Heresy and Orthodoxy

The word "orthodox" makes one think of Greek Orthodoxy or Russian Orthodoxy (and there are other versions of Christianity with Orthodoxy in their names), but the word actually means correct religion, as opposed to heresy.  Heresy is incorrect religion.  How do you tell the difference?

There is and can be no absolute guide.  You can tell which was the true religion by who won.  Obviously God wouldn't let the wrong guys win, everyone said (and says).  Alternately, however, the Bible talks about "when two or three are gathered in my name...." so maybe the tiny minority is right and the self-styled winners are wrong and going to hell.  Guess we'll find out!

Heretics are specifically people who should know the true religion but have gone seriously astray.  So different versions of Christianity can (and often do) label each other as heresy.  Latin Christendom and Greek Orthodoxy excommunicated each other in 1054 and have only recently started getting back together.  (Protestants and Catholics have also decided that the other side isn't really a bunch of heretics.  Or not too heretical.)  So Christianity considers Islam not a heresy but a different religion, and Muslims aren't heretics but infidels.  Pagans, those who believe in multiple gods, are also not technically heretics.  This has never stopped the word "heretic" being tossed around a lot for anyone someone disagrees with.

Early Christianity had a lot of heresies.  Some of the most serious were so-called Christological heresies, arguments over the nature of Christ.  Was he just an inspired human?  Was he God in disguise?  Did he really die on the Cross or, if he was God the whole time, was it just a big charade?  If he was an inspired human who did rise again from death, should we pray to him rather than directly to God or is that a big mistake?  Are God and Jesus both gods, separate ones--and what about the Holy Spirit?  The efforts of the Council of Nicaea (325) to define the Trinity, one God in three persons, Jesus both fully human and fully divine, tried to settle the matter and just led to a lot of new heresies.  Most only ended with the rise of Islam in the seventh century, when a lot of territories that had been Christian under the Roman empire instead had Islam as their dominant religion, making a lot of the arguing irrelevant.

Other early Christian heresies included pelagianism, the idea that you could save yourself by being as good as you possibly could without needing grace (via the sacraments), and donatism, the belief that sacraments (which you needed) could only be validly administered by a pure priest, so if the priest had secretly sinned they didn't count.  These were also more or less wiped out once Islam gave people more things to think about than theological niceties.  Pelagianism had been especially strong in Roman Britain, until the arrival of the pagan Angles and Saxons ended that issue.

Another serious heresy was manichaeism, the idea that the universe was locked in a battle between absolute good and absolute evil, which neither would ever win, and that the spiritual world was good and the physical world evil.  There is a fair amount of dualism (the idea of two equal powers fighting it out) in orthodox Christianity, but this is heresy.

A lot of early Christian doctrine was worked out in response to heresy.  Someone would announce a new insight into religious issues no one had really thought about much, a church council would meet, discuss, decide it was wrong, and settle on an official doctrine of the opposite.  (This is how for example it was decided that the Christian Bible would include the Old Testament, the Jewish Bible, even though Christians felt they had "moved beyond" a lot of it.)  Thus heresy (and the reaction to it) helped define orthodoxy.

A version of Manichaeism took root in southern France in the twelfth century, among people who thought they were good Christians and that God's true message had finally been revealed to them.  This version is often called Catharism (from catharsis, a freeing or purging of oneself from troublesome things), and the Albigensian Crusade was launched against it in 1209 (on which see more here).

My husband and I have written a novel, Count Scar, set in a fictional version of southern France in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade--except with magic.  We've moved the geography around some, and all the people are fictional; the single biggest change we made was not getting into northern France's invasion of southern France in this crusade.  (The book is available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.)

We're finishing a sequel, Heretic Wind, for anyone who enjoys the first one.  Coming soon!

© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on real medieval heresy, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Albigensian Crusade

What we now know as the Crusades began, as I have discussed previously, with efforts in 1095 to conquer the Muslims in the Holy Land (essentially what is now Israel and Syria) and make it a Christian territory.  But the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem fell to the Turks in 1187, never to be regained.  This did not stop the desire for Crusades, just their likelihood of success.

The crusading movement quickly branched out to be wars against heretics (or even personal enemies in a few cases), rather than only against Muslims.  The first big war against heretics was the Albigensian Crusade, launched in 1209, called that because much of the fighting was near the town of Albi in southern France.

A heresy we now call Catharism had been growing and spreading for some time.  It was actually an alternate version of Christianity, a dualist religion related to Zoroastrianism and to the Manichaean heresy of late antiquity.  It seems to have reached western Europe via Bulgaria, and its adherents were sometimes called Bogomils.  The basic tenet was that the universe was divided equally between forces of light and darkness, locked in eternal conflict (and no, we're not talking here about the Star Wars' Force).  For adherents, the physical universe was the creation of the devil, not of God, and the ultimate goal was to free oneself from all hint of physicality until finally starving to death.

There is a fair amount of dualism in orthodox Christianity, but it has always held that God, not the devil, created the physical world (reread Genesis), and that when we rise again we will rise in the flesh, not as disembodied spirits.

For a long time this growing heresy was considered deplorable but nothing more.  When towns in southern France started having two bishops, one adhering to Roman Christianity and one to Cathar beliefs, Cistercian monks were sent south to preach and to try to talk the locals out of what was considered their mistaken faith.  It didn't work.  Even the count of Toulouse, the most powerful lord of southwestern France, adopted at least some tenets of Catharism.

The pope sent a legate (representative) to try to help coordinate the preaching.  His legate, Pierre de Castelnau, was murdered in 1208, some said at the orders of the count of Toulouse.  No more Mister Niceguy!  Calling the heresy a cancer that must be cut from the body of Christendom before it spreads, the pope declared a Crusade.  The count of Toulouse's efforts to calm everything down were unsuccessful, and he was placed under anathema.  The Crusade, essentially a war of northern France against southern France, began in 1209.

It was a vicious war.  Northern forces were led by Simon de Montfort.  You should still not tell Simon de Montfort jokes in southern France, because these are not considered funny jokes.  When asked how they could tell who was and wasn't a heretic before burning a whole village, he was said to have quipped, "Burn them all.  The Lord will know His own."

Having (sort of) won, the northern armies settled down to hold southern lands.  They took over and enlarged a number of quite stunning castles that the heretics had held.  These are now sometimes called "citadels of vertigo" from being perched on high peaks and cliffs.  The newly established order of Dominican friars continued the efforts to try to convert people they kept hoping were just confused.  The Inquisition got underway, trying to find and deal with hidden heretics.

One of the more remarkable events, a generation after the Crusade, was the Massacre at Montségur in 1244.  A group of heretics, with their families, held out in a castle on a mountaintop for close to a year.  When the castle was finally captured (Swiss rock climbers went up the back of the mountain, so steep as to be thought inaccessible), the attackers gave any heretics who would renounce their faith two weeks to get out, not wanting to kill children and admiring the defenders' resolve.  But at the end of two weeks most were still there.  And, feeling they really had to do so, the attackers burned everybody.  You can now visit Montségur and, after paying a few euros, climb to the top.

My husband, Robert Bouchard, and I co-wrote a fantasy novel, Count Scar, set in a slightly reimagined version of southern France in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade.  It is available as an ebook on Amazon and other e-tailers.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on real medieval heresy, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.