An admission of intolerance

During this Holy Week, one’s mind has to turn to matters divine even as one’s body consumes hot cross buns in toxic numbers.

Hence I thought of a recent conversation with a good friend, who is an Orthodox Christian (the Constantinople rather than Moscow patriarchate, as he always seeks to make clear). I said something contemptuous about the happy-clappy lot, and my friend rebuked me. “I welcome anyone who celebrates Christ,” he said.

I admired the sentiment, admitted he was a better Christian than me and left it at that. But then what the French call l’esprit d’escalier (literately, ‘staircase thought’, one that occurs to you after the conversation) led me to think that, had the Church always displayed such open-armed hospitality, it would have disappeared a long time ago.

Hence my tendency to regard even mainstream Protestantism, never mind its quasi-pagan sects, as out and out heresies. That makes it hard for me to see, say, a Baptist or a Pentecostal as a brother in Christ.

Since the time of St Paul one, perhaps the main, function of the Church has been to find a compromise between the truth as revealed from heaven and life as lived on earth. The static perfection only achievable in the kingdom of God had to be balanced against the dynamic human nature made imperfect by the Fall. The great synthesis based on the dual nature of Christ had to be made to work in everyday life.

This wasn’t an Eastern synthesis of things similar in nature. It was a balance coaxed out of a clash between opposites: one of them divine, the other human, both perfect and both extreme. The balance was so precarious that it had to be vigilantly observed: one step too far in either direction, towards either the sacred or the profane, and a precipice beckoned. One or the other end of the seesaw would shoot up, tossing either God or man into the abyss.

The Church had to find a compromise between perfection, as reachable only in the kingdom of God, and the imperfection of human nature, as precipitated by original sin. This the Church achieved during the period roughly demarcated by Paul at one end and Aquinas at the other.

In the process it had to fight off numerous heresies, each aiming to destroy the delicate balance. There the Church had to make sure it was preserving the Revelation in its fullest, without overstressing any one aspect. Such overstressing is in fact the essence of heresy; for all intents and purposes it might serve as its definition.

Most people assume that a heresy puts forth a wrong proposition, or at least one that contradicts the orthodoxy altogether. That’s not quite true. In fact, most heresies aren’t wrong in their main belief.

Where they err is in trying to assign an unduly universal significance to that one idea, passing a part for the whole. This inevitably puts too much weight at one end of the seesaw, destroying the balance.

For example, it’s not wrong to assert that Christ is God, as Docetism did, and neither is it wrong to say he is a man, as Arianism did. It is heretical, however, to deny the balance of the two – the balance without which Christendom wouldn’t have come about.

In fact, the Greek word hairesis implies a choice, inclination towards one thing, which then forms a distinct view of the world. This can act as the starting point for a political party, ideology, religious sect or philosophical school. In other words, the term hairesis contains an idea of something unilateral, of an obstinate concentration on just one of all the facets. 

While orthodoxy runs across the spectrum, heresy is by definition partisan and divisive. The sectarian spirit promoted by a heresy is characterised by egotism and ensuing atomisation. These are unavoidable whenever a partial thesis is proposed as the essence of absolute truth.

Such sleight of hand denies an antithesis to a thesis, making any synthesis impossible. There is nothing to synthesise. The balance no longer works, and doctrine is split into mutually exclusive aspects.

Thus the business of heretical sectarianism is choosing the fragments it finds attractive. On the other hand, the business of catholic orthodoxy consisted from the very beginning in gathering together all the pieces in their wholeness.

However, in trying to achieve this goal, the Church laid itself open to subsequent attacks launched by critics, from the early heretics to Calvin, from Wycliffe to Hus, from Luther to Jansen. With varying justification, such critics could always find the everyday practices of the Church wanting when held up against the absolute ideal put forth in, say, the Sermon on the Mount.

That has been either the nature or at least the tactic of most schisms and all reformations, including the one we spell with a capital ‘R’. And even when they weren’t officially declared to be heretical, they all used the heretic stratagem of placing too much emphasis on one or a few things at the expense of the balance among all.

However, had the Church not found such a balance, Christianity would now be remembered at best as a timid attempt to reform Judaism in the early days of the Roman Empire.

It wouldn’t have become a world religion, and neither would it have had the chance to create history’s greatest civilisation. Therein lies the strength of the Church. But therein also lies its weakness. For, trying to adapt to the relative imperfection of human nature, the Church itself had to become relatively imperfect.

Also, trying to fashion a religion that could thrive among peoples of different history, culture and national character, Christianity had to adapt more and more to the local conditions, especially as the monolithic Roman world was dissolving into separate nations.

Here the inherent Christian universalism was invaluable: at every critical point, when the world is being put asunder, people need a unifying religion where, in St Paul’s words, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek… for ye are all one in Jesus Christ.’          

Had the church been able to prevail over the atomising tendencies of individuals and nations, much grief could have been avoided. Yet it wasn’t always able to do so, and increasingly it wasn’t people who had to adapt to Christianity, but Christianity that had to adapt to them.

Adapting to the character of each nation meant at least slightly varying its own character from one geographical location to the next. As indirect proof of this, the Venerable Bede, England’s first historian, testifies that already by his time (d. 735) the barely post-natal English Church had already acquired traits peculiar to it, long before the great schism occurred.

The underlying faith of, say, an Englishman, a Gaul and a Corinthian was the same. But, when their cultural idiosyncrasies came into play, it was a safe bet that their religions wouldn’t remain exactly the same in perpetuity. Thus an institution created to spread the absolute truth had to, by its very nature, overlay its mission with potentially deadly relativities.

That wasn’t just a rhetorical conundrum. It was a disaster waiting to happen. For, trying to be all things to all men, the Church had to delve deeper into worldly matters than was good for it. That made it vulnerable to worldly criticism first and savage attacks second.

Those were launched by people who either couldn’t grasp the delicate nature of the balance maintained by the Church or hated that balance because it took something away from one or two things they held as paramount. That was heresy in action, and Luther, Zwingli, Calvin et al. were heresy personified.

They didn’t quite succeed in their mission of destroying the Church. But they did manage to split away from it. The house was divided against itself, and it could no longer stand as tall. A button was pushed for a gradual marginalisation of Christianity as a social, intellectual, moral and aesthetic dynamic.

In the subsequent centuries Protestantism proved its inherently factious nature by splitting into hundreds, some say thousands, of heretical sects, each celebrating Christ in, to be kind, rather idiosyncratic ways. Not only each sect but also each adherent is invited to have his own take on doctrine – to a point where the doctrine becomes unrecognisable.

So yes, perhaps I’m indeed mean-spirited and therefore a lousy Christian. But to me Christianity is inseparable from Church doctrine, which Protestantism has been systematically destroying for centuries by thousands of pinpricks.

In the good Christian tradition, I love Protestants as men and women, while detesting their heretical cults. (I could say the same about socialists and any number of other secular deviants, but won’t because that would be off my subject today.)