Tag Archives: Gottfried Arnold

free choice: and there was one not three?

Goethe was enchanted by Gottfried Arnold’s “The Impartial History of the Church and the Heretics,” writing, ” that every man in the end came to have his own religion, and now it seemed to me the most natural thing in … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

mercy mercy them: the H word

An account of religious heresy. Hardly. No one can match Gottfried Arnold’s Impartial History of the Church and the Heretics. The Lutheran priest published the two volume tome in 1699 to almost universal disdain from within the Church and their … Continue reading

Posted in Art History/Antiquity/Anthropology, Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

into the heartland of heresy: religion as a private matter

Heresies. Recurrent ideas which break through the continually sealed crust of orthodoxy because they contain an important truth or an irrepressible human aspiration. And they don’t seem limited to one religion. In fact, monotheism seems to reinforce their appearances… The … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

heretics: each according to his own religion

Gottfried Arnold’s two volumes, Impartial History of the Church and the Heretics, published in 1699, which consisted of twenty-three hundred double-column folio pages , raised a storm that lasted a generation. And there were fewer heresies then than now. He … Continue reading

Posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment