1
The Heretics
Over the past two thousand years Christian heretics have
been likened to whores and lepers, savage beasts and demons, sexual
perverts and child killers. So far as the sixteenth-century Jesuit
Francis Coster was concerned, they had a great deal in common
with “the filthy dregs that flowed through the outhouse.” Warming
to his theme, Coster added that just as phlegm was expelled from
the body, so heretics were to be banished from “the heavenly body
of saints . . . as if religion became sick and vomited them out.”1
Behind the unsavory rhetoric there was often an assumption
that heresy ought to be obliterated. It was not simply pesky, it was
utterly pernicious and, as a character in Thomas Mores A Dialogue
Concerning Heresies opined, it was the obligation of the righteous
“to sit upon the mountains treading heretics under our feet like
ants.”
Sometimes God was touted as the chief executioner. Stories
would be told of the fourth-century heresiarch Arius (about whom
well hear much more) going to the lavatory one day only to witness
his bowels gushing out. Into which disgusting mess, so Saint Ambrose
reported, his head fell “headlong, besmirching those foul lips
with which he had denied Christ.” This, Ambrose crowed, was no
random accident, no “chance manner of death.” It was the Almighty
inflicting vengeance upon “wickedness.”
Sometimes, the ant treading was leftto human beings, as
when hundreds of medieval Cathars were slaughtered by crusading
armies at Béziers in 1209; or when (so legend tells) North African
Donatists were herded onto ships at Carthage in 347, weighed down
with casks of sand, and dumped far out at sea; or when poor old Giulio
Cesare Vaninis tongue was cut out ahead of his being strangled
at the stake in 1619 Toulouse. Many heretics made it through the
vale of tears unharmed, but this did not necessarily exempt them
from punishment. They could be condemned after death, at which
time their bones would be dug up and destroyed or, like the sixty-seven
deceased heretics in Mexico in 1649, be burned in effigy.
These were not the only sanctions available to the syndics of
orthodoxy, however, and the historical landscape of heresy is not
nearly as corpse-strewn as might be imagined. From the perspective
of the ecclesiastical establishment, to kill a heretic was to fail.
The murdered heretic was someone who, despite all the threatening
and cajoling, had obstinately refused to recant his errors. Worse
yet, he could look a lot like a righteous martyr to his followers and
confreres. It was far preferable, therefore, to win supposedly errant
Christians back to the supposedly true path by means of corrective
justice. This, in terms of theological logic, was deemed to be charitable
(you were only trying to save people from eternal perdition,
after all). If this was caritas, however, it was often of an extravagant,
sometimes brutal variety.
Medieval heretics were made to go on penitential pilgrimages
(often in chains), their clothes were bedecked with stigmatizing,
stitched-in symbols, and they were sentenced to grueling service
in the kings galleys. In sixteenth-century France they could be
whipped or made to endure the most public humiliations: standing
in their penitential gowns in the church or the public square,
bareheaded and shoeless, holding a lighted candle, abjuring their
errors, and begging the community for forgiveness. If they were errant
clerics, their heads might be shaved (removing all sign of their
tonsure), their priestly vestments ceremonially stripped off, or, if
they were especially unlucky, their flesh cut from the thumb and
index finger: a symbolic way of removing their right to celebrate the
Eucharist.
An obvious question springs to mind. What was this thing
called heresy and why was it so detested? To indulge in such lavish
persecutory measures must surely have required a great deal of
certainty on the part of those doing the persecuting.
An important first step was to define this most heinous of
crimes: it had to be identified before it could be stamped out. An
awful lot of theological ink was spilled in this pursuit but, for our
present purposes, a sentence from the medieval theologian Robert
Grosseteste is as good a starting point as any. Heresy, he wrote, is
“an opinion chosen by human perception, contrary to Holy Scripture,
publicly avowed and obstinately defended.”5 At first blush, this
looks fairly straightforward but, once it is unpacked, the definition
turns out to be quite sophisticated. Religious truth, so the theory
went, was divinely inspired, objective, and fixed — soaring far above
the fleeting speculations of human opinion. There was room for
reined-in theological interpretation (at least for learned clerics),
the variable nuts and bolts of worship could sometimes be tinkered
with, and some concepts and rituals might take several centuries to
emerge. When it came to basic Christian dogmas, however, these
were all contained within the New Testament message. They had
been righteously pored over by the fathers of the early church and
codified in a succession of creedal statements, church councils, and,
so far as the Western half of Christendom was concerned, papal
pronouncements.
There was no good excuse for any reasonably well informed
Christian to dissent from these supposedly eternal verities. To do
so was to threaten the unity of Christendom: it was to trample on
the memory and sacrifice of Christ. Heretics often advertised themselves
as holy men but, so far as the church was concerned, they
were madmen, prideful scoundrels addicted to the exercise of their
addled imaginations, or, more than likely, the minions of Satan.
Grossetestes talk of public avowal is also crucial. The heretical
mind in which dangerous thoughts secretly festered was beyond the
reach of the church militant. There had always been vipers in the
nest: hypocrites and dissemblers who harbored heretical opinions.
It didnt really matter. God could tell the difference and would deal
with such wretches accordingly. In the here and now, so long as the
heretic did not spout his blasphemies in the street, the tavern, or the
pew, then others were not at immediate risk of infection.
Obstinacy, another of Grossetestes keywords, was just as important.
There was no need to rush to judgment when confronted
with a seemingly heretical deed or utterance. To be guilty of full-fledged
heresy a person had to be aware that his behavior contradicted
orthodoxy, and he had to persist in that behavior. The
theological term for this is pertinacity. Often, the suspected heretic
might simply have been acting out of ignorance, confusion, or
habit. Perhaps he was brought up by heretical parents and had never
been exposed to what the established church regarded as pure doctrine.
The obvious litmus test for distinguishing between unintentional
and willful heresy was to inform the supposed heretic of the
churchs acceptable teachings and see how he reacted. If he agreed
to conform, then that, after the exaction of suitable penances, was
usually the end of the matter. If, however, he clung to his heterodox
notions, then the more gruesome punishments could be unleashed.
Problem solved and terms neatly defined, then. To be a heretic
was to dissent publicly and repeatedly from genuine Christianity.
The heretic was far worse than the pagan, Muslim, or Jew. Such
people had never had the chance to embrace the Christian message.
The heretics, by contrast, had been shown the way toward
eternal bliss, but they had traveled other roads. They had betrayed
Christ and, during the many centuries when Christianity was intimately
connected with political power, they had also threatened
to undermine social order and cohesion: they were as treacherous
as regicidal maniacs and more infectious than the most virulent
pandemic.