Erastianism

“ Not in vain were the splendid utterances of the infidels, while beyond all price are the discoveries of science.
The church has impeded, but it has not and it cannot stop the onward march of the human race. Heresy cannot be burned, nor imprisoned, nor starved. It laughs at presbyteries and synods, at ecumenical councils and the impotent thunders of Sinai. Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress. ”

“ All the philosophers of the East, whose tenets, as we have seen, were, that the Deity had nothing at all to do with matter, the nature and qualities of which they considered to be malignant and poisonous; that the body was held in subjection by a being entirely distinct from Him to whom the dominion over the rational soul belonged; that the world, and all terrestrial bodies, were not the work of the Supreme Being, the Author of all good, but were formed out of matter by a nature either evil in its origin, or that had fallen into a state of depravity ”

“ There is a blessing in the tears of women, and the maiden who has wept over the sorrows of the Mother of God is thereby freed from the curse of heresy. What I usually add, are innocuous things, pictures, relics, flowers, a few mementoes of death and the grave. You remember how in the Eleusinian mysteries the initiated were led up to the truth through serious or pleasing symbols. Permit me to use a few aids of this kind. The symbol is the language of our church, only the heretic is satisfied with the mere word. ”

“ Heresy is the pioneer, erect and manly, striding over the forbidden line in his search for truth. Heterodoxy develops the intellect, orthodoxy smothers it. Heresy is the star twinkle in the night, orthodoxy the cloud which hides this faint gleam of light from the weary travellers on life’s encumbered pathway. ”

“ As the cumulus of experience on experience grew greater, chance violations of tradition, or custom, or ritual, or formula achieving for the violator a mastery or stability which performance and obedience failed to achieve, the new heresy became the later orthodoxy, for in religion, as in all other matters human, nothing succeeds like success. An impotent god has no divinity; a disused potency means a dying life among the immortals as on the earth. ”

“ And it is not only that among the savants responsible for these advances the proportion of Peripatetics is overwhelming; one may also notice that in this school alone it is assumed as natural that further research will take place and will probably correct as well as increase our knowledge, and that, when such corrections or differences of opinion do take place, there is no cry raised of Heresy.
It is the old difference between Philosophy and Religion, between the search of the intellect for truth and the cry of the heart for salvation. ”

“ Even the study of philosophy was at length introduced among the Christians, but it was not always productive of the most salutary effects; knowledge was as often the parent of heresy as of devotion, and the description which was designed for the followers of Artemon, may, with equal propriety, be applied to the various sects that resisted the successors of the apostles. “They presume to alter the Holy Scriptures, to abandon the ancient rule of faith, and to form their opinions according to the subtile precepts of logic. ”

“ Having briefly spoken of the divine nature in the terms of Greek philosophy, Aristides proceeds to ask which of all the races of men have at all partaken of the truth about God. Here we have the first attempt at a systematic comparison of ancient religions. For the purpose of his inquiry he adopts an obvious threefold division into idolaters, Jews and Christians. Idolaters, or, as he more gently terms them in addressing the emperor, “those who worship what among you are said to be gods,” he subdivides into the three great world-civilizations—Chaldeans, Greeks and Egyptians. ”

“ And about the eight and thirtieth year after he began to reign, there sprang up everywhere among God's people great heresy, and evil men went about everywhere they could, and brought Christian men into heresy, and said that the belief was naught which all faithful men believe without doubt, viz. that all men at Doomsday shall arise with the same bodies in which each one before lived here in life, 'and then each man shall be doomed according to his deserts, either to misery in hell-torment, or to mirth in the kingdom of heaven. ”

“ If then the elements themselves are dissolved and destroyed and forced to be subject to another that is more stubborn than they, and if they are not in their nature gods, why, forsooth, do they call the images which are made in their honour, God? Great, then, is the error which the philosophers among them have brought upon their followers.
IV. Let us turn now, O King, to the elements in themselves, that we may make clear in regard to them, that they are not gods, but a created thing, liable to ruin and change, which is of the same nature as man ”

“ Government can no more Subsist without Subjection, then the Multitude can Agree without Government: And the Duty of Obeying, is no less of Divine Appointment, then the Authority of Commanding.
Here's a Petition to Jupiter, in Truth, against Himself; and in the Moral, a Complaint to God against Providence; as if the Harmony of Nature, and or the World; The Order of Men, Things, and Bus’ness, were to be Embroil'd, Dissolv'd, or Alter’d, for the sake of so many Asses. What would become of the Universe if there were not Servants as well as Masters? ”

“ Thus, O King, have the Greeks put forward foulness, and absurdity, and folly about their gods and about themselves, in that they have called those that are of such a nature gods, who are no gods. And hence mankind have received incitements to commit adultery and fornication, and to steal and to practise all that is offensive and hated and abhorred. For if they who are called their gods practised all these things which are written above, how much more should men practise them—men, who believe that their gods themselves practised them. ”

“ The moment a man of genius pronounces the name of the Pelasgi, of Athens, of the Etrurian, of the Roman people, we see their state under a new aspect. As in poetry and history, so in the other departments. There are few masters or none. Religion is yet to be settled on its fast foundations in the breast of man; and politics, and philosophy, and letters, and art. ”

“ But if any do never so little repugn against the high divinity of Aristotle, he is quickly with clapping of hands driven out of the place. For of him we have learned, that the felicity of man is imperfect, except he have both the good gifts of body and of fortune. Of him we have learned, that no commonweal [Pg 40] may flourish, in which all things are common. And we endeavour ourselves to glue fast together the decrees of this man and the doctrine of Christ—which is as likely a thing as to mingle fire and water together. ”

“ At the head of social heresies, and rapidly beginning to take rank as a religious heresy as well, I have no hesitation in placing modern Spiritualism. Those who associate this latest mystery only with gyrating articles of furniture, rapping tables, or simpering planchettes, are simply in the abyss of ignorance, and dangerously underrate the gravity of the subject. ”

“ His example consecrated the abnormal post-Homeric vices of Greece. He is capable of metamorphosis into various beasts, and his temple courts are thronged with images of frogs, and mice, and wolves, and dogs, and ravens, over whose elder worship he throws his protection. He is the god of sudden death; he is amorous and revengeful. The fair humanities of old religion boast no figure more beautiful; yet he, too, bears the birth-marks of ancient creeds, and there is a shadow that stains his legend and darkens the radiance of his glory.
Artemis. ”

“ Chapter XXVIII.—Those who first advanced the Heresy of Artemon; their Manner of Life, and how they dared to corrupt the Sacred Scriptures.
1. In a laborious work by one of these writers against the heresy of Artemon, [1] which Paul of Samosata [2] attempted to revive again in our day, there is an account appropriate to the history which we are now examining.
2. For he criticises, as a late innovation, the above-mentioned heresy which teaches that the Saviour was a mere man, because they were attempting to magnify it as ancient. ”

“ And Aristotle himself, forgetting his first Doctrine, tells us, the first Heroical Kings were chosen by the People for their deserving well of the Multitude; either by teaching them some New Arts, or by Warring for them, or by Gathering31 them together, or by Dividing Land amongst them; also Aristotle had another Fancy, that those Men who prove wise of Mind, were by Nature intended to be Lords, and Govern; and those which were Strong of Body were ordained to obey, and to be Servants. ”

“ When Grecian science and philosophy seemed to stand on the threshold of modern enlightenment the pall of despotism and superstition descended on the earth and stifled every impulse of progress for more than fifteen centuries. The Yggdrasil of Christian superstition spread its roots throughout the Roman Empire, strangling alike the nascent ethics of Christendom, and the germinating science of the ancient world. ”

“ If a man at a feast calls him Choroebus or a drunkard, he in his turn will in the pulpit cry heretic, or forger, or schismatic upon him. I believe, if the cook were to set burnt meat on the dinner-table, he would next day bawl out in the course of his sermon that she was suspected of heresy. Nor is he ashamed, nor does he retreat, though so often caught, by the very facts, in manifest falsehood. ”

“ In the time of the reformers were developed both of the chief directions in theology, viz. the rationalistic and transcendental, which in the following centuries were to divide the supremacy with orthodoxy. Erasmus is the founder of theological rationalism ; the modern speculative or transcendental direction is a development of mysticism. ”

“ Our complacent attitude toward primitive man has of late been fostered by certain gifted classical scholars, chief among them Professor Gilbert Murray and Miss Jane Harrison, who with the help of anthropology have recreated that dim world which lay behind Greek letters. The beautiful logic by which these scholars reach their results increases our conceit that reason is a modern instrument, while the world they picture, a hopeless tangle of religion and superstition, of necromancy and the arts, reassures us as to what we have risen from. ”

“ We follow the ancient Etruscans from the cradle to the tomb, perceiving their various national costumes, peculiar physiognomies, names and relationships, houses, furniture, ranks, avocations, games, dying scenes, burial processions, and funeral festivals. And, further than this, we follow their souls into the world to come, behold them in the hands of good or evil spirits, brought to judgment and then awarded their deserts of bliss or woe. ”

“ And the disciples of Aristotle say that some of their treatises are esoteric, and others common and exoteric. Further, those who instituted the mysteries, being philosophers, buried their doctrines in myths, so as not to be obvious to all. Did they then, by veiling human opinions, prevent the ignorant from handling them; and was it not more beneficial for the holy and blessed contemplation of realities to be concealed? But it was not only the tenets of the Barbarian philosophy, or the Pythagorean myths. ”

“ And to me there is no doubt but that the earth abides through the supplication of the Christians. But the rest of the nations err and cause error in wallowing before the elements of the world, since beyond these their mental vision will not pass. And they search about as if in darkness because they will not recognize the truth; and like drunken men they reel and jostle one another and fall. ”

“ That which makes heresy is the spirit of pride, of revolt, and of schism, which burst forth in heaven when Satan, separating the angels of light, attempted to remodel, according to his liking, the theology of eternity, and reform the work of God in the world ”

“ And when he had sundry times, one after another, thundered out the same thing, and most men wondered what ailed the man, at last he explained it thus, making two words of one. "A heretic must be put to death." Some laughed, and yet there wanted not others to whom this exposition seemed plainly theological; which, when some, though those very few, opposed, they cut off the dispute, as we say, with a hatchet, and the credit of so uncontrollable an author. "Pray conceive me," said he, "it is written, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.' But every heretic bewitches the people ”

“ A different sort of development appears in the rites of the cults that sprang up on the ruins of the old faiths—Greek Mysteries, Mithraism, Isisism, Christianity. These were all redemptive religions, highly individualistic and intense, efforts to infuse into old forms the ideas concerning moral purity, union with the deity, immortality, and future salvation that had arisen 511in the Græco-Roman world by the natural growth of thought and the intermingling of the various existing schemes of religious life. ”

“ How is it, Aristodemus, thou rememberest, or remarkest not, that the kingdoms and commonwealths most renowned as well for their wisdom as antiquity, are those whose piety and devotion hath been the most observable? And why thinkest thou that the providence of God may not easily extend itself throughout the whole universe? ”