Dictionary of Heresies, Errors, and Schisms

# INTRODUCTION.

...study Continuing the phrase "brought into the study of religion" from the previous page. the authority of revelation which proposed mysteries to it, and the desire for enlightenment which constantly strives to understand and to explain everything that the mind receives as true; it believed the mysteries, and tried to make them intelligible. It could only make them intelligible by means of the ideas that reason provided; it brought the mysteries into alignment with its own ideas or principles, sometimes substituted its own ideas for the mysteries, or admitted into the mysteries only that which conformed to its principles and its ideas. Driven, like all men, by an invincible love of happiness, and led by religion to seek it in the hopes of the next life—while the senses and passions showed happiness in the objects that flatter them—it tried to reconcile the interests of the passions and the senses with the hopes of religion, or sacrificed one to the other, and saw a crime in the most innocent actions; while the most criminal actions were turned into so many acts of virtue.

One man, enamored with the happiness that religion promises, strove to raise himself to the very heart of the Divinity In this context, "Divinity" refers to the essence of God.. To enjoy this happiness before death, he gave himself over to contemplation, had visions, fell into ecstasy A state of spiritual rapture or being "outside oneself.", and believed he had risen above the impressions of the senses, above the passions, and above the needs of the body, which he abandoned to whatever surrounded it. Meanwhile, another man, struck by the misery of the damned, saw demons and hell everywhere; he neglected the most essential duties of Christianity to cling to superstitious and barbaric practices suggested to him by imagination and terror.

revelation, mysteries, reason, principles, happiness, religion, passions, virtue, Divinity, contemplation, ecstasy, Christianity, superstition

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