Bound in Love

What is a heresy?

We’re going to pull from a few sources in order to try to answer these questions from different perspectives. The three primary sources were going to use are:

• A book just published by Bishop Athanasius Schneider called “flee from heresy.”
• A book written in 1938 by an English Catholic named Hilaire Balloc called “the great heresies.”
• And a book written by M. L. Cozens in 1928 in Great Britain called “a handbook of heresies.”

So we have a contemporary author who is looking at things from our current point in history. And we have an English public intellectual writing just before the second world war as Europe is quickly shedding its Christian mentality. And we have an academic writing about 100 years ago providing a list with definitions. So let’s take a look and see what they say about how to define a heresy. 

Bishop Schneider acknowledges that the word has been used in many ways throughout the history of the church. But within that diversity it has always been used to describe some form of choice or separation from a larger integrated whole. The Greek word that gives us this English word is the Greek word for selection or choice. 

We can think of this as refusing to eat the meal that the chef has prepared but insisting that he cut out the vegetables or the spices. By limiting oneself to only part of the whole dish or message, one is exercising a choice. Heresy comes from the persistent or obstinate holding of that limited choice.

Bishop Schneider goes on to say that in the early church the term was used more generally to describe any idea that deviated from the authentic Christian teaching and practice of the apostles. Remember that the early church fathers had in many cases known the apostles personally, so it was easy for them to recognize a deviation from what they had received from the apostles. Early examples of heretics include a man named Marcion, and his heresy was to reject the Old Testament as pertinent to Christians.

Bishop Schneider notes that the term heresy came to be narrowed to focus on rejection of the truths of the faith and morals only: that is the things that must be believed in order to be considered a Catholic. And he says that today there are three basic uses of the term. The first one is to propose something that on its own contradicts the Catholic faith. The second is the canonical definition of heresy, which is “the obstinate denial or doubt after the reception of baptism of some truth which is to be believed by divine and Catholic faith.” (Canon 751) and the third definition of heresy is the mortal sin which is the offense of freely and knowingly committing heresy. His point here is that if one proposes something that is in opposition to the doctrine of the church, or if one refuses to believe what is required of believers, then one has committed a grave sin and one soul is spiritually dead. So heresy is a serious issue, even though it’s not included in the 10 Commandments and therefore might be not considered by people who call themselves good Catholics.

Belloc also notes that the word heresy is used in many different ways, and he associates that vagueness with the modern mind which is in his opinion averse to precision in ideas as much as it is in love with precision in measurement. Putting that another way, in the modern world we are fuzzy on terms like socialism but super accurate on things like follower counts. Remember a central feature of the modern mentality is the dominance of the subjective view of things over the objective view of things. Belloc says that this is the reason why the word heresy is used in so many different ways, for different people have their own definition of it.

Writing in the 1930s he says that most people today in the English language use that word pejoratively to suggest a prejudice against rational examination. Belloc is arguing that his readers need to understand that most people who talk about heresy are treating it as a relic of history rather than something that might be at work in the world today. With that context, he says that heresy is “the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part of that scheme.” So he is saying what the bishop said: it is taking away some part of something that should be received as an integral whole. By the term self-supporting scheme, he means any system — and that could be physics or philosophy or mathematics — in which the various parts are coherent and they sustain each other. Thus, Newtonian physics would be a scheme of this kind.

So one can be a heretic of any scheme or religion; it is not exclusive to the Christian faith. Belloc points out that it actually can show up within the Christian faith, and he uses the example of the 19th century academic scriptural scholarly scheme known as the textual criticism school. Within that school, he notes, is a philosophy that whenever you find in any book of the Bible a miracle you have a right to conclude that the document was not written around the time that was claimed to be written and that the miracle is not historical. So anyone who says that, “Well, I think the author actually did write the book and he wrote it around the time he says he wrote it and I believe in the miracles” is a heretic according to the textual criticism school of scriptural studies.

Belloc notes that heresy is not the denial of the scheme in totality. It is an essential characteristic of heresy that it leaves standing a great part of the structure that it attacks. He points out that this is part of the reason why it remains popular with believers in that scheme, for it only targets part of what they say they believe.

M. L. Cozens is our third author, and he argues that that heresy is necessarily tied up in the extension of the revelation of God to all nations from its original revelation to the Israelites. He argues that the Hebrew language did not have the terminology necessary to support philosophy, so that in the Hebrew Scriptures the study of God — theology — had to take the language of poetry, and concrete images took the place of definitions or philosophical syllogisms. We certainly saw some of that poetry and those images in our study of the book of the Psalms.

He argues that since the church is no longer a Jewish church but a Catholic Church, and the revelation is to all mankind and has to be received and assimilated not by the practical ethical Hebrew only, but also by the subtle-minded Greek, by the Eastern mystic, and by the untrained mind of the Germanic tribes and other barbarians. He says that whenever the faith comes to a mind not prepared to give it the first and ruling place, but one determined to judge and test it by that mind’s own presuppositions and its own prejudices, then the truth will become perverted and that is where heresies came from. He then walks through the heresies that the Jewish converts in the first Gentile converts had to overcome.

Why are Heresies Important?

Let’s start with the point that Bishop Schneider makes about why God would allow the evil of doctrinal error to the present against or even inside his church. Acknowledging that the church is always preserved free from error in her official teaching and her binding commands, he does note that there are times when even her bishops are permitted by God to fall into error.

Let’s remind ourselves that the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople, from which we get the creed that we profess at mass every Sunday, were called to address the heretical claims of a bishop named Arius. Even though those councils anathematized Arius and his teachings, which were called Arianism, almost every single Bishop in the eastern part of the Empire was Arian or semi-Aryin. Only Bishop Athanasius remained Orthodox.

Later on in the history of the church there was a Pope Honorius I who reigned from 625 through 638 who was subsequently found to have held irregular views. About 600 years later, Pope John XXII was deemed to be either heretical or right at the edge of it, and Bishop Schneider argues that in our current day the current Pope makes statements that are pretty close to the definition of heresy. He goes so far as to say that certain affirmations in the texts of the second Vatican Council have lacked the necessary doctrinal precision and clarity, and so while not being heretical they are open to misinterpretations.

We can see in the New Testament that this is somehow part of God’s plan. “Some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to spirits of error, and doctrines of devils” (1 Tim 4:1). And St. Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians (11:19) “there must also be heresies: that they also, who are approved, may be made manifest among you.” St. Peter says in his first letter (1:7) “that the trial of your faith may be found unto praise and glory and honor at the appearing of Jesus Christ.” The Bishop notes that through the history of the church the most terrible heresies and crisis periods have almost always led to greater precision and clarity of her official teaching and often to greater discipline and sanctity among her members. So it is only at the end of time that we will be sure that there will be no more heresy, and it is important that we know what’s a heresy so that we can be vigilant towards them.

Belloc explains that because heresy affects the individual it affects all society. So if one is to examine a society formed by a particular religion, one must concern oneself with the warping or diminishing of that religion. Writing as a Catholic Christian at the very end of the Christian age of Europe, he argues that it is important to understand heresy if one wants to understand how Europe came to be and how its changes have been caused. Belloc explains that even at the time of his writing, the reality is that there will always be some kind of creed that directs human society because a code and a character are the product of a creed. While an individual can be agnostic, a society really cannot. An organic human mass, such as what we would call England or the United States must have some collection of beliefs that are bedrock to its self understanding and to its paradigm for dealing with issues. The Christian religion is based on some fairly simple precepts, and from those precepts flow in cultural rules and customs and norms and laws and modes of behavior and general civic guidelines. Belloc is pointing out that even if the Christian religion is abandoned, human society will require something to replace it. For this reason, therefore, understanding Christian heresies will help one understand what’s wrong with the world today.

Our last author M. L. Cozens does not really concern himself with the question of why they’re important. Perhaps he thinks his book proved by his very existence that they are important and need to be studied.

Why Are Heresies Common?

Hopefully from all of this, we can see that heresies are so common because the doctrines of a faith are not always easily understood. Since we are concerned about the Christian faith, we will focus on that.

It is a central doctrine of Christian faith that humanity was made in the image and likeness of the divine creator, given an immortal soul and a rational mind and free will and a creative spirit unlike anything else he had created. It is also a central doctrine of Christian faith that humanity applied its rational mind and creative spirit and concluded that the devil was correct and that God was a liar. So they did the thing that God told them not to do.

It is also a central doctrine of Christian faith that this original act of disobedience caused the harmonious relationship between God and the pinnacle of his creation, humanity created in his image and likeness, to be broken. The immortal soul would remain immortal, but the body would know death. The rational mind was clouded as a result of the fall. The free will remained but was wounded and now forevermore tended toward disobedience. And the creative spirit was no longer used exclusively to glorify God.

The Christian faith claims that the creator God was both the unity — one God — and a Trinity — the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost. The Christian faith claims that in the fullness of time, the father sent the son to become incarnate — that is to become fully human just like us — and to enter into his own creation and by his own death reconcile us to the father so that we could receive the sanctifying grace we had lost in the fall.

Finally, the Christian faith claims that there will be an end to time, and at the end of time the sun will sit in judgment and every created person will be sent to his eternal abode: to the heavenly realm to look upon the fullness of God in the beatific vision, or for the place of eternal separation from God that is generally known as hell.

There, in just a few sentences, I proclaimed what is called the kerygma, or the heart of the gospel. We can see from those two sentences how many places there are for doubt to creep in, or for mystery to be rejected. The first Christian heresy of note which we’ve already mentioned, found the message of the New Testament to be completely disconnected from the message of the Old Testament. So the leader of that heresy, a man named Marcion, discarded the Bible of the Jewish people. But that is not what the Church teaches regarding the Bible; the Church believes that the entire Bible is one communication and written record of God’s love for his children, and it says that one cannot fully understand the Old Testament absent the New Testament and vice versa. The next big heresy in Church history, known as Arianism, stumbled over the claim that God became man.

The Christian faith in many ways is simple, but as we all know simplicity is not the same thing as easy. Perhaps this is why Christians are encouraged to approach God with childlike faith. Heresy enters when we childishly presume to be able to think as our heavenly father thinks, and we define him with our limited human vocabulary rather than accept him in his ineffable heavenly vocabulary.