The Mystic

Abstract

The historical backdrop against which Eugène Vintras’s bizarre heretical cult made its first appearance in France in the 1840s was one marked by a forceful resurgence of secular rationalism. Opposing Auguste Comte’s Positivist assertion of mankind’s progress toward scientific enlightenment, the fin-de-siècle mystics who were influenced by Vintras vaunted a higher knowledge they claimed was obtainable only from divine sources, insights that were yielded only by non-rational intuition. Instead of a confident march toward technological mastery, Vintras’s followers believed that time itself was ending, overturning governments, hurling a church corrupted by materialism into the abyss of fire that would open with the coming apocalypse.