United States or Hungary ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It would be ridiculous to say that the fate of religious feeling is really involved in the fate of grotesque cosmogonies and theosophies framed in the infancy of men's knowledge of nature; for history shows us quite the contrary. Religious feeling has survived the heliocentric theory and the discoveries of geologists; and it will be none the worse for the establishment of Darwinism.
It is the fashion to disparage the scholastic theology, and it has certainly suffered by being congealed, like everything else that Rome touches, into a hard system; but it is immeasurably superior to the theosophies and fancy religions which run riot in the superficially cultivated classes of Protestant countries.
The intellectualism of the heresy was largely due, as we have shown, to the Aristotelian logic and metaphysic; its mystic elements derive, as we proceed to indicate, from Neo-Platonism and kindred theosophies. Alexandria had been for centuries the home of the mystics.
There flourished for a while and died fantastic eclectic creeds, pagan theosophies masquerading as Christianity. Gnosticism was a typical product of the city. Valentinus and Basilides and the other gnostics made in that cosmopolitan atmosphere their attempts to reconcile Christianity with Greek and oriental thought.
Lombardy, and most probably the south of France, Flanders and the Rhine towns, were full of strange Manichean theosophies, pessimistic dualism of God and devil, in which God always got the worst of it, when God did not happen to be the devil himself.
It is often forgotten, amid the welter of modern ethical ideals and modern mystical theosophies, how grand and unique a thing is this Religion of Israel a religion whose God is at once Personal and Invisible. After all, what do we know?
In the earliest times the mystic doctrine appears to have been a form of Jewish Gnosticism, speculation about the nature of God and His connection with the world. But it was not till the Middle Ages that Jewish mysticism received definite and separate literary expression, and by that time it was mixed up with a number of neo-Platonic and magical fancies and foreign theosophies.
But to the "little systems" science can only be welcome in so far as it fits in with the petty scale upon which their theologies and theosophies have constructed the universe. At first, everything is passionately denied, a cry of horror goes up in the land that science is engaged in an attempt to dethrone the God of their theology.
Word Of The Day