Heresies, if they spread wide and last long, may eventually vanish but seldom without a trace. They leave a toxic residue that may lie fossilised for centuries – only to come alive all of a sudden and do their poisonous work.
People spreading this poison may be unaware of its origin or even of its toxic nature. They may think they enunciate orthodox tenets, when in fact reviving various fragments of an ancient heresy.
The Church managed to defeat some of the deadliest heresies, such as Arianism and Manichaeism, while learning, or rather trying to learn, how to co-exist with some others, such as Protestantism and Islam.
Putting the last two into that category may sound contentious, but not if we remind ourselves what a heresy actually is. Unlike a different religion, a heresy doesn’t reject orthodoxy root and branch. On the contrary, it retains much of its doctrine – but never all of it.
A heresy usually sets out to simplify and improve doctrine by accentuating some parts at the expense of the whole. Recognising a heresy for what it is may take a long time. Thus at least a century passed since 1517, when Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, before it was acknowledged that Protestantism and Catholicism were irreconcilable.
Initially, Luther and even Calvin were taken at their word, as merely reformers seeking to take Christianity back to its ancient roots. Standing in the way of that noble intention were sheer incidentals, things like sacraments, ecclesiastical structure, post-Gospel revelation, priesthood, the papacy, the language and trappings of the liturgy. Calvin even denied the doctrine of free will, one of the mainstays of Christianity.
Islam too started out as a Christian heresy, in that it accepted many of the key Christian dogmas. God was one. He was the Creator. Christ was a divine man (though not God). The soul was immortal. The Last Judgement would decide the eternal destination of the soul. Whether it went to heaven or hell depended on how its owner lived his earthly life.
Just like ‘solo scriptura’ Protestantism centuries later, Islam reduced its whole teaching to a book, making it easy for believers to stay righteous and to understand their creed. Also like Protestantism, Islam dispensed with priests, replacing them with prayer leaders also acting as religious advisers.
The heresy to which recent events have drawn my attention is Manichaeism, or rather one specific branch of it, Catharism. The Cathars got their names from the Greek word meaning ‘pure’. They are also called ‘Albigensians’, after the city of Albi near Toulouse that was one of their centres.
Between the 11th and 13th centuries, Catharism gradually took control of southern France, posing a direct threat not only to the French monarchy but to the very survival of Catholic Christianity. The threat was both doctrinal and military.
In common with other Manicheans, the Cathars couldn’t reconcile the notion of a good and omnipotent God with evil, suffering and death. They rejected out of hand the Christian explanation of evil based on Original Sin.
Since suffering and death were evil, they couldn’t have been created by one good God. There was another, evil, God at work there, and the two deities were equal competitors. The good God was in charge of the human spirit; the evil one ruled the physical world of matter. Thus everything physical was evil. Good could only be spiritual.
Therefore, Jesus never was fully man. His physical body was merely an illusion, and the Incarnation never happened (there the Cathars were regurgitating the Docetic heresy of early Christianity). It was a fallacy, as was the resurrection of the body.
The Pure Ones, the Cathars, justified their name by renouncing the body and living the life of the spirit. Physical pleasure of any kind was the work of the evil deity: anyone enjoying food, sex (even reproductive sex), meat, wine — in fact, anything at all — was committing a deadly sin.
Many Albigensian fallacies were later revived by the Puritans and other Calvinist sects, but two of them were recently enunciated by Pope Leo XIV: the absolute rejection of war and of capital punishment.
His Holiness tried to pass those Albigensian tenets for orthodox Christianity, but I doubt he did so deliberately. It’s more likely that the pontiff was led astray by unwittingly ingesting some of the toxic Manichean residue left by the Cathars, helping it down with some secular woke misconceptions.
By the 13th century, the Cathars had grown dangerously strong – for the same reason Protestantism wasn’t nipped in the bud three centuries later. Powerful political figures, who knew little and cared less about the essence of those heresies, realised they could advance their own cause by supporting the dissenters against their common enemy.
Thus assorted German princes used Protestantism as a cudgel they could beat the Emperor with, while Catharism provided the same weapon for southern French and Spanish potentates who saw the King of France as an enemy. Prime among them were Count Raymond of Toulouse and Peter, the King of Aragon.
Both of them used the Albigensian heresy as an ideology to inscribe on the banners of conquest. By 1209 it had become clear that the threat could only be stopped by force, and Pope Innocent III reluctantly called for a crusade.
The spiritual leader of the Albigensian Crusade was St Dominic, and the military campaign was led by one of the ablest medieval commanders, Simon de Montfort. It was he who rode with a small force of 1,000 knights to confront the horde of some 100,000 invading from Spain.
The key battle was fought on 12 September, 1213, near Muret, a small town 15 miles south of Toulouse. Montfort’s knights stayed mounted as they heard Mass sung by Dominic himself, and then rode to engage Peter’s cavalry and infantry in a textbook surprise assault. After Peter was killed, his troops were dispersed, and the battle swung the Catholics’ way.
Towards the end of the Albigensian Crusade, St Dominic founded, and Pope Gregory IX later endorsed, the Inquisition. Its original aim was to uproot Catharism, a task in which the Inquisition was, by the looks of it, only partly successful.
Various Manichean fallacies have kept popping up ever since, and we may see such throwbacks among today’s neo-Puritan sectarians demonising alcohol, youngsters refusing to eat meat – and even pontiffs preaching that war and the death penalty are “inadmissible” under any circumstances.
Do you still wonder why Anglophone conservatives gravitate towards Catholicism? I hope not.
As I used to hope for Pope Francis, and I now hope for Pope Leo, the pope should preface most comments with: “It is my unexamined opinion, and not Church doctrine that…” Such would alleviate many misunderstandings and arguments.
In addition to being wrong about war and of capital punishment, he is also wrong about the miracle of the loaves and fishes. His recent sermon in Cameroon, where he stated that the true miracle of the loaves and fishes was that people shared, seems in direct contradiction to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC). “The multiplication of the loaves and the fish happened while sharing: that is the miracle! There is bread for everyone if it is given to everyone.” He continued with, “It was not wasted by those who gorge themselves in the presence of those who have nothing to eat.” This reads more like hippy commune sharing rather than a miracle. The CCC tells us that the miracles of the multiplication of the loaves “prefigure the superabundance of this unique bread of His Eucharist.” That is quite clear. He was commenting on John, chapter 6. Verse 11 clearly states “He distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted.” Note: as much as they wanted. This wasn’t a case of the rich not gorging themselves in front of the poor. Pope Leo did then try to return to scripture, stating that the food increased as it “passed from the hands of Christ to those of His disciples”, but I think the damage had been done. He may be a Cathar. He may be a socialist. He may just be a man who speaks without fully understanding the deeper meaning of what he is saying. None are qualities one hopes to find in the pope. Instant communication is not a boon for the Church.