Complacency and Heresy

It may be impossible to fall into heresy without first falling into complacency. The Calvinist who cheerily damns all humanity is nonetheless sure that he will be one of the few God saves. The Arian who pulled Christ down from high heaven still expected to ascend up to it. Even the pelagians working feverishly for their own salvation still fancied themselves clever enough to earn it.

Our modern heretics are no less smug even if they are more mundane. Not for them the grand cosmos of the gnostics, the brutal penances of the Jansenists, or the stalwart asceticism of the puritans. They feel no need to renounce the Church. It is enough to enlighten, expand, and accompany until the Church disappears in a haze of post-Christian goodwill. Theirs is an armchair sophistry more reminiscent of the effete ancient rhetors than red blooded Christian heretics. It shouldn’t be surprising that those pushing for a post-Christian world should find themselves imitating the pre-Christian one. 

At the moment, these heretics are celebrating their ascendence in the secular hierarchy. They see the power-shift in the United States as an opportunity for the Church to finally make its peace with the secular world. This is impossible. The Church has never been at peace with the world. Even at the height of Christendom the Church’s rightful place was not in the world, but besides it, urging it on towards heaven. Could it leave its place now that the world has turned and started back the other way? Clearly not. Yet many wish it would.

I suspect their real sin is not that they have made peace with the world but that they have made peace with themselves. I do not mean the hard won peace of placing their trust in God come what may knowing that what will come is some suffering for everyone and great suffering for some. Rather, they embrace themselves with whatever good or ill they have and refuse to let God budge them. The thought process is clear enough: “What good is it to be eaten by lions instead of just burning a little incense? After all, if one stays alive one can continue dialoguing with the emperor. It would be positively irresponsible to cut off debate by refusing one little concession.” To the heretic, orthodoxy is always a dangerous imprudence.

Thus every Christian’s concession to the world begins as a concession to himself, as a refusal to stay on the cross next to the Master who refused to climb off it. As they “miraculously” descend from the cross to the praise and adulation of the pharisees and Romans below they imagine themselves to be better saviors than the wretched Christ suffering still above them.

True Christians (and I think I mean the bulk of them) cannot remain so at ease. The saint can weep for even a small sin and feel himself further from God for it than the Calvinist who cheerily declares himself depraved. However great a man’s faith, if he is wise he will remember he is merely a man. He might believe in God’s thoughts, but they are not his thoughts and his thoughts are poor and weak enough. Thus even Pope Benedict XVI could write that whatever and however deeply a man believes, there remains the whisper, “perhaps.” Perhaps he has been wrong. He does not think so, but he cannot know, at least not until the shadows pass. The acknowledgement of perhaps is itself an act of self surrender wherein man, having reached the limit of his intellect, commits himself trustingly to one greater than he.

This is what separates the believer from the heretic: one trusts, the other presumes. It might seem a fine line but it is out of such lines that eternity is etched. Trust is always focused on another, while presumption is fundamentally about the self. Trust is confident of God’s ends and patient with his means. Presumption demands God act by certain means and is unconcerned with his ends. But to see God in such a way is to cease seeing him at all. Thus the God of the heretic is merely a reflection of himself. What a poor god he must eventually find himself to be.