does not suggest — beyond the ordinary condemnations of the Church and tithes — the possibly confused influence of Bogomilism. In the same way that, less than a century later, peasants in the Chalons region fell under the accusation of Catharism. But it is true that, around 1025, the Italian Gandulf openly preached Bogomilism.

Eudes De L’etoile, Or Eudo De Stella

Originally from Loudeac in Britain, perhaps from minor nobility, Eudes preached in the name of Christ against the priests and monks in 1145 or so, while Bernard of Clairvaux was hastening to restore the monastical orders and the clergy to dignity and holy appearance. Eudes lived in a community that was supposedly quite numerous, and exalted asceticism and the evangelical life.

His faithful called him the Lord of Lords. At a time when the myth of an immanent justice nourished the hopes of the disinherited, Eudes came to judge the living and the dead. Chroniclers have mocked his completely personal interpretation of the formula for exorcism: “Per eum qui venturus est judicare vivos et mortuous,” which meant, according to him, “Through Eudes, who will come to judge the living and the dead.” What have we got here, other than a Jewish, Gnostic or Judeo-Christian exegesis of the Bible? Wasn’t this the way that the famous evangelical truths were taken from Hebrew and Aramaic midrashim?

In the forests in which his partisans took refuge as if in a new “desert,” Eudes founded a Church with archbishops and bishops to whom he gave such names as Wisdom, Knowledge, and Judgment, each endowed with a singular Gnostic connotation. (A systematic study, in the manner of [Robert] Graves, of all Christian mythology would show the progress, nay, the wandering, the recreation, the reoccurrence and the transformation of [certain] fundamental themes.)

While Bretagne, ravaged by famine in 1144 and 1145, was prey to pillage and brigandage, the partisans of Eudes conducted the raids that, destroying churches and monasteries, assured their own subsistance.

According to William of Newburg, Eudes and his faithful lived in luxury, were magnificently dressed and [lived] in a state of “perfect joy,” an expression that perhaps suggests a faraway influence of the Bogomiles or Cathars, but one must remember that William drafted his chronicle 50 years after the events he describes.[323]

Like Paul of Samosate or Gaianus, Eudes celebrated Mass in his own name. An even more curious trait: he possessed a scepter in the form of a Y. The two branches of the fork elevated towards heaven meant that two tiers of the world belonged to God and one tier belonged to Eudes. The proportion was inverted in the contrary movement, conferring upon Eudes a nearly absolute power over the world, which was the old dream of the Marcosians, Simon of Samaria, and the Barbelites: memories of ancient trinitary conceptions that were no doubt unfamiliar to the gentleman from Breton.

As is frequently the case when fatuity has the upper hand on the quest for a richer life, Eudes was confronted by the representatives of the Church who met sin Rouen in 1148. Thrown in the archbishop’s prison, he perished there from hunger and ill-treatment. His partisans, arrested, died on the pyre.

Two Reformers: Pierre De Bruys And Henri Du Mans

While the new towns attempted to use insurrection to obtain the independence that was refused them by the lay lords and the prince-bishops — who were increasingly objects of a growing hatred because they, residing in the city, publicly insulted the Church’s principles of holiness through their dissolute morals and rapacity — , preachers wandered around France, where peasants and artisans were the most disposed to receive their messages. Two figures, identified by ecclesiastical repression, stand out from the others, who remain unknown: independent preachers, communalist agitators, Bogomile missionaries, and Cathars, who denounced clerics and monks attached to the privileges of Rome, who in their turn, stipended by the Church, hunted down heretics.

Around 1105, Pierre de Bruys, an old Provencal priest, traveled the south of France, preaching especially on the eastern side of the Rhone. He called for the destruction of churches, because one could pray just as well in a youth hostel or a stable. He burned crosses, instruments of the martyrdom of the Christ, the symbolism of which only too perfectly accorded itself with the cruel oppression of the Church.

The dead had no need of prayer [for Pierre de Bruys]. What value were the sacraments administered by priests who most often were themselves unworthy, and why did not faith assure the salvation of the faithful, who were so badly served by the clergy of Rome?

Not content with encouraging the traditional refusal to pay tithes (which itself sufficed to bring about accusations of heresy), Pierre de Bruys denounced the market in penitence and indulgences.

He thus attracted the animosity of Cluny, where Bernard de Claivaux was simultaneously moralizing to the clergy about the respect and obedience that were due to the dignitaries of the clergy, and inciting ad capiendos vulpes to capture the foxes of heresy. The Council of Toulouse would condemn Pierre’s doctrine in 1119, no doubt due to the agitation that he had fomented, in the course of which (one believes) he met his disciple and successor, Henri du Mans.

Pierre de Bruys perished in an ambush near the Abbey of Sant-Gilles, where he preached around 1126. A faction probably incited by Cluny seized him and lynched him, before throwing his body into a pyre. (The cross sculpted on the tympanum of the Cathedral, then being constructed, was erected in defiance of Peter’s partisans, who denounced the cross’s morbid and mortifying character.)

Several years later, Pierre the Venerable, Abbey of Cluny, would distribute a Treatise against the Petrobrusians that justified the [repression of the] doctrines adopted by Henri du Mans, around whom the partisans of Pierre de Bruys rallied. The Councils of Pisa (1134) and Lateran (1139) would make the condemnation precise.

Deceased around 1148, Henri du Mans (also called Henri de Lausanne) founded his agitation on communalist struggles that opposed the cities to the Church and the terrestrial aristocracy, which was often hostile to the emerging bourgeoisie. His doctrine, which was perfectly coherent, mixed ideas defended by Pierre de Bruys with elements derived from Bogomilism, and prepared the way for Catharism, nay, the competing movement, Valdeism.

The origins of Henri du Mans remain obscure. A monk or hermit, he was highly cultured; Bernard de Clairvaux called him litteratus. Perhaps he preached in Lausanne against the general corruption of the clergy and in the Petrobrusian spirit that opposed the ekklesia, identified with a community of believers, to the Roman Church. In 1116, the success of Henri’s predictions in Mans worried Bishop Hildebert of Lavardin, who prohibited him from preaching. Henri ignored him and enjoyed, it seems, a considerable role in the government of the city. It is probable that the bishops at first tolerated some of Henri’s reforms. As Pope Innocent III had recommended raising the moral state of prostitutes and saving them from scorn, Henri persuaded them to cut their hair, burn their rich clothes, and divest themselves of their finery. The sect offered them an outfit and their adepts married these “impure” women, without dowries. In place of marriage, the celebration as Henri prescribed it was accomplished with the mutual consent and sincere union of their hearts.

A clear break with the misogyny harbored by the Church participated in this courteous current, which, even today, is only superficially studied, but was certainly noticed by the court of Champagne, where Andrew the Chaplain (*) treated it antithetically to the way it was treated in the Languedoc, where the freedom of women was translated into the juridical domain, as well.

(*) A Twelfth Century Champenois cleric, the author of De amore (around 1185) in two parts: one that exalted women and carnal love, another that collated the most excessive instances of misogyny.

Henri’s exaltation of apostolic virtues did not tip over into ascetic rigor, because he estimated — contrary to the Cathars — that the flesh merited neither an excess of dignity nor an excess of indignity.

In 1116, chased from the town, or leaving it voluntarily (one isn’t sure), Henri traveled in Poitou, Bordelais and the region of Albi. No doubt he participated in the agitation in Toulouse, where it is possible that encountering Pierre de Bruys radicalized his evangelical doctrine. In 1119, the Council of Toulouse thrashed Henri’s “errors.” It seems that, at the same time, his partisans were sacking churches, demolishing altars, burning the crosses and roughing up the Church’s representatives.

Arrested by the Archbishop of Arles, Henri was brought before the Council of Pisa; put before Bernard de Clairvaux, Henri feigned that he accepted his arguments and agreed to enter Citeaux, so as to avoid prison, if not the pyre.

He soon escaped and returned to Provence. If we believe the words of Bernard de Clairvaux, who was resolved to finish off the Henricians, Toulouse lived under the influence of this reformer. It is true that the Count did not discourage the anti-Roman movement, which was widely popular and from which Catharism would freely benefit. One doesn’t know if Henri fell into the hands of Cardinal Alberic, papal legatee of Rome, who had sworn Henri’s downfall. His traces disappear in 1144.

Around 1135, a community in Liege claimed the Henrician doctrine for itself: the rejection of the baptism of infants and prayers for the dead, and the refusal of the sacrament of marriage in the name of the union of hearts.

Like the Bogomiles, Henri was inclined to reject the Old Testament. His condemnation of the ornamental luxury of the churches, to which Bernard de Calirvaux had subscribed, announced the voluntary poverty of the Vaudois.

• Chapter 27 : 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 archbishop, guild-leader or popular agitator. Their violence also struck the masters as well as the rebels or the Jews, who were scapregoats for all kinds of fantastic resentments.

The first Crusade, launched 1095 by Pope Urban II — who counted among his motivations the desire to re-locate into the conquered countries the superabundance of disinherited people, ruined nobles, and people of uncertain fate — suddenly revealed in the designs of God and the Pope something that sanctified the thirst for ambition, cupidity and bloody desublimation [defoulements].

The influx of poor peoples into the towns posed a dilemma for the Church: how could it Christianize creatures reduced to the state of wild, starving dogs by extolling to them the holiness of the poor, while the high clergy lived in opulence?

“Insurrections occurred chiefly in episcopal cities,” notes Cohn.

Unlike a lay prince [Cohn continues], a bishop was a resident ruler in his city and was naturally concerned to keep his authority over the subjects in whose midst he lived. Moreover the attitude of the Church towards economic matters was profoundly conservative; in trade it could for a long time see nothing but usury and in merchants nothing but dangerous innovators whose designs ought to be firmly thwarted. The burghers for their part, if once they decided to break a bishop’s power, were quite capable of killing him, setting fire to his cathedral and fighting off any of his vassals who might try to avenge him. And although in all this their aims usually remained severely limited and entirely material, it was only to be expected that some of these risings should be accompanied by an outcry against unworthy priests. When the lower strata of urban society were involved such protests tended in fact to rise shrilly enough.[324]

The Patarin Movement

The Gregorian reform undertaken by the Clunisian monk Hildebrand, inaugurated pope under the name Gregoire VII, attempted to promote a politics of the moralization of the clergy, which would be of a nature to favor the Christianization of the masses. At the same time that it desired to free the Church from the temporal control of the Emperor of Germany, and thus the great feudal lords, Gregorian reform clashed with the very privileges of the ecclesiastical dignitaries, princes, bishops, and archbishops, nay, the parish priests who arrogated to themselves an excessive authority over rural communities or parishes.

“The purety of the life that the heretics preached became the second great goal of Gregoire VII, who, behind the sacramental office of priest, maintained the requirement of his personal dignity.”[325]

The Patarin movement in Milan and Florence conferred upon Gregoire’s reforms a popular basis, in which voluntary poverty was proposed as the model for an apostolic life and organized the communities of the faithful according to a mode of solidarity and mutual aid that was quite similar to that of the synagogues and churches of the Second Century.

The name Patarin probably derived from the neighborhood of Pataria in Milan, inhabited by salt-sellers and dealers in secondhand items. The Patarins, contrary to a confusion often made between cathari and patari, had nothing in common with the Cathars, since they were not preoccupied with the reform of the Church or even adhesion to Christianity.

In 1057, Guido, Archbishop of Milan, condemned the Patarin movement. Social insurrection was battering the authority of the men of the Church, with the consent of the pope, whose politics bet upon communal liberties so as to break the power of the feudal bishops. Nevertheless, “the union of the Pope and the Patarins was a union of means and not ends.”[326]

Tactically in solidarity with the reformers, the bourgeois and the weavers, who animated the movement, demanded liberties that the Church would combat from the moment that the aid of these allies lost its utility.

The patari rapidly spread to Tuscany. They would exist until 1110 in Florence, 1120 in Orvieto and the region of Treves. Nevertheless, the reaction did not wait. In 1075, the Patarins of Milan, accused of arson, were massacred.

The case of Ramihrdus, in Cambria, is exemplary in this sense. In 1077, an insurrection of bourgeois and weavers forced the bishop to enfranchise the town. Priest Ramihrdus, who was close the weavers — who especially propagated the most radical demands and doctrines — proclaimed that he would not receive communion from the hands of any of the abbeys or bishops who were thirsty for power and gain. Accused of heresy and burned alive, Ramihrdus would have the posthumous consolation of being honored as a martyr by Gregoire VII.[327]

So as to compete with the reformers who were too audacious, the hermits of Citeaux, under the leadership of Robert of Molesme, founded groups of ascetics and the voluntarily poor who renounced all personal property. “To possess the smallest amount of money was, for them, a flagrant infraction of this principle and a ‘grave’ sin.”[328]

In the same way, Robert of Arbrissel and his nomadic penitents, at the heart of the Church, defended one of the themes of the anti-clerical reformers: mankind only uses the riches of which God remains the unique owner. But were not Rome, the Churches and the abbeys instituted as the depositories of God’s presence? After twenty-five years of existence, Citeaux was no longer a rich monastery with a doctrine centered on the poor. The papacy would not delay in rendering to the Church what was the property of the Lord, whose glory it maintained.

Tanchelm Of Antwerp

Even when stripped of the calumnies made by the Archbishop of Utrecht, the person of Tanchelm differs from Ramihrdus and the Patarin movement in many ways. Tanchelm’s first step towards power inscribed itself in the framework of pontifical reforms to which Robert II, Count of Flanders, was attached; Tanchelm might have been the Count’s officer or notary. He assuredly took advantage of a conflict between the Count and the Archbishop of Utrecht to support the people of Antwerp against a corrupted clergy. Anecdote has it that the concubinage of a priest named Hilduin with his niece incited Tanchelm to fulminate against the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Tanchelm went to Rome, where Pascal II, the Pope from 1099 to 1118, would influence his views. He then preached an anti-clerical doctrine, as well as the refusal to pay tithes and the rejection of the sacraments delivered by unworthy priests, in Antwerp, Utrecht, Bruges and Zeland.

To the church of clerics, Tanchelm opposed the church of simple people, whom he would guide in the name of the Spirit that was incarnated in him. It is hardly probable that, denouncing the “brothel of the church,” he surrendered himself to public debauchery, as was claimed by Norbert of Xantem, who became a saint following his fight against Tanchelm. On the other hand, the fact that Tanchelm called his companion Mary and favored marriages “according to the heart” reveals a conception that, perhaps, was propagated by Bogomilism, that is, if one supposes that an ideology is necessary to justify an on-going practice among the common people.

A communalist prophet, Tanchelm governed the city in the name of God, surrounded himself with a guard of armed and devoted ostentation, and multiplied sermons in the hysteria proper to this genre of ceremony. One of his friends, the blacksmith Manasse, led a fraternity of twelve men that recalled the apostles.

In a prelude to the Archbishop of Utrecht’s offensive, a priest stabbed Tanchelm in 1115. His adepts conserved power in Antwerp, until the armed forces, allied with the predictions of Norbert of Xantem (who preached to Tanchelm, as well, but in the framework of orthodoxy, that is, apostolic poverty), assured the clergy’s control over the town, the history of which signaled the continuing revolt against the Church.

Under the patronage of the Divine Spirit, Tanchelm united the function of a tribune and the mission of an apostle. The demand for freedom, exalted by communal independence, spontaneously wedded itself to a renewal of the Christian community, hostile to riches and to the useless pomp of the Church, and identified the true apostolic practice with poverty, fraternity and solidarity organized through the works of mutual aid and helping the starving. The idea that the goods of the rich and the clergy belonged to those whom poverty had sanctified would be reprized around 1250, and in Antwerp, by Willem Cornelisz, a kind of “worker priest” close to the weavers of the time.

Arnaud Of Brescia

Another communalist tribune and reformer, but without making explicit references to the Christ and the apostles, Arnaud (born in Brescia around 1100) had the status of a condottiere whose aspirations oscillated between a taste for power and a sincere attachment to the freedoms of the most unfavored.

A student in Milan, where he marked the Patarin movement, then in Bologna, Arnaud left for Paris so as to receive Abelard’s instruction.

In 1129, as the Superior of the regular Canons, Arnaud gained a popular audience by extolling evangelical asceticism, which was the antithesis of the oppressive hedonism of the clergy (deplorable in its spirit). He condemned the propriety of the priests and demanded more rigorous reforms. Thus, he did not delay in entering into conflict with the bishop of the town. Condemned by the Council of Lateran in 1139, though he professed neither the ideas of Pierre de Bruys nor those of Henri du Mans, Arnaud fell under the blow of an edict of banishment.

A refugee in France, close to Abelard, he incurred the threats of Bernard de Clairvaux, who pursued the master of his animosity. Persecuted by Bernard, Arnaud left for Constance, from which he [also] had to flee, denounced by an insiduous letter from the holy reformer. The troubles in Rome suddenly offered him the occasion to apply his ideas.

Upon the death of Innocent II (1143), a conflict of succession exploded, and was doubled by a schism caused by an Antipape, Anaclet II. The Roman bourgeoisie would soon profit by demanding the recognition of his rights. A crowd lynched Pope Lucius II. Arnaud survived as a mediator. He dealt with Eugene III, the successor to Lucius, and reestablished him in his functions, but did not succeed in keeping him under his control. The Pope, actually, estimated it more prudent to take refuge in Viterbe.

His hands free, Arnaud openly declared that he wished to destroy the power of the Church. His sermons preached the secularization of the clergy’s goods, the confiscation of the bishops’ and cardinals’ riches, and the abolition of their temporal power. Spiritual leader of the Roman revolution, he demanded a communal republic that would exclude the Pope’s govenment. His program offered to history the inconvenience of anticipating Garibaldi’s resolution by eight centuries.

On 15 July 1148, Eugune III — powerless to shake Arnaud’s power if the tribune’s politics did not tip over into delays and indecision — hurled an anathema upon Arnaud. Arnaud was mistaken when he appealed for rescue from Emperor Frederick, who was little inclined to tolerate the instauration in Rome of a popular and republican government. His partisans were divided upon the cogency of a frightening recourse. In 1155, Arnaud left Rome and fell into the hands of Frederick Barberousse, who, cutting across Tuscany, extended his tyrannical claws towards Rome. From then on, everything played out quickly. For the price of a tactical reconciliation, Arnaud was delivered up to Pope Adrian IV, who hastened to take him and burn him.

The Arnaudites, sometimes called the “poor of Lombardy,” sought refuge in France, where they enjoyed the adhesion of the partisans of Henri du Mans and Pierre de Bruys. Several years later, Pierre Valdo revived the dream of reform that implied the return to the evangelical community — historically speaking, that of the Second Century, but which Christian mythology and its sectarians back dated to Jesus and his apostles in an idyllic Palestine.

Ugo Speroni

Even if the presence of a particularly eloquent tribune or agitator brought a specific relief to the [necessity of] ideas of reform, the majority of communalist insurrections pell-mell brewed demands for independence, the appeal of commercial freedoms and the condemnation of the Catholic Church of dignitaries.

As discreet as it was, the work of Ugo Speroni, a jurist from Piacenza, was not less indicative of the popularity of ideas traditionally characterized as heretical and presented as the emanations of marginal or minoritarian small groups. In 1177, at the same time that Pierre Valdo seeded trouble in Lyon, Ugo Speroni led the struggle with equal brio on the political and religious fronts.

Ugo Speroni placed the accent on the importance of interiority, the intimate conviction of faith, which sufficed in itself, and he took exception to the Church and its sacramental arsenal. He rediscovered Pelagius when he assured [his followers] that the infant was born without sin and was thus saved, without baptism, if it should happen to die. The true Christian had no need to pass through the sacrifice of redemption to become chosen. The moral obstinacy to practice virtue was sufficient to fulfill the conditions of salvation. It was, moreover, from the force of conviction that the right of the Perfect Ones to unite, without submitting to the ecclesiastical ritual of marriage, derived.[329]

• Chapter 28 : 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 control.

Gnostic, Platonic, Aristotlian and Plotinian speculations — often badly digested by the Roman doctrine — would make the ecclesiastical body sick more than once, risking the emptying-out of its substance. Philosophy, which the Church intended to treat as ancila theologiae, inherited the very same weapons (designed to combat the closed system of dogma) that merchant rationality would turn against the conversatism of agrarian structures. Philosophy would also be founded on the aspirations to plenitude and emancipation that the body suggested, that is, to certain particularly sensitive natures.

Thus, sooner or later, the terrestrial economy would absorb the celestial economy, and reject the sacred like excrement.

• Chapter 29 : The Cathars

Chapter 29: The Cathars

The uncertain lights of Marcion have projected the most diverse shadows on the world and history. The frantic founder of a Church of which he wanted to be the master, Marcion imprinted on the ecclesiastical party, which appeared among his adversaries, the political will in which temporal exigences folded and refolded Christianity until it fit into the Constantian mold. Mani, who came from an Elchasaite milieu, was also influenced by Marcion. Where Marcionite churches sunk because of the unsupportable paradox of a missionary authority that confronted the absolute evil of the universe, Mani fought his way through the old Persian dualism, which was better disposed to receive it than the Greco-Roman propensity to merchant rationality and the rationality of the State, which was easily conquered by monotheism.

The Paulicians and the Bogomiles formed other branches that grew in parallel to the dualism that was rooted in the separation of man from himself, which diffused the fractured unity of human life born from nature into light and darkness, good and evil, and the spiritual and the material, and aspired to rediscover in nature in a new, peaceful and creative alliance.

The Cathar movement, such as it was propagated in Northern Italy, Provence, the Rhineland region, Flanders and Champagne, in the beginning proceeded from Bogomile missionaries. The heretic hunters were not deceived when they called them “Bulgari” [bougres], that is to say, Bulgarians (the Song of the Crusade, V. 18, calls the Albigensians “those from Bulgaria”). The term “Cathar,” which came from the Greek word catharos, “pure,” suggests the German word Ketzer, “heretic.” Flanders knew them from the beginning as the “pifles” and in Gaul they were called the “weavers,” a reference to a guild that was prompted to take action against tyranny and to spread ideas of liberty.[344]

Catharism manifested itself in the current of the Twelfth Century as a new syncretism, assimilating several Christian notions and texts, but on an absolutely different basis from Christianity and a fortiori from the Catholicism of Rome.

The First Bogomile Missionaries

Singular though it was, the case of Leuthard of Vertus suggests the action of Bogomile missionaries, wandering merchants, pilgrims, itinerant day-laborers or Goliards in Western Europe. Other isolated sectarians met in Ravenna and Mayence.

Around 1018, an important group that was well implanted in the working-class [populaire] mileux of Aquitane rejected the cross, baptism, marriage and the consumption of animal flesh. Around 1022, the population of Toulouse showed itself receptive to their influence — from whence came the reputation as an old nest of heretics that Petrus Valium attributed to it: Tolosa tota dolosa.[345]

In 1022, the Orleans affair exploded.[346] The nobles and priests of the Church of the Holy Cross, including a familiar of King Robert and the confessor of Queen Constance, professed Bogomile opinions, perhaps influenced by an Italian missionary. They held that matter was impure; they rejected marriage and the pleasures of love, baptism, communion, confession, prayer, the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the material existence of the Christ (“We were not there and we can not judge if it is true,” they said in their vows). Through the laying-on of hands, they purified the believer of his or her sins. The Holy Spirit then descended on him or her; from then on, his or her soul was raised up and delivered from suffering.

Denounced to King Robert, this group was placed on the pyre on 28 December 1022, following the penalty reserved by customary right for sorcerers. The chroniclers of the time assured their readers that the condemned went to their deaths laughing.

In 1025, in the dioceses of Chalons and Arras, an Italian named Gandulf incited the enthusiasm of the disinherited and the weaver-workers by preaching a doctrine in which various social themes, Bogomilism and the reforms announced by Henri du Mans and Pierre de Bruys were mixed.[347]

For Gandulf, it was absurd to impose baptism on new-borns whose reason wasn’t sufficiently enlightened to accede to evangelical life. The unworthy priests had no right to the pretensions that their responsibilities conferred upon them. The eucharist was only a “vile negotium,” a “vile commerce”: how could the Christ share his body of flesh, become bread, with so many faithful? Faith had little regard for the facts. The Churches were only masses of stones; the cross and the ecclesiastical hierarchy with its bells and songs merited no attention at all.

Marriage had no importance: it was only a question of making love without being saddled with an aggressive concupiscence (Catharism was absolutely opposed to such a trait, but, on the other hand, it sanctified [traduit] the emerging and ephemeral privileges of women, which would be expressed in a watered-down form by courtly love).

The apostolic life consisted in living from the work of one’s own hands, not hating anyone, and loving all one’s fellows. Gerard the First, bishop of Cambrai, a clever man who was favorable to reform of the Church, preferred to close his eyes and, renouncing the repression of Gandulf, “reconciled him with the Church.”

And yet, in the same era, Terry, a hermit living in a grotto near Corbigny, in the Nevers region, made similar remarks and was burned along with two women from among his faithful.[348]

In Italy, from whence came certain agitators, Bogomilism stocked up and engendered specific doctrines. In 1028, a community of some 30 people belonging to the nobility, and centered around the Countess of Ortes, met at the chateau of Monteforte. They formed an ascetic group whose aspirations to an evangelical Christianity assimilated the teachings of Bogomile and announced Catharism.

The Christ was not God, but the Soul of man, the beloved of God. The hidden meaning of the Bible (*) and the revelation of the Holy Spirit presided over the regeneration of each. The new man, disapproving of all that came from this world, would discover in his virginity his most elevated ideal, the doctrine of the “pure love” (**) that would be proposed in its diverse meanings by the Monials of the Thirteenth Century, the erotics of the troubadours and the Cathars.

(*) Their recognition of the Old Testament breaks with Bogomile and Catharist teachings.

(**) “If he is married, his should consider his wife to be his mother or his sister, and dream that humanity, like the bees, will perpetuate itself sinlessly.”

“All goods must be placed in common; one must not eat meat; one must fast or pray constantly, visissim, day and night. One must mortify oneself to be pardoned and as soon as natural death approaches, let yourself come to an end through its companions to achieve martyrdom and holiness.”[349] (This prescription was close to the Cathars’ voluntary death or endura.)

When the Archbishop of Milan, Aribert, arranged to pursue these people, they offered no resistance, confessed their faith and, obliged to choose between the adoration of the cross and the pyre, they willingly threw themselves into the flames, assured of another world that would liberate them from the miserable imperfections of terrestrial existence.

Other adepts of similar beliefs showed up near Verona, Ravenna and Venice. Gerard of Csanad (1037–1046) remarked that they had many brothers in faith in Greece. They scorned the Church, the priests and their rites, and mocked the resurrection of the flesh.

Between 1043 and 1048, the agitation spread to the region of Chalons, not far from Vertus, where Leuthard had previously sowed trouble. At the time of the Council of Rheims (1049), there were mysterious assemblies of peasants who refused marriage and the pleasures of love. They practiced the laying-on of hands and refused to kill animals.

In 1051, in Goslar, the emperor condemned to the gallows those Lorrain peasants who refused to kill the chickens that the bishop of the town had presented to them as a test of their beliefs.

For almost a century, no document attested to the perpetuation of Bogomilism, which was subjected to local interpretations in its propagation in Western Europe. Or its adherents assured themselves, through an extreme prudence, of the protections of clandestinity, or the communalist insurrections gave their demands a less religious turn.

It was necessary to wait for the 1140s for Byzantium’s persecution of Bogomilism to push towards the west a new wave of faithful, often assimilated by the Manicheans. No doubt the deplorable outcome of the Second Crusade returned to their foyers Crusaders who had become disillusioned and, since their stay in Byzantium, carriers of the new faith in which the powers were identified with Satan’s henchmen.

The Second Wave Of Bogomile Prediction

Towards the end of the first half of the Twelfth Century, the “novi haeretici” appeared everywhere and in force. The name “Cathar” would only be applied to them after 1163. The preachers, surrounded by their partisans, gave way to schools, organizations and churches.

In 1143, in Cologne, there were many people who led the apostolic life, glorified themselves by possessing nothing, worked with their hands and punctuated with periods of fasting and prayer an existence that was in conformity with the veritable Church, which was assuredly not that of the rich prelates. The first pyres of heresy were lit for them in Cologne and Bonn.

At the same time, two brothers from the village of Bussy, Evrard and Clement, who propagated ideas of reform and purification, were delivered to Guibert of Nogent, who had them lynched and burned by his henchmen.[350]

In the Perigord, around 1147, the “novi haeretici” easily seduced nobles, clerics, monks, nuns, peasants, and weavers. “In scarcely two years, the Cathar movement controlled the areas from the Rhine to the Pyrenees (...) The spark lit in the East now became a powerful flame.”[351]

The old partisans of Henri du Mans rallied to the Cathar bishop who preached in the region of Albi. In the north, Champagne had a bishop at Mont-Aime. The gravedigger Marcus, converted to the new faith, preached in Lombardy. Wandering missionaries reached Naples and England, where around 1162 adepts were quickly put to death. On 5 August 1163, several Cathars were burned in Cologne, in front of the Jewish cemetary, in the manner of Canon Eckbert. The scholar Hildegarde von Bingen did not disdain from denouncing them.

With the development of a veritable Church, internal dissidence and polemics grew. Western Bogomilism was grafted upon an ensemble of social demands and a kind of apostolic reform by letting moral practice take precedence over dogmatic questions. A difference was created between the Christian component of an egalitarian evangelism and a dualist religion that had nothing in common with Christianity of the Montanist type, propagated by the currents of voluntary poverty.

The intervention circa 1167 of Niketas, the Bogomile bishop of the Church of Byzantium (who was close to Marcus, the deacon of the Italian Cathars), imprinted on the entirety of the movement a more exacerbated dualism: Satan, the master of a miserable world, was a divinity parallel to the God of Goodness. The entirety of the beliefs in which the majority of the Cathar communities recognized themselves composed a doctrine that was irreconciliable with the principles of Christianity. More than a heresy, Catharism showed itself to Rome with the amplitude of a competing religion, a regeneration of Manicheanism.

Nevertheless, rivalries and schisms multiplied within Catharism. The conception according to which purity of ideas and rites depended upon moral purity constituted a weapon in the rivalries for power. The Cathars of Florence rejected Garattus, candidate for the Lombard priesthood, and rejected his doctrine because he had been caught in the company of a “star of the Herdsman” [a prostitute]. Thus the star that Lucifer brought down with him was called a prostitute.

Furthermore, in 1178 certain bishops of Toulouse and the Aran Valley professed their Christian faith and disavowed the belief in two divinities.

Such internal dissensions surreptitiously introduced a ferment of desperation into the movement, the power of which attracted all social classes, as Arno Borst has shown:

The archbishops of Bordeaux, Narbonne and Bourges were seriously threatened by Catharism. In the surroundings of Albi, Toulouse and Carcassonne, and in Gascogne, the Cathars were so numerous that the Count of Toulouse, frightened, had to intervene in 1177. The Cathars appeared in the north of France, in Bourgogne and Flanders; then in Nevers, Vezelay, Auxerre, Troyes, Bescancon, Metz, Reims, Soissons, Roanne, Arras and other towns. In Spain, they were still rare, but one found them in England around 1210. In Germany, one encountered them all along the Rhine, in the archdioceses in particular, but also in the priesthoods along the Danube, in Passau and Vienna. But their paradise was the north of Italy, the walled-in worlds of the cities of Milan, Udine, Como and Viterbe. Towns, out-lying areas, villages and chateaux were filled. Everything that, near-by or from afar, had more or less favored the hatching of Cathar ecumenicism, now found itself implicated by its great stupefaction in a universal conspiracy against the Catholic Church. All of the social strata were touched by the Cathar missionaries. The severity of Cathar morality attracted the ruling classes; noble and princely patrons, knights, and rich and cultivated people were attracted to it everywhere. Priests and monks received and put into practice the new sacred teachings. But these were not the milieux that spread these teachings, because, at that moment, evangelical morality was no longer the fundamental preoccupation of the Cathars: Bogomile dogma had passed from the first rank. Catharism’s simple rationality particularly touched the common [populaire] classes. A gravedigger who daily experienced the destruction of matter preached in Italy. His principal theme: the Demon created the flesh. Men of the pen or weavers, workers belonging to sedentary or meditative professions, fell into step, following the ruling classes. A proletarian intellectualism took hold of Bogomile teachings. Despite the “affinity of choice” that united the laboring classes with the most elevated layers of society, this was not a proletarian movement. It was disparate in its social structure and, in 1125, it was still unclear which would impose itself, the high or the low, the adepts of a simple Christianity or those of Bogomile dualism.

The Cathars’ situation on the economic plane also rested on a contradiction. They certainly extolled apostolic poverty. Each ‘Perfect One,’ upon his entrance into the sect, had to give his fortune and his goods to the Cathar Church and to satisfy his needs through the work of his own hands. The adept was poor, no doubt, and the Church was rich. In 1162 in Flanders, and in 1163 in Cologne, it offered to the Catholic prelates the spectacle of a church corrupted by money; in 1177, in the south of France, it swam in riches.

In Rimini, as in Beziers, the Cathars pawned [their belongings]. Mobs crowded around these ’pro subsidiis temporalibus.’ And the heretics, who were themselves merchants, conducted their affairs and those of the soul in public and at the same time. They collected their gifts for their Church. They did not prohibit their adepts from practicing the loan with interest; the rich believers relieved their consciences with large widows’ mites. Once again, the conflict appeared between the exigencies of Western evangelical morality and the financial necessities of a Church founded on a well-defined dogma; profiting from the confused situation that created Catharist contradictions, a precocious capitalism was instaurated.

In politics, the position of the Cathars was not clear. Especially in the south of France, the ascetics who scorned the world were soon supported by the nobles and, at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century, almost all of the barons were their adepts. Count Raymond VI of Toulouse (1194 to 1222) and Ramon Roger of Foix (1188–1223) were examples. Their wives supported the Cathar Church. An old aristocrat, Pontius of Rodelle, explained to Foulques, the Catholic Bishop of Toulouse: the Cathars are our parents; they live among us. Why must we persecute them? But it was not uniquely the severe and impressive morality of the Cathars that seduced the nobility. The nobility in Provence was poor and the Cathars were the enemies of the Catholic Church, the riches of which were held by the lords. The Cathars did not have a political program; [but] they became the instrument of politics when they offered their alliance to the Count of Toulouse against Paris. The Pope was not completely wrong when he reproached them — what makes a power is always well-made. Here as well was enthusiastic honor and bad conscience; here as well the material of the here-below infiltrated into piety and renunciation.[352]

The first popular Christian reaction to erect itself against Catharism furnished an army of great efficacity, so the Church did not disavow it or reject it as heresy. Born around 1173, centered around a merchant named Pierre Valdes or Valdo, the Vaudois current propagated fidelity to Catholic dogma and, at the same time, the necessity of a reform of ecclesiastical morals. Perhaps it was too late when, the occasion lacking, the popes hastened to combat the Cathars on the terrain of voluntary poverty.

When the Cathars reproached the Spanish bishop Diego of Osma for preaching in magnificence, he chose to confront them under the outward appearance of poverty and humility. Dominique de Guzman and his Dominican order adopted a similar tactic. The wretched results quickly augured the ineluctable recourse to the final solution.

The assassination of the papal legatee Pierre of Castelnau in 1208 by sympathizers of the Count of Toulouse and the Cathars quickly justified the necessity of offering to the crucifix the indispensible extension of the sword.

Citeaux preached the Crusade. The conflict that opposed King Philippe August and his vassal, the Count of Toulouse, added to political interests the hope of profits and pillages less hasardous than in the Saracen regions.

The End Of Catharism

The violence of the Crusade against the Albigensians gave the Church a position of strength that it used to create a ruse, a reform with which it would less and less accommodate itself. How could people so sensitive to the pleasures of the beyond, where the Good God reigned, not be resigned in the encounter with the brutes of the north? Even when the resistance was organized, the Cathars carried their defeat within themselves. Their goodness was founded on the renunciation of self, on their love of abstinence. What strength could they draw from the pleasures that were not of this world?

While extermination tightened around them, the Cathars did not tire of dogmatic quarrels. Around 1230, John of Lugio composed a vast work in Latin, in which he tried to revive the Christian tradition by finding the justification of Catharism in philosophy.

In Italy, the towns controlled by Cartharism were, by turns, protected or repressed according to political about-faces that, breaking and renewing alliances, incited the Emperor to fire up the pyres or extinguish them.

Languedoc succumbed in the blood (most often mixed) of the Cathars, the Catholics and the peasants who still practiced the old agrarian cults, and in the blood of those who did not care to believe in whatever it was that dogma insisted upon. But the Church carried to victory by the French reconquesta fell into the hands of the kingdom decorated by the fleur-de-lis. For two centuries thereafter, the Church paid the price by indenturing itself to French temporal power.

Frederic II, anticipating all Roman initiatives, soon gave the force of law to the ordinances of the Council of Lateran. He decreed death by fire for all the Cathars. For him, heresy was a crime against the State; he held as heretical anyone who dared to contest his decisions, since he was the Pope.

Rome made use of the henchmen in monks’ robes, the Dominicans. Languedoc particularly execrated their inspiration, Dominique, and his acolyte, Pierre, called the Martyr, whom the hardliners succeeded in executing. In 1231, the Inquisition finally began to function. It relieved and legalized the work of the heretic hunters, who had acted almost with personal title, such as Robert the Bulgari or Conrad of Marburg, torturers who organized huge book-burnings everywhere they went.

Around 1244, with the fall of Montsegur’s bastion, Catharism received the death-blow. It would thenceforth perpetuate itself clandestinely, stirring up renewals of repression in 1295, when the pyre walled in the agitational campaign of Pierre Autier, or in 1321, when Pastor Guillaume Belibaste fell into the hands of the Inquisition and perished in fire. In 1340, the pyre was lit at Carcassone for the last Cathars. They survived up to 1322 in the areas around Florence, until 1340 in Sicily, 1388 in Sienna and 1412 in Turin. (The first signs of hysteria concerning the “black Manicheanism” of sorcery, which appeared in the Fourteenth Century and culminated in the Sixteenth Century, suggested — as well as a regression of the freedoms of women and love — a continuation of Catharism without Cathars. Confounding Vaudois and the Perfect Ones — one would speak of the “Vauderie” of Arras — the Church recuperated the principle of purity and, in its way, pursued the combat of the angels against the forces of evil: the marginals, Jews, “inferior” races, and all the sectarians of the Devil.)

Dualism And Asceticism

Despite their diversity, the various local Catharisms — mind you, Albigensianism, swelled by the Crusade, was incorrectly presented as the reality of the entire movement — shared certain common traits, principally linked to dualism and an ascetic rigor that composed the first Greco-Roman Christianity.

There were two modes of dualism. One, mitigated, conceived of a single God, the creator of all things, including the angel Satanael, who repudiated his native goodness, corrupted himself, and drew from matter a corrupted world. The human soul, proceding from two primordial angelic natures, made use (through free will) of the faculty of choosing evil or good, and thus threw itself into salvation or damnation.

This doctrine was propagated in the milieux that were attached to a certain Christian formalism.

[On the other hand] absolute dualism broke more deliberately with Christianity and recognized two antagonistic powers, as in Marcionism. The material world was the work of a Bad God. The Good God engendered an uncorruptible universe, that of spirits or the Spirit.

The theory of the angelos-christos resurged in Catharism. The Christ, angel of God, only possessed a spiritual body.

In his Book of the Two Principles, John of Lugio argued for the co-eternal character of the perfect world, the domain of the God of Goodness, and the bad world governed by Satan. The idea that Satan forced God to reveal the evil that was in him under the forms of the Will to Justice and the Power to Punish proceded curiously — perhaps influenced by the Kabbalistic Jewish milieux or the Passagians (*) — from the Jewish Gnosticism attested to by an Essene faction.

(*) This was a Judaic sect that appeared in Lombardy and was condemned at the Council of Lombardy in 1184. Hostile to the sacraments and the Church, this sect believed that circumcision was indispensible for salvation.

Prompted by Marcionism, Catharism professed an absolute refusal of nature, which was identified with evil, perversion and death. Underneath an apparent respect for life — which enjoined them from killing other men or animals, excluded theft and violence from their behaviors, and taught them to conduct themselves as fundamentally good people (traits that one found among apostolic preachers such as Gandulf) — the Cathars scorned the pleasures of existence. At the heart of a civilization on which the privileges of love and women were only timidly asserted, the Cathars condemned all amorous relations as mortal sin. Even marriage was a “jurata fornicatio.” Women were to be avoided with fright. Certain faithful Cathars estimated that Satan inhabited the bodies of pregnant women.[353] Such an extreme rigor did not exist without reversals or excesses. It seems that the Cathar bishop Philippe hasarded the idea — reprized by the Beghards of the Free Spirit — that “there is no sin below the belt.”

It is true that the believers did not fall into the constraints of the puritanism imposed on the Perfect Ones and made use of the right to get married.

The Perfect Ones refused to swear, take oaths or sit on tribunals, because human justice was essentially diabolical. It was not permitted for the Perfect Ones to carry arms, eat meat or abandon themselves to the least voluptuousness.

The consolamentum, the principal ceremony and heritage of Bogomilism, absolved all sin and initiated one into the order of the Perfect Ones.

The endura, or the fast that was sometimes prolonged up to death, was a form of suicide. It was never made the object of an obligation or an inducement, contrary to the assertions propagated by the Catholics, but the endura did possess a certain attraction for people who were little disposed to discover the charms of the here-below.

Few Cathar texts have survived, other than the Liber de duobus principiis of John of Lugio and the Interrogatio Johannis, a gospel of Bogomile origin. Other writings circulated and echoed in the Summa de catharis by the apostate Cathar Rainier Sacconi. Fables that composed a veritable mythology translated the teachings of the Perfect Ones into colorful narratives (a dragon carries off the angels in the folds of its tail; battles in a glass sky that breaks under the weight of demons; the theme of golem animated by Lucifer...). Their influence on folklore [English in original] still hasn’t been studied.

• Chapter 30 : The Vaudois and the Adepts of Voluntary Poverty

Chapter 30: The Vaudois and the Adepts of Voluntary Poverty

The Vaudois movement illustrates the occasion lost by Rome in its struggles against the Cathars and the subversive effects of the urban pauperization exploited by the “apostolic” reformers. Few records exist that clarify the figure of the movement’s founder, a rich merchant from Lyon named Pierre Valdo or Valdes, perhaps de la Vallee [of the valley].

Legend has it that he received a warning from heaven while hearing the Complaint of Saint Alexis. He made gifts of all his belongings to devote himself to voluntary poverty and evangelism, such as they were prescribed by a canonical text attributed to Matthew: “If you want to be perfect, sell your goods, give them to the poor.”

Around 1170, men and women assembled themselves around Valdo and began to preach voluntary poverty in a strict will of Catholic orthodoxy, without any possible collusion with Catharism, nor with the Pataria, who were glady anti-clerical, nor a fortiori with the Henricians, Petrobrusians or “apostolics.”

The conflict began when Archbishop Guichard (1165–1181), protecting his privileges, prohibited the group from preaching. Valdo was summoned to the Pope. He came to Rome where, scalded by the radicalization of the Patarins, he was enjoined by the Pope to preach only upon the request of the clergy. This was done to support the Archbishop of Lyon. Valdo ignored him. He was excommunicated and chased from the town by Archbishop Jean de Belles-Mains [Good Hands], which was an error all the more unpardonable because, according to Thouzelier, Valdo signed — at a regional synod held in Lyon in 1180 — a profession of faith in which he confirmed his devotion to Roman Catholicism.[354]

• Chapter 31 : 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 humanity.

The conception of a relational unity with nature, perfectable on earth and in the individual, not by the roads of asceticism and renunciation but, on the contrary, through pleasure in oneself and in others, escapes from the syzygy of orthodoxy and heterodoxy.

In its radical form, the attitude called “Free-Spirit” by the inquisitors who were intent upon situating it did not easily enter into the classifications of heresy, but belonged to the project of the total man, as old in its hopes as the wanderings of man separated from himself by an economy that exploits him.

Penetrating into the convents, the beguinages, Franciscanism and the clergy attached to Christianity and Catholicism, the spirit of freedom [also] invested those who were outwardly more in conformity with the dominant discourse; the refinement of desire ceded place to the good caprices of those who, identifying themselves with God, engaged in a project of appeasement common to all tyrants.

The Amaurians

The ecclesiastical concern with identifing the behaviors that escaped the control of the Catholic Church with a particular heresy grouped together, under the name Amaurians or the disciples of Amaury de Bene, the clergymen (mainly parish priests) in villages situated not far from Paris (Vieux-Corbeil, La Celle, Ursines, Lorris, and Saint-Cloud).

Originally from Bene, near Chartres, Master Amaury taught in Paris, where one of his assertions stirred up controversy at the heart of the university. In 1204, his thesis — according to which all Christians were members of the Christ and actually suffered the torture of the cross with him — was submitted to the Pope, who condemned it. Amaury abjured and died around 1207. Struck by a simple pontifical reprobation, Amaury’s conception had in itself presented nothing subversive, as it did not translate into theological jargon the reality concretely lived by the simple people and that the accused in the trials of 1210 and 1211 would express more brutally: if the Christ died for the sins of humanity, the fault thus redeemed exempted each person from having to pay it off a second time through suffering, renunciation, contrition, guilt, penitence and submission to the Church.

Ten of the accused would perish in the pyre; four were condemned to prison in perpetuity. In 1211, Master Godin, cleric of Amiens, was burned for having propagated Amaurian ideas, which the Council of Lateran would condemn by judging them to be “much more senseless than heretical.” A revelatory formula: beyond heresy, the negative province of orthodoxy’s territory, there existed only what was “beyond sense.”

Among the 80 victims executed by fire in Strasbourg in 1215, there were also Vaudois and Cathars who were accused of affirming that “the crudest sins are permitted by nature and are in conformity with nature.”[358]

• Chapter 32 : Beghards and Beguines

Chapter 32: Beghards and Beguines

Around the end of the Twelfth Century, associations that were both religious and secular were founded, most often on the initiative of magistrates or rich bourgeois; the members of which, designated by the names “Beghards” and “Beguines,” lived in communitarian houses called “beguinages.”

Founded as a public service to stop the multiplication of poor people in the towns that drained the surplus of manpower from the countrysides, these communities were independent of all monastic orders and placed under the exclusive surveillance of the bishop. The influx of beggars of both genders did not cease to grow in importance, especially in the northern towns such as Liege, where the first establishments date from 1180–1184 (and thus were contemporaneous with the initiatives of Pierre Valdo in Lyon): Tirlemont (1202), Valenciennes (1212), Douai (1219), Ghent (1227) and Antwerp (1230). In 1250, there were more than 1,000 adherents in Paris and Cambrai, and 2,000 in Cologne.

Mixing individual and communitarian interests together, the current of the Free-Spirit awoke a particular echo in the beguinages that Jundt paints in an idyllic tableau:

In France and Germany, the Beguines lived in great numbers in the same house, whereas in Belgium their habitation recalls to us less a cloister than one of our modern workers’ cities: they were composed (and are still composed today) as a series of small houses, each of which didn’t contain more than two or three Beguines; at the center a church and a charity hospital for the aged or sick sisters had been erected; close-by one found a cemetery. The genre of life of these women occupied a space between the monastic life and profane life. They did not renounce the society of men, nor terrestrial affairs and occupations; they made vows of chastity and obedience, but not in an absolute manner like the religious orders; they conserved the freedom of leaving the association when they wished and [then] getting married (...)

They didn’t wait long before finding imitators. Brotherhoods of artisans, most often weavers, formed in their image in the different towns where they had their establishments. Called Beghards by the people, the members of these eminently secular associations enjoyed the same independence as the Beguines; they devoted their lives to manual labor and exercises of piety and thus attracted the favor of the people.

The progress of these two religious societies did not fail to create enemies, especially among the secular clergy, whose jealousy they aroused. The parish priests received a certain sum per year to indemnify them for the loses caused by the presence of a priest specially attached to each of these associations; one even gave them a portion of the price of burials when some rich bourgeois (and the case was not rare) demanded to be buried in the cemetery adjoining the establishment; as far as the religious orders, they could only lose out to the pious foundations that deprived them, not only only of the support of many members, but also important donations.[375]

The spirit of freedom spread like wild fire in the communities of men and women less preoccupied with theological struggles than the two great themes debated in the Thirteenth Century because their reality was tested every day: the meaning of poverty and the practice of love, which aspired to raise itself from brutal satisfaction to the art of pleasure. When had such immediate questions of utility and pleasure better attempted to discover responses than in these places of refuge and encounter, in which Beghards and Beguines learned, through a beneficial idlness and under the pretext of good works, to live according to their preferences?

From 1244 on, the Archbishop of Mayence set himself against the way that the young Beguines were abusing their freedom. It is true that the monastical communities and the parish priests cast a disapproving eye on the impetuous zeal of certain beguinages that, through the gratuity of their aid, deprived them of profitable business. At the beginning, the Pope intervened to defend the Beghard communities against the despoilations and trials of the local clergy, but the local condemnations multiplied very quickly. In 1258, the Synod of Fritzlar condemned the wandering Beguines and Beghards who begged to cries of “Brod durch Gott” [bread by God] and preached in secret and subterranean places.[376]

In 1307, at the Synod of Cologne, Bishop Henri II of Virneburg enumerated the points of accusation among which one could find such collectively welcomed remarks as “To make love is not a sin” and “Those who are led by the Spirit of God are no longer under the law, because the law is not imposed on the just, on those who live without sin.”

In 1311, Pope Clement V was worried by the progress of the Free-Spirit in Italy and everywhere else. At the Council of Vienna, which took place that same year, he launched against those “who call freedom of spirit the freedom to do whatever pleases them” two decrees, Ad nostrum and Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, the ensemble of which formed the Clementines and would serve from then on as an inquisitorial guide for the systematic persecution of the Beghards and Beguines, dragging to the pyre a number of good Catholics devoted to the struggle against pauperization and adepts of the Free-Spirit who adjured, if necessary, for the simple reason that sacrifice or martyrdom did not enter into their aspirations.

The Communities Of Cologne And Schweidnitz

Walter of Holland, the author of De novem rupibus spiritualibus (Of the Nine Spiritual Rocks), a text that is lost today but which Mosheim would consult in the Eighteenth Century, founded in Cologne a group that met in a place baptized “Paradise.” According to the chronicler William of Egmont, a couple represented Jesus and Mary. After a ceremony conducted by the Christ dressed up in precious clothes, a nude preacher would invite the assembly to undress and celebrate their refound Edenic innocence with a banquet, followed by the pleasures of love.

In the manner of the “Homines intelligentiae,” active a century later in Brussels, an initiatory ceremony based on “refined love” expressed the unity of the body and the spirit in the identification of amorous ecstasy and the incarnated Spirit (*) and removed sin and guilt. As among the Barbelites and Messalians, courtesy and refinement of pleasure, so as to accede to good conscience, started down the road of hierogamy, a psychoanalysis before there was such a thing, in which God the Father, the Son, his mother, virgin and wife, traditional factors of castration and repression, suddenly gave their consent without reserve to this essential quest for love.

(*) Here, once more, there was a resurgence of the Gnostic pneuma assimilated with the sperma.

The persecution led by Bishop Henri II of Virneburg sent Walter to the pyre in 1323. William of Egmont counted 50 victims burned or drowned in the Rhine.

Nevertheless, another community existed at that time. It continued up to 1335, which indicates the popular expansion of the movement and the repression’s lack of efficacity.

Indeed, in 1335, a certain John of Brunn (Brno), who lived with his brother Albert in a Beghard community in Cologne for twenty years, adjured and avoided the pyre by rallying to the Dominican order. In a confession to Gallus Neuhaus, the Inquisitor of Prague, he revealed the singular practices of the Free-Spirit in the ecclesiastical lower-orders.

The brotherhood was divided into two classes: the neophytes and the Perfect Ones. The first group, after having given all of their goods and dress suits to the second group, begged and learned to renounce their own wills, so as to be penetrated by divine plenitude. They devoted themselves to work that constrained them and was repugnant to them, so as to better break the body and empower the spirit. Once descended below all conscience, with the result that they stole and killed with impugnity — they called it “sending them back to eternity” — without scruples or remorse, they acceded to the state of perfection and lived in luxury and pleasure. They made love with the Beguines or adepts whom they recognized, as among the Messalians, by the usage of code and signs (tickling the palm of the hand, touching the end of the nose), unless they simply declared “Fac mihi caritatem” (“Give me charity”), because they excelled at giving a more agreeably sensual meaning to ritualized formulas.

For twenty-five years, a community of Beguines or Monials functioned in Schweidnitz, Silesia, on a model identical to that of Cologne. The denunciation of mistreated novices drew the attention of the Inquisitor Johannes Schwenlenfeld, who would die, as many of his species did, under the blows of an anonymous avenger in 1341. Revealed by an inquest in 1332, the facts brought to light practices quite similar to those reported by Diderot in the Eighteenth Century in The Religious and attested to by the cadavers of newborns frequently discovered in the old manasteries. They only took on a certain relief here because of the doctrine of spiritual freedom, which was invoked to justify them. Same annihiliation of will among the novices reduced to slavery and submitted to the caprices of the “Marthas” or mistresses; same state of impeccability and absolute license among the Perfect Ones, dressed in the most beautiful finery and passing their days in luxury and debauchery. Gertrude of Civitatis, superior of the community, affirmed: “If God created everything, then I co-created everything with him. And I am God with God, and I am Christ and I am more.”

The “Marthas” of Schweidnitz often visited other convents or communities. Their presence was attested to in Strasbourg, where their teachings reflected a sermon falsely attributed to Eckhart, Such was Sister Catherine, the Daughter that Master Eckhart had in Strasbourg, which described the diverse degrees of initiation of a novice according to the Free-Spirit and the Adamite innocence of “Everything is permitted.”

Wandering Beghards And Beguines

The trials of the Beghards and Beguines who propagated the doctrine of an absolute freedom or, in the manner of Marguerite Porete, the art of refined love, furnished an indication of the degree of dispersion of the current, the meaning of which the Church could not understand, so it postulated its eradication.

The majority of the condemned had either ceded to the presumption and played the prophet or the Christ in a sensual apostleship or had, by the numbers of their partisans, aroused the suspicions of the inquisitorial functionairies, the monks and priests always ready to make the first move so as to avoid the blame of the religious police.

While the popularity of Bloemardine and her reputation for holiness discouraged the inquisitors in Brussels and chassed away Ruysbroeck, the publication of a post-Eckhartian treatise entitled Meester Eckhart en de onbekende leer (Master Eckhart and the Unknown Teachings) attested to the presence of identical preoccupations in Holland. Soon after, Gerhard Groot and his Modern Devotion would strive to oppose to the Free-Spirit a mystique that was reduced to pure intellectual speculation and strictly billeted within the limits of dogma. In 1380, Geert Groote would denounce Bartholomew, an Augustinian partisan of the Free-Spirit; he exhumed and burned the body of Matthew of Gouda who had affirmed that he knew “more motives than the Christ of the so-called God.”[377]

In 1336 three Beguines “of high spirit,” arrested in Magdeburg, hastened to abjure “their errors and horrible blasphemies” and were set free. The same year, a certain Constantine was burned in Erfurt. In 1339, three Beghards “professing the crudest pantheism” were sent to prison in perpetuity in Constance. Others were arrested in Nuremburg and Ratisbonne (1340), then Wurzburg (1342); Hermann Kuechener suffered the penalty of fire in Nuremburg in 1342 for having professed the return to the innocence of Adam before the fall.

The theologian Jordan von Quedlinburg composed a work of refutation of the Beghards of Free-Spirit, from which Romana Guarnieri selected important extracts.[378]

The Inquisitor Schadelant sent Berthold von Rohrbach, accused of having preached the theses of the Free-Spirit in Franconia, to the pyre in Spire in 1356.

Hidden by the Spanish Inquisition, which often confused itself with a gigantic pogrom, the German Inquisition exercised its bureaucratic ferocity. It kindled the largest number of pyres and cranked the procedural machinery with the greatest efficacity. It was also in Germany, when the flames of heresy were extinguished, that women, men and children accused of sorcery would take up the slack for the Beghards and wandering prophets. In this domain, the Frenchmen Boguet and De Lance, pursuing the demons of their morbid fantasms, would, it is true, give their German colleagues a run for their money.

The execution of the Beguine Metza von Westenhove in 1366 presented a particularly odious character. Condemned 50 years earlier for having propagated the freedom of acting according to one’s desires, she was judged to have relapsed at an advanced age and was offered as a sacrifice at the time of a welcoming festival for a prince organized by the city.

The case of Johannes Hartmann, called the Spinner (the Weaver), arrested and burned in Erfurt in 1367, illustrated the behavior of certain adepts of the Free-Spirit, which foreshadowed the conceptions of Donatien Alfonse Francois de Sade.

The state of perfect and autodeification to which Johannes acceded, through the preliminaries of asceticism and revelation, prescribed that he unreservedly follow the caprices, desires and passions that God, that is to say, he himself and nature, had inspired in him. Did he desire a woman? He would seduce or rape her. A valuable item? He appropriated it. The owner objected? He expedited him [back] “into eternity,” where he could garner the money spent and the pleasures that were offered to him. And Johannes had this peremptory formula: “It would be better to want the entire earth to perish than to renounce an act incited by nature.”[379]

That same year [1367], Walter Korling, Hartmann’s accuser, sent seven other Beghards to the pyre in Nordhausen, Thuringia.

In France, the troubles of the great peasant revolt and the war with England left the wandering preachers a greater leisure to escape the nets of the heretic-hunters. It seems that the numerical importance of the Beghards and Beguines known under the name “Turlupins” (in the Netherlands and England they were called “Lollards”) had drawn down upon them the repression of 1372 in Paris. Mosheim supposes that many came from Germany, fleeing the persecutions.[380] The Inquisitor of Ile-de-France, Jacques de More, killed them along with Jeanne Dabenton, their prophetess. His pyre would also consume the body of his friend, who died shortly before in prison. Certain people gained la Savoie, where the Pope would engage Count Amedee to serve against them, then in Switzerland. An adept of the Free-Spirit was burned at Bremgarten, near Berne.

Following [Jean Charlier de] Gerson, the sect still had representatives when he was still alive; but they fled the populous localities and hid themselves in overlooked and deserted places.

Gerson preserved the fundamental points of their doctrine for us. They taught that a man, after he had achieved peace and tranquility of the spirit, would be relieved of the requirement to observe the divine laws; that it was not necessary to rage at anything that was given by nature; and that it was through nudity that we return to the state of innocence of the first men [and women] and that we attain from here-below the supreme degree of happiness. “The Epicureans, dressed in the tunic of Christ, insinuated themselves among the women by simulating a profound devotion; little by little they won over their confidence and did not delay in making them the playthings of their passions.” Abolishing all modesty, not only in their language, but also in their relations with each other, they conducted secret meetings in which they tried to represent the innocence of Paradise in the manner of the heretics of Cologne. In several passages Gerson sets them into relation with Joachim of Fiore. It is probable that they based their principle of spiritual freedom on the theory of the three ages and it is without doubt that one of the five prophetesses charged with announcing the beginning of the era of the Holy Spirit was seized in Lyon in 1423.[381]

While Gerhard Groot launched the mystical and orthodox movement of the New Devotion in Holland, Germany intensified its persecution of the Beghards. On 26 January 1381, Conrad Kannler, brought before the inquisitorial tribunal of Eichstadt, expounded upon his conception of the Free-Spirit: “It is achieved when all remorse of conscience ceases and man can no longer sin (...). I am one with God and God is one with me.” He insisted on the legitimacy of satisfying his passions, whatever they were, on the condition that the desire assumed an irresistible character.[382] Thus the Fraticelles and, much later, the Allumbrados of Spain would recommend to men and women that they sleep nude, side by side, and remain chaste as long as possible, so as to lead passion to the point at which it could not restrain itself any further.

• Chapter 33 : The Millenarianists

Chapter 33: The Millenarianists

In the adventure of God, the Jewish, Essene and Christianized apocalypses (or revelations) expressed the historical myth of a Golden Age, passed but promised to return, such as it was conceived, in regret and hope, by the Greco-Roman mindset, deceived by the disorder of the emperors and decked out in all the virtues of an ideal and universal republic.

In the “revelations,” the creator God, originally imperceptible and inaccessible, resembled his creatures and, through a growing epiphany, manifested himself so as to separate the just and loyal from the bad and wicked, with the result that, the latter having been annihilated, he would descend to the earth and build with the saints and the elect a kingdom of a thousand years.

The Constantinian Church, called “Catholic,” accommodated itself poorly to a doctrine previously and collectively received by a Hellenized Christianity that aspired to the triumph, not of an ecclesiastical authority, but of the ekklesia or communities of the faithful. Justin the Apologist, Irenaeus of Lyon, Tertullian and Origen were convinced millenarianists. The conception discretely continued up to the Twelfth Century, despite the reticence of the clergy, the exclusive holder of salvation, which controlled access to the kingdom of the saints.

Joachim Of Fiore

With the renewal of the social and political forms of the Twelfth Century, there came to be a consciousness of history in progress but still enclosed in the cyclical form of myth. The revolutionary process of market expansion, which incited philosophy to free itself from theological tutelage, also instilled at the very heart of the language of God the venom [venin] of becoming [devenir], a venom from which it would eventually die.

The idea of an Eden uprooted to the beyond and inscribed in a human future that was more or less near expressed — at the heart of a theocentric cosmos — the same hopes for the immediate future that would be sung (to the point of loss of voice and life) by the ideologies of the revolutions still to come.

Ironically, such a project was born in the brain of the monk who was the least inclined to sow trouble in the ecclesiastical universe. The theories of Joachim of Fiore only offered, it is true, a danger to the Church due to the interpretations that drew the efferverscence of the centuries from them.

In the Ninth Century, Bishop Rathier of Verona founded upon the balance of three orders the conservative society that produced the agrarian economy: the oratores, monks and priests; the armatores, soldiers; and the laboratores, working to feed those who protected them on earth and in the name of heaven.

Everything happened as if the commerical flight [l’essor] of the towns — like an arrow let fly at the modernity of capital — made the cyclical and static representation of Rathier of Verona tip over into the spirit of Joachim, flattening and stretching it according to a linear becoming, ordered into three ages.

The Book of Concord of the New and Old Testaments, written around 1180, put forth a sampling of formulas, none of which were threatening to the Church, but the meaning of which — sharpened by history — would cut like a knife into the adipose flesh of Roman power.

The first era was that of knowledge; the second that of wisdom; the third will be that of full intelligence. The first was servile obedience; the second filial servitude; the third will be freedom. The first was the ordeal; the second action; the third will be contemplation. The first was fear; the second faith; the third will be love. The first was the age of slaves; the second that of sons; the third will be that of friends. The first was the age of old men; the second that of young people; the third will be that of children. The first passed in the flash of the stars; the second was the aurorea; the third will be a full day. The first was winter; the second was the beginning of spring; the third will be summer. The first carried nettles; the second one roses; the third will carry lillies. The first one provided herbs; the second one cobs; and the third will provide wheat. The first provided water; the second wine; the third will provide oil. The first is related to Septuagesima; the second to Quadragesima; the third will be related to Easter. Thus the first age was related to the father, who is the author of all things; the second to the Son, who deigned to invest our [mortal] clay; the third will be the age of the Holy Spirit, of which the apostle said, ‘There where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.’[388]

In the precise date that the Calabraisian monk assigned to the advent of the Third Age, the explosive mix of the Joachimite component and historic evolution discovered a detonator. Joachim counted from Adam to Jesus 42 generations of 30 years each, thus 1260 years. As the same period of time must be reproduced from the birth of the Christ [to the present], the new era would start at the dawn of 1260. Great troubles and the unleashing of the Antichrist obviously were the prelude to the birth of a paradisiacal world in which the saints, in joy, expected the return of the Christ.

Under the archaism of the cyclical calculations, there slid a subtle political design. Joachim foresaw the growing importance of the beggar orders, a veritable war machine that the Church opposed to the progress of the Vaudois heresy and the voluntarily impoverished reformers. It was of their preeminence that Joachim dreamed when he announced the reign of the saints. And the order closest to apostolic despoilment, Franciscanism, would succumb the easiest (through a malicious return) to the seductions of millenarianism.

With the rule of the Elect of the Joachimite Third Age, the reign of the Church would be abolished. There would no longer be Father, nor Son, nor rites, nor sacrifices, nor sacraments, just one law, the lex libertatis. The Amauricians, nay, the simple reformers, such as Pierre de Bruys and Henri of Lausanne, had already predisposed the Joachimite spirit to a social and individual practice that was radically hostile to Rome and, in the best of cases, radically hostile to the very essence of religion, which is the exile of self. How indeed could one, faced with the imminence of a paradisiacal nature in which God would be dissolved, prevent abstract concepts from retaking bodies by breaking the ecclesiastical barrier that prohibited access to the conjoined pleasure in the world and in oneself?

Sterilized by theological and philosophical speculation, certain words began to recover their fecundity. In the notion of perfection germinated the refusal of all guilt; contemplation became the illumination of the God of desire that each carries inside oneself; charity was elevated to the art of erotic courtesy; love translated the effusion of lovers; and freedom evoked at least the freedom of nature, at most the surpassing of the unfortunate coupling of divine tyranny and oppressed and violated nature.

Joachimism

The writings of Joachim encountered an immediate success among the learned. Among the Amauricians condemned in 1210, William the Goldsmith and Master Godin of Amiens had already drawn the subversive implications of the imminence of the Third Age. If Valdeism and Catharism knew nothing about them, the “spiritual” faction born from the dissensions in the Franciscan order perceived in the rule of the saints the emergence of a society inspired by the voluntary poverty that Francis of Assisi had so cleverly snatched from Valdo’s disciples, the Cathars and the apostolic preachers.

The date 1260, forseen by Joachim as the inauguration of the new era, exploded in history as multiple social, political and religious fragments. The shock waves would agitate the stratification of the centuries accumulated by the time without which the Edenic expiration date, always deferred, involved no other consequence than the revision of prophetic calculations.

Drafted in the second half of the Thirteenth Century, two works of wide distribution proved the influence of Joachimism on the political rivalry between Rome and the emperors of Germany. The Abbatis Joachim Florensis scriptum super Esaiem prophetam (the manuscript was belatedly printed in Venice in 1517) and the Interpraetatio praeclara abbatis Joachim in Hieremian prophetam (Venice, 1525) fixed 1260 as the end of the affliction of the Holy City. The German emperor, Frederic II, would in the hands of God be the whip destined to punish the sinful Church. The Imperium ravaged by the Saracens, who were destroyed in their turn by the Mongols and the Tarars, would lead the world to the brink of annihilation. Thereafter, as backlash, there would finally be born the rule of peace and the era of the just. (In the Nineteenth Century, at a time when ideological language had supplanted religious language, such would be the conception of the anarchist Ernest Coeurderoy in his Hurrah, or the Revolution of the Cosacks.[389])

The elitism of the Spirituals discovered a nourishment appropriate to their chiliastic pretensions in the theories of Joachim of Fiore. In 1254, a Spiritual from Pisa, Gerardo da Borgo San Donnino, radicalized and vulgarized Joachimite ideas in his Introduction to the Eternal Gospel. Insisting on the fateful year 1260, he prophesized the disappearance of the Roman Church and the advent of a spiritual Church, in germination in Franciscanism. The condemnation of the book in 1255 reflected on the Abbey of Fiore, thenceforth held as suspect of heresy. Condemned to perpetual reclusion, Gerardo da Borgo San Donnino would die, after 18 years of severe incarceration, without having denied his conceptions.[390]

Joachimism was revived again, but more vididly, among the Spirituals who took up the old program of reform and were increasingly opposed to the racketeering [affairiste] politics of Rome. A radical faction would be born from the Spiritual current, at the boundary between Franciscanism and the Free-Spirit, which the Church would condemn under the name “Fraticelles.”

Here there stood out — that is, once stripped of the anti-Semitic resentment of the Pastoureaux and the morbid comportment of the flagellants — an egalitarian social movement for which God constituted less a religious reference than a principle of government that excluded the Church and the princes in the name of a new and classless society.

Gerardo Segarelli

In the Italian towns, the political and social struggle most often obeyed the confusion of quarrels between the Guelphs, allies of Rome, and the Ghibellins, partisans of the Emperor of Germany. The will to purge the Church of its corruption (which Savonarole would still require in 1491) and revolutionary millenarianism created monthly, if not weekly tumults.

In the Joachimite year of 1260, in Parme, then ravaged by famine and internecine wars, a shopkeeper named Gerardo Segarelli — renewing the gesture of Pierre Valdo — sold his goods to the profit of the poor and decided to promote a community of faithful in which the apostolic virtues of the Christ and his apostles would be revived.

Illuminated, and no doubt imprinted with the hysteria shared by preachers and tribunes of all types, Segarelli soon played the role in Parme of popular and picturesque Messiah, although he failed to position as lies and calumnies the majority of the ridiculous traits with which the Franciscan Salimbene weighed him down. (In his Chronicle, Salimbene confessed the motives of his bad-tempered incontinence: “The people of Parme give more willingly to these vagabonds than to the brother preachers or the minor brothers.”[391]) Segarelli enjoyed the benevolent protection of Bishop Opizo, perhaps motivated less by solicitude than by aversion to the official beggars who constituted the Dominicans, universally detested for their base police work, and the Franciscans, often charged with hypocrisy.

Rallying the flagellants to his ecumenicism, Segarelli traveled through the town to cries of “Penitenzagite!” the popular form of “Panitentiam agite!” (do penitence).

With the aid of an old Franciscan, Robert, called Fra Glutto (Glutton), Segarelli organized a brotherhood to which thronged “debauchees, cowherds, swineherds, loafers who roamed the streets eyeing the women, and good-for-nothings for knew neither work nor prayer.”[392] In vain did the Council of Lyon of 1274 order them to dissolve or rally to one of the orders recognized by Rome.

Strong from their numerical significance and their growing audience, the Segarellists sent out missionaries, wandering apostles often confused with the Beghards, who shared with them a common devotion to voluntary poverty and the impeccability that it guaranteed.

The influence of “the spirit of freedom” was not absent from Segarellism, despite its exhortations to penitence. The prophet himself made assurances that the life of the poor was the true life of the apostles, “the most perfect of lives (...), freedom in adoring God, freedom in sermons, freedom in the relations between man and woman.”[393]

One attributes to Segarelli and his disciples the practice — recommended by the very orthodox Robert of Abrissel — of the “white martyr,” which consisted in a couple going to bed nude and interlaced, but resisting the natural solicitations of love. The current of the Free-Spirit gave to the exercise a more human meaning by changing it into a patient refinement of the desire that was not satisfied before it became irresistible. It is probable that certain apostles of Segarelli conformed more willingly to the latter version of martyrdom, denuded of excessive rigor.

Salimbene was surprised that Segarelli refused to assume the role of community leader, although he was the object of a great veneration. Sincerely devoted to the Christic myth, he deemed it offensive to his holiness if he governed rather than radiated. Nevertheless, he couldn’t avoid all forms of power.

Guidone Putagi, brother of the Podesta of Bologna, took control of the government of the congregation and would exercise it for many years, despite an ostentatious way of life, little in conformity with evangelical requirements.

A schism was declared, which degenerated into armed struggle in which each camp disputed Segarelli, a most unfortunate God in his successive incarnations and attempts to once again assist in the birth of a Church.

Guidone’s partisans carried him off, but shortly afterwards, he left the brotherhood and rallied to the Order of the Templars. (His adherence to the order of the Temple left the road open to calculations on the opening of the [age of the] spirit by the future victims of Philippe the Beautiful and Clement V. Merchants and bankers two centuries ahead of their time, they did not reject scorn for received ideas, nor for the pleasures that cynically camouflaged the exemplary reputations of the soldiers and businessmen who were above suspicion.)

In 1286, Pope Honorius IV condemned the Segarellist apostolics, refused to receive them or give them alms from the Vatican coffers.

A year later, the Council of Wurzburg enjoined the faithjful to no longer welcome nor feed the wandering apostolics dressed in extravagant clothing and called leccatores, ghiottoni, or scrocconi, that is to say, “gluttons.”[394]

Segarelli (again according to Salimbene) was increasingly eccentric. Three of his disciples, accused of debauchery, were hanged in Bologna so that there would be no doubts about their holy calling, which had been so loudly proclaimed.

Thrown into prison, Segarelli owed his salvation to the Bishop of Parme, who offered him refuge in his house. Nevertheless, a new bull issued in 1290 by Pope Nicolas IV relaunched the repression. In 1294, on the entreaties of the Inquisition, two men and two women who were members of the congregation were put on the pyre. That same year, and so as to to take by surprise an institution that was unanimously abhorred, the episcopal authorities — including civil power and certain ecclesiastical dignitaries — brought before it the prophet whose downfall Rome had sworn and whom it condemned to perpetual imprisonment.

This does not even mention the fierceness of the religious police. The actions engaged in by the Inquisition would involve the condemnation of Gerardo Segarelli to death, forty years after his divine revelation. With him perished many of his partisans, including Etienne, one of his principle evangelists.

Among those who, on 18 July 1300, contemplated the prophet in his tunic of flames, one of his partisans, Dolcino of Novara, would bring to Joachimism the modern form of a social and peasant-based revolution, inaugurating a tradition that would continue to exist until the decline of the colonies in the Twentieth Century.

The Guillelmites

At the same that Segarelli was agitating Parme and attracting the hostility of a Church that was clouded by the accumulation of capital, a millenarianist group founded in Milan claimed for women the privilege of guiding humanity as a whole towards the Third Age and the egalitarian kingdom.

In the prophetic year 1260, a young widow and her son arrived in Milan. Guiglelma, said to be from Bohemia, seems to have been the daughter of Constance, wife of the king of Bohemia. Nothing authenticates such parentage other than the declaration of one of her disciples, Andrea Saramita, who had been to see Constance in the hope of recovering a debt. Soon thereafter her exemplary piety attracted followers, whose numbers grew with her reputation as a thaumaturge and the multiplication of miraculous recoveries. The cult of the saint was soon made a part of the whirlpool of fashionable messianic ideas. Her sectarians let it be understood that she had been chosen to convert the Jews and the Saracens, and to instaurate the universality of the Christian faith.

Around 1276, a gilded legend supported the idea that Guiglelma was the incarnation of the Holy-Spirit, designated the harbinger of the Third Age by Joachim of Fiore. She was incarnated as the third in the Trinity as the Christ had been the incarnation of the second in the body of a man. Her nature was at once divine and natural, if one believes two of her more zealous partisans, Andrea Saramita, a notable from Milan, and an umiliata in the ancient convent of Biassono, the sister of Maifreda di Pirovano, who belonged to the powerful Visconti family. Guiglelma had the prudence to openly contest such a pretense, which made her subject to inquisitorial control, but, with or without her consent, her role as saint inscribed itself in the double signification of millenarianism and feminine preeminence, which — from the Cistercian Monials to Hadewijch and Porete — did not cease to disturb the Church.

When Guiglelma died, on 24 August 1281, she left her goods to the Cistercian community of Chiaravalle, near Milan, where she was buried in a great luxury of piety. The cult organized in her honor did profitable business. A month after the transfer of her remains, Andrea Samarita, with great pomp, exhumed the body. She washed it with wine and water, and preserved the precious mix as a cream for the healing of the sick. Maifredo used it as a cure for pilgrims; she also instaurated new ceremonies for the anniversary of Guiglelma’s death and the transfer of the saint. The abbey, whose prestige grew year by year, attracted the favor of generous donors. One of them, Giaccobe of Novati, a nobleman from Milan, bequeathed to it all of his goods and offered his powerful protection to the Guillelmites.

It was now necessary for the group to claim that it constituted the kernel of a new Church, marking the advent of the reign of the saints. Andrea, spiritual daughter of Guiglelma, devoted herself to defining a new dogma. The Archangel Raphael announced to the blessed Constance that the Holy-Spirit was incarnated in her; she chose feminine form because, under masculine form, she’d perished as the Christ, and the entire world with him. The tomb of Chiaravalle was raised to the glory of Saint-Sepulcre; rites were prescribed and communion was held in it.

From time to time, Guiglelma would appear to the faithful in the form of a dove. The gospels were replaced by Andrea’s writings, which imitated Paul’s epistles. Maifreda, the author of litanies and prayers, prophesizd the second coming of Guiglelma and the end of the traditional papacy. She herself would become a pope. She worked to form a cardinal college exclusively composed of women. Sumptuously dressed, she gave her benediction, celebrated Mass, consecrated the Host, and gave communion to the faithful.

The support of a number of rich Milanese, including the Visconti family, in all probability explains the slowness and hesitations of the Inquisition. It was disquieted by the Guillelmites in 1284, but contented itself with a simple admonishment. The inquests of 1295 and 1296 were not followed up upon. However, at the time Maifreda revived the millenarian danger by announcing the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost 1300, the Church decided to intervene in a center of agitation that had consolidated the front of apostolics, Fraticelles, Dolcinites and heterdox Beghards.

Among the Guillelmites who were arrested, four or five were condemned as relapsers. On 23 August 1300, Sister Giaccoa dei Bassani mounted the pyre. In September, it was the turn of Andrea Saramita and Maifreda. Lighter penalties were given to the others. Guiglelma’s remains were exhumed[395] and burned. Thus ended a schism that opposed to the patriarchal Church the will to found a feminine Church and that brought a gynecratic constitution to millenarianist hopes. It would not be until the Sixteenth Century that the idea of salvation through women would appear (in the writings of Guillaume Postel).

Dolcino Of Novara

In Dolcino of Novara was incarnated the millenarianist aspirations of the urban areas and the old collectivist dreams of the peasant commune, according to a covergence that, up to the Twentieth Century, would govern the archaic and modern meanings of economic, political and social revolution. Remarkable for his intelligence, courage and sincerity, Dolcino offered to seven centuries of history one of the first and noblest revolutionary figures to attempt to instaurate a new society.

Originally from the region of Novara, Dolcino was the son of a certain Giulio, a priest in Trentano in the valley of Ossola or a hermit from Prato near Novara. Another priest, Agosto, attached to the church of Saint-Anges in Verceil, took charge of his education and trusted him with a pedagogue named Ziona. His brilliant spirit attracted animosity. A calumnious imputation accused him of stealing from his protector, driving him from Verceil. Perhaps he then joined a wandering group of apostolics, Fraticelles or Beghards, adepts of Segarelli. His prestige and eloquence rallied to him a large number of partisans. Carried to the head of the Segarellist movement, he drafted a new version of Joachimite doctrine.

The past was divided into three periods. The first covered the centuries of the Old Testament; the second extended from the coming of the Christ to Pope Sylvestre and situated itself under the sign of penitence; the third ran from Sylvestre to Segarelli, marked by the decadence of the Church that no reform succeeded in saving: not that of Benoit, nor the attempts of Dominique and Francis of Assisi. The fourth period, inaugurated in 1260, would procede towards the annihilation of the corrupt Church, the end of monks and priests, and the triumph of the poor and humble, the only carriers of the Holy Spirit and a new fraternal and egalitarian society.

Like all the prophets, Dolcino made the error of fixing a precise date — [in his case, it was] in three years, that is, in 1303 — for the universal upheaval from whence would burst forth the light of the terrestrial kingdom. Politically, Dolcino bet upon Frederic II, enemy of the papacy, on whom it fell to accomplish the designs of divine justice.

According to the Apocalypse attributed to John and Bogomilist tradition, as well, Dolcino identified the angels of the seven Churches: Sylvestre for Pergame, Benoit for Ephesus, Dominique for Laodicea, Francis for Sardes, Segarelli for Thyatire and Dolcino himself for Philadelphia. (At the same time, Guion of Cressonaert, friend of Marguerite Porete, also called himself the angel of Philadelphia.)

The course of events contradicted Dolcino’s short-term prophecies. Boniface VIII died in 1303, the victim of the brutalities to which he subjected Nogaret and Colonna, mandated by Philippe the Beautiful, King of France. Frederic did not manifest himself and the new pope, Benoit XI, was chased from Rome by the Colonna faction, took refuge in Perugia and did not temper the zeal of the Inquisitors against the Dolcinists.

A second epistle from Dolcino pushed back the date of the end of the Church of Rome by two or three years. In 1304, Benoit XI perished unexpectedly, no doubt with the aid of a posion; Frederic still hadn’t shown up. Clement V, enemy of the Beghards of Free-Spirit, proclaimed his resolution to finish off the Dolcinist movement.

At the head of some 4,000 men, Dolcino — accompanied by his friend, the rich and beautiful Marguerite of Trente — commanded a staff of experienced men, such as Alberto of Cimega, Longino Cattaneo of Bergamo, Federigo of Novara, and Valderigo of Brescia. Dolcino then began a guerrilla campaign that baffled his enemies with its great mobility, winning Bolgone, Modena and Northern Italy, especially the regions around Bergamo, Brescia, Milanm and Como. Arrested three times by the Inquisition, he escaped [each time]. He ended up establishing himslf in the region neighboring Novara and Verceil, where the peasant populations regrouped themselves under his leadership into a veritable peasant revolt.

Milano Sola, a rich [property] owner from Borgo di Sesia, offered to house Dolcino, but the pressure brought by the armies levied by Saint-Siege incited him to search in the mountains of Valsesia for a better refuge. In 1305, Mount Balmara and then the Parete Calvo, snowy and difficult-to-reach summits in the Alps, were erected as fortified camps for a population of 1,400 people, organized as a commune.

Around the couple formed by Dolcino and Marguerita, the partisans were called to lay down the bases for a new world in which the goods for survival were collectivized, property was abolished and marriage — which reduced women to objects of appropriation — was suppressed in the name of the “union according to the heart.” Dolcino recommended the practice of nudity among couples, refining the gestures of love until irresistible desire accomplished the will of nature in an innocence that revoked all guilt.

Clement V assimilated the struggle against the Dolcinists into a crusade enriched by indulgences. Through threats and promises, the people of Valsesia were forced to adhere to a line destined to prevent all aid to those who were besieged. Pushed by deprivation, Dolcino’s partisans’ raids and pillages alienated the sympathies of the villagers who had been initially won over to their cause, but the presence of enemy troops added to both the increasing misery and the ordinary cowardices to be found in such situations.

Nevertheless, the audacity of Dolcino turned in his favor a situation judged to be disastrous. The Podesta of Varallo, who fell into the hands of the Dolcinists after trying to seize the Parete Calvo, was exchanged with his troops for an important shipment of supplies.

On 10 March 1306, after a year-long stay in the cold and scarcity, the Dolcinists abandoned a retreat that was dooming them to a slow annihilation and succeeded in taking up a new position on Mount Rubello, near the village of Treverio in the Verceil region. Badly armed and weakened, their numbers did not exceed a thousand, but they nevertheless managed to break two offensives launched by the Bishop of Verceil. Pushed by famine, Dolcino provoked the enemy into battle, throwing itself into a hasardous confrontation from which he emerged the victor, capturing prisoners whom he exchanged for supplies.

Clement V then issued several Bulls of Crusade, promised tax reductions and advantages for all the [religious] orders, and obtained military reinforcements from Lombardy, Piemont and the Count of Savoie. To the blockade [of Dolcino’s position], Clement V added siege machines and the weapons of experienced mercenaries.

Drafting The Divine Comedy, (*) Dante Alighieri didn’t hide the sympathies that Dolcino’s guerrilla war aroused in him. Dante put Dolcino on guard against the tactic of falling back in a climate that worked against him and deprived him of the advantages that had assured him the mobility of his seasoned and well-nourished troops.

(*) The Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise correspond to the three Joachimite ages. The three degrees of the Scala perfectionis participated in both the alchemical process and the quest for “refined love.”

At the start of winter, a battle that turned to carnage saw the Dolcinists victorious again. The blockade and the rigors of the cold where the real reasons for their heroism. On 23 March 1307, the assault exhausted the last resistance.

Clement V would show his relief by giving out prebends and fiscal compensation to the Crusaders. His resentment prescribed him to inflict the most odious punishments upon Dolcino, Marguerite and their friends. Dragged through the streets of Verceil, Dolcino was — like many arrestees on the way to the pyre — carved up alive with the aid of red-hot pinchers. Witnesses recounted that Dolcino did not let out a cry.

Bernard Gui, one of the most ignoble men ever produced by inquisitorial fanaticism, vowed on his life to pursue the Dolcinists. They were burned in Toulouse in 1322, along with Pierre de Lugo, who was originally from Galice; in Trente in 1332 and 1333; in Compostelle, where the disciples of the Italian Dolcinist Richard were condemned in the manner of Bernard Gui; in Prague in 1305; in Rietti in 1335, despite the municipal authorities, who refused to deliver the Dolcinists to the Inquisition; in England; in Padua in 1350; in Avignon, under John XXII; in Naples in 1372; and in Germany at the beginning of the Fifteenth Century.

Although it was led by the parish priest Guillaume Cale, the great peasant revolt was encumbered by few religious considerations. Moreover, it involved more rioting and tumult than a politically organized plan and a program of precise demands. The peasant movement led by John Ball in England in the second half of the Thirteenth Century enjoyed the sympathy of the Lollards but, beyond Ball’s preaching and his celebrated question “While Adam dug and Eve spun, where was the nobleman?” the religious connotations remained absent. Same with the revolt led by Watt Tyler and the many popular insurrections that split the great cities. Millenarianism, still impregnated with the sacred spirit, did not reappear until the Anabaptists of Munster. It would fascinate thinkers such as Campanella and Weitling, a contemporary of Marx. The great revolutionary movements gave to millenarianism a more ideological than religious form — nevertheless, it would be a mistake to underestimate the role of irrational and Joachimite faith in Nazi millenarianism,[396] that is, in the antithesis of the projects of a classless society or an ecological paradise, both carried to consciousness by the successive waves of the economny.[397]

• Chapter 34 : The Flagellants

Chapter 34: The Flagellants

Stoicism taught that one should endure suffering; Judeo-Christianity taught one to love it. From punishment as proof of divine love to the love of punishment was only a step. Did not the markets in dereliction, death and fear count among the most profitable for the Church?

The appearance in Perugia around 1250 of the movement of the Flagellants inscribed itself in a conjuration of events — the famine of 1250, the plague of 1259, the bloody struggle between the Guelphs and the Ghibellins — that was propitious for the nourishment of the sentiment that the displeasure of losing oneself carried the consolation of involving the whole world in that loss. The Joachimite expiration date once more catalyzed the tumult of passions that a impossible life easily turned towards the outlet of death.

At first encouraged by the Church, hysterical and collective self-punishment — due to its pretensions to exclusivity — rapidly came to threaten the privileges of afflicting and consoling reserved by the clergy. The hell claimed for earth removed all credit from the merchants of the beyond. Surrendering oneself to outrages and tormenting the flesh identified one with the Christ and released one from all duties to the Church.

For a long time, flagellation counted among the self-punitive practices admitted by the Church. It expressed the ordinary scorn for terrestrial life and pleasure inherent in all religions, without (for all that) curtailing an existence denuded of attractions by the quest for a sanctifying punishment, as in the New Prophecy or the Cathars’ endura.

It was in the crowded Italian towns that organized flagellant processions appeared for the first time. The movement was launched in 1260 by a hermit of Perugia and spread southwards to Rome and northwards to the Lombard cities with such rapidity that to contemporaries it appeared a sudden epidemic of remorse. Led usually by priests, masses of men, youths and boys marched day and night, with banners and burning candles, from town to town. And each time they came to a town they would arrange themselves in groups before the church and flog themselves for hours on end. The impact which this public penance made upon the general population was great. Criminals confessed, robbers returned their loot and usurers the interest on their loans, enemies were reconciled and feuds forgotten. Even the two warring parties which were dividing Italy, the Guelphs or supporters of the Pope and the Ghibellines or the supporters of the Emperor, for a moment lost some of their intransigence. Whole towns became involved in the movement — at Reggio the chief magistrate, the bishop and all the guilds took part. As the processions moved along they constantly increased in size, until they were many thousand strong. But if at times people of all classes would join in, it was the poor who persevered; so that in the latter stages of the movement they alone remained.

The circumstances under which this first outbreak of mass self-flaggellation occurred are significant. Even by medieval standards, conditions in Italy at that moment were exceptionally hard. In 1258 there had been famine, in 1259 a serious outbreak of plague. Above all, incessant warfare between Guelph and Ghibelline had reduced the country to a state of the utmost misery and insecurity. The situation of the Guelph towns was particularly desperate, for their cause had just suffered a heavy blow when the Florentines were defeated at Montaperto, with fearful slaughter, by the Tuscan Ghibellines. Frederick II’s son, Manfred, seemed well on the way to establishing his sway over the whole of Italy. It was not for nothing that the flagellant movement started in a Guelph city and flourished among Guelphs. Yet all these afflictions were felt to be but a prelude to a final and overwhelming catastrophe. A chronicler remarked that during the flagellant processions people behaved as though they feared that as a punishment for their sins God was about to destroy them all by earthquake and by fire from on high. It was in a world which seemed poised on the brink of the abyss that these penitents cried out, as they beat themselves and threw themselves upon their faces: ‘Holy Virgin take pity on us! Beg Jesus Christ to spare us!’ and ‘Mercy, mercy! Peace, peace!’ — calling ceaselessly, we are told, until the fields and mountains seemed to echo with their prayers and musical instruments fell silent and love-songs died away.[398]

Through the sentiment of an intolerable existence, from which so often came the obscure wish for universal annihilation, the principle of hope also marked out a path. The phenix reborn from its cinders. Thus the most diverse traits [and people] were mixed together in the flagellant movement: the refusal of the Church and the clergy; the divine freedom to which the most disinherited (thus those who suffered the most) acceded by right; those who — like the Beghards of Cologne, the Beguines of Schweidnitz and the ancient Messalians — overcame the ordeal of sorrow and entered into the promised land of Edenic happiness; but also those oppressed people whose resentment turned this way and that against the [various] powers and, most often due to the ordinary insanity [sanie] of cowardice and sadism, tortured and massacred Jewish men, women and children.

In 1349, the Pope blamed the Flagellants when he declared: “Most of them or their followers, beneath an appearance of piety, set their hands to cruel and impious works, shedding the blood of Jews whom Christian piety accepts and sustains.”[399]

In 1261 and 1262, the movement crossed the Alps, went up the Rhine and entered southern Germany, where it took a turn that was more popular, more anti-clerical and more faithful to Joachimite eschatology. The appeals to purity of soul and faith didn’t fail to revive the anti-Semitic core, which had been cultivated by Emico of Leningen, the Master of Hungary and an anonymous clergyman from Passau (the author of a chronicle of the second half of the Thirteenth Century that attributed all the world’s misfortunes to the Jews and heretics.)

If one participated in a procession of flagellants, the duration of which was 33-and-a-half days (in memory of Christ’s age), it was deemed enough to assure one of impeccability whatever one did and, evidently, freedom from the Church and its sacraments. After 1262, the on-going threat to clerical profitability would justify the prohibition announced against the hysterical hordes who exhibited their bloody wounds and pled Christic sorrow in the countrysides and the towns so to be able to devote themselves without sin to coupling, libations, rape and pillage.

The Black Plague of 1348–1349 revived the propensity to merciful suffering, on which the Church of the Fifteenth Century would base its lucrative market in death. Possessed by a holy fury, groups of 50 to 500 people paraded in successive waves in Germany, the Netherlands and Hungary, exorcizing through an exemplary expiation the just anger with which God overwhelmed his creatures. England, little concerned with a redemption obtained by a cynical, higher bid in misfortune, rejected the flagellant movement.

Repressed in Strasbourg in 1296, Bergamo in 1334, and Cremone in 1346, the Flagellants still managed to invade Bruges, Ghent, Tournai and Dordrecht. The bishops sometimes tolerated them and tried in vain to temper their devastating zeal.

As the excess of horrors accumulating in the 1350s raised suffering to the dignity of supreme good, millenarianism reappeared to be the logical consequence of the project of annihilation conducted by God with a great power of conviction. A mysterious Celestial Letter, which no doubt issued from Segarellism, announced the decision of the Lord — as dictated to a prophet by his friends — to exterminate mankind. Angered by the unworthy conduct of his creatures and, in particular, the rich, God would only spare humanity in exchange for a general repentance and a contrition embellished by the whip. One still had to receive clemency through the intercession of Mary. The egalitarianism of the adepts of voluntary poverty was far from the movement of the nobility, which sometimes ceded to penitential solicitations. Did not Clement VI prescribe the virtues of flagellation? He would retract his support and in 1349 condemned the movement, with the result that the messianism of the artisans and peasants would turn to confrontation with the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the clergy, the hedonism of which — judged to be contrary to the wishes of God — aroused celestial anger.

Anti-clericalism frequently gave way to anti-Semitism. The pogroms permitted the profitable disposal of the marginals condemned by the disgrace imputed to them by the Church to serve as scapegoats when they ceased to fill the coffers of the bishops and princes. The Jewish communities of Frankfurt, Mayence, Cologne and Brussels were exterminated. (In 1146, Pierre de Cluny could already ask, “What good does it do to go to the end of the world (...) to combat the Saracens when we let live among us other infidels who are guiltier with respect to the Christ than the Mahometans?”[400]

In Thuringa, Konrad Schmid led the millenarianist flagellants. He revived the legend of the return of Frederic, the Emperor of the Last Days, to whom Dolcino imprudently gave a political potential.

Renewing the tradition of the itinerant Christs, Schmid demanded an absolute submission to his person. He decreed that self-flagellation was the prelude to the birth of an Edenic age to come in 1369. The Inquisition would hasten to seize Schmid and burn him in Nordhausen in 1368, one year in advance of the due date.

By reinforcing its repression, Rome would try, as it was accustomed, to recuperate the movement to its profit. The Spaniard Vincent Ferrier, the leader of the penitents, who were severely supervised and controlled, would win his sanctification by giving an orthodox coloration to the stripes of the whip. He was only partially successful. Seeing him overwhelmed on all sides, [Jean Charlier de] Gerson adjured in 1417 by renouncing his stinging apostolate.

From then on, the Inquisition took the initiative. The pyres (principally in Germany) reduced to cinders some 90 flagellants in 1414, 300 in 1416, a dozen in Nordhausen in 1446 and Sonderhausen in 1454. The last victims would succumb around 1480.

the Flagellants’ doctrine hardly bothered with theological subtlties. Konrad Schmid advocated a second baptism, a baptism of blood, which conferred [personal] salvation and doomed the Church, the clergy and the sacraments to uselessness. The refusal to pay tithes and the denunciation of the trade in indulgences belonged to all the popular movements that the Church did not cease to arouse against it and its clerical bureaucracy. The rejection of the cult of the saints and purgatory would form [Martin] Luther’s heritage, as would anti-Semitism, all things considered.

Dominico Savi, also called Mecco Sacconi, burned in 1344 in Scoli, attested to the penetration of Free-Spirit ideas even in the destructive fury of the Flagellants. Indeed, he taught the following theses, here re-transcribed by the spirit of the inquisitors who sentenced him to death.

Their impudence went as far as saying that pleasure was not a sin; men and women praying together in the obscurity of the night do not commit sin, whatever else they might be doing at the time; it is permitted for women to flagellate themselves for their sins, nude and publicly; lay people also have the faculty of absolving all of their sins.[401]

• Chapter 35 : 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 poverty and the refusal of all ecclesiastical ownership — theses that were more and more embarrassing for the Church, which was engaged in the whirlpool of business affairs and already provided with the modern financial power that had hardly begun the decline of its political and spiritual authority in the Twentieth Century. Three men took the lead in the fight against pontifical politics: Angelo Clareno (Peter of Fossombrone), Pierre-Jean Olieu or Olivi, and Ubertino of Casale. Angelo Clareno gave an historical account of the conflict in his History of the Tribulations.

According to him, Crescentius — general of the order from 1244 to 1248 and successor of Elie of Cortone — showed “the same avidity for riches and science, the same aversion for the poor convents scattered in solitude, which he changed into sumptuous monasteries; around Crescentius, the brothers chased after testaments summoning their debtors to justice, devoted themselves to schools of dialectics, neglected prayer and Scripture in favor of the useless curiosities of Aristotle.”[402] Brother Bonadies, jurisconsulate and adjoint of the general, “drank fraud and lied like water.” He observed with a malevolent eye the growing sect of Spirituals “who do not walk, he thinks, according to the truth of the Gospel, scorning the rules of the order, believing themselves better than the others, living in their manner, relating everything to the Spirit and even wearing cloaks that are too short.”[403]

Innocent IV, then at war with Frederic II, would give Crescentius permission to pursue the dissidents and destroy to the roots “their occasions for schism and scandal in the order.” The ascension of John of Parme to the head of the order restored power to the Spirituals for a time, but their sympathies for Joachimite theories and the reforms of Segarelli offered their enemies the occasion to amalgamate the austere Spirituals and the “libertarian” party of the Fraticelles.

After exile in Armenia between 1290 and 1293, an autonomous group led by Liberat (Peter of Macerata) and Angelo Clareno obtained the protection of Pope Celestine V and, in 1294, they formed the Pauperes heremitae domini Caelestini. In vain, because Celestine’s successor, Boniface VIII, had the greatest interest in the temporal preoccupations of the Church. He condemned the Spirituals, threw into prison the poet Jaropone da Todi, who — converted to voluntary poverty after the accidental death of his wife (which did not prevent him from comparing women to serpents and Satan) — had joined Angelo Clareno’s friends.

Libertat and his adepts took refuge in Archaie, then Thessalia. Upon the death of Libertat, Angelo Clareno took the lead of the Spirituals and returned to Italy. One of his partisans, the physician and alchemist Arnaud of Villeneuve, convinced Clement V to reconcile the two rival tendencies.

Ubertino of Casale, leader of the Spirituals in Tuscanny, went to Avignon to confront the leaders of the Conventual faction, Bonagrazia of Bergamo and Raymond of Fronsac. It is not useless to recall that Ubertino estimated it good not to incur any reproach for having guilty sympathies for the Fraticelles, because as an Inquisitor he had raged against the Franciscan partisans of the Free-Spirit in the Spolete region. Arnaud himself did not disdain from anathematizing a doctrine so contrary to religion. The conciliation ran aground because the Conventuals did not know at what point the progress of the economy comforted the power of the Roman Church and its then-uncertain control over nations and principalities.

The ascension of John of Cahors, the redoutable businessman of the pontificat, under the name John XXII, gave the signal for the repression to begin. The same reprobation fell upon the Spirituals, Fraticelles, Dolcinists, Beghards and partisans of the Free-Spirit, who Clement V condemned at the Council of Vienna in 1311.

The Pope ordered that the sovereigns among whom the Spirituals had sought refuge expell them as heretics. The bull Sancta romana attributed the official denomination “Fraticelles” to them for the first time.

Arrested in Avignon and then freed, Angelo Clareno precipitously left for Italy, where in 1318 he rallied partisans to the thesis that the Christ and his disciples possessed nothing. At the Chapter of Perugia in 1322, he obtained important support in the person of Michel of Cesene, general minister of the Franciscan order, who held the absolute destitution of Jesus and the apostles to be “holy and Catholic” dogma. (To combat the thesis of the Spirituals using iconographic propaganda, the Church would recommend that painters represent Jesus and the apostles equipped with a purse.)

This directly challenged the interests of the Church, the tributary of capitalist development that slowly freed itself from the agrarian mode of production. Soon one saw the Joachimite legend return in force, rewritten and adapted for the people of the time. John XXII, leader of the “carnal Church,” was stigmatized as the “mystical Antichrist.”

The Antichrist, scorning the reformers and their preoccupation with the sordid aspects of life [miserabilisme], retorted with a very astute maneuver.

While Francis of Assisi prescribed that Saint-Siege retain all of the order’s furniture, the Pope decided to transfer it to the Franciscans, entrusting them with an arrangement that would also transform them willy-nilly into [property] owners. At the same time, his Bull dated 12 November 1323, Cum inter nonnullos, condemned as heretical the theses of Michel of Cesene, who also took refuge with his friends under the auspices of Emperor Louis of Bavaria.

Angelo Clareno went into exile in Basilicate, where he continued to lead his party until his death in 1337.

The Spirituals would remain active in the region of Naples, in Sicily (to which the Tuscan group of Henri of Ceva withdrew) and in Tabriz, Armenia.

It would be among the adepts of Monte Maiella that the Roman tribune Cola di Rienzo would be welcomed after his first failure.

In the eyes of the Church, there no longer existed a single Franciscanism, that of the “Observants.” The dissidents fell under the inquisitorial label “Fraticelles of Opinion,” opinion here designating the theses of voluntary poverty.

Bernard Delicieux

On 7 May 1318, the first victims of Franciscan orthodoxy perished on the pyres of Marseille. That same year, the Inquisition condemned to perpetual prison one of the rare, if not the only public and openly declared adversary of the Catholic and Roman police.

Born in Montpellier in 1260 and entered into the Franciscan order in 1284, Bernard Delicieux soon made himself the spokesman of the populations of Toulouse, Carcassonne and Razes, indignant about the machinations of the Inquisition and the barbarity of the Dominicans. In Carcassonne he led a riot that seized the citadel and freed the heretics held in the official “wall” or “prison.”

It was part of his intentions to appeal to the justice of the King of France, more generous in matters of faith but, implicated in a conspiracy (which was real or mere intrigue designed to bring him down), he would attract the disgrace of Philippe the Beautiful. The King had hanged the consuls of Carcassonne, Limoux and Razes; his despotic nature did not support the politics of communal autonomy. Reprieved in 1307, Bernard fell in 1313 into the net patiently woven by inquisitorial vindictiveness. He was accused of having attempted to poison the Pope with the complicity of Arnaud of Villeneuve. The crudeness of the accusation aroused reservations; he would only escape the pyre by dying in 1320, after two years of incarceration in the jail of God’s executioners, whose infamy he had denounced. It would only be in the Sixteenth Century, with Sebastian Castellion, that a second voice in the world concert would demand the abrogation of the death penalty for crimes of belief.

Prous Boneta

In 1325, the Inquisition seized Prous Boneta, venerated by the Spirituals for her courage and humanity. Imprisoned in 1315 in Montpellier, she resolved — as soon as she was freed — to give her help to the persecuted Spirituals with her sister Alissette.

In 1320, Prous was seized by visions, similar to those of Hadewijch, Mechtilde of Madgebourg and Teresa of Avila. Later, she had an ecstatic encounter with the Christ. Maundy Thursday, he breathed his pneuma into her and promised her she would give birth to the Holy Spirit that would inaugurate the Third Age. According to her own version of Joachimism, Elie was Francis of Assisi and Henoch was Olivi.

The power given to the Christ by God ended from the moment that Olivi was invested with the Holy Spirit: the papacy ceased to exist, the sacraments and confession fell into desuetude. Thenceforth, contrition effaced sin, without need of either penitences or priests.

Rising up against the massacre of the Spirituals and the lepers, unjustly accused of posioning water sources in 1321 and 1322, whom she compared to the Innocents (the alleged victims of Herod), Prous Boneta offered all the traits of a perfect victim to the eyes of the Inquisitor of Carcassonne, Henri of Chamay. She did not repudiate any of her convictions in front of the tribunal and was delivered to the flames in 1325.[404]

In Avignon, the celebrated troubadour Raimon of Cornet barely escaped the pyre in 1326. The same fate was narrowly escaped by Jean de la Rochetaillade (Juan de Pera Tallada, better known to alchemists as Rupescisse). Professing Joachimite opinions, this friend of Arnaud of Villeneuve and the Spirituals compared the Church to a bird born without feathers, which strips the plumage from all other birds so as to dress itself in pride and tyranny.

While the trials of the Spirituals multiplied in number, Free-Spirit and libertarian comportments were more often incriminated. Most often this meant the ordinary calumnies by which popes, ecclesiastical dignitaries and inquisitors imputed their own debauchery and erotic fantasms to the poor ascetics. The Spirituals had always fought the Fraticelles and nothing permits one to suspect the martyrs of Franciscan rigor — such as Francesco of Pistoia, burned in Venice in 1337, John of Castillon and Francis of Arquata, executed in Avignon in 1354, and Michel Perti, reduced to cinders in Florence in 1389 — of taking libidinous liberties.

In 1341, John XXII definitively confirmed the act of dissolution of the dissident group, doomed to extermination. Due to one of the aftershocks that often bring people penetrated by infamy to their downfall, this Pope, who was sensitive to the odor of burning fagots — he had the Bishop of Cahors (his home town) skinned alive and burned — , suddenly reiterated the doctrine of Pelage on the innocence of newborns and the uselessness of baptizing them. A council notified him of the silence concerning a matter so profitable for the Church’s interests, which he had always defended vehemently. Scared to hear from his mouth such manifestly heretical remarks, the conciliatory fathers deposed him and discretely put him to death.

Bentivenga Da Gubio

He became one of the members of the Franciscan Observance — an order invested at the beginning of the inquisitorial missions, the Franciscans being reputed to act with less ferocity than the Dominicans — so to impose a final solution to what John XXII called the “pestilential plague of Fraticellianism.”

Unlike the Spirituals accustomed to asceticism, the Fraticelles were most often confused with the Beghards and the apostolics of Free-Spirit. Such was the case with Bentivenga da Gubio.

In Parme, Bentivenga adhered to the apostolic group of Gerard Segarelli until the episcopal prohibition of 1281, which provoked the dispersion of the adepts. He then joined the Minorites (minor brothers or Franciscans) and in Ombria rallied the partisans of Free-Spirit, who were numerous in the region. Before his arrival, there was in Spolete, around a certain Ottonello, a Congregatio Libertatis that was fought by Jacopo da Bevagna, whom Claire of Montfaucon would much later suspect of [being] Free-Spirit. His influence was such that the Flagellants passing through the valley abandoned their procession to discover the effects of pleasure freed from suffering.

Conceit would incite Bentivenga to expound his theories to Claire of Montfaucon, then sanctified. She delivered him to the Inquisition with six other Minorites. Ubertino of Casale, part of the Spiritual current, had already taken him to task in his Arbor vitae crucifixae Jesu. He reproached him for ideas “inspired by the Devil to corrupt the spirit of the simple people.” He summarized those ideas thus:

1. Apathy: an impious deception has appeared, inspired by the Enemy, which corrupts the spirits of the simple people, according to which they must — under the pretext of serenity in the will of God — remain as insensitive to the Passion of the Christ as the suffering of anyone else, and rejoice only in the pleasure of God, without caring if one offends God or anyone else. And they say, ‘God guides all towards the best of the choices.’

2. Impeccability: they say that men who have the grace of God and charity can not sin. They affirm that those who sin in some fashion have never had charity nor the grace of God.

3. From the quite true principle of the death of the Son — we can do nothing good without grace — they infer that, whatever we do, it is through grace. For this reason, they say that eating and making love and other, similar things are not due to faults in us, because grace — they are assured — incites these things.[405]

In the summer of 1307, Bentivenga was condemned to life in prison in Florence.

Paolo Zoppo

In Rieti, the Inquisitor Simone da Spoleto began in 1334 a procedure against a group of Fraticelles united around Paolo Zoppo. Robert of Arbrissel called the ordeal that consisted in sleeping nude between two nude women and triumphing over the desire to make love the “white martyr”; Zoppo himself practiced with a widow and her servant a style of caresses in which delays imposed upon the “amor extaticus” were related to the tantric method of illumination obtained by sexual tension. The same delayed pleasure was practiced by the Homines Intelligentiae [Men of Intelligence] in Brussels and the Alumbrados or “Illuminati” of Spain. Paolo Zoppo and his companions paid with life in prison for wanting to substitute for the ordinary, cunning and brutal debauchery of the convents the refinement of amorous pleasure and the celebration of women, creators of all joy.[406]

At the time of the trial in Rieti, it appeared that the Fraticelles envisioned electing a Pope who would be opposed to the “Antichrist John XXII.” Angelo Clareno himself recommended giving the pontificat to Philippe of Majorca, which was attested to by Francis Vanni of Assisi.

In 1419, the Inquisitor Manfred of Verceil reported that the Fraticelles of Opinion — particularly numerous in Florence, Tuscanny and the region around Rome — refused to submit to Martin V because they had their own Pope. When Nicolas V tasked the Inquisition with proceeding against the Fraticelles who had taken refuge in Athens in 1451, he specially recommended the capture of the one who passed for Pope.

The Extermination Trial Of The Fraticelles

Tasked by Martin V in 1418 and 1426 and by Eugene IV in 1432 with pitilessly pursuing the Fraticelles, Jacques de la Marche and John of Capistrano — both honored with the title of saint for their good inquisitorial services — burned 36 rebel residences and multiplied bookburnings. The hatred that they aroused in the people was such that they had to ceaselessly protect themselves against assassination attempts.

In 1449, new pyres were lit in Florence. In 1452, the same year in which Jerome Savonarola was born, Jacques de la Marche published his Dialogue against the Fraticelles, in which he retraced the extermination-trial of Maiolati.

There had been a community of Fraticelles of Free-Spirit ever since 1410 or 1420. A bell at the church carried the inscription, dated 1429: “Brother Gabriel, Bishop of the Church of Philadelphia, (*) parish priest and general minister of the minor brothers.”

(*) A century earlier, a friend of Marguerite [Porete] called himself the angel of Philadelphia.

The minutes of the trial were inspired by the accusations Epiphanius once made against the Barbelites (the Inquisitors used it without scruple against the Vaudois and the Cathars): men and women meeting at night, chanting hymns, “extinguishing the candles and rushing to each other according to chance. The children issued from such commerce were brought before the assembly; one passed them hand-to-hand in a round until they died. The one in whose hands they died was elected the great pontiff. They burned one of the babies and threw the cinders in a vessel into which they poured wine; they made those initiated into their brotherhood drink from it. They fought against the ownership of goods and believed that the faithful did not need to engage any magistrates and that the souls of the fortunate would only see God after the resurrection.”[407] Thus did Pierre Bayle recount the trial in his Dictionary. He did not believe in a practice often used to justify the cruelest repressions and that the Inquisitors called the “barilotto” [keg or barrel]. The propaganda cunningly conducted so as to bring the discredit of pious souls upon the unfortunate Fraticelles would exercise its ravages upon public opinion with a durable effect, since popular language would for a long time afterwards conserve the insulting expression “Tu sei nato dal barilotto” (“You were born from a barilotto”).

For all that, Bayle estimated that a strong probability existed that this Fraticelle community led a joyous life for 30 years, managing a terrestrial existence as luxurious and luxuriant as possible, with the approval of the heavens, and in the absence of the guilt that gnawed at the tormented hedonism of the powerful. The rage of the two Holy Inquisitions was only exacerbated. A great expiatory blaze illuminated the sinister depths of their consciences.[408]

In 1466, a group of Fraticelles arrested and tortured in Assisi confirmed — upon the insistence of the inquisitors — the existence of the barilotto in Poli near Tivoli, in the Marches and in Maiolati. The sect, known under the name “The Truth,” which had anarchronistically Freemasonic connotations, propagated lampoons in which the ideas of the Free-Spirit were expounded.[409]

As among the Beghards of Cologne, the solicitation to love was expressed by the formula “Fac mihi caritatem” (“Give me charity”), caritas here re-finding its original meaning of “love of the next person,” carus, “beloved.”

The Fraticelles disappeared from the Inquisition’s registers, but a popular fable has it that, entrenched in the deep valleys and forests, they continued fantastic convents that haunted the tormented imaginations of the readers of de Sade, Lewis, Ann Radcliff, Walpole and the gothic novel.

• Chapter 36 : The Eastern Reformers: The Hussites and Taborites

Chapter 36: The Eastern Reformers: the Hussites and Taborites

Rome discovered in Bohemia a source of considerable riches. Half the land belonged to the clergy, which — exploiting it in the name of the Christ — aroused a popular hatred more lively than anywhere else, if that was possible.

In 1360, the ascetic reformer Jan Milic denounced in Prague the corruption of the Church, the veritable incarnation of the Antichrist, and vainly exhorted the priests to the voluntary poverty characterized as evangelical.

Upon the death of Milic, his disciple, Matthew of Janov, pursued his reforms. He opposed to the “body of the Antichrist,” served in the form of the Host during the communion of the corrupted Church, the eucharist of the Ekklesia, the true Church of the faithful. The commensality of the bread and the wine, (*) which Janov opposed to the abstract and mechanical ritual of the clerical communion, explained the exacerbation of the eucharistic quarrels in Bohemia during the Hussite, Taborite and Adamitic wars.

(*) The communion under the two kinds [especes] was started as a symbol hostile to Catholicism, in which one communed under a single kind.

Around 1380, the reformist doctrines of Wycliffe — in favor of which worked the clever hostility of England with respect to Roman power — began to spread.

John Huss, an admirer of Wycliffe, suddenly brought to his preaching a universal turn towards critiques that were until then cantonized within the limits of nationalist claims. The prestige attached to his function as Rector of the University of Prague conferred upon his voice an import that made it echo everywhere in Europe. He proved it when John XXII summoned to Prague the emissaries charged with preaching a crusade against his personal enemy, the King of Naples, and collected the funds necessary for the enterprise through a promotional sale of indulgences. In the name of the sacred Scriptures, Huss rose up against the cynicism of the Pope and condemned an attitude unworthy of Christian teachings.

Huss was neither a heretic nor a revolutionary. He simply pushed honesty to the point of imprudence when he denounced the economic and financial politics of the Church. His presumption incited him to bet upon King Wenceslas, who was favorable to him, but whose more powerful interests would divert him from his fate.

Excommunicated and summoned to the Council of Constance in 1414, Huss would respond accompanied by his disciple, Jerome of Prague, and thanks to safe-conduct guaranteed by Emperor Sigismond. He defended his thesis in front of the Council: the Christ was the leader of the Church, not the Pope. The council decided in his favor on one point: it deposed Pope John XXII (*) for simony, murder, sodomy and fornication, complaints that, all things considered, could have been made against the majority of the pontifical sovereigns.[410]

(*) In the Twentieth Century, so as to efface the memory of a Pope who did not count among the worst, another was given the title John XXIII.

On the other hand, the ecclesiastical dignitaries did not let themselves be stripped of their lucrative apostolic functions. Led by the French Cardinal, Pierre d’Ailly, who — a convinced millenarianist — remained attentive to his immediate interests, the councilist fathers excommunicated John and Jerome, and delivered them to the pyre in 1415. Emperor Sigismond, who had counseled Huss to retract his statements, in fact hardly desired that an independent Bohemia be created, the claims for which he perceived underneath the theological arguments. This was a bad calculation, because the executions of Huss and Jerome precipitated the insurrection.

While King Wenceslas broke with the Hussites on the insistence of Pope Martin V and his brother, Emperor Sigismond, the Church of Bohemia passed to secular control and was snatched by Roman domination.

In July 1418, when Wenceslas excluded from the government of Prague the representatives of the working-class [populaire] neighborhood of Ville-Neuve, weavers, workers, tailors, brewers and peasants seized the City Hall and defenestrated the new councilors. Under the pretext of hunting the patrician families hostile to John Huss, the uprising inscribed itself properly in the tradition of communalist class-struggles.

The guilds and artisanal confederations expelled the Catholics, expropriated the monasteries and confiscated ecclesiastical riches to the profit of the Council of Prague. Very quickly, the moat between proletarian radicalism and the notables hastily reconverted to Hussism was dug. A moderate party emerged, which, close to the Catholics, nevertheless distinguished itself by communing through bread and wine, that is to say, under two kinds. Its members adopted the name Utraquists.

In 1419, the radical wing of the Hussite movement organized itself on a resolutely autonomous basis. Located on a hill near the chateau of Bechyne, a group of partisans rebaptized the place in the name that the canonical Gospel attributed to Matthew brought to eminence by proclaiming that that was where Jesus announced his return before being elevated towards heaven: Mount Tabor.

The Taborites accorded to each person the right to interpret the Scriptures. They rejected purgatory, prayers for the dead, and the cults of the saints and the relics. Like the Vaudois, they refused to take oaths and were against the death penalty. Once more there intermixed (in favor of working-class demands) the themes of voluntary poverty, an egalitarian millenarianism and, in an antagonistic manner, the thrust of the Free-Spirit and the weight of extremist fanaticism.

In 1420, the news that the fire of God was going to descend upon the towns and villages started a great exodus towards the mountains, where five Taborite cities would be erected under divine protection, because “they would not deal with the Antichrist.”[411]

The preacher Jan Capek based himself on citations from the Old Testament to massacre the sinners: “Cursed is the man who restrains his sword from spilling the blood of the enemies of the Christ. Each believer must wash his hands in blood.”[412] Certain people, such as Peter Chelcicky, faithful to the principle of pacificism, reacted to the hysteria of such remarks and denounced the ruse of Satan, who was clever to suggest to the furious that they were angels tasked with purifying the world.

In March 1420, the truce between Sigismond and the moderate Hussites gave way to a merciless war in which the personality of the Chief Taborite, Jan Zizka, imposed itself. By crushing the German and Hungarian bands, the swords of which had the benediction of Rome, Zizka haloed himself with a prophetic glory. It fell to him to instaurate the millennium and to prepare, through the kingdom of the saints, the return of the Christ to earth. The social program had hardly changed: “All men should live together like brothers, none should be subjected to another.”[413] “All the lords, all the nobles and all the knights will be executed and exterminated in the forests as outlaws.”[414] As often happened, the first victims of the program of purgation were less exterior enemies than the radical wing of the Taborites, the Pikarti, who were decimated by Zizka in the name of the holiness of morality.

The collectivism of subsistance instaurated in the Taborite communities did not bother with an organization of the production of goods, and so the Taborites were soon reduced to conducting supply raids. The despoilation of the nobility and the clergy would be succeded by the exploitation of the peasants, who found themselves in a worse situation than under the regime of the lords.

In April 1421, Zizka annihilated the libertarian communities formed by the Pikarti and the Adamites. Nevertheless, their protests of egalitarianism did not cease to spread, and fomented peasant revolts in Bourgogne and Germany, where the peasants’ war would become endemic.

In 1430, armed Taborites attacked Leipzig, Bamberg and Nuremburg. Their victories provoked uprisings against the patricians in Mayence, Constance, Weimar and Stettin. Nevertheless, the moderate wing — the Utraquists — seceded and soon passed over to the enemy. In 1434, the Taborites were battered in Lipan by the Ultraquists of Bohemia. This was the signal for a slow debacle that came to an end with the fall of Mount Tabor in 1452. The majority of those rescued from the general massacre would return to pacificism and would found the community of the Moravian Brothers. For all that, the Taborite doctrine did not cease to propagate itself and would continue to keep alive in the towns and countrysides the flame of freedom that found a decrepit world to set on fire.

• Chapter 37 : The Men of Intelligence and the Pikarti of Bohemia

Chapter 37: The Men of Intelligence and the Pikarti of Bohemia

On 12 June 1411, Willem van Hildernissem of the Carmelite order was called before the Inquisitor Henri de Selles, acting on the behalf of the episcopal tribunal of Cambrai. Willem van Hildernissem was accused of playing an important role in a group of Free-Spirit known to Brussels under the name the Men of Intelligence. Formerly a reader of Holy Scriptures at the Carmel of Tirlemont, he found an inspired ally in Gilles of Canter (Gilles the Cantor, Aegidius Cantor), a sexagenarian layman (probably the son of a noble family) who was dead by the time of the trial.

Everything seems to indicate that they shared an interest in the theories of Bloemardine, whose memory remained more vivid than any inquisitor dared to imagine. Ironically, Henri de Selles — attached to the Abbey of Groenendael where Ruysbroeck, the enemy of Bloemardine, died in 1381 — barely escaped a premeditated assassination attempt at a crossing by the partisans of the Humines Intelligentiae. In the absence of an execution, a song ridiculing the Inquisitor circulated in Brussels.

The support that the group received from both the working class and the notables (their meetings were held in a tower owned by an alderman) was not foreign to their leniency of judgment. After three years in prison, Willem was allowed out, perhaps due to a conciliation in which he adjured and rejected the most subversive part of Gilles’ doctrine.

The Joachimite connotation was made straight off by the very name of the sect. The Third Age was that of the natural intelligence of beings and things, a “scholarly ignorance” in which the innocence of the child and the learning of the total man was joined, a union of gnosis and pistis, with pistis not meaning faith in God but faith in oneself. Gilles of Canter thus said that one day the Holy Spirit inspired him and said to him: “You have arrived at the stage of a child of three years.”

In the original, natural state of freedom, there was neither sin, nor guilt, neither spiritual nor temporal authority. The Church, the laws and the sacraments had no meaning; nor did penitence or redemption. The only important thing was the road to perfection on which amorous ecstasy translated the state of perfect humanity (and thus “divinity” in religious language). The adepts of Gilles and Willem thus traveled along — if they desired to — an initiatory road marked by the diverse degrees of amorous pleasure, but each person was free to remain chaste or to give him- or herself up to libertinage.

Well versed in the Holy Scriptures, Willem van Hildernissem was able to justify any behavior with appropriate quotations, because everything was intended by God.

In the “paradise” in which the sectarians reunited without distinction of class or wealth, Gilles of Canter taught a way of making love “that was that of Adam before the Fall.” This was probably a [form of] delayed orgasm, without ejaculation, ending up in tantric illumination and the removal of the fear of pregnancy for the women.

The absence of fear and guilt, allied with an art of coming [jouir] that authorized the most voluptuous quests in all domains, easily induced the feeling in the spirit of the adepts that they belonged to an elite, without common measure to the mass of contemporaries leading an absurd and frightened life under the shepherd’s crook of the lords and the priests.

The prudence employed during the trial, and the derisory rigor of the judgment, suggested the cleverness of the adepts in propagating their doctrines in complete safety, enjoying a great favor in the urban areas and the protection of the notables. Such were the doctrines that the “Pikarti,” who left Picardy to radicalize the Taborite revolution, attempted to implant in Bohemia.[415]

The Pikarti, Or The Adamites Of Bohemia

Who were the Pikarti who around 1418 flocked to Bohemia, where the Taborites had instaurated a kind of peasant collectivism? Contrary to the opinion that sees in the word Pikarti a translation of bagardi, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini gave it the meaning “Picard, originally from Belgian Gaul.”[416] The Free-Spirit doctrine that they propagated suggests a close relationship with the Homines Intelligentiae, whose community in Brussels had been purged by the Inquisition.

In the manner of the Anabaptists tramping towards Munster a century later, the Pikarti converged on Bohemia, where the Hussite insurrection sent out glimmers of freedom and gave glimpses of the opportunity for an existence in accordance with the teachings of Willem van Hildernissem and Gilles of Canter.

The Picardian doctrine especially took hold in the regions that were badly controlled by the Taborites, such as Zatec, Plzen and Prague. It showed through under a watered-down form in the closed field of theological quarrels surrounding Sigmund of Repan and especially Martin Huska, called “Loquis,” who preached a kind of Dolcinism, which evoked the end of time and the reign of the saints. In the fashion of the times, Huska announced “if the Christians must always suffer thus, I would not want to be a servant of God.”

In February 1421, the chronicler Laurent of Brczova denounced the progression of the Free-Spirit among the Taborites: “Because of this heresy, alas! The brothers living in Tabor have split into two factions, one Picard[ian], the other Taborite. The most faithful party, the Taborites, expelled more than 200 men and women who were infected by the Picardian heresy.”[417]

In the Eighteenth Century, Beausobre would attribute to the Pikarti the name Adamites, due to the Edenic innocence that they claimed for themselves. According to Laurent: “Traveling through forests and over hills, several of them fell into such madness that men and women disencumbered themselves of their clothes and went around nude, saying that clothing had been adopted because of the sins committed by the first parents, but they were in a state of innocence. Through a similar madness, they imagined that there was no sin if one of the brothers had commerce with one of the sisters. And, if the woman gave birth, she would say that she had conceived through the Holy Spirit. (Baptism was not practiced because) children of parents living in holiness (that is to say, the members of the community) were conceived without the original, mortal sin (...). They prayed to God whom they possessed inside them by saying: Our Father who is inside us ...”[418]

Aloof from Picardian radicalization, Martin Huska remained loyal to the apostolic tradition and was inspired by more moderate demands so as to instaurate a religious modernism in matters of the eucharist.

The autonomy of the Picardian community would last two months, from December 1420 to January 1421. Its spokesperson, Peter Kanis, seconded by men and women of the people such as Rohan the Blacksmith, Nicolas also known as Moses, Adam, and Mary preached in the taverns and celebrated the free weddings of love that the clergy and the Taborites called fornication or sexual license.

Soon enough, the persecutions of the Pikarti began. Nicolas of Pehlrimov published a treatise against Kanis as a prelude to the attack that, around mid-April, military chief Jan Zizka launched against those expelled from Tabor. Fifty prisoners, including Peter Kanis, were burned at Klokoty.

The survivors then organized their resistance under the leadership of Rohan the Blacksmith. On 20 April, after violent fighting, Zizka crushed the Pikarti and sent 25 prisoners to the pyre. Others were executed in Prague.

On 21 October 1421, the partisans of Kanis who had taken refuge in a forest outside of Bernatice succumbed and were exterminated, except for one person who was spared so that he could report upon the Picardian doctrine. A small number of Adamites occupied the fortress of Ostrov for a while before winning the south by conducting subsistance raids against the villages, which gave them a reputation for brigandage.

The terror by which Zizka’s Taborites exonerated themselves from their own difficulties made an expiatory victim of Martin Huska. Although Huska was no longer in solidarity with the Pikarti and had abjured, Zizka vowed that he would be burned in Prague, along with his friend Procope the Blind. Frightened by the troubles in the capital, where Martin enjoyed great sympathy, the magistrates preferred to send their executioner to Roudnica. Martin and Procope were put to death in a refinement of tortures that the Inquisition used to punish the Taborite heretics, inspired by the same God, it is true.

• Chapter 38 : 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, the omnipresent image of death and a Hell directly inspired by the services of penal justice.

The fear, hatred and scorn of the Constantinian Church never ceased to animate the most diverse classes of society. Indifference and irreligion reigned in the disinherited milieu, where the cynicism of false piety served the beggars and soliciters. Only the aspiration to a pre-Constantinian Christianity — ascetic, altruistic, loyal to voluntary poverty, inclined towards martyrdom, anti-clerical and theocratic — brought a religious coloration to the collectivist nostalgias from the Fourth to the Sixteenth Centuries. Each time that Christianity manifested itself, the Catholic Church persecuted it (with the exception of a brief period in the Sixteenth Century).

Attentive to the temporal prerogatives that, through enrichment, conferred upon it a considerable power, the Catholic Church was more and more distanced from the Ekklesia, the spiritual communities of the faithful, which summoned to their vows Vaudois, adepts of voluntary poverty, Wycliffe’s Lollards, Hussites, Taborites and a crowd of agitators whose project to abolish tithes guaranteed success.

In the Church itself, voices were raised to clamor for new accords between the interests of God and the financial interests of a “multinational” that was insisted upon by the Zealot Simon, metamorphosed into Saint Peter.

“Our fat canons believe themselves freed from God if they sing in a clear voice, in the choir, a hallelujah or a response; then they allow themselves to return to their homes to entertain themselves and have supper with their ham actors and their jugglers.”[419] This diatribe was not written by Savonarola, nor by Luther, but by Antoine of Padua (1195–1231), an orthodox spirit but aware of the split between the faith of the poor and the Church of the rich that, through its carelessness, discouraged the resignation of the disinherited, who were completely prohibited from “living according to the Christ.”

Neither Wycliffe, Huss, Savonarola, Luther nor Calvin pursued aims that were revolutionary, schismatic or hostile to Catholicism. Their designs placed them in the political line of Gregoire IX, taking the side of Ramihrdus against the high clergy.

The development of the economic process gave Luther and Calvin a weapon that was finally capable of breaking the spiritual monopoly that the cynicism of the pontifical bureaucracy had discredited by the scandal of the market in indulgences and the priority given to business. The expansion of commerce, the growing independence of the banks and preindustrial artisanal enterprises instaurated a spiritual state that was favorable to the new reforms. The separation from Rome did not simply signify the end of an odious hierarchy, intermixing faith and financial interests; it implied the ideas that belief properly belonged to the individual in his or her relationship with God and that the management of capital constituted a domain separate from religion, governed by the imperatives of Christian morality. The rigorous obedience to God of a Calvinist man of business accorded with the intransigent search for profit, because — banishing the crazy expenditures of hedonism — it underwrote an ascetic morality in conformity with the Christian institution. As Max Weber has shown, Protestantism discovered in the austerity of accumulation and the reproduction of capital a puritanism that inspired the “free” relationship of the sinner with the tutelary God, keeping watch over the rate of profit. Where Rome looted [pille] and squandered [gaspille], the reformers economized and invested.

The concern with moralizing the morals of the clergy intervened too late to dam up the pious ethics of the reformers. The Council of Trente would run aground in its attempt to restore the authority of Catholicism in the northern regions, the cradle of the industrial revolution and the first bourgeois, parliamentary and democratic regimes.

Two Agitators At The Dawn Of The Reformation: Hans Boehm And Jerome Savonarola

“He was,” Norman Cohn writes, “a shephard and, in his spare time, a popular entertainer, drumming and piping in hostelries and in the market-place — whence the nickname, by which he is still known, of Drummer (or Piper) of Niklashausen.”[420]

In an ordinary irony of history, Hans [Boehm] heard about the Italian Franciscan John of Capistrano, not as a pitiless inquisitor, author of the massacre of the Fraticelles of Maiolati, but as a brother extolling repentance and the rejection of luxury in Germany 30 years previously. As John of Capistrano had incited the bonfire of the vanities in which the people set aside their beautiful clothes, their games of dice and cards, their objects of pure enjoyment, on a day of Lent, the shepherd would burn his drum in front of the parish-church of Niklashausen and preach.

Mary appreared to him and intimated to him the order to propagate the Good Word [parole], with the result that Niklashausen would raise itself to the glory of the terrestrial Jerusalem. There had been in the church a statue of the Virgin, to which were attributed miraculous powers. The priest of the parish would not give his support to a project that erected Niklashausen as the place elected by divine providence instead of Rome.

The fact was that the little shepherd suddenly revealed himself to be endowed with an extraordinary eloquence. From the fascination that he exerted upon the crowds and diverse classes of society, he soon inferred that God had endowed him with thaumaturgic powers. He preached the simplicity of morals, making himself strong enough to save any soul from hell. The pyres of the vanities would be succeded by violent attacks on the corrupt clergy and the powerful.

He would soon incite the refusal to pay taxes and tithes. And that the priests should abandon their outrageous privileges and content themselves with whatever the people agreed to give them.

The Archbishop of Mayence, who had until then been cantonized in a prudent reserve, plotted to put an end to an agitation that had won over a growing number of regions in Germany.

“In the end Boehm emerged as a social revolutionary,” Norman Cohn recounts, “proclaiming the imminence of the egalitarian Millennium based on the Law of Nature.”

In the coming Kingdom the use of wood, water and pasturage, the right to fish and hunt would be freely enjoyed by all, as they had been in olden times. Tributes of all kinds would be abolished for ever. No rent or services would be owed to any lord, no taxes or duties to any prince. Distinctions of rank and status would cease to exist and nobody would have authority over anybody else. All would live together as brothers, everyone enjoying the same liberties and doing the same amount of work as everyone else. ‘Princes, ecclesiastical and secular alike, and counts and knights should only possess as much as common folk, then everyone will have enough. The time will have to come when princes and lords will work for their daily bread.’ And Boehm extended his attack beyond the local lords and princes to the very summit of society: ‘The Emperor is a scoundrel and the Pope is useless. It is the Emperor who gives the princes and counts and knights the right to levy taxes on the common people. Alas, poor devils that you are!’

No doubt Boehm’s teaching appealed in different ways to different sections of the population. The demand for the overthrow of all rulers, great and small, probably appealed particularly to the urban proletariat; we know that the townsfolk did in fact come to Niklashausen, not only from Wurzburg but from all over southern and central Germany. On the other hand in demanding that wood, water, pastorage, fishing and hunting should be free to all men, Boehm was voicing a very general aspiration of the peasants. The German peasants believed that these rights had in fact been theirs in olden time, until usurped by the nobility; this was one of the wrongs which they were always expecting the future ‘Emperor Frederick’ to undo. But above all it was the prestige of the preacher himself, as a miraculous being sent by God, which drew the tens of thousands into the Tauber valley. The common people, peasants and artisans alike, saw in him a supernatural protector and leader, such as the ‘Emperor Frederick’ was to have been: a savior who could bestow on them individually the fullness of Divine Grace and who would lead them individually into an earthly Paradise.

News of the wonderful happenings at Niklashausen passed rapidly from village to village in the neighborhood and was carried further afield, too, by messengers who went out in all directions. Soon vast hordes of common folk of all ages and both sexes, and including whole families, were streaming towards Niklashausen. Not only the surrounding country but all parts of southern and central Germany were in commotion, from the Alps to the Rhineland and to Thuringia. Artisans deserted their workshops and peasants their fields, shepherds and shepherdesses abandoned their flocks and hastened — often still in the same clothes and carrying their picks and hammers and scythes — to hear and adore him who was now known as ‘the Holy Youth.’ These people greeted one another only as ‘Brother’ or ‘Sister’ and these greetings acquired the significance of a rallying-cry. Among the multitudes of simple, wildly excited folk there circulated fantastic rumors. What the plebs pauperum had believed of Jerusalem these believed of Niklashausen. There Paradise had literally descended upon the earth; and infinite riches were lying ready to be gathered by the faithful, who would share them out among themselves in brotherly love. Meanwhile the hordes — like the Pastoureaux and the Flagellants before them — advanced in long columns, bearing banners and singing songs of their own composition.[421]

Hans Boehm’s preaching began around 1474. Towards the end of March 1476, the pilgrimages led to retaliatory measures on the part of the large towns. The municipal council of Nuremburg prohibited the inhabitants from going to Niklashausen. Wurzburg closed its doors and armed its militias. On 12 July, the Prince-Bishop sent an infantry section of horesmen to the holy city. Arrested, Hans was incarcerated in Wurzburg, while a peasant, invested in his turn with a prophetic role, incited the people to march upon the episcopal city, where the walls would fall like those of Jericho. Forty millenarian liberators were killed. Judged hastily, Hans Boehm would have to mount the pyre where he died, one says, singing hymns. The offerings deposited by the pilgrims in the church of Niklashausen were confiscated. The Archbishop of Mayence, the Bishop of Wurzburg and the Count upon whom the New Jerusalem depended did not disdain from sharing them equitably among themselves. The cinders of the prophet, dispersed so that no cult could render homage to him, were not allowed to put into the air of the time the germs of a millenarianist and reforming renewal that would break the reins of all-powerful Rome.

Jerome Savonarola

For Savonarola, Joachimite prophetism, voluntary poverty, the asceticism of the Spirituals and the political calculations of the communalist tribunes composed a conjunction of diverse ambitions that would elevate him to power and plot his downfall.

Born in Ferrara in 1452, he distinguished himself in the order of the Dominicans by his eloquence and his culture. The Prior of the Monastery of Saint-Marc in Florence, he soon exercised on the brilliant court of Larent de Medici a fascination that exacerbated the attraction of purity, so frequent in the wavering of guilty pleasures.

Jean Pic de la Mirandole, whose philosophical theses were condemned by the Church, discerned an ally in the monk-prophet who, through his diatribes against the luxuria and aviditas of the Pope and the clergy, gave his voice to the popular anger, accumulated over the centuries, about the despotism of Rome.

Savonarola’s millenarianism was seductive in the times in which dreams of fortune and ordinary poverty suggested an imminent apocalypse. He shared with Dolcino the mistake of giving a too precise turn to his prophecies. He announced terrible misfortunes for Italy. One didn’t fail to believe him, because misfortunes occurred every day. Even death unburdened itself in the lines of the poems in which Laurent celebrated youth and beauty.

Against the vises and tyranny of the papacy, Charles VIII, the King of France, brandished the “scourge of God, the vengeful sword,” the new Charlemagne, the new Frederick, the new king of a Third Age. Marcil Ficin, well versed in Kabbalah, friend of literature and pleasure, scented around the monk [Savonarola] the acrid odor of a rigor as pernicious as the Sadian hedonism of the prelates and aristocrats.

After the death of Laurent de Medici, who, enjoying a dissipated life, had invested Fra Girolamo with a secret hope of redemption, Pierre de Medici would show greater reserve, nay, frank hostility to the one who was ambitious enough to rule the lives of the Florentines.

Savonarola’s appeals to voluntary poverty, which revived memories of the Fraticelles and the Spirituals, rallied to him the suffrage of the disinherited classes. He would soon thereafter tip over into the puritanical mysticism of all the extremisms.

The flight of Pierre, the proclamation of the Florentine Republic in 1494 and the triumphal entry of King Charles VIII into the city all bestowed upon Savonarola the power of a spiritual and temporal leader.

Florence, promoted as the New Jerusalem, finally marked the beginning of the Third Age, the prelude to the return of the Christ to earth and the massive conversion of the Turks and the Jews.

The hysteria inherent in the compulsion for virtue would kindle in the town, renamed for the refinement of its arts, purifying flames that one called “pyres of the vanities.” One threw on them pell-mell jewels, ornaments, books, paintings, and luxurious frocks.

Sandro Botticelli, the most sensual of the painters, would succumb to this destructive madness, to this rage in which life took revenge on the scorn that overwhelmed it by annihilating with a sinister joy all that made life pleasant. Into this rage was mixed the legitimate resentment of the exploited, on whose back lived luxury, from which the exploited were excluded. Savonarola’s sermons, which both flattered the demands that he could not satisfy and the hatred to which he gave evangelical virtue (thereby alienating him little by little from the aristocracy and the intellectuals), contained promises of a new order that, politically, would remain a dead letter.

The party of Rome regrouped its partisans. Pope Alexander VI, who was intelligent, brutal and corrupt, excommunicated the monk and prohibited him from preaching. Savonarola would ignore him. Arrested in his convent at Saint-Marc, then tortured, charged with heresy, which his doctrine basically did not merit, he was — despite the effervescence of his partisans, the Piagnomi, from Piagnonia, which was the name of the bell at the convent of Saint-Marc — hanged and burned with two of his disciples, Domenico of Pescia and Sylvestri Maruff, on 23 May 1498.

The program for the renewal of the Church, which Savonarola had folded within the risky politics of the city, would be expounded by Luther as the protest of all Christianity against the ignominy of Catholicism, the religion soiled by the unworthiness of its priests. Savonarola had the prudence to remain in Germany, where the old tradition of the emperors and princes hostile to Rome would make the old principle cuius regio, eius religio[422] work in favor of Lutherism.

From Heresy To The Religion Of The State: Luther And Calvin

The Reformation of the Church trimphed with Luther and Calvin, but it triumphed outside of the Church and against it. What victories could those who dreamed of a renewal of faith and the freedom of belief hope to see from the new state religion?

Born in 1483, a student, then the holder of a Master’s Degree from the University of Erfurt in 1505, [Martin] Luther was ordained a priest in 1507. He attained the position of professor and preacher at the University of Wittenberg due to the sympathies that he aroused in the Prince-Elector of Saxony.

A visit to Rome in 1511 revealed to him the state of cupidity and license that reigned among the prelates and the pontifical court. Assuredly, he was not the only one, nor the first one to be jealous of the feasts and luxury of the Church, to be indignant with a vehemence.

The promotional sale of indulgences, begun by Pope Leon X to finance the works of the Church of Saint-Peter, offered Luther an occasion to excite the discontent of the northern towns and the regions heated by the agitation of Boehm and the Taborites, but also the German princes, who were traditionally hostile to Rome and soon thereafter (around 1520) put off by the authoritarianism of the Catholic Emperor Charles V.

To collect funds from the sale of indulgences, the archbishop of Mayence, having deputized the Dominican Tetzel, a talented preacher who would absolve all sins if the price was paid, said “one could fornicate with the Virgin Mary herself.”

From his arrival in Wittenberg, a violent polemic opposed Tetzel to Luther, who had the double advantage of being there with him and being able to express with the crudeness of popular language opinions that were widely held. With the glibness of a traveling businessman, Tetzel proposed to settle the debate with an ordeal of fire and water: “I mock your brayings,” Luther would retort. “In place of water, I advise the juice of the grape arbor and, in place of fire, the aroma of a roasted goose.” The rough treatment that the people gave to Tetzel’s emulators alarmed those in Rome responsible for the marketing[423] operation founded on the redemption of sin, while the monk of Wittenberg — emboldened by his popularity — summarized in 95 articles his theses against the Roman clique. On 31 October 1517, he attached them to the walls of the Church of All Saints. In vain did Cardinal Cajetan, the apostolic nuncio and the ecclesiastical hierarchy try to get him to sign a retraction.

In 1520, the Papal Bull Exsurge condemned 41 of Luther’s propositions and ordered that the lampoons be burned. Accompanied by his disciples, Luther brought himself to the door of Wittenberg, where a pyre had been lighted, and with great solemnity both the Papal Bull as well as the writings of Luther’s adversaries were thrown into it.

From Germany to England, in France and the Netherlands, the pyre of Wittenberg — which had symbolically consumed the power of Rome — would set public opinion aflame. For the princes and kings, Catholicism was merely an instrument of political domination. None of them had any scruples about dumping it if it encumbered more than it served. In 1527, the very loyal servant of faith named Emperor Charles V subjected Rome to the most pitiless sacking and massacres that it had known since the days of the Visigoths. Francois I, King of France, no less a good Catholic, burned the Protestants but helped the German reformers in their struggle against Charles V; he hated the Emperor so much that he did not hesitate to ally himself with Islam.

While the economy had condemned Dolcino, the Spirituals and Savonarola, it saved Luther and his movement; the economy carried them to power by virtue of the force that, underneath the outward appearance of religion and ideology, began to appear in broad daylight as the veritable mode of government of mankind: the economy.

Luther and Calvin ratified the obscure decrees on free enterprise, even in the crushing of peasant communalism and the condemnation of the Free-Spirit so resolutely irreconciable with the economic control exercised over the lives of men and women.

In 1521, Charles V summoned Luther to appear before the diet of the princes meeting in Worms, in the Rhineland. Strong from the sympathy that his act of rebellion aroused among the lords who were not anxious to grovel under the boot of the Emperor, Luther presented his profession of faith like a challenge, then, foreseeing arrest, took refuge in Saxony, where the Elector — under the pretext of imprisoning him — protected him at his chateau in Wartburg. There he translated the Bible into German and laid the bases for a new dogma.

In 1521, Thomas Muntzer, taking the freedoms claimed by Luther literally, joined the peasants in revolt and revived the hopes for a Joachimite Third Age. In 1525, Luther, in his lampoon entitled Against the Bands of Looting Peasants and Assassins, appealed for the most pitiless repression, thereby removing the last reticences of the German princes concerning his doctrine and thus counter-signing the birth of Lutherism as the religion of the State. In five years, the heresiarch (in his own way) repeated the Constantinian operation of the Roman Church. He set himself up as the pontifex maximus by according to the national and religious independence of the principalities and kingdoms of the north the support of a bourgeoisie of free enterprise that saw in enrichment the compensation for sacrifice and obedience to a reasonable God.

John Calvin

The heresiarchal career of John Calvin ended with a coup d’Etat, the success of which he himself assured. He was born in 1509 in Noyon, in Picardy, where his father, who was the attorney of the chapter, reserved him for a career in the church. After studying at the College of Montaigu in Paris, Orleans and Bourges, he published a commentary on Seneca’s De clementia.

Around 1533, he adopted the ideas of the Reformation. Suspected of having drafted a harangue against his friend, the Rector of the University of Paris, Nicolas Cop (who was deeply impregnated by the Lutherian doctrine), he fled to Angouleme, then took refuge in Nerac with the help of Marguerite of Navarre, sister of Francois I and protector of the reforms.

In 1534, Calvin was in Basle, where he drafted the first version of The Christian Institution. In 1536, William Farel, who attempted to implant the Reformation in Geneva, invited him to use his authority to convince the citizens, who were not in a hurry to exchange a new religious truth for an old one about which they only cared a little. Banishment sanctioned them both in 1538 and Calvin went to Strasbourg, where Martin Bucer had consolidated one of the bastions of Lutherism. Returning to Geneva in 1541, Calvin thenceforth worked to instaurate his power. An opposition among the inhabitants of the city rose against him, founded just as much on the awareness of belonging to a free state as on the repugnance that Calvinist austerity aroused among the people who were naturally inclined to the joys of existence. Calvin would work patiently at breaking the party of political freedom — stigmatized under the name “libertines” — that was led by Jacob Gruet and the Pocques, Perceval and Quintin Thierry faction, vituperated under the name “spiritual libertines.”

In 1547, after an unjust trial, Jacob Gruet was decapitated for having defended the free choice of atheism and being an insurgent against the dictatorship of a Puritanism that forged in the north of Europe the Anglo-Saxon mindset that illustrated English Victorianism and Americanism in the most deplorable senses of the words.

To confirm the truth that God had imposed, all one would need to do would be to drag to the pyre the physician Michel Servet, who took refuge in Geneva in 1553 to escape from Inquisitorial barbarity.

• Chapter 39 : The Dissidents from Lutheranism and Calvinism

Chapter 39: The Dissidents from Lutheranism and Calvinism

In 1523, Luther published the treatise Jesus-Christ was born Jewish, which accused the papacy of having distanced the Jews from the truth faith. The Church had confined them to usury; it had calumnied them, accused them of “using the blood of Christians to remove their bad ordor,” and “I do not know what [other] nonsense.” “If we would like to help them,” the Reformer wrote, “it is the law of Christian love that we must apply to them, not the law of the Popes.”[424]

What became of such beautiful provisions, after the “Constantinian” turn of the religion called reformed, and the appeal to a holy war against the peasants? In 1543, two pamphelts were published back to back by the master of Wittenberg: Against the Jews and their Lies and Shem, Hamephoras.

Jean Delumeau judged it useful to yield some extracts from writings that Hitler would print in millions of copies:

The Christ, the Reformer [Martin Luther] writes, did not have “enemies more venomous, more determined, more bitter than the Jews.” He “who lets himself steal, sin and curse for them has only to (...) grovel on his knees, to adore this sanctuary (...) then to glory himself for having been merciful (...): Christ will compensate him on the day of the Last Judgment with the eternal fire of Hell.” When Judas was hanged, “the Jews sent their servants with platters of money and pitchers of gold to collect his piss along with the other treasures, and then they ate and drank this shit, and had thus acquired eyes so penetrating that they perceived in the Scriptures glosses that were not found by either Matthew or Isaiah” ... “When God and the angels hear a Jew fart, there are such bursts of laughter and gamboling!”

“Observe all that the Jews have suffered for fifteen hundred years and there will be much worse in Hell (...). They must tell us why (...) they are a people who are rejected by God, are without a king, without prophets, without a temple; they can’t give any other reason than their sins...” “Never has the anger of God manifested itself with more brilliance than on these people.”

“To make this blaphemous doctrine disappear, it will be necessary to set fire to all their synagogues and, if something remains after the fire, to cover it with sand and mud so that one can no longer see the smallest tile or rock from their temple... One must prohibit Jews from being among us and on our soil, and from praising God, praying, teaching or singing, upon pain of death.”[425]

In that same year, 1523, when Luther extolled a certain tolerance for the Jews, he also propagated the notion of the heresy of prudent reservation, which no doubt intimated to him his own destiny:

“If you want to extirpate the heresy,” Luther wrote in 1523, “above all you must know how to remove it from the heart and to provide men with a way to divert themselves through a profound movement of the will. By force you will not exhaust it, but you will instead reinforce it... Because if by force one burns all the Jews and the heretics, one will not convince nor convert a single one through these means.”[426]

But (Jean Delumeau notes) after the violence of Th. Munzter and the war of the peasants, and while the princes and towns adhered in great numbers to the Reformation, here Luther changed his tone, by virtue of another logic, contrary to the first one: Protestantism is the return to Scripture, the removal of the “novelties” — the Roman “superstitions” as well as the “sacramentalism” of Zwingli. Inversely, “the wickedness of the world” manifests itself as both “idolatry and heresy.” The State can not tolerate these Satanic aberrations. The Reformer thus judged necessary the intervention of civil authority so as to bring an end to “abominations” such as Mass. Under threats, the Chapter of the Collegiate Church of Wittenberg ceased celebrating Mass on Christmas 1524. Two years later, Luther wrote to John, the new Elector of Saxony: “There must only be a single kind of preaching in each place.” In 1527, he demanded that the Elector organize “ecclesiastical visits” to his territory. Thenceforth, in the Lutherian countries, the State would control the organization of the Church, would break religious deviances, and had to look after the preaching of the Gospels. The “German mystical spiritualists,” disappointed with Luther, had good sport reproaching him, as well as the other reformers of the people, with having substituted “a new papacy,” a “papacy of paper” (the Bible) for the Roman papacy. For Schwenckfeld, Luther “led us out from Egypt and through the desert, across the Red Sea, but he left us there, wandering aimlessly, everything striving to persuade us that we were already in the Promised Land.” A little later, Weigel would reproach the “Pope of Wittenberg” with having organized a new slavery and persecuting the inspired.[427]

Like the Popes that he vilified, Luther indeed did not disdain from adopting the ordinary hypocrisy that, to serve powerful interests, one must choke off with the left hand the morality caressed with the right. When Philippe of Hess demanded the authorization to marry a second spouse in a just wedding, the spiritual master, after having equivocated, accepted on the condition that the affair remain secret. The recognized Landgrave sent a cask of Rhineland wine as the price for the indulgence. At least Pope Jules II paid Michel-Ange with money extorted from the Catholics.

Calvin knew nothing of such weaknesses. He hated detested with a visceral hatred and his faith never tolerated the least lapse. Several months after having assassinated Michael Servetus, while Sebastian Castellion (*) set himself against such barbarity, Calvin published a Declaration to Maintain the True Faith, in which he declared:

Our merciful [one], who takes great pleasure in letting the heresies go unpunished (...) would like — out of fear that the Church of God is not defamed by too much rigor — that one makes a fashion of all the errors... Therefore God does not want that we spare either the towns or the people, indeed, to the point of razing the walls and exterminating the memory of the inhabitants and intimidating everyone as a sign of a much greater hatred, for fear that the infection might spread further.[428]

(*) In the Treatise of the Heretics, Castellion wrote: “We see that there is hardly any sect — today there are so many of them — that does not see the others as heretical: with the result that, if in one city or region you are esteemed to be truly loyal, in the next one you are esteemed to be heretical.”[429]

And Theodore of Beze raised the stakes:

Tyranny is a lesser evil than having license such that each one makes his own fantasy and it is better to have a tyrant, nay, even a cruel one than not having a prince, or having one under whom it is permitted for each person to do what he wants to do... Those who do not want the magistrate to mix himself up in religious affairs, and principally to punish heretics, scorn what the Word [Parole] of God expresses ... and bring ruin and extreme destruction to the Church.[430]

The Prince “must erect and maintain good edicts against those who by simple stubborness want to resist the establishment of the true religion, as we see our time in being practiced with respect to the papacy, the Anabaptists and other heretics in England, Denmark, Sweden, Scotland, a good part of Germany and Switzerland.”[431]

Johannes Denck

While the shadow of Lutheranism and Calvinism threatened to spread over the world an obscurantism that had the fallacious advantages over Rome of reason and freedom, Johannes Denck was — along with Sebastian Castellion — one of the rare, lucid and sincere men for whom human feeling had the upper hand over beliefs and ideologies that were so quick to suffocate under their sublime abstractions.

Denck was a member of no party other than his own; he did not aspire to govern others. To emancipate himself from all constraints appeared to him a sufficient task. Lutherian freedom did not accommodate itself to such license — indeed, it was hardly reconciable with any church, it is true.

Born in 1500 in Habach, in Upper Bavaria, Denck entered the University of Ingolstadt at the age of 17. While pursuing his studies at Basle, he worked as a proofreader at a print shop and perfected his Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He read Erasmus and was passionate about medieval mysticism and adhered to the ideas of Thomas Muntzer. On the insistance of the Lutherian Oecolampade, he was named Rector of the Saint-Sebald school at Nuremberg when he was 23 years old. He got married and frequented the milieu that, without anarchronism, can be called libertarian.

Like other great preindustrial towns, Nuremberg oscillated in the undertow of the Reformation between Lutherian tyranny, disappointment with imperfect freedoms and the old Catholic current in which the restless and disenchanted ebbed. Indifference to the [whole] religious thing, which had dominated the absolute reign of Catholicism according to the imperative ritual observances, changed into cold and willful skepticism.

A number of strong spirits, including the clergy, no doubt shared the atheism of Thomas Scoto or Hermann of Rijswijck but were not emboldened enough to claim it, that is, beyond the people who possessed the means of their insolence — such as Frederick II or the condottiere Montefeltro, whose cask carried the inscription that promised a beautiful future: “Neither God nor master.” The contestation of the existence of God now resulted in the multiplication of dogmatic truths and parties of the “true faith.”

The affair of the “three Godless painters”[432] offered to the municipality the occasion to rage against the party of the skeptics. The banter that was opposed to the religions too often found complacent ears among the people. It sharpened the language of the intellectuals and the artists. The three painters put into question (the brothers Behaim) enjoyed the friendship of Johannes Denck, whose independence of spirit had more than once irritated the Lutherian notables, Osiander in particular.

The council would summon him to appear and demanded a confession of faith from him that would wash away all suspicion. Denck complied and expounded upon his doubts with a provocative sincerity in two successive texts.

Examining the belief in which he had been educated, he apparently adopted the position that it was a matter of a purely fictive faith, “because it had not triumphed over my spiritual poverty, my inclination to sin, my weakness and my sick situation (...). I will not undertake to pretend that I now possess the faith that translates itself into life, although I see clearly that my disbelief can no longer continue before God.” And he added: “All believers are, at one moment or another, unbelievers. To become believers, they must let their passions and the terrestrial man die, in such a fashion that it is no longer they who live, such as they might in their nonbelief, but God who lives in them through the mediation of the Christ.”[433]

God’s presence acting in man freed him from all constraints and all sin: such would be the doctrine of those Calvin would call the “Spiritual Libertines.”

On 25 January 1525, Denck was condemned to banishment. Forced to leave his family and stripped of his university position, he took refuge in June 1525 among the Anabaptists of Saint-Gall, who were themselves victims of the hatred of the Lutherians; he would soon shock them with his conceptions of individual freedom. Wandering led him to Augsburg, where he stayed up to October 1526, drafting Wer die Wahre warlich lieb hat,[434] a balance sheet of paradoxes, contradictions and absurdities in the Bible, which brought him to this conclusion: the quarrels about interpretation had no shared meaning, only the presence of God (when the Spirit deigned to reveal it), which signified and served as a guide to existence through the spontaneity of the impulses that it engendered.

Hostility from the Lutherians forced Denck into exile again. The same fate awaited him in Strasbourg, where Bucer and Capito denounced him for subversive activities.

He was already worn out by his solitary combat when he arrived in Basle in September 1527. Oecolampade was disposed to accord him asylum on the condition that he adjured. Denck wrote a kind of confession, mixing a few concessions (dictated by weakness) with opinions close to those of Schwenckfeld and his notion of the inward man. Oecolampade would enter into the tradition of the inquisitorial lie by publishing it under the title (deceptive at the very least) The Abjuration of Hans Denck.

When Denck died from plague in Basle at the age of 27, he was about to publish Von der Wahren Liebe.[435] In it he insisted on the following theme: he who loves God and has God in his heart need not bother with institutions, which only blind him.

In 1528, two of his texts, which appeared as the preface and the appendix to the Deutsche Theologie, made it clear “that the creature is necessary to God and that the man deified by illumination enjoys the union with Him as well as with the Christ,” which was an idea that the philosopher Jacob Boehme — another victim of the New [Protestant] Churches — would develop in the Seventeenth Century.

The Nineteenth Century would see in Denck one of the pioneers of free thought. No doubt he influenced the lucid and tormented conscience of Kierkegaard. Nevertheless, it seems that the combined hatred of the Protestants and the Catholics was caused by the impregnation of the Free-Spirit, which was discernible in this thesis: “Where there is faith, there is no sin; where there is no sin, there resides divine virtue.”[436]

Sebastian Franck

A philosopher and historian, Sebastian Franck belonged to the very small number of humanists who allied an unfailing passion for tolerance and respect for life with intelligence.

Born in Donauworth, in Souable, in 1499, he enrolled at the University of Heidelberg, where he associated with Martin Bucer, the future master of Strasbourg. Despite his contacts with Luther after 1519, he began his ecclesiastical career in the Catholic Church, which he left around 1525. An evangelistic preacher in the region of Nuremburg, he married Ottilie Behaim, sister of the painters Barthold and Sebald, disciples of Durer and [various] free spirits to whom all forms of religion were repugnant.

Nevertheless, he also took a position against the justification through faith defended by Johannes Denck, friend of the Behaims, and adopted a position that was in conformity with Christian principles. But in 1529 he resigned his ecclesiastical functions, moved to Strasbourg, associated with Michael Servetus and Caspar Schwenckfeld, and increasingly adopted Denck’s attitude, in which convictions only had meaning in the coherence between ideas and a life stripped of artifice and hypocrisy. Such was the spirit that animated his masterpiece, Chronica, Zeytbuch and Geschictbibel (Chronicles, Annals and History of the Bible), published in 1531. Erasmus took offense at a citation and denounced him to the Council of Strasbourg; with the support of Bucer, he got Franck expelled. Exposed to the hatred of Erasmus and the Lutherians, and condemned by Melanchton, he ended up as a printer in Ulm, the Council of which rejected several demands for his expulsion, including one attempted by Philippe of Hess, Luther’s protector. Franck took the time to publish several personal works and a treatise by Cornelius Agrippa, before being banished in 1530. Taking refuge in Basle, where he entered into a second marriage with the heiress from a family of great publishers, he did not cease publishing — his collection of proverbs enjoyed a great popularity — and fighting for tolerance and the suppression of the death penalty. (“If the choice was given to me, I would much rather be in the condition of many whom the world has condemned as heretical than in that of those whom it has canonized.”[437]) He died in 1542, scarcely 43 years old.

Hostile to all forms of ecclesiastical organization, he rejected the authority of the priests as well as that of the Scriptures. The Gospels, he said, had replaced pontifical authority with a papieren Papst (a paper Pope). This was the cause of all evil; he denounced it in a society dominated by the strength and power of the Prince. No war was just because all wars derived from the principle of appropriation. On the other hand, his pessimism hardly accorded any credit to revolt. Closer to the Tao than to La Boetie, he contented himself with identifying God with a feeling of interior plenitude, in which he dreamed that brutality and the misery of a changeless world were annihilated.

In the insurmountable and vain confrontation in which truths fought each other bitterly, tolerance represented the only human virtue. (“Thus take from each sect what is good and leave the rest to the Devil.”[438]). This sufficed to bring down upon him the animosity of the majority of the humanists, ideologues and sectarians of his time, from the Catholics to the Anabaptists. On the other hand, Sebastian Castellion did everything he could to distribute his works, to which Valentin Weigel, Jacob Boehme, Dirk Coornherdt and the historian Gottfried Arnold paid homage.

Carlstadt And Schwenckfeld

The rivalry of power that quickly opposed Luther to Andreas Rudolf Bodenstein, also known as Carlstadt, determined a rivalry of opinion that was even more subject to uncertainty than the dogma of the reforms that were incomfortably cemented to the controversies. The Constantinian Catholic Church had hardly preceded otherwise, but its absolutism treated doubts with the sword. The similar operation attempted by Luther, Calvin and Henry VIII of England no longer inscribed itself in the same historical conditions. Underneath the predominance of the agrarian mode of production, the mole of merchantile expansion was at work. The progress of values open to modernity no longer guaranteed the stability of the divine order and the unchanging power of its ministers.

The defeat of the Roman Church, the power of which was only imperfectly restored by the counter-offensive of the Council of Trente, thus prohibited the despotic pretensions of the popes of the Reformation to go beyond local tyrannies that poorly resisted contestation.

Unlike Denck, Munzter, Storch, Hoffmann and Schwenckfeld, Carlstadt did not have a doctrine properly speaking. He contented himself with scorning Luther, knocking around that conceited wimp whose shadow extended over Europe.

Born around 1480, Carlstadt studied philosophy and theology in Erfurt (1499), then in Cologne (1500). There he was, professor of theology, exegete of the Bible and honest doctor at the University of Sienna. Interested in Luther’s demands, he soon clashed with the man’s intransigence, for which the dogmatic interpretation of sacred texts had the upper hand over the generosity of the heart’s impulses. Was it not precisely the most sensitive part, nay, the most sensual part of man, that most ardently fought against the Roman clergy?

Carlstadt’s meeting with Thomas Muntzer, whose revolutionary millenarianism both fascinated and frightened him, hastened the break with Luther, who chased him from Wittenberg. Taking refuge in Orlamuende, where he came out against the necessity of baptism and communion, he was expelled on the insistence of his old friend, who pursued him in hatred, especially where he had the support of the princes. Carlstadt would only find peace in the company of Zwingli, who founded a rival Church in Zurich and did not follow Luther. Carlstadt would defend his positions, which were close to those of Denck, who estimated that the sincerity of faith dispensed with all spiritual authority. He was teaching at the University of Zurich when he died from plague in 1541.

Freedom was the cause of the break between Luther and Caspar Schwenckfeld (1490–1561), whose sect experienced equal persecution under the Catholics and the Lutherians. In the line of Denck, he rejected the sacraments and religious rites in favor of faith, in which humanity founded its feeling of conformity with the designs of God. He put the accent on the inward man, whose mystical experiences participated in illumination. Certain Pietists would later claim his teachings.

Michael Servetus

A physician and humanist, born around 1509 in Villaneuva, Spain, Michael Servetus owed his dramatic end less to an audacity of thought — more well-known than it would appear, if not less imprudent — than to a settling of accounts to which the morbid authority of John Calvin humbled itself. His medical studies at the University of Toulouse and the University of Paris induced in him, as in Rabelais, a certain skepticism in theological matters. The man who discovered the mechanisms of the circulation of blood in the lungs would experience some difficulty in finding clarity in the Trinity that was a part of the Constantinian arsenal and had presided over the instauration of Catholicism as the religion of the State.

Anti-trinitarianism, popularized by Socin and his friends, responded less to a theological preoccupation than to the questioning of the Church through the derision of a principle that had never succeeded in getting itself out of trouble and the mystical character of which in fact dissimulated the political necessity of holding firm between God (the Father) and humankind (the Son) the balance of the Spirit that governed the temporal in the name of a celestial mandate.

Published in 1531, Servetus’ De trinitatis erroribus justified Arius and the old Gnosticism by denying the existence of the Spirit — and thus the Church — as distinct beings. According to Servetus, everything took place between the Logos, which was eternal, and the Son, who was not.

In 1553, the anonymous publication of Servetus’ Christianismi restitutio drew down upon him threats from the Inquisition. Arrested in Lyon and imprisoned, he had the good fortune to escape and the misfortune of going to Geneva, that is, near-by Calvin, with whom he had exchanged letters more than once. The Restitutio was an ironic take on Calvin’s Institutio and it put Calvin on his guard inasmuch as Servetus adopted positions that were close to those of Anabaptism. But his freedom of morals and language especially worked upon Calvin like an insult to his majesty as a prophet. An unjust trial, to which no one gave credit (because the complaints offered no common measure with the accusations that had been made against Jacob Gruet), succeeded where the Inquisition had failed and would benefit Rome. Servetus was burned alive on 27 October 1553.[439]

Sebastian Castellion

By the force of things, the Reformation inscribed itself in a movement of desacralization inherent in the merchantile expansion that, up to the Twentieth Century, reduced the religions of the indistrialized nations to supermarket junk. With its multiple sects, Protestantism marked the transition from clerical theology — supported by a huge apparatus of popes and monarchs of divine right — to the ideologies founded on a restrictive ethics that oscillated between totalitarianisms of the nationalist or collectivist type and the demand for freedom that in fact authorized the becoming of the economy.

The importance of morality in the Reformed religion prolonged the will of the reformers who, starting in the Eleventh Century and especially in the whirlpool of urban freedoms, intended to moralize the Church. Even if ethical despotism was most often succeded by the tyranny of dogmatic prescriptions, the absence of a sacred orthodoxy — of a rectilinear perspective in which God was the point of flight and arrival — no longer authorized one to speak of heresies from the moment that Protestantism occupied the predominant position in a given country or region.

If Calvin treated Servetus as a heretic, this was because he estimated himself to be — as much as the Pope did — the elect of God, fixing in Geneva the New Jerusalem that did not stop fluctuating geographically. On the other hand, his role as puritan dictator took the upper hand during the polemic between him and Sebastian Castellion. The controversy was no longer theological: it was ideological. It put into question the inhumanity of the repressive discourse attributed to God.

The official history makes a lot of Erasmus, the humanist and anti-Semite, intellectual and misogynist, defender of freedom and partisan of the death penalty for heretics, whom he occasionally denounced. He knew nothing of Guillaume Postel, who discerned in the emancipation of women the foundation of a human society, nor Castellion, who fought for tolerance.

Born in 1515 in Saint-Martin-du-Fresne in the Bugey, where the influence of the Vaudois continued to exist, Sebastian Castellion studied in Lyon and associated with the humanists who were seduced by the new ideas. The spectacle of the persecutions and his reading of Calvin’s The Christian Institution won him over to the Reformation. He left for Strasbourg, then Geneva, where Calvin offered him a professor’s position in 1542. His Sacred Dialogues reflected his first hesitancies concerning Calvin’s growing authoritarianism. In it he celebrated tolerance and remarked that “There is no one who more obstinately resists the truth than the great ones of this world.” He soon left Geneva, having attracted the animosity of the man whom he had the naivete to admonish for his sectarianism.

Reader of Greek at the University of Basle, he provided his first manifestation of a free conscience in the preface to his translation of the Bible into Latin. Indignant over the execution of Servetus in 1553, which inspired him to write De haereticis an sit persequendi? (Basle, 1654), he developed a doctrine that was opposed to predestination, which Calvin used to justify his own crimes.

Published in 1562, Castellion’s Advice to Distressed France called for universal tolerance and refused to “force consciences.” It opposed the fanaticisms and horrors of the wars undertaken for the greatest glory of God. Rarely has a book been welcomed by such unanimous reprobation. Lutherians, Calvinists, Catholics and humanists all judged the project to abolish the death penalty for the crime of heresy to be criminal. His nephew and brother-in-law, guilty of having introduced the book into Geneva, had to take flight. Until his death on 29 September 1563, Castellion did not cease diffusing throughout all of Europe letters that extolled freedom of thought and were sent to all those whom he estimated capable of sharing his ideas and spreading the effects.[440]

• Chapter 40 : The Alumbrados of Spain

Chapter 40: The Alumbrados of Spain

Quite discreet until then, the Inquisition was unleashed in Spain in 1492 and took up — under the mantle of threatened faith — a gigantic genocidal operation, principally directed against the Jews, whose systematic despoilation kept the coffers of the State from going bankrupt. The power that bestowed upon the Inquisition insignia of services rendered in the art of balancing the deficits of the kingdom, in which the Jews (in a certain way) financed the conquest of the American markets, brought down upon Spain the functionaries of the religious police, with whom Northern Europe had canceled its contracts and whom the Italy of the Renaissance valued more beyond its borders than within them.

Italian Catholicism accommodated itself to pleasures sooner or later seized by redemption, remorse and contrition. Better than the Council of Trente, the hedonism of a country inclined to luxury and the passions erected a natural barrier against the incursions of Reformation Puritanism, of which the pre-Calvinist austerity of Savonarola had presented the enticing program.

Still cramped within the old agrarian structures in which the taste for life and liberty was only marked out through the insurrections of the comuneros, several peasant revolts and the emerging richness of the great towns, Spain kept the heritage of the ascetic masochism of Priscillian and Dominique Guzman, the leader of an order of divine killers, the furor of which Loyola would soon revive by giving it a less brutal but more police-like turn.

In Spain the Inquisition would durably prevent — with a zeal that was the envy of the German inquisitors — the implantation of a Protestantism that it would not succeed in containing in Flanders, despite the frightening catacombs.

Nevertheless, the Inquisition would remain abashed at the time it discovered the existence of groups of people, apparently quite numerous, who had devoted themselves to the freedoms of love according to the routes of the ecstasy that, through strange references to the old Gnosticism and the Hebdomade, popular language situated in the seventh heaven.

Bataillon dates from 1512 the appearance of the qualifier alumbrado, applied to a Franciscan who was “illuminated by the darkess of Satan.”[441]

In Toledo, where the influence of heterodox Sufis of Islam was secretly perpetuated, the Inquisition hesitated to pursue Isabel de La Cruz, who had a reputation for holiness and around whom formed a group whose teachings recalled those of Marguerite Porete. One would have to wait until 23 September 1525 for the great inquisitor Manrique to promulgate an edict against the Alumbrados, no doubt under the cover of a campaign against the Protestants, with whom they could only be confused by some malignity of the Holy-Office. Arrested in 1529, Isabel de La Cruz was condemned to life imprisonment. One of her disciples, the priest Juan Lopez, would mount the pyre in Grenada one year later.

The chronicler Alfonso de Santa Cruz transcribed several articles from the accusatory notification for the trial at Toledo:

They say that the love of God in man is God. (... They) affirm that ecstasy or illumination leads to such perfection that men can no longer sin, neither mortally nor venally; that illumination frees and releases one from all authority; and that they need not render accounts to anyone, not even God, because they have put their trust in him (from whence comes their refusal of sacraments, prayers, and good works).

They call the Host a bit of pate; the cross a stick; and genuflection idolatry. They believe the annihilation of their own will to be a supreme glory (...). They deny Hell (...).

Far from weeping over the Passion of the Christ, they rejoice and enjoy all the pleasures during Holy Week. They affirm that the Father was incarnated as the Son and believe they speak with this God neither more nor less than with the Corregidor of Escalona. So as to remember Our Lady, they contemplate the visage of a woman instead of contemplating an image. They call the conjugal act union with God. The sect is centered around Isabel de La Cruz and a certain Father Alcazar.[442]

At the same time, a group of Alumbrados developed around the beata [blessed one] Francisca Hernandez, who was originally from Canillas, near by Salamanque. Around 1519, her court consisted of young clergymen: Bernardino Tovar, the Franciscan Gil Lopez and the bachelor Antonio of Medrano, whose amorous relations with Francisca were denounced to the Inquisition, which condemned the lovers to live separately.

Relocated to Valladolid, Francisca first lived with Bernardino Tovar and then the financier Pedro Cazalla. In the tradition of the Homines Intelligentiae, she founded an occult center named Paradise, in which the refinements of love conferred Edenic innocence at the end of an initiation that intermixed chastity, libertinage and exclusive passion.

At the time of the trial, Antonio of Medrano declared that, since he had known Francisca, God had given him the grace to no longer experience carnal desires, with the result that he could sleep with a woman in the same bed without prejudicing his soul. On the other hand, Francisco Ortiz affirmed: “After having relations with her for around 20 days, I acquired more wisdom in Valladolid than I did studying in Paris for 20 years. Because it is not Paris, but Paradise, that can teach me such wisdom.”[443]

Francisca Hernandez seemed to have attained such a decree of holiness that continence was no longer necessary for her. The richest part of her teachings no doubt consisted in disencumbering her disciples and lovers from the feeling of guilt, which — along with the fear of coming [jouir] — formed a vicious circle in which love was poisoned. The theologian Melchior Cano would express the skillfully irreligious enterprise of Francisca in a formula of an astonishing modernity: “Remove fear and give assurance.”

It was precisely on anguish and fear, the foundations of all religion, that the Inquisition would play to annihilate Alumbradism. Arrested in 1529, Francisca Hernandez and her follower, Maria Ramirez, denounced — under the threat of torture and the quemadero[444] — Bernardino Tovar, her brother and fourteen other people. And, according to the will of the inquisitorial tribunal, they denounced them not as Alumbrados but as Lutherians, which does not lack piquancy, given the hatred of Luther and Calvin for the adepts of the Free-Spirit.

In many regions of Spain, the Alumbrados represented such a force that the Church did not dare to attack them directly and preferred to assimilate them with the Reformers, the condemnation of whom aroused fewer reservations. They were so numerous in Seville that the Inquisition would not intervene. “The major part of the town is infected,” reported a letter of the times. “There is no Duchess or Marquise, no woman of high or low condition, whom one cannot reproach for some error of this heresy.”[445]

In the second half of the Sixteenth Century, a group of Alumbrados pushed imprudence as far as publicly contesting the Church’s teachings. In 1578, a Dominican, Alonso de La Fuente — who in Llerena in Estremadure blamed the Alumbrados in person — was interrupted by a woman who said: “Padre, the life they lead is better than yours, and their doctrine is better, too.” Her audacity, supported (in all probability) as a favorable opinion that was communally accepted in the region, would arouse the immediate reaction of the Inquisition. Arrested and subjected to torture, she confessed the names of her companions.

Their doctrine was expounded by eight members of the secular clergy. Fernando Alvarez and Father Chamizo recommended that the novices meditate on the wounds of the crucified Christ with such ardor that their faces become red, that they sweat, feel sorrow in their hearts, become nauseated, so as to culminate in an ecstasy in which, according to their expression, they “become liquefied in the love of God.” [Marguerite] Porete had spoken of the “annihilated soul” that announced the identification with God that Simon of Samaria called megale dynamis, while the Beghard John of Brunn evoked the identity of the pneuma and the sperma in the fusion that would leave him totaliter liquefactus.

Rendered impeccable by organic illumination, they acceded to the state of perfection and, permanently plunged into inward exaltation, they were founded in following their desires and rejecting the Church, its authority and its rites.

Beyond Alvarez and Chamizo, who was reproached for having initiated into celestial pleasure 34 people, the community at Llerena included Juan Garcia, a clergyman from Almendralejo and the bachelor Rodrigo Vasquez, a parish-priest in La Morea, who affirmed: “If the Turks govern and win Spain, it will be because each of them lives as he wants.” The community also included Doctor Cristobal Mejia, a clergyman from Cazalla; a Franciscan from Valladolid, who was 63 years old; Pedro of Santa Maria; a parish-priest from Zafra, Francisca de Mesa, who, speaking of the Passion of the Christ, said: “What good is it to be preoccupied every day with the death of this man?”[446]

In Zafra, where the adepts united around the widow Lari Gomez, a shoemaker, Juan Bernal, nourished the intention to present to the court a memoire in favor of the Alumbrados.

The group had existed for four years when the Bishop of Salamanque, Francisco de Soto, was charged by the inquest of 1578. When he died in Llerena, on 21 June of that same year, rumor accused the Alumbrados of having poisoned him. The majority would perish on the pyre.

Such was the context in which the mystical exaltation of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila took place. At first suspected of Alumbradism, both of them — hastening to furnish proofs of their perfect submission to the Church — channeled the carnal ecstasies that haloed them with a divine grace towards a morbid asceticism.

• Chapter 41 : The Spiritual Libertines

Chapter 41: The Spiritual Libertines

At the same time that the Spanish Inquisition worried itself with people who, unconcerned with Catholicism, Protestantism, the Church and its reforms, lived in the quest for love and discovered in it the very meaning of their existence, Luther and Calvin attempted to subdue — in the countries slowly conquered by their glacial truths — the natural liberties that authorized among the people the spiritual liberties that were being arrogated by the Reformers.

Eloi Pruystinck And The Loyists

Thanks to economic development, around 1520 Antwerp saw the new wave of individual initiative push towards the shore the audacities of private enterprise, the reconversion of God into divine capital and, at the same time, a propensity for luxury and the feeling of power that raised the man of business to the dignity of the elect, nay, the Demiurge.

At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, when God — carved up by two factions that disputed their exclusivity — finally left an opening for the human, a slate-roofer by the name of Eloi Pruystinck, an illiteratus et mecchanicus proletarian, agitated the working-class neighborhood of Saint-Andrew.

A letter from David Joris allows one to understand that an encounter put the two men into motion on the following question: What is the best life according to the God of goodness and freedom, whom the Reformation extolled, at least in the mind of Eloi?

In February 1525, Pruystinck went to Wittenberg with the intention of persuading with the justness of his convictions the man towards whom Europe had come to turn its eyes: [Martin] Luther, entangled in his sudden glory. Pruystinck confronted Philippe Melanchton in the presence of the master who, scandalized by the libertarian opinions of Eloi, sent a veritable letter of denunciation to the Reformers of Antwerp:

I have learned how much your country is agitated by spirits who are full of errors, who devote themselves to hindering the progress of the Christian truth; I know that there has come among you a demon incarnate who wants to induce and divert you from the true intelligence of the Gospel, so as to make you fall into darkness. To avoid his traps more easily, I would like to provide you with some of his propositions: ‘Each man,’ according to him, ‘has the Holy-Spirit; the Holy-Spirit is nothing other than our reason. — Each man has faith; nature has taught me to do to my neighbor what I would like done to me; it is to have faith to act this way. — Each one will have eternal life; there is neither Hell nor damnation; only the flesh will be damned. — The law is not violated by bad desires as long as my will does not give in to them. — Those who do not have the Holy-Spirit do not sin any longer, because they do not possess reason.’ There is no one who does not want to be more knowledgeable than Luther; everyone wants to win his spurs at my expense. Your demon, when he was here with me, denied all of Luther’s articles, although what they were was demonstrated to him and although he himself was betrayed by defending several of them. To tell you the truth, he is an inconstant and lying spirit, full of audacity and insolence, which allows him to affirm something and then deny it at the same time. He never dares to maintain what he has affirmed, and he only came here to praise himself for having discussed a few things with us. With energy he supported the idea that God’s commandments are good and that God does not want sin to exist, which I willingly conceded to him; but he obstinately refused to agree that God, in not wanting sin to exist, nevertheless permits its reign over mankind. I do not doubt that he represented me to you as if I said that sin is required by God.[447]

Returning to Antwerp, Eloi did not cease to continue to propagate his conception of a life inspired by a good God who was hostile to violence, punishment and guilt, and whose grace rendered Edenic innocence to those who followed their desires and their propensity for happiness. Eloi seems to have associated with the humanist Johannes Campanus, (*) a man full of sweetness, whose project — expounded under the title On the Possibility of a Union of the Christians and the Turks (1546) — would in part inspire Pruystinck’s ideas.

(*) In 1530, Melanchton would refuse any contact with Campanus and would demand that he be arrested. After the Servetus affair, Campanus would be imprisoned for twenty years.

In February 1526, Eloi and nine of his friends were arrested for committing the crimes of heresy and reading forbidden books. The penal moderation that the Regent Marguerite of Austria encouraged in the Netherlands explains the clemency of the judgment. Condemned to apologize and to wear a pectoral sign that designated him a heretic, Eloi — loyal to his refusal of martyrdom — simulated such a perfect devotion that the magistrates dispensed with the opprobrious marking.

A group formed around Eloi that was more and more important, and whose propaganda — distributed in Holland and Germany — was created by Dominique of Uccle, “writer of their killer books.” Van Meteren revealed among their many adepts the presence of several bourgeois from Antwerp, “the best, the richest and the most well-considered, who agreed to live together joyously and in an Epicurean manner.” And the chronicler deplored “their impious opinions, which were supportive of the world and the flesh, and which derided and treated as stupidities both the Catholic religion and the Reformed one.”[448]

Like the Homines Intelligentiae in Brussels a century earlier, the Loyists lost all prudence to the extent that those who were indifferent to the war conducted in the name of the Pope of Rome or the “Pope” of Wittenberg were increasing in number. In 1533, the Lutherian Carnovianus, passing through Antwerp, spoke with indignation about the “Illuminati” in Antwerp in a letter he sent to Johannes Hess: “Those men are far more perverse and obstinate than the Anabaptists.”[449]

The winds of repression became more violent when, in 1531, Marguerite of Austria ceded the Regency of the Netherlands to her niece, Mary of Hungary, sister of Charles V, who was resolved to pursue the heretics, “repentant or not, with a sufficient severity that their error is a death blow and without any other consideration than that of not entirely depopulating the provinces.”

No doubt the frenzied persecution of the Anabaptists diverted the Inquisitorial eye (in which the light of the pyres shined) to the Loyists. Nourishing as little sympathy for the adepts of Melchior Hoffmann as for the other henchman of the God of justice, the Loyists did not take part in the raids of the Munsterites who plotted to seize Antwerp’s City Hall on 11 May 1535. The frightful massacre that ensued thus spared them, while the siege of the town by the Duke of Gueldre, acting for the King of France and against Charles V, gave them a fresh postponement.

The fatal blow would come from Deventer, where Juriann Ketel, a friend of David Joris, was tortured and denounced Corneille Van Lier, a lord from Berchem (a village near Antwerp), his two brothers-in-law, the French jeweler Christopher Herault, a companion of Eloi, and a certain “slate-roofer.” When informed, the Governess Mary of Hungary demanded expeditious justice.

Other accusations, cleverly spread around, proceeded from the Calvinist milieu.

In 1544, Vallerand Poulain (from Strasbourg) wrote to Calvin: “Our brothers from Valenciennes who just now provided us with certain writings of the Quintinists have returned (...). If you would take up arms against the Quintinists, I would rejoice. (...) My brother Raymond has written to me that these horrors are now spreading in Lower Germany through the actions of certain people named David and Eloi. He still has not yet sent me the expose of their doctrine as he had promised me. When he sends it, I will transmit it to you.” Everything indicates that the announced expose was none other than the Summa doctrinae, published by Doellinger; I have provided the French translation in The Movement of the Free Spirit.[450]

In July, the police arrested Eloi, Christopher Herault, John Davion, a rich bourgeois originally from Lille, Jan Dorhaut, a poor salt-seller, Dominique of Uccle, the author of the pamphlets, the painter Henry of Smet, the engraver and sculptor Cornelis van den Bossche, and others.

A large number of Loyists took flight and went to England, where some of them joined the Familists of Henry Niclaes. On 14 September 1544, Dominique of Uccle, learning of the tortures to which Eloi was subjected, profited from the absence of his guardian and hanged himself in his cell. His legend as a kind dreamer and sweet Epicurean would continue into the Nineteenth Century in his neighborhood of Saint-Andrew, where Georges Eeckhout welcomed it.[451] Herault and his companions were decapitated.

No doubt the Loyist movement survived clandestinely. The chroniclers no longer mentioned it, but in 1550 the existence of a group of men and women claiming for themselves the freedoms of love was indicated in the environs of Alost, in Flanders. In 1561, an attack on a convent of Dominicans near Bruges was attributed to this band. One then went after the blazing iconoclasts. The exploits of Jacob Gherraerts, called the Hollander, evoked the partisans of Battenburg more than the peaceful Loyists, but it does not appear from Eloi’s doctrine that the partisans of the sweetness of life would let themselves be killed without defending themselves.

The Loyist influence can be discerned in the Familists, the Ranters, Dirk Coornherdt and the anti-clericalism that was strong in the city in which Richard Payne Knight assured his readers that it was, from the beginning, devoted to the fusional cults of the Magna Mater.

Jacob Gruet

It is to the honor of Geneva, corrupted by dictatorship, that there rose up against the theocratic pretensions of Calvin citizens who were inclined — according to a tradition of national[ist] liberty — to claim the free disposition of self. Several enlightened bourgeois took it upon themselves to confront the fanatic who was resolved to subject the entire population of the city to his austere compulsions.

The revolt, baited by taunts, would reveal an atheistic and irreligious current that the uncertain fate of the Reform party still authorized happy license.

Benoite, the wife of Senator Pierre Ameux, justifying the luxuriance of his amorous life, would declare that she only saw in it the fortunate effect of the “communion of the saints.”[452]

Jacob Gruet, leader of the opposition to Calvin, composed a lampoon that evoked the theses of Thomas Scoto and Hermann of Rijswick. Though he ordered the destruction of this book, the autocrat could not prevent himself from quoting extracts in his Opinion that Calvin will deliver at the Proceeding that one must convene against the Book by Gruet to the Senate of Geneva.

In 1547, Gruet would try to stir up the people of Geneva. He affixed an appeal to revolt to the walls of the principal church in Geneva. Had he waited too long? Calvin obtained his arrest and the arrest of Gruet’s friends. The accused were decapitated and Calvin would reign as master in his citadel, throwing (like fodder to divine anger) the enemies whom he had attracted to the better ones to be consumed, or denouncing them to the magistrates, Catholic and Reformed, so that justice could be served.

Calvin had called “libertines” the friends of political and religious liberty, which he wished to reduce. He would give the name “Spiritual Libertines” to a faction that propagated a doctrine of the free satisfaction of desire according to the tradition of the Free-Spirit among the humanists and men of the people who were seduced by the modernity of the Reformation and rebuffed by the obscurantism that stood out against it.

• Chapter 42 : The Anabaptists

Chapter 42: The Anabaptists

If in the Sixteenth Century no religious movement endured as much combined hostility from the Catholics, the Protestants and the temporal authorities as the Anabaptists did, this was because they added to the religious discourse of egalitarian theocracy the old social dream in which nostalgia for a golden age provided the weapons of hope to the desperate struggle against the exploiters and the destroyers of the natural riches.

In the foreboding of the Third Age, the imminence of which fit in with the crisis of the birth of modern capitalism, the proletarian demands of the towns easily mixed with the peasants’ aspirations and the regrets of the old autartic rural commune.

The specter of the millennium, which agrarian fundamentalism still gave the inhumanity inherent in the celestial mandate to the antithetical ideologies of Bolshevism and fascism, would engender among the partisans of the old order and the adepts of a new one a climate of endemic hatred and fear propitious for all the cruelty to come.

Close to the Vaudois tradition, the peaceful Anabaptists did not any less provoke persecution than those who extolled armed struggle. The Vaudois nourished such a calling for martyrdom that they practically solicited the executioner’s hand. In Munster, where their equality of divine right would institute itself, the Anabaptists would show that the God of the little fathers of the people hardly spared the children judged unworthy of his goodness.

Storch, Pfeiffer And Muntzer

In the writings of its enemies, Anabaptism designated an ensemble of independent groups that were governed by prophets or apostles armed with the sword and word [parole] of God. Their common traits evoked the demands of the reformers of the Middle Ages. They took exception to the baptism imposed upon infants, because it was generally administered by unworthy priests and because it did not obey the individual’s choice made in full knowledge of the community of the faithful. In practice, baptism played a role among the Anabaptists, and especially the Munsterians, similar to the one played by the [Communist] Party among the old Stalinists of the Twentieth Century. It was a sign of election that authorized access to the egalitarian kingdom of the saints.

The absolute authority that the Anabaptists recognized in God, whose ministers they were, freed them from obeying the spiritual and temporal authorities. In the German principalities, it expressed the nearly unanimous rejection of the prince-bishop and his allies. The collusion of the Catholic and Lutherian notables participated in the discredit of two religions that were judged to be irreconciliable with God’s designs. Anabaptism especially estimated itself to be the carrier of a new order. It needed to destroy the ramparts of the old tyrannies so as to impose the authoritarian reign of the saints. Such a project would discover its social ferment in the peasant wars and the insurrections of the miners, weavers and unemployed workers.

The peasant discontent was a constant factor in history ever since the Circoncellions and Bagaudes. The peasant uprisings led by Dolcino, William Carle and John Ball rhythmned this constancy with an energy that was exacerbated each time that the economy, through the free circulation of goods, broke the closed system of the agrarian mode of production, which was the motherly paradise that was ruined by the sordid exploitation of terrestrial nature and human nature.

From century to century — like sparks from a forge in which a humanity devoted to Hell was active — there flew manifestoes, prophecies and pamphlets such as The Book of One Hundred Chapters, written at the beginning of the Sixteenth Century by the “Revolutionary from the Upper Rhineland.”[462]

Inspired by John Ball and the radical Taborites, this work expounded the demands for equality and justice that animated the revolt of the Bundschuh and that breathed life into the idea of freedom that Luther celebrated before repudiating.

Regrouping the peasants, the poor people of the villages and the wandering mercenaries, the Bundschuh drew its name from its emblem, which was the peasant’s lace buskin. (According to Pianzola, the emblem was painted by Jorg Ratgeb.[463]) The movement was organized under the leadership of a man of the people, Joss Fritz, a forest-guard from the village of Lehen and, after an attempt upon Selestat in 1493, it imposed itself in 1502 in the region of Spire. The insurrection was crushed, but Joss Fritz managed to escape the repression and, in 1513 and 1517, organized new conflagrations in Souabe and even Alsace. His millenarianist program did not bother with theological considerations: he appealed for the extermination of the rich and the nobles, and for the establishment of an egalitarian and fraternal society. Outside of the patrician caste and the lords, the majority of the towns were receptive and the current of sympathy aroused by the peasant wars expressed itself so strongly among the artists of the time that the majority of the official histories of art have preferred to pass over them in silence. Only Maurice Pianzola has taken the pleasure of indicating these artists in his study, Painters and Villains.[464]

They were named Durer, Grunewald, Jorg Ratgeb (who was a painter and military counselor to the armed peasants quartered at Pforzeim in 1526), the brothers Hans Sebald and Bartel Behaim (already condemned for irreligion at a celebrated trial at Nuremberg), Lucas Cranach, Nicolas Manuel Deutsche, Urs Graf, Philippe Dietmar (decapitated at Wurzburg in 1525), and Tilman Riemenschneider (renamed for the always equal-sized hands of his figures and whose fingers were broken by the executioners at the time of the tortures in Wurzburg in 1526).

It would fall to Muntzer and his friends to give to the movement a type of religious carapace, which was more proper to stifle than to protect it, as much as it is true that the spirit of sacrifice more predisposed the movement to martyrdom and expiatory defeat than to the victories of natural liberty.

Born in Stolberg (Thuringia) in 1488, Thomas Muntzer studied Greek, Latin and Hebrew in the course of several brilliant years at the university, which destined him for the priesthood. Soon thereafter rallied to Luther’s party, he quit it no less rapidly when, having become the Pastor at Zwickau, not far from Bohemia, he met the weaver Nicolas Storch.

Influenced by the Taborite movement, Storch preached the imminence of the millenarianist revolution. The saints or elect of the New Age would be the faithful who possessed in themselves the Spirit or the Living Christ. Muntzer entered into Storch’s views and gave them a more theological and sacrificial turn.

Stripped of his own will, the adept would expose himself — in the manner of the Christ — to ordeals and suffering, which Muntzer called “the cross.” Finally allowed a kind of resurrection, he would receive the Living Christ in himself and the will of God would manifest itself through its intermediary. Here the idea of the incarnated God, common to the Free-Spirit, passed through the preliminary of the renunciation of life, along the access road to social purification without which there could be no kingdom of the saints.

Like Savonarola, Muntzer took exception to culture and erudition, condemned reading, pleasure and lust. His preaching against the Lutherian notables and the lechery of the bishops attracted the sympathies of the weavers and the miners who were reduced to poverty by inflation.

In April 1521, the municipal authorities chased him from the city. Storch unleashed an uprising that was quickly crushed. Muntzer traveled through Bohemia, was expelled from Prague, wandered in Germany and in 1523 found himself the preacher of Allstedt in Thuringia, where — with the peasants, copper-mine workers and artisans from the town — he founded a League of the Elect, which was a prefiguration of the lay League of Communists that Marx dreamed was the iron lance of the proletariat.

Invited to preach before Duke John of Saxony in July 1524, he prophetized the return of humanity to the Christ, to nature and to paradise in harmony and peace. Was not the sovereign, an open and tolerant spirit, seduced by Muntzer’s eloquence and program? He took time to reflect before summoning the prophet to Weimar for a reconciliation, at which he simply asked him to abstain from all prophetic declarations.

Nevertheless, because Heinrich Pfeiffer, an old monk, had incited a revolt of the disinherited classes against the patrician oligarchy in Muelhausen, Muntzer hastened to join him and give him the League’s support. The failure of the insurrection chased Muntzer from the city and convinced him to bet upon the peasant movement; Pfeiffer, through even more audacity, succeeded in reversing the municipal majority and instaurating working-class power.

In April 1525, Muntzer hoisted a white banner painted with a rainbow, which was the symbol of the divine law that haloes the earth. Muntzer then began an apocalyptic discourse, the hysterical ardor of which augured a great deficiency in the means required for such an enterprise: “If there are but three of you who, trusting in God, seek only his name and honor, you will not fear a hundred thousand. Now go at them, and at them, and at them! The scoundrels are as dispirited as dogs...”[465]

Pfeiffer refused to leave Muelhausen. Storch, on the other hand, joined the peasant forces led by the messiah of the Third Age.

Joss Fritz conducted guerrilla operations with his skillful and rapid forces. As for Muntzer, he put the fate of his army in the hands of the same God that Luther invoked, from his side, so as to aid the princes and finish off the riffraff. In Frankenhausen, 5,000 peasants — hoping for a gesture from the Savior until the last minute — let themselves be massacred. The army of the princes and Luther lost eight mercenaries. Storch died trying to escape from the vise that the masters of heaven and earth tightened upon him. On 27 May 1525, Thomas Muntzer and Heinrich Pfeiffer were decapitated after having been tortured according to custom. The repression fell upon all of Germany. But if revolutionary Anabaptism ebbed in the countrysides, it did so only to be reborn with an increased rigor in the towns, where economic development progressed at the cost of a forced exploitation of the proletariat.

Hut, Huebmaier And Hutter

While the persecution multiplied visions of pyres, gallows and wheels [of torture], which the works of Pieter Brueghel would hold up like acts of accusation against a completely humiliated humanity, the Anabaptist movement hesitated between the anemic pacificism of the Vaudois and the violence in which God would (as usual) recognize his own.

A disciple of Muntzer, Hans Hut (also a native of Thuringia) did not hesitate to announce that in 1528 the Christ would descend upon the earth to confer the sword of his justice to the saints who were rebaptized so that they could annihilate the parish-priests, pastors, nobles and kings. The Kingdom of God would be established in the shared community of goods and the freedom of love.

Captured in 1527, Hut died in prison, no doubt due to torture, leaving others the care of leading his program to completion: “The Christ would give them, the Anabaptists, the sword and vengeance to punish all sinners, to efface all governments, to place in common all property and kill those who would not allow themselves to be rebaptized.”[466]

Hut wasn’t the only one to substitute a God of resentment and great purification for the God of the dominant oppression. In 1528, the Anabaptists of Esslingen, on the Neckar [River], and Ulm fomented social revolution under the flag of what the Twentieth Century would call “extremism.” (The last monotheistic religion, Islam, would rediscover in extremism a similar clash between the decline of the agrarian system and the emergence of mercantile modernity.)

Unlike the doctrines of Hut and Muntzer, those of Balthasar Huebmaier (called Pacimontanus) professed an absolute pacifism and a great spiritual opening. The pastor at Waldschut in Bavaria and a preacher at the Cathedral of Ratisbonne, he expounded the cause of Anabaptism in 1525; shortly thereafter he became uneasy and went to Zurich, from whence he was chased in 1526.

Taking refuge in Moravia, he rallied the sympathies of the inhabitants of Nikolsburg to his pacifist ideals. He gained the protection of the lords of Lichtenstein. He founded a print shop, from which came tracts that popularized the new faith. His adepts were estimated to number around 12,000 people.

Around 1527, Hans Amon, the leader of the Anabaptists in Lower Austria, provoked a schism in Huebmaier’s community. Amon estimated that believers must not possess anything of their own, unlike the more moderate opinions that Menno Simonsz would later adopt according to the doctrinal line traced out by Huebmaier.

Nevertheless, Moravia soon experienced the backwash of the repressive wave that hit Germany. Since Vienna had summonded him to appear and respond to its religious options, Huebmaier — who refused to retract his remarks — was delivered to the inquisitors by his protectors, the lords of Lichtenstein. He was burned on 10 March 1528.

Hans Amon took refuge with his disciples in Slavkov, better known as Austerlitz. There in 1523 he faced the dissidence of a faction that — in the heritage of the Pikarti or Adamites — intended to live in accordance with free sex, nay, free love.

John Hutter, a native of Moso in South Tyrol, was invited to lead the community and banned those who enriched themselves. Threatened with arrest, he left Moravia for Tyrol, where he would die, executed in February 1536.

The Moravian Anabaptist community known in Slovakia under the name “Habans” — from the Hebrew words ha banim, “the true children of God” — would perpetuate under the name “Hutterite” the fundamental teachings of Valdeism that had been adopted by Anabaptism: the rejection of private property; the refusal to pay taxes by arguing that the State used this money to finance armed conflicts; the election of the preacher who leads the community; baptism submitted to the decision of adults; the refusal to bear arms; and the condemnation of war and the death penalty. Such would be enough to arouse the permanent animosity of the temporal and spiritual authorities.

Around the middle of the Sixteenth Century, there were nearly 70,000 adepts in Moravia. Incited by the Jesuits, the Catholic authorities would chase them from the country. The adepts’ disobedient attitude during the Thirty Years’ War would end up in their dispersal. They went to Translyvania, Poland, southern Russia and, starting in the Eighteenth Century, the United States.

Meanwhile, Mennonism would distance the faithful from their ambition to instaurate on earth the egalitarian kingdom of “each for God and God for all.”

Melchior Hoffmann

The road taken by Melchior Hoffmann irresolutely traced itself between the aggressivity of Muntzer and Hut, and the pacifism of Huebmaier. Born around 1495 in Swabisch Hall, Hoffmann was enthusiastic about the mystical works of Tauler and the works of Luther, whom he defended at Wolmar until his expulsion from the town in 1523. At Dorpat in Estonia he preached against the use of images, inspiring an iconoclast riot in 1525, in the course of which the crowd prevented his arrest.

Hoffmann’s obstinacy in predicting the end of time drew upon him the hostility of the Lutherians, one of whom (Tegetmaier) forced Hoffmann to leave Dorpat. In Stockholm, where he got married, Hoffmann fixed 1533 as the advent of the era of the saints. Exiled by Gustave Vasa, he fled to Luebeck with his wife and children, then went to Magdeburg for a while; the Lutherian Nicolas Amsdorf demanded his expulsion. Welcomed in Holstein, he was flushed out by the intrigues of Luther, whose zeal in persecuting dissidents was the envy of the inquisitors. Summoned by Duke Christian to present himself at a public confrontation in Flensburg, Hoffmann responded, not without pride, to the question of his partisans: “I do not recognize any adherents. I hold myself upright and only in the Word [Verbe] of God. Each one does the same.”[467]

Chased from Denmark, Hoffmann took refuge in Frize, where he encountered Carlstadt, then went to Strasbourg. There in 1529 he published his Dialogues on the quarrels of Flensburg. He associated with Caspar Schwenckfeld and produced prophetic texts. Then Hoffmann joined the Anabaptists and intervened at the Council at Strasbourg so that a church might be assigned to them. This brought a torch to the fire of the repression. Once again he was forced into exile. In Frize, he founded an Anabaptist community, while Luther raged against those whom he (drawing upon Hoffmann’s first name) called “Melchiorites.” Luther’s words had the virtues of a guillotine blade. In 1531, Volkertszoon and eight [other] Melchiorites wee decapitated at The Hague. Stirred by the ardor of their martyrdom, Hoffmann preached in Hess and Frize where, around 1532, Obbe Philipps became his disciple.

In the incessant glow of the violence, Hoffmann suddenly proposed — in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans — a peaceful conception of Anabaptism that excluded all recourse to weapons, pursuaded as he was that the redemption of humanity proceded from those who preach in the desert.

He had scarcely appeased the notables and the [property] owners when a pamphlet in which he addressed prayers, not to the Christ nor to the Holy-Spirit but to God alone, displeased the Protestant clergy, prompted like all the priests and ministers to take offense that one might address oneself to the master of the heavens without referring to the masters of the earth. Bucer, the Pope of Strasbourg, would order his arrest.

His biographers have estimated that this was an error from the point of view of maintaining order, because his growing influence little by little counterbalanced the directives of the insurrectional wing of Anabaptism which, growing in Holland, would soon inspire a wave of urban revolts that ran aground in Amsterdam, Antwerp and Luebeck, but succeeded in Munster.

After the defeat of the Munsterites, among whom his disciple Rothman perished, the conditions of Hoffmann’s detention became more serious. Only the hope of dragging a public retraction out of him — which were indeed the means that Bucer and Capito used — could save him from capital punishment. He died in 1543, never having lost his eloquence, his naivete or his faith in the imminence of the terrestrial Jerusalem.

Ironically, the majority of Hoffmann’s disciples would find themselves at the center of the Munsterian powder keg. But it is true that, for close to a century, Anabaptism expressed in theological terms an endemic insurrectional situation, the violence of which most often got lost in the countries dominated by Catholicism and its religious wars. Like Hans Denck, who ironically regretted that God had not permitted him to believe in God, the Anabaptists substituted for the God of feudalism a collectivist God elected by the members of their own party. In this sense, Munster offered a beautiful example of the divine collectivism that was headed for a frightening future once God was removed from office by the State, which, self-sufficient, would no longer feel the need to invoke a celestial phantom to perpetuate the reign of fear on earth.[468]

The Munsterites

“North-west Germany at the beginning of the Sixteenth Century consisted in the main of a number of petty ecclesiastical states, each with a prince-bishop as its sovereign. Usually such a state was torn by fierce social conflicts. The government of the state was in the hands of the prince-bishop and of the chapter of the diocese, which elected him and to a large extent controlled his policy. The members of the chapter were recruited solely from the local aristocracy — a coat of arms with at least four quarterings was commonly an indispensable qualification — and they often chose one of their own number as bishop. This group of aristocratic clerics was subject to no control by any higher authority; in the regional diet they were powerfully represented and could always rely on the support of the knighthood. They therefore tended to govern solely in the interest of their own class and of the clergy of the diocese. In the ecclesiastical state, the clergy were not only very numerous — in the bisphoric of Munster there were some thirty ecclesiastical centers, including four monasteries, seven convents, ten churches, a cathedral and of course the chapter itself — but also highly privileged. Members of the chapter enjoyed rich prebends and canonries. The monks were permitted to carry on secular trades and handicrafts. Above all, the clergy as a whole were almost entirely exempt from taxation.”[469]

In 1531, Chaplain Bernt Rothmann was converted to Lutheranism at Munster. He enjoyed the support of the guilds and a rich textile manufacturer, Knipperdollinck. Seduced by the prophetic inspiration of Melchior Hoffmann, Rothmann preached the imminence of the “messianic sorrows” that announced the birth of a new era in 1533, the 15^th centenary of the death of the Christ.

Upon the death of the bishop, the guilds opened the town to Reformed pastors. Hunted everywhere, the Anabaptists came there as if to the promised land.

In 1531, Sebastian Franck summarized The Fifth Epistle attributed to Clement thus:

A little later, Nemrod would reign and then whomever was successful at it dominated the next one. And they began to divide the world and to quarrel about questions of property. One then distinguished Mine from Thine. Finally, the people became savage, like wild beasts. Each one wanted to be more beautiful and better than the others, in fact hoping to become their master. But God had made all things to be held in common, as today we still take advantage in common of the air, fire, the rain and the sun, and which several thievish and tyrannical men cannot appropriate and keep jealously for themselves.[470]

The Fifth Epistle was partial to Rothmann, whose popularity was growing among the afflux of unemployed Dutch workers, whom the rich Lutherians could not see wandering the streets of the city, penetrated with holiness, without experiencing fear.

The imprisonment of Melchior Hoffmann in Strasbourg weakened the pacifist faction and favored the efflorescence of the apostles and prophets who were more willing to brandish the torch of Munster. Among them, the butcher Jan Matthys of Haarelm and Jan Bockelson (also called John of Leyden) set themselves up as the spokesmen for a crowd for which God had prepared to set the table for a new egalitarian law.

In February 1534, a veritable hysteria for conversion seized the city; the streets were filled with ecstatics who professed their obedience to the eternal Father, to whom they delivered the city hall without striking a blow. Lutherians and Catholics took flight while Munster was proclaimed the New Jerusalem through the voices of Rothmann, Matthys and Bockelson.

The goods of the banished Lutherians and Catholics were confiscated and used to enrich communal funds. While a decree promulgated the death penalty for those who balked at letting themselves be rebaptized, the Bishop of Munster organized the siege of the town and alerted the princes and municipal counsels so that the hordes who were converging upon the egalitarian millennium could be intercepted and massacred.

After the death of Matthys, who was killed during a sortie that a divine order conjoined him to attempt, Bockelson imposed a collectivist regime and a theocratic dictatorship by virtue of which all opposition was a crime of high treason.

Each was paid by the municipal power; in the refectories, communal meals assured the needs of all under the auspices of fraternal communion. Since property depended upon sin, it was mandated that the doors of the houses be kept open. The executions of “heretics,” presided over by “the King of the Final Days,” went on and on in an atmosphere of terror, to which famine was soon added. Like all paradises of celestial or governmental [etatique] obedience, the reign of the perfect ones turned into Hell.[471]

The millenarianist revolution imploded into horror. After the reconquest of the town by the besiegers, the great fear caused by Anabaptism would efface the dream and nightmare of the collectivists of God with a still greater ferocity. In silent agony, John of Leyden, Knipperdollinck and their friend Krechting — carved alive by burning pincers — condensed into an eternal silence the inhumanity of the oppressor and the oppression that continues to reign under the deceptive name of human history.

Pacifists And Terrorists: Menno Simonsz And Battenburg

The annihilation of Munster enraged the hardliners at the same time that the pacifism of Huebmaier and old Hoffmann restored Anabaptism to the road of sweet resignation. The odor of holiness would again be found in the very fetidity of God’s carnivorous breath.

Although persecuted as much as the Munsterites, the disciples of an old priest named Menno Simonsz (1496 to around 1560), or the “Mennonites,” professed a resolutely nonviolent doctrine that was stripped of collectivist demands. In 1537, the tendency inspired by Huebmaier fell under the control of Simonsz, who organized it and founded one of the many Protestant churches still in vogue today in Holland, the United States and Canada.

By contrast, the guerrilla war led by John of Battenburg, born in 1495 in Gueldre, marked a stage of transition between the disaster at Munster and the unfurling of the iconoclasts in the southern Netherlands and northern France.

Abandoning his functions as the Mayor of Steenwijck in the Overijssel, John of Battenburg rallied the insurrectional wing of the Anabaptists and, in 1535 — during a tumult caused by the sect — seized Oldeklooster, a monastery in the Bolsward region.

That same year, he founded with the survivors of Munster the group called Zwaardgeesten, “The Spirits of the Sword.” Identifying himself with Elie, and tasked with preparing the return of the Christ to earth, Battenburg called for the destruction of churches, preached polygamy and the community of goods, demanded divorce when one of the partners in a couple refused to practice confession, and exhorted his followers to exterminate with their swords anyone who didn’t share his opinions.

In 1536, the Congress of Bocholt tried in vain to reconcile the Munsterites, the partisans of Battenburg and the sectarians of David Joris. The pacifists carried the day and Battenburg’s appeal to armed struggle was judged to be premature.

Arrested in 1537 in Vilvorde near Brussels, Battenburg died on the pyre in 1538, leaving Zeylmaker, Appelman and Mickers at the head of the Zwaardgeesten. The attacks against the monasteries and churches increased; the places that were sacked were located in Alkmaar (1538), Utrecht (1541), the Overijssel, Frize, Brabant, Leyden and the surroundings of Munster, where the Battenburgist Peter Van Ork was burned in 1544. Despite the execution of Appelman in Leyden that same year, the anti-clerical actions intensified in Frize (1549), Alost (1550), where a group of insurgents practiced sexual freedom, Leyden (1552) and Courtrai (1553).

The sacking of churches and the asassinations of their ministers aroused popular approval, “because the people who did not like priests were not lacking and they gladly applauded the priests’ troubles and disasters”[472] and wanted to “hang the assholes [couilles] in the air,”[473] as Marc Van Vaernewijck reported in his Memoirs of a Ghentian Patrician on the Religious Troubles in Flanders.

The Iconoclasts

Even when the leaders of the Battenburg party disappeared, the Anabaptist uprisings did not any less inflame the Netherlands and northern France. But with a growing obviousness the social and political motives gained the upper hand on the [strictly] religious character. The national[ist] struggle undertaken in the Netherlands against Spanish domination created an odd front in which the most diverse interests tried to unite upon the general discontent, which lacked a shared program. The nobles uneasily tolerated the restrictions imposed on their regional privileges by the absolutism of Philippe II; the bourgeoisie balked at paying taxes for a war that hindered its growth; even the clergy feared having its hands tied by the State power that the Inquisition wanted to have with a self-interested fervor. As far as the “malicious animal called the people,” to use the words of Granvelle, the Governor of the Netherlands, it had only the recourse of toppling those responsible and the symbols of its oppression, that is to say, nearly the totality of what surrounded it.

The social violence was doubly useful for the political designs of the candidate for power: it would bring William of Orange to royalty and fostered his legend as the liberator of the northern provinces. Through the repression that it incurred, once victory was assured, it would legitimate him in the eyes of the princes, who were impatient to cage the wild beasts after letting them roar for a while.

In 1566, the discontent seemed to come from Saint-Omer. (As early as 1562, two Calvinist weavers led to the pyre in Valenciennes were liberated by rioters. In 1564, the people forced open the doors at the prisons in Bruges and Brussels.) The troubles spread to the north. On 13 August [1566], in Bailleul, the crowd destroyed the cloister, burned the crosses and the sacerdotal habits, and brought down the tabernacles. The sacking lasted eights months and spread to Armentieres, Menin, Hondschoote (which was so constant in its resolution that, later, the commissars of the Duke of Albe — charged with penal sanctions — kept far away), Tournai, where several magistrates embraced the party of the iconoclasts, a part of Artois, Brabant, Utrecht, Zelande and Amsterdam. In Antwerp, the houses of the rich were pillaged on the third day.

On 8 April 1566, taking the unfurling of iconoclasticism as their pretext, Catholics and Calvinists presented a reprimand to the Regent Marguerite of Parme and to the “bad counselors to the King” that was known as the “Compromise of the Nobles.” In it, the Catholics and Calvinists matched their rejection of absolutism with their promise to restore order. They adorned themselves, as with an emblem, with the epithet “Beggar,” which a minister had applied to them in an insulting manner and for which the destroyers of cathedrals vyied. On 25 August 1566, Marguerite of Parme feigned to give in. She decreed the suppression of the Inquisition, the freedom of the Reformed religion and amnesty for the nobles accused of conspiracy. The latter hastened to suppress the riots and intervened in the consistories to calm peoples’ spirits. William of Orange marched on Antwerp and the Count of Egmont attempted to restore order in Flanders, where the number of rebels was estimated at 60,000 out of a total of 200,000 inhabitants.

Reassured by guarantees of freedom offered to their ministries, the Calvinist preachers condemned the iconoclastic party, whose ardor had not weakened. At first, those whom one in northern France called the “howlers” [hurlus] abstained from killing and carrying off ecclesiastical goods that were generally destroyed on the spot. They prided themselves on only leaving behind the rubble of some 400 churches.

Having concentrated the Spanish troops, Marguerite went on the offensive in December 1566. She annulled the decisions that dictated to her the necessity of temporizing and sent the army to Armentieres, Tournai and Valenciennes, where it brought the repression begun under feudalism to a good end.

William of Orange and Brederode fled to the northern provinces, where an open guerrilla war was being fought against Spain. The expeditious justice instituted by the envoy of Philippe II, the Duke of Albe, spared neither the iconoclasts, the Catholics, the Calvinists nor the nobles who were judged to be disloyal. (The Counts of Egmont and Hornes were decapitated in 1568.)

In the southern provinces, the “Beggars” of the forests fought in Hainaut and Artois under the leadership of William of La Marck, and in Flanders under Jan Camerlynck, originally from Hondschoote, and the preachers Michiels and de Heule, the son of a rich family from Bruges. On their side, Jan Abels and the “Beggars” of the seas attacked Spanish ships with the aid of light, small boats. They benefited from the benevolence of Elizabeth of England and the aid of William of Orange, who in tried to make them submit to his authority. On 1 April 1572, the seizure of the port of La Brielle and the subsequent occupation of Flessingue marked a decisive stage in the liberation of Holland. Albe, who sank in his attempt to reconquer it, was recalled to Spain the following year. The movement of the “Beggars” fell under the blows of William of Orange and, in the south, was only able to launch political conspiracies that had no results.

The last flare-up of revolutionary Anabaptism would embrace the regions of Cleve and Wesel in Westphalia in 1567. A shoemaker named Jan Willemsen would led 300 adepts (among whom were survivors of Munster) in the nth version of the New Jerusalem, to which Adamite practices gave a bit of piquancy. Polygamy was prescribed and the Messiah Willemsen would marry 21 chosen ones. The community of goods did not implicate an economy of production; the saints lived off of raids and pillaging, attacking the homes of the priests and nobles. They lasted a dozen years before succumbing to punitive expeditions.[474]

• Chapter 43 : The Individualist Messiahs: David Joris, Nicolas Frey, Hendrik Niclaes

Chapter 43: The Individualist Messiahs: David Joris, Nicolas Frey, Hendrik Niclaes

David Joris

Among the wandering preachers whom the Reformation and the free interpretation of the sacred texts threw upon Europe’s roads, David Joris distinguished himself more through the singularity of his destiny than through the originality of his thought. Pursued by the hatred of the Catholics, Lutherians, Calvinists, Mennonites and Munsterians, this man — upon whose head there was a price wherever he went — would end his life peacefully in Basle, under the outward appearance of a notable, orthodox adept of Reformed doctrines, honorably known as John of Bruges.

Born in Bruges, perhaps in Delft, less probably in Ghent, he was surnamed David due to the role traditionally played by his father, Joris, during the sacred mysteries presented at the Chambre de Rhetorique. After a career as a glass engraver in Delft, he traveled as much as a merchant in the Netherlands, France and England, frequently visiting Antwerp, where he engaged in polemics with Eloi Pruystinck, founder of a group of Free-Spirit.

In 1524, he wedded Dirckgen Willems in Delft. His enthusiasm for the Reformation and his hostility for the Roman clergy brought him public torture and a banishment of three years. He then adhered to the most persecuted sect, the Anabaptists, went to Strasbourg in 1535 and manifested his opposition to the violence of the Munsterites. By virtue of an exception, his meglomania never brought him to renounce the ideals of pacificism and tolerance.

The vision of the prophetess Anneken Jans suddenly revealed to him his eschatalogical mission. He identified with the biblical David whom his father so often played on the boards of the local theater; he preached renunciation, asceticism and the advent of the millennium. The number of his partisans soon worried the temporal powers, which took repressive measures against him. Like all those elected by God, David discerned in the threats that stood out against the horizon the traditional ordeals that announced the birth of a new era. He wrote to the court of Holland, to Philippe of Hesse and to the Emperor, soliciting their support for the Davidite royalty that God had enjoined him to found.

In 1539, when Menno Simonsz denounced her as a false prophet, Anneken Jans was burned at Delft. Condemned to a proscribed life, he clandestinely visited Holland, Frize and Belgium. After the death of John of Battenburg, many terrorists joined his party, in which nonviolence offered a larger place for certain Free-Spirit ideas, in particular, Adamism, that is, the necessity of recovering Edenic innocence.

Although he was hunted everywhere in Europe, David Joris devoted himself to a frenetic activity intended to get himself recognized as a messiah. He went to Oldenburg and Strasbourg, encountering there the moderate wing of the Anabaptists, whom he irritated with his obstinacy in asking for their obedience. In 1542, his most important book, The Book of Marvels (’t Wonderboeck), was published.

David denied the Bible its self-avowed privilege as unique Book. Mystical experience took priority over Scripture because only revelation illuminates the presence of God in each person. Identifying the body of man with the temple of God, David — in the first edition of his book — represented “the last Adam or the new ecclesiastical man” and “the fiance of the Christ, the renewal of all things” in engravings that were judged to be “obscene.” A note made precise the idea that the attractiveness of the young woman of the era of the saints, or Eve, symbolized “the happiness, life and voluptuousness of the spirit.” Once more, the amorous conjunction discovered in spiritual androgyny the pretext for its natural legitimization. The secret life joyously led by David after his retreat from Basle would use religious discourse to remove shame and bad conscience.

Jundt quotes many extracts from the Wonderboeck.

God is absolute, without beginning, a light beyond all light, a depthless abyss, the eternal origin of all that exists, an endless end. He resides in himself, unchanging and impassive, incomprehensible and silent, reposing on the foundation of his own being, like a rock or a mountain of gold. Essence without essence, he does not manifest himself in his absoluteness, he does not think about himself; nor does he express what he is; his grandeur, length, size and depth surpass all human conception; everything is annihilated on his side. And yet he is the supreme activity, he is the eternal essence and lives in all objects. It is not outside of ourselves that we must look for him, but inside us, because he is Spirit; he is the infinite light of eternal justice, widsom, truth and reason; he is the Lord of this very light, substance, life and intelligence that enlighten the intimate thoughts of the hearts of the believers and thanks to which we are able to distinguish the objects of the visible world: holy and pure essence, of perfect beauty and innocence.

The eternal and hidden God is obliged to manifest his unintelligible essence through his Word [parole] of justice, in the power of his eternal wisdom and trust; he realizes in his Word the virtuality that he has to know himself. In his Word, he lets escape outside of himself, and creates in visible form, his Sons and Daughters in conformity with his own manner of being, and destined to possess in all truth his Spirit and essence, as the eternal lights of the new heavens. God knows himself in the Word [Verbe], which is the image of his divine splendor, his Spirit and his substance, insofar as it is inclined towards the world of the creatures; he expresses in himself all that exists, his holy creatures equal to him, who are his Sons and Daughters. God thus begins to exist (in concrete form) in his creatures; his creation has its eternal origin in himself and pursues itself indefinitely by means of the Son, that is to say, the divine intelligence and the distinctions that this intelligence establishes in the absolute essence. Everything that emanates from God is and remains God; God remains in everything, all in all, him alone and no other. In this emanation towards us, God has received in Christ the many denominations, by means of which we try, stammering, to express his essence. This emanation does not exhaust the divine essence: similar to a fountain that flows without interruption, the Spirit of God overflows all parts and lets escape beyond him the plenitude of his being, strength, life and intelligence.

When a person is elevated to the perfection of the life of the Spirit, there is no longer for him any difference between good and evil, life and death, the fall and the rising. The members of the body fulfill quite different functions and yet are equally necessary to him: it is likewise unnecessary to say that one thing is not as good as another, because all things are equally good in the eyes of God and it isn’t possible to make them otherwise or better. To scorn anything would be to scorn God in his entirety [son oeuvre]. It is only for us that different degrees of beauty, faith, spirituality and holiness exist: for God and in God there is neither augmentation nor diminution; he remains unchanging in his essence as he has always been. If someone — following the example of the Pharisians — wants to render his external life irreproachable so as to appear just and good in the eyes of mankind, it is only necessary to aggravate the state of corruption in which he finds himself; because he scorns the work and life of God, he damns his soul through his own justice and his own wisdom. No: to be blamed and condemned on earth is to be justified and sanctified in heaven. What one in the here-below calls lowdown and corrupt is beautiful and praiseworthy to [aupres] the Lord; because what pleases men displeases God; what they call good, he calls evil; what they consider to be pure and holy, he considers impure and execrable. In the same way that light follows darkness, and day is born from night, faith manifests itself through incredulity, hope through despair, love through hate and envy, goodness of the heart through guile, simplicity through duplicity, innocence through indecency, frankness through dissimulation, the spirit through the flesh, truth through the lie, and celestial essence through terrestrial essence; and so it is necessary to place oneself above the judgment of men, if they blame you or if they praise you, to act in complete freedom, and to realize with a total independence good through evil, what is imperishable through what is perishable, and to let what is luminous and pure manifest itself in its purity through what is impure.

Mankind must completely abandon itself to God’s direction and do what he commands, women as well as men. God only acts from eternity in eternity; everything that exists is his work. It follows that all that is, must be, and that which does not exist, must not. God in his goodness has made everything good. Thus we live without being concerned about anything, because we are free from all evil; we reside and we live in the good. We abstain from finding anything bad, because all God’s works are good. If someone does us wrong, we do not get carried away: do we get irritated with the stone against which we stub our toe? In the same way that a flute does not play itself, but is played by the breath of a person, mankind does not act by itself, but is played, speaks and manifests itself through him. Mankind is the property of God; the unique goal of its existence is to glorify its Creator; thus it must not seek its own glory in anything, but must attribute all glory to God and Christ, according to the terms of the Scriptures. Each must be content with the destiny that has been assigned to him; mankind must obey (without murmuring appeals to his Creator), must be ready to follow God anywhere he pleases and to let God make of it what he wants. Does not the potter have the right to give the clay the form that is fitting? With his iron scepter, the Eternal will break all resistance from his creatures, as easily as the potter in anger smashes the vases that he has fashioned. The man to whom these truths appear too elevated must not repell them for the simple reason that he does not understand them; he must receive them in complete submission and keep quiet on what exceeds his understanding, unless he would risk blaspheming God in his ignorance, according to the Scriptures.

The regenerated need no longer desire, seek and marry according to the flesh any [particular] woman, as if they were [mere] men, subjected to their sinful natures, but can desire, seek and marry — according to the inward Spirit — the celestial substance, whose beauty is eternal and whose glory is imperishable; they must conceive in their intelligence the splendor and purity of the divine essence, the unalterable satisfaction that God experiences in himself and must let the rest follow their regular course, according to the good will of God. A man must not devote himself to a woman, nor a woman to a man: the elect must devote themselves exclusively to the Lord. Not that men and women must cease to engender [children], which would be contrary to the plan and will of God: here it is a question of the marriage of the angels, the celestial wedding, long since prepared for the children of God, according to the words [parole] of Jeremiah, Chap. XXXI: a woman will surround a man and unite with him; she will become a man with him, flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone. This isn’t a unique woman of whom the prophet speaks, but seven women united into one, the Fiance of Christ resides in seven communities. Seven women, yes, seven communities — understand me well! — must voluntarily humble themselves before one man who is Christ and they will be called his wives. Many communities give to Christ the names of Lord, Husband and King; but they are not his wives or his body: as long as they have not become his wives, he will not be their husband or their life. Christ lives for God and the community lives for Christ, that is to say, the woman lives for the man, but the man does not live for the woman. Indeed, the man is not created for the woman, but the woman is created for the man. The woman is deprived of liberty, vigor and will; she is placed under the power of the man, not under the protection and power of God. Such were Adam and Eve, of whom we carry the image in our nature: here were two souls, originally united in a single body. This unity has been broken: the man carries in himself the substance of the heavens, the woman the substance of the earth. This is why it is necessary for the woman to become man, according to the Scriptures, so that the substance foreign to the divine being can disappear. Then man will be an angel before the face of God, and man and woman together will again become equal to the Creator. Whomever will not be found in this state of celestial marriage will be cursed.[475]

Jundt concludes: “David Joris thus founded the legitimacy of polygamy or, rather, elective affinity, on the metaphysical principle of the recomposition of the integrity of human nature through the union of the sexes in a single being.”[476]

Unfortunate turns of events weren’t without the comfort of the idea that (according to the Lord) it suited David Joris to live an existence as bitter as that of a messiah, sect leader, apostle or outlaw. His mother was decapitated at Delft. In Deventer, his friend and publisher Juriaen Ketel died on the scaffold; his confessions led to the death of Eloi Pruystinck of Antwerp and the execution of his “libertine” friends. In his hatred, Menno Simonsz pursued Joris, denouncing his hypocrisy and the debaucheries perpetrated under the cover of perfection.

In Frize, a polemic with Johannes had [...][477] Lasco, where his authority as prophet was disparaged, motivated him to withdraw to Basle. There, under the name John of Bruges, he presented himself as a Lutherian who was persecuted by the papists. He installed himself in Basle in 1544 with his family, including his son-in-law, Simon Blesdijck, who was a Mennonite turncoat.

A respectable citizen thanks to the money that his disciples sent him, David Joris continued to send many letters of millenarianist hopes to his partisans, who lived as far away as Denmark. He justified his retreat by referring to the flight of the Christ to Egypt. No doubt Joris found good reasons by which to comfort his disciples’ voluntary poverty, while he himself lived in opulence thanks to his sect’s funds.

Furthermore, he used his credit as a notable from Basle to openly wage combat in favor of tolerance. He defended Michel Servetus and united in friendship with Schwenckfeld and Castellion. Towards the end of his life, he quarreled with his son-in-law Blesdijck, who became an enemy due to conditional loyalty. David Joris died on 25 August 1556 and was interred with great pomp at the Saint-Leonard Church in Basle.

Approximately two and a half years later, following the familial dissensions to which Blesdijck was not a stranger, Joris’ identity was brutally revealed, which provoked a slightly banal scandal in the city. Anxious, his family and friends protested their innocence. They affirmed that they knew nothing of the doctrines professed by David and that Blesdijck would condemn (the least orthodox aspects, that is) in a lampoon. He publicly adjured.

On 13 May 1559, the body and books of David were thrown on the pyre. Up to the Seventeenth Century, the Davidjorists continued to exist in Holstein, keeping up an atmosphere of polemic and calumny. David would find a defender in Gottfried Arnold, who attempted to rehabilitate him in his Unpartelische Kirchen — und Ketzer — Historie.[478]

Nicolas Frey

The case of Nicolas Frey offers a piquant parallel to the attitude of Henry VIII of England; and while the sword of justice overwhelmed one and served the other, the same divine will conferred the seal of its absolutism upon their very personal choices in the treatment of conjugal and private affairs.

Nicolas Frey was originally from Windsheim in Bavaria, where he was a trader of furs. When the Reformation came to this town, he became one of the most zealous partisans of the new ideas; but a short time later he allied himself with the Anabaptists in the countryside, received a second baptism, which would be the occasion for trouble in his native town; he was imprisoned and then released when he promised to change his conduct. But as the authorities demanded that he publicly retract his errors, he preferred to flee rather than submit to this humiliation. Thus after 15 years of marriage, he left his wife Catherine, with whom he had eight children, and headed towards Nuremburg. Deceiving the hospitality that he was offered in this town by one of its most pious and respected citizens, he won over to his doctrines the sister of his host, a woman named Elizabeth, and engaged with her in what he called a spiritual and celestial marriage. Catherine, the abandoned wife, arrived a little later in Nuremburg and encouraged her husband to return with her to their native town. In response, Frey mistreated her and chased her away. Later on, he wrote about this subject to his spiritual sister or, as he called her, his conjugal sister, Elizabeth: ‘I have seen in the Trinity that I must break the head of my first wife so that the prophecies of the Old and New Testaments can be accomplished. Is it not said that the seed [semence] of the woman will break the head of the serpent? My first wife is the serpent or demon spoken of by the Scriptures; as far as you are concerned, you are the wife whose seed must break her head. So as to become a disciple of Christ, I must hate women, children, home and homeland. If I have crushed the serpent of disbelief, it is because I was forced to do so, because it isn’t me who did it, but God who lives inside me and in whom I live.’ Obliged to leave Nuremburg, Frey went to Strasbourg in 1532; Elizabeth joined him soon thereafter. Their imprudent schemes and badly dissimulated relations with the other sectarians of the locality soon attracted the attention of the authorities. They were imprisoned. Warned of the presence of her husband in Strasbourg, Catherine went there and beseeched him to return with her to Windsheim. Frey was inflexible. Seeing his obstinacy, the magistrate condemned him on 19 May 1534 to be drowned as a bigamist, which took place three days later at the Pont du Corbeau.

According to Capiton, he had to confess the following errors: ‘The Church and the sacraments are the inventions of the Devil. — All the prophecies of the Scriptures refer to me, to my first wife and second wife. My first wife is the Queen of the Kingdom of Disbelief; she is prefigured in the person of Saul. My second wife is prefigured in David, I myself in Jonathan. In the same way that David and Jonathan formed a perpetual alliance to hunt Saul, I am allied spiritually with Elizabeth so as to hunt Catherine. — The most perfect work that a believer can accomplish is to abandon his first wife and wed a second. — The faith that justifies the Christian and the love of one’s neighbor consist in the constant affection of Elizabeth; this is a work that God produced in her, so that the loyal and pious Christian is improved and comes closer to his own origin. — Elizabeth is the mother of all believers; it is through her that the true Christian faith began on earth. — In the same way that Mary engendered the Christ, Elizabeth will restore the image of the Christ to humanity and for this reason she is as worthy of singing the Magnificat as the Virgin. — I am the leader of the Church; the Christ accomplished in me all his previous promises; no divine promise will be accomplished after me. — I am Christ following the eternal Word [Verbe], the angular rock that the builders rejected. — I am sent by God to show mankind the image of Christ in my person, just as Moses had previously showed it in his person. All the mysteries of the divinity must now be unveiled, because the Last Days have come. — All creatures who have fallen into perdition since the birth of Christ must be restored to their original perfection in me; I am the instrument by which God wishes to manifest his glory. — It is to the sublime school of God that Elizabeth brought these revelations; it is the Holy-Spirit who gave birth to them in her heart. — The ordinary preachers of the Gospel have only flattered idols; they know, it is true, how to quarter grossly the rocks [pierres] and to clear away the terrain for the future edifice, but they know nothing of construction. In their preaching they dishonor God and seduce their brothers because of their lack of faith, because they say that we are all sinners and they refrain from fulfilling the holy and perfect law, which is to abandon wife and children and follow the Lord.’[479]

Hendrik Niclaes And The Familists

Founded in 1540 by Hendrik Niclaes, the Family of Love — often wrongly defined as an Anabaptist sect — intended to reestablish the original human community in its innocence. Its organization included a bishop, whose authority was supported by twelve sages and four classes of priests. All gave their personal belongings to the sect. It included a quite large number of faithful, principally in the Netherlands and England, where their existence was still attested to in the Seventeenth Century.

Born in 1502, Hendrik Niclaes claimed that he had his first visions when he was nine years old, while attending a latin school. At the age of 12, he worked in his family’s business and took it over upon the death of his father. Arrested in 1529 for Lutheranism, he went to Amsterdam where he stayed for nine years before being suspected of Anabaptism. In 1541, he lived in Emden where he engaged in a flourishing trade in wool. He frequently traveled to Antwerp, where his friend, the printer Christopher Plantin, had been inspired by several of his texts.

At the age of 59, new prophetic visions and the publicity that he gave them brought torture [by the authorities] down upon him. He fled to Kempen, in the Overijssel, then to London, which was a temporary exile because Niclaes opportunely saved Plantin from ruin by transporting to Cologne the typographical materiels threatened with seizure by those who accused the printer of heresy. Dissent within the group darkened his last years. He died in 1580. Nippold attributed to him 50 pamphlets that were distributed clandestinely.

Niclaes’ doctrine preached love, tolerance and mutual respect, and rejected the God of justice in favor of a God of goodness. From millenarianism he retained the pretense that he acted as the mediator of divine revelation and the herald of the new era, in which antagonism among mankind would disappear.

His principal disciple was his servant, Hendrik Jansen, called Barrefelt, no doubt due to Barneveld, the place of his birth. Around the time of his break with Niclaes in 1573, he took the name Hiel, which in Hebrew means “one life in God.” Having gained the friendship of Christopher Plantin, Hiel began to prophetize on his own, perhaps in England, where the Family of Love had existed for more than a century. Many of these adepts joined the Ranters. His religious doctrine was related to that of Hans Denck.

‘The Father made himself human among us according to the inward man and edified us according to the inward man in a Spirit with him. The soul of man is not a creature, but a part of the uncreated God.’ And so he called himself ‘a man whom God raised from among the dead, whom he filled and anointed with the Holy-Spirit; an enlightened man of the Spirit of the celestial truth and the veritable light of the perfect essence; a man deified along with God in the spirit of his love and transformed into the being of God.’ According to him, the Christ is only ‘the image of the being of the right of God’; he must no longer be envisioned as a historical personage, but as a ‘condition’ shared by all those who live in union with God. From this metaphysical principle, he deduced that sin no longer exists in the heart of the regenerated: his disciples and he ‘only said in their prayers the first three parts of the Dominican oration, because, for them, they did not sin insofar as they were born from God’; he still derived both uselessness and unimportance from religious ceremonies: ‘The Lovers live and die without either baptism or the sacraments,’ or rather they considered the baptism of infants to be a valueless act that some were free to neglect while others were free to practice. They thus distinguished themselves from the Anabaptists, to whom it was no doubt fitting to link them historically. Hendrik Nicolas [sic] founded his doctrine on the theory of the three ages: ‘Moses only preached hope, Christ only taught faith, he himself announced the love that united all. The first penetrated into the square in front of the temple, the second into the sanctuary, he himself into the Holy of Holies.’[480]

The Puritan John Knewstub said of Hendrik Niclaes: “He got religion upside-down. He constructed heaven on earth; he made a man of his God and God a man (...). This heaven was games and laughing, [and] hell was grief, affliction and sorrow.”[481]

Jan Torrentius

Born in Amsterdam in 1589, Jan Torrentius — charged with Anabaptism, Davidjorism and Familism — cut the figure of an accursed painter in liberal Holland, well, at least in Holland liberated from Catholicism. Painter of still-lifes and so-called erotic paintings, he attempted to illustrate the hedonism celebrated by Dutch painting in the Seventeenth Century with, perhaps, less reservation than Jan Steen.

A member of an Adamite group that practiced the pleasures of love and the table,[482] he was arrested and subjected to torture. He denied all participation in the sect, but the “scandalous” character of his works earned him 20 years in prison.

Freed on the insistence of the ambassador from Austria, he took refuge in England. His return to Amsterdam brought new persecutions from the Protestants until his death in 1640. The government would order his paintings collected and burned by an executioner.[483]

• Chapter 44 : 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,[484] 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 who were outside of meaning — the senseless, the crazy — began (in the Renaissance) to lose the means of persuasion and terror that somehow or other strengthened the correct line of the dogma around which gravitated the spirit of beings and things, if not their very hearts.

Assuredly, the mockery, sarcasm and irony that whipped the austere and unhealthy ass of religion did not give birth to the tumults of the Sixteenth Century. The difference was that it was formulated in speech [parole] and not in writing. Penal history teems with reports such as the one that Jundt made in his study of popular pantheism:

In 1359, the town council forever banished a certain Claushorn, surnamed Engelbrecht, the school director Selden, and Cuentzelin of Atzenheim because they rapped on a seat of wood and a tripod, and said, ‘Here is God; we would like to break his foot,’ and because they had effaced the black points with which they were marked and said, ‘Here is God, we would like to burst his eyes.’ One of them even threw his knife at the sky and cried out, ‘I would like to strike God with my knife.’[485]

The formidable network of awakening and deadening that the printed press stretched between towns and countrysides had at first thrown between everyone’s hands the two Testaments that were completely filled with the incoherencies, absurdities and infamies through which God manifested his uncertain presence in society. By emphasizing the antitheses contained in the Bible, Johannes Denck abandoned each person to the care of devoting himself (or not) to the convictions of a faith that was intimate and deprived of reason. A little later, those whom the Church called “strong spirits” because they threatened the power of its Holy-Spirit began to disclose in writing the ironies that were capable of dissolving the authority of the Book that, for centuries, had crushed terrestrial and voluptuous life under its weight of guilt, fear, ferocity and contempt.

In this mixture of audacity and pusillanimosity, much remains poorly known.

Valentin Weigel

Despite his weak attachment to violence, Valentin Weigel (1533–1588) does not fail to evoke the parish priest John Meslier. A Lutherian pastor in Zschopau, Weigel led an existence [apparently] deprived of remarkable traits, only to reveal after his death a collection of works, partially published in Halle in 1609, in which he reduced the texts consecrated to the Apocalypse and the Revelations attributed to John to the name of the Beast, the number of which [666] nourished visions of the Third Age. He considered Luther, the Pope, Zwingli and others to be Antichrists, and thought the pastorate to be perfectly useless. Each man possessed in himself the divine spark that, embracing the body and the soul, rendered the Scriptures, grace, the clergy, theology and all historical religion to be null and void. The knowledge of God proceded, not from the Bible nor from the sacraments, but from an inward conviction that one could not restrain.

Dirk Volkertszoon Coornherdt

A polemicist, writer, engraver and humanist, Dirk Coornherdt was among the principal representatives of the Renaissance in Holland. Versatile and courageous, [and] in a country in which Protestant intransigence succeded Catholic intolerance, he led, despite persecution, an incessant fight in favor of religious freedom and against execution for committing heresy. A precursor of free-thinking, he left to each person the care of depending upon his or her own conscience and founding lay morality on the respect for others and a certain stoicism. His belief in a perfection accessible to mankind brought down upon him charges of “Pelagianism,” a term already in disuse in the Sixteenth Century.

Born in Amsterdam in 1522, Coornherdt was educated in the Catholic faith, which he never abjured, even under Orangist power; he would especially keep his evangelistic principles. He traveled to Spain and Portugal, became familiar with biblical exegesis, and learned music and engraving. After his return to Amsterdam, he got married in 1540 and then moved to Haarlem, where he became a professional engraver. Around 1544, he discovered the works of Luther, Calvin and Menno Simonsz. In 1550, he wrote Comedie van de rijcke man, and shortly thereafter translated Boece’s De consolatione philosophiae. Coornherdt associated with Hendrik Niclaes, the founder of the Family of Love, with whom he later quarreled, not without maintaining a certain nostalgia for an original, idyllic community. Thanks to Hans Denck, he was also interested in Sebastian Franck and the mystical fragments of the Deutsche Theologie. In 1560, Coornherdt took exception to Calvin and Menno. Two years later, Calvin threw at him his Response to a Certain Dutchman who, under the Guise of making the Christians completely Spiritual permits them to Pollute their Bodies through Idolatry and, in response to other texts on free will by Coornherdt, would be on his guard against “this man who pushes impiety to the extreme.”

A notary at the court of Holland, Coornherdt was successful at making himself suspect to both the Catholics and the Reformers. Following the riots of the iconoclasts, in which his role has not been clearly established, he was imprisoned at The Hague in 1567. He used his detention to write short texts and pamphlets; he escaped in 1568 and was a secret agent for the Prince of Orange, despite the hostility of the Protestants, until 1572. He returned to Haarlem and, charged in a report about the “Beggars” led by Lumey, he denounced their brutalities and abuses of power, and thus attracted their hatred. Coornherdt hid himself in Leyden, then Zamten. When Requesens, the Governor of the Netherlands, announced a general pardon in 1574, Coornherdt was excluded. He didn’t hesitate to address himself to Philippe II in the hope of recovering his confiscated goods. From whence comes his reputation, which followed him, for “playing all the angles” [manger a tous les rateliers].

When Coornherdt returned to Holland, the hostility of the Reformers towards him had grown and he did nothing to attenuate it. He defended the Catholic minority, which was oppressed in Holland; he produced many appeals for tolerance; he pronounced himself opposed to the death penalty for dissidents of all stripes; and he translated the writings of Sebastian Castellion. It was only because of the influence of William of Orange that Coornherdt was not condemned to life in prison. Chased from Haarlem in 1585, he went to Emden, where he published a work of Stoic inspiration in 1586. Banished from Delft after a stay of three months, he sought refuge in Gouda and died there on 29 October 1590.

In Coornherdt one sees the passage of Christian morality into lay morality, enriched with ideas of tolerance and freedom of spirit. The influence of the mystics and Denck appeared in a language stripped of its sacred references, in an exhortation for the mutual respect of individuals. Finally, the idea that mankind can attain perfection through a constant effort of will, so that it can no longer sin, appears in Pelage’s theses and not — as one sometimes reproached Coornherdt — in the doctrines of the Spiritual Libertines.

Bernardino Ochino

The humanist Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564) practiced all of the religions and doctrines of his time for nearly 80 years. He did not wait for the first fruits of old age to affirm — despite the risks of a contrasted destiny — that the unique value of life is found in terrestrial favors and savors. Born in Sienna in the neighborhood of Oca, from which he drew his name, he entered the Franciscan order and became a nasturtium [capucin] preacher. He met Juan of Valdes and let himself be seduced by Luther’s ideas. Ochino broke with Catholicism and went to Geneva, where his tolerant spirit was found to be repugnant to Calvin. He then went to Augsburg, Strasbourg and Canterbury, where he vituperated the Pope. He wrote The Labyrinth of Free Will or, to speak truly, Servile Will and the Means of Getting Out of It. As he recovered from [attachment to] all systems, he professed a discreet atheism, allied with a Rabelaisian quest for pleasure. At the time, one attributed to him — and no doubt falsely — authorship of The Book of the Three Impostors, which was imputed to other adventurers of his type and whose influence merits being better studied:[486] Simon of Neufrille (from Hainaut), who died in Padua in 1530, a disciple of the skeptic Christopher of Longueil, himself the teacher of Etienne Dolet.

At the age of 60, Ochino wed a young woman. His Dialoghi XXX, which celebrated the merits of polygamy, caused his expulsion from Zurich in 1563. He took refuge in Poland, then in Slavkov (Austerlitz) in Moravia, where he succumbed to the plague in 1565.[487]

Noel Journet

Originally a schoolteacher from Suzanne, near Attigny-en-Rethellois, Noel Journet was among the disciples of Dirk Coornherdt, whom he met during a visit to the Netherlands. He inscribed himself in the line of Johannes Denck through his attention to the inconsistencies and absurdities in the Bible. The publication of his commentaries drew down upon him the denunciations of the Calvinists, who had him burned, along with his book, on 29 June 1582.[488]

Pastor John Chassanion found it useful to refute the lampoon, which thus attached his name to the annals of the infamy of informers and Journet’s name to the unfortunates of reason.

The Refutation of the Strange Errors and Horrible Blasphemies against God and the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Prophets and Apostles made by a certain Misfortunate Person who for such Impieties was justly Condemned to Die and who was Burned in the City of Metz on 29 June, the year of Our Lord MDLXXXII, by John Chassanion, Minister of the Reformed Church of Metz quotes the following statements, among others:

‘Moses was an enemy of humankind, a captain of murderers and brigands. He gave the orders into the hearts of all to sack [the place] when they entered Canaan, to kill the women and all the male children who had been spared by the downfall of the Madianites, only preserving the virginal girls (Nb 31, 17–18; Dt 7, 2).’

‘Jacob was a deceiver. He notably used striped sticks to influence the color of the lambs and to increase his portion of the animals (Gn 30, 37–42).’

‘Moses did not write the Pentateuch, seeing that his own death is related at the end of it (Dt 34).’

’Deuteronomy was drafted in the land of Canaan, because it says, Dt 4, 47, that the children of Israel possessed the land of the two Amorean kings beyond the Jordan.’

Other affirmations more surely brought upon him the sanctions of the justice. He did indeed declare that the magistrates were all “tyrants and thieves,” that the great ones [les tailles] were “true tyrants” and that “a woman no longer married according to her tastes can take another husband so as to avoid debauchery.”

Geoffroy Vallee

Geoffroy Vallee owed his new name and premature death to a lampoon entitled The Beatitude of the Christians, or the Scourge of Faith. Born in Orleans around 1550, the “beautiful Valley,” as his libertine friends called him, allied with the search for the pleasures of existence the taste for publicly critiquing the things that hindered and perverted them. He pushed imprudence as far as signing his name to a pamphlet that was directed, not only against the [established] religions, but against all beliefs, which were all founded on fear, according to him. Sometimes distributed under the title De arte nihil credendi [The Art of Believing in Nothing], this text was accused of committing divine high treason. Arrested on the orders of the Provost-Marshal Nicolas Rapin, Vallee soon thereafter benefited from the support and friendship of the libertine aristocracy that the Seventeenth Century took pride in: people like Desbarreaux (whose great-uncle was Geoffroy), Claude the Small, Belurgey, Theophile of Viau, Blot, and Cyrano de Bergerac, who were free spirits who often despaired of the prohibitions that sanctioned the simple aspiration to live well.

The defense [in Geoffroy’s trial], adopting an old argument of the Church, invoked the “senseless” character of the writing and its author. Rapin was inclined to grant a relative leniency if the Bishop of Nevers, Armand Sorbin, did not personally intervene to demand the youthful man’s execution. On 9 February 1574, Geoffroy Vallee, 84 years old, was hanged then burned. The Jesuit Garasse rejoiced at the “beautiful sacrifice to God at Greve, where he [Geoffroy] was burned half-alive.”[489]

Geoffroy Vallee condemned to execration “this [religious] faith, since it wants all that we are lodged within it, for all of our lives, even to the point of singing the Credo to us at death.” He successively examined the Catholic faith, “from which comes all evil” and that forged the fear of the devil and the executioners; the faith of the Hugeunots, with their “false intelligence (and) fear and baton blows, so that, if they do not believe, they can not be saved.” The faith of the Anabaptists and that of the Libertines were hardly better. Even atheism didn’t find a place, because “I take my sensual pleasure in God; only in God have I torment”; atheism does not abandon the fear that is inherent in all beliefs. “All the religions,” he wrote, with a great lucidity, “have removed from mankind the happiness of the body in God so as to render it still more miserable.”

In sum, the important thing isn’t believing or not believing, but being without fear: “He who is in fear, whatever fear it is, cannot be happy.” Thus one must banish the fear inherent in all the faiths so as to have “reason in one’s head, without seeking it outside oneself or in the sword.” Here Vallee attained a radicality of which the Libertines of the Seventeenth Century, the atheists of the Eighteenth Century and the free-thinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries were ignorant. (The interest of such humanists as Paracelsus, Agrippa of Nettesheim, Guillaume Postel, Tommaso Campanella, Giordano Bruno and Lucio Vanini reveals more than the history of philosophy.)

• Chapter 45 : Levellers, Diggers and Ranters

Chapter 45: Levelers, Diggers and Ranters

By decapitating King Charles (1649), 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 commodities. Despite the fact that it remained inflexible in its principle of infeudating the masters of the heavens and the earth, religion proceeded towards the status of an ideology, in which it was reduced by the processes of desacralization and marginalization with respect to nationalism, liberalism, socialism, fascism and communism. Opening itself to the bourgeois virtues of formal tolerance, despite the high and mighty, the Protestant religion multiplied the diversity of the sects like chains enclosed in a unique ring, forged in a divine spirit of guilt and repressed pleasures.

Such was the vengeance of the Judeo-Christian religions that, stripped of the weapons of divine justice and theocratic language, they impregnated the ideologies that were the most hostile to their ritualized pretenses with the odors of sacrifice, sin, mortifying compulsion and voluntary servitude.

Levelers And Diggers

At the moment that, according to the formula of Winstanley, “the old world ... is running up like parchment in the fire,”[490] the Levelers and the Diggers inscribed themselves less in a religious current than in the framework of a social and economic revolution.

The favors given to the small landowners by Cromwell led to increases in the price of rented land, which condemned tenant farmers to hire themselves out as day laborers or shepherds. Starting in 1649, the Levelers formed the left-wing of Cromwell’s troops under the leadership of John Lilburne (1614–1657). [Christopher Hill writes:]

Whilst food prices reached famine levels, the Levelers demanded reelection of Agitators and recall of the General Council of the Army. ‘We were before ruled by King, Lords and Commons, now by a General, a Court Martial and House of Commons; and we pray you what is the difference?’ At the end of March [1649], Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn and Prince were arrested. A Leveler pamphlet, More Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, appealed to the soldiers ‘to stand everyone in his place, to oppose all tyranny whatsoever,’ particularly that of the lawyers, enclosed lords of manors and the Army Grandees who have rejected social reform and have done nothing for the poor.

Next month mutinies broke out in the Army when men who refused to volunteer for service in Ireland were demobilized without payment of arrears — exactly what had driven the Army to revolt two years earlier, though then with the acquiescence of the generals. In May more serious revolts broke out among troops in Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Buckinghamshire, and there were rumors of civilian support from the Southwest, the old Clubmen area. Cromwell and Fairfax, acting with great rigor and determination, overwhelmingly defeated the mutinous regiments at Burford on 14 May. The period of crisis for the military regime was over. Frightened conservatives rallied to its support, as the lesser evil. Oxford University and the City of London hastened to honor Fairfax and Cromwell. The sermon preached on the latter occasion appropriately denounced those who aspired to remove their neighbor’s landmark. Leveler conspiracies continued (...): but none of them offered a serious threat to the regime so long as the repeatedly purged Army remained securely under the control of the generals.

Nevertheless, the early months of 1649 had been a terrifying time for the men of property. It was for some time not so obvious to contemporaries as it is to us that the defeat at Burford had been final and decisive. As late as November 1649 Ralph Josselin tells us that men feared to travel because of danger from robbers, and the rich even felt insecure in their own houses. Poor people, he added the following month, ‘were never more regardless of God than nowadays.’[491]

Kept out of a political scene in which they figured less through popular support than through a democratic aspiration that animated their speeches and manifestoes, the Levelers revealed, by withdrawing, the presence of rural agitators who were engaged in struggles against the local powers and who were determined to instaurate collective ownership of the farm lands. The movement of the Diggers was characterized by a clear rejection of religious obedience.

In April 1649, in Walton-on-Thames, six soldiers invaded the church and announced the suppression en bloc of tithes, ministers of agriculture, magistrates, the Bible and the “Sabbath.”[492] Not far from there, day laborers attempted to dig the fallow lands, thereby signifying their seizure of the commons. They choose Sunday in a deliberate attempt to annul the government of time that the Church had arrogated for itself since the Sixth Century.

With the Diggers, the social revolution rejoined the tradition of the incendiaries who annihilated God in his temples and ministers. Ever since 1630, England had experienced a wave of church destruction that prolonged the iconoclasm of the Netherlands in the preceding century, but with more consequence, since the Bible was quite often also condemned to the fire or execration. As Clement Writer, a clothier from Worcester wrote in his Fides divina (1657): “No testimony that is fallible and liable to error can possibly be a divine testimony.”[493]

The number of Diggers centered around Gerrard Winstanley, a small, ruined merchant who became a salaried farmer at Walton-on-Thames, grew rapidly.

A vision enjoined him to spread the news that “the earth should be made a common treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons.”[494] The agitation of Winstanley invaded the south and center of England, where the Diggers dug, manured and seeded the communal fallow lands. While Winstanley produced many pamphlets between 1649 and 1650, John Lilburne, the leaders of the Levelers, condemned the “erroneous tenets of the poor Diggers” and “repudiated any idea of abolishing property.”[495] [Christopher Hill writes:]

For Winstanley, Jesus Christ was the Head Leveler. Winstanley’s thought incorporated many Leveler ideas: it goes beyond them, beyond the vision of the small proprietor, in its hostility to private property as such.

“In the beginning of time the great creator, Reason, made the earth to be a common treasury, to preserve beasts, birds, fishes and man, the lord that was to govern this creation... But not one word was spoken in the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another... But ... selfish imaginations ... did set up one man to teach and rule over another. And thereby ... man was brought into bondage, and became a greater slave to such of his own kind than the beasts of the field were to him. And hereupon the earth ... was hedged in to enclosures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made ... slaves. And that earth, that is within this Creation made a common storehouse for all, is bought and sold and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonored, as if he were a respecter of persons, delighting in the comfortable livelihood of some and rejoicing in the miserable poverty and straits of others. From the beginning it was not so... “

Winstanley told lords of manors that:

“... the power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the Creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land.”

Winstanley extended the Leveler justification of political democracy to economic democracy:

“The poorest man hath as true a title and just right to land as the richest man... True freedom lies in the free enjoyment of the earth... If the common people have no more freedom in England but only to live among their elder brothers and work for them for hire, what freedom then have they in England more than they can have in Turkey or France?”

Winstanley transcended the Leveler theory of the Norman Yoke, that all we need is to get back to the laws of the free Anglo-Saxons. “The best laws that England hath,” he declared, “are yokes and manacles, tying one sort of people to another.” “All laws that are not grounded upon equity and reason, not giving a universal freedom to all but respecting persons, ought ... to be cut off with the King’s head.” But the England’s rulers had not completed the Revolution [...].

Winstanley must have been expressing the opinions of many disappointed radicals when he wrote in 1652:

“Therefore, you Army of England’s Commonwealth, look to it! The enemy could not beat you in the field, but they may be too hard for you by policy in counsel if you do not stick close to see common freedom established. For if so be that kingly authority be set up in your laws again, King Charles hath conquered you and your posterity by policy, and won the field of you, though you seemingly have cut off his head.”[496]

Winstanley went even further when he demanded the suppression of the prison and emphasized that all laws must be corrective, not punitive. He was, before the philosophers, one of the first to demand that reason be substituted for divine providence (especially profitable for the exploiters) in the government of societies.

“What is the reason,” Winstanley asked, “that most people are so ignorant of their freedoms, and so few fit to be chosen commonwealth’s officers? Because,” he replied, “the old kingly clergy ... are continually distilling their blind principles into the people, and do thereby nurse up ignorance in them.” Many of them had taught that Charles I was the Lord’s Anointed. Priests “lay claim to heaven after they are dead, and yet they require their heaven in this world, too, and grumble mightily against the people that will not give them a large temporal maintenance. And yet they tell the people that they must be content with their poverty, and they shall have their heaven hereafter. But why may not we have our heaven here (that is, a comfortable livelihood in the earth) and heaven hereafter too, as well as you? ... While men are gazing up to heaven, imagining after a happiness or fearing a hell after they are dead, their eyes are put out, that they see not what is their birthrights, and what is to be done by them here on earth while they are living.”

A traditional Christian, who “thinks God is in the heavens above the skies, and so prays to that God which he imagines to be there and everywhere, ... worships his own imagination, which is the devil.” “Your Savior must be a power within you, to deliver you from that bondage within; the outward Christ or the outward God are but men Saviors.” Winstanley himself came to use the word Reason in preference to God, “because I have been held under darkness by that word, as I see many people are.” We must be careful “lest we dishonor the Lord in making him the author of the creatures’ misery,” as hell-fire preachers do. Winstanley spoke of their God in terms which came near to William Blake’s Nobodaddy — unless we are to suppose he held a completely Manichean dualism, which is unlikely. Winstanley told “priests and zealous professors” that they worshiped the devil. He spoke of “the God Devil.” “The outward Christ, or the outward God ... sometimes proves devils.” He told his opponents in Kingston court that “that God whom you serve, and which did entitle you lords, knights, gentlemen and landlords, is covetousness.” This God gave men a claim to private property in land. He “appointed the people to pay tithes to the clergy.” It is this God-Devil that the state Church worships. “We will neither come to church nor serve their God.”[497]

Close to the partisans of Jacob Boehme who, around 1640, began to appear in England, Winstanley refused to venerate any other Christ than the symbol of the resurrection of man in himself. Eden was humanity seeking to reconstruct the innocent conditions destroyed by covetousness and appropriation. However, if Winstanley believed that sin was a lucrative invention of the clergy, he never adopted the views of the Ranters, who revoked it in the name of pleasure and the natural liberties that it founded.

During the punitive expeditions against the Diggers, many sects — such as the Seekers and the Quakers — recuperated their popularity and stripped them of their subversive practices, and rapidly acceded to the status of Churches due to their selective tolerance for whomever did not threaten the foundations of religion and the established order.

The Ranters

Luther and Calvin removed from sin the insurance contract that the Roman Church had imposed by means of confession and redemption. Sin, which the payment of a fee no longer alleviated, was only a more frightening burden for the creature exposed to the libidinous temptations of the Evil One.

In the tradition of the Free-Spirit, the Ranters affirmed their absolute rejection of all guilt through the imperscriptible right to enjoy the benefits of existence.

At one Ranter meeting of which we have a (hostile) report, the mixed company met at a tavern, sang blasphemous songs to the well-known tunes of metrical psalms and partook of a communal feast. One of them tore off a piece of beef, saying ‘This is the flesh of Christ, take and eat.’(*) Another threw a cup of ale into the chimney corner, saying ‘There is the blood of Christ.’ Clarkson called a tavern the house of God; sack was divinity. Even a Puritan enemy expresses what is almost a grudging admiration for the high spirits of the Ranters’ dionysiac orgies: ‘they are the merriest of all devils for extempore lascivious songs, ... for health, music, downright bawdry and dancing.’[498]

(*) These remarks recall those of Claushorn and his friends, who were banished from Strasbourg in 1359. Such was the ordinary treatment of God when joy and drink loosened the language of the religion that tied it.

Spontaneously rediscovering the pleasantries that, in 1359, got three gay blades banished from Strasbourg, a Ranter affirmed: “If I should worship the sun or the moon, or that pewter pot on the table, nobody has anything to do with it.”[499] Captain Francis Freeman, a great amateur at ribald songs, declared that he saw God in the table and the candlestick.

Captain Underhill restored theological speculations to their terrestrial origins and meanings with as much lucidity as humor when he explained that “the Spirit had sent into him the witness of free grace, while he was in the moderate enjoyment of the creature called tobacco.”[500]

Certain Ranters denied the existence of the Christ or, affirming themselves to be the Christ or God, joyously authorized themselves all license.

If a God existed, Jacob Bauthumley proclaimed, he was in himself and every living thing, in “man and beast, fish and fowl, every green thing from the highest cedar to the ivy on the wall.” “He does not exist outside the creatures.” God is in “this dog, this tobacco pipe, he is in me and I am in him.”[501] (In the Eighteenth Century, a similar spirit animated Christopher Smart’s poetic work Jubilate Agno.)

Active between 1649 and 1651, the Ranters were not constituted as organized groups and none of them took the title of leader or master thinker. They contented themselves with leading joyous lives and spreading good cheer [conscience]. It was unfortunate that a Scottish peasant named Jack was hanged in 1656 for denying the existence of heaven, hell, God and the Christ, because the Ranters, in their taste for terrestrial existence, made it a duty to avoid martyrdom through a prompt retraction.

Abiezer Coppe

Originally from Warwick, a student at Oxford and then a preacher in the army, Coppe was 30 when he gained the reputation as a Ranter. In 1649, he published Some sweet sips of some spirituall wine and, with the same taste for alliteration, A Fiery Flying Roll.

Here, there was no lying prophecy dictated by God. The message emanated from “my most excellent majesty and glory (in me) ... who am universal love, and whose service is perfect freedom and pure libertinism.” Coppe proclaimed: “Sin and Transgression is finished and ended,” because God, “that mighty Leveler,” prepares to “lay the Mountains low.”[502]

At first, Coppe was among the radical wing of the Levelers. He called for cutting “the neck of horrid pride,” which was the cause of all spilled blood. Bishops, kings, lords and the great ones of this world must disappear so that “parity, equality and community” could assure the reign of “universal love, universal peace and perfect freedom.”

The “betrayal” of the Levelers accentuated for him the feeling of the necessary unity between individual pleasure and the interdependent struggle against the powerful. He recounted how, in the middle of the street, he hurled his contempt at the men and women of the highest rank, taking exception to the coaches and their occupants. “Hide not thyself from thine own flesh,” he wrote, “from a cripple, a rogue, a beggar, ... a whoremonger, a thief, etc., he’s thine own flesh.”[503] Addressing himself to the rich, he threatened them:

Thou hast many bags of money, and behold I come as a thief in the night, with my sword drawn in my hand, and like a thief as I am, — I say deliver your purse, deliver sirrah! deliver or I’ll cut thy throat!

I say (once more) deliver, deliver, my money ... to rogues, thieves, whores and cutpurses, who are flesh of thy flesh, and every whit as good as thyself in mine eye, who are ready to starve in plaguey Jails and nasty dungeons...

The plague of God is in your purses, barns, houses, horses, murrain will take your hogs, O (ye fat swine of the earth) who shall shortly go to the knife, and be hung up in the roof except ...

Did you not see my hand, this last year, stretched out? You did not see. My hand is stretched out still... Your gold and silver, though you can’t see it, is cankered... The rust of your silver, I say, shall eat your flesh as if it were fire... Have all things in common, or else the plague of God will rot and consume all that you have.[504]

But at the same time, Coppe perceived in the happiness of serving his pleasures a guarantee of peace and a prevention against violence: “Not by the sword; we (holily) scorn to fight for any thing; we had as lief be dead drunk every day of the week and lie with whores in the marketplace, and account them as good actions as taking the poor abused, enslaved plowman’s money from him.”[505]

In 1650, Parliament condemned A Fiery Flying Roll, judged to be full of “many horrid blasphemies,”[506] to the flames and sent Coppe himself to prison in Newgate. In exchange for his release, he drafted a partial retraction, then another one that was more complete but whose malicious reservations suggested the actions’ lack of sincerity. (Thus Coppe did not abstain from being ironic in the manner of Jacques Gruet or Noel Journet: “God forbids killing but tells Abraham to slay his son; [he forbids] adultery, but tells Hosea to take a wife of whoredom.” He proclaimed that it is “the community which is sinful” but added that “if the flesh of my flesh be ready to perish, [and] if I have bread, it shall or should be his.” Instead of recognizing the notion of sin, he declared “the laying of nets, traps and snares for the feet of our neighbors is a sin, whether men imagine it to be so or no; and so is the not undoing of heavy burdens, the not letting the oppressed go free, the not healing every yoke, and the not dealing of bread to the hungry ... whether men imagine it to be so or no.”)[507] After the Restoration, prudence enjoined Coppe to change his name. He became a physician and was esteemed in the small town of Barnes, in Surrey. He pushed humor as far as having himself buried at the parish church.

Lawrence Clarkson

A wandering preacher, born in Preston, Clarkson — raised as a Puritan — very quickly acquired an equal repugnance for all the sects and the clerical profession: “Thousands better than your parish priests have saluted the gallows. It is more commendable to take a purse by the highway than compel any of the parish to maintain such that seek their ruin, whose doctrine is poisonable to their consciences.”[508]

A Leveler in 1647, he rallied to the Ranters and maintained that — God being in all living things and in matter — all action comes from him and nothing is a sin in his eyes, not even the crucifixion of the Christ. There is neither heaven nor hell beyond mankind. He publicly declared that “I really believed no Moses, Prophets, Christ or Apostles.” “There is no such act as drunkenness, adultery and theft in God... Sin hath its conception only in the imagination... What act soever is done by thee in light and love, is light and lovely, though it be that act called adultery... No matter what Scripture, saints or churches say, if that within thee do not condemn thee, thou shalt not be condemned.”[509]

“None,” he wrote, “can be free from sin till in purity it can be acted as no sin, for I judged that pure to me which to a dark understanding was impure.”[510]

Clarkson lived joyously in sweetness and love, traveling the country in the company of Mrs Star, seeking adventure with other women, but being “careful for moneys for my wife,” amusing himself with an assembly of Ranters among whom “Dr Paget’s maid stripped herself naked and skipped.”[511]

Arrested in 1650, he asserted his rights as “a freeborn subject,” was condemned to exile and pardoned, no doubt following a retraction. From then on, he quieted down, trained in magic and astrology so as to join Muggleton’s sect, which was one of the many groups that has continued to exist in the fog of millenarianism and the apocalypse.

Jacob Bauthumley

A shoemaker like Boehme, Bauthumley fell into the hands of the authorities in 1650 for having published The Light and Dark Sides of God. Accused of blasphemy, he was punished by having his tongue pierced by a red-hot poker. Milton admired him and shared many of ideas.

The light of God showed its presence in every thing: “Not the least flower or herb in the field but there is the divine being by which it is that which it is; and as that departs out of it, so it comes to nothing, and so it is today clothed by God, and tomorrow cast into the oven.” “All the creatures of the world ... are but one entire being.” “Nothing that partakes of the divine nature, or is of God, but is God.” God does not love one man more than another: all are fellows in his eyes. God “as really and substantially dwells in the flesh of other men and creatures as well as in the man Christ.” There where God dwells is “all the heaven I look ever to enjoy.”[512]

Sin belongs to the dark side of God. It is an absence of light. “The reason why we call some men wicked and some godly is not any thing in the man, but as the divine being appears more gloriously in them... . God is no more provoked by sin to wrath than he is allured to blessing by my holiness.” And Bauthumley specified that “according to the counsel of his will, they did no more that crucified Christ, than they that did embrace him.”[513]

Bauthumley denied the existence of hell and the Demon. The resurrection was a purely inward act and did not take place in the beyond.

He also ended up a respectable citizen of his native town, Leicester[shire], where he became a bookseller.

Thomas Webbe

The Rector of Langley Burnhill, Webbe seemed to glumly promise not to receive tithes from his parishioners. His popularity, already assured by a measure that no Church would tolerate, found itself strongly strengthened when he proclaimed from the pulpit that he hoped to live quite a long time so as to see “no such thing as a parsonage or minister in England.” To propagate such remarks, the French parish-priest Meslier took the useful precaution of dying first.

During the 1650s, Webbe was accused of having constituted “a Babel of profaneness and community.” An admirer of Coppe, he said a remarkable thing in a letter to Joseph Salmon: “The Lord grant that we may know the worth of hell, that we may for ever scorn heaven.”

In 1650, the notables — careful to separate themselves from him — charged him with adultery, then a crime punished by execution on the gallows. He won an acquittal. He claimed [according to a witness] to “live above ordinances and that it was lawful for him to lie with any woman.” One attributes to him this witticism: “There is no heaven but women, nor no hell save marriage.”[514] His enemies managed to get him banished.

Coppin, Pordage And Tany

Richard Coppin was part of the moderate wing of the Ranters; he was satisfied with a pantheism in which theology had the upper hand over the refusal of social and moral imperatives. “God is all in one, and so is in everyone,” he wrote in Divine Teachings. “The same all which is in me, is in thee; the same God dwells in one dwells in another, even in all; and in the same fullness as he is in one, he is in everyone.” Resurrection consists of coming out of the grave, which is in us and in the Scriptures, so as to be reborn as “the new man [who] sinneth not.”[515]

Coppin refused the Church in the name of his own experience of the Lord. Referring to the decree of 1650, which abolished the obligatory nature of Sunday services, he spoke of “the anti-christian law of compelling men to church.”[516] Arrested in 1655, Coppin was condemned to six months in prison.

The Vicar of Reading, then the Rector of Bradfield, John Pordage — a disciple of Jacob Boehme — drew the attention of the authorities in 1655 for propagating the Ranters’ opinions. He denied the historical existence of the Christ, believed in the presence of God in each person, refused [the notion of] sin, held marriage to be a harmful institution, and announced the imminent disappearance of Parliament, the magistrature, the government of England and all the higher powers, which “he cared no more for ... than this dust beneath his feet.”[517]

His friend Thomas Tany, called Theaureaujohn, estimated that no man can lose his redemption. But he went further than this and maintained that all religion is “a lie, a fraud, a deceit, for there is but one truth and that is love.” He also demanded that the people’s lands were rendered to the people. In 1654, Tany made an exemplary gesture, one of rare audacity. With a beautiful critical concision, he burned a copy of the Bible at Saint George’s Fields, “because the people say it is the Word of God, and it is not.”[518]

• 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[519] — 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 in the artifice of panegyric. On the other hand, obscurantism did not spare free spirits such as Cyrano de Bergerac, the peasants reduced by famine and the rapacity of the tax collectors, or the Protestants condemned by the thousands to the galleys. This was the reign of the hypocrites, who threw upon the pyre the poet Claude the Small for having celebrated the art of fucking while the sovereign bathed the bed of his ancillary couplings with remorse.

The quarrel of Jansenism thus inscribed itself in the archaic framework of theological disputes and the political tradition in which the temporal masters claimed that they should be legislators in spiritual matters.

Michel Baius

Born in 1515 in Meslin-l’Eveque in the Hainaut region, Michel Baius (or de Bay) undertook — as a fervent Catholic and Doctor of the University of Louvain — to combat Lutheranism and Calvinism, which became widespread in the Netherlands by basing themselves on the Scriptures that were erected as the supreme authority by the Protestants.

With his friend John Hessels, Baius opposed to Calvin — for whom the irremediably bad human being was completely in the capricious hands of God — a manner of softening the doctrine that went back to Augustine of Hippone. For Baius, nature was originally good, but eminently corruptible. Adam sinned freely and, through his sin, lost the control he had exercised over his senses. Ever since then, mankind has felt the attraction of concupiscence so vividly that he cannot resist it.

From the Augustinian notion of predestination Calvin induced the idea that, saved or damned by God’s will alone, the [human] creature had no other choice but to assume the burden of his misery as if it were a constant torment in which all pleasure was obscenely dissonant. But predestination also offered to all humans the argument according to which everything was permitted because God mocked human efforts [oeuvres]. Hardly to be suspected of debauchery and licentiousness, Baius merely opened part-way the door of theological free will onto the desperate soaking to which the devout Reformers devoted themselves.

At first, the conceptions of Baius and Hessels did not shock the Cardinal of Granvelle, who was the Governor of the Netherlands, nor the papacy, since the two theologians participated in the Council of Trente.

Even when Pius V reacted in a Papal Bull by condemning 73 propositions advanced by Baius, he — whose name had not been mentioned — remained the Chancellor of the University of Louvain and submitted a retraction in good graces.

Among his adepts were a Louvainist theologian, Jacques Janson, and the Bishop of Ypres, Cornelius Jansenius, who swore to wash Baius’s reputation of suspicions of heterodoxy, which were unmerited in their eyes.

Meanwhile, the Jesuit Lessius revived the quarrel in the milieus that were lying in wait for theological speculations to which they attributed public interest that the majority of the people — already sufficiently encumbered by the constraints of Mass, the sacraments and ecclesiastical rituals — easily dispensed with.

Lessius estimated that sinners lost nothing of their means to accede to the eternal life of the heavens. He agreed with the Spanish Jesuit Luis Molina (1536–1600), for whom the divine presence did not hinder mankind’s free will in its choice between good and evil.

In the wooden language of theology, this was expressed by the discord between the theses expounded by Molina in The Concordance of Grace and Free Will and Jansenism, unless it was in fact the dissent between the Christian presence that governed the world at the cost of necessary compromises and an eremitic Christianity that sought in retreat (far from the world) the feverish and anguished approach of an intransigent God. As Moliere illustrated the situation, it was Tartuffe against the misanthrope of Port-Royal.[520]

Cornelius Jansenius

Born in 1585 near Leerdam in Holland, Cornelius Jansenius studied at Utrecht and Louvain, where his teacher was Baius’ disciple, Jacques Janson. Jansenius was friends with Duvergier of Hauranne, the future Abbey of Saint-Cyran. He devoted himself passionately to the study of Augustine of Hippone and the theses that he opposed to those of Pelage. After a stay in France, he returned to Louvain; he believed he had discovered in Hippone’s philosophy arguments that would properly rehabilitate Baius. It is not easy to disentangle the motives that incited him to confront pontifical thunderbolts and the powerful party of the Jesuits. His affection for Jacques Janson? The hope of shining in the faraway reflection of the pyres? A rigor that corresponded to his taste for asceticism and that incited him to disapprove of the discreet license of the confessors who mixed devotion with the perfume of the boudoir and practiced in theological fashion a psychoanalysis well before there was such a thing?

“The more I advance,” Jansenius wrote to Saint-Cyran, “the more the affair frightens me (...). I do not dare to say what I think about predestination and grace out of fear that, when all is said and done, what has happened to the others will happen to me” (he would be condemned).[521]

Jansenius had the forethought to die from the plague in Ypres shortly after he sent a letter to Pope Urban VIII that declared he was disposed to approve, improve or retract his statements “according to what would be prescribed by the voice of thunder that comes from the skies of the apostolic See.”[522]

His posthumous work, the Augustinus, published in 1640, was condemned by Urban VIII two years later.

The Father of Avrigny summarized Jansenius’ doctrine in his Chronological and Dogmatic Memoirs.

Since the fall of Adam, pleasure is the unique spring that moves the heart of man; this pleasure is inevitable when it comes and invincible when it has come. If this pleasure is celestial, it brings virtue; if it is terrestrial, it determines vise; and the will finds itself necessarily led by the stronger of the two. These two pleasures, the author says, are like the two plates on a balancing scale; one cannot rise without the other one descending. Thus, man does good or evil, invincibly but voluntarily, according to whether he is dominated by grace or cupidity.[523]

Here is proof — if proof was needed — that the root of all that constituted controversial religious matters resided in the tormented attitudes of individuals when they were confronted by the pleasures of a life that was denied them by virtue of the mandates of heaven and the Spirit, which were the sad abstractions of the earth and the body, respectively.

The Church’s obsession was not caused by the scandalous licenses to which pious Jansenius was improbably given access, but by the self-determination that he attributed to man and that — turned towards the most devout asceticism — removed from dogma and the clergy their utility in the government of beings and things.

Jansenism moreover quite rapidly took shape from within a Calvinism transplanted into a society that still had not delegated its powers to free enterprise and the devotion to money sanctified by God.

John Duvergier of Hauranne, the Abbey of Saint-Cyran and a long-time partisan of Baius’ ideas, saw his mission in the propagation of the doctrine of his friend Jansenius. His rigor was greatly displeased by the fact that the enjoyment of pleasures chilled by remorse led to the complacency of disenchantment. He won the sympathies of the Arnauld family, especially Pascal and Nicole, who supported the monastery of Port-Royal and erected it as a bastion of Jansenism.

When Saint-Cyran died in 1643, he was succeeded by the “Great Arnauld,” who took the lead of the movement, which he treated as if it were a family affair. It is not useless to dwell a little upon this clan, which brandished before the court [of France] and Rome a theological arsenal whose fire-power seemed to result from the discourteous relations that divided the members of a brotherhood that was as holy as it was tormented.

The Arnauld Family

Originally from Herment, in le Puy-de-Dome, Antoine Arnauld (1560–1619) was born to a Protestant father whom Saint Barthelemy convinced to convert to Catholicism. Antoine settled in Paris in 1577 and professed a disdain for the glory of weapons and the conquest for royal favors, which made religion his field of battle. From him came a breed of magistrates and learned men whose Puritan rigor, taste for authority, a certain propensity for revolt and a solid sense for business would have turned towards Calvinism if Jansenism had not furnished a better opportunity.

A counselor to Catherine de Medici after he studied at the University of Paris and got a degree in law from Bourges while studying under Cujas, Antoine Arnauld then entered the bar and applied himself with ardor to several polemics against the Jesuits. A Gallician and nationalist, he mocked their “blind obedience to a Spanish General,” defended the University of Paris against them and was opposed to their return after Chatel’s attack against Henry IV caused them to be banished from France.

Antoine’s wife, Catherine Marion (who became a nun at Port-Royal in 1641), gave birth to 20 children, among whom Catherine, Jacqueline-Mary-Angelique, Jeanne-Catherine-Agnes (author of a book called Letters), Anne, Mary, and Madeleine would belong to the Abbey, as did Robert and Antoine, the 20^th child, who became known as the “Great Arnauld.” Henri Arnauld would become the Bishop of Angers, thereby providing his family — always at the frontiers of heresy — with the pledge of his orthodoxy.

The last child of Catherine Marion, the Great Arnauld (born in 1612), was seven years old when his tyrannical and brutal father died; the child was educated by his mother or, more exactly, by the celebrated Abbey of Saint-Cyran, who presided over the destiny of Port-Royal. Yet the world seduced little Antoine; jurisprudence attracted him; he frequented the mansion of Rambouillet; and he was initiated into the literary art of preciousity and imitated Voltaire. But his fate had been decided: he belonged to theology. Enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1633, he studied Augustine under the spiritual direction of Saint-Cyran. The latter, for whom “nothing is as dangerous as knowledge,” imposed ordeals on the young man: fasting twice a week, praying and reading the Holy Scriptures on bended knee.

After being ordained a priest, the young man entered Port-Royal one year later (in 1641), resolved to “flee the conversation of the world like poisoned air.” One says that he pushed the love of mystery to the point of denouncing as false a thesis that he judged to be too intelligible. The Frequent Communion (1643), which was published the year that Saint-Cyran died, brought him to the head of the Jansenist current and aroused the hatred of the Jesuits, who schemed to incarcerate him in the Bastille. During the 25 years that his retreat lasted, the Great Arnauld engaged in polemics against the Jesuits (New Heresy in Morality, The Moral Practice of the Jesuits), which furnished Pascal with the material for his Letters Written to a Provincial. Returned to grace in 1669, the Great Arnauld became friends with Boileau and Racine, and violently attacked Calvinism, thereby rejoining his brother, Henri, the Bishop of Angers, who applauded the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

When politics took a hostile turn at Port-Royal, the Great Arnauld fled to Mons, Tournai and Brussels, where he died in 1694. A letter from his friend, the abbey of the Trappist monastery, shows the esteem in which he was held: “At last, Monsieur Arnauld is dead. After pushing his career as far as he could, he had to end it. Whatever else one says, these questions are now closed.”[524] To Abbey Bremond, here was “a theological machine-gun in perpetual movement, but completely emptied of interior life.”[525] At the time, it was not necessary to perceive that Arnauld’s grandeur resulted from an accumulation of pettiness.

A similar social life and an eloquent refusal of the world also animated the life of Robert, called Arnauld of Andilly. His Memoirs served his own glory more than that of the God he claimed to venerate: “I have never had an ambition, because I had too many.” The supremacy of the absolute nevertheless tallied with the art of intrigue and influence peddling. A madrigal that he offered in the manner of the Garland of Julie showed that he wedded devotion to gallantry without too much difficulty. Saint-Cyran made Robert his residual heir on the condition that he retired to Port-Royal. Robert then used all kinds of pretexts to delay the date of his retirement. He schemed at becoming the tutor of the Dauphin; he published Stanzas on Diverse Christian Truths; wrote a poem on the life of the Christ; produced his Letters, in which he took care to include endorsements from the Jesuits. In vain. The charge that he so coveted escaped him and disappointment pushed him to Port-Royal, where he hastened to send six of his daughters (out of his 15 children). The scandal of his retirement, orchestrated for so long, made him a celebrated person and made Jansenism fashionable.

In 1664, the dispersion of the community caused Robert to go into exile in Pomponne, where one of his sons lived. Having been a odious father, he seemed execrable to his daughter-in-law, who saw him die without displeasure in 1674. He had translated the Augustine’s Confessions, Saint Theresa’s works and Flavius Joseph’s History of the Jews.

Jacqueline-Mary-Angelique, the daughter of Antoine the Elder (born in 1591), was of a completely different nature. Her brutal frankness broke with the caution of Robert and the Great Arnauld, people who were much closer to Tartuffe than to Moliere’s Misanthrope. Intelligent and lively, she preferred marriage to the Abbey, which was imposed on her from the age of seven. “You would like me to be a nun,” she said; “I would quite like that, but on the condition that I am an Abbess.” At the age of nine, she made her profession of faith, but not without specifying that she “felt free in front of men, and committed to God.” Her frenzied calling was always a horror: “I was cursed when men, not God, made me an Abbess and when the monks of the Citeaux consecrated me at the age of 11.” From the other side of the window, she was visited by her father and when he, furious, treated her like a parricidal monster, she stated: “My parents made me a nun at the age of nine, when I did not want to be one; today they want me to damn myself by not observing my order.”

While one after another of her sisters entered Port-Royal, she became fervent as if overcome by a somber and desperate ecstasy. Named Abbess in 1642, she wedded the cause of Jansenism, and did not hesitate to treat Pope Innocent X as a deceiver when the five propositions of Augustinus were condemned in 1653. God was the weapon of her vengeance against the men who banned her from the world. This passionate woman, whose intelligence and sadly constrained sensuality merited a destiny better suited to her hopes, died in 1661, while Pope Alexander promulgated new condemnations in a formulary that the clergy had to sign.

• 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 authority as an abstract government of beings and things. If, for Boehme, the signs of the divine still wore the patched and cheap finery of theology (Christ, Trinity, grace), they were no less surely distributed as signs of a life identified — as in the thought of Marguerite Porete and Simon of Samaria — with an eternal flux in which the “amorous” conjunction created the beings and things that mankind created in its turn.

The universe manifested itself at every instant in the indissociable coupling of material energy and energetic matter, in the desire that rejoiced in the androgyny of interlaced lovers and the mysterium magnum of pleasure and creation.

The radical wing of Pietism expressed, most often through the vehicles of visions, revelations and apocalypses, the feeling of a diffuse sexuality in search of an experience in which the unity of the individual and the world was accomplished.

It happens that the vehicle of the visions threw the illuminated one into the play of political influences in which his or her claims to rule the future attracted the reprobation of the authorities, if not worse.

Jean-Albert Adelgreiff had a sad experience. The seven angels who mandated him to reform the conduct of the rulers did not prevent him from being burned at Koenigsberg in 1636. Czar Peter, called Peter the Great, proceeded in the same manner against the unfortunate Quirinus Kuhlmann, condemned to the pyre in Moscow in 1689.

The theosophical alchemist Paul Felgenhauer spent a large part of his life in prison or wandering Europe due to successive banishments. His Dawn of Wisdom, in which was figured the Aurora and the Sophia dear to Boehme, fixed sometime in the [Seventeenth] century the beginning of the millennium that had not made an exact appointment. With the same probable certitude, Paul Nagel foresaw the collapse of the papacy in March 1623.

Others, such as Elie Eller (1690–1750), assured prophetic determinations in matters of destiny with more cleverness. Eller, while looking for work in Elberfeld, seduced a rich widow with whom he founded one of the Pietist communities in which exaltation and prayer propelled faith in the divine presence well beyond the domes of the temples and the other places “sullied by papist or Calvinist [parpaillots] hypocrites.”

Anna von Buchel, the daughter of a baker, plunged her adepts into ecstasy due to luxuriant visions in which she dialoged with Jesus-Christ in a very intimate fashion. Since Elie Eller occupied the carnal place of Jesus in her heart, the husband took offense and, accusing Anna von Buchel of mystification, drew down upon himself the [counter-]accusation of making sacrifices to Satan. Eller got him locked up as a lunatic and married the prophetess, whose revelations he recorded in a work entitled Hirtentasche (The Shepherd’s Sack).

Figured as the Mother and Father of Sion, the couple undertook to make Jesus reborn in the womb of Anna. He first appeared in the untimely form of a girl. A second child, male this time, soon thereafter died, not caring about his triumphs to come. Anna succumbed in her turn.

Elie Eller entered into a third marriage. His adepts were numerous in Remsdorff, where he was named mayor. He thoughtfully died in 1750, without anyone knowing if he lived in harmony with his desires or only in a cunning calculation of holiness, honorability and libertinage.

Johann-Willem Petersen (1649–1727) was inspired by Jacob Boehme and Valentin Weigel, and provided his pious communities with the effervescence of millenarianist preaching and the exaltation of visions that catechized the crowds. His religious ardor sometimes took on the colors of a mystical sensuality.

Assuredly, the Spirit of prophecy was not partial to anyone. Here were a swarm of clairvoyants who fluttered around the leaders of the sect: Madeleine Elrich, Christine-Regina Bader, Adelaide Schwartz and Anne-Marguerite Jahn As in a well-regulated troupe, each one had his or her role: Anna-Maria was the ‘Pietist singer.’ Anne-Eve Jacob was ‘the sucker of blood.’ There were other stars who, naturally, had more important roles. Jean-Guillaume Petersen had the privilege of having divine illuminations and also had the advantage of being married to a woman, Eleonore of Merlau, who also had visions. She composed works that the celebrated Pietist published under his name. Guillaume Postel also had some influence on Petersen’s thought. Petersen also referred to a book by an English countess, whose name he did not mention, and who composed De principiis philosophiae antiquissimae et recentissimae, a work that is not without depth and which was inspired by Jewish Kabbalah.

According to Petersen, when the reign of a thousand years had established itself in heaven and on earth, the Jews would convert and, returning to Palestine, they would reestablish their ancient kingdom. Petersen refrained from setting the date of the second coming of Jesus-Christ. Moreover, one observes that the ‘end of this age did not designate a universal conflagration, but the ‘end of the current age.’ Contrary to a certain tradition, the woman of the Revelations who would give birth (ch. 12) was the Jewish nation; it would give birth to the Christ despite the efforts of the infernal Dragon, the monster that would be put down by Saint Michael, the protecting angel of Israel. Rosemonde-Julienne von Assburg was one of the ballet dancers [coryphees] of the troupe of Pietist Sibyls. Leibniz judged her visions to be quite respectable, no less than those of Saint Hildegarde, Saint Brigitte, Saint Melchtilde and other holy ladies. This same Leibniz was the editor of several of Petersen’s works. The influence of Madame Petersen was considerable in Germany and England.[526]

For Johann Georg Gichtel and Eva von Buttlar, the Sophia of Boehme and the ancient Gnostics was illustrated by the two figures (less antithetical than they might appear at first) of the future Eve and the current Eve, the femininity of a faraway princess and the nearby femininity of tumultuous sensuality (but this was also the case with certain exalted, Pietist “suckers of blood” and the pneuma that was identical with sperma).

In his study of The English Disciples of Jacob Boehme, Serge Hutin devoted several pages to Gichtel:

Johann-Georg Gichtel (1638–1710), the son of a counselor to the court of Ratisbonne, had shown mystical tendencies since his childhood. As an adolescent, he wanted, in imitation of the Christ, ‘to annihilate’ his carnal self: renouncing all pleasure, he vowed perpetual virginity. A Lutherian, he was rapidly disappointed by the dryness of official Protestantism and turned towards the Catholic religion, which did not delay in also disappointing him. This young man, more and more sinking himself into a solitary and exalted devotion, became impassioned with studying and spent entire nights immersed in Greek, the sacred Eastern languages and theology. After successfully enrolling in the College of Theology at the University of Strasbourg, he nevertheless had to give in to his tutors, who obliged him to follow his father and become a magistrate: willy-nilly he became a lawyer at the imperial High Court of Spire. But this important function did not monopolize his attention for long: fleeing from pressing feminine solicitations, Gichtel returned to his native town in great haste. Enrolled in the bar at Ratisbonne, he happened — while at a library — to meet Baron Justinian Ernst von Weltz; the two men became close friends on the spot. Weltz (1621–1668) was a rich Illuminati who wanted to found a missionary society, the Christerbauliche Jesusgesellschaft [the Christian Edification Society of Jesus], the objectives of which would be the realization of Christian unity and the conversion of the entire world to the Gospel; he associated himself with Gichtel and together they submitted their project to the Evangelical Assembly of the Lutherian Church: at first the Assembly welcomed the proposal and the Baron deposited in a bank in Nuremberg the sum — enormous for the times — of 30,000 riksdallers. But the theologians, upon becoming aware of the chimerical and nebulous character of the project, quite quickly manifested their disagreement. To disencumber themselves from the two associates, who began to create a scandal in the Rhineland, the apostolic delegate from Mayence proposed to them that they go convert the Indians of South America; Weltz and Gichtel went to Holland, but refused to get on the boat at the last minute.

Having left the Baron, and returned to Ratisbonne, Gichtel was then, after fervent prayers, the object of an illumination that put him into direct contact with the Divinity: submitting himself in advance to all the ordeals that the Christ had him undergo, he completely abandoned himself to the superior ‘Will’ that had ‘annihilated’ his own will. Losing all prudence, he publicly denied the necessity of outward religion, in which he now saw a redoubtable obstacle to the inward communication of the soul with God; and, still more maladroitly, he violently expelled the pastors from the town. The pastors had him brought before the tribunals as ‘seditious,’ an ‘enthusiast’ and ‘anabaptist.’ At first imprisoned in Nuremberg, Gichtel then languished for three weeks in a somber dungeon in Ratisbonne. Condemned for ‘anti-social heresy,’ he was excommunicated, excluded from the sacraments and all the ceremonies of the Lutherian Church, and was even sentenced to be executed; after the intervention of the magistrate of the city, his death sentence was commuted into perpetual banishment: deprived of his position, his goods and his status as a citizen, the visionary was chased from Ratisbonne (February 1655).

At first Gichtel wandered through southern Germany, where charitable people provisionally housed him. Then he went to Vienna, where he had influential relatives, and obtained a position at the imperial court, at which he was assailed with many worldly temptations (riches, honors ...); seeing how he was favored in the capital, his persecutors in Ratisbonne became afraid and restored his fortune to him. But Gichtel, having made the irrevocable resolution to renounce all the goods of this world, vowed extreme poverty: he gave his money to his oldest sister (who quickly squandered it), abandoned his official functions, gave up his luxurious clothing for a coarse frock made of leather and left on foot for Holland.

After being detained in Zwolle by the Lutherian authorities, who suspected him of being an Anabaptist, Gichtel established himself in Amsterdam, where from then on he was forced to live on the subsidies of diverse protectors — he had been expressly prohibited from expressing his religious convictions in any way.

In 1669, he became “the spiritual husband of the Virgin Sophia”: she manifested herself to him, became his “wife,” revealed to him the last explication of all things and enjoined him to institute the “priesthood of Melchisedeq,” to found the “New Church,” the Church of the Last Dispensation; all books had to be rejected, with the exceptions of the Bible — interpreted theosophically — and the works of Jacob Boehme. After this great “illumination,” Gichtel united around him a small group of disciples who desired to live — according to his own example and the model of the Christ — a life of perfect purity: this was the community of the Brothers of the Angelic Life, a small sect that still subsists secretly in Germany.

According to Gichtel, the Reformation destroyed Catholicism without substituting anything better in its place, and so a veritable Reformation would have to be instituted: this Reformation would have to consist in putting into practice the theosophy of Jacob Boehme. (...)

The put this new dispensation into practice, Gichtel instaurated the “priesthood of Melchisedeq,” a community of “saints,” of “Brothers of the Angelic Life,” of “soldiers of the Christ.” These brothers and sisters — because women would be admitted into the community, with rights equal to those of the men — had to strive to return to the state of angelic perfection, lost by Adam during the Fall; it would thus be possible for them to regain the primitive androgyny of man: ’ ... in heaven, there is neither man nor woman.’

‘The Christ,’ Gichtel said, ‘has taught us that if we want to be his disciples, we must renounce all terrestrial desires, choose and follow that choice: and this instauration is addressed, not only to the apostles, but to all Christians. The first Christians practiced this commandment and thus testified that they loved the Christ and that they upheld His law.’[527]

In the consecration of Melchisedeq, Gichtel’s frenzied asceticism rediscovered the Essenism that had been the original, true Christianity:

In the same way that the priests of the Old Testament, to celebrate their religion, had to keep themselves pure, holy, immaculate and chaste — so that the Anger of God was not aroused by them, and so that they could stand before God in the Sanctuary — the priesthood of Melchisedeq of the New Alliance demanded it even more, because completely divine service required a complete renunciation of all terrestrial love.[528]

Unlike the Stylites and the Anachoretes, whose repression of sexuality was allied with a hatred of the self, which they called the absolute evil of Satan, Gichtel extracted from his libidinal energy — transmuted into mystical visions — not the horrors of diabolical temptation, but a kind of ravishing succubus, which was nothing other than the Sophia of the Gnostics and Boehme. Gichtel himself recounted the flashes of his ethereal orgasms:

I see in my heart a white light, around my heart a large serpent, twisted three times upon itself like a tress; in the middle, in clarity, the Christ appeared in the form described by John (Revelations, 1, 13, 14, 15).

When the soul has walked for some time with its Beloved in the garden of roses, when it has provided flowers, the Fiance takes the soul completely beyond the body. It then appears like a ball of fire (...) it is plunged into a sea of fire: this happened to me five times over the course of five consecutive days, during my evening prayers; I saw that it was in a pool of a crystalline blue, like the firmament, but it was an igneous water that the soul, by crossing it, made choppy with little waves of fire; I cannot express the delicious taste and impression.

(...) After a black cloud appeared, a white one followed and out of it came the noble, celestial Virgin Sophia of Jesus (...), his loyal companion and friend, whom he (Gichtel) had loved until then without knowing her. And she appeared to him in his spirit, face to face; God had thus sent (...) his eternal Word [Verbe] Jesus in a virginal form, to serve him (Gichtel) as consort and wife... O how lovingly she embraced his soul! No woman could frolic more affectionately with her husband than Sophia did with his soul. And what he experienced in the course of such a union he would equally desire that other souls enjoy, because words cannot express the inexpressible sweetness, even if it were permitted... [529]

In his correspondence with Colonel Kirchberger, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin evoked the love of Gichtel and his Sophia:

‘Sophia, his beloved, his divine Sophia, whom he loved and whom he had never seen, made her first visit on Christmas Day, 1673; he saw and understood in the third rule this virgin who was dazzling and celestial. In this interview, she accepted him as husband and the wedding was consummated with ineffable delights.’ Married to Sophia, who ‘made him hope for spiritual progeniture,’ lived with her ‘in the luminous inward depths,’ Gichtel engaged in daily conversations with her: ‘Sophia also possessed a fundamental language, without outward words and without vibrations of air, and which did not resemble any human language; nevertheless, he understood it as easily as his mother tongue.’[530] Through revelations concerning the soul and nature, she directed him to publish the works of Jacob Boehme.

Raadt, a scholar associated with Gichtel, fell in love with Sophia and imposed on himself the ‘spiritual circumcision’ so as to merit seeing this entity. ‘She will let fall several rays of her image on the terrestrial qualities of their souls.’ Around Gichtel was soon formed the Society of the Thirty, all lovers of Sophia and beneficiaries of her favors, which caused him to remark ‘how much the astral spirit desires enjoying the nuptial bed of Sophia.’ Dissent appeared among the Thirty in 1682, but a young wholesaler from Frankfurt named Ueberfeld, who later published Gichtel’s letters, went to find him and decided to remain as a disciple. ‘Upon his arrival, Sophia manifested herself in the third rule to the two friends in the most glorious way.’ Ueberfeld took Sophia as his wife and ‘he was elevated to the most sublime heights.’

One confirmed that Sophia, the immaterial wife, was polygamous, sharing herself among all her chosen ones, on the condition that they were initiated: ‘No soul, even a good one, can possess Sophia.’ She could even be the celestial spouse of a woman, since the first vision that the English mystic, Jane Leade, had was one in which Sophia manifested herself physically. Saint-Martin said of the wedding of Gichtel and Sophia: ‘Everything in it had the seal of truth. If we were close to each other, I would also have a story of marriage to relate to you, one in which the same step was taken by me, although in another form.’[531]

At the same time in France, Montfaucon of Villars — in his Count of Gabalis, published in 1670 — approached cum grano salis the problem of libertine relations with beings issued more from the mysteries of nature than from the heavens: “The most beautiful (of women) is horrible next to the least sylphide.” The air, fire and earth were full of superb creatures whose uselessness assures them of favor. “They only require of men that they abstain from women whose faults they cannot suffer (and) permit us to love them as much as it pleases us.”

In The Amorous Devil (1772), and in the same gallant manner, Jacques Cazotte would treat ideas already in fashion among the Gnostics and Alexandrine Hermeticists, and that the Byzantine monk Michael Psellos had expounded in the Eleventh Century in his Peri energeias daimonon.

While Gichtel appeased the excesses of a repressed sexuality in esoteric couplings, other Pietists married the heavens to the earth in less disincarnated, if not less spiritual weddings.

In Germany, colleges of piety multiplied; these were congregations in which religious hysteria made use of an audience ready to unhinge itself unreservedly. Such assemblies survived in great numbers in the churches and sects of the United States, where television successfully exhibited the neurotic troubles of ecstasy.

Created by Eva von Buttlar, the Christian and Philadelphian Society ascribed to the Sophia of Boehme and Gichtel the traits of a terrestrial and generous sensuality. Eva von Buttlar herself had wed a French refugee, a dance professor at Eisenbach. She left him to throw herself into Pietism. Having founded an association in which piety excited her passionate nature, she was recognized as the Sophia, at once the New Eve and a reincarnation of the Holy-Spirit. The heavens, over which she ruled, provided her with two lovers. She named one God the Father and the other God the Son. She believed that marriage was a sin and preached the holiness of love freely lived. The Lutherians obtained from the police the information that the name of this order was Paradise, in which Eva von Buttlar and her adepts practiced the teachings of God according to [Charles] Fourier well before he began imparting them.

The counts of Wittgenstein opened their domains to all those whose beliefs condemned them to persecution. Eva took refuge there, but her crime appeared inexpiable. Sophia and “God the Father,” condemned to death, managed to escape from the authorities and no doubt consoled themselves about their paradise lost in prudent clandestinity.

At the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, Pietism evolved towards Aufklarung [enlightenment]. Two workers, the Kohler brothers, mixed apocalyptic diatribes together with the first accents of a proletarian insurrection that they announced for Christmas Day 1748. One was executed, the other imprisoned. They prefigured [Wilhelm] Weitling, a contemporary of the young Marx who mocked his archaisms. He proposed a general insurrection of the proletariat whose iron lance — constituted by criminals released from prison and transformed [transcendes] by their divine mission — would introduce into the cadaver of the old world the ferment of the egalitarian millennium. It was not assured that such a beautiful project would involve more fatal results than the quite rational program of the Communist parties.

A wandering preacher who was persecuted everywhere, Ernst Christoph Hochmann von Hochenau (1670–1721) would also find among the counts of Wittgenstein an asylum from which he led the fight for tolerance and the abolition of the death penalty.

A radical Pietist, Gottfried Arnold was the first to approach the history of the Church and the [various] heresies in a spirit that was disengaged from theological prejudices, if not religious prejudices as well. For him, the sincerity of conviction took precedence over doctrine, and nothing was condemnable among the diversity of opinions and practices if they did not aim to harm life or the dignity of individuals. The human meaning that slowly revoked the celestial obedience of the religions could not be better expressed than Holderlin did: his Diotima was the sensual and amorous Sophia, and she exorcized the pangs of a Pietist education by attributing to the marvelous designs of childhood the poetic source that creates and re-creates the world.

The Quietists

The Church of Rome reserved for the monastic communities the exercise of contemplation and the privilege of assuring a direct transmission between humanity and God through prayer. The course of the world was thus pursued under the stick of the spiritual and temporal powers without the ardors of faith inopportunely claiming to displace the institutional mountain tops.

The people did not happily nourish these congregations of loafers who converted the care they took over souls into chores, taxes and tithes. The people later demonstrated their displeasure by joyously sacking the abbeys and monasteries.

By expelling the monastic orders, the Reformation gave acceptability to those who desired to offer themselves the luxury of dialoging with God without being preoccupied with the power of their terrestrial subsistence.

The form of visionary Pietism known in the Catholic countries under the name of Quietism aroused the reprobation of Rome and the public powers in the Seventeenth Century.

An inhabitant of Lille, Antoinette Bourignon (1616–1680) was overtaken by an extreme devotion at an early age, but it entailed a strictly Catholic obedience. A sudden illumination persuaded her to confer the light of divine inspiration upon the world.

In the name of the powerful movements of the soul, she condemned the outward forms of religious organization. Kolakowski noted her “repulsion for her mother, which appeared in her childhood, and later her hatred for women and obsessional fear of sexual matters.”[532]

Bourignon’s speculations on original androgyny did not lack piquant aspects:

He had in his womb a vessel in which small eggs were born and another vessels full of a liquor that made these eggs fecund. And when the man became excited by the love of his God, the desire that he had for other creatures to praise, love and adore this great majesty sprinkled — through the fire of the love of God — these eggs with inconceivable delights; and one of these eggs, made fecund, then exited the man through the canal in the form of an egg and, shortly thereafter, from this egg there hatched out a perfect man. Thus it will be that, in the eternal life, there will be a holy and endless generation, quite different from the one that sin introduced by means of women, [a holy generation] by which God will form people — in conformity with the new discoveries of anatomy — by drawing from the flanks of Adam the viscera that contain the eggs that women possess and from which people are still born.[533]

Serge Hutin comments:

The matrix of original androgyny was torn from Adam during the bipartition, which resulted from the Fall.

These considerations [of Bourignon] were tied to a very original Christology: the Word [Verbe] was engendered by Adam when he was in the hermaphroditic state of innocence. The work of Jesus in his terrestrial incarnation was to teach mankind the means by which it could recover the favor of God and return to its perfect condition before the Fall.

To be saved, one must completely detach oneself from terrestrial things and become aware of the fact that they have disappeared and that God alone remains, the being having been annihilated in Him; the only qualification required for teaching the Truth is thus the perfect union of the soul with God.

Antoinette Bourignon thus described the birth, after the end of this world, of the New Jerusalem, the celestial dwelling of the just; and she showed how, after the [Last] Judgment, the earth will be transformed into an infernal prison in which the individual wills of the damned will be given over to a merciless struggle; but divine mercy will finally triumph and deliver the damned.[534]

Traveling the world [of Europe] so as to propagate her vision of an inward and purely spiritualized reality, Antoinette Bourignon had the chance to escape the fate of her friend Quirinus Kuhlmann (1651–1680) and her contemporary, Simon Morin (1623–1663).

A visionary and the [self-avowed] reincarnation of the Messiah, Simon Morin had the misfortune of living under the rule of a devout king, to whom he was denounced by a mediocre writer named Desmarets of Saint-Sorlin. The latter feigned placing himself among the ranks of Morin’s proselytes, obtained from him an exposition of his chiliastic doctrine and delivered it to the authorities. Louis XIV had him burned along with his writings in 1663. In 1647, Morin published his Thoughts of Simon Morin.

As for Quirinus Kuhlmann, Vuilliaud summarized his destiny in a few words: “The pyre was his throne.”[535]

At the age of 18 and at the end of a serious illness, Kuhlmann had a vision of God, who invested him with the mission of revealing his message to all the nations. Kuhlmann then left Breslau, his native town, and traveled through Germany and Holland, where he became enthusiastic about the works of Jacob Boehme.

According to Serge Hutin,

in Amsterdam, Kuhlmann came to know another young visionary, Johann Rothe, who was as exalted as he was; both joined the community of the ‘Angelic Brothers,’ but, quickly coming into conflict with Gichtel, they founded their own society.

After Rothe’s arrest, Kuhlmann led the life of a wanderer according to his prophetic ‘inspirations.’ In 1675, he went to Luebeck; he wanted to go to Rome to dethrone the pope, but finally embarked for Smyrna, where he proclaimed the imminence of the definitive Reformation. Persuaded that he would be its craftsman, and that the ‘spiritual kingdom’ would at first be instaurated in the East, he went to Constantinople, where he tried in vain — through the intermediary of the Dutch ambassador — to obtain an audience with the great vizier (1678). He then went to Switzerland, England (he visited London in 1679, and translated his books into English), France (he was in Paris in 1681) and Germany.

Finally, he left for Russia with the goal of instaurating the ‘Kingdom of God’ there; he took two wives, frequented the strangest Russian sects and attempted to convert the Muscovites to his mission. Peter the Great had him imprisoned as a dangerous heretic and conspirator; on 4 October 1689, Kuhlmann and his friend Conrad Nordermann were burned alive in Moscow.[536]

In a certain way, Peter Poiret (1646–1719) can be situated at the hinge between the first and second generations of Quietism. Born in Metz, he was a Calvinist minister in Heidelberg and Deux-Ponts. His reading of texts by Tauler, Thomas-A-Kempis and especially Antoinette Bourignon converted him to Quietism, which reduced existence to the pure contemplation of an inward God and the ecstasies of the unfathomed soul. Chased from the Palatinate by the war, he took refuge in Amsterdam, then went to Hamburg to meet Antoinette Bourignon, and spent eight years there studying the mystics. Persecuted by the Lutherians, he went to a place near Leyden in Holland, where he died in 1719. He published the works of Antoinette Bourignon and the works of Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de La Motte, better known as Madame Guyon, who gave Quietism its letters of nobility.

Madame Guyon

In 1675, the Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos (1628–1696) published A Spiritual Guide Intended to Led the Soul to Perfect Contemplation and the Rich Treasury of the Peace of the Heart. Well received by the Catholic milieus, the book was suddenly condemned as Quietist and, in 1679, Pope Innocent XI pushed cruelty as far as throwing its author into the prisons of the Divine Office, where he eventually died. The crime committed by the unfortunate Molinos was simply having revived the memory of the Alumbrados of the Sixteenth Century by assimilating them into a great spirituality. Molinos undertook to maintain the soul and the body in an absolute inaction so as to let God express himself in each person without the obstacles of conscience and [moral] imperatives. Molinos excluded the idea that the faithful should break with the observance of religious duties, but he conferred so many privileges upon the annihilation of the soul in ecstasy that the Church, the sacraments and works of piety were greatly de-emphasized.

Molinos’ principal accuser, the Bishop of Naples, claimed that the people who authorized divine quests did so to revoke his [personal] authority and to follow their inclinations freely. And no doubt this was not pure calumny, since the satisfactions of nature excelled at displaying the very reasons for combating them.

Molinos’ doctrine found echoes in France, where Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de La Motte, the widow of a certain Guyon, recommended the annihilation of the soul to the point that all prayer disappeared, except for the rebuke: “Thy will be done!”

Violently attacked by Bossuet, Madame Guyon obtained the protection of Fenelon, the Bishop of Cambrai. Condemned to prison, then exile, she did not repudiate any of her opinions. Accused by Pope Innocent XII, Fenelon abjured.

No more than the “Guerinets,” or adepts of the parish-priest Guerin, of whom Racine spoke in his Summary of the History of Port-Royal [1747] (*) neither Madame Guyon nor Fenelon used the illumination acquired by prayer to take Jesuitical liberties with asceticism. But it is probable that the simple people made more handy use of the divine graces and ecstasies so common in love. The songs that lampooned the Quietists were in circulation at the time. One of the refrains related the miraculous effects of devotion:

As for my body, I abandon it to you,
My soul being my only care.
When the soul gives itself to God
One can leave one’s body to one’s friend.

It is true that, at the time, the virtuous Bossuet, in a cassock, practiced the charming peril and disgraces of love with Mademoiselle Mauleon. In a society that was choked by the devout party and the prudishness of a pitiful monarchy, it was necessary that the pleasures of the senses were exalted in the shadow of the confessional, since it was dangerous to rally to the joyous revolt of the libertines such as Saint-Pavin, Blot, Claude the Small and Cyrano de Bergerac.

(*) “This was when two famous nuns from Montdidier were introduced to Maubuisson by one of the visitors, to teach, he said, the secrets of the most sublime prayers. The Mother of the Angels and the Angelic Mother were not close enough to the will of the fathers, and they often reproached them for knowing no other perfection than that which was acquired by the mortification of the senses and the practice of good works. The Mother of the Angels, who had learned at Port-Royal to mistrust novelty, observed these two young women closely; and it happened that, in the jargon of pure love, annihilation and perfect nudity, they excused all of the illusions and horrors that the Church had condemned in Molinos. These women were indeed from the sect of the illuminati from Roye, whom one calls the Guerinets, for whom Cardinal Richelieu had made such a careful search. Since the Mother of the Angels gave notice of the peril that the monastery was in, these two nuns were confined very strictly by order of the court; and the visitor who protected them was forced to withdraw.”

• 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 and monasteries began to express itself openly in the works in which the derision of sacred things showed quite well that religion merited the impertinent pikes of quips more than the thrusts of philosophical reason. The execution of the Knight of La Barre recalled that the Church was still capable of biting cruelly, but this was the last crime prescribed by the obedience of civil law to religious power.

Nevertheless, if Diderot, due to his insolence, only received a short period of imprisonment, the anti-religious thinkers of the beginning of the Eighteenth Century still had the most lively interest in being vigilant and dissimulative.

The case of the parish priest Jean Meslier is too well-known to be discussed at length here.[537] We recall that this parish priest of Etrepigny lived — with the exceptions of a disagreement with the lord of the town and a forbidden love affair with his servant — the life of a man fulfilling the duties of his position. His Testament, discovered after his death, eradicated God from society and the universe by extirpating him along with hierarchicalized power and the principle of the exploitation of man by man, which were the foundations of God’s fantastical existence. The text, mutilated by Voltaire, was only distributed in its unabridged version later on, but the celebrity of Meslier himself arrived well ahead of the publication of his work, thanks to the celebrated formula: “Humanity will only be happy when the last priest has been hanged with the guts of the last prince.”[538]

Thomas Woolston

The humorous irreverence and misfortune of Thomas Woolston proceeded from a misunderstanding. Even if it is fitting to not underestimate its corrosive humor, his Discourse on the Miracles of Jesus-Christ obeyed a desire to demonstrate at what points the Scriptures had only allegorical meaning. Such was already the opinion of Origen, Denck and Weigel; today it is the sentiment of the theologians who are dismayed by the common derision that confronts the religions of present-day [commodity] consumption.

Born in 1669 in Northamp, and later a student at Cambridge, Woolston acquired the reputation as an erudite and punctilious man of the Church. His Latin dissertation on a letter from Pontius Pilate to Tiberius on the subject of Jesus put into doubt a fabricated document, as many such documents were, with the sole goal of authenticating the historical Jesus.

Another one of his works expounded his thesis on the necessity of allegorical interpretations of texts claimed to be sacred. Intervening in the quarrel between Collins and the theologians concerning the foundations of Christianity, he wrote his ironic work, Moderator between a Nonbeliever and an Apostate.

Published in 1727, his Discourse on the Miracles of Jesus-Christ completed the quarrel with his friends and exposed him to the persecutions of all the religious spirits, conformist or not. Condemned to a year in prison and to a fine that he could not pay, he aroused the democratic sentiments of many of his fellow citizens. Samuel Clarke solicited his release in the name of the freedom of thought claimed by England. The authorities consented, on the condition that Woolston refrained from publishing anything shocking. He refused to exchange a repudiation for freedom, which he estimated to be the spring of natural rights and died on 27 January 1733, saying, “Here is a battle that all men are forced to fight and that I fight, not only with patience but also willingly.”

He addressed an acerbic dedication to the Bishop of London, his prosecutor; it rendered homage to him “with as much justice as you are due, because of the prosecution that you have wisely brought against the Moderator, as against a nonbeliever who here renders to you very humble thanks, and who declares himself to be an admirer of your zeal, wisdom and conduct.”

His Discourse ridiculed the Scriptures. He was astonished that Jesus-Christ had permitted demons to enter into a herd of pigs and cause destruction. “Where was the goodness and justice of such an action?” With respect to the recovery of a woman who lost some blood, he remarked: “If one reported to you that the Pope had cured a loss of blood similar to that of the woman in the Gospels, what could Protestants say, if not that a stupid, credulous and superstitious woman attacked by some slight illness had imagined herself to have been cured and that an impostor pontiff, helped by people so rascally that, to bring him the veneration of the populace, they had spread the rumor that such a recovery was a great miracle?”

He added: “I am charmed that it is not said in the Gospels that he [Jesus] had taken money from these brave people, for having exercised his trade as a fortune teller; had this happened, our doctors would not have failed to found upon such an example a right to demand taxes, salaries and pensions as payment for their divinations.”

Woolston mocked the curse hurled by Jesus against a fig tree that dried up one night without taking into account the interests of the thus-injured owner. He mocked the resurrection and the fact that Jesus appealed to Lazarus in a loud voice, “as if Lazarus was so deaf that he must have been a dead man.” Like Jacques Gruet, Thomas Scoto and Hermann of Rijswick, Woolston characterized the Savior “as impostor full of deceit.”

Woolston’s caustic spirit did not attack the authority that the Constantinian Church invested in the mythical Jesus-Christ without also aiming at all the truths that were so quick to send to the pyre or prison those who did not kneel down before them. Woolston defended the memory of Servetus against Calvin. His refusal of a freedom purchased at the price of an enslavement to received ideas rested upon a model of dignity struggling for a tolerance in which many were content, like Voltaire, to raise their voices when the danger had passed and their glory was not in peril.

Woolston’s spirit, disencumbered from the scruples of faith in the Church, sharpened itself upon Holbach’s Portable Theology and especially upon the works composed by the Abbey Henri-Joseph du Laurens (1719–1797), whose Matthew the Accomplice, or the Diversity of the Human Spirit was among the funniest texts that ridiculed religious prejudices. (One of his characters says the following, which contains a large part of the mystery of faith: “It is a great way in fact[539] in mystical love to have previously exercised all the faculties of one’s soul on that of a lover.”)

The Book of the Three Impostors

A mythic book if there ever was one, the De tribus impostoribus haunted the imaginations of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance before offering bibliophiles occasions for research and passionate quarrels.

If there ever existed such a manuscript circulated hand to hand with all the attractions of peril and prohibition, its content probably added nothing to the thesis that its title proposed with such pleasing concision: three impostors have led the world — Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. Is it necessary to discover authors for such a formula, the obviousness of which would impose itself sooner or later, if only furtively, on anyone disturbed by the chaos and vexations ruling over society and the order of things? Goliards, ribald students, priests without modesty, bishops and popes less concerned with faith than prestige, peasants tyrannized by the aristocracy, bourgeois entangled in fiscal injustice, workers and unemployed workers begging in the streets day and night for a little food or money, women scorned or treated like Satan’s creatures — who, one time or another, has not spit upon the holy figures erected everywhere like bloody totems for monotheism and its ministers?

A slightly exhaustive study of mindsets from the Fourth to the Eighteenth Centuries would show at what point religious belief — perhaps more in certain orthodoxies than in many heretical engagements — was generally only a prudent or comfortable covering, (*) under which the torments and fleeting satisfactions of passion were unleashed.

(*) In 1470, a police ordinance applied to beggars in Nuremberg conceded to them permission to exercise their trade on the condition that they knew how to recite the Pater, the Ave, the Credo and the ten commandments.

In the preface to his reprint of De tribus impostoribus,[540] Gerhardt Bartsch retraced the history of this text, which according to all probability existed as a short affidavit of its provocative assertion before acceding to the typographical reality of a book.[541]

Abu Tahir, a philosopher belonging to the Karmate current that, from the Ninth to the Tenth Centuries, rejected and ridiculed belief in Mohammed and Islam, said: “In this world, three individuals have corrupted mankind: a shepherd, a physician and a camel-driver. And this camel-driver was the worst pickpocket, the worst prestidigitator of the three.” This idea, adopted by Ibn Rachd, better known as Averroes,(*) suggested to the West the existence of a work as elusive as the opinion that it illustrated: the Liber de tribus impostoribus sive Tractatus de vanitate religionum (the Book of the Three Impostors, or the Vanity of the Religions).[542]

(*) “The Jewish religion is a law of children, the Christian religion a law of impossibility and the Muslim religion a law of swine.”[543]

A professor at the Sorbonne and an admirer of Aristotle, Master Simon of Tournai (1130–1301) proclaimed — without being otherwise disturbed — that “the Jews were seduced by Moses, the Christians by Jesus and the Gentiles by Mohammed.”[544]

The scholar La Monnoye, among the first people to study the question, cited the accusation made by Gregoire IX against Frederic II, for whom religion was a simple instrument of domination. For a long time, the book appeared (there was no proof) to have come from his pen, or that of his chancellor, Pierre de la Vigne.

According to Alvaro Pelayo, Thomas Scoto denounced the imposture of the prophets. Hermann of Rijswick referred to it in his confession. Putative authors were not lacking: Arnaud of Villeneuve, Michel Servetus, Jacques Gruet, Fausto Longiano (whose Temple of the Truth [now lost] dismissed all the religions), Jeannin of Solcia, the Canon of Bergamo (who was condemned on 14 July 1459 for affirming that the three impostors “governed the world with their fantasies”[545]) and all of the following: Ochino, Campanella, Le Pogge, Cardan, Pomponaccio and even Spinoza. (I have found no trace in the works of Antoine Couillard of the remark denounced by Drujon: “Jesus-Christ founded his religion on idiots.”)

Studying the printed copy dated 1598, which he found at the Library of Vienna, Bartsch established that it was actually published much later. Without prejudging the prior existence of a manuscript copy, he confirmed Presser’s thesis, according to which the book — published around 1753 — was the work of Johannes Joachim Mueller (1661–1733), grandson of the theologian Johannes Mueller (1598–1672), who was the author of a study entitled Atheismus devictus. Taught about the existence of the mythic book [De tribus impostoribus], Johannes Joachim undertook to give it a reality, and fixed — not without mischievousness — its date of publication at 1598, the date of his grandfather’s birth.

In its modern version, De tribus impostoribus alludes to the Jesuits; it sets the “eternal truths” of each religion against the others. It emphasizes the incoherencies of the sacred texts and reaches this conclusion: there is no other God than nature, and no other religion than the laws of nature.

Matthias Knuetzen

A poet of atheism and the struggle against religious obscurantism, Matthias Knuetzen (1646–1674) knew an impassioned destiny that was exemplary in the history of the emancipation of mankind under the Ancien Regime.

His theses inspired the French encyclopedists, even though — with the exception of Naigeon — they were resolved not to mention him.

Born in 1646 in Oldenmouth, in Holstein, he was the son of an organist. Upon the death of his parents, he was welcomed by Pastor Fabricius, who took care of his education, but without — or so it seems — inculcating in the boy the obedience and austerity of the morals that were pleasing to God. His studies of theology in Koenigsberg ended up winning him over to atheism.

At the age of 21, he returned to his hometown without a strong desire to preach there. In 1668, he enrolled at the University of Copenhagen, where he wrote De lacrimus Christi (now lost). Upon his return to Oldenmouth, he scandalized the good people by taking the floor at Toenningen, in front of an assembly of peasants to whom he extolled rebellion against the Protestantism of the pastors and the absolutism of the princes. Banished by the city council in 1673, he took refuge at Krempen, in Denmark, and again took up his diatribes against the wealth of the consistories. Chased from Krempen, he traveled through Germany, where he publicly preached atheism and the struggle against the aristocracy. On 5 September 1674, he deposited at the principal church of Iena the manuscript of Ein Gesprach zwischen einem Gastwirt und drei ungleichen Religionsgasten[546] and the Latin text Amicus Amicis Amica. These anonymous lampoons, also sent to the principal authorities, aroused excitement in the fortified city.

Knuetzen just barely escaped the repression, went to Cobourg, where he distributed his Amicus, which he diligently recopied. He did the same in Nuremberg. He returned to Iena under the pseudonym of Matthew Donner. He spread the rumor of an international sect, the “Conscious” [conscientaires], of which he was the initiator. The sect only existed in his will to propagate individual freedom and revolt against all forms of power. And in fact his pamphlets — clandestinely printed by his emulators, the existence of whom the probably knew nothing about — circulated in France, where they counted among the first texts that opened a breach in the feudal citadel that the French Revolution would destroy. His traces disappeared in 1674 and the common opinion is that he died in Italy. One of his letters (falsely dated Rome) was published in French in Interviews on Diverse Subjects in History by La Croze in Cologne in 1711.

“Above all,” he wrote in Amicus, “we deny God, and we hurl him down from his heights, rejecting the temple with all its priests. What suffices for us, the Conscious, is science, not one, but the greatest number (...). This is the consciousness that nature, benevolent mother of the humble people, has accorded to all men, in the place of the [various] Bibles.”[547]

The Fall Of God

As Knuetzen wanted, the French Revolution hurled God down to earth, where he agonized for two centuries, surviving in the spirit of the great [political] ideologies that supplanted the European religions. At the end of the Twentieth Century, the collapse of both brought together in a unanimous discredit the residues of celestial thought, sacred and profane, theist and atheist, religious and lay.

The decline and fall of an intellectual conception of the living was completed in a state of indifference that contrasted with the rage that presided over its critique. The hatred of the “church-goers” [calotins], which, from the towns to the countrysides, was a prelude to the Revolution in its sacking of churches and monasteries, was legally consecrated in the Civil Constitution of the clergy, an act of bureaucratization [fonctionnarisation] that marked the end of religious power over the citizenry, for which Statist repression was quickly substituted.

Promulgated in 1790 by the French Revolution, the Civil Constitution of the clergy offered few points in common with the provisions that had subjected the Anglican Church to royal power. More than just the prerogatives of the pope, the influence of religion itself was revoked. The refusal of Roman authority proceeded from the destruction of the divine rights of kings.

Supported by the new exigencies of the economy, philosophy triumphed over a “religious obscurantism” that in fact did not stop haunting it, perpetuating in enlightened mindsets the bloody stupidity that tore the individual away from what was most alive so as to identify it with the frozen truths of science, politics, sociology, ethics and ethos. The flag effaced the cross, before being burned in its turn. Although the collapse of Jacobinism and Bonapartism gave the Church of the Nineteenth Century a considerable power, Catholicism and Protestantism — worn away by social modernity — did not cease to decline. At the dawn of the Twenty-First Century, they only survive as the folklore recounted on Sundays.

In the towns as well as in the countrysides, the first months of the revolutionary effervescence decided the fate of the clergy. The [Church] dignitaries, closer to the aristocracy than to the people, shared the discredit of the Ancien Regime. Some of them chose prudence and conciliation. The others, espousing the convictions of their parishioners, honored themselves by representing them at the National Assembly. From their zeal came the image of “Citizen Jesus,” which demonstrated — even in the theology of liberation — the astonishing capacity of religious values to adapt.

One refused to swear [jurer] allegiance to the Civil Constitution and preferred exile or clandestinity; another gave sermons and perjured himself [se parjurerent] at the opportune moment; and another took a career (full of risks) as a State civil servant. The civil servants’ discomfort grew to the extent that Jacobinite centralism displeased the provinces and countrysides, and aroused liberal insurrections and Catholic peasant revolts.

After eight months of silence, Pope Pius VI condemned the Civil Constitution as “heretical and schismatic.” He was soon hanged and burned in effigy in the garden of the Tuileries. Nevertheless, the parish priests gained in political character what they lost in sacralized virtue. Those who, in the manner of Jacques Roux, took the side of the Enrages succumbed to Jacobin persecution. The unruly [refractaires] were pursued and those who swore allegiance were held to be hypocrites. The high clergy skillfully navigated so as to safeguard their privileges. Emblem of the two centuries to come, Tallyrand — unscrupulous enough to give sermons and consecrate other bishops who swore allegiance — used honorable mimicry to survive the Revolution, Bonapartism, Empire, the Restoration and the monarchy.

His exemplary modernity, his art of chipping away at the sacred in accordance with the necessities of politics, presaged the destiny of Christianity itself, which was condemned to become socialized before it succumbed to the indifference that market society would propagate in matters of opinion at the end of the Twentieth Century.

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• Vogt, H.J., Cetus Santorum. Der Kirchenbegriff des Novatien und die Geschicte seiner Sonderkirche, Bonn, 1968.

• Vonaux, Les Actes de Pierre, Paris, 1922.

• Vos, K., “De doopgezinden te Antwerpen in de XVI eeuw,” in Bulletin de la Commission Royale d’Histoire, Brussels, 1920.

• Vuarnet, J.-N., L’Extase Feminine.

• Vuillaud, P., “Fin du Monde et Prophetes Modernes,” in Les Cahiers d’Hermes, Paris, 1947.

• Wasmod (Johann of Hamburg), Contra Hereticos Bekardos Lulhardos et Swestriones, in Haupt (see above).

• Wattenbach, W., “Uber die Sekte der Bruder vom Freien Geiste,” in Sitzingsberichte der Koniglichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaft, Berlin, 1887.

• Werner, E., and Buttner, Th., Circumcellion und Mittelalter, Leipzig, 1957–1958.

• Whittaker, M., Jews and Christians: Greco-Roman Views, Cambridge, 1984.

• Wiesel, W., “Bibliography of Spiritual Libertines,” in Religion in Geschicte und Gegenwort.

• Wilker, R.-L., Le Mythe des Origines Chretiennes, Paris, 1971.

• Williams, G.H., The Radical Reformation, Philadelphia, 1962.

• Wilson, R.M., Studies in the Gospel of Thomas, London, 1960.

• Wippold, R., Hendrik Niklaes, in Zeitschrift fur Historische Theologie, 1862.

• Wittaker, M., Acta Pilatis, Paris, 1912.

• — , Oratio ad Graecos and Fragments, Oxford, 1982.

• Workman, H.B., The Dawn of the Reformation, London, 1901–1902.

• Wunsch, R., Sethianische Verfluchtungstafeln aus Rom, Leipzig, 1898.

• Yadin, Y., The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada, Jerusalem, 1965.

[1] Translator’s note: Latin in original, meaning “the last resort.”

[2] Translator’s note: Not just “rackeetering” business affairs, but worldly affairs, as well.

[3] Translator’s note: A naive person. See Voltaire’s novel Candide, ou l’Optiminisme (1759).

[4] Translator’s note: “Big players” attempts to capture les brasseurs d’affaires, which literally means “the brewers of affairs,” and might also be rendered as “people with a lot of pokers in the fire.”

[5] Translator’s note: La religion — c’est-a-dire ‘ce qui relie’. This pun — something along the lines of religament — doesn’t translate very well into English.

[6] Author’s note: In the 1990s, the hostility — sly or declared — of the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish establishments [milieux] with respect to a novelist who’d been condemned by Islamic fanatacism to death for impiety speaks volumes about the democratic sincerity and the spirit of tolerance of those diverse sectarians of the “true God,” who are quite fortunately deprived of the help of State terrorism.

[7] Author’s note: An arbitrary dating system that accredits a Messiah and today still recalls the extravagant appropriation of time by the Church.

[8] Translator’s note: English in original.

[9] Translator’s note: Latin in original, meaning “willingly or unwillingly.”

[10] Translator’s note: In Rabelais, Physis is joyful and unashamed, and Antiphysis is hateful and destructive.

[11] Translator’s note: The first volume of The Criminal History of Christianity was published in 1986. The author (born in 1924) has most recently published Volume 8 (2004).

[12] Translator’s note: The word used by Vaneigem, repoliner, doesn’t seem to exist in French. A typo?

[13] Translator’s note: Magnetic effects, images of traces of electromagnetic energy.

[14] Translator’s note: Traite de savoir-viver a l’uage des jeunes generations (Gallimard, 1967), translated as The Revolution of Everyday Life; Le Livre des plaisirs (Encre, 1979), translated as The Book of Pleasures; and Adresse aux vivants sur la mort qui les gouverne (Seghers, 1990), not yet translated into English.

[15] Translator’s note: Le Mouvement du libre-espirit (Editions Ramsey, 1986), translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith as The Movement of the Free Spirit (Zone Books, 1994): “If it is true that the test of a book’s intelligence is what it can offer toward the pleasure of living better, let me say, right from the start, that there is no such intention in my study of the movement of the Free Spirit” (p. 12).

[16] Translator’s note: Latin in original: “under the aspect of eternity.”

[17] M. Simon, Le Judaisme et le Christianisme antique, Paris, p. 49.

[18] J. Hadot, Histoire des religions, Brussels, 1980–1981, p. 14.

[19] Ibid., p. 27.

[20] C.C. Torrey, “Certainly Pseudo-Ezekiel,” JBL, 53, 1934.

[21] B. Dubourg, L’Invention de Jesus, Paris, I, p. 251–260.

[22] Y. Yadim, The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada, Jerusalem, 1965; Th. Middendorp, Die Stellung Jesu Ben Sira zwischen Judentum und Hellenismus, Leidenn, 1973.

[23] Flavius Joseph, Antiquities judaiques, Paris, 1929, VIII, 45.

[24] C. Puech, “Un rituel d’exorcisme (11 Q Ps Ap),” Revue de Qumran, XIV, #55, 1989.

[25] J. Eisenberg, Histoire du peuple juif, Paris, 1974, p. 174.

[26] Ibid., p. 163.

[27] Ibid., p. 165.

[28] Th. Mommsen, Histoire romaine, Paris, 1863–1872.

[29] K. Deschner, Kriminalgeschicte des Christentums, Hamburg, 1986. I, p.125.

[30] M. Simon, Recherches d’histoire judeo-chretienne, Paris, 1962; ID., La Polemique antijuive in Melanges Cumont.

[31] Petrone, Satyricon, fr. 371.

[32] Whittaker, Jews and Christians, Cambridge, 1984, p. 82.

[33] D. Rokeah, Jews, Pagans, and Christians in Conflict, Jerusalem-Leiden, 1982.

[34] J. Eisenberg, op. cit., p. 179.

[35] K. Deschner, op. cit., pp. 117 sq.

[36] B. Dubourg, L’Invention de Jesus, Paris, 1987, I, p. 266

[37] M. Simon, Les sectes juives a l’epoque de Jesus, Paris, 1960; E.M. Laperrousaz, L’Attente du messie, Paris.

[38] Flavius Joseph, Antiquites judaiques, XVII, 10.

[39] Flavius Joseph, La Guerre des Juifs, II, 4, 5.

[40] Ibid., II, 18.

[41] Flavius Joseph, Antiquites judaiques, XVII, 10.

[42] Ibid., XVIII, 1.

[43] Flavius Joseph, La Guerre des Juifs, II, 11.

[44] Translator’s note: in Latin: the Tenth Legion.

[45] Y. Yadin, The Ben Sira Scroll from Masada, Jerusalem, 1965.

[46] Translator’s note: this French word can mean a two-sided coin, a “doubloon,” or a typographic double.

[47] A. Dupont-Sommer, Les Ecrits esseniens decouverts pres de la mer Morte, Paris, 1980, p. 408; J. Hadot, op. cit. p. 35.

[48] J. Marques-Riviere, Histoire des sects et des societes secretes, p. 92.

[49] J. Picard (or de Picardie), “Histoire des bienheureux du temps de Jeremie,” in Pseudoepigraphes de l’Ancien Testament, p. 34.

[50] Saulcy (Fr. de), Dictionnaire des antiquites bibliques, Paris, 1859.

[51] J. Doresse, Les livres secrets des gnostiques d’Egypte, Paris, 1958–1959, II, p. 328.

[52] B. Dubourg, L’invention de Jesus, op. cit., II.

[53] J.-M. Rosenstiehl, L’Apocalypse d’Elie, Paris, 1972, p. 69.

[54] Philonenko (M.), Pseudoepigraphes de l’Ancien Testament et des manuscrits de la mer Morte, Paris, 1987, t. I.

[55] A. Jaubert, La Date de la Cene, Paris, 1957.

[56] N. Toci, I manoscritti del mar Morto, Bari, 1967.

[57] J. Duhaine, “Etude comparative de 4 QM FGGG 1–3 et 1 QM,” Revue de Qumran, XIV, #55.

[58] B. de Montfaucon, Lettres pour et contre la fameuse question si les Solitaires, appeles Therapeutes, dont a parle Philon le Juif etaient chretiens, Paris, 1712.

[59] A. Dupont-Sommer, Les ecrits esseniens... , op. cit. p. 16.

[60] Philonenko, op. cit.

[61] Id., Les interpolations chretiennes... , Paris, 1960, p. 31.

[62] Ibid. p. 20.

[63] J. Fitzmayer, S.J., “The Q Scrolls and the NT after forty years,” Revue de Qumran, XIII, #49–52, p. 613.

[64] Philonenko, Interpolations, op. cit., p. 29.

[65] A. Dupont-Sommer, op. cit., p. 377.

[66] Ibid., p. 373.

[67] Id., Observations sur le Manuel de Discipline decouvert pres de la mer Morte, Paris, 1951.

[68] Ibid., p. 384.

[69] Ibid., p. 6.

[70] J.L. Teicher, “The Teachings of the Pre-Pauline Church in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Journal of Jewish Studies, 1952, III, #3–5.

[71] A. Dupont-Sommer, Les ecrits esseniens... , op. cit., p. 235.

[72] Regle, 11, 6–8, in Philonenko, Pseudoepigraphie ... , op. cit., in Picard, p. 4.

[73] A. Dupont-Sommer, Observations ... , p. 24.

[74] Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord, Utrecht, 1982, p. 154.

[75] J.T. Milik, Discoveries in the judean desert. I Qumran, Cave I, Oxford, 1955.

[76] Erbetta, Gli apocrifi del NT, Turin, 1964, t. III.

[77] “Can we exclude Samaritan influence from Qumran?” Revue de Qumran, VI, 1967, pp. 109 sq.

[78] Isser, s.j. “The Dosithean,” in Studies in Judaism in the Late Antiquity, Leiden, 1976, XVII; Th. Caldwell, S.J., Dositheos Samaritanus, Kairos IV, 1962, pp. 105 sq; R. Simon Wilson, Dositheos and the Dead Sea ZRGG9, 1957.

[79] Vilmar, Annales Samaritani Abulfathi, Gotha, 1865.

[80] Fossum, op. cit., p. 37.

[81] Ibid., pp. 36 and 37.

[82] Ibid., p. 48.

[83] M. Goulder, The Roots of the Christian Myth, The Myth of God Incarnated, London, 1977.

[84] O. Cullmann, Le probleme litteraire et historique du roman pseudo-clementin, Paris 1930, p. 184.

[85] Vilmar, op. cit., p. 160.

[86] Cited by Fossum, op. cit., p. 245.

[87] Ibid., p. 39.

[88] J.M.A., Salles-Dabadie, “Recherches sur Simon le Mage. L’Apophasis megale,” Cahiers de la Revue biblique, #10, Paris, 1969, p. 10.

[89] Ibid., p. 15.

[90] Ibid.

[91] Ibid.

[92] Ibid., p. 21.

[93] Ibid., p. 25.

[94] Ibid..

[95] Ibid., pp. 27–29.

[96] Ibid., p. 33.

[97] Ibid., p. 35.

[98] Ibid.

[99] Ibid., pp. 35–37.

[100] Fossum, op. cit., p. 160.

[101] J. Annequin, Recherches sur l’acte magique et ses representations aux 1^st et 2d siecle, Paris, 1979, p. 16.

[102] Ibid., p. 17.

[103] Ibid.

[104] Menard, Les Textes de Nag-Hammadi, Leiden, 1975, pp. 127 and 128. [Translator’s note: the English translation published in The Nag Hammadi Library, edited by James M. Robinson, revised edition (San Francisco, 1990) is as follows: “And if you (Asclepius) wish to see the reality of this mystery, then you should see the wonderful representation of the intercourse that takes place between the male and the demale. For when the semen reaches the climax, it leaps forth. In that moment, the female receives the strength of the male; the male, for his part, receives the strength of the female, while the semen does this.”]

[105] Irenaeus, I, 31, 1.

[106] “Les noces spirituelles dans l’Evangile selon Philippe,” Museon, Louvain, 1974, LXXXVII, 1–2, p. 157.

[107] Delatte, Etudes sur la magie grecque, Louvain, 1914, p. 75.

[108] W. Koller, Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft, VIII, 1915, p. 229.

[109] Irenaeus, I, 24, 1–2.

[110] Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity, New York 1959, pp. 15–17.

[111] M. Tardieu, Museon, 87, 1974, p. 530.

[112] Translator’s note: these very phrases and/or phrases very similar to them do in fact appear in the English translation of this hymn, titled “The Thunder, Perfect Mind” (The Nag Hammadi Library, edited by James M. Robinson, revised edition: San Francisco 1990), but they do not appear in this order. It appears that Vaneigem’s source — Tardieu’s Museon? (see footnote 24) — offered a skim rather than a deep quote from this hymn. For its entire text, see the collection of the Gnostic Society Library at www.gnosis.org.

[113] W. Duliere, De la dyade a l’unite par la triade, Paris, 1965, p. 76.

[114] Rapporte, ibid., p. 78.

[115] Ibid.

[116] Ibid.

[117] J. Matter, Histoire critique du gnosticisme, Paris, 1828, t. II, p.53.

[118] Fossum, op. cit., p. 268.

[119] Quoted by Leisegang, La Gnose, Paris, p. 81.

[120] Delatte, op. cit., p. 78.

[121] Lesisegang, op. cit., p. 100.

[122] Ibid., p. 103.

[123] S. Hutton, Les gnostiques, Paris, 1976.

[124] A. Dupont-Sommer, La doctrine gnostique de la lettre WAW, Paris, 1961.

[125] Leisegang, op. cit., p. 104.

[126] Following Leisegang, op. cit., p. 101.

[127] Ibid., p. 115.

[128] R. Graves, La Deesse blanche, Paris, 1986.

[129] Leisegang, op. cit., p. 133.

[130] Ibid., pp. 135 and 136.

[131] Fossum, op. cit., p. 297.

[132] Ibid., p. 307.

[133] J. A. Fitzmayer, “The Contribution of Qumran Aramaic to the Study of the New Testament,” New Testament Studies, 20, 1973–1974, p. 391.

[134] Fossum, op. cit., p. 290.

[135] Ibid., p. 312.

[136] Ibid.

[137] Nag-Hammadi, Gnosticism and Early Christianity, ed. Hedrick and Hodgson, 1988, pp. 55–86.

[138] C. Puech, Les Nouveaux Ecrits, p. 127; M. Tardieu, “Les livres mis sous le nom de Seth et les sethiens de l’heresiologie,” Gnosis and Gnosticism, NHS 8, Leiden, 1977.

[139] G. Strounsa, “Aher, a Gnostic,” in Rediscovery of Gnosticism, II.

[140] J. Doresse, Les Livres secrets des gnostiques d’Egypt, p. 211. [Translator’s note: the English translation of this portion of this text, which is called “Eugnostos the Blessed” (The Nag Hammadi Library, edited by James M. Robinson, revised edition: San Francisco, 1990), is as follows: “Afterwards another principle came from Immortal Man, who is called ‘Self-perfected Begetter.’ When he received the consent of his consort, Great Sophia, he revealed that first-begotten androgyne, who is called, ‘First-begotten Son of God.’ Now, First-begotten, since he has his authority from his father, created angels, myriads with number, for retinue. The whole multitude of those angels are called ‘Assembly of the Holy Ones, the Shadowless Lights.’ Now when these greet each other, their embraces become like angels like themselves. First Begetter Father is called ‘Adam of the Light.’ And the kingdom of Son of Man is full of ineffable joy and unchanging jubiliation, ever rejoicing in ineffable joy over their imperishable glory, which has never been heard nor has it been revealed to all the eons that came to be and their worlds. The Son of Man consented with Sophia, his consort, and revealed a great andryogynous Light. His masculine name is designated ‘Savior, Begetter of All things.’ His feminine name is designated ‘Sophia, All-Begettress.’ Some call her ‘Pistis.’”]

[141] Rediscovery of Gnosticism, op. cit., II, p. 656.

[142] J.A. Fitzmayer, p. 619.

[143] Revue de Qumran, VII, 1970, #27, pp. 343 sq.

[144] H. Corbin, “Necessite de l’angelologie,” in L’Ange et l’homme, Paris, 1978, p. 38.

[145] Ibid., p. 39.

[146] A. Vaillant, Les Livre des secrets d’ Henoch, Slavic text and French translation, Paris, 1976; M.A. Knibb, The Ethiopic Book of Enoch, Oxford, 1976; R.H. Charles, The Book of Enoch, London, 1917.

[147] M. Warner, Die Entstehung des christlichen Dogmas problemgeschictlich dargesteullt, Berne and Tubingen, 1953, p. 344.

[148] I. Kryvelev, Le Christ: mythe ou realite? Moscow, 1987.

[149] Justin, Dialogue avec le juif Tryphon, p. 49.

[150] M. de Chamrun-Ruspoli, Le Retour du Phenix, p. 69.

[151] Justin, op. cit., p. 48.

[152] P. de Labriole, La Reaction paienne. Etude sur la polemique antichretienne du 1 au IV siecle, Paris, 1934, p. 19.

[153] H. von Soden, Christentum und Kultur in der geschictliche Entwicklung ihrer Beziehungen, 1933.

[154] Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots, Manchester, 1967.

[155] R. Ambelain, Jesus ou le mortel secret des templiers, Paris, 1976.

[156] R. Graves, La Deesse blanche, op. cit., p. 66.

[157] J. Brill, Lilith, Paris, 1986.

[158] J. Doresse, L’Evangelie selon Thomas, Monaco, 1988.

[159] B. Dubourg, L’Invention du Jesus, op. cit., II, p. 264.

[160] A. Dupont-Sommer, La Doctrine secrete de la lettre WAW d’apres une lamelle arameene inedite, Paris, 1961.

[161] Leisegang, La Gnose, op. cit., p. 212.

[162] Fossum, op. cit., p. 357.

[163] H. Corbin, op. cit., p. 41.

[164] A. Dupont-Sommer, Les ecrits esseniens..., op. cit., p. 373.

[165] Cited by Laperrousaz, Les manuscrits de la mer Morte, Paris, 1961, p. 55.

[166] M. de Chambrun-Ruspoli, op. cit., p. 79.

[167] MacCoby, Paul et l’Invention du christianisme, p. 60.

[168] B. Dubourg, op. cit., II, p. 46.

[169] B. Dubourg, L’Invention de Jesus, op. cit., II, p. 157.

[170] G.P. Luttikhuisen, The Revelation of Elchasai: Investigation into the Evidence for Mesopotamian Jewish Apocalypse of the Second Century and It’s Reception by Judeo-Christian Propagandists, Tubingen, 1985.

[171] R. Eisenmann, Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumrans, Leiden, 1983.

[172] Ibid.

[173] J. Moreau, Les persecutions dans l’Empire romain, Bruxelles, 1964.

[174] J. Menard, “L’Evangile selon Thomas,” Nag-Hammadi Studies, Leiden, V, 1975.

[175] Ibid.; Grant, [trans.: text missing from original here].

[176] J. Doresse, L’Evangile selon Thomas, op. cit.

[177] Ibid., p. 88.

[178] Ibid., pp. 31–35.

[179] B. Dubourg, L’Invention de Jesus, op. cit., II, p. 354.

[180] O. Cullmann, op. cit., pp. 82 and 83.

[181] Ibid., p. 83.

[182] Cited by Maccoby, Paul et l’invention du christianisme, op. cit., p. 260.

[183] J.-M. Tosenstiehl, “Portrait de l’Antichrist,” in Pseudoepographie, p. 59.

[184] Erbetta, Gli apocrifi.

[185] Cited by M. de Chambrun-Ruspoli, Le Retour du Phenix, op. cit., p. 165.

[186] P. Alfaric, Le probleme de Jesus, Paris, 1954, p. 21.

[187] B. Dubourg, op. cit., II, p. 149.

[188] E.M. Smallwood, The Jews under Roman Rule p. 234.

[189] G. Ory, Le Christ et Jesus, Bruxelles, 1968; Meeks, The First Urban Christians, London, 1983, p. 8.

[190] K. Deschner, op. cit., III, p. 99.

[191] B. Dubourg, op. cit.

[192] K. Deschner, op. cit., III, p. 99.

[193] Ibid., pp. 100 and 101.

[194] Ibid., p. 102.

[195] Erbetta, op. cit.

[196] M. O’Connor, o.p., Truth: Paul and Qumran. Studies in New Testament Exegesis, London-Dublin-Melbourne, 1968.

[197] A. Dupont-Sommer, Les ecrits esseniens ..., op. cit., pp. 378 and 379.

[198] O. Cullmann, op. cit., p. 85.

[199] Maccoby, op. cit.

[200] Leisegang, p. 74.

[201] E. Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, New York, 1981.

[202] W.H. Frend, Martyrdom and Persecution, Oxford, 1965, pp. 222 sq.

[203] E. Harnack, Marcion. Das Evangelium vom fremde Gott, Leipzig, 1921.

[204] H. Resche, Die Werkstatt des Marcusevangelisten, Iena, 1924.

[205] J. Turmel, Histoire des dogmas, Paris, 1931–1933.

[206] Cited by M. De Chambrun-Ruspoli, Le Retour du Penix, op. cit., p. 69.

[207] Leisegang, La Gnose, op. cit., pp. 187 sq.

[208] A. Huck, Synopsis of the First Three Gospels, 1936.

[209] J. Turmel, op. cit.

[210] K. Deschner, III, p. 75.

[211] Clement of Alexandria, Stomates, III, 1, 1–3.

[212] Ibid.

[213] Ibid., IV, 12, 83.

[214] Leisegang, op. cit., p. 146.

[215] Elenchos, VII, 20.

[216] Pseudo-Denys the Areopagite, Theologie mystique, Paris, 1943.

[217] Irenaeus, op. cit., I, 24–6.

[218] Bonner (C.), Studies in magical, gnostic amulets, London 1950.

[219] Leisegang, op. cit., p. 171.

[220] Ibid., p. 172.

[221] Flavius Vopiscus, Saturn., VII, 8.

[222] Clement of Alexandria, Stromates, III, 6, 59.

[223] Lettre de Ptolemee a Flora, translation and notes by G. Quispel, Paris, 1949.

[224] Cited by Leisegang, op. cit., pp. 203 and 204.

[225] Ibid., p. 206.

[226] Ibid., p. 208.

[227] Ibid., p. 209.

[228] Ibid., p. 287 and 288.

[229] Ibid.,

[230] Irenaeus, I, 13, 5.

[231] Ibid., I, 13 sq.

[232] Ibid., XIV, 1 sq.

[233] B. Dubourg, L’invention de Jesus, op. cit., I, p. 245.

[234] Leisegang, op. cit., pp. 227 and 228.

[235] Clement of Alexandria, Stromates, III, 2, 9, and 3, 9.

[236] Leisegang, op. cit., pp. 180 and 181.

[237] Leisegang, La Gnose, op. cit., p. 179.

[238] Irenaeus, I, 25.

[239] Translator’s note: As elsewhere, all parenthetical insertions (thus) were made by the author, Raoul Vaneigem. Note as well that the wording of this passage, I Corinthians 13: 1–8, in the Revised Standard Version (1952) is quite different: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends [...].”

[240] Frend, Martyrdom and and Early Christianity, p. 288.

[241] Ibid., p. 293.

[242] Apollonios of Ephesus, quoted in Eusebius of Cesarea, Ecclesiatic History.

[243] Runciman, Le Manicheisme medieval, p. 23.

[244] Aland, Augustin und der Montanismus, 1960, p. 132.

[245] Epiphanius, Panarion, 48, 2, 4.

[246] Aland, op. cit., p. 126.

[247] Ammien Marcellin, quoted in Rougier, Celse contre les chretiens, Paris, 1977, p. 13.

[248] Rougier, Celse contre les chretiens, p. 13.

[249] P. Giet, “Un courant judeo-chretien a Rome au milieu du IIe siecle,” in Aspects du judeo-christianisme, Paris, 1965.

[250] R. Joly, Introduction au Pasteur d’Hermas, Paris, 1968, p. 41.

[251] Quoted by Rougier, op. cit., p. 14.

[252] Tertullian, Apologetique, 37, 4.

[253] ID., De poenitentia, I, 1.

[254] Ibid., 4.

[255] ID, De anima.

[256] Irenaeus, Mize en lumiere et refutation, I, 28, 1.

[257] Tatian, Oratio, VII.

[258] K. Deschner, III, p. 109.

[259] H.W. Hogg, “The Diatessaron of Tatian,” in Ante-Nicaean Fathers, Grand Rapids, 1951–1956; M. Wittaker, Oratio ad Graecos and Fragments, Oxford, 1982.

[260] Justin, Apologie I, 35, 9–48, 24.

[261] Tertullian, Apologetique, 21, 24.

[262] Acta Pilatis, translation by E. Revillont, Paris, 1912.

[263] Matte-Bonnes, R. and C. Bonner, op. cit.

[264] Tertullian, Apologetique, XXI, p. 8 sq.

[265] E. Junod, “Creation romanesque et tradition ecclesiatique dans les Acts apocryphes des apotres,” in H. Koester and F. Bovon, Genese de l’ecriture chretienne, 1991.

[266] Erbetta, Gli apocrifi, op. cit., p. 139.

[267] H. Koester and F. Bovon, op. cit., p. 36.

[268] Ibid., p. 43.

[269] Ibid., pp. 43 and 44.

[270] Ibid.

[271] H.J.W. Drijvers, Cults and Beliefs at Edessa, Leiden, 1980, p. 194.

[272] Ibid., pp. 5 and 7.

[273] ID., The Book of the Laws of Countries: Dialogue on the Faith of Bardesane of Edessa, Assem, 1965. [Trans: note the small mistake: Vaneigem’s text refers to the Livre des lois des nations, not Livre des lois des pays.]

[274] ID., Cults and Beliefs at Edessa, op. cit., p. 222.

[275] Ibid., p. 219.

[276] E. Junod and J.-D. Kaestli, Histoire des Actes apocryphes des apotres, p. 41.

[277] C. Puech, “Audianer,” in Reallexicon fuer Antike und Christentums, 1950, pp. 910 sq.

[278] A. Jaubert, preface to Homelie sur Josue/Jesus d’Origen, Paris, 1960.

[279] H.J.W. Drijvers, Cults and Beliefs at Edessa, p. 196.

[280] Leontius of Byranze, De sectis, 3, 3.

[281] Theodore of Mopsueste, Une controverse avec les Macedoniens, Paris, 1913.

[282] Frend [Translator: rest of footnote missing from original.]

[283] A. Siouville, Hippolyte de Rome: Philosophoumena ou Refutation de toutes les heresies, Paris, 1928, p. 194.

[284] H.J. Vogt, Cetus Sanctorum: Der Kirchenbegriff des Novatian und die Geschicte seiner Sonderkirche, Bonn, 1968.

[285] H. Guillemin, L’Affaire Jesus, Paris, 1962, p. 75.

[286] R.L. Wilker, Le Mythe des origines chretiennes, Paris, 1971, p. 58.

[287] J. Jarry, Heresies et factions dans l’Empire byzantin du IV au VII siecle, Le Caire, 1968, p. 189.

[288] Ibid., p. 192.

[289] Ibid., pp. 190 et 191.

[290] Abbe Pluquet, Memoires pour servir a l’histoire des egarements, Besancon, 1817, article “Arianisme.”

[291] Acta Saturnini, in P.L., 18, 8, 701.

[292] Optat, Contra Parmenien le Donatiste.

[293] ID., op. cit., ed. Vassal-Philips, 1917, 3, 3.

[294] Translator’s note: “from the works performed,” that is, from the sacrament itself.

[295] Runciman, Le Manicheisme medieval, op. cit., p. 31.

[296] Maxime the Confessor, Scolies sur la hierarchie ecclesiastique de Denys, in P.G., 4, 3192b.

[297] Photius, edited by Henry, p. 39.

[298] V. Magnian, Les Mysteres d’ Eleusis, Paris, 1938.

[299] Philostorgue, Epitome Historiarum, III, in P.G., LXV, 501–505.

[300] Quoted by Runciman, op. cit., p. 34.

[301] J.D. Mansi, De sacrorum conciliorum novo collectio, 1759, 7, 58–60.

[302] W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement, Cambridge, 1972.

[303] J. Jarry, Heresies et factions dans l’Empire byzantin du IV au VII siecle, op. cit., p. 82.

[304] Translator’s note: and in English as well.

[305] H. Chadwick, Priscillian of Avila: The Occult and the Charismatic in the Early Church, Oxford, 1976.

[306] A.J.M. Goosen, Achtergronden van Priscillianus’ christelijike ascese, Nimegue, 1976, p. 401.

[307] Translator’s note: “Long live death” was the slogan of the Spanish fascists in the 1930s.

[308] Translator’s note: Latin for “corpse or cadaver,” a slogan of Ignacius.

[309] Translator’s note: Latin for “rest, freedom, unity.”

[310] Gregoire the Great, cited in Dictionnaire d’histoire et de geographie ecclesiastique (Priscillian).

[311] Epiphanius, Panarion, I, 3.

[312] B. Primov, Les Bougres: Histoire du pope Bogomile et de ses adeptes, Paris, 1975, p. 97.

[313] M. Erbstoesser, Les Heretiques au Moyen Age, Leipzig, pp. 51 and 52.

[314] B. Primov, op. cit., p. 120.

[315] Ibid., p. 100.

[316] Ibid.

[317] Ibid., p. 157.

[318] Ibid., pp. 162–164.

[319] Ibid., p. 180.

[320] Gregoire of Tours, Historia Francorum, X, 25.

[321] Ibid., X, 25.

[322] J.B. Russell, “Saint Boniface and the Eccentrics,” Church History, Chicago, 1964, XXXIII, 3.

[323] William of Newburg, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, t. XXV.

[324] N. Cohn, Les fanatiques de l’Apocalypse, Paris, 1983, p. 46. [Translator: this is the French translation of Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary messianism in medieval and Reformation Europe and its bearing on modern totalitarian movements, New York, 1961, pp. 33–34. Rather than translate Cohn back into English, we have directly quoted from the English-language original. Note a slight disagreement or slippage: while Cohn refers to “burghers,” that is, inhabitants of boroughs or towns, Vaneigem and/or the translator of the volume he consulted refers to les bourgeois. For a general review of the influence Cohn’s book had on Vaneigem and other members of the Situationist International, see our comments at www.notbored.org.]

[325] A. Borst, Les Cathares, Paris, 1974, p. 73.

[326] Ibid., p. 73.

[327] Ibid.

[328] T. Manteuffel, Naissance d’une heresie: Les adeptes de la pauvrete volontaire, Paris-La Haye, 1970, p. 29.

[329] Ilarino, L’eresia di Ugo Speroni, Rome, 1945.

[330] Denys the Areopagite, De theologia mystica, II, 3.

[331] J. Scotus Erigina, De pradestinatione, I, 1. [Translator: the long passage full of quotations that follows this remark comes from A. Jundt, Histoire du pantheisme populaire au Moyen Age et au XVI siecle, Strasbourg, 1875. See footnote 11, below.]

[332] J. Scotus Erigina, De divisione naturae, II, 1.

[333] Ibid., II, 19.

[334] Ibid., I, 74.

[335] Ibid., V, 7.

[336] Ibid., II, 5.

[337] Ibid., V, 20.

[338] Ibid., V, 7.

[339] Ibid., V, 25.

[340] A. Jundt, Histoire du pantheisme populaire au Moyen Age et au XVI siecle, Strasbourg, 1875, p. 12.

[341] C. Thery, Autour du decret de 1210: David de Dinant: Etude sur son pantheisme materialiste, Kain, 1925.

[342] A. Jundt, Histoire du pantheisme populaire au Moyen Age et au XVI siecle, Strasbourg, 1875.

[343] R. Vaneigem, Le Mouvement du libre-esprit, Paris, 1986; P. Fredericq, Corpus documentarum, Gard, 1889–1900, I p. 452.

[344] C. Gaignebet, Art profane et religion populaire au Moyen Age, Paris, 1985.

[345] Translator: punning Latin for “Completely deceitful Toulouse.”

[346] Translator: the Seventh National Council of Orleans, held in 1022 under Bishop Odolric, proceeded against the Manicheans.

[347] Stafano, Riformatori, p. 347; Illarino, Eresie, p. 68.

[348] Dupin, Histoire des controverses du XII siecle, chap. VI.

[349] A. Borst, Les Cathares, op. cit., p. 70.

[350] B. Monmod, Le Moine Guibert et son temps, Paris, 1905.

[351] A. Borst, op. cit., p. 81.

[352] Ibid., pp. 90–93.

[353] Ibid., p. 156.

[354] Thouzelier, Catharisme et Valdeisme en Languedoc, 1966.

[355] Translator: Publio Elvio Pertinance was proclaimed the Emperor of Rome the morning after the murder of Commodo in the year 192.

[356] Thouzelier, op. cit.

[357] N. Cohn, Les Fanatiques de l’Apocalypse, pp. 98–102. [Translator: Vaneigem refers to the French translation of In Pursuit of the Millennium. Rather than translate Cohn back into English, we have directly quoted from the original, pages 82–87. All ellipses in conformity with Vaneigem’s citations.]

[358] Nauclerus, p. 912.

[359] C. Oliger, De secta operitus libertatis, Rome, 1943, p. 101.

[360] B. Monod, Le Moine Guibert et son temps, op. cit., p. 202.

[361] Ibid.

[362] R. Vaneigem, Le Mouvement du libre-espirit, op. cit., p. 103. [Translator’s note: here Vaneigem translates from Garnius von Rochefort, in Clems Baeumker (ed.) “Contra amaurianos,” Beitrage zur Geschicte zur Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters (Munster: Aschendorff, 1926), vol. 24.]

[363] Ibid.

[364] Ibid., pp. 104 and 105.

[365] Ibid., p. 113.

[366] Ibid., pp. 115 and 116. [Translator’s note: here Vaneigem quotes from Determinatio de novo spiritu. Ellipses [...] mark the removal of sentences that appear in The Movement of the Free Spirit, translated by Randall Cherry and Ian Patterson (New York: Zone Books, 1994, p. 119).]

[367] M. Porete, Le miroir des simples ames, in Guarnieri, Il morimento del libro spirito, Rome, 1965, p. 617.

[368] R. Vaneigem, op. cit., p. 127.

[369] R. Guarnieri, op. cit.

[370] R. Vaneigem, op. cit., p. 128.

[371] Ibid., p. 129. [Translator’s note: here Vaneigem is quoting from Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls. See The Movement of the Free Spirit, p. 132).]

[372] P. Fredericq, op. cit., I, p. 186.

[373] J. Ruysbroeck, L’ornement des noces spirituelles, Brussels, 1928, p. 200 and sq. [Transator’s note: see The Movement of the Free Spirit, p. 147).]

[374] Fredericq, op. cit., p. 120. [Translator’s note: this text also appears in Vaneigem’s The Movement of the Free Spirit, p. 115.]

[375] A. Jundt, op. cit., pp. 45 and 46.

[376] R. Vaneigem, Le Mouvement du libre-espirit, op. cit., p. 149. [Translator’s note: The Movement of the Free Spirit, translated by Randall Cherry and Ian Patterson, Zone Books: New York, 1994, pp. 154–155, refers in a footnote to Giovanni Domenico Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum novas et amplissima collection (1759), vol. 23, p. 997.]

[377] R. Guarnieri, op. cit., p. 459.

[378] Ibid., p. 459.

[379] R. Vaneigem, Le Mouvement du libre-espirit, op. cit., p. 174. [Translator’s note: The Movement of the Free Spirit, p. 182.]

[380] Mosheim, De beghardis et beganibus commentarius, Leipzig, 1790.

[381] A. Jundt, op. cit., p. 111.

[382] [H.] Haupt, Beitrage zur geschicte der Sekte von freiern geiste und des Beghartentums, Gotha, 1885.

[383] K. Schmidt, Nikolaus von Basel, Vienna, 1866; H. Haupt, Zur Biographia des Nicholas von Basel, in ZKG, 1885.

[384] H.B. Workman, The Dawn of the Reformation, London, 1901–1902.

[385] A. Jundt, op. cit., p. 108.

[386] Translator’s note: Book of Spiritual Poverty. German in original.

[387] A. Jundt, op. cit., p. 108.

[388] Joachim of Fiore, Concordia, 7, 28 c.

[389] Translator’s note: in 1972, Vaneigem wrote a preface for a collection of Coeurderoy’s writings.

[390] Joachim of Fiore, Concordia, 7, 28 c.

[391] E. Aegerter, Joachim of Fiore: L’Evangile eternel, Paris, 1928; J.C. Huck, Joachim of Fiore und die joachimistiche Literatur, Freiburg-en-Brisgau, 1938.

[392] Chronica fratris Salimbene, in Monumenta Germaniae scriptores, XXXVII, I, pp. 255 sq.

[393] Ibid.

[394] R. Vaneigem, Le Mouvement du libre-espirit, Paris, 1986, p. 73. [Translator’s note: cf. Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit, translated by Randall Cherry and Ian Paterson (Zone Books, New York), pp. 80–81.]

[395] Translator’s note: this doesn’t make sense unless, after Andrea Samarita exhumed Guiglelma’s body and “washed it with wine and water, and preserved the precious mix as a cream for the healing of the sick,” she buried it again.

[396] Translator’s note: here Vaneigem is supporting the central thesis of Norman Cohn, In Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: 1957).

[397] E. Agnanine, Fra Dolcino, Florence, 1964.

[398] N. Cohn, Les fanatiques de l’Apocalpyse, Paris 1983, pp. 134 and 135. [Translator’s note: here Vaneigem refers to the French translation of Norman Cohn’s In Pursuit of the Millennium (New York, 1957), pp. 125–126. Rather than translate Cohn back into English, we have quoted directly from the original.]

[399] Ibid., p. 147. [Translator’s note: Norman Cohn, In Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 139.]

[400] Cited by Delumeau, La peur en Occident, Paris, 1978, p. 313.

[401] R. Guarnieri, Il morimento del liberto spiritio, Rome, 1965, p. 427.

[402] Clareno, Historia septem tribulationum (ALKM).

[403] Cited in Cantu, L’Italie mystique, p. 198.

[404] H.C. Lea, Histoire de l’Inquisition au Moyen Age, Paris, 1900, p. 49.

[405] R. Vaneigem, Le Mouvement du libre-espirit, op. cit. [Translator’s note: cf. R. Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free-Spirit (New York: Zone Books, 1986), p. 128.]

[406] F. Ehrle, Die Spiritualen, ihr Verhaltnis zum Franziskanerorde und ze den Fraticelle, ALKG IV, 1888, pp. 78 sq.; L. Fumi, Bolletino di storia patria per l’Umbria, V, 1899, pp. 349–382.

[407] P. Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. “Fraticelli.”

[408] Oliger, op. cit.; Guarnieri, p. 476; Ehrle, op. cit., p. 78 and sq.

[409] F. Ehrle, op. cit., pp. 127, 137 and 180.

[410] N. Cohn, p. 226. [Translator’s note: here Vaneigem refers to the French translation of Norman Cohn’s In Pursuit of the Millennium (New York, 1957), p. 219.]

[411] Ibid., p. 232. [Translator’s note: Norman Cohn, In Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 225.]

[412] Ibid.

[413] H. Kaminisky The Free Spirit in the Hussite Revolution, La Haye, 1962, p. 47.

[414] Ibid., p. 48.

[415] R. Vaneigem, Le Mouvement du libre-espirit, op. cit., p. 180 and sq. [Translator’s note: see Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit (New York, Zone Books, 1994), p. 192–195.]

[416] L. de Brezcova, De Gestis, Prague, 1893, p. 431.

[417] Ibid.

[418] R. Vaneigem, Le Mouvement du libre-espirit, op. cit., p. 186 and sq. [Translator’s note: see R. Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit, pp. 193–194.]

[419] L’Italie mystique, p. 156.

[420] Translator’s note: Norman Cohn, In Pursuit of the Millennium (New York, 1961), p. 241.

[421] N. Cohn, Les Fanatiques de l’Apocalypse, pp. 247–254. [Translator’s note: Norman Cohn, In Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 243–245. Rather than translate Cohn back into English, we have quoted directly from the original.]

[422] Translator’s note: Latin for “religion follows the faith of the prince.”

[423] Translator’s note: English in original.

[424] J. Delumeau, op. cit., p. 371. [Translator’s note: The German title of Luther’s pamphet was Das Jesus Christus ein geborener Jude sei. For his Von den Juden und ihren Luegen, see W. Linden (ed.), Luther’s Kampfschriften gegen das Judentum, (Berlin, 1936).]

[425] Ibid., pp. 372 and 373.

[426] Ibid., p. 518.

[427] Ibid., p. 519.

[428] Calvin, Declaration pour maintenir la vraie foi, in Opera omnia.

[429] Castellion, Traite des heretiques, p. 12.

[430] Th. De Beze, quoted by Delumaeu, op. cit., p. 520.

[431] Ibid., p. 521.

[432] Kolde, Zum Process des Johann Deuck, 1890.

[433] J. Danck, in Dictionnaire d’histoire et de geographie ecclesiastique, Paris, 1930.

[434] Translator’s note: “He Who Has the True Love.”

[435] Translator’s note: “Protected by Love.”

[436] J. Danck, in Dictionnaire d’histoire et de geographie ecclesiastique, Paris, 1930.

[437] S. Franck, Chroniques, annales et histoire de la Bible.

[438] Ibid.

[439] R. Bainton, Hunted Heretics, 1953; G.H. Williams, Radical Reformation, 1962.

[440] H. Buisson, Sebastian Castellion, Paris, 1892.

[441] M. Bataillon, Erasme et l’Espagne, Paris, 1937, p. 73. [Translator’s note: Alumbrados can be translated by “Illuminati.”]

[442] M. Menendes Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxas espagnoles, Mardrid, 1929, p. 526.

[443] Ibid., p. 530.

[444] Translator’s note: the Quemadero De Tablada was a place for executions, built in Seville in 1481.

[445] R. Vaneigem, op. cit., p. 193. [Translator’s note: see R. Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit (New York: 1994), p. 199.]

[446] Ibid., p. 194. [Translator’s note: see R. Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit, p. 200.]

[447] M. Luther, Werke, Weimar, 1883–1908, vol. XVIII, French translation in Jundt, op. cit., pp. 122–123.

[448] Van Meteren, Historia der Nederlanden, Amsterdam, 1623.

[449] Ibid.

[450] French translation in R. Vaneigem, Le Mouvement du Libre-Espirit, p. 210. [Translator’s note: Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit (New York 1994), pp. 210 and 212.]

[451] G. Eekhoud, Les libertins d’Anvers, Paris, 1912.

[452] Histoire de Geneve, I, p. 399.

[453] A. Jundt, op. cit., p. 127.

[454] F. Berriot, Un proces d’atheisme a Geneve, l’affaire Gruet, BSHPF, 1979.

[455] Ibid.

[456] Calvin, Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des libertins, Geneve, 1547.

[457] A. Jundt, Histoire du pantheisme populaire ... , op. cit., p. 128.

[458] Ibid.

[459] Calvin, Contre la secte ... , op. cit., p. 113.

[460] Ibid. [Translator’s note: Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit, p. 232.]

[461] A. Jundt, op. cit., p. 131; R. Vaneigem, op. cit., p. 215 and sq. [Translator’s note: Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit, pp. 224–232.]

[462] N. Cohn, Les fanatiques de l’Apocalypse, p. 255. [Translator’s note: Norman Cohn, In Pursuit of the Millennium, New York, 1961, p. 250. Rather than translate Cohn back into English, we have quoted directly from the original.]

[463] M. Pianzola, Peintres et vilains, Paris, 1962. [Translator’s note: in 1974, Vaneigem himself used the pseudonym “Ratgeb” to publish De la greve sauvage a l’autogestion generalisee, translated by Paul Sharkey in 1981 as From Wildcat Strike to Total Self-Management.]

[464] Ibid.

[465] N. Cohn, op. cit., p. 270. [Translator’s note: Norman Cohn, In Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 267.]

[466] Ibid., p. 278. [Translator’s note: Norman Cohn, In Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 275: “[...] Christ would return to earth and placed the two-edged sword of justice in the hands of the rebaptized Saints. The Saints would hold judgment on the priests and pastors for their false teachings and, above all, on the great ones of the earth for their persecutions; kings and nobles would be cast into chains.”]

[467] Mennonite Encyclopedia, Scottdale, 1955–1959, article “Melchior Hoffmann.”

[468] N. Cohn, op. cit., p. 279. [Translator’s note: though there is nothing on p. 275 of Cohn’s In Pursuit of the Millennium that would call for such a footnote on Vaneigem’s part, it is certain that he is supporting Cohn’s basic thesis.]

[469] Ibid., p. 280. [Translator’s note: Norman Cohn, In Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 276.]

[470] S. Franck, Chronica, GA.

[471] Barret and Gurgand, Le Roi des derniers jors, Paris, 1981.

[472] M. Van Vaernewijck, Memoires d’un patricien gantois sur les troubles religiuex de Flandre.

[473] Ibid., p. 23.

[474] Bouterwek and N. Cohn, Zur Literatur und Geschiscte der Wiedertaufer, Bonn, 1884, p. 306.

[475] A. Jundt, op. cit., p. 165.

[476] Ibid., p. 166.

[477] Translator’s note: there appear to be words missing from the text here.

[478] G. Arnold, Unpartelische Kirchen — und Ketzer — Historie. [Translator’s note: German for An Impartial History of Churches and Heretics.]

[479] A. Jundt, op. cit., p. 178.

[480] Ibid., p. 201.

[481] C. Hill, Le monde a l’envers, Paris, 1977, p. 25.

[482] Translator’s note: According to the Rosicrucian order A.M.O.R.C., Torrentius was a member of the Brethren of the Rosie Cross. The date of his death is said to be 1644, not 1640.

[483] Translator’s note: One painting survived: Still Life with a Bridle (1614), which is part of the collection at the Rijsmuseum in Amsterdam.

[484] Translator’s note: Written in 1548 by Etienne de la Boetie.

[485] Hegel, Chroniken von Closener und Koenigshofen, Leipzig, 1871, extracts in Livre secret du magistrat de Strasbourg, II, p. 1201; quoted by A. Jundt, Histoire du pantheisme populaire, op. cit., p. 106.

[486] Translator’s note: There appears to be text missing from here.

[487] R. Bainton, Bernardino Ochino, 1940.

[488] R. Peter, “Noel Journet, detracteur de l’Ecriture sainte (1582),” in Croyants et sceptiques.

[489] F. Lachevre, L’Ancetre des libertins du XVII siecle, Geoffroy Vallee, brule le 9 fevrier 1574, et la “Beatitude des chretiens,” Paris, 1920.

[490] C. Hill, Le Monde a l’envers, Paris, 1977, p. 15. [Translator’s note: this is the French translation of Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, London, 1972, p. 14. Rather than translate Hill back into English, we have — here as elsewhere in this chapter — quoted directly from the reprint of The World Turned Upside Down published by Penguin in 1991.]

[491] Ibid., pp. 88 and 89. [Translator’s note: C. Hill, pp. 108–109.]

[492] Ibid., p. 90. [Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 109.]

[493] Ibid., p. 207. [Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 265.]

[494] Ibid., p. 91. [Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 112.]

[495] Translator’s note: The World Turned Upside Turn, p. 119. Note that while Hill attributes the first quote to Lilburne, A Whip for the Present House of Lords (February, 1647–8), anthologized in The Leveler Tracts, 1647–1653 (Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 449, the second quote is actually Hill’s own summary.

[496] Ibid., pp. 105–107. [Translator’s note: C. Hill, pp. 132–134.]

[497] Ibid., pp. 112 and 113. [Translator’s note: C. Hill, pp. 140–142.]

[498] Ibid., p. 159. [Translator’s note: C. Hill, pp. 200–201.]

[499] Ibid. [Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 200: “Quoted by Masson, Life of Milton, III, p. 525.”]

[500] Ibid. [Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 200.]

[501] J. Bauthumley, The Light and Dark Sides of God, 1650, p.4. [Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 206. Note that the third quotation is from Edward Hide, A Wonder, yet no Wonder (1651), pp. 35–41, who was an opponent of the Ranters.]

[502] C. Hill, pp. 166–168. [Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 210. See also Abiezer Coppe, Selected Writings, London, 1987, pp. 16 and 20.]

[503] Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 211.

[504] Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 211. See also Abiezer Coppe, p. 38.

[505] Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 211. See also Abiezer Coppe, p. 24.

[506] Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 212. See also Abiezer Coppe, p. 111.

[507] Translator’s note: C. Hill, pp. 212–213.

[508] Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 214.

[509] Translator’s note: C. Hill, pp. 214–215.

[510] Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 216.

[511] Translator’s note: C. Hill, ibid.

[512] Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 219.

[513] Translator’s note: C. Hill, pp. 219–210.

[514] Translator’s note: All quotes attributed to Thomas Webbe come from C. Hill, p. 227.

[515] Translator’s note: C. Hill, pp. 220–221.

[516] Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 222.

[517] Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 225.

[518] Translator’s note: C. Hill, p. 226.

[519] Translator’s note: Jean-Baptiste de Lully (1632–1687) was an Italian-born French composer, attached to the court of Louis XIV. Jacques-Benigne Bossuet (1627–1704) was a French bishop and theologian.

[520] Translator’s note: Written by Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere (1622–1673), Le Tartuffe, or l’imposteur was banned in 1664 by Louis XIV.

[521] Abbe Pluquet Memoires pour servir a l’histoire des egarements de l’espirit humain par rapport a la religion chretienne, or Dictionnaire des heresies, des erreurs et des schismes, Besancon, 1817, II p. 213.

[522] Ibid.

[523] Ibid., p. 214.

[524] Dictionnaire d’histoire et de geographie ecclesiastique, article “Arnauld.”

[525] Ibid.

[526] P. Vuilliaud, “Fin du monde et prophetes modernes,” Les Cahiers d’Hermes, Paris, #2, 1947, p. 112.

[527] S. Hutin, Les Disciples anglais de Jacob Boehme, Paris, 1960, pp. 16–19.

[528] Ibid., p. 21.

[529] Ibid.

[530] L.-Cl. de Saint-Martin, Correspondance ineditie, Paris, 1862.

[531] Alexandrian, Histoire de la philosophie occulte, pp. 366 and 367.

[532] Kolakowski, quoted by J.N. Vuarnet, Extases feminines, Paris, 1991.

[533] Quoted by S. Hutin, op. cit., pp. 27 and 28.

[534] Ibid., p. 28.

[535] P. Vulliaud, op. cit., p. 114.

[536] S. Hutin, op. cit., p. 25.

[537] Translator’s note: an otherwise unremarkable Catholic priest (1664–1733) who wrote a massive book called Common Sense (also known as Meslier’s Testament), which promoted atheism and was only discovered after his death. Voltaire edited and wrote a preface to its second edition.

[538] Translator’s note: Others have rendered this formula as Je voudrais, et ce sera le dernier et le plus ardent de mes souhaits, je voudrais que le dernier des rois fut etrangle avec les boyaux du dernier pretre: “I would like, and this would be the last and most ardent of my wishes, I would like it that the last king was strangled with the guts of the last priest.” It appears that, in any case, the remark does not appear in the text of the Testament itself, but in one of the many abstracts of it that circulated during the French Revolution. On 17 May 1968, Vaneigem and the other members of the Situationist International who, among many others, occupied the Sorbonne, sent out telegrams that included the declaration: “Humanity won’t be happy until the last capitalist is hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat,” or, depending on the intended recipient, “... until the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist.”

[539] Translator’s note: in criminal law, chemin de fait means a violent or illegal act.

[540] Translator’s note: in 2002, Vaneigem himself edited and wrote a preface for a new edition of The Three Impostors. Published in French by Editions Payot & Rivages (Paris) under the title L’Art de ne croire en rien, suivi de: Livre des trois imposteurs, it also included a translation into French of De arte nihil credendi (The Art of Believing in Nothing).

[541] G. Bartsch, preface to the reprint of the De tribus impostoribus, Berlin, 1960.

[542] Mosheim, Histoire de l’Eglise, p. 151; P. Marchand, Dictionnaire historique, vol. II.

[543] J. Nevisan, Sylvae nuptialis libri sex.

[544] Collectio de scandalis ecclesiae, Florence, 1931.

[545] Rainaldus, Annales ecclesiastiques, t. XIV.

[546] Translator’s note: German in the original: A Conversation between an Innkeeper and Three Religious Guests.

[547] G. Bartsch, Ein deutscher Atheist und Revolutionar Demokrat der 17. Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1965. One of Knuetzen’s letters, falsely dated Rome, was published in French in the Entretiens sur divers sujets d’histoire of La Croze, in Cologne, 1711.

Chronology :

November 30, 1992 : The Resistance to Christianity -- Publication.

April 26, 2020 : The Resistance to Christianity -- Added.

January 04, 2022 : The Resistance to Christianity -- Updated.

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