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 kindred spirit is seen in much of the verse alike of the northern
Trouvères and the southern Troubadours. A modern Catholic historian
of medieval literature complains that their compositions "abound with
the severest ridicule of such persons and of such things as, in the
temper of the age, were highly estimated and most generally revered,"
and notes that in consequence they were ranked by the devout as
"lewd and impious libertines." [1320] In particular they satirized
the practice of excommunication and the use made by the Church of
hell and purgatory as sources of revenue. [1321] Their anti-clerical
poetry having been as far as possible destroyed by the Inquisition, its
character has to be partly inferred from the remains of the northern
trouvères--e.g., Ruteboeuf and Raoul de Houdan, of whom the former
wrote a Voya de Paradis, in which Sloth is a canon and Pride a bishop,
both on their way to heaven; while Raoul has a Songe d'enfer in which
hell is treated in a spirit of the most audacious burlesque. [1322]
In a striking passage of the old tale Aucassin et Nicolette there is
naïvely revealed the spontaneous revolt against pietism which underlay
all these flings of irreverence. "Into paradise," cries Aucassin,
"go none but ... those aged priests, and those old cripples, and
the maimed, who all day long and all night cough before the altars,
and in the crypts beneath the churches; those ... who are naked and
barefoot and full of sores.... Such as these enter in paradise, and
with them have I nought to do. But in hell will I go. For to hell
go the fair clerks and the fair knights who are slain in the tourney
and the great wars, and the stout archer and the loyal man. With them
will I go. And there go the fair and courteous ladies [of many loves];
and there pass the gold and the silver, the ermine and all rich furs,
harpers and minstrels, and the happy of the world. With these will I
go...." [1323] It was such a temper, rather than reasoned unbelief,
that inspired the blasphemous parodies in Reynard the Fox and other
popular works of the Middle Ages.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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