Heresy, being a deadly poison generated within the organism of the Church, must be ejected if she is to live and perform her task of continuing Christ’s work of salvation. Her Founder, who foretold the disease, also provided the remedy: He endowed her teaching with infallibility. The office of teaching belongs to the hierarchy, the ecclesia docens (The teaching Church), which, under certain conditions, judges without appeal in matters of faith and morals. Infallible decisions can also be given by the pope teaching ex cathedra. Each pastor in his parish, each bishop in his diocese, is in duty bound to keep the faith of his flock untainted; to the supreme pastor of all the Churches is given the office of feeding the whole Christian flock. The power, then, of expelling heresy is an essential factor in the constitution of the Church. Like other powers and rights, the power of rejecting heresy adapts itself in practice to circumstances of time and place, and, especially, of social and political conditions. At the beginning, it worked without special organization. The ancient discipline charged the bishops with the duty of searching out the heresies in their diocese and checking the progress of error by any means at their command. When erroneous doctrines gathered volume and threatened disruption of the Church, the bishops assembled in councils, provincial, metropolitan, national, or ecumenical. There the combined weight of their authority was brought to bear upon the false doctrines. The first council was a meeting of the Apostles at Jerusalem in order to put an end to the Judaizing tendencies among the first Christians. It is the type of all succeeding councils: bishops in union with the head of the Church, and guided by the Holy Spirit, sit as judges in matters of faith and morals. The spirit which animates the dealings of the Church with heresy and heretics is one of extreme severity. St. Paul writes to Titus: “A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition, avoid: knowing that he, that is such a one, is subverted, and sins, being condemned by his own judgment.”[1] This early piece of legislation reproduces the still earlier teaching of Christ: “And if he will not hear the church, let him be to thee as the heathen and the publican”;[2] it also inspires all subsequent anti-heretical legislation. The sentence on the obstinate heretic is invariably excommunication. He is separated from the company of the faithful, delivered up “to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”[3]
Principles of Church Legislation
The guiding principles in the Church’s treatment of heretics are the following: Distinguishing between formal and material heretics, she applies to the former the canon, “Most firmly hold and in no way doubt that every heretic or schismatic is to have part with the Devil and his angels in the flames of eternal fire, unless before the end of his life he be incorporated with, and restored to the Catholic Church.” No one is forced to enter the Church, but having once entered it through baptism, he is bound to keep the promises he freely made. To restrain and bring back her rebellious sons the Church uses both her own spiritual power and the secular power at her command. Towards material heretics her conduct is ruled by the saying of St. Augustine: “Those are by no means to be accounted heretics who do not defend their false and perverse opinions with pertinacious zeal (animositas), especially when their error is not the fruit of audacious presumption but has been communicated to them by seduced and lapsed parents, and when they are seeking the truth with cautious solicitude and ready to be corrected.”[4] Pius IX, in a letter to the bishops of Italy (10 Aug., 1863), restates this Catholic doctrine: “It is known to Us and to You that they who are in invincible ignorance concerning our religion but observe the natural law . . . and are ready to obey God and lead an honest and righteous life, can, with the help of Divine light and grace, attain to eternal life… for God… will not allow anyone to be eternally punished who is not willfully guilty”[5]
Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction over Heretics
The fact of having received valid baptism places material heretics under the jurisdiction of the Church, and if they are in good faith, they belong to the soul of the Church. Their material severance, however, precludes them from the use of ecclesiastical rights, except the right of being judged according to ecclesiastical law if, by any chance, they are brought before an ecclesiastical court. They are not bound by ecclesiastical laws enacted for the spiritual well-being of its members, e. g. by the Six Commandments of the Church.
Reception of Converts
Converts to the Faith, before being received, should be well instructed in Catholic doctrine. The right to reconcile heretics belongs to the bishops, but is usually delegated to all priests having charge of souls. The order of proceeding in a reconciliation is: first, abjuration of heresy or profession of faith; second, conditional baptism (this is given only when the heretical baptism is doubtful); third, sacramental confession and conditional absolution.
Role of Heresy in History
The role of heresy in history is that of evil generally. Its roots are in corrupted human nature. It has come over the Church as predicted by her Divine Founder; it has rent asunder the bonds of charity in families, provinces, states, and nations; the sword has been drawn and pyres erected both for its defense and its repression; misery and ruin have followed in its track. The prevalence of heresy, however, does not disprove the Divinity of the Church, any more than the existence of evil disproves the existence of an all-good God. Heresy, like other evils, is permitted as a test of faith and a trial of strength in the Church militant; probably also as a punishment for other sins. The disruption and disintegration of heretical sects also furnishes a solid argument for the necessity of a strong teaching authority. The endless controversies with heretics have been indirectly the cause of most important doctrinal developments and definitions formulated in councils to the edification of the body of Christ. Thus, the spurious gospels of the Gnostics prepared the way for the canon of Scripture; Patripassian, Sabellian, Arian, and Macedonian heresies drew out a clearer concept of the Trinity; the Nestorian and Eutychian errors led to definite dogmas on the nature and Person of Christ. And so down to Modernism, which has called forth a solemn assertion of the claims of the supernatural in history.
Intolerance and Cruelty
The Church’s legislation on heresy and heretics is often reproached with cruelty and intolerance. Intolerant it is: in fact, its raison d’être is intolerance of doctrines subversive of the faith. But such intolerance is essential to all that is, or moves, or lives, for tolerance of destructive elements within the organism amounts to suicide. Heretical sects are subject to the same law: they live or die in the measure they apply or neglect it. The charge of cruelty is also easy to meet. All repressive measures cause suffering or inconvenience of some sort: it is their nature. But they are not therefore cruel. The father who chastises his guilty son is just and may be tender-hearted. Cruelty only comes in where the punishment exceeds the requirements of the case. Opponents say: Precisely; the rigors of the Inquisition violated all humane feelings. We answer: they offend the feelings of later ages in which there is less regard for the purity of faith; but they did not antagonize the feelings of their own time, when heresy was looked on as more malignant than treason. In proof of which it suffices to remark that the inquisitors only renounced on the guilt of the accused and then handed him over to the secular power to be dealt with according to the laws framed by emperors and kings. Medieval people found no fault with the system, in fact heretics had been burned by the populace centuries before the Inquisition became a regular institution. And whenever heretics gained the upper hand, they were never slow in applying the same laws: so, the Huguenots in France, the Hussites in Bohemia, the Calvinists in Geneva, the Elizabethan statesmen and the Puritans in England. Toleration came in only when faith went out; lenient measures were resorted to only where the power to apply more severe measures was wanting. The embers of the Kulturkampf in Germany still smolder; the separation and confiscation laws and the ostracism of Catholics in France are the scandal of the day. Christ said: “Do not think that I came to send peace upon earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”[6] The history of heresy verifies this prediction and shows, moreover, that the greater number of the victims of the sword is on the side of the faithful adherents of the one Church founded by Christ.
Overview[7]
It is important to note that six of the earlier heresies in the history of the Church concerned the divine persons of God. The Arians (325) taught that Christ was inferior to the other persons of the Trinity. The Macedonians (381) taught that the Holy Spirit was inferior. The Nestorians (401) taught that there were two persons (not two natures) in Christ. The Eutychians (451) taught that there was but one nature – the divine. The Monothelites (680) held that Christ had no human will. The Manichaeans (280-1215) taught that Christ did not assume a real human body, but merely appeared in one like the angels of the Old Testament.
The Pelagian heresy denied the doctrine of original sin. The Iconoclasts opposed sacred images. And the heresy of Berengarius (1078) denied the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
During the latter Middle Ages, the most famous heresies were those of the Albigenses and Waldenses, condemned by the council of Lateran in 1179; and the teachings of Wycliffe and his disciple, Huss, condemned by the council of Constance in 1414.
These may be styled early Protestants, from the fact that they expressed the religious unrest or their time. The Calvinists were proud to trace their ancestry to the Waldenses; and Wycliffe is sometimes styled the prototype of English Protestantism.
The Albigenses were so styled after Albi, a town in southern France, where the sect became numerous about 1200. Pope Innocent III, sent Peter, of Chateau-neuf, and three other monks to convert them; but they murdered Peter and terrified his followers. Count Raymond of Toulouse sided with them, and they carried things with a high hand. The murder of the Pope’s legate was’ the occasion of a crusade against Toulouse and Albi, led by Simon of Montfort, at the head of a French army. The war lasted. from 1209 to 1227, and finally drifted from a religious to a political contest. The Albigenses were utterly crushed.
Respecting the nature of the Albigensian teachings, contemporary writers agree in connecting them with the Manichaeans. Identification with Manichaeism is regarded as a damning indictment against the Albigenses. The judicial records of the Middle Ages are full of the blackest crimes attributed to this sinuous and surreptitious sect.
Mani, a Persian teacher or the third century, compounded Paganism and Christianity into a system of doctrines, which persisted through the centuries in various forms and under various names. There were over seventy Manichean sects.
The popular and legal dislike towards the Manichaeans was due, not so much to their theological vagaries, as to their reputed immoralities. They inculcated devil-worship, denied the divinity of Christ, rejected the Old Testament, and repudiated the observance of Sunday.
Their midnight orgies, their hatred of marriage, their incest, fornications and suicides were the scandals of the Middle Ages. They united secrecy and hypocrisy as methods of covering their tracks.
In France, they were called, from their origin, Bulgarians; in some parts of Italy, Publicans, a corruption of the word Paulicians; in the provinces, where they were most numerous, Provincials, or, after 1208, Albigenses, from the town of Albi in Languedoc; in the Milanese Territory, Cathari, i.e., the Pure, or Paterenes and Paterinians, a name which they had usurped from the anti-simoniacal Catholic church party in Milan; in Belgium, Piphiler or Weavers, from the trade which the greater number of them followed, and sundry other names; but the generic term, Manichaeans, was given to them universally, and was accepted by themselves in their disputations with Catholics.
The Albigenses held many of their doctrines, and rivaled them in many points of violence and debauchery. “I have seen on all sides,” says Stephen,[8] Abbot of St. Genevieve, describing to the King of France the condition of Albigensian Toulouse, “churches burned and ruined to their foundations; I have seen the dwellings of men changed into the dens of wild beasts.”
The Waldenses, who were also termed Vaudois and Poor Men of Lyons, were followers of Peter Waldo, a merchant of Lyons. In 1160 Waldo, affected by the death of a fellow merchant, gave his property to the poor, and led a life of poverty. In teaching that malefactors ought not to be condemned, but should be allowed to go at large, —after the manner of the tares described in the parable, —the Waldenses came into — conflict with the civil power. They denounced oaths as sinful, and advocated Communism. The Mass and Purgatory were eliminated from their religion. They thought the clergy ought to hold no property. Ultimately some of them drifted into the immoral and pagan customs of the Albigenses. The fact that they existed about the time and in the neighborhood of the Albigenses, has led to “their being confused with these more unworthy sectaries.
The heresies of Wycliffe (1324-84) and John Huss (1375-1414) bore fruits in the Lollards of England and the Bohemian Brethren of Prague. Henry V. put. down the former on the charge of conspiracy, and the Bohemian Brethren, after a bloody civil Wycliffe continued a priest of the Catholic Church to the time of his death. His divergence from Catholic teaching had reference to the supremacy of the Pope in spiritual matters, which he partly controverted, and to certain regulations respecting the authority of Bishops over priests. He seems to have recanted his views prior to his death.
Huss followed Wycliffe in most points, but was more violent in his methods. He attended the Council of Constance under a safe conduct from the Emperor Sigismund. The Council condemned his teachings as heretical, and heresy being at that time a violation of the civil as well as of the ecclesiastical law, the secular arm took hold of Huss after the Council had got through with him. He was burned at the stake July, 1414.
“The tenets ascribed to them [the Albigenses] by all contemporary authorities coincide so remarkably with those held by the Paulicians, and in earlier times by the Manichaeans, that I do not see how we can reasonably deny what is confirmed by separate and uncontradicted testimonies, and contains no intrinsic want of probability.”[9]
“The descent of the Albigenses may be traced with tolerable distinctness from the Paulicians, a sect that sprang into existence in the Eastern Church during the sixth century. The Paulicians were agnostics and were accused by their enemies and persecutors of holding Manichean doctrines which, it is said, they vehemently disowned. Their creed, whatever it may have been precisely, spread gradually westward through Europe. In the ninth century, it found many adherents in Bulgaria, and three hundred years later it was maintained and defended, though not without important modifications, by the Albigenses ill the south of France.
They [the Albigenses] inherited and used, as has already been said, certain doctrines of eastern origin, such as the Manichean dualism, Docetism in relation to the persons of Christ, and a theory of metempsychosis. They seem, like the Manichaeans, to have disowned the authority of the old Testament; and the division of their adherents into the perfecii and credenies is similar to the Manichean distinction between elecli and oudiiori:”[10]
“Western Manichaeism, however, though it adhered only to the broader principles of Orientalism, the two co-equal conflicting principles of good and evil, the eternity of matter, and its implacable hostility to spirit, aversion to the Old Testament as the work of the wicked Demiurge, the unreality of the suffering Christ, was, or became, more Manichean than its Grecian parent, Paulicianism. Western Manichaeism is Populars, suspected, or convicted, or confessed Manicheans.
The chief seat of these opinions was in the south of France. Their religion was chivalry, but chivalry becoming less and less religious; the mistress had become the saint, the casuistry of the Court of Love superseded that of the confessional. There had grown up a gay license of manners not adverse only to the austerity of monkish Christianity but to pure Christian morals.” [11]
“In a short time, the Albigenses had congregations with schools and charitable institutions of their own. Then they drove away the Roman Catholic priests from the churches, took possession of the buildings, and elected their own priests and bishops. This state of things caused, of course, great alarm at Rome.” [12]
[1] Tit., 3:10-11.
[2] Matt., 18:17.
[3] 1 Cor., 5:5.
[4] P. L., 33, ep. 93:160
[5] Denzinger, “Enchir.”, n. 1529
[6] Matthew 10:34.
[7] Desmond, Humphrey Joseph, Mooted Questions of History, (New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1895), pp. 67-77.
[8] Stephen of Tournai, canonist, born at Orléans, France, 1128; died at Tournai, September, 1203.
[9] Hallam’s View of the Middle Ages, Ch, IX. part II. (P. 359, Vol. III. (New York, W. J. Widdleton, Pub., 1877).
[10] Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 1., 454.
[11] History of Latin Christianity, (Vul. V., Ch. viii, p. 159-63.) By Henry Hart Milman. (New York. Sheldon & Co., 1861).
[12] The Schaff – Herzog Dictionary. Vol. 1. Article on Albigenses.