Why tolerate religion epub

To Walter Wakefield , 22 , neither urbanisation nor a salient increase of the populace plays a primary role in throwing light on the rise or resurrection of the plague of heresy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Instead, he pays much heed to the revival of religiosity in general and that of piety in particular. Several intensely God-fearing men and women and their innocent children were fated to be labelled as foemen of God, the Temple of the Roman Pontiff — the Ecclesia Romana — , and all human race alike.

Wakefield ibid. The rise of the heresies is explicable only in the light of that revival of piety which occurred everywhere in Western Europe […]. It took the new religious orders, of enhancement of episcopal and papal power, of mystic exaltation for some, of application of intellect to theological problems for others […].

While warriors marched on crusade to the Holy Land and pilgrims thronged the routes to famous shrines, other men and women also scrutinized religious ideas closely and critically […] to find the most authentic forms of Christian life.

Like always, it was up to the authorities to decide which is good and which is bad, and what threatens the foundations of the ruling institution and the prevailing order. I bid you notice that orthodoxy always ought to entail dissent.

Paul, a consummate dialectician, matching Heraclitus, admitted rather than conceded 1 Cor. Heresy remained inseparable twin of the established faith and loomed large in high mediaeval debate see Goodman b, xv. Paul gave the concept its legs. We can discern a novel desire for personal spiritual perfection and a stress on purity of life within a group in multiple episodes of dissent already in the eleventh century. We observe within them a diminution of the sense of need for clergy and sacraments.

How was the Church as the very stronghold of conservativism to react to these two stances? The pilgrim movement at the close of the eleventh century culminated in the sanguinary crusades against the infidels, while contacts between Western Europe and Constantinople came to be closer than ever before. Pope Calixtus II presided a council in to anathematise an anticlerical group in the district of Toulouse.

Of these abominations, only their reprimand of marriage is not a sign of their Dualist roots cf. Runciman , In the present oeuvre, thoughts are mainly directed to Western and Southern Europe at the expense of other parts of this comparatively narrow continent.

One of the most important differences between […] Byzantium and Latin Europe was the preservation in the former […] of a highly speculative […] and numerous groups of churchmen and laypeople who preserved a tradition of intellectual Christianity that had produced heresies and orthodoxies since the third century and continued to produce them until the fourteenth […].

Even though many centers of heresy had been lost to Byzantium during the Moslem invasions of Africa and the Near East, old heretical texts survived to inform new generations about Gnosticism, Arianism, and the various Christological heresies, especially Monophysitism, that had been ruthlessly suppressed […] by diligent emperors and muscular church councils and patriarchs.

In Byzantium old heresies had a great capacity for survival and new ones a great capacity for growth in a fertile religious culture that had a large proportion of literate and educated clerics and laypeople, a proportion that would not be reached in the Latin West until the twelfth century.

Peters ibid. Among Byzantine movements that […] exerted some influence on the West, Paulicianism, Iconoclasm, and Bogomilism are particularly important. The Paulicians originated in Armenia, deriving their name from the third-century heretic Paul of Samosata, and circulated throughout the Byzantine Empire, although their greatest strength lay in their powerful military state on the Euphrates which flourished briefly in the third quarter of the ninth century.

At the same time, Paulicianism slowly changed from an Adoptionist heresy into a dualist one. Peters throws light upon the nature and significance of iconoclasm that kicked against the anthropomorphic practice of representing the divinity pictorially. As a matter of course, iconoclasm assaulted religious images in general and implied that to ascribe material dimensions to the most sacred spiritual beings was to humanise, and so to limit, them by turning down their pure spiritual gist.

Peters also illustrates differences between East and West. On no account was the splendour, fertility, and diversity of Byzantine metaphysical religious life matched in the Latin West.

In the occidental regions, the incessant battle was decisively more against the residual paganism of the Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic nations than against old or new forms of heresies. Most of the efforts of Latin Christian shepherds were aimed at changeover from the pagan perspective and against backsliding movements toward paganism. Sure as the sun at noonday, the monuments of the early western endeavour are the heroic missionary and monastic achievements of the period between the fourth and the ninth centuries ibid.

Heresy was still a marginal issue, and by definition, heathenism was neither a heresy nor an invention.

There seems to have been a lull all over Europe in the last half of the eleventh century. Yet the calm, if there was any, ended as quickly as the twelfth century began. Thereafter, for about two centuries, the contest for being right about orthodoxy and heresy, at its bitterest in southern regions of France, was a dominant element in religious occupation and politics Wakefield , Like twitter-time man knows the concept of genetically transmitted disease, his mediaeval fellow human being had been instructed to cognise that heresy could be handed down from generation to generation.

To the perpetrator, heresy was a costly error, punishable by temple and state in cordial concordance. Owing to many complicated causes […] a general renewal of Latin literature had then taken place, which profoundly modified the intellectual condition of Europe […]. For the first time for many centuries, we find a feeble spirit of doubt combating the spirit of credulity: a curiosity for purely secular knowledge replacing, in some small degree, the passion for theology; and […] a diminution [sic!

In every department of thought and of knowledge, there was manifested […] a spirit of restless and feverish anxiety, that contrasted strangely with the preceding torpor.

The long slumber of untroubled orthodoxy was broken by many heresies, which, though often repressed, seemed in each succeeding century to acquire new force and consistency. Manichaeism […] burst into a fierce flame among the Albigenses […]. Then it was that the standard of an impartial philosophy was first planted by Abelard in Europe, and the minds of the learned were distracted by subtle and perplexing doubts concerning […] the faith.

Then, too, the teachings of a stern and uncompromising infidelity flashed forth from Seville and from Cordova; and the form of Averroes began to assume those gigantic proportions, which, at a later period […] almost persuaded some of the ablest men that the reign of Antichrist had begun.

At the same time, the passion for astrology and for the fatalism it implied revived with the revival of pagan learning Lecky , I, 47—48; emphasis added. The Temple, the hierarchy of which convinced itself that skepticism was evil, demonised doubt as being a match for heresy Lea , I, There is only one party of corporative nature that controls practically everything, allowing no opposition, denouncing doubters and critics, as they appear, as dissenting and unamenable to hold to the sacrosanct world-order of the Triune Godhead in substance.

It further stands in canon law quoted by John that. It is not required however, that everyone adhere to any particular Catholic truth explicitly. But he who doubts that the whole Christian faith is true is manifestly heretical and should be judged stubborn since he is not ready to be corrected, for no one is ready to be corrected by a doctrine which he believes to be false Peters , On this point W. Lecky , I, 49 , the quondam well-known historian of European Morals is more eloquent, a moralist as he is:.

Every doubt, every impulse of rebellion against ecclesiastical authority, above all, every heretical opinion, was regarded as the direct instigation of Satan, and their increase as the measure of his triumph […]. Europe was beginning to enter into that inexpressibly painful period in which men have learned to doubt, but have not yet learned to regard doubt as innocent; in which the new mental activity produces a variety of opinions, while the old credulity persuades them that all but one class of opinions are the suggestions of the devil.

In part at least, it is contended, mediaeval heresies were a product of disappointment with, and resentment against, a corrupt clergy. Having developed its structures, the Ecclesia Romana had surfaced as a wealthy and worldly company and bureaucracy, forgetful of its apostolic vision, strategy, and mission.

Related to this stand is another theory, in pursuance of which heresies arose as protests against socio-economic dislocations and common inequity, and as such, they could be sounded off exclusively in religious terms. We are disposed to opine that alienation from the bosom of the Temple had opened the way for such seductive doctrines as religious dualism that took good and evil rationally.

In Why Tolerate Religion? However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and secular claims of conscience, highlighting the practical and moral flaws associated with it. We believe that Leiter identifies a genuine and important contemporary legal and philosophical problem. We find much to admire in his reasoning. However, we raise questions about two claims that are crucial for his argument.