A Heresy You Need to Know About
by Gene Veith
I quite randomly stumbled upon a fascinating and
illuminating essay by Catholic philosopher Edward Feser,
who argues, in the words of the title of his article, that Wokism
is the New Face of An Old Heresy, And It Can Be Defeated Again.
The heresy is Catharism,
named after its adherents who called themselves Cathars,
which is Greek for “the pure ones.” They
are also known as Albigensians, from the French city
of
Catharism was a particularly toxic Gnostic cult, believing that
the physical realm is intrinsically evil.
Thus, they rejected the elements of Christianity that have to do with
the physical realm–creation, the incarnation, the resurrection, and the
sacraments–which is to say pretty much everything about it. They also believed in reincarnation. Their rejection of marriage and their exaltation
of the “feminine” principle is thought to have been
influential in the medieval cult of courtly love. Here is Feser’s
explanation:
What was the
content of Catharism?
It was grounded, first and foremost, in the conviction that the world is
absolutely permeated by evil. This is
not the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, but something much darker. For the Cathars,
the natural order is not the creation of a benevolent deity from whose grace we
have fallen. Rather, they held that it
always was in the first place the product of an evil power. And they identified this evil power with the
God of the Old Testament, the authority of which they rejected. On the Cathar
conception of salvation, the imperative is not to redeem the natural order but to
be altogether liberated from it, and thereby to be “Pure Ones” (the literal
meaning of Cathari).
Those
closest to achieving this were known as the Perfect, who took on the full
weight of Catharist moral discipline. Its chief component was renunciation of
marriage and children, which were regarded as wicked insofar as they
perpetuated the evil natural order of things.
Meat and dairy products were also eschewed, given their connection to
procreation. Private property was rejected.
Capital punishment and war were condemned as intrinsically immoral. Yet suicide was not only permitted but
commended for those judged ready for it.
Infanticide was sometimes practiced.
And as the murder of the papal legate illustrates, the Cathars would sometimes resort to violence in order to
protect the movement itself.
Most
adherents of the Cathar movement (the “Believers” rather
than the Perfect) were not expected immediately to adopt its austere ethic in
its entirety, though. Hence, while
complete abstinence from sex was considered the ideal, sexual indulgence was
tolerated among Believers as long as it did not lead to procreation. Indeed, sexual practices of the kind that
carried no risk of pregnancy were judged permissible,
and extreme debauchery was frequently a part of Cathar
life. Whereas the Church favored sex
when it was procreative, the Cathars favored it only
when it was not procreative.
Sound familiar?
Today’s common view of sex is all for sexual
indulgence, as long as it doesn’t lead to the purpose of sex, namely, to
conceive a child. And if the elaborate
means devised to prevent that from happening fail and a child is conceived, he
or she may be killed by abortion.
That can be rationalized by the same line of thought
that held by many of the 47% of Americans aged 18-49 who say they are unlikely
to have children. A major reason given
by 38% of that group is that the world is such a bad place that it would be
wrong to bring a child into it.
The commonly-expressed notions that existence is
meaningless, life is absurd, and “reality sucks” reflect that Gnostic, Albigensian worldview.
Feser also sees it in the environmentalists who believe the
human race should just die out and in the critical theorists who see intrinsic
systemic oppression everywhere. He also
sees transgenderism, with its claim that a person can
be “born in the wrong body,” as a version of the Cathars’
belief that the body is only a prison from which the true self of the soul
seeks release. Also
in euthanasia, which the Cathars reportedly sometimes
practiced.
I would also note that the Cathars
were mostly members of the nobility, just as the wokists
are mostly members of today’s cultural elite.
And both groups were and are highly self-righteous, even when they defy
the ordinary canons of righteousness, considering themselves to be the “pure
ones.”
Behind both Catharism and
the woke sensibility is “the conviction that the existing order of things is
evil to the core; a revelatory gnosis that uncovers this purported truth and
the radical means of remedying it; and a Manichean division of mankind into the
good and enlightened, who accept this gnosis, and the wicked, who resist it.” Feser concludes, “In
general, wokeness, like Catharism,
is essentially about the radical subversion of normal human life in the name of
a paranoid metaphysical delusion.”
The medieval church tried to deal with the Cathars by trying to persuade and convert them. A leader in that effort was the cleric who
would become St. Dominic, who would found the preaching and teaching order
known as the Dominicans. But when those
efforts bore little fruit, the Pope proclaimed the Albigensian
Crusade, which lasted 20 years (from 1209-1229), which brutally slaughtered
thousands, followed by the Inquisition, which finished the extermination by 1350.
Feser doesn’t advocate anything like that, he is quick to
say, but he says that persuasion might not be enough to extirpate today’s woke
mind virus. He says that the state
should do what it can to actively oppose it.
As an anti-social, hateful, militant, pathological ideology, he says, it should “be
treated the way we treat Nazism, segregationism, and
other ideas that are inherently destructive of basic social cohesion – as
something to be purged altogether from school curricula, government, and other
institutions, as well as from respectable discourse. ”