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