Memorials of Human Superstition: Being a Paraphrase and Commentary on the Historia Flagellantium of the Abbé Boileau, Doctor of the Sorbonne
9781465674524
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
THE Abbé Boileau, the author of the Historia Flagellantium, was elder brother to the celebrated Poet of that name. He filled, several years, the place of Dean of the Metropolitan Church of Sens, and was thence promoted to the office of one of the Canons of the Holy Chapel in Paris, which is looked upon as a great dignity among the French clergy. While he was in that office (about the year 1700) he wrote, among other books, that which is the subject of this work. This book, in which the public expected, from the title of it, to find an history of the particular sect of Hereticks called Flagellants, only contained an aggregation of facts and quotations on the subject of self-disciplines and flagellations in general among Christians (which, if the work had been well done, might however have been equally interesting) and a mixture of alternate commendation and blame of that practice. The Theologians of that time, however, took offence at the book. They judged that the author had been guilty, in it, of several heretical assertions; for instance, in saying, as he does in two or three places, that Jesus Christ had suffered flagellation against his will: and they particularly blamed the censures which, amidst his commendations of it, he had passed upon a practice that so many saints had adopted, so many pontiffs and bishops had advised, and so many ecclesiastical writers had commended. In the second place, they objected to several facts which the author had inserted in his book, as well as to the licentiousness of expression he had sometimes indulged; and they said that such facts, and such manner of expression, ought not to be met with in a book written by a good Christian, and much less by a Dean of the Metropolitan Church of Sens, a Canon of the Holy Chapel, and in short by a man invested with an eminent dignity in the Church; in which latter respect they were perhaps right. Among the critics of our author’s book, were the Jesuits of Trevoux; the then conductors of a periodical review, called the Journal de Trevoux. The poet Boileau, taking the part of his brother, answered their criticisms by the following epigram.
