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booknotes: Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium
"Nothing is sin but what is thought of as sin."
(Belief of an "adept of the Free Spirit", as reported through Albertus Magnus in his writings against them.)
Cohn's book discusses a collection of millennarium movements c. 1100 - 1650 CE. I found particularly interesting those that he groups as the antinomians (I had to look that word up, Luther coined it to polemicize against them): the radical Beghards, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the English Ranters. How closely these people would have agreed with one another's beliefs is not clear to me1, but Cohn puts this near the core: it's only sin if you think it is.
Very neat, isn't it? I don't see why it isn't more popular.
This is different than Christian Science, as I understand it -- this doctrine holds that Hell is real, sin is real, it's a real consequence of action of the mind. There are people (anyone remember who I'm thinking of?) who believe that a sudden thought come into the mind should be presumed to come of God. This is that, taken whole: the will of the enlightened soul is one with the will of God; God wills what I will. The Ranters are described (by opponents) as acting on caprice.
I find this a fascinating example in the spectrum of the varied relations of spirituality to self-trust and self-untrust. This is the furthest pole of self-trust I can imagine. And I find a kind of glee -- history, it's like the Internet, but it's bigger -- in realizing that any interior life you can imagine has likely been lived by someone in history.
Marguerite Porete:
"Why should such souls have qualms about taking what they need, when necessity demands it? That would be a lack of innocence and a hindrance to that peaces in which the soul rests from all things.... Such souls use all things that are made and created, and which nature requires, with such peace of mind as they use the earth they walk on."
Laurence Clarkson:
"Now observe at that time my judgment was this, that there was no man could be free'd from sin, til he had acted that so called sin, as no sin [...]"
1 I do suspect Cohen of being a lumper.
(Belief of an "adept of the Free Spirit", as reported through Albertus Magnus in his writings against them.)
Cohn's book discusses a collection of millennarium movements c. 1100 - 1650 CE. I found particularly interesting those that he groups as the antinomians (I had to look that word up, Luther coined it to polemicize against them): the radical Beghards, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the English Ranters. How closely these people would have agreed with one another's beliefs is not clear to me1, but Cohn puts this near the core: it's only sin if you think it is.
Very neat, isn't it? I don't see why it isn't more popular.
This is different than Christian Science, as I understand it -- this doctrine holds that Hell is real, sin is real, it's a real consequence of action of the mind. There are people (anyone remember who I'm thinking of?) who believe that a sudden thought come into the mind should be presumed to come of God. This is that, taken whole: the will of the enlightened soul is one with the will of God; God wills what I will. The Ranters are described (by opponents) as acting on caprice.
I find this a fascinating example in the spectrum of the varied relations of spirituality to self-trust and self-untrust. This is the furthest pole of self-trust I can imagine. And I find a kind of glee -- history, it's like the Internet, but it's bigger -- in realizing that any interior life you can imagine has likely been lived by someone in history.
Marguerite Porete:
"Why should such souls have qualms about taking what they need, when necessity demands it? That would be a lack of innocence and a hindrance to that peaces in which the soul rests from all things.... Such souls use all things that are made and created, and which nature requires, with such peace of mind as they use the earth they walk on."
Laurence Clarkson:
"Now observe at that time my judgment was this, that there was no man could be free'd from sin, til he had acted that so called sin, as no sin [...]"
1 I do suspect Cohen of being a lumper.
no subject
Omitting the G-d part, you get Nieztsche and Machiavelli.