From The Guardian-In the 500 years since Martin Luther started the Reformation, not much that he believed has survived. The thought world in which he moved has vanished utterly and his perspective is very difficult for us to recapture. But one thing has lasted – he made “heretic” into a term of moral approval. He didn’t mean to: he thought it was his opponents who had fallen into heresy. To Luther, and to everyone before him, a heretic was someone who was wrong in fact and morally wrong as well. Today’s equivalent would be climate change denier or a “scientific racist”. But all these people would nowadays claim the benefit of heresy. The word has come to imply moral integrity, and the hope of future vindication. “Orthodoxy” is, by implication, something to be overthrown.
This means that heresy, after Luther, has become an innately unstable condition. No heresy can persist for very long: either it must triumph, and then it will form a new orthodoxy of its own, or it will fade into oblivion. This was not always true. Before Luther, and still in pre-Lutheran thought, heresies were perennial: they represented recurrent temptations to be wrong, the sort of thing we call today a cognitive bias rather than an intellectual disagreement. Some beliefs, like flat Earth theory, are heresies in both the modern and pre-modern senses. But most of the things we call heresies are meant in the modern sense.
More here-
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/25/the-guardian-view-on-the-power-of-heresy?CMP=share_btn_fb
1 comment:
So in 1907 the Pope Pius X declared that Modernism was the "Synthesis of all Heresies".
I was going to grab a quote, and was surprised when this came up *before* the Vatican page I read the encyclical on, long ago:
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/modernism-the-heresy-of-heresies
It astounding, because the thing they mention Modernism begins with is that all religions are equal. That isn't what the encyclical said. (It largely focused on Reformers within the Church- Priests.) Essentially, it seemed like the Pope was worried about a new Martin Luther type.
ChurchMilitant is an awful cult. I'm not Catholic (or even Christian), but I think Pope Francis is the bees knees. (Which means- very, VERY good.) Both he and JP2 err.. Pope John Paul 2 understood there is a tension between the future and the past. After the Holocaust, he knew it was time (as he said) "to let in some fresh air." Thats.. putting it mildly. But I still appreciate it. Nostra aetate was a little tame, but a step in the right direction.
And Sollicitudo rei socialis†
† From the encyclical: 'reference to the notorious inequalities in the situations of those same people12; the confirmation of the Council's teaching, a faithful echo of the centuries - old tradition of the Church regarding the "universal purpose of goods"'
He couldn't endorse socialism without losing face. But universal/common/shared ownership of goods to combat inequalities shows that the Catholic faith has gained much ground on representing the values Christ cherished. Even an old Spinozaist/Einsteinian Heretic like me can see that.
Post a Comment