May 24, 2004

• More Heresy
  
  
  My feelings about history are
  love/hate.  I’m very much interested in what went on in the
  past.  History does not always record that.  Histories are
  written by the victors in wars or by scholars under the patronage of
  rich and powerful men.  Another subject that has always interested
  me is religion.  It used to astound me how little knowledge
  Christians (adherents of the only religion with which I had any contact
  during my youth) had of the history of their religion.  I was
  naive then, thinking that everyone was like me.  Now Greyfox has helped me to see and understand just
  how little the average person knows, or wants to know, about anything.

  I have always wanted to know… anything, everything, whatever.  I
  have come to value my associations with others who likewise want to
  know.  I learn from them, and I try to pass along some of what
  I’ve learned elsewhere to them.  This is part of such an effort,
  and was instigated by krisinluck. 
  I made a start on it a few days ago, and when I realized what a big job
  it would be, I allowed myself to go off on a personal tangent and put
  off the big task.  I would not feel right about
  putting this off any longer, but it’s a
  chore.  Reading it may be a chore as well.  This will be long
  and information-dense.  Most of this blog will be transcription,
  not simply
  keyboarding to record my own thoughts.  The mechanical aspect of
  this is laborious to me. 

  I spent a couple of days searching the
  web, hoping to find some suitable texts I could copy and paste
  here.  I found translations of some original sources at Fordham
  University’s Internet Medieval Sourcebook. 
  However, the translations are often stilted and obscure, and extracting
  the points I wish to make from original sources is another laborious
  chore.  I mention the sourcebook for those scholars who wish to
  consult primary sources. 

  To make my point and fulfill my
  commitment to say more about the arguments between Pelagius (and other first millennium heretics) and the
  fathers of Monasticism and modern Christianity, I find it simpler to quote secondary sources
  (the works of historians) and, first of all, a summation of the
  case from a (well-researched) work of fiction.  The passage begins
  with a Roman legate just returned to Britain from Rome, speaking to his uncle:
  

      “…Are you familiar with Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo?”
      Again, I felt a sense of things of import crossing
  my horizons.  I shook my head.  “No, not at all.  Tell
  me about him, too.”
      “Well,” he went on, with a barely discernible
  hesitation that was emphasized by its briefness, “Augustine is one of
  the most respected scholars of the Church.  A very wise and
  learned man and a famed interpreter of the Word of God.”
      “Oh!  One of those.  That sounds ominous.  Go on.”
      “Augustine, whom most men call a saintly man, has
  come into conflict with Pelagius–or, rather, it’s the other way
  around.  Pelagius has locked horns with Augustine.”
      “So?  What’s the problem of the saintly Augustine?”
      “Pelagius thinks he is a hypocrite and a liar.”
      I whistled to myself.  “Has he told him so?”
      “He has told the entire world.”
      “Why?  For what reasons?”  In spite of
  myself, in spite of the fact that I knew nothing of this Pelagius, I
  felt dismayed by this last statement of Picus’s.  “If, as you say,
  everyone thinks Augustine is a saintly man, your Pelagius runs a very
  real risk of being thought a madman, or a trouble-maker.”
      …”Quite so,” he said.  “But it is bigger than
  that.  Augustine is the champion of the theory of divine
  grace.  He is a man of God.  A bishop.  But in his youth
  he was a notorious womanizer….  Anyway, he has a prayer that has
  become notorious… that God would send him the grace to find
  chastity… but not yet!  …Augustine believes that man is
  incapable of finding or winning redemption without divine help. 
  He believes that man is born damned, in mortal sin.  Only baptism
  will wash away that sin, and only divine grace can enable man to stay
  away from sin thereafter.  He believes that all of life is a
  temptation and that man should spend his life in prayer, abandoning
  himself to God’s mercy in bestowing grace upon him.”
      I nodded.  “That, my young friend, is the view
  one tends to get from an ecclesia.  That is what all the priests
  say.  There’s nothing new in what you’ve told me, except the
  saintly bishop’s own example….  And you say Pelagius finds fault
  with this?”  He nodded.  “How?”
      “Totally.  Pelagius believes that the entire
  concept of grace is a man-made device invented by the Church to keep
  all men in bondage.”
      “Hah!  Come on now, your friend Pelagius is
  beginning to sound like one of those old women who sees a rapist behind
  every bush.  How can divine help keep men in bondage?”
      “It works by making men forget that they are made in
  the image of God Himself, and therefore able to determine between right
  and wrong.”
      I saw the flaw immediately.  “But that’s not possible.  Your man is
  mad!  Men have known the difference between right and wrong since
  Eve ate the apple.  The knowledge of good and evil.  Men have
  always known the difference.”
      “Exactly, Uncle.  That’s what Pelagius says….
  Pelagius argues that man, made in the image of God, knows the
  difference between good and evil, and has the ability to choose between
  them, and has always done so, even before the time of the Christ. 
  Even barbarians have their moral laws, unwritten though they may
  be.  Pelagius sees this divine grace as an instrument of men,
  designed to keep all other men in subjugation and reliant on the Church
  as the only intermediary between God and man.  He sees Original
  Sin as an invention foisted upon men by other men to make all men
  guilty at birth, and therefore incapable of freedom of choice from the
  outset….
      “It comes down all the way to personal
  responsibility.  Carried to its logical conclusion, the concept of
  divine grace destroys the basis of law.  …in the absence of
  grace the fault for crime can be laid right at God’s door.
      “…Pelagius believes, as the Scripture tells us,
  that God made man in his own image.  If man has the attributes of
  God, he says, then man must have free will.  The majority of men
  know that society demands certain rules for the governance of property,
  sanity, decency and dignity.  Those rules constitute the
  law.  Pelagius maintains that a man–any man–born with the divine
  spark is free to choose between good and evil as defined by both Church
  and society.  If he chooses to go against the law, be it divine or
  human, that choice is his own and he has to be prepared to accept the
  responsibility for his choice in the eyes of God and in the eyes of his
  fellow men.”
      “It takes a lot of nerve to go against the
  Church.  I’d never heard of this fellow Pelagius before this
  morning, but he makes sense to me, too.  How far has this argument
  between them gone?”
      “A long way.  It’s the talk of Rome.”
      “Sound’s like it might become the talk of all the world.  And you say this bishop is powerful?”
      “Extremely.  He has powerful friends, great influence.  Some say he should be Pope.”
      “Sounds like your friend Pelagius is spitting into
  the wind.  Will they reach an agreement?  Some kind of
  compromise?”
      “How can they?  They’re like day and night.”
      “Aye, and darkness is falling quickly, it would
  seem.  Does Pelagius have any support within the Church?  Or
  is everyone convinced he is possessed by evil spirits?”
      “He has support.  In plenty.  Many of the most powerful espouse his cause.”
      “How many? In terms of odds, I mean.  Is there an even match?”
      “Perhaps.  There could be.  If we were
  dealing only in numbers…. The question here is one of basic
  policy.  An army mutineer may have some right on his side in terms
  of the conditions that drove him to mutiny.  But he has to die for
  his mutiny, no matter how laudable his cause might have been, no matter
  how understandable and sympthetic his motives.  Mutiny cannot be
  condoned, no matter what the justification.  To condone one
  instance of mutiny would be to invite, and to incite, the eventual and
  inevitable destruction of all the armies.  So it is with
  Pelagius.  He has to lose, or overthrow five hundred years of a
  Church established by the Christ Himself, with all its rules and
  methods.  Pelagius knows this, Publius, he is not a stupid
  man.  He is not challenging the Christ’s Church but men’s
  corruption of it, yet he knows he is too late to alter what others,
  stronger than he, have been building for centuries with a view to
  making it eternal.  You see, Pelagius’s doctrine, if you want to
  call it that, destroys the need for a Church just as surely as
  Augustine’s doctrine destroys the need for the law.  Pelagius is
  saying that every man carries the Church within his heart, and that he
  can commune directly with God by simply meditating!  Augustine is
  saying that man is absolutely nothing without the Christian Church,
  which has as its symbol the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.  The
  Church already speaks for God.  Pelagius speaks for man. 
  Therefore, Pelagius must be defeated in this struggle.”

  The Singing Sword
  by Jack Whyte

  I perceive a belief in such a “grace” to
  be what the psychological field calls, “magical thinking.”  I
  encounter a form of this type of thinking in the, “suit up, show up,
  get a sponsor, work the steps,” party line in 12-step groups.  It
  neglects to mention the most important aspect of recovery from
  addiction:  abstinence, which is the personal responsibility of
  the addict.  I have watched, in the past year, more than a few
  people come in, hear that message, swallow it, and try to make the
  magic work for them but end up relapsing and not understanding why,
  feeling that God has rejected or abandoned them because He did not give
  them his grace.  But that is just one little personal
  illustration of the concept, and the idea is much larger and more
  pervasive in our culture than this one instance I’ve given. 

  The heresies suppressed by the Church in the Middle Ages were a lot
  more numerous than just those of Pelagius, and “Saint” Augustine was
  not the only miscreant who distorted, corrupted and perverted the
  teachings of Joshua ben Joseph, the Christ, for his political
  aims.  I mentioned “Saint” Jerome in my previous heresy blog, and the
  granddaddy of them all, Saul of Tarsus, the Apostle Paul.  Paul apparently
  hated and feared women, and his influence can be seen in Augustine’s
  writings.  Paul also made an impression on “Saint” Ambrose, who
  lived in the latter half of the fourth century.  His father had
  been the Roman Prefect of Gaul.  I’ll take the easy route now, and
  copy-and-paste some of the words of historian Richard Hooker, before I go back to transcribing from my library:

  One of Ambrose’s most significant legacies to the Middle
  Ages and the medieval church was his fierce hatred of women. Like many
  other bishops, he felt several pressures urging the church to gender
  equality. On the one hand were communities of virgin nuns who were held
  up as the highest exemplars of spiritual life; on the other hand, the
  Gnostic religions, including Gnostic Christian religions, accorded
  women something approaching gender equality. Yet still there was Paul
  of Tarsus, who claimed that women shouldn’t speak on matters of
  doctrine. So Ambrose concluded that church offices, ie, the priesthood,
  should be completely closed off to women. It wasn’t enough to assert
  this; Ambrose had to prove why women were insufficient to occupy
  priestly offices.

     He argued that women were fundamentally flawed, especially
  in the area of sexual control. He believed that women were destined,
  through their sexuality, to always tempt men as Eve had tempted Adam.
  This was not the fault of men but rather the fault of women’s lack of
  sexual control. In many ways, Ambrose’s exclusion of women from church
  office reflected the Roman exclusion of women from offices. Ambrose,
  however, introduced a radically new element to Roman misogyny—he linked
  female inferiority to female sexuality. It was female sexuality that
  was the threat and the fundamental flaw of women; this was the logic
  that explained such paradoxical views as holding up virgin nuns as
  being the highest examples of spirituality while at the same time
  denying women any official role in the church. One cannot overestimate
  the influence of Ambrose’s linking of misogyny with female sexuality—it
  is the single most dominant aspect of gender relations from Ambrose to
  our time.

     Perhaps more disastrous was Ambrose’s religious
  intolerance and his legitimation of this intolerance. Throughout the
  early years of Christianity, the religion lived alongside a multitude
  of other religions. On the one hand was Roman and Greek paganism, the
  official religion of the empire; on the other hand were a multitude of
  other religions, from ethnic religions such as Judaism to mystery
  religions such as Gnosticism and Mithraism. Not only did Christians
  live side by side with these religions, but they often crossed over and
  sometimes incorporated elements of these other religions into their own.

     When the Emperor Gratian (375-383) signalled that the
  state religion would not be paganism by removing the statue of Victory
  from the Roman Senate, Ambrose formulated an argument that if were Rome
  were a Christian empire, no other religion, including paganism, could
  be tolerated. In his debate in the Roman Senate with Ambrose, the pagan
  Symmachus argue eloquently for religious tolerance, but Ambrose argued
  that there was one and only one correct religion and all others should
  be stamped out.

     This position soon became the church’s position and had
  two far-reaching consequences. From the fourth century onwards, one of
  the principal characteristics of Christianity was its intolerance—in
  fact, often extremely homicidal intolerance—of other religions. For
  Rome, however, this religious intolerance was one of the central
  reasons for the disintegration of the Roman Empire. In many ways, the
  Roman Empire held together because of its religious tolerance. Subject
  states did not enjoy being under the empire, but the cultural and
  religious freedom that they had at least made it bearable. When the
  Christian Empire began to suppress native religions, areas under Roman
  control soon rebelled. These rebellions fractured the empire in pieces
  at a point in time when migrating Europeans were invading the frontiers.

  Monasticism
          The triumph of the church resulted in
  problematic changes to the church. Ambrose, as noted above, began a
  trend of reconceiving clerical office as something more along the lines
  of secular offices. The Roman concern with practical administration
  drained much of the spiritual mission of the early church. The
  Patristic writings departed significantly from the spirituality of the
  earliest Christian texts; in the place of faith and insight they
  offered only rationality and arguments. This secularization of the
  clergy and the church as well as the rationalization of Christian
  discourse led to the growth of a new Christian phenomenon, monasticism.

     The earliest monks were not clergy, but ordinary
  individuals who fled the poverty of the church to live spiritually
  dedicated lives while suffering extreme poverty and self-affliction.
  Seeing the church as too worldly and too materialistic, they lived
  solitary lives of severe ascetism, or “world denial.” This form of
  monasticism in which an individual ascetic lives alone is called
  eremetic monasticism, that is, the monasticism of a hermit.

     Monasticism first appeared in the eastern reaches of
  Christianity in the third century when the Roman Empire seemed to be
  falling apart; in this sense, monasticism was related to the anxiety
  and uncertainty of the age. It did not really spread, however, until
  after the conversion of Constantine and the realignment of the church
  along more material and political lines. At that point, the practice
  spread throughout the east to Egypt and North Africa. The extreme forms
  of eremeticism are legendary; these ascetic monks soon were sought out
  by Christians who literally worshipped them and the various material
  that came in contact with them—or came out of them.

     In the fourth century, monasticism soon adopted a communal
  form. Again, monks were not clergy but rather laymen that came together
  in a community to remove themselves from the world. This form of
  monasticism, called cenobitic monasticism, was most successfully
  implemented by Basil (330-379), who, after a time as a hermit monk,
  came out from the wilderness to found a community of other monks.

     The most essential difference between the communal
  monasticism of Basil and the eremetic monasticism practiced before was
  the nature of self-discipline and rejection of the world. The eremetic
  monks would discipline themselves to reject the world by engaging in
  self-torture, sometimes bordering on the psychotic. Basil, however,
  believed that one could discipline one’s body and will as well as
  reject the world through constant labor rather than self-torture. So
  the community of monks he set up engaged in constant physical and
  spiritual labor; this would become the pattern for both Western and
  Eastern monasticism.

   Now, I think it’s obvious that where Saul of Tarsus,
  Ambrose, and their ilk erred was in ignorance.  They did not know,
  and if they had been told they would have rejected the idea, that like
  other animals humans are subject to hormones, pheromones and other
  neurochemicals.  The chemistry of sex is not all that different
  from the chemistry of addiction.  Oh, some of the chemicals are
  different (dopamine is one that is the same), but their profound effect
  on the minds in the bodies those chemicals are controlling are
  practically identical.  Just as the founders of Alcoholics
  Anonymous eighty-some years ago and the founders of Narcotics Anonymous
  fifty years ago didn’t know about the neurochemistry of addiction, the
  early Church Fathers knew nothing of the neurochemistry of sex. 

  They saw women in thrall to their natural reproductive urges using
  every wile at their disposal to attract men to father children for them
  and to hold them there to support those families they produced. 
  They themselves felt the effects of the women’s pheromones on their own
  hormones, and they blamed the women.  Of course… who else were
  they going to blame, God?  Not hardly!  He was the Big Guy,
  and you know you don’t go picking on the Big Guy when there’s a little
  person around you can pick on.  The same dynamic goes on today in
  households where men bring home their frustrations with the government
  or their employers, and release them in domestic violence against their
  wives and children.

  Now, from Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization, Volume 4, The Age of Faith:

  CHAPTER III The Progress of Christianity 364-451

  THE foster mother of the new civilization was the Church. As the old
  order faded away in corruption, cowardice, and neglect, a unique army
  of churchmen rose to defend with energy and skill a regenerated
  stability and decency of life. The historic function of Christianity
  was to re-establish the moral basis of character and society by
  providing supernatural sanctions and support for the uncongenial
  commandments of social order; to instill into rude barbarians gentler
  ideals of conduct through a creed spontaneously compounded of myth and
  miracle, of fear and hope and love. There is an epic grandeur, sullied
  with superstition and cruelty, in the struggle of the new religion to
  capture, tame, and inspire the minds of brute or decadent men, to forge
  a uniting empire of faith that would again hold men together, as they
  had once been held by the magic of Greece or the majesty of Rome.
  Institutions and beliefs are the offspring of human needs, and
  understanding must be in terms of these necessities.

  I. THE ORGANIZATION OF THE CHURCH

  If art is the organization of materials, the Roman Catholic Church is
  among the most imposing masterpieces of history. Through nineteen
  centuries, each heavy with crisis, she has held her faithful together,
  following them with her ministrations to the ends of the earth, forming
  their minds, molding their morals, encouraging their fertility,
  solemnizing their marriages, consoling their bereavements, lifting
  their momentary lives into eternal drama, harvesting their gifts,
  surviving every heresy and revolt, and patiently building again every
  broken support of her power. How did this majestic institution grow?

  It began in the spiritual hunger of men and women harassed with
  poverty, wearied with conflict, awed by mystery, or fearful of death.
  To millions of souls the Church brought a faith and hope that inspired
  and canceled death. That faith became their most precious possession,
  for which they would die or kill; and on that rock of hope the Church
  was built. It was at first a simple association of believers, an ecclesia or gathering. Each ecclesia or church chose one or more presbyteroi–elders,
  priests–to lead them, and one or more readers, acolytes, subdeacons,
  and deacons to assist the priest. As the worshipers grew in number, and
  their affairs became more complex, the congregations chose a priest or
  layman in each city to be an episcopos–overseer,
  bishop–to coordinate their functioning.  As the number of bishops
  grew, they in turn required supervision and coordination; in the fourth
  century we hear of archbishops, metropolitans, or primates governing
  the bishops and the churches of a province.  Over all these grades
  of clergy patriarchs held sway at Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem,
  Alexandria, and Rome.  At the call of a patriarch or an emperor
  the bishops and archbishops convened in synods or councils.  If a
  council represented only a province it was called provincial; if it
  represented; if it represented only the East or the West it was called
  plenary; if both, it was general;  if its decrees were accepted as
  binding upon all Christians, it was ecumenical–i.e., applying to the oikoumene,
  or (total Christian) inhabited world.  The occasionally resultant
  unity gave the Church its name of Catholic, or universal.

  This organization, whose power rested at
  last upon belief and prestige, required some regulation of the
  ecclestical life.  In the first three centuries of Christianity,
  celibacy was not required of a priest.  He might keep a wife whom
  he had married before ordiantion, but he must not marry after taking
  holy orders; and no man could be ordained who had married two wives, or
  a widow, a divorcee, or a concubine.  Like most societies, the
  Church was harassed with expremists.  In reaction against the
  sexual license of pagan morals, some Christian enthusiasts concluded
  from a passage in St. Paul (I Cor. VII, 32), that any commerce between
  the sexes was sinful;  they denounced all marriage, and trembled at the abomination of a married priest.  The provincial council of Gengra (circa 362) condemned these views as heretical,
  [emphasis added] but the Church increasingly demanded celibacy in her
  priests..  Property was being left in rising amounts to individual
  churches; now and then a married priest had the bequest written in his
  name and transmitted it to his children.  Clerical marriage
  sometimes led to adultery or other scandal, and lowered the respect of
  the people for the priest.  A Roman synod of 386 advised the
  complet continence of the clergy; and a year later Pope Siricius
  ordered the unfrocking of any priest who married, or continued to live
  with his wife.  Jerome, Ambrose,
  and Augustine supported this decree with their triple power; and after
  a generation of sporadic resistance it was enforced with transient
  success in the West. [more added emphasis]

  The gravest problem of the Chruch, next to reconciling her ideals with her continuance,
  [yeah, this is me again calling your attention to a select portion of
  Durant's text--just assume that any boldface type is my doing and all
  within brackets is my addition, okay?] was to find a way of living with
  the state.  The rise of an ecclesiastical organization side by
  side with the officials of the government created a struggle for power
  in which the accepted subjection of one to the other was the
  prerequisite of peace.  In the East the Church became subordinate
  to the state; in the West she fought for independence, then for
  mastery.  In either case the union of Church and state involved a profound modification of Christian ethics.  Tertullian, Origen, and Lactantius [following the teachings of the Christ] had
  taught that war is always unlawful;  the Church, now protected by
  the state, resigned herself to such wars as she deemed necessary to
  protect either the state or the Church.  She had not in herself
  the means of force; but when force seemed desirable she could appeal to
  the “secular arm” to implement her will.  She received from the
  state, and from individuals, splendid gifts of money, temples, or
  lands; she grew rich, and needed the state to protect her in all the
  rights of property.  Even when the state fell she kept her wealth;
  the barbarian conquerers, however heretical, seldom robbed the
  Church.  The authority of the word so soon rivaled the power of
  the sword.

  II. THE HERETICS
  The most unpleasant task of ecclesiastical organization was to prevent
  a fragmentation of the Church through the multiplication of
  heresies–i.e., doctrines contrary to conciliar definitions of the
  Christian creed.  Once triumphant, the Church ceased to preach
  toleration; she looked with the same hostile eye upon individualism in
  belief as the state upon secession or revolt.  Neither the Church
  nor the heretics thought of heresy in purely theological terms. 
  The heresy was in many cases the ideological flag of a rebellious
  locality seeking liberation from the imperial power;  so the
  Monophysites wished to free Syria and Egypt from Constantinople; the
  Donatists hoped to free Africa from Rome; and as Church and state were
  now united, the rebellion was against both.  Orthodoxy opposed
  nationalism, heresy defended it; the Church labored for centralization
  and unity, the heretics for local independence and liberty.

  …

  (ellipsis)

  We cannot
  interest ourselves today in the many winds of doctrine that agitated
  the Church in this period–Eunomians, Anomeans, Apollinarians,
  Macedonians, Sabellians, Massalians, Novatians, Priscillianists; we can
  only mourn over the absurdities for which men have died, and
  will.  Manicheanism was not so much a Christian heresy as a
  Persian dualism of God and Satan, Good and Evil, Light and Darkness; it
  thought to reconcile Christianity and Zoroastrianism, and was bitterly
  buffeted by both.  It faced withunusual candor the problem of
  evil, the strnage abundance of apparently unmerited suffering in a
  world providentially ruled; and felt compelled to postulate an Evil
  Spirit coeternal with the Good.  During the fourth century
  Manicheism mad many converts in East and West.  Several of the
  emperors use ruthless measures against it; Justinian made it a capital
  crime; gradually it faded out, but it left its influence on such later
  heretics as the Paulicians, Bogomiles, and Albigensians.  In 385,
  a Spanish bishop, Priscillian, was accused of preaching Manicheism and
  universal celibacy; he denied the charges; he was tried before the
  usurping Emperor Maximus at Trier, two bishops being his accusers; he
  was condemned; and over the protests of St. Ambrose and St. Martin he
  and several of his companions were burned to death. (385).

  I tire of this transcription
  process, although I’ll never grow weary of the subject.  I did
  have a bit more copy-and-paste, some excerpts of letters from “Saint”
  Jerome, illustrating my contention that he was a dirty old dog in the
  manger, but my browser crashed and I lost it (so glad I’d saved the
  rest already), and I think I’ve already made this so long I doubt
  anyone will read it.
  

  • 3:36 am
  • 13 Comments