Did You Know?

Instant Classic Students today may grumble about having to read the Dante’s Divine Comedy, but Dante’s contemporaries loved it. More than 600 fourteenth-century copies survive, attesting to its wide circulation. At least 12 commentaries had been written about it by 1400. Later it was among the earliest books to be set in movable type. But the poem lost favor with the rise of rationalism, and only three editions were printed in the seventeenth century. The Pre-Raphaelites helped bring the poem back into fashion in the nineteenth century, and its status now seems assured. More than 50 English translations of Inferno were published in the twentieth century alone.

(Source: An email from Christian History magazine)

Those of you in the Ideas section of Church and Empires will cover Dante more extensively than we do on the History side, but I thought you might be interested in therecent biographical sketch in Christian History magazine.

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Dante Alighieri
Worldly creator of divine verse

“O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!”

By his early fifties, Dante had been exiled from his hometown, wrestled with the top authorities of the church, and taken up arms against his fellow countrymen. He had made plenty of enemies, and he was not pleased. So he did with his enemies what many have wished to do: he sent them all, even the pope, to hell—literarily, that is. But his damnatory writing was no screed; it was the finest poem of the Middle Ages, a summation of classical and medieval beliefs so profound that its critics labeled it “divine”: The Divine Comedy. (Click here to read more…)

We are soon going to be discussing the Gnostics so I thought you might want to read this short introduction:

The Heresy that Wouldn’t Die
Though Gnostic sects faded in the early church, Gnostic ideas have had a long shelf life.
by Philip Jenkins

This world is not my home. As it stands, that statement reflects the views of a great many orthodox Christians, but a Gnostic would take it much further. From a Gnostic perspective, the material world is not just fallen but an utterly flawed creation, beyond redemption. God—or at least, the good, true God—certainly does not work in history. Escape is only available to the small minority who know, who recognize the need for liberation, which lies within. Wisdom, Sophia, is for the spiritual, the elite, and distinguishes them from the gullible herd of humans mired in the material, the victims of cosmic deception. They will remain asleep, while the true Gnostic is awakened.

Gnosticism has never gone away, however much some modern scholars lament the suppression of its hidden gospels in the late Roman Empire. The main themes survived, for instance, in the Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, which explains how the world was created through the fracturing of the vessels into which the divine goodness was poured. In addition to seeking their own mystic ascent to God, believers also pledge themselves to achieving tikkun olam, the restoration of the broken world.

Within Christendom too, the fact that Christian states officially suppressed heresy just drove these ideas beyond the frontiers, into regions like Mesopotamia and Armenia. Gnostic and dualist ideas thrived across large parts of Asia in movements like the Paulicians and the Manichaeans, who taught the children of light how to liberate themselves from the evil god of this world.

Occasionally, these ideas were reimported into Europe, most famously in the Cathar or Albigensian movement, which was suppressed by a near-genocidal crusade in 13th-century France. The Cathars followed the old Gnostic ideas faithfully, offering full salvation to the “perfect” who absolutely renounced the world. These old-new movements relied chiefly on the Christian gospels, interpreting the parables in their own distinctive way. Like the early Gnostics, though, they also wrote their own scriptures, such as the Book of John the Evangelist. (”Then did the Contriver of Evil devise in his mind to make Paradise, and he brought the man and woman into it.”)

Living in a Christian-ruled society, later Gnostics defined themselves against the church and its doctrines, which provided a foil for the truly spiritual. The Cathars rejected the Roman Catholic Church as, literally, the synagogue of Satan. Catholics followed the deluded God who had created the abomination of the world in which we live and whose bloody misdeeds are chronicled in the Old Testament. Ordinary Catholic believers were the sheep, in the sense of being docile, ignorant, and uncomprehending. (Click here to read more…)

I recently interviewed Phillip Johnson on the intersection of Politics and Christianity. You can read the interview by CLICKING HERE.

All history is incomprehensible without Christ.
~ Ernest Renan

Dying to be Faithful
Persecution brought out the best and worst in the early Christians.
by Jennifer Trafton

“Come fire, cross, battling with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body, cruel tortures of the devil—only let me get to Jesus Christ!”

Hardly the stuff of Sunday morning conversation in the 21st century. Ignatius, a bishop in Antioch, wrote these words in a letter to the Roman church in the early second century. He had been arrested for being a Christian and knew that a grisly death probably lay before him. Yet he looked forward to it almost joyfully. Why?

Ignatius and many other believers in his time were dealing with dilemmas most American Christians will never have to face: “Should I go to the local executioner and volunteer to die for my faith, or should I try to avoid being arrested at all costs? Is it okay to offer sacrifice to the pagan gods just once, if it means staying alive? Does martyrdom bring me closer to the sufferings of Christ? Are martyrs more special than the rest of us?” Questions like these shaped early Christianity.

Click Here to read more . . .