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
nobles traded in bishoprics; the popes sold their ratifications for
great sums; the money was normally borrowed by the bishops from the
papal usurers; and there was witnessed throughout Europe the spectacle
of the Church denouncing all usury as sin, while its own usurers were
scrupulously protected, the bishops paying to them their interest
from the revenues they were able to extort. [1285] Satirical comment
naturally abounded wherever men had any knowledge of the facts; and
what current literature there was reflected the feeling on all sides.
The occurrence of the first and second crusades, the work
respectively of Peter the Hermit and St. Bernard, created a period
of new fanaticism, somewhat unfavourable to heresy; but even in that
period the new sects were at work, [1286] and in the twelfth century,
when crusading had become a mere feudal conspiracy of conquest and
plunder, [1287] heresy reappeared, to be duly met by slaughter. A
perfect ferment of anti-clerical heresy had arisen in Italy, France,
and Flanders. [1288] At Orvieto, in Italy, the heretics for a time
actually had the mastery, and were put down only after a bloody
struggle. [1289] In France, for a period of twenty years from 1106,
Peter de Brueys opposed infant baptism, the use of churches, holy
crosses, prayers for the dead (the great source of clerical income),
and the doctrine of the Real Presence in the eucharist (the main
source of their power), and so set up the highly heretical sect of
Petrobrussians. [1290] Driven from his native district of Vallonise,
he long maintained himself in Gascony, till at length he was seized
and burned (1126 or 1130). The monk Henry (died in prison 1148)
took a similar line, directly denouncing the clergy in Switzerland
and France; as did Tanquelin in Flanders (killed by a priest, 1125);
though in his case there seems to have been as much of religious
hallucination as of the contrary. [1291] A peasant, Eudo of Stella
(who died in prison), is said to have half-revolutionized Brittany
with his anti-ecclesiastical preaching. [1292] The more famous monk
Arnold of Brescia (strangled and burned in 1155), a pupil of Abailard,
but orthodox in his theology and austere in his life, simplified his
plan of reform (about 1139) into a proposal that the whole wealth of
the clergy, from the pope to the monks, should be transferred to the
civil power, leaving churchmen to lead a spiritual life on voluntary
offerings. [1293] For fifteen years the stir of his movement lasted
in Lombardy, till at length his formation of a republic at Rome forced
the papacy to combine with the Emperor Frederick II, who gave Arnold up
to death. But though his movement perished, anti-clericalism did not;
and heretical sects of some kind persisted here and there, in despite
of the Church, till the age of the Reformation. In Italy, during
the age of the Renaissance, all alike were commonly called paterini
or patarini--a nickname which seems to come from pataria, a Milanese
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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