A Universal Apology Point Twelve Continued: A SHORT HISTORY OF HERESY
A SHORT HISTORY OF HERESY
Let us take a short while (or, if need be, a long one) to review some of the heresies of the first ten centuries of the Church. I am confident that even an abbreviated list will make clear the particular nature of heresy:
FIRST CENTURY
Simon Magus —In addition to his power of flight, and his willingness to buy church offices, Simon the Magician taught that (1) the world was created by angels and (2) when the soul leaves the body it enters into another body (3) that man has no free will, thus good works being unneeded for salvation.
Menander—Calls himself the messenger of the Unknown Power. His disciples were promised immortality in this life. Menander invented the doctrine of Aeons, and that Christ exercised functions in appearance alone.
Cerinthus—Denied that God was the creator of the world; asserted the Law of Moses was necessary for salvation; taught that Christ would establish a terrestrial kingdom in Jerusalem, where the Just would spend a thousand years in the enjoyment of every sensual pleasure; Cerinthus denies the divinity of Christ. Jesus was born a mere man, when baptized in the Jordan “Christ” descended upon him in the form of a dove, filling him with power and knowledge; but after Jesus fulfilled his mission, he was deserted by Christ, who returned to heaven, and left him to darkness and death.
Ebion—Admitted no part of the New Testament except the Gospel of St. Matthew, and that mutilated, leaving out two chapters. St. John wrote his Gospel to refute the errors of Ebion. Ebion says Jesus Christ was the son of Joseph and Mary, born as other men are, but on account of his great virtue, the Almighty adopted him as his Son.
HERESIES OF THE SECOND CENTURY
Corpocrates—Gnostic who taught we must practice every form of evil and concupiscence through many lifetimes in order to defy the Demiurge and his rules; taught that Christ was a man born as other men are, and that the world was created by angels. Everyone has two souls, for without the second, the first would be subject to the evil angels. Venerated Pythagoras.
Valentine—Gnostic who taught that the Reprobate (Hylics) were fated to damnation, and the Elect (Pneumatics) were freed from the need for good works and allowed every carnal concupiscence. Jesus was not born of a Virgin, nor Incarnate, but brought his body down from heaven.
Prodicus—Held it was lawful to deny the faith to avoid martyrdom, he was a worshiper of the four elements, sun and moon, condemned all prayers to any invisible God, but worshiped the planets. Heresiarch of the Adamites, who practice all their rites naked, and perform abominations.
Cerdonius—a Gnostic and a Manichean. Preaches the resurrection of the soul but not the body. Rejects all the Gospels but that of Luke.
Marcion—arch-Gnostic, Manichean, hater of matter, identified the Demiurge as God of the Jews, the creator of matter and of law. The Good God sent his messiah, Christ, and the Bad God has yet to send the Jewish messiah. He also mutilated the New Testament to make it separate from the old, in his effort to portray the New Testament God as a different figure from the Old.
Montanus—led the prophetesses Priscilla and Maximilla to utter new prophecies, speak in tongues, use unknown words, and utter rodomontades.
Refused to admit lapsed sinners to repentance. Claimed to be greater than Christ on the grounds that the Holy Spirit inhabited him, holding that there was to be additional prophets after Christ. The Heresy of Montanus shot forth different branches:
- Cataphrigians=Eucharistic bread made from the blood of infants. If the infant died of the cutting, was considered a martyr, but if survived, was considered a high priest.
- Artotirites= offered up bread and cheese
- Peputians=ordained women, saying there was no difference between men and women
- Ascodrogites=Bacchanalians
- Pattalorinchites=Wore a sick on their mouth or nose to keep strict silence.
Bardesanes— disbelieved in the resurrection of the dead.
Theodotus the Currier—Held that Christ was a man.
Theodotus the Banker— Held that Melchisadech is Christ, or greater than he.
Hermogenes— Held that matter is uncreated and eternal. The devils hereafter be united with matter, and the body of Jesus Christ is in the Sun.
HERESIES OF THE THIRD CENTURY
Praxeas—Patripassionist, saying the Father entered the world as Jesus and suffered.
His followers included Berillus, Noetus, Sabellius. This later was the heresiarch of the Sabellines.
Manes—Founder of the Manicheans. Teaches that there are two gods, one of good and one of evil, and two souls in every man, one good and one evil. Denies free will, saying man is always carried by a force his will cannot resist, and denies the necessity of baptism. Jesus never took a body like ours.
Tertullian—he called the Catholics Psichici, or Animals. Widely regarded to be a Montanist, despite that he wrote against Montanism. Said the Church could not absolve adulterers. He taught that the soul was a body of a palpable form but transparent because one of the Prophetesses heard so in a vision.
Origen—Presuming too much on his wisdom, he fell into different errors, by wishing to interpret many texts of Scripture in a mystical, rejecting the literal, sense. Believed in universal salvation, and the salvation, after a second crucifixion to come, of the devils trapped in the bodies of stars and planets; and in the creation of many worlds before this one, and many to come after. The souls of men were created before the beginnings of the world, and then sent to inhabit the bodies of men.
Novatus and Novatian — Schismatic rather than heretic, but they denied that the Church could absolve those who become idolaters through fear of persecution, denied the sacrament of confirmation, refused communion to those who contracted second marriages.
Angelicals—offered worship to angels
Apostolicals— Said it was not lawful for anyone to possess property of any sort. Not lawful to marry.
HERESIES OF THE FOURTH CENTURY
Donatus—Donatists held that the church is composed only of the righteous and Just. They broke Catholic altars and chalices and threw the host to the dogs, who, going mad, turned and consumed them.
Circumcellionists—Led by Faber and Maxidus. Freed slaves and abolished debts, killed those who did not become proselytes to their doctrines. Aching for martyrdom, they flung themselves from precipices, or into the fire, or drowned themselves or cut their own throats. (It must be said that the Donatists attempted every authority and power to stop them).
Arius—Arians: taught that the Word in the Incarnation took a body without a soul, and that the soul was part of the divinity. The Word was not from all eternity, but created out of nothing by the Father; Christ according to his free will was of a mutable nature, and might have followed vice, but since He embraced goodness, God rewarded him with divine nature, honoring him with the titles Word, Son, and Wisdom.
Macedonius—Denied the Holy Ghost was God, and taught that he was only a creature like the angels, but of a higher order. Called the Pneumatomachi—enemies of the Spirit. Noted for their moral lives and monastic regularity.
Apollinarists—Apollinaris taught that Christ had no soul per se, but instead had the Word where a man would have a rational soul. The error was based on the Platonic conception, rejected by the Church, that man has three substances: body, soul and mind. He followed with three other errors: first, that the body of Christ, born of Mary, was consubstantial with the Divinity of the Word, and hence followed the divinity of the word was passible, and suffered, in reality, torments and death; second, that the flesh of Christ came not from Mary but was brought down from heaven (and on this ground called the Catholics, who teach that the flesh of Christ comes from Mary Homicolists); third, the Divine Substance of the Word was converted into flesh. Apollinaris also erred in teaching that there were degrees among the Trinity (God=greatest, son=greater, ghost=great) and said the Jewish rites ought be resumed.
Antidicomarianites, or adversaries of Mary—who teach that she did not remain a virgin, but had other children after Christ by St Joseph.
Collyridians—the opposite error, holding that Mary was a deity. So called because they worshipped the virgin by offering a certain sort of cake called in Greek collyrides.
Aerius—taught that there is no difference between priests and bishops; that prayers for the dead are useless; and that the observances of fasts and festivals, even of Easter, is only a Jewish rite, and useless.
Antropomorphites—Audaeus their founder, Said God was literally like man, possessing members and so on. They followed the Jewish rite of Passover rather than Easter.
HERESIES OF THE FIFTH CENTURY
Elvidius—taught that Mary had other children after Christ by St Joseph.
Vigiliantius—Condemned the practice of celibacy; condemned the veneration of relics of the martyrs, calling the Catholics Cinerists and idolatrous; condemned the lighting of candles by day; eschewed prayer for the dead; condemned public vigils in the Churches; reprobated the custom of sending alms to Jerusalem; totally condemned monastic life, saying we make ourselves useless to our neighbors by embracing it.
Pelagius—Taught that Adam and Eve were created mortal, and that their sins only hurt themselves, not their posterity; that infants are now born in the same state that Adam was before his fall; children dying without baptism do not go to heaven, but do possess eternal life; that the naturel force of the free will of man could fulfill all divine precepts, conquer all temptations and passions, and arrive at perfection without the assistance of grace.
Predestinarians—who say the good works were of no use to those foreknown to be lost, but neither do the sins of those elect foreknown to salvation work harm to them.
Nestorianism—Nestorius revived the error of Ebion and Photinus, teaching that the Word was not hypostatically united with Christ, but only extrinsically, so that God dwelled in Christ as in his Temple. Taught that Mary was the Mother of Christ, but not of God. Christ has two persons, God and Man, even as he has two natures.
Felix of Urgel and Elipandus of Toledo supported Nestorianism. These maintained that Jesus Christ, according to his human nature, was not the natural but only the adopted Son of God, or, as they said, the nuncupative, or Son in name alone.
Eutychianism— Eutyches taught Christ had two natures before his incarnation, but after had but one, commingled, and so it is a fable to say Christ suffered and died.
HERESIES OF THE SIXTH CENTURY
Existants or Tolerators—who permit every religion save that of the Catholic.
Agnoites or Ignorants—founded by Themistius. Christ, being of divine nature confounded with human, was ignorant of many things, such as the day and hour of the Judgment; this ignorance was as natural to him as other inconveniences, as hunger, thirst, and pain which he suffered in this life.
Tritheists—Founded by Philoponos the Laborer. Held that one person must have one nature, therefore the trinity is three gods. He also wrote against the Resurrection in the flesh.
Corruptibilists—Held that Christ had a corruptible body, and was subject to suffering involuntarily. (The Catholic doctrine was that these sufferings were voluntary, out of unbounded love; and that his passions, as were those of prelapsarian man, bound by reason, and on that account are called propassions.)
Incorruptibilists or Phantasiasts—Founded by St. Julian of Halicarnassus. The body of Christ was by its nature incorruptible and free from passions. He suffered neither from hunger nor thirst nor weariness nor pain.
Julian the Phantasist and Themistus the Corruptibilist stirred up a commotion of the people of Alexandria, that they burned each other’s houses, and murdered each other on account of their difference of opinion.
HERESIES OF THE SEVENTH CENTURY
Mohamet—pretended to be a prophet of God, but could produce no miracle to attest to his commission; but he boasts of one ridiculous in the extreme: a piece, he says, fell off the moon into his sleeve, and he fixed it on again; for this reason the Mahometans adopt the half moon as the symbol of their empire. He composed the Alcoran, assisted, as some think, by Sergius, a monk. It is a collection of precepts, taken from Mosaic and Christian law, together with many of his own, and interspersed with fables and ridiculous revelations. He professes there is but one God; but in his Alcoran he relates many trivialities unworthy of the Supreme Being, and the whole work is filled with contradictions. The Mahometan paradise is fit only for beasts, for filthy sensuous pleasure is all the believer has to expect there.
Monothelites—said that Christ, albeit of two natures, had one will or one operation alone. Christ is the Son himself, and produces the divine and human operation by means of one theandric or divine-human operation alone, both divine and human, so that the distinction exists not in reality but is only drawn by our understandings.
HERESY OF THE EIGHTH CENTURY
Iconoclasts—A captain of the Jews, Sarantapechis (whose name means ‘four cubits’) induced the Caliph Jezzid to commence a destructive war on the sacred images in the Christian churches.
The error was repeated in the Twelfth Century by the Petrobrussians, Henricians, and Albigensians; two hundred years later the same error was repeated by the followers of Wickliffe; by the Hussites, in Bohemia; by Carlostad, in Wittemburg, though against Luther’s will; and by the disciples of Zuinglius and Calvin, those faithful imitators of Leo and Copronimus, and imitators of the Jews and the Saracens.
HERESY OF THE NINTH CENTURY
The Great Schism introduced by Photius and consummated by Cerularius—The errors here concern the procession of the Holy Ghost, and the consecration in Leavened Bread.
HERESIES OF THE TENTH CENTURY
None.
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My comment:
There are at least two possible reactions to this list. One is so be surprised that so many modern opinions are so ancient, and be unimpressed with reopening a case that was long ago decided. Another and opposite reaction is to be appalled that the modern opinion is so old and has been suppressed for so long by such ruthless dishonesty.
I imagine a Gnostic or an Ebionite or a Manichaean is just as outraged as a Mormon to find that the True Church of Gnosticism (or whatever) was suppressed while St John was yet still alive, and pleased that the mercy of God kept the True Church alive in secret for so many centuries. I imagine the reaction of Orthodox and Catholic is the opposite: a mixture of wonder and disgust at the persistence of wrongheadedness.
By no means are all the heresies of the first ten centuries listed here. There are several things striking about this list, brief as it is. First is the perpetual nature of the heresies; second is their tendency to come in pairs, and hence to serve as a basis for accusation against orthodoxy; third is their simplicity. Heresies are always simplifying a subtle or complex idea, and therefore robbing it of life and energy.
Heresy is perpetual. Many of these ideas are natural enough, even reasonable upon the surface, or appealing to some vanity in man which has not changed, and so they recur throughout history.
Cerinthus denying the divinity of Christ is an idea repeated by everyone from Mohamet to Thomas Jefferson to Mary Baker Eddy. The Adamites of Prodicus remind me of Mike the Martian from Robert Heinlein’s paean to narcissism, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. The Peputians are active to this day, seeking to have women ordained. I met a student of Hermogenes, that is, a scientist who claimed that since matter was uncreated and eternal, the theory of the Big Bang must be wrong. Karl Marx is a heresiarch akin to the Apostolicals.
And nearly all of modern Political Correctness has the same attitude and approach as the Gnostics, that is, the belief in verbal formulae as the key to salvation, which is restricted to an intellectual elite, combined with a belief that everything that common sense calls good is actually evil and everything common sense calls evil is good. Gnosticism is a favorite pastime of several authors I have read, from David Lindsay to John Crowley.
Arians are alive and well and preaching that Jesus was the Son of God, but not God, and so are the Antidicomarianites, who deny the perpetual virginity of Mary. Particularly after the Sexual Revolution in America, it became fashionable to regard virginity with pity, as a deprivation, and so the idea of living one’s entire life in abstinence became unimaginable to that generation. It is more than a little shocking to me how many Arians I have run across, particularly among the New Age movement, who regard Christ as a created being like ourselves, or like angels.
The doctrine of Apollinaris, that the Jewish rites ought to be resumed by Christians, I hear preached on the radio periodically by a divine I otherwise deeply respect, who also suggests a return to the Jewish practice of observing the Sabbath on Saturday rather than the Christian Sunday.
(You see, if you only accept scripture as authoritative, and New Testament scripture was written when Christianity was in its infancy, no mature feature of Christian development will be present in scripture, but the fully mature Jewish features will be. One will not find scriptural authority for Sunday services, and will conclude, quite logically (and, given the false premise, quite falsely) that Saturday service or polygamy or whatnot is proper Christian practice and dogma.)
And, of course, the Existants or Tolerators, who tolerate every religion save that of the Catholics are alive and well in the person of modern multicultural cultists and relativists.
The second striking feature is how often the heresies come in pairs. For example, opposite the Antidicomarianites, who hold that Mary could not accomplish the feat that many Nuns and Monks accomplish of living an abstinent life, were the Collyridians, who adored Mary as a goddess. Again, opposite the Nestorians, who held that Christ was two persons, mortal and divine, are the Eutychians or Monophysites, who held Christ had only one person with only one nature. Then there are the Phantasists, who say Christ could not suffer weariness or pain, and the Corruptibilists, who said Christ could not help but suffer weariness and pain.
The advantage of this pairing of opposite heresies is that the orthodox position can always be accused of the opposite flaw to one’s own. Arius called Catholics Sabellians, because we profess that the Son was God, like unto the Father. Pelagius called us Manicheans, because we insist on the necessity of grace. Eutyches called us Nestorians, because we believe that there are two distinct natures in Christ—the divine and the human. Likewise, Nestorius called us Arians and Apollinarists, because we confess Christ in one person, true God and true man.
The disadvantage of this pairing is that when one accuses the Catholics of something they do not believe and do not teach, the Catholic can merely point to the official ruling where that heresy was anathematized. For example, it is amusing to answer those who claim that Catholics worship Mary by asking them why the Catholic Church specifically held the worship of Mary to be a heresy?
One of my readers here has repeated the accusation that Catholics have been corrupted by Greek metaphysics, despite that when real Greek metaphysics (such as the doctrines of the Apollinarists) appear in history, and they are contrary to Christian metaphysics, they are unambiguously condemned and anathematized by the Catholics.
One can immediately sift honest accusations from mere propaganda in this way. Someone who honestly if mistakenly thinks that Catholics worship Mary will be dumbfounded to find the practice of the Collyridians is and was condemned by the Catholics, and will correct his mistake. The accuser more devoted to accusation than to truthfulness, however, will merely repeat the accusation, perhaps adding an expression of wonder at the hypocrisy of the Catholics who so blithely disobey their own precepts.
One advantage to the accusers of these heresies coming in pairs of opposites, is that the Catholic theologians must resort to theology, that is, to careful and precise reasoning about the nature of divine things. At that moment, the Catholics can be accused of hair-splitting, of wasting time on trivialities, and of scholastic arguments about the number of angels able to dance on the head of a pin. This accusation has a tremendous advantage of flattering the ignorant, who are always suspicious (usually with good reason) of the rigorous and technical lucubration of scholars. Technicalities of theology provoke in the human breast the immediate desire to return to the simpler days of a simpler form of Christian teaching, something that can be understood by a child. This desire is vain: God is infinite and mysterious, beyond the reach of human thought, but something of His nature has indeed been revealed to us. He cannot be simplified) because reality is not simple (even though, technically speaking, His nature is perfect, ergo simple).
One of the things I did when looking into which denomination to join was to read up on this history of some of these heresies, particularly Arianism. Because all heterodoxy by its nature accuses orthodoxy with heterodoxy, it is absolutely necessary for anyone making a wise decision about denominational loyalty to be familiar with what heresy is, and what the range of opinions are. One of the tools the examination of the history of heresies gave me was an ability to recognize the ‘look and feel’ of heretical thought, because there is a recurring pattern to it.
There is a pattern to heretical ideas. A heretical idea is always the brainchild of one man, so it is always one simple idea, something that can be repeated on a bumper sticker. Heresy is impatient with quibble, qualification, and precision. It is always a flat idea, something that seems more like a diagram and less like a family portrait. And it is always an unbalanced idea, like a wild cook finding that a little ketchup makes burgers and fries taste better concluding that a lot of ketchup will make everything from eggs to ice cream taste better. This is because the truth is a balancing act, and a heresy is a stumble and a fall.
Because heresies are one man’s opinion, they are simple, and because they are simple, they are perennial. Easy ideas are easy to stumble upon again. Because they are simple, heresies provoke, as a natural reaction, both a balanced counter action from the orthodox, and an unbalanced counter action from another heresiarch, who tries to combat the false bumper sticker with another bumper sticker equally as false. Easy ideas easily father easy over-reactions in the opposite direction, as Libertarianism is an overreaction to Communism. And they are unbalanced.
Anyone who has read a heresiarch knows how boring it is to read a man with one fixed idea which he relates to everything from shoes to ships to sealing wax to cabbages to kings. His one grand theory, which is simple enough to write on a postcard, can explain everything, everywhere.
Reading the history of heresies robs modern heresies of most of their glamour. One begins to become tone-deaf to their appeal. It will immunize any patient thinker against the lure of the shiny new idea or allegedly revolutionary conception, because all such modern ideas are merely old ideas with a new coat of paint.
You see, the heretics like to pretend either (1) that they are returning to an older conception of the Church which the Catholics have since misplaced, like an absentminded old crone forgetting where she left her car keys, or (2) that they are discoverers and inventors of a new truth, like Copernicus or Einstein, fearlessly turning the world on its ear by proclaiming that, after all, Man is the only God or that Christ was only a Man (in the First Millennium, Arians and Mohammedans) or proclaiming that the Holy Spirit does not proceed from the Father and Son and neither protects the sanctity of doctrine nor animates the Church (Second Millennium, Photius, Luther) or proclaiming that God the Father, is after all, a Mother (Third Millennium, various feminists).
But the claim to be returning to an older conception is deflated if you find the Church from ancient times discussed and dismissed and rejected as alien to Christian teaching the pet idea you are trying to say Peter and Paul believed, or should have believed; or that there is no trace of any such teaching at all.
And the claim that you have a revolutionary new religious insight is deflated if you find the Church from ancient times discussed and dismissed and rejected as alien to Christian teaching the pet idea you are trying to say is brand new.
There is also, to my mind at least, a question of legal process. In the scientific community, certain ideas, such as, let us say, the Phlogiston theory, or the Steady State theory, have been discredited and are no longer discussed seriously. The matter is settled. This is because there is a process for settling such disputes, namely, the court of nature.
But a theological question cannot be settled by looking at the natural world, because theological questions concern supernatural things. There is, nonetheless, a process and a method of theological argument much as there is of philosophical argument.
Unlike philosophical argument, however, which is merely a matter of private opinion, a theological argument concerns corporate opinion, that is, it concerns what the Church will preach and teach as orthodox, what she will condemn as heterodox, and what she will rule is left to the private discretion of the faithful each man in his own opinion.
My question is this: absent a showing of improper procedure or denial of due process (cf. the Robber Council) or absent a new revelation from God surrounded by signs and wonders to show the revelation is divine and not merely an opinion of men, if the Church has decided the orthodox teaching on a specific issue centuries or millennia ago, what are the grounds for revisiting the decision?
You either have to claim, as the Protestants do, that the Church has no Magisterium, no teaching authority; or you have to claim, as the Mormons do, that there was no Church until the coming of Joseph Smith (or whoever your founder is), merely twelve apostles who founded an antichurch.
Or you have to claim you have new evidence, such as your Wayback machine has investigated the Tomb of Christ in the Holy Land, and you can see that a pack of dogs rolled the stone away while the Roman guards were sleeping, an dragged the body behind a bush and consumed it, bones and all. And then Christ’s hitherto unknown twin brother Bejesus dressed up as him and tried to spook the Apostles as a prank, which simply got out of hand.
But an emotional feeling that the Bible is all you need and each man’s opinion is as good as St Thomas Aquinas or St Augustine, or that Christ was just a prophet and not divine, or that there should be many christs among the pagans because it is unfair that the Jews should be a chosen people, or that Mary should have had other children because large families are nice, or that priests are icky — none of this is evidence. None of this is even argument. It is sentimentalism.
Sentimentalism is an insufficient reason to revisit the Church’s decisions on orthodoxy, and an insufficient warrant to re-open a closed case.
If this way of thinking seems alien to a democratic nation like the United States, where each man has the right to worship in whatever fashion he sees fit, or to speak anything he sees fit, consider that to become a naturalized citizen of the United States from another nation you must consent to the proposition that all men are created equal, and to the other legal and moral ideals represented by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and indeed swear and oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. Soldiers must swear such an oath likewise, and the wording is the same for lawyers when they enter the profession. The Church is older and greater and larger than any nation, and will outlast them all, and she demands a much greater degree of loyalty than the mere citizen of a democracy, whose private life is his own matter.
Joining your life to Christ crucifies your life to the world and the world to you. It is an absolute commitment. Unless you personally have had a private revelation, where Christ came to you personally and described who He was and what He did to save you, you cannot know about Christ or come to Christ except through the Church or through some books the Church wrote and protected and declared holy. Knowing what that devotion entails is not and cannot be a matter of personal opinion. There is not one Christ for me and another for you just as there is a not a private reality for me and another for you. Theological truth is much more like a scientific canon of findings or the findings of a court of law, it is a public and corporate finding, than it is like private opinion.
You do not have the right to tell the Church, especially the Church Fathers, what to teach. The Fathers are in heaven, and are not going to reissue updated versions of their books. Their books are older than your nation, and, unless you are Greek, older than your language.
There are only two options. Either the Church has the authority to decide what she shall and shall not teach as Church teaching, or she has not.
If she has not that authority, then no theological dispute or debate is ever finally decided, not on the basis of scripture, nor precedent, nor human reasoning, nor for any other reason, any more than philosophical issues are ever finally decided. It is all a matter of personal opinion, and each man must discover the truth for himself, or decide based on his personal wisdom and interests and preferences.
If she has that authority, then certain theological issues are dead. The matter is settled. Rome has spoken.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
