Heresy

My wife and I recently returned from a 10-day trip to England where we toured part of the southwest coast, Dartmoor, the city of Bath and Windsor.  England is one of our favorite places, and my English ancestry makes the country even more fascinating.  We drove through the part of Bath where my very early ancestors on my mother’s side lived.  She was a Blackmore.  Many Blackmores were centered in the area called Blackmore Valley near the city of Honiton, just a short drive from the southern coast and English Channel.

English history is full of drama and intrigue with religion playing a major part in conflict and wars.  Protestants and Catholics often were at swords points, and I marvel at how these so-called followers of Jesus Christ could be so murderous.  Perhaps the reason is despite being called Christians, they really were not Jesus’s followers subject to his commandments.  It’s a convenient and useful way to establish and defend political alignments.

While away and in anticipation of our visit to Windsor Castle, I found and read the 2024 book “Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God” by Catherine Nixey.  What defines a heretic?  Nixey provides her conclusion especially well described in her chapter “The Birth of Heresy.”  

She wrote about persecutions of heretics and explained: “At the heart of many of these persecutions was the new Christian concept of ‘heresy.” Heresy came to be closely associated with Christianity, but as a word it long predated it.  ‘Heresy’ comes from the Geek word haireo, which means ‘I choose.’ In the form ‘heresy’ – haeresis in Greek – it merely meant something that was chosen: a ‘choice.’ In the pre-Christian Greek world, ‘heresy’ had been a word with positive connotations – to use your intellect to make independent-minded choices was, then, considered a good thing. It did not retain that positive feel.  Within the first century of the birth of this new religion, ‘choice’ for Christians had become no longer a praiseworthy attribute but a ‘poison.’  Heretics started to be spoken of not merely as people but as a disease to be ‘cured,’ a gangrene to be ‘cut out’ and a pollution to be eliminated in order to purify the Christian body as a whole.  As St. Augustine – always a man with enviable mastery of metaphor – would later put it, heretics were those whom the church ‘voids from itself like shit.” 

I have a new appreciation of what makes for a heretic, and I’m now far better informed especially because at one time or another I’ve been called a heretic because I haven’t always been on the band wagon peaching complete conformity and defending dogmas difficult to defend or understand. I subscribe to haeresis with its positive connotations.  I try to follow Jesus’s commandments and live by his beatitudes.  That’s hard enough.

A troubling fact not appreciated by most Catholics is the evil unleashed and encouraged by Pope Innocent III in 1208 against other Christians he considered to be heretics.  Read about the Cathars in Beziers and the crusaders who slaughtered them – men, women, children, and babies. Thousands were killed in a cathedral where they had taken sanctuary.  All heretics had to be slaughtered. The crusaders set fire to the city. This Pope’s support for this horror lead to the establishment of the Inquisition with its extensive cruel and evil bureaucracy.  

Let’s be clear that calling someone a heretic is dangerous and for many accusers just disingenuous.  The Church’s history of dealing with so-called heretics is appalling and antichrist behavior. Nixey’s accounts are enlightening.  Christians can be the worst hypocrites and faux followers of Jesus.  Just consider White Christian Nationalists, for example.

Deacon David Pierce