Heresy: Its Utility And Morality. A Plea And A Justification — John Shaqi
Heresy: Its Utility And Morality. A Plea And A JustificationBradlaugh, Charles
Religion
Heresy: Its Utility And Morality. A Plea And A Justification
Bradlaugh, Charles
Free thought; Heresy
This was well illustrated in the case of Thomas Campanella, born 1568,
who, attracted by the teachings of Telesio, wrote vigorously against the
old schoolmen and in favor of the new philosophy. Despite an affected
reverence for the Church of Rome, Campanella spent twenty-seven years
of his life in prison. Campanella has been, as is usually the case with
eminent writers, charged with atheism, but there seems to be no fair
foundation for the charges He was a true heretic, for he not only
opposed Aristotle; but even his own teacher Telesio. None of these
men, however, yet strove to reach the people, they wrote to and of one
another, not to or of the masses. It is said that Campanella was fifty
times arrested and seven times tortured for his heresy.
One Andrew de Bena, a profound scholar and eminent preacher of the
Church of Rome, carried away by the spirit of the time, came out into
the reformed party; but his mind once set free from the old trammels,
found no rest in Luther's narrow church, and a poetic Pantheism was the
result.
Jerome Cardan, a mathematician of considerable ability, born at Pavia
1601, has been fiercely accused of atheism. His chief offence seems
to have been rather in an opposite direction; astrology was with him a
favourite subject. While the strange views put forward in some of his
works served good purpose by provoking inquiry, we can hardly class
Cardan otherwise than as a man whose undoubted genius and erudition were
more than counterbalanced by his excessively superstitious folly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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