 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(February 2023) |
The Adamites, also called Adamians, were adherents of an Early Christian group in North Africa in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th centuries. They wore no clothing during their religious services. [1] [2] There were later reports of similar sects in Central Europe during the Late Middle Ages.
The obscure sect, dating probably from the 2nd century, professed to have regained Adam and Eve's primeval innocence. [2] Various accounts are given of their origin. Some have thought them to have been an offshoot of the Carpocratians, who professed a sensual mysticism and a complete emancipation from the moral law. [2] Theodoret (Haer. Fab., I, 6) held this view of them, and identified them with the licentious sects whose practices are described by Clement of Alexandria. Others, on the contrary, consider them to have been misguided ascetics, who strove to extirpate carnal desires by a return to simpler manners, and by the abolition of marriage.
St. Epiphanius and Augustine of Hippo mention the Adamites by name, and describe their practices. They called their church "Paradise", claiming that its members were re-established in Adam and Eve's state of original innocence. [3] Accordingly, they practiced "holy nudism", rejected the concept of marriage as foreign to Eden, saying it would never have existed but for sin, and lived in absolute lawlessness, holding that, whatever they did, their actions could be neither good nor bad. [4] They were therefore accused of devil worship. [5] The old Adamites have been considered to be early Protestants. [6]
Practices similar to those of the ancient Adamites appeared in Europe several times in later ages. During the Middle Ages the doctrines of this obscure sect, which did not itself exist long, were revived. [4] In the 13th century in the Netherlands the Brethren of the Free Spirit were sometimes called Adamites. [7] They often took off their clothes during their secret rituals, believing that perfection could be achieved by a return to the perfect love of Adam and Eve. [8] In the 14th century it was widely reported that heretics were practicing nude rites and chroniclers often referred to them as Adamites. [9] In the 15th century the Taborites in Bohemia produced an offshoot known as the Bohemian Adamites. [10] Everywhere these sects met with firm opposition from the mainstream churches. [9] The splintering of Protestantism during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the 17th century saw Adamites recorded in the Catalogue of the Several Sects and Opinions in England. [11]
The Taborite movement started in 1419 as the more radical branch of Hussitism in opposition to the authority of the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. One sect, the Bohemian Adamites, dissociated themselves from the Taborites and took up the practice of going naked through towns and villages. They preached that "God dwelt in the Saints of the Last Days" and considered exclusive marriage to be a sin. The historian Norman Cohn observed: "Whereas the Taborites were strictly monogamous, in this sect free love seems to have been the rule. The Adamites declared that the chaste were unworthy to enter the Messianic kingdom ... The sect was much given to ritual naked dances held around a fire. Indeed, these people seemed to have spent much of their time naked, ignoring the heat and cold and claiming to be in the state of innocence enjoyed by Adam and Eve." Cohn also commented that the Adamites were criticised by other Taborites for "never thinking of earning their own living by the work of their hands". [12]
The Bohemian Adamites took possession of an island in the river Nežárka, and lived communally, practicing social and religious nudity, free love and rejecting marriage and individual ownership of property. Jan Žižka, the Taborite leader, nearly exterminated the sect in 1421. [13] In the following year, the sect was widely spread over Bohemia and Moravia, and especially hated by the Taborites (whom they resembled in hatred toward the hierarchy) because the Adamites rejected transubstantiation, the priesthood and the Eucharist. [14] The strife between the Adamites and the Taborites is dramatized in Against All , the third part of Otakar Vávra's Hussite film trilogy (1958). [15]
In church history, the term acephali has been applied to several sects that supposedly had no leader. E. Cobham Brewer wrote, in Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, that acephalites, "properly means men without a head." Jean Cooper wrote, in Dictionary of Christianity, that it characterizes "various schismatical Christian bodies". Among them were Nestorians who rejected the Council of Ephesus’ condemnation of Patriarch Nestorius of Constantinople, which deposed Nestorius and declared him a heretic.
The Hussites were a Czech proto-Protestant Christian movement that followed the teachings of reformer Jan Hus, a part of the Bohemian Reformation.
Ebionites as a term refers to a Jewish Christian sect that existed during the early centuries of the Common Era, whose name may have been taken from the first group of people mentioned in the Beatitudes of Jesus as blessed and worthy of entering the coming Kingdom of God on Earth.
The Hussite Wars, also called the Bohemian Wars or the Hussite Revolution, were a series of civil wars fought between the Hussites and the combined Catholic forces of Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, the Papacy, and European monarchs loyal to the Catholic Church, as well as various Hussite factions. At a late stage of the conflict, the Utraquists changed sides in 1432 to fight alongside Roman Catholics and opposed the Taborites and other Hussite spin-offs. These wars lasted from 1419 to approximately 1434.
The Ophites, also called Ophians, were a Christian Gnostic sect depicted by Hippolytus of Rome (170–235) in a lost work, the Syntagma ("arrangement").
The Taborites, known by their enemies as the Picards, were a faction within the Hussite movement in the medieval Lands of the Bohemian Crown.
The pre-Adamite hypothesis or pre-Adamism is the theological belief that humans existed before the biblical character Adam. Pre-Adamism is therefore distinct from the conventional Abrahamic belief that Adam was the first human. "Pre-Adamite" is used as a term, both for those humans believed to exist before Adam, and for believers or proponents of this hypothesis.
Utraquism, also called Calixtinism, was a belief amongst Hussites, a reformist Christian movement, that communion under both kinds should be administered to the laity during the celebration of the Eucharist. It was a principal dogma of the Hussites and one of the Four Articles of Prague.
In culture, a "fig leaf" or "fig-leaf" is a literal or figurative method of obscuring an act or object considered embarrassing or distasteful with something of innocuous appearance. The use of an actual fig leaf for the purpose originates in Western painting and sculpture, where leaves would be used by the artist themselves or by later censors in order to hide the genitalia of a subject. Use of the fig plant in particular came about as a Biblical reference to the Book of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve used fig leaves to cover their nudity after eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Collyridianism was an alleged Early Christian movement in Arabia whose adherents apparently worshipped the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, as a goddess. The existence of the sect is subject to some dispute by scholars, as the only contemporary source to describe it is the Panarion of St. Epiphanius of Salamis, published in approximately 376 AD.
The Antidicomarians or Antidicomarianites, also called Dimoerites, were a Christian sect active from the 3rd to the 5th century. Their name was invented by an opponent, Epiphanius of Salamis, who described them as heretical in his Panarion. The existence of the Antidicomarians as an organized sect may be doubted, as it is attested only in Epiphanius, but the doctrines he attributes to them were certainly matters of live debate in the late 4th century.
Christian naturism is the practise of naturism or nudism by Christians.
In early Christian heresiology, the Panarion, to which 16th-century Latin translations gave the name Adversus Haereses, is the most important of the works of Epiphanius of Salamis. It was written in Koine Greek beginning in 374 or 375, and issued about three years later, as a treatise on heresies, with its title referring to the text as a "stock of remedies to offset the poisons of heresy." It treats 80 religious sects, either organized groups or philosophies, from the time of Adam to the latter part of the fourth century, detailing their histories, and rebutting their beliefs. The Panarion is an important source of information on the Jewish–Christian gospels, the Gospel of the Ebionites, and the Gospel of the Hebrews.
Nudity in religion deals with religious beliefs as the basis for modern attitudes and behaviors regarding nudity.
Heresy in Christianity denotes the formal denial or doubt of a core doctrine of the Christian faith as defined by one or more of the Christian churches.
This timeline of social nudity shows the varying degrees of acceptance given to the naked human body by diverse cultures throughout history. The events listed here demonstrate how various societies have shifted between strict and lax clothing standards, how nudity has played a part in social movements and protest, and how the nude human body is accepted in the public sphere.
Anarcho-naturism, also referred to as anarchist naturism and naturist anarchism, appeared in the late 19th century as the union of anarchist and naturist philosophies. In many of the alternative communities established in Britain in the early 1900s, "nudism, anarchism, vegetarianism and free love were accepted as part of a politically radical way of life". In the 1920s, the inhabitants of the anarchist community at Whiteway, near Stroud in Gloucestershire, "shocked the conservative residents of the area with their shameless nudity". Mainly, it had importance within individualist anarchist circles in Spain, France, Portugal and Cuba.
Peter Kániš was a priest and theologian during the Bohemian reformation, being the chief spokesman for the Taborites. Along with other Taborites, he was burned at the stake for heresy by Jan Žižka, who wanted to control the most radical parts of the reformation. Kániš advocated the postponement of baptism until the age of thirty over infant baptism. He took a memorialist view of the Eucharist. Bishop Nicholas Biskupec wrote a treatise against him defending the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. A few of those led by Kániš and Martin Húska would later form the Adamite sect.
Apostolici, Apostolic Brethren, or Apostles, are the names given to various Christian heretics, whose common doctrinal feature was an ascetic rigidity of morals, which made them reject property and marriage.
Media related to Adamites at Wikimedia Commons| Nakedness and clothing | |
|---|---|
| Nudity and sexuality | |
| Issues in social nudity | |
| Naturism | |
| Nude recreation | |
| By location | |
| Social nudity advocates | |
| Depictions of nudity | |
| See also | |
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
