Heretic!

I've been meaning to read some of Hilaire Belloc's work for years now and I finally got around to getting one of his books from the library. (No, I'm not talking about the magnificent book of children's poems, Cautionary Tales for Children. Though I read that too and I'll have a brief notice later.) The book I read was The Great Heresies, which was written in 1938. That's germane because I think his opinions on heresies may have undergone some revision had he lived to see the changes of Vatican II.

In his book Belloc names 5 great heresies. In his writing, Catholicism is synonymous with Christianity and anything other than Catholicism is not rightfully called Christianity. He deals with ideas he considers to be heretical to Christian belief. Those are, in chronological order, Arianism, Islam (which he calls "Mohammedanism"; and since I think it is a better term I will use it from here on as well), Albigensianism, the Reformation (Protestantism) and Modernism. This last he notes is not a specific or general heresy in the form of the other four, but a competing idea which seeks nothing less than the destruction of Christianity. (He differentiates this from Mohammedanism since he thinks Mohammedanism is fundamentally derivative of Christianity and is thus a corruption rather than something entirely other.)

Meet me on the flip side for more details and quotations!
I'm going to leave Arianism to one side since it is far less of a force than it was and the idea that Christ was less than fully human and fully divine has been discarded by all serious and numerous Christian bodies for centuries.

The Manichean dualism of Albigensianism is more prevalent today, but seems to me to be found mostly among those who are not at all serious about their Christian faith. That is, is occurs among people who profess a belief in God but do little in the way of finding out about him and what to do about said belief. It is the refuge of the unserious Christian and probably goes hand in hand with the remnants of the Arian heresy since, as Belloc notes, the association of the good with the spiritual runs with Albigensianism. I'll leave that for now as well.

Modernism, which Belloc would probably have agreed is essentially synonymous with multi-culturalism, had he known the term, is one on which I've written before and deserves more space than I'm going to give it here. He refers to this as a danger because it seeks to eliminate anything that holds itself out as exclusive and true. I'm going to quote at length, because I think this is important.

You will find people saying on every side that the Bolshevist movement (for instance) is "definitely anti-Christian"--"opposed to every form of Christianity"--and must be "resisted by all Christians irrespective of the particular Church to which each may belong", and so on.

Speech and writing of this kind are futile because they mean nothing definite. There is no such thing as a religion called "Christianity"--there never has been such a religion.

There is and always has been the Church, and various heresies proceeding from a rejection of some of the Church's doctrines by men who still desire to retain the rest of her teachings and morals. But there never has been and never can be or will be a general Christian religion professed by men who all accept some central important doctrines, while agreeing to differ about others. There has always been, from the beginning, and will always be, the Church, and sundry heresies either doomed to decay, or, like Mohammedanism, to grow into a separate religion. Of a common Christianity there has never been and can never be a definition, for it has never existed.

I think he has that almost right. I'd consider the Catholic Church (if you'll allow me the term) to be a heresy (popes and all), but what Belloc is saying is correct as far as it goes. One cannot compromise on doctrine. I can consider someone a fellow Christian if he approves or disapproves of instrumental music in worship because that isn't a point of doctrine for me. But he cannot consider me a fellow believer if it is a point of his doctrine. Belloc's point about the modern attack is that it refuses to be separate from the Church. It insists not only that the Church is wrong, but that the Church must change. A current example would be the efforts of homosexuals, not only to be different, but to insist that everyone else acquiesce in acknowledging that it is well and good for them to be different as they are.

Belloc later writes "The modern attack will not tolerate us. It will attempt to destroy us. Nor can we tolerate it. We must attempt to destroy it as being the fully equipped and ardent enemy of the Truth by which men life. The duel is to the death." And he's quite right.

I feel that I ought to write a lot more about this; the book was very interesting and engaging, though I disagreed with much of it. It's worth reading if only to see his outline about what the Reformation was and why it sprang up. He even claims that the Reformation has run its course, has lost all its vigour and will shortly disappear. Interestingly, he takes this as being so obvious that he doesn't support it very much. I'd be interested in his reasons for that if anyone knows where such things are to be found. But I've rambled on long enough, anyone interested in Christian history and/or heresies would be well-advised to pick it up.