Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  The Catholic definition of heresy was not limited to those who committed overt actions against Christians or Christian institutions; thinking differently, and refusing to accept the authority of the Roman church, was all it took to be stigmatized—first by the church, then by the state. The continued existence of a heretical group implied the legitimacy of a valid alternative within a given society, and that was as unacceptable to the Catholic Church as it had been to the ancient Israelites and would be in future Calvinist and Muslim theocracies.

  The numerous religious movements considered heretical by the Church of Rome, even when confined to the first five centuries of Christianity, would provide (and have provided) material for a very large library. Dissident movements that flourished in the fourth and fifth centuries are of particular interest, because they were thriving, and attracting converts, at precisely the moment when the state weighed in on behalf of Catholicism. There would never be another time, until the post-Enlightenment world, when a new religion could be founded in the West without antagonizing an existing theocratic state. Even after the Enlightenment, new faiths often faced stringent social opposition. That people went right on founding new religions is a tribute to the irrepressibility of both heresy (let us call it “thinking differently”) and the vainglorious prophetic impulse. Did Joseph Smith, when he walked into the woods in upstate New York in the 1820s and came back with wondrous tales of the golden tablets he had received from the Angel Moroni, differ in any fundamental way from the disciples who saw Jesus on the road to Emmaus after he had died on the cross and been buried? Was Smith’s story any more or less plausible than the narrative of Manicheans who believed that the actions of men on earth poured light into the heavens?

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  Two of the most consequential Christian sects anathematized by the Roman church and state were Donatism and Pelagianism. These heresies are little-known today to anyone other than dedicated theological scholars, although the issues they raised (like those emphasized by the better-known Manicheans) continue to crop up in debate over religion. The Donatists, who outnumbered Catholics in North Africa until the religious balance of power was transformed by successive invasions and immigration of Muslims in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, were obsessed with the high degree of purity and goodness that they considered essential to salvation. Pelagianism, even though its founder was a devout Christian from Britain, breathed religious air that contained a sulfurous whiff of what would be called secularism today, especially in its premise that humans alone are responsible for their moral decisions. In very different ways, both sects embodied many of the conflicts over conversion and religious liberty that would characterize Western culture for the next fifteen hundred years. The church rejected the right of such faiths to exist, or seek converts, whether the sects considered themselves Christian or not.

  Some heretics who considered themselves “the true Christians” were just as adamant as Catholics about equating conversion to another sect with treason. Donatists required that any Roman Catholic who converted to their sect be rebaptized. They had no tolerance for any members—especially the clergy—who joined the Roman camp, whether the deserters had been convinced by the charismatic sermons of bishops like Augustine or because they saw the political handwriting on the wall in the pro-Catholic decrees of Christian emperors. In 404, the Donatist bishop of the city of Bagai in southern Numidia (today’s Algeria) was attacked by members of his congregation and left for dead after he defected to the Roman Catholic camp. Unfortunately for his former congregants, the bishop survived and sought to punish them through an imperial court. It proved to be a case supporting the adage “Ask and ye shall receive.” In 405, the Roman court classified the Donatists as heretics, making them subject to all of the provisions of the Theodosian code restricting the practice of non-Catholic religions. The Donatist church was officially outlawed, although Donatists were not—not exactly—forced to join the Catholic Church. Technically, their bishops were supposed to be removed and the Catholic Church was to take over their congregations. Imagine what a joyful task it must have been for a Catholic bishop to walk into a Donatist congregation in Carthage or Alexandria and tell people who considered themselves true Christians that their absent bishop was a heretic and they were, too, unless they immediately adopted an attitude of “out with the old, in with the new!”

  The rupture between the Donatists and the Roman Catholics, which dated from the period when Donatist pastors and bishops had refused to surrender their sacred scriptures to Diocletian, was both bureaucratic and philosophical. In 311, just a year after the persecutions ended, the first dispute between the two groups came to a head. Caecilian, the bishop of Carthage, had been ordained by one of the bishops who had handed over his sacred books to be burned by Diocletian’s minions. Because of his predecessor’s sin, Caecilian’s ordination was considered invalid by those who had taken a posture of absolute resistance to Diocletian. The Numidian bishops replaced him with another bishop, Donatus, after whom the sect would henceforth be called. Although this sounds like nothing more than a power grab, a deeper issue underlay the split. Donatists believed that the validity of the sacraments depended on the sanctity of those administering the sacred rites; hence, a man ordained by one who had committed treason against the faith by surrendering his books to the state had lost all claim to being a valid representative of Jesus, in a line of descent traced to the apostles. For Catholics, by contrast, the authority of the church and the validity of its sacraments did not depend on the sanctity of the priest, even though he was considered a mediator between God and man. The fundamental question was whether a sinner could transmit grace to other believers. Augustine was the most forceful exponent of the doctrine (as it was soon to be declared by Rome) that the validity of sacraments had nothing to do with the moral probity of priests. In Confessions, we also find an early hint of Augustine’s eventual acceptance of the necessity of coercion—whether to reconcile a schismatic group like the Donatists to the true church or an individual to God. Referring to Manicheism, Augustine writes about having influenced a dear friend “to believe in the same superstitious, soul-destroying fallacies which brought my mother to tears over me.” The friend, however, was pursued by a “god of vengeance” and fell ill from a fever. Expected to die, he was baptized (by whom, Augustine does not say) as he lay unconscious. At the time, Augustine assumed that this forced baptism, over which his friend had no control, would mean nothing if he recovered.

  …I chose to believe that his soul would retain what it had learnt from me, no matter what was done to his body when it was deprived of sense. But no such thing happened. New life came into him and he recovered. And as soon as I could talk to him—which was as soon as he could talk to me, for I never left his side since we were so dependent on each other—I tried to chaff him about his baptism, thinking that he too would make fun of it, since he had received it when he was quite incapable of thought or feeling. But by this time he had been told of it. He looked at me in horror as though I were an enemy, and in a strange, new-found attitude of self-reliance he warned me that if I wished to be his friend, I must never speak to him like that again.2

  Augustine’s friend then had a relapse and died. By the time he wrote Confessions, Augustine found the forced baptism a source of deep spiritual consolation. Since the friend had died in a state of grace—even though, had he been in his right mind, he would have not consented to baptism in the first place—Augustine might meet him again in the next world.*3 And if the validity of a sacrament does not depend on the conscious, active consent of the recipient, how much less could it depend on the moral perfection of the priest administering the rites of the church? Sanctity and authority rest in the church itself, not in its fallible administrators and messengers. (I suspect that I would have been on Augustine’s side on the latter point had I been alive and Christian in the fifth century. The human fallibility of priests and bishops, whether considered apostolic successors or not, must have been as o
bvious to Christians then as it is to Christians today. I have not heard of any mass movement demanding rebaptism for Catholics who discover that they may have been christened by a pedophile priest.)

  The other issue between Donatist Christians and Catholics was the proper relationship to the larger society and the state, and this offers a perfect example of the relevance of early heresies to modern disputes over the same subject. The Donatists saw themselves as a saving remnant, a pure (or purer) group that could only be corrupted by association with the state. The Catholic Church saw itself as a part of society and as a transformative force; thus, its leaders were not only able but eager to form alliances with the state and its rulers. In this context, it is easy to understand why the Catholics won out. Nondemocratic states and rulers favor religions and religious leaders who want to cooperate with the governing authorities in return for the secular government’s enforcement of their religious beliefs. The Donatists, like dissenting Quakers, Baptists, and Anabaptists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wanted nothing from the government except to be let alone. Roman emperors were always coming to the rescue of Roman Catholicism when it could not win over “heretics” by persuasion. With regard to religious conflict, the rulers of a declining empire played the role of a judge ordering an unhappy wife who has left her husband to return or face being flogged and stripped of her possessions and means of support.

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  Pelagianism, also a genuinely significant movement representing a breach within Christianity in Augustine’s time, takes its name from Pelagius, the teacher from Britannia who had the temerity to reject the doctrine of original sin. Although Pelagius is often called a monk by scholars (including Augustine), he never calls himself a monk in his writings, which stress the role of the Christian layman as teacher. He repeatedly cites Paul’s allusions to the duty of all Christians to instruct one another and rejects the church’s emphasis on the exclusive teaching authority of the clergy.*4 (This could be the reason Augustine calls Pelagius a monk while disputing his ideas. Pelagius was definitely not a priest, but the idea that a mere layman’s ideas could be worthy of refutation may have been distasteful to Augustine.)

  We know little about Pelagius’s life before he turned up in Rome, around 400. When he did look into the heart of the empire and the aspiring heart of the church, his reaction seems to have resembled that of Jimmy Stewart’s character in the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Here were men claiming to be the direct successors of the apostles while living sumptuously and co-opting imperial officials (and, in many instances, being co-opted by them) for financial and political gains that had little to do with faith and goodness. Yet Pelagius also moved in highly educated circles, including laymen and scholarly monks who debated and wrote about theological issues (such as original sin) that were already resolved as far as many clerics, intellectual or not, were concerned. Pelagius believed in the Christian God as devoutly as Augustine, but he did not believe that God’s grace or withholding of grace determined the actions of men.

  Adam’s fall was not the cause of man’s sinfulness, Pelagius asserted: each human being is solely responsible for his virtues and vices. Nor is death the penalty for original sin, as traditional Christian theology maintains. Adam was nothing more or less than a man, and he would have died whether he sank his teeth into the fruit of the tree of knowledge or not. Poor Pelagius! Small wonder that he was condemned by more church councils than any other heretic of the pre-medieval Christian era. His analysis belongs much more to the history of skepticism and humanism than to the history of faith, although he certainly—like the Donatists—considered himself a “true Christian.” However, Pelagianism proved far more important than Donatism in the intellectual long term—notwithstanding the larger number of Donatists in late antiquity. Pelagius was concerned with what it means to be human and how much God has or does not have to do with the choices humans make, for good or for evil.

  Pelagius’s assertion that human choices are determined not by original sin or by divine grace but by each human being might well be described as the ultimate heresy—hence, the condemnation by so many Vatican councils and by theologians ranging from Augustine to far-right evangelical Protestants today. As one conservative evangelical scholar puts it, “It is this heresy that lies at the bottom of much of popular psychology (human nature, basically good, is warped by its environment), political crusades (we are going to bring about salvation and revival through this campaign), and evangelism and church growth (seeing conversion as a natural process, just like changing from one brand of soap to another).”3 This commentator makes Pelagius sound like a fifth-century Rousseau, and nothing could have been further from the truth. Pelagius’s concern about the impact of the physical environment on humanity’s moral choices has led some commentators on the religious left to see him as a prototype of nineteenth-century Christian Socialists—in its own way, as ludicrously anachronistic a conclusion as the idea that he believed in man as a noble savage. Pelagius was influenced by the many ascetic movements of his time, but he advocated a more moderate form of asceticism than either the Manichees or, to cite a Christian example, Jerome. Pelagius’s view of wealth and poverty might be summed up with one word—enough. He believed neither in the exaltation of riches nor in the passive notion that “the poor ye shall always have with you.” Although Pelagius did believe that a corrupt environment corrupted its inhabitants, he held humans solely responsible for the quality of the environment they established—a view that, it must be emphasized, does no better than original sin in attempting to lay the theodicy problem to rest. Pelagius’s most consistent position was his belief in the capabilities of man and woman—he clearly took women’s intellectual and spiritual faculties seriously—and his refusal to assign blame or credit to the supernatural.

  “Whenever I have to speak of laying down rules for behavior and the conduct of a holy life,” he wrote Demetrias, a young woman from an old and noble Roman family who had decided to become a nun, “I always point out, first of all, the power and functioning of human nature, and show what it is capable of doing…lest I should seem to be wasting my time, by calling on people to embark on a course which they consider impossible to achieve.”4 In the same letter, Pelagius elaborated on his belief that, although God had endowed humans with the intelligence and understanding to choose between good and evil, He wants our choices to be the product of our own reason rather than fear of his punishments—“volutarium, non coactum.” God wants the fulfillment of His plans to come from our own willing collaboration, not the divine will. God wants a lot: in the Pelagian philosophy, He wants to have it both ways. It is obvious that Pelagius was no more successful than Augustine and his orthodox contemporaries in his effort to reconcile free will with divine power. What separates him from the rest is a much higher opinion of human capacities; the balance in Pelagian thought is tilted in favor of human reason rather than divine intervention through grace. A man or woman might seek divine grace but cannot rely on it to ensure a sound moral life. Nor, in the Pelagian scheme of things, may human beings blame the evil they do on the Divinity’s withholding of grace.

  Pelagius’s rejection of original sin also calls into question the doctrine of Christ’s death on the cross as a onetime atonement for the curse inflicted on all men by Adam. “If mankind’s sin is, so to speak, not solid but atomic,” he argues, “there can be no single and solid act of redemption for mankind en bloc.”5 For Pelagius, it is the earthly example of Jesus—not his death—that makes the Christian religion worthwhile. This emphasis on Jesus’s earthly good works rather than his death points in the opposite direction from the Nicene Creed and every doctrine that revolves around Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection.

  Augustine, who also knew the aristocratic family of the nun Demetrias, recognized the Pelagian threat immediately when he learned of Pelagius’s letter to Demetrias. Augustine wrote to Demetrias’s mother, Juliana, to assert “that the virtues of Demetrias, great and outstanding
as they were, did not come from her own strength, but were the gift of God: she must be humble and honour the Savior to whom she alone owed her high merits.”6 He also warned Juliana that an inflated opinion of human reason and capacity for good could lead men and women to deny the need for prayer and divine guidance. Why ask God for anything if you have the power to choose good on your own? Augustine must have been on close terms with Juliana to send her such a letter, but scholars report that she cooled considerably toward the bishop of Hippo after receiving this unsought advice. It is a rare mother who wants to hear that her daughter’s excellence comes not from her own independent mind and spirit, not from her upbringing in a learned and devout family, but from an outsider—even if the outsider is, as in this case, God Himself.

  There is another element distinguishing Pelagius from the orthodox fathers of the church: a sense of humor. Regarding original sin, the bête noire that led to his condemnation at so many church councils, he remarked, “There are enough things for which we are morally accountable, without blaming us for the things for which we are not.”7

  There is a tendency on the part of all who have a passion for the past to cherry-pick aspects of biography that mesh with the authors’ views. This human shortcoming of historians, which only divine grace might be capable of eliminating, can lead to awful anachronisms of the sort that would turn Augustine into a repressed homosexual and Pelagius into an Enlightenment philosopher or a Marxist. Of the two, Augustine is the religious rock star, because Catholicism won out. Pelagius was nothing more or less than a brilliant philosopher speaking for a part of Christianity that was suppressed for a millennium. If he is a precursor of anyone or anything, it is of Erasmus and Christian humanism. The probative evidence of Pelagius’s humanism, and a reason for profound regret that he was on the heretical losing side, is that the possibility of moral justification for forced conversions never seems to have occurred to him. He is another figure thrown by the wayside in the Christian narrative, for his brand of early humanism could never have led to a union of government force and religious faith. If the writings of Pelagius had been handed down through generations of Christians, as Augustine’s were, the road of Christianity might have taken a detour around both the Spanish Inquisition and Calvin’s Geneva. Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?