RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Antidiconiarianites Antinomianism
demiurge, some thought it their duty to practise a rigorous asceticism, while others are represented by their Christian assailants as thinking it right to destroy the body by vicious practises. The
Cainites (q.v.) regarded with approval
2. Gnostic Cain, Esau, Korah, the Sodomites,
Antinomian- and all other characters reprobated
ism. in the Old Testament, and presumably
supposed that they were doing God service in themselves defying the authority of Jehovah (the demiurge) and doing the things forbidden in the law. Carpocrates (q.v.) and Epiphanes appear to have disseminated antinomian teachings. The followers of Marcion (q.v.) and the Manicheans (q.v.) were antinomian in the sense that they rejected the Mosaic law because of its permission of marriage and even polygamy and concubinage, of capital punishment, etc.; but did not, so far as appears, make repudiation of the law an excuse for fleshly indulgence. The followers of Priscillian (q.v.), a strong ascetic party in Spain with Gnostic tendencies (fourth and fifth centuries), were tortured into confessing the most immoral practises; but there is no good reason for crediting the calumnies of their persecutors. The Messalians (q.v.), a mystical sect that flourished in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Armenia Irom the fourth century onward, are said to have practised a squalid kind of asceticism, mendicancy, promiscuous sleeping together of men and women, and prayer to the devil. On account of the lastnamed practise they were sometimes called Satanites. It seems probable that they were antinomian. Of like character, or worse, were the Adamites referred to by Epiphanius, and the same may be said of medieval parties known by this name (see Adamites).
The Bogomiles and kindred sects (see New Manicheans) are accused by their enemies of the most immoral practises. Amalric of Bena (d. 1204) carried pantheistic ideas so far as to maintain that " to those constituted in love no sin is imputed " (see Amalric of Bena). His followers are said to have maintained that harlotry and other carnal vices are not sinful for the spiritual man, because
the spirit in him, which is God, is not
3. Antino- affected by the flesh and can not sin,
mianism of and because the man, who is nothing,
the Middle can not sin so long as the spirit, which
Ages. is God, is in him. Such teachings
were carried to the most immoral consequences by the Brethren of the Free Spirit and the Beghards (qq.v.), if the inquisitorial records of the fifteenth century can be believed. Johann Hartmann in the diocese of Mainz claimed that by contemplation he had become so completely one with God and God so completely one with him that an angel could not tell the difference; that a man free in spirit is rendered impeccable and can do whatever he will and whatever pleases him. He carried these doctrines to the most extreme and revolting consequences (cf. the documents in Dollinger, Beitrage zur Sektengeschichte des Mittelalters, ii., Munich, 1890, pp. 384 sqq.). This We of antinomianism seems to have been widespread during the later Middle Ages and was per-
petuated in some of the parties of the Reformation time.
The pantheistic sect of the " Libertines," who appeared in the Netherlands about 1525 and thence spread into France and were combated by Calvin (see Libertines, 3; Loists) were Antinomians. They disregarded the Mosaic law and law in general as inapplicable to the spiritual man and felt free to lie, steal, and indulge the passions. David Joris (q.v.), the mystic, was accused by his opponents of antinomian teachings, but
apparently without sufficient reason. 4. Of the It would be easy to point out anti- Sixteenth nomian tendencies in a number of and Seven- continental parties of the sixteenth teenth and seventeenth centuries not com- Centuries. monly reckoned among Antinomians.
The hyper-Calvinistic (supralapsarian) teaching of men like Piscator (d. 1625) and Gomar (d. 1641) in the Netherlands, as that " sins take place, God procuring and himself willing that they take place, nay, absolutely so willing " and that in giving the law and commanding its observance He made its observance absolutely impossible, really struck at the root of human responsibility and discouraged any effort to control the natural impulses. So, too, the Jesuit casuists of the more reckless type in substituting for the Mosaic law the Canon Law and in making the violation of the latter easy by their doctrines of " philosophical sin," " direction of attention," " mental reservation," and " probabilism," etc., were constructively antinomian. Mystics of the later time, so far as they pantheistically identified themselves with God and supposed that by virtue of such spiritual exaltation they were subject to no ordinances human or divine, were antinomian in the sense in which the Brethren of the Free Spirit were. Of special importance in this connection, because of the wide-spread influence exerted by his teachings on English and American thought and life, is Hendrik Niklaes, founder of the Familists (q.v.). In 1577 several of his works were published in English and called forth a considerable body of polemical literature. At this time there are said to have been one thousand Familists in England,
and they were making an active and 5. In successful propaganda. To counter- England, act their influence the privy council
issued a form of abjuration to be applied to members of the party arraigned for heresy. Their principles were too nearly [identical with those of the Brethren of the Free Spirit not to be subversive of morality as well as of Scriptural authority and historical Christianity, and their errors were all the more insidious because of the fact that they allowed themselves to conform outwardly to any required ecclesiastical or civil usages, and by the use of ambiguous language to profess the acceptance of any doctrine.
During the Civil War and Commonwealth times almost every imaginable type of religious propagandism went forward with astonishing zeal and success. Familism (with other important influences) produced a relatively pure and evangelical mysticism in the Society of Friends and a grosser
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