A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 1 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumesRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 1 of 2: Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Free thought -- History
The official creed, with its principle of rigid uniformity and
compulsion, is now recognizable as the only expedient by which
the Church could be held together for its economic ends. Under the
Eastern Empire, accordingly, when once a balance of creed was attained
in the Church, the same coercive ideal was enforced, with whatever
differences in the creed insisted on. Whichever phase of dogma was in
power, persecution of opponents went on as a matter of course. [933]
Athanasians and Arians, Nestorians and Monophysites, used the same
weapons to the utmost of their scope; Cyril of Alexandria led his
fanatics to the pillage and expulsion of the Jews, as his underling
Peter led them to the murder of Hypatia; other bishops wrought the
destruction of temples throughout Egypt; [934] Theodosius, Marcian,
St. Leo, Zeno, Justinian, all used coercion against every heresy
without a scruple, affirming every verbal fantasy of dogma at the
point of the sword. It was due to no survival of the love of reason
that some of the more stubborn heresies, driven into communion with
the new civilization of the Arabs, were the means of carrying some
of the seeds of ancient thought down the ages, to fructify ultimately
in the mental soil of modern Europe.
§ 5
Against the orthodox creed, apart from social and official hostility,
there had early arisen critics who reasoned in terms of Jewish and
pagan beliefs, and in terms of such rationalism as survived. Of the two
former sorts some remains have been preserved, despite the tendency of
the Church to destroy their works. Of the latter, apart from Lucian,
we have traces in the Fathers and in the Neo-Platonists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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