Heresy
Abstract
Heresies
The Romans had not been bothered about blasphemy per se and did not understand heresy in the way the Church did—all religions were heresies. In the Acts of the Apostles, Paul is an heretic for being a Nazarene! Romans were concerned that gods might be angered, and might not be discriminating in their responses, which were usually natural disasters like plagues, famines and floods. The Christians, whose God was love, took the same attitude but were far more zealous and neurotic about it. Plagues, floods and famines were punishments by God for heresy and blasphemy, and when anything like them happened, some poor innocent would be scapegoated for the inconvenience. Disease and famine were, of course, more prevalent than they need have been from the Church’s obsession with ignorance and filth as virtues desired by God.
It all conspired to turn people’s venom against luckless people thought to have been inviting divine trouble—heretics. Any misfortune led an ignorant and superstitious people to suspect their neighbours of heresy and accusations would begin to fly. Christian mobs pursued poor suspects, tortured them into confessing and then punished them in the way God preferred by burning them at the stake. Heretics were hounded without mercy for almost a millennium before the Church decided to regulate the practice. Mob law preceded the law of the Church, but they were Christian mobs. The Church cannot escape responsibility this way.
There was a widespread expectation of the end of the world in the millennial year 1000 AD, as propesied in Revelation. The tenth century was the low-water of mediaeval civilization, and people looked forward to the expected judgement. They were disappointed. Nothing happened, and the vileness of the times went on unchanged.
Only Christians regarded Rome as the center of light in Europe after it ceased to be Pagan, and not many of those. At the end of the Middle Ages, during the Renaissance, Rome briefly flowered in art because for a while it adopted Pagan values once more. By the millennium, enlightenment was returning to Europe along paths from the east, along the valley of the Danube from Byzantium and Bulgaria, entering Christian Europe via southern Germany and the Alps. Another was along north Africa via the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain with the Moors, entering Christian Europe by the Pyrenees and the south of France. Lastly, there were sea routes into Europe from the east mainly through the Italian trading cities like Venice and Genoa, and also Marseilles.
For, during the darkest age of Christendom, a brilliant and tolerant Moslem civilization flourished in Spain, north Africa and the near east—the Moors. Its culture had crossed the Pyrenees to enlighten the barbarian Christians of Europe, and it threatened Byzantium, the remnant of the Roman empire hanging on in decadence. They also occupied Sicily and acted as mercenary soldiers for the Italian princes. The only scholar of the tenth century, Gerbert, Pope Silvester II (999-1003), belonged to the south of France and learned his science in Moorish Spain. The Cordoban Moors had influence in the south of France and even occupied it briefly. With them might have come a gentle variety of Christianity, later categorized as witchcraft.
Starting about 1100 AD, educated people were beginning to read the bible for themselves, and some wanted to translate it into the language of the common people. But as Catholic doctrines were not all in line with scripture, readers might doubt or dispute them. Popes “wanted to see the power of the Church, which was their own power, dominating men’s lives”:
It was just because many of them doubted secretly the entire soundness of their vast and elaborate doctrinal fabric that they would brook no discussion of it. They were intolerant of doubts and questions, not because they were sure of their faith, but because they were not.H G Wells, Crux Ansata
The way to stop it was to stop people from reading the bible. The Church forbade it. It was the solution the Catholic Church took for hundreds of years. Catholic Christians were forbidden to possess their own bible in any language, including Latin! The laity were forbidden to argue with Jews because they could read and therefore cite the scriptures that Christians were forbidden to read, even if they could read Latin. S Louis (1214-1270) advised any Christian challenged to a theological discussion by a Jew “to thrust his sword into the Jew’s belly as far as it would go”!
That anyone wanted to read the bible, was proof of heresy to the Catholic Church. No one would want to do it unless they disbelieved the doctors of the Church. Men and women were burned at the stake for reading the bible, even in Latin. William Tyndale was burned as a heretic because he translated the bible into English. People were burned as heretics for owning or reading his translation. The invention of printing with the Protestant Reformation stopped the suppression of the bible. That is why it can be read today, not because of any liberality in the Church.
The history of the medieval sects is told mainly by the Catholic Church, so it is not easy to get a proper picture of them. There is little literature from these sects until about 1400, but they claimed to be much older. Protestants have argued that the established Church from Constantine and pope Sylvester I gained the first temporal possession for the papacy, and so began the system of a rich, powerful and worldly church, with Rome for its capital. They changed the earlier single essentially Essenic basis of Christianity, making it into a syncretized religion taking in aspects of the other popular religions of the time, like the Mithraic mysteries. Not surprisingly, there were traditional Christians who did not approve of the secularized church. Preferring the older, Essenic, apostolic religion of simplicity, honesty and poverty, they maintained it against Roman Catholicism, always persecuted, but able to survive mainly because they were never considered any real threat to the establishment.
For the great new religion of the empire, the Ebionite-like or Nazarene-like Christians would have seemed merely a nuisance but they persisted and were among the earliest declared heretics, but it now begins to seem that there was a good number of Catholics who retained the Essene lifestyle while otherwise conforming. Canon 8 of the Nicene Council of 325 concerned “those who call themselves Cathari”. Canon 19 concerns “the Paulianists”. From time to time they were reinforced by people from the east. While the Latin world was so brutalized it stopped thinking, a heresy had rooted deeply in the wilds of Asia Minor, fringing the Armenian district of the Byzantine Empire. It was Paulicianism, apparently a mixture of Gnostic, Persian and primitive Christian ideas.
In the seventh century, the dualist sect called the Paulicians provoked ecclesiastical hatred by demanding freedom of thought and ecclesiastical reform. As Popelicans, they began to cause alarm in France at the beginning of the eleventh century, in the reign of king Robert, when they established themselves in the diocese of Orleans. A council held against them in 1022 condemned thirteen to be burnt. Their name did not last but their influence did. What is interesting is that a chronicler, called Adhemar de Charbannes, accused these heretics of meeting the Devil each day in the form of a black man who handed out bags of money.
Paulicianism is identifiable as an evangelical Church from the 400s. Asia Minor or Anatolia was where Paul had first preached his gospel, and they called themselves Paulicians, either after the missionary himself or a later successor called Paul—Paul of Samosata is suggested in The Chronicon of Georgius Monarchus about 840. The Paulicians themselves apparently thought they had been founded by Constantine of Mananoli, a place on the western bank of the Euphrates. He based his teachings on the gospels and on the epistles of Paul, and nothing else except perhaps the ten commandments. He took the Pauline name of Silvanus and went about creating churches. Any dualistic religion was called Manichæism by the Medieval Christians, and all of the anti-sacerdotal sects were, but a follower of Paul of Samosata was Archelaus of Syria who strongly opposed Mani. His followers were the Pauliani rejected by the Catholic Church at Niceaa, when they were required to be rebaptized.
The Armenian patriarch John IV (c 728) tells of Narses an earlier predecessor who had confronted the sect but to no effect. They were still active after he had died about 554. Photius includes them in his Historia Manichæorum, and, about the same time, Petrus Siculus visited them at their independent state and fortress of Tephrike. Photius and Petrus Siculus show the Paulicians as being perpetually in conflict with the Byzantine Church. One Christian empress of the ninth century slaughtered a hundred thousand of these people, but an emperor of the tenth century still had to transport two hundred thousand of them to the desolate frontier of his empire, as a buttress against the Bulgars, and to try to suppress the heresy. The Paulicians soon converted the Bulgars! The crusaders found them everywhere in Syria and Palestine, and many came into western Europe after the crusades under the suggestive names of Publicani and Sadducaea. (Walter Map, archdeacon of Oxford and a well known courtier of Henry II, wrote in De Nugi Curialium (On Courtiers’ Trifles, 1180) of the Publicani, the Cathars of Germany.) Most oddly, they are never mentioned by Armenian writers for the 500 years from 1200, but then they suddenly start being mentioned again in just the places they were in before! In 1828, the had a book of ancient sacraments called The Key of Truth.
The Cathars have been called “the debris of an early Christianity”, a somewhat pejorative description. They seem most likely to have been early Christianity preserved beyond the bounds of Rome into the middle ages.
From the earliest days of the Church, a parallel dualist tendency—pitting God against Satan as two equal and opposite forces—had existed alongside the official orthodoxy of monist Christianity.P Stanford, The Devil
Paulicianism was a primitive Christianity much like that of the apostles and with a lifestyle and outlook matching the ancient Essenes. When the Paulicians spread their gospel peacefully among the Bulgars, Europe was confronted with a new heresy, the Bogomils (Theophiloi), “Lovers of God” or “Friends of God”. The Bogomils, an earnest and ascetic sect, threatened to win over the entire nation and even the whole of Europe, by proselytizing. A religion like this is noted in Bulgaria about 862 when the Roman and Orthodox churches were in competition for the converting Bulgars. The open discussions of relative merits allowed the primitive Paulician Christians to make their point too, and it seems that large numbers of Bulgars preferred it to its big brothers.
The Bogomils, following Jesus’s instructions to his apostles, sent out missionaries amongst the Slavs, and followed the routes of commerce into central Europe. From the beginning of the eleventh century, people of this dualist religion appeared everywhere—usually on the gibbet. The Church had began using its historical holy weapons of persuasion—persecution, torture and murder. The Albigensians, of the south of France, who were drowned in their own blood by the “greatest” of the popes, Innocent III, were inspired by the Bogomils, and like them were described by Catholics as Manichæan. They were known as Patarenes in Italy, as Publicans in France and Belgium, and by other names in other countries. Their numbers were prodigious in the century chosen as “the great Catholic century”—the thirteenth century. Dante tells us how prevalent heresy, even radical skepticism, was in Italy in his day. Europe was on its way to deserting Roman Christianity, but the Church invented its most savage weapon—the Inquisition.
These heretics retained some of the Essene names for themselves, notably the Perfect Ones—Cathari—although Professor Anne Brenon in Les Cathares: Pauvres du Christ ou Apôtres de Satan? thinks they never called themselves anything other than “Christian” or “Apostle”, and the use of “Cathar”, was a sarcasm of derision. If true, the derision plainly had its basis in the fact that they did consider themselves Perfect Ones, even if they did not use the name themselves, out of humility. The authors of the Community Rule call themselves the men of Perfect Holiness who are trying to build a House of Perfection. The idea comes from the Jewish scriptures and is strongly repeated in the gospel.
- Thou shalt be perfect with Yehouah thy God. Deuteronomy 18:13
- Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the Ebionim, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. Matthew 19:21
The name of Cathari was applied to these sects that looked for all the world like Essenes displaced by a millennium in time. The meaning of Puritan, the name adopted for themselves by the Protestant sects, means the Pure Ones, and that is the meaning of the Greek katharoi, or Cathars. Cathars were artisans and traders and gathered in the large towns with the rise of the burghers. They were therefore associated with the rise of capitalism.
In the west, they called these Cathari Manichæans. Proof the Cathari were Manichæans is lacking. In particular, the Catharans did not admire Mani. If they were real Manichees then they were not Christians, and although for apologists for Christianity, what is a heresy and what is not seems entirely flexible, heresy is supposed to be a deviation from Christian orthodoxy. The nineteenth century authority, C Schmidt, denied that Catharism was Manichæism. He thought it was an independent dualism that spread into Europe from Anatolia via the Slav lands. Jean-Claude Dupuis a modern Catholic apologist, states frankly:
Catharism is not properly called a Christian heresy—it is rather more another religion.
If their views are true, then Schmidt and Dupuis have demolished the legal basis of the Medieval Inquisition. Canon 751 says heresy applies only to people who have been baptized as Christians. Manichæism could not have been described as a Christian heresy. Yet, these so-called Manichæan sects were described as heresies of Christianity by the contemporary Catholics, and the sectaries themselves. They were therefore not Manichæism, but were a dualistic form of Christianity. From what we know of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essenes were themselves dualistic, and so the Cathars might easily have been a Christian sect that retained much more of the original Essenism than worldly Catholicism did.
Dualism came from Persian Zoroastrianism, a religion that impacted on our history in the sixth century BC when Cyrus the Persian conquered the known civilized world. Persians believed in two supreme principles, created equal, one who made good, and one who made evil. Humanity had to choose between helping the one or the other in every detail of life and Nature, and by thoughts, words, and deeds. In dualistic systems described in the middle ages as Manichæism, there were these two great creative powers, but the evil principle was the creator of matter, darkness, the flesh and the Lie or sin, while the real God, was purely spiritual and in deadly conflict with him. At the end of time, the Good God would destroy the material world and judge everyone.
This idea was an enticing explanation of the origin and power of evil, and removed from God, the good spirit, the responsibility for matter and flesh. It was more reasonable than Christianity, rejecting the Old Testament and all its moral crudity, regarding Christ as a wonderful spirit but not God, and scorning priests and sacraments. Christendom’s consecrated immorality of its priests, monks and nuns, the heresy loathed.
Lying was the worst sin in Zoroastrianism. In Christianity, it is the highest virtue, so long as it is lying for Christianity.
In every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Jesus is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.S Paul. Philippians 1:18
If through my lies God´s truth abounds to His glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner?S Paul, Romans 3:7
Ebionites disdained Paul as a fraud. Like Zoroastrians, Cathars often would not answer direct questions rather than risk telling a lie. Lying was their worst sin. The trials of Jesus suggest he had the same principle. Like Essenes, Cathars would not swear on oath, because to do so implied that otherwise they were not telling the truth. Invoking God in an oath was to involve the spiritual supreme being in the evil of the material world, and that was unforgiveable. Nor would they swear fealty because such a vow could then conflict with their greater commitment to their religion.
Dualism is an enticing explanation of theodicy, the origin and power of evil, and removed from God, the good spirit, the responsibility for it. Incipient in Christianity is the idea that matter and flesh are evils, but since they are God’s own creation, it is not clear why. Catharism was more reasonable than Christianity, rejecting much of the Old Testament and its moral crudity, regarding Christ as a wonderful angel but not God, and scorning priests and sacraments. Cathar aims and its rationalistic method made it appealing to the populace. Its anti-ecclesiasticalism was a nucleus for much political and ecclesiastical discontent.
The degree of equality of the two principles seemed to separate some of these medieval sects. Some said they were absolutely equal, as they almost are in Zoroastrianism, the only difference being that the good principle, having foresight knows it will be victorious at the eschaton. In the so-called mitigated form of dualism, the good principle alone was eternal and supreme. The wicked principle is then merely a creature—a disobedient angel of the absolute God. This latter is the Jewish version accepted by modern Christianity, whereas the former is the original Zoroastrian version. Only the Zoroastrian version avoids the problem of theodicy. The mitigated version loses this advantage merely to have a monotheistic absolute God in theory, even if in practice He is plainly not absolute. The Bogomili preferred the Jewish adaptation and the Albigenses the Zoroastrian form. The institutions of both were the same.
H C Lea and the historian H A L Fisher put emphasis on the Kushti girdle in the form of a sacred cord that the Cathar Perfects wore in Zoroastrian fashion. Concerning it, Lea writes:
The use of which by both Zends and Brahmans shows that its origin is to be traced to the prehistoric period anterior to the separation of those branches of the Aryan family.
This hardly supports the belief that the cord shows Catharism is Manichæan. It is indeed the sort of custom that would spread easily with derivatives of Zoroastrianism, and it is found among the Jews:
Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue: And it shall be unto you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of Yehouah, and do them, and that ye seek not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye use to go a whoring: That ye may remember, and do all my commandments, and be holy unto your God.Numbers 15:38-40
Jews call these fringes “tzitzit”. It is actually four long strands drawn through holes in the corners of a square scarf. The two ends are tied by a double knot. The longest half, called “shammash” is then wound seven, eight, eleven and thirteen times round the other seven halves of the four threads. After each set of windings the pieces are again double knotted.
This habit of wearing a cord or thread to show piety undoubtedly comes from the dualist Zoroastrian religion, and possibly before that from the Aryans, which might be why the Brahmins have the same habit, although conceivably they could have got it from Avestan missionaries at the time of the Persian empire which extended into India. If Jews had this habit, Jewish Christians, from whom the Paulicians and then the Cathars evolved will also have had it. There are curious legends of a girdle of Christ, and a girdle of Mary, the mother of Christ, this latter bestowed on Doubting Thomas. Nothing therefore stands in the way of the hypothesis that the first Christians wore a Kushti thread, but that early on the gentile or Catholic Church dispensed with the habit. Or perhaps they did not. It evolved into the scapular.
In the eleventh century, the Popes and bishops of Christendom were still more interested in wine and women than the souls of their flocks. Bouts of morality kept breaking out, however, to disturb their pleasuring. In 1012 AD, several “Manichaeans” were prosecuted in Germany. In 1017, thirteen canons and priests of the diocese of Orleans were convicted of Manichaeism and burned alive. In 1022, cases were recorded at Liege, in 1030, in Italy and Germany, in 1043, near Chalons in France, in 1052, again in Germany. In the early part of the twelfth century some “Poor Men of Christ” were burned in Germany.
By the middle of the twelfth century, Europe was seething and bubbling with heresy. Their numbers were prodigious in “the great Catholic century”—the thirteenth century. Dante tells us how prevalent heresy, even radical skepticism, was in Italy in his day. Europe was on its way to deserting Roman Christianity, but the Church invented its most savage weapon—the Inquisition.
The name of the more important heretical sect, the Cathars, is the Greek word (“katharoi”) for “the Pure Ones”, or “Puritans”. They regarded the Church as a corrupt institution, scorned its sacraments, ritual and hierarchy, despised its dissolute monks and nuns, and tried to get back to the pure teaching of Christ—voluntary poverty, strict chastity, brotherly love, and ascetic life.
The Beguines and Beghards, said to have been founded by a Belgian priest in the thirteenth century, spread a network of ascetic communities, more like the ancient Essenes and Therapeutae than the Christian monks all over Europe. They were severely persecuted, though their only heresy was that they did as the gospel Christ bade them do.
Substantially the same were the Waldensians, the followers of Peter Waldo, also of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They called themselves the “Poor in Spirit”, and literally obeyed every word of Christ, and so they were branded as heretics and burned in batches, sixty at one time being committed to the flames in Germany in 1211 AD, and some being burned in Spain even earlier.
The famous Flagellants of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries fairly come under the same heading. The world and Church were so corrupt that they expected a speedy end of them, and they did penance for their sins and those of others. The Fratricelli, a detachment from the Franciscan Order whom the clerical corruption drove into heresy, belong to the same period, and were fiercely persecuted.
More important were the Lollards, the followers of John Wyclif in England, and the Hussites of Bohemia. Wyclif’s heresy—he was at first supported by his university and the nobles—was really a return to primitive Christianity—Essenism—and it took such root in England that in the middle of the fourteenth century one-tenth of the nation, some historians estimate, were Lollards. It paid the typical penalty of being true to Christ.
Meantime, as the king of Bohemia married an English princess, the Lollard ideas passed to that country, then one of the most enlightened in Europe, and, by the preaching of John Hus, a large part of the nation embraced and developed them. The Hussites scorned the corrupt priests, monks, and nuns, attacked clerical celibacy, confession, the eucharist, and the ritual. Two hundred years of war and savage persecution were needed to suppress them. At one time, most of the nobles of Bohemia were Hussites.
