BEYOND BELIEF: A SYMPATHETIC LOOK AT HERESY

February 15, 2024

GLEANINGS FROM CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUAL TEACHERS

From Karen Armstrong’s, The Spiral Staircase

    I have noticed that compassion is not always a popular virtue.  In my lectures I have sometimes seen members of the audience glare at me mutinously: where is the fun of religion, if you can’t disapprove of other people!  There are some people, I suspect, who would be outraged if, when they finally arrived in heaven, found everybody else there as well. Heaven would not be heaven unless you could peer over the celestial parapets and watch the unfortunates roasting below….

    (But) if we try to hold onto our partial glimpses of the divine, we cut it down to our own size and close our minds.  Like it or not, our human experience of anything or anybody is always incomplete; there is usually something that eludes us, some portion of experience that evades our grasp.

    Religion itself is really an art form…. Like all art, theology is an attempt to express the inexpressible…. And, like great art, the best theology tends to be universalistic.  Ethnic, tribal or ideological polemic is as out of place in theology as in Impressionist or Realist art. If you are bent on proving that your own tradition alone is correct, and pour scorn on all other points of view, you are interjecting self and egotism into your study, and the sacred texts will remain closed.  I found this idea beautifully expressed by the influential 12th century Muslim mystic and philosopher Ibn al-Arabi:

Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise, you will lose much that is good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter.

     Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy.  If you behave in a certain way you will be transformed.  The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality, but because they are life enhancing.

** REFLECTIONS **

    “Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogma,” the English author G.K. Chesterton once said. A convert to Roman Catholic orthodoxy, Chesterton argued that the human ability to formulate and remain faithful to certain fixed ideas, whether religious or political, was a key factor in the rise of advanced civilization. Freethinkers, he maintained, tended to underestimate the constructive power of commonly held systems of belief and how crucial it was to uphold them. While he questioned on both moral and practical grounds the use of coercion and torture to ensure ideological conformity, Chesterton’s approach to social and religious life was unapologetically doctrinaire.

    That old Englishman would undoubtedly have been cheered by the message Peter Kreeft, a Boston College philosophy professor and staunch Roman Catholic, brought to Madison a few years back.  Speaking before an appreciative local audience, Kreeft had harsh words to say about so-called “Cafeteria Catholics” who pick-and-choose which of the Church’s teachings to follow.  “To be a Catholic is to take the whole deal,” he insisted.

   Kreeft was especially critical of Roman Catholic politicians who oppose the Church’s position on abortion. “These are wicked people,” he declared,

…people who love power more than they love God… I’d say they are worse than child molesters because their sin is deliberate -- it is not a sin of weakness…. This is cold, calculating sin that’s straight from the devil.

    While such stern rhetoric may strike some of us as authoritarian and unreasonable, it reflects a core principle of Kreeft’s religious tradition. Orthodoxy – an insistence on correct belief – has been a hallmark of the Roman Catholic Church since its inception in the Fourth Century, so no one should be shocked by his desire to see it taken seriously. Even today, the push back against Pope Francis’s calls for greater tolerance among Roman Catholics has been considerable.

    However, if one is looking for a religion that fits well with their own private convictions, there is now a multitude of alternatives to choose from, ranging from the most open and permissive to the narrow and restrictive.  Unlike in medieval times, affiliation with the Roman Catholic Church is optional, not mandatory. If you don’t like dogma, don’t dally in it.

    Back in the olden days when religious options were few or none, heresy – which in the original Greek simply meant to “choose on one’s own, apart from the community” – was a much bigger deal. As recently as a few centuries ago, the penalties for deviation from official doctrine – whether Catholic or Protestant - were severe. It’s scarcely surprising, then, that in the past critics of orthodoxy often wrote under pseudonyms to avoid persecution.

    The social critic and essayist Adam Gopnik has addressed the motivation of the clerics who, with the Vatican’s blessing, carried out various inquisitions in the late Middle Ages. “They were absolutely certain that the existence of their Church depended on it,” he wrote. 

If you believe that you know the truth of the cosmos or of history, then the crime of causing pain to one person seems trivial compared with the risk of permitting the death or damnation of thousands.  “We had no choice,” is what the Grand Inquisitor announced in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.  We know the cruelest of fanatics by their exceptionally clear consciences.

     In the post-Enlightenment world of today, people no longer worry overmuch about an Inquisitor-type barging into the living room, and at least some people now proudly wear the label “heretic” on their sleeve. The late philosopher Walter Kaufmann’s intellectual autobiography was entitled The Faith of a Heretic and a similar work by former Episcopal bishop James Pike challenged readers with a title that read, If This Be Heresy.  More recently, Spencer Burke, the former minister of an evangelical megachurch, published A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity in which he repudiated many of the dogmas he had once defended. Choosing on one’s own in the contemporary religious marketplace is a privilege many of us simply take for granted. G.K. Chesterton not withstanding, heresy seems to have become quite acceptable in many quarters.  

    But it wasn’t always this way, and if as a culture we are eager to maintain the freedom we have achieved, it’s well to know how this whole business about “orthodoxy” got started in the first place. What was the source of this curious tradition (virtually unknown in the great Eastern religions) with its insistence that certain absolute, propositional truths were never to be questioned, never challenged and certainly never repudiated? 

    It’s hard to make this case from the teachings of the New Testament, for despite the ardor with which they expressed their opinions, neither Jesus nor Paul was especially doctrinaire. As Spencer Burke observes, meek submission to the doctrinal requirements of a powerful religious establishment is something Jesus“rejected with every ounce of his being.”  Nor did the Apostle Paul demand unanimity of belief among members of the congregations he counseled early in the first century.  Generally speaking, Paul placed greater emphasis on forbearance, acceptance and good will than on ideological purity.

    There was, in fact, no such thing as orthodoxy, no Christian consensus around even the most fundamental theological questions, for the first three centuries of the Christian era. “Even those who ate bread and drank wine together to celebrate the Lord’s Supper often could not confine the meaning of their worship to any single interpretation,” church historian Elaine Pagels writes. The sacrament of baptism, the relationship of Jesus to God the Father, the meaning of salvation, the likelihood of Christ’s Second Coming – none of these issues had been settled and their answers carved in stone. “Many early Christians saw themselves as not so much ‘believers’ as ‘seekers,’” Pagels informs us. 

    But this state of affairs didn’t sit well with some prominent followers of Jesus. Irenaeus was a late second century leader of the church in Lyon and it was he who initially used the term “heretic” with reference to his religious opponents. Irenaeus sought to discredit alternate perspectives by arguing that his ownpositions on theological issues were wholly consistent with an unbroken “apostolic tradition” stretching back to the original disciples. He alone was a “faithful steward” handing down the original, unequivocal and unchanging principles that defined the one true faith. Irenaeus underscored the importance of dogma by proposing that “correct belief” was a matter of life and death. Only those who thought the way he did would be saved.

    Irenaeus’s perspective wasn’t embraced immediately, and more than a century would pass before it earned the Roman Church’s stamp off approval. That step was taken under Constantine, the Roman Empire’s first Christian emperor. An eminently practical ruler, Constantine was eager to find a unifying principle to stabilize and strengthen his fractious empire. By this time, most of Rome’s subjects were nominal Christians, but they belonged to many different competing sects. Convinced that his political interests were not well served by so much religious diversity, Constantine allied himself with what he judged to be the best organized and most disciplined of the various Christian factions and made their cause his own.

    In order to ensure the dominance of this favored group the emperor granted tax exemptions to members of their clergy, at the same time imposing tax increases on rival “heretical” sects. When this proved an insufficient incentive, Constantine raised the stakes. Factions other than the one in which he was invested were now ordered to stop holding meetings and to surrender whatever property they owned to his most holy Catholic church. According to one estimate, as many as half of all Christians in the Empire were deemed illegitimate by virtue of these orders.

    If you were a non-conforming Christian – now stigmatized with the label “heretic” -- it was pretty much all downhill from there. With full access to the coercive powers of the state the Catholic Church would create and maintain a virtual religious monopoly in Western Europe for over a thousand years.  “To be fully human,” Loren Mead writes, “was to be a Christian and a member of the Empire.  To be outside either was to be outside the law – an “outlaw.”

    Although the Church’s dominance declined during the Protestant Reformation, the concept of orthodoxy was readily adopted by Lutherans, Calvinists and Anglicans.  There were few safe havens for heretics until well into the 18th century and heterodox opinions were as likely to be suppressed in England as in Italy, Switzerland as in Spain. Early exponents of Unitarianism such as Michael Servetus, Frances David and John Biddle were victims of persecution, and even in the first years of the American republic, one of the revolution’s true heroes -- Thomas Paine -- was literally hounded from the country on account of his radical religious views.

    Now, the late philosopher Robert Solomon has said that although “belief” is certainly a component of the spiritual life, it is not its central concern.  Spirituality ought to be an expression of one’s overall orientation toward life, and has more to do with reverence, gratitude, awe, wonder, compassion and curiosity. It is more about “being” than “believing,” and thus theoretically a heretic can be as profoundly spiritual as any champion of orthodoxy.

    Institutional religion – the communal manifestation of spirituality – is also concerned with belief. But again, this is not its most salient feature. What really matters is the sense of “belonging” one enjoys as part of a beloved community that provides security, support and comfort.  “We must get over the need to interpret religions as alternative systems of knowledge,” Solomon argues, for that is not where their value truly lies.  The highly regarded sociologist of religion Robert Bellah concurs:

Churches should aim to provide a favorable environment for people to work out their own solutions to questions of the sacred…without imposing a prefabricated set of answers.

     Nevertheless, religion in the West has had a hard time breaking free of the ideological fetters with which it has been bound for seventeen centuries. Speaking from his own experience in an orthodox environment, Spencer Burke complains that: “The institutional church…is obsessed with boundaries:”

Who’s in and who’s out, who’s saved and who’s lost. In general, institutional churches today don’t ask questions.  They present answers – answers to questions that people in our culture aren’t even asking.

    So, although heresy is much more common than it once was, for a significant number of people religion still seems to be all about belief, submission to certain unassailable, authoritative truths. “People of all persuasions have been taught that asking questions about such matters as God is somehow demeaning of their faith,” the cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett observes.

    This was something one of my colleagues, John Wolf, discovered very early in life – and it is what propelled him into the Unitarian Universalist ministry.

    As John tells the story, he had a friend named Eddie – maybe seven or eight years old -- who lived down the street. Well, Eddie was a curious kid who didn’t think twice about asking questions. One day, however, he asked the kind of question that simply wasn’t permitted in his straight-laced religious household.  John wasn’t sure if Eddie posed this question to his minister or to his parents, but it resulted in a spanking, forfeiture of his allowance and seven days of home detention. 

    His horrible offense?  Eddie had innocently asked whether Jesus smelled after he had been dead for three days – a not-unreasonable question to pose, since Jesus himself had been warned about the stench coming from Lazarus’ tomb when he arrived to raise him from the dead.

    In any case, when John Wolf’s neighbor, a kindly older man named Charlie Olorgan found out about Eddie’s severe punishment, it made him hopping mad. “I shall never forget what he told me,” John writes. 

He said people like that – people like Eddie’s parents – think they are going to solve the world’s problems by keeping their minds closed, by telling their children that there are things that you just don’t question – much less come right out and ask questions about.  But they’re wrong.  ‘It doesn’t matter how right they think they are,’ Charlie said, ‘they are wrong.’

   “Question everything,” Charlie used to tell me. It was his way of teaching us values.  It was his way of saying that, in matters of ethical principle, the willingness to ask questions ranks right up there.

     Although the more conservative and traditional branches of Christianity and Islam still insist upon doctrinal conformity and submission to authority, it isn’t easy for religions and cultures to avoid scrutiny and impose dogmas. Too much information is readily available on-line; our culture has become too diverse and interconnected; modern science has punched too many holes in religion’s cherished truths.  Indeed, in his 2009 inaugural address, Barack Obama made the unprecedented assertion that the United States is a nation comprised not only of Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus, but of “unbelievers” as well. What more legitimacy could a heretic ask for?

    But although it has made considerable strides, heresy hasn’t quite gone mainstream.  In America today no one is going to be pilloried for exposing the patriarchal biases of the Bible – as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the grand dame of the women’s rights movement, was in 1896. Nor is it conceivable that someone would be fined and imprisoned by a U.S. court for blasphemy, as was a freethinker named Ruggles in 1811. In that particular case, Judge Kent of the New York Supreme Court wrote for the majority: 

The free, equal and undisturbed enjoyment of religious opinion is granted, but the abuse of that right, as in the case of blasphemy, had a tendency to corrupt the morals of people, and to destroy the good order….

    Still, even in a society that has achieved as much openness as ours, certain beliefs are still generally deemed socially and religiously unacceptable. We may not be a “Christian” nation, but according to many, we are supposed to be a God-fearing one – which is why atheists are still looked at askance by a significant majority of Americans.

     So, yes…heresy – the freedom to choose apart from the larger community – is a premise most religious progressives accept. But we must also be aware that this is a perilous and hard-won freedom that our forebears were denied in the past and that can be forfeited again. The great enemy of free-thought is always fear, and when fear besieges a society and causes it to begin circling the wagons, heresy becomes intolerable.  As Adam Gopnik reminds us, we had our own Torquemada not long ago, a man who fed on fear. His name was J. Edgar Hoover and “he was as scary an inquisitorial type as could exist,”

Hoover would surely have tortured and executed the Communists he imagined besieging America…if he had had the chance.  But he didn’t have the chance. Mostly, Hoover lost, and what made him lose was the persistence of traditions and laws of civil liberties…. We have been party to a fragile triumph of…Enlightenment values. A bloody miracle, really.