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
A less savage treatment may have made possible the alleged success
of Gerhard, bishop of Cambray and Arras, in reconciling to the
Church at Arras, in 1025 or 1030, a number of laymen--also said to
have been taught by an Italian--who as a body rejected all external
worship, setting aside priestly baptism and the sacraments, penance
and images, funeral rites, holy oil, church bells, cross-worship,
altars, and even churches, and denied the necessity of an order
of priests. [1270] Few of the Protestants of a later age were so
thorough-going; but the fact that many of the sect stood to the old
Marcionite veto on marriage and the sexual instinct gives to their
propaganda its own cast of fanaticism. This last tenet it seemingly
was that gave the Paulicians their common Greek name of cathari,
[1271] "the pure," corrupted or assimilated in Italian to gazzari,
whence presumably the German word for heretic, Ketzer. [1272] Such
a doctrine had the double misfortune that if acted on it left the
sect without the normal recruitment of members' children, while if
departed from it brought on them the stigma of wanton hypocrisy; and
as a matter of fact every movement of the kind, ancient and modern,
seems to have contained within it the two extremes of asceticism and
licence, the former generating the latter.
It could hardly, however, have been the ascetic doctrine that won for
the new heresy its vogue in medieval Europe; nor is it likely that the
majority of the heretics even professed it. If, on the other hand, we
ask how it was that in an age of dense superstition so many uneducated
people were found to reject so promptly the most sacrosanct doctrines
of the Church, it seems hardly less difficult to account for the
phenomenon on the bare ground of their common sense. Critical common
sense there must have been, to allow of it at all; but it is reasonable
to suppose that then, as clearly happened later at the Reformation,
common sense had a powerful stimulus in pecuniary interest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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