Can I borrow that strawman for an upcoming Hallowe’en decoration?
The specific sequence, here, was a reference by DaphneBlack to specific divergent beliefs in the second and third century that were fought with texts and sermons. You responded with a sarcastic reference to a crusade waged over a thousand years later in a way intended to directly contradict her post, not in a way that would indicate (correctly) that as the church acquired temporal power it abused that power. Since no one has argued that the church was “pure,” you are trying to make a case against an opposition that does not exist.
Since you are throwing everything including the kitchen sink into the discussion, I will make a couple of observations:
Most of the deaths in fourth century occurred during riots, not church-ordered persecutions. This is an extremely nasty and shameful part of church history, (one of which more Christians, particularly Catholics should be aware), demonstrating the sort of evils of religion so frequently pointed out by those who see religion, itself, as evil. However, it was not a matter of various bishops or councils ordering the deaths of those who were (in their eyes) “in the wrong”; it was a matter of having turned religion into a banner of parties in which mobs attempted to enforce “true” belief. When Durant and MacMullen point out the huge number of Christians who died at the hands of Christians, they are not claiming that the Orthodox Catholics were waging war on Arians, but that Orthodox Catholics and Arians were locked in a vicious combat that resulted in deaths on both sides. In towns where Orthodox Catholics predominated, Arians died; in towns where Arians predominated, Orthodox Catholics died, and in towns where the sides were generally evenly matched, both sides died and the towns were often destroyed in rioting. It is a shameful period. I am sure that Jesus wept. The actual events, however, are not those of Mighty Rome smashing hordes of people with variant beliefs. (In fact, Rome was not even involved in most of those battles which tended to occur at the East end of the Mediterranean or in North Africa.)
The case of Hypatia is another particularly shameful incident–one to which I have pointed in several earlier posts. However, the evidence seems to indicate that she was caught up in political disputes among factions in Alexandria. It is very shameful that the rioters were never brought to justice, but even those who assert a direct connection between Bishop Cyril and her death never suggest that the church officially took action against her. (In fact, she is one of the few pagans murdered in church-related activities in the years immediately following its legalization by Constantine. Christians outside Egypt generally condemned her death while apologists for the Egyptian church tended to excuse it.)
‘The Church’ is certainly not going to be defended by me. But it is worth realising that it was hardly a foregone conclusion that ‘the Church’ was going to ‘win’ in the earliest period - Arian Christians in the East and Donatist Christians (who were completely orthodox in practice, in fact) in North Africa had extended periods in which they were the majority. There was a great deal of violence on all sides. Religious minorities of all sorts were certainly coerced and persecuted throughout the period. As Tom~ points out, Rome was in fact a relatively minor player (especially compared to Constantinople). ‘The Church’ simply was a very different organism from in the 250-450s than it was after. That doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t acknowledge what happened in this period.
You seem to think that it is okay and natural to limit the debate to that Church-apologetic specificity. That is what I am denying. Repeating a rejected point over and over is getting none of us anywhere. It is just a typical trick of Church apologetics. I prefer my one battle in a wider war that was won by brute force approach and i’m satisfied from my own reserach that the Cathar dualism was just the latest manifestation of a dualist thread than ran counter to Christianity as defined by the early church and whose definition was enforced by fire and sword.
It ran through Byzantium, Armenia and the middle east and came through Bogolism back into Europe where political and social conditions allowed it to become enough of a visible threat again to be worth dealing with in the same way Catholicism had and continued to deal with doctrinal disputes. Force.
To treat Mani and any other specific dualist ‘ism’ as if they were standalone instances is intellectually niaive. We don’t treat any other intellectual tradition in this way - Platonicism isn’t reinvented with each neo-platonic school of thought, democracy isn’t invented anew each time the oppressed get uppity and I don’t see why dualism should be treated any differently. The doctrinal and organisational similarities between Catharism and Manicheanism are many and the lineage can be historically traced. They are similar partially because they were part of a wider dualist counter-current as the contents of the Nag Hammadi Library (hidden to avoid persecution by right-thinking christians) make clear.
The original inciting statement is only true in the very narrowest of senses but absurd in the context of church and western history. The struggle against dualism is the defining struggle of the early church, it is embodied in the life of Augustine and in the pages of the absurd theology of The City of God. You can’t just snip off Mani, isolate it from its forebears and progeny, remove it totally from context and then pretend the issue was settled over tea and scones. That is disenegenuous propaganda but par for the Catholic course, as illustrated by the Catholic Encyclopedia and the ‘Apologies’ of JP2 and their careful preservation of Church Infallibility by blame-shifting.
In reality many battles were fought in a wider war and it is the war that counts. And that war was not won by tracts it was won by force - of which the Cathar Crusades is the most horrifying example and which continued with the Inquisition.
That you can’t see what you are doing is an impressive testimonial to the grip of your religion. I’ve enjoyed the discussion and thanks for that but there’s no point any of us wasting our time debating this further.
The Roman Empire included Constantinople. I make no distinction. I’m sure you and Tomndebb don’t mean to be apologists but your statement was so narrow and so context-free that it was disengenuous, which I’m certain was not your intention but it was. And we can’t pretend that once a literalist christianity became the state religion it did not use state power as a weapon to win the war with dualism and against paganism. In that context I most certainly hold the Church directly responsible for the action of christian mobs. the rabble-rousing evil bigot Cyril and Alexandria being a case in point. And I note the Church just so disapproved of him that he is still a Saint today.
The Nicene version of the religion held the political influence to set a context of religious oppression and led by example and so it is simply disengenuous of it to claim it was not responsible for the actions of Christian mobs or christian emperors.
The only difference between the early church and the later church that I can see is that it became much more effective in mobilising state power to persecute its enemies.
Perhaps. Malcolm Lambert writing in his The Cathars ( 1998, Blackwell Publishers Ltd. ) disagrees. Quoting:
When, in the first half of the eleventh century, heresy did reappear in a series of episodes, often ill recorded in chronicles or the proceedings of Councils, Church authorities were alarmed and uncertain. From their book of knowledge, the heresy they knew best and feared most was Manichaeism…The heretics who were uncovered in these episodes were wquiet, puritannical groups, often strongly ascetic and dualistic in their teaching, inclining contemporaries brusquely to label them Manichaean.
and
It is clear that the heresies which began to appear from c.1000, so often labeled Manichee, had nothing to do with Mani and his movement, which had long died out in Western Europe. They were not the endpoint of a line of ancient heresy: their roots lie in the religious and social history of their own age. They were individualistic, sui generis, sporadic, the fruit of particular circumstances, coteries, isolated leaders. Each of the episodes has its own history and has required individual investigation. None, apparently, formed a lasting tradition: most were snuffed out and failed to survive the death or recantation of their leadership.
So it continues to be an area of at least some academic dispute.
I personally don’t find the sui generis argument untenable. Christianity having almost certainly adopted/absorbed the trappings or seeds of dualism from Zoroastrianism so long ago, I don’t find it unreasonable that individual groups could have quite independently jumped that little half-step to a more full blown manifestation of that concept. Heck, modern Evangelicals with their emphasis on the works of Satan seem halfway there themselves ;).
Alternatively, attacking a specific point in a discussion based on events that happened years after the specific event mentioned in the discussion is “typical” of arguments intended to condemn every event as if it was part of a monolithic institution that burst into history with every one of its conceivable faults fully formed by the middle of the first century.
I have not limited the debate so much as noted that your initial complaint was anachronistic.
I agree - it could go both ways but that is not what the debaters were saying. It was stated dogmatically that there was no connection. Your quote is also making the mistake of looking for a direct line between Mani and Cathars. All I, and those who see a continuation are saying, is that both are part of a dualistic view that never died out and a view the church never stopped fighting.
Dualism continued in the near east they argue, and in Armenia and was transmitted back into western europe via the Bogomils. The gnostic tradition was also one of ‘wandering bishops’ and they apparently
And I find that much more plausible, given what we know of cultural diffusion, that that is much more likely than the Cathar dualism having invented itself from whole cloth.
We’re quite happy to trace the ebb and flow of other ideas and movements across time and space without believing each instance is a local flowering and to me it is up to those making the exceptional claim that this was not the case here, to provide exceptional evidence. Of course the whole study is hampered by the whole ‘victors write history’ and the book and people-burning effectiveness of the church which has destroyed most of the evidence so that most of what we know of the history and beliefs of heretics come from the torture chambers and forked tongues of their catholic enemies.
My original point was only that to isolate one instance of the struggle of the literalist church against dualism and then say it was won by writing tracts is to so misrepresent the history of the church as to be disengenuous. Just to isolate Mani out of the context of the church’s wars against paganism and ‘heresies’ is an ideological act and a common tactic of the catholic church and its apologists.
I have no difficulty at all, particularly given the tradition of Wandering Bishops preserving alternative lines of apolostic succession, that dualist belief linked to manicheanism survived like seeds in dry sand in secret societies and sects, wisely keeping beneath the church’s eagerly seeking and unforgiving radar.
The fact that the church continued to knock out treateses against the Mani heresy suggests an active tradition to persecute and therefore lends further support to the notion that the Cathars have deep and continuing roots. In the light of all this I find the notion that the Cathar’s sprung whole and newly formed into the world, highly implausible and they were part of a dualist tradition, of which mani was also a part that never went away and the church never stopped persecuting.
Pricillian was burned around 380 for his dualist-tinged heresy and the byzantine empire thought throwing a Zorastrian on the barbie was particularly apposite. Justinian’s Codex Lustiniani laid down that death by fire was the punishment for heresy against the catholic church in the 6th century and this was ratifying earlier emperor’s decrees. It is just undeniable that christianity in its catholic and other forms fought heresy with violence, not just words from the moment it got its hands on the levers of power up to and beyond the Reformation.
And for those of you who have good memories, that is the origin of this debate - my admittedly sarcastic response to the implication that it was through the writing of tracts. I concede, in the absense of net quotable sources, that Mani and his followers weren’t burned but in the wider context of the centuries long and dreadfully violent response of the church to heresy the statement was trivially true to beyond the point of meaninglessness into the realms of unintentional deception of the type the Catholic Church continues to practice in which it is never the chruch that was wrong but always individual catholics.
OK…
You are more than welcome to hold the Church responsible for the actions of Christian mobs. That still will have very little to do with the point I was making, way back in my first post.
I was being narrow and making a small point (context-free, if you insist, but in my min d I was trying to add some information to answer the OP’s question) because, I guess, that’s what you do when you are talking about a topic about which you are doing research. I was not introducing some moral claim into this thread, and neither did the OP. You have successfully made this thread about the moral responsibility of the Church, which was not why I was participating in the thread, so I’m going to bow out now.
