The Great Heresies
by Hilaire Belloc
Chapter 2: The Scheme of This Book
* View
Heresies as attacks on the Catholic Church (except for the Moslem and modern
attacks)
* their
failure and causes of their failure
* the
present struggle and the survival of the Church in the culture which she
created and which is abandoning her. The
reason for the view of attack of the Church is because it is the institution
proclaiming itself today the sole authoritative and divinely appointed teacher
of essential morals and essential doctrine.
He makes a distinction between two arguments:
1.
The historicity of the church and its claims,
namely the claim of the authority to declare what are the morals that should be
followed
2.
the validity of
those claims
Whether the claim be true or
false has nothing whatever to do with its historical origin and
continuity. (p10) This organism that
makes this claim and has done for 2000 years is The Church.
Against this claim
(authority) are 5 main attacks. He
chooses 5 because they exemplify the framework of all of the attacks. They are discussed in historical order in
which they occurred.
1.
The Arian,
2. The Mohammedan, 3. The Albigensian,
4. The Protestant, 5. “The Modern”
1.
The Arian
proposed a change of fundamental doctrine.
Had this change prevailed, the whole nature of the religion would have
been transformed. It would also have
failed.
· This heresy lasted through the 4th century
and into the 5th century.
· It proposed to attack the authority of the church by
attacking the Divinity of Jesus
· More serious to the attack is its underlying motive
was a rationalizing of the mystery upon which the Church bases herself; they
mystery of the Incarnation.
· Arianism was in fact an attack on the difficulties
attached to mysteries as a whole thought though the way to attack all mysteries
is to attack the first and fundamental mystery.
· It was an attack against the supernatural. By removing the supernatural one withdraws
from religion all that by which religion lives.
2.
The Mohammedan (began in the 7th
century from Mecca and Medina) attack was different in that it was
geographically outside the area of Christendom.
It was a “foreign enemy” It was not a new religion attacking the old, it
was a Heresy but from the circumstances of its birth it was a heresy alien
rather than intimate. It threatened the
Church by invasion rather than from within.
3.
The Albingensian (12th and 13th centuries in Southern France) attack
was but the chief of a great number of all which drew their source from the
Manichean conception of a duality in the Universe;
· The conception that good and evil are ever struggling
as equals and,
· That the Omnipotent (unlimited) Power is neither
single nor beneficent (charitable)
· Matter is evil
· All pleasure, especially of the body, is evil
· This was an attack upon morals more than on doctrine
· It was like a cancer from within the Church, producing
a life of its own that was antagonistic to the life of the Church
4.
The Protestant (The Reformation Period was from 1517-1648) attack differed from the rest
especially in characteristic,
· It did not promulgate new doctrine or a new authority
· It made no attempt to create a new church
· It had as its own principle the denial of unity
· It had as its goal to change that which a “Church” in
the old sense of the word-that is, as an infallible, united, teaching body, a
Person speaking with Divine authority—should be denied
· It was not arguing doctrine (at least in the
beginning)
· It was a denial of the authority of the Church to
claim and advance doctrine with a unique authority
· Two protestants may affirm contradictory doctrines
from each other but remain “Protestant” because they are communicating in the
fundamental conception that the Church is not a visible, definable and a united
personality, that there is no central infallible authority, and that therefore
each is free to choose his own set of doctrines.
· So, the Protestant protests two things; the denial of
unity (One Church) and the denial of that one Church’s claim of authority
5.
The Modern
(emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) might
have been called “alogos” for those who belittled or denied, the divinity of
Christ even as they called themselves Christian. People used to feel about this type of
rationalism the same way we feel about a color-blind man, that they have
something missing in their ability to apprehend (understand). Positivism is another descriptive word
because the modern movement relies on things that can be proved by experiment
· That only is true which can be appreciated by the
senses and subjected to experiment.
· That what can be believed is what can be measured and
tested by repeated (trial.
· Religious affirmations are thought to be illusions
· God itself and all that follows on it is man-made and
a figment of the imagination
To concentrate our attention on
each in turn teaches us
· The character of our religion
· The strange truth that men cannot escape sympathy with
it or hatred of it
· This study of 5 sums up all the directions from which
assault can be delivered against the Faith
· It is the nature of the Church to provoke the anger
and attack of the world
Belloc differentiates between
the heresies and the schisms. Schisms
are an attack on the life of the Church as are the heresies; the greatest
schism of all, the Greek or Orthodox, which has produced the Greek or Orthodox
communion is manifestly a disruption of our strength. But, he still separates
them and decides to discuss the heresies.
