Bound in Love

Our three authors take different approaches to the topic of heretics, but they generally agree on a top five. Bishop Schneider tries to be comprehensive, so he starts with pre-Christian religions that might not be technically Christian heretics but are useful to understand as we Christians interact with a post-Christian culture. Bishop Schneider also likes to be precise, so he tackles each of the major Protestant groupings rather than lump them into a single topic. Likewise, he goes through the many permutations of what might be grouped under the general topic of modernism.

Jews

What Cozens calls the Judaic Heresy is the fact that not all Jews turned and followed the true messiah. And many who did follow Jesus thought that one must be a Jew in order to become a Christian. These are the people St. Paul castigates as Judaizers in his letters to the Christian communities in Asia Minor. Cozens says that some refused to accept the decision of the Council of Jerusalem described in Acts 15, and they followed Paul around in his travels sowing dissension.

Schneider notes that these Judaizers were still an issue decades later, as evidenced by St. Ignatius of Antioch warning against them in the second century. There were three main categories, according to Schneider: the Nazarenes, who followed the Mosaic Law but admitted the divinity of Christ, the Ebionites, who denied the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, and considered St. Paul to be an apostate, and an Ebionite offshoot infected with Gnosticism.

Arianism

Belloc argues that Arianism is critical when learning about Christian heresies because it proposed to go to the heart of the Church’s authority by attacking the full divinity of its founder. Because the mystery of the Incarnation requires a mind open to reality that is above the reality we can discern by our rational powers alone, it is easily rejected by rational thinkers. Arius is, in many ways, the forerunner of every subsequent rational rejection of the supernatural element that is central to Christianity and, indeed, most other religions. Since Arius could not figure out how Jesus could be truly God and also at the same time truly man, he decided Jesus was not truly God.

Cozens explains that Arius came from Alexandria, which had developed a strong Catechetical School for the teaching of the faith. In that setting, Arius questioned how the title “Son of God” was to be understood. Arius just ignored the beginning of the Gospel of John, which makes clear the claim that Jesus is God when it says, “In the beginning was the Word and the word was with God and the Word was God.” Arius asked “If God the Son was begotten of the Father, does that not imply that the Father existed before Him?” Cozens points out that Arius was arguing from the perspective of humanity, which is in and bound by time, rather than from the perspective of eternity – which is an essential characteristic of God. For God, the terms “before” and “after” simply do not apply. He is. That is how he identified himself when Moses asked his name on Mt. Sinai, and Jesus claims that same title six times during the Bread of Life discourse in John Chapter 6. Arius limited Jesus to being a super-angelic creation of the Father rather than co-eternal with the Father. To make matters worse for the Church, Arius refused to get back on board with the orthodox teaching but instead went out and preached this perversion of the faith and gained many adherents quickly. There was a great deal of confusion among the faithful on this point of doctrine, which is why the Emperor Constantine told the bishops to hold a council and settle the matter once and for all.

Bishop Schneider explains that it took two councils to make things crystal clear. At the council of Nicea in 325AD, Arius was declared a heretic. At the First Council of Constantinople in 381AD, Arianism was declared to be a heresy.

Islam

Belloc is the only one of our three authors who includes Islam, which he calls “Mohammedanism,” in a list of heresies, and he includes it because he argues it was not an external – and fundamentally different – religion but actually a Christian heresy. Those of you who were with us when we looked at Islam will remember how much evidence we found that supported the theory that Islam was probably born out of a form of Nestorianism. Nestor and his followers denied that Jesus suffered and died on the cross, or that he was born Son of God but only the anointed one (“Christos”). Our study of Islam showed how the cross was found on very early Arab coins but quickly disappeared and hatred of the cross and denial of the Trinity were essential aspects of Islam by the 9th century.

Belloc notes that Mohammed was not Catholic but argues the world he grew up in was, though Arabia was at the edges of the Christian world and so Mohammed picked up Christianity the way you might learn Spanish from watching soap operas Univision TV instead of going to school for Spanish instruction. So he knew the key elements: one all-powerful God, the personal nature of God, his goodness, and his providence, as well as his creative power as the origin of all things. Mohammed also preached an eternal human soul and how its destination was determined by human actions on earth.

The denial of the Incarnation, Belloc argues, necessarily leads to the loss of the sacramental life. This explains the enthusiasm with which Islam attacked the priesthood, the Mass, and the sacramental nature of marriage. Belloc argues that the success of the Islamic religion is mostly tied to the military success of the Arab warriors.

Cathars

We get the term “Cathars” from what these people called themselves: the Pure Ones, which is kathari in Greek. They moved from the Balkans to northern Italy and grew in strength in southern France. We get the term “Abigensians” from a town called Albi which is near the center of this heresy: Toulouse in Langue d’Oc, a province of southern France.

The Albigensians were philosophical descendants of the Manicheans, which was the dualistic religion St. Augustine tried before he finally found orthodox Christianity. The Christian answer to the problem of suffering is this: we were made in perfect harmony and without suffering in the Garden of Eden. We by our own will chose to turn away from that harmonious relationship with our Creator and to believe the lie of the Devil that we could know what God knows. We call that break the Fall. After the Fall, suffering entered into the world. But the Creator sent his son – both truly human and truly divine – to take upon himself all the sins related to and resulting from the Fall and to redeem all of us by his death upon the Cross. Three days later, he was resurrected in victory over sin and death. At the end of time, we will be resurrected and enjoy bodily presence with Him on his throne.

The Manicheans responded to the problem of evil and suffering by denying the omnipotent goodness of the Creator. They asked the question, “If God is all-powerful, why is there evil when he could just eradicate it?” They argued there were two equal principles – one good and the other evil – that were always at war. They said that matter and the entire material world belongs to the evil side, and good is entirely spiritual. That is not Jewish or Christian: we believe that God created everything good, and evil is the loss of God. The story of the Fall is how evil took over God’s good creation. But the Manicheans deny the Incarnation: Our Lord was not born truly human but was a spirit clothed in a human body. They deny the reality of the Passion and the Resurrection. Since the Church teaches these things, the Manicheans and their Cathar descendants end up denying the Church’s authority and the sacramental system.

If mankind is a combination of two opposing and irreconcilable principles – one a spiritual being made by the Good God which is put in an evil material being created by the Bad God – then the goal must be to deliver the soul from its imprisonment in evil matter. This abhorrence of materiality led the Cathars to practice severe self-mortifications, and these holy ascetics were a very attractive alternative to the fat, rich monks in the traditional monasteries.

St. Dominic was called to preach and teach against the Albigensians, and after they were subdued, his order was asked to lead the Inquisition and ferret out any who continued to deny the orthodox Christian faith.