Book Study The Great Heresies By Hilaire Belloc Chapter 2 The Scheme of This Book

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 4^th century and into the 5^th 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 7^th 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 (12^th and 13^th 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 19^th and early 20^th 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.