I approach this topic neither as an ecclesiastical
historian nor as a theologian, but as a literary critic. Whether a given human belief is objectively
“true,” it is always meaningful as an image, a symbol, a shadowing forth of
character and desire. In the ferment of
the early centuries of Christianity, as the new belief supplanted ancient
practices, a range of opinion blossomed, fascinating both as speculation and as
spectacle. In the mere listing of the
names of heretical schools I find an incantatory power. A romance, too, lingers about the ghosts of a
thousand lost causes. May this minimal
survey summon a whiff of such old and wandering spirits momentarily reanimated,
perhaps, by the reader’s sympathetic
mind!
Theological
essays find few readers today even among believers. The issues that once aroused fierce passions,
energetic contentions, and, at times, persecution and war, seem to make little
difference in the contemporary world. As
increasing numbers abandon organized religion altogether, the differences among
sects or even belief systems seem less significant than what they share. An expanded sense of “many mansions” informs
the more liberal even among many whose creeds demand exclusivity. The details of belief that once meant
everything now seem all but inconsequential.
In the Christian
church’s early centuries, before the great councils that formed an orthodoxy of
settled dogma, great ferment surrounded theological issues. The word heresy is derived from αἵρεσις,
meaning “choice” or “thing chosen,” originally with no anathema attached. In the beginning before the enforcement of
uniformity in the Christian community there was a broad spectrum of views from
which to select that most fitting to the devotee’s spiritual needs, Due to relentless persecution by those
espousing majority views, most of the writing by these early heretics have
vanished and their views can only be reconstructed with the aid of the hostile
arguments of their opponents, most significantly Irenaeus in the second century
and Epiphanius two hundred years later.
Amid the confusing
proliferation of beliefs during this period, several common areas of
controversy emerged. Gnostics at first
questioned the authority of the god of the Hebrew scriptures. The everlasting punishments of hell remained
a minority opinion for centuries. For
half a millennium and more clerics debated the enigmatic concept of the Trinity
and, in particular, the exact nature of Christ.
Most dramatically transgressing the orthodoxy
that eventually coalesced were the sects labeled Gnostic. Some were associated with Judaism, some with
Christianity, and some with paganism, yet the common name may be justified by
certain characteristics. In the gnostic
view, more dualistic than Christianity, the material world is inherently
sinful, the creation not of the Supreme Being but of a demiurge. The devotee’s goal is enlightenment and
passions are considered obstacles to knowledge rather than sins. Neoplatonism contributed substantially to
gnostic cosmologies and the movement tended to veer (like Tibetan Buddhism) toward
the esoteric and the mystical, including the construction of layers of mystical
beings between humanity and the true god.
Among the gnostic
peculiarities was a particular interest in Seth, Adam and Eve’s third son, who
was regarded as a forerunner of Christ and was made a model of wisdom and a
culture hero, responsible, according to Josephus, for many inventions and discoveries.
The gnostics were prone to the elaboration
of complex cosmological schemes unsupported by Hebrew scripture. In the Apocryphon of John attributed
to the apostle (2nd c. C.E.) Ultimate Reality is the Monad, an
utterly transcendent deity, who produces as a “first thought” an Aeon, or
emanation of the divine, a female (or sometimes androgynous) entity called
Barbelo. A series of further Aeons are
then created, one of whom, Sophia of Epinoia (“wisdom of thought or insight”) goes
rogue, creating a demiurge called Yaltabaoth without the Monad’s oversight. Sophia realizes the transgressive character of
Yaltabaoth and conceals its existence, thus causing the created world to be
ignorant of its source the Monad.
Related sects
propounded a variety of such creative systems.
The Archontics and Borborites imagined eight archon-governed heavens;
the seventh ruled by Sabaoth, the Hebrew god whom they depicted as an ass or a
hog. According to Epiphanius they used
menstrual blood and semen in their eucharist.
The significance
of similar trends in early Christian thought is apparent in the fact that the
gnostic theologian Valentinus was, according to Tertullian, at one time
considered for the position of bishop. His numerous followers opposed the efforts of
their opponents to expel them from Christian communities. Valentinus claimed to be transmitting an
esoteric doctrine that had passed from Paul the Apostle through Theudas to
him. Valentinus described the Aeons and
emanations and the world’s fall through the action of Sophia, importing
Platonic terms to distinguish spiritual and material worlds.
The Gospel of
Truth is a Valentinian apocryphal text that attributes the creation to the Aeons
and characterizes Christ’s crucifixion as Error’s attempt to maintain
ignorance. The book also contains an
exposition of the esoteric name of Christ, an example of the numerology and
esoteric analysis of letters that became common in later Gnosticism. The Marcosians, for instance, built on
earlier Hebrew and Pythagorean systems to investigate the mystic meaning of
numbers, using, in particular, the method of isopsephy, adding the figures
associated with the letters of a word to get a significant sum. A student of Valentinus named Colarbasus
maintained that study of the esoteric implications of the Greek alphabet could
reveal all truth.
Basilides led
another second century gnostic cult which is said to have followed the
Pythagoreans (and more distant Hindus and Buddhists) in proposing
metempsychosis. Like other gnostics
Basilides considered that salvation was a matter of knowledge rather than
faith, and that souls advanced through a series of lives. Thus his followers thought that Christian
martyrs were simply working out the bad karma of an earlier life and were thus
unworthy of praise.
Similar ideas were
also circulating under the name of Marcion of Sinope, a second century
evangelist who claimed to be the transmitter of the doctrines of St. Paul whom
he considered the only true apostle.
Having been taught by a certain Cerdo, a follower of Simon Magus (who
was himself said to fly). Marcion, too, distinguished
a supreme being associated with Christ’s unbounded love from a lesser creator
called Yahweh by the Jews ruling the temporal world. Marcion produced a book, the Antitheses,
which sought to demonstrate the incompatibility of the two by contrasting
parallel passages of Hebrew and Greek scriptures. For him Christ was fully divine and his appearance
before people was an illusion, a view called Docetism. For a considerable time Marcionite
congregations spread and flourished, for a time rivaling the orthodox.
Jewish texts
prior to a few hundred years B. C. E. promise no afterlife; the strongest hints
of such a notion are in Daniel, a book atypical in language and
content. Many early Christians expected
the Apocalypse to overtake the world at any moment, rendering any individual
death incidental, but passages such as “And these shall go away into
everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (Matthew
25:46) clearly anticipate individual judgement resulting in rewards or
retribution. According to a recent
study (Bart Ehrman’s Heaven And Hell: A History Of The Afterlife), the
idea of heaven and hell, absent in mainstream Jewish thought in which body and
soul were identified and the end of one implied the end of the other, actually
derived from Greek influence.
The fact is that
belief in eternal punishment after death was a minority opinion in early
Christianity. For influential
theologians such as Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Gregory of Nyssa hell
was a temporary purgation which purified the soul prior to its entry into
heaven. Of the six major schools of
thought in early Christianity, four (those centered in Alexandria, Antioch,
Caesarea, and Edessa) were universalist, that is, they believed in the ultimate
salvation of every soul. This belief was
founded on passages such as “For the Lord will not cast off for ever”
(Lamentations 3:31) and “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be
made alive.” (1 Corinthians 15:22) The
dogma of a permanent hell did not appear until the pseudo-Athanasian Creed and
universalism is not condemned until the Second Council of Constantinople in 533
C. E. Belief in universal salvation (or
apokatastasis) persisted, for instance in the work of St. Isaac the Syrian
during the 7th century and never really vanished in spite of the
church’s opposition, resulting in the nineteenth century founding of the
American Universalist Church.
The most tangled
and perplexing disputes arose over the character of the Trinity and in particular
the nature of Christ. Those defending
what came to be orthodox interpretations had to confront two paradoxes: first,
the claim that Christianity is monotheistic while recognizing three divine
persons, and, second, the claim that Christ is both god and human at the same
time. A great range of interpretations
sought to make sense of this unique and ungainly concept. A good many gods had been thought to appear
in human form while remaining fully gods, a sort of disguise that in
Christianity became the heresy of Docetism, the notion that Christ on earth was
a sort of illusion, only appearing to be like other people while in fact
omnipotent and unlimited. On the other
hand, the Audians thought that not Christ alone but god himself had a physical
human form and thus were also called Anthropomorphites.
The problems of
this complex of conundrums were evaded by those called Monarchianists who urged
the sole power of God the Father. Some
asserted an Adoptionist view (also called psilanthropist), claiming that Christ
was a virtuous mortal who had been selected by God as his agent. Among these were the vegetarian Ebionites and
the Valentinian gnostics who followed Theodotus’ teaching that, while Christ
was born of a virgin, he had received the Holy Spirit only at the time of his
baptism and had become wholly divine only upon his resurrection. Other
Monarchianists favored the Modalism of Sabellius who argued that God was a
single person and that the three “persons” are in fact only three “modes,”
aspects or roles of one agent. As this
view maintains Christ’s total divinity, he cannot have suffered or died as
people do.
The most
influential heretic who privileged God the Father over Christ was Arius, a
writer from Cyrenaica (today Libya) who thought that Christ had not always
existed and does not share the essence or nature of God the Father but is
instead one of his works. This group
itself split into a more moderate faction, sometimes labeled semi-Arians, that
described Christ’s nature as “similar” to God the Father or “homoiousian” and
those who maintained that there was no likeness, the Anomoeans (also called Heterousians). Varieties of Arianism were adopted by the
Germanic tribes and persisted until the late seventh century.
In the fourth
century Bishop Macedonius of Constantinople argued against the divinity of the
Holy Spirit, saying that it had been created by the Son. The supporters of this view were called Pneumatomachi,
“those who battle the spirit” in the Hellespont area and Tropici in Egypt.
Monophysites for
whom Christ had only a single divine nature lasted far longer, indeed into the
present day (as the Miaphysites of the Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, and Syrian
Orthodox churches). So-called “real” Monophysites adhered to the
teaching of Eutyches of Constantinople that Christ’s unitary nature combined
human and divine, but the divine so dominated as to absorb or transmute the
human element. Some, favoring the view
of Severus the Great that while Christ’s body was corruptible, he nonetheless
had a single nature, were known as “verbal” Monophysites. Endless regional political relationships as
well as philosophical hair-splitting resulted in the Acephali, the Agnoetae, the
Aphthartodocetae, the Apollinarians. In
the sixth century Monophysitism dominated the eastern empire under the
patronage of Justinian’s wife Theodora though the emperor himself was a
Chalcedonian.
Though the Sabellians,
Monarchians and Pneumatomachoi considered the orthodox Trinitarians to be in
fact “Tritheists,” believing in three gods (a view common among Muslims and
Jews today), at the Council of Chalcedon the Homoousians, those for whom God
and Christ had the same essence, won the day, defeating Monophysitism, Modalism,
Arianism, and Homoiousianism, and defining acceptable belief on the issue until
the Reformation.
This unsystematic
overview omits more than it contains. There
were those who welcomed new prophets, for instance, such as the followers of
Montanus and his female sybils, called Cataphrygians, whose activities included
ecstatic gatherings. The Ascitae, for
instance, danced around burst wine-skins, recalling practices of Pentecostals, Shakers,
and Hasidim.
Outsiders of all
sorts are often accused of antinomianism and especially with sexual
transgressions, Such claims are often made with little or no evidence, yet
unconventional sexual practices (sometimes exploitative) are common among
cults. Moderns will never know, for
instance whether the Nicolaitians (who are actually mentioned in the Christian
testament) indeed practiced promiscuity.
Epiphanius may have been maligning Deacon Nicolas when he quoted him as
saying "Unless one copulates every day, he cannot have eternal life."
Did the Carpocratians and the Phibionites also practice free love? Today the truth is obscure, impossibly jumbled with polemical
propaganda.
The corpus of
pseudepigrapha has increased significantly even in the last century. The Gospel of Thomas, in which Christ
dances with his followers like Krishna with the gopis, had long attracted
attention. The Gospel of Mary, a second century
text, narrates the exchanges of a certain Mary, variously identified as the
Mother of Christ, as Christ’s sister, and as Mary Magdelene, with skeptical
disciples including Peter and Andrew. In
the Sethian gnostic Gospel of Judas it appears Judas is the sole
confidant of Christ to whom he conveys an esoteric message: that liberation is
not enabled by his death which, like animal sacrifice and the “cannibalistic”
Eucharist, is abhorrent to a benevolent deity, but is rather available within
each soul through contemplative practices.
Many have seen a
kind of philosophia perennis underlying religious traditions in widely
separated parts of the world,
particularly in the records of mystics.
Yet spiritual experience is not independent of individual sensibility
and even taste. Each heretical opinion
reflects not so much a hermeneutic approach to scriptural authority as a style
of approach to the holy.
The gnostics
begin with revulsion, conceiving of the creation as a thing of evil, gone wrong
from the start, requiring the most rigorous efforts to overcome while promising
a potential reward in the end of enlightenment.
The Aeons and the rest of the
imagined cosmic machinery seem like baroque, over-elaborate decoration similar
to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite dreaming up nine orders of angels or the
fourteen worlds of the Puranas and the
Atharva Veda.
Clearly those who
reject the notion that eternal punishment awaits the unrighteous after death
are motivated by their loving kindness, which cannot conceive of an utterly
punitive deity.
The
Christological disputes arise from subjective spiritual experience. In Christianity the equivalent of
enlightenment is to locate in oneself what George Fox called “that of God in
every man.” Some, such as Meister
Eckhart, find at times what feels like a total identification. For others the divine remains largely Other,
to be propitiated with prescribed ceremony.
These opposed extremes allow as well countless intermediate positions.
Enforcement of
orthodoxy has mercifully become far less common than it once was, yet the
living ferment of religious experience within Christianity at any rate seems
torpid today, focused mainly on political issues of ethics. The breadth of spiritual choice, meanwhile,
has enlarged with the popularity of New Age and exotic beliefs, and the earnest
adoption of other people’s rituals.
Perhaps the most reasonable of arguments for the existence of god, the
argument from desire, maintains that since all people everywhere seek god, it
would be absurd if no such thing exists. Yet the splitting of sects in every tradition
indicates that a conviction of Ultimate Reality is only a beginning of a
definition, not of the divine in itself, but of the individual’s spiritual
desire.
