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They that approve a private opinion,
call it opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy: and
yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.
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Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
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In the first century there was no heresy for the simple reason
that there was no orthodoxy. The "heresies" referred
to in old translations of the New Testament are merely differences
of opinion. Small Christian
communities believed what they wanted to and worshipped as they
chose. As we have seen, there were no central authorities, no
set rituals, no agreed canon of scripture, no Church hierarchy
and no established body of doctrine. In line with the toleration
practised throughout the Empire, each group of Christians was
free to believe whatever it wanted. The natural consequence
of this state of affairs was that ideas and practices in different
communities diverged.
Towards the end of the second century Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons,
saw the dangers of numerous opinions developing. He attempted
to establish an orthodox body of teaching. He wrote a five-volume
work against heresies, and it was he who compiled a canon of
the New Testament. He also claimed that there was only one proper
Church, outside of which there could be no salvation. Other
Christians were heretics and should be expelled, and if possible
destroyed. The first Christian Emperor agreed. Gibbon summarises
the edict that announced the destruction of various heretics:
After a preamble filled with passion and reproach, Constantine
absolutely prohibits the assemblies of the heretics and confiscates
their public property to the use either of the revenue or
of the catholic church. The sects against whom the Imperial
severity was directed appear to have been the adherents of
Paul of Samosata; the Montanists of Phrygia, who maintained
an enthusiastic succession of prophecy; the Novatians, who
sternly rejected the temporal efficacy of repentance; the
Marcionites and Valentinians, under whose leading banners
the various Gnostics of Asia and Egypt had insensibly rallied;
and perhaps the Manichæans who had recently imported
from Persia a more artful composition of oriental and Christian
theology.
The design of extirpating the name, or at least of restraining
the progress, of these odious heretics was prosecuted with
vigour and effect. Some of the penal regulations were copied
from the edicts of Diocletian; and this method of conversion
was applauded by the same bishops who had felt the hand of
oppression and had pleaded for the rights of humanity.
Further laws against heresy appeared in 380 under the Christian
Emperor Theodosius I, who laid down the new rule:
We command that those persons who follow this rule shall
embrace the name of Catholic Christians. The rest, however,
whom we adjudge demented and insane, shall sustain the infamy
of heretical dogmas, their meeting places shall not receive
the name of churches, and they shall be smitten first by divine
vengeance and secondly by the retribution of our own initiative,
which we shall assume in accordance with divine judgement.
St Augustine taught that error has no rights. He cited biblical
texts to justify the use of compulsion, notably Luke 14:16-23
(especially Luke 14:23). Had not Christ himself blinded St Paul
in order to make him see the true light? According to Augustine,
coercion using "great violence" was justified. He
made a distinction between unbelievers, who persecuted because
of cruelty, and Christians, who persecuted because of love.
A war to preserve or restore the unity of the Church was a just
war, a bellum Deo auctore, a war waged by God himself.
He also found a way to avoid churchmen getting blood on their
hands: dissension against the Church amounted to dissension
against the State, so anyone condemned by the Church should
be punished by the State. Centuries in the future such ideas
would culminate in the activities of the Inquisition, which
also required the secular authority to execute its judgements
of blood. Augustine is often recognised explicitly as the father
of the Inquisition, since he was responsible for adopting Roman
methods of torture for the purposes of the Church in order to
ensure uniformity. Already, in 385, the first recorded executions
for heresy had been carried out under Emperor Maximus at the
request of Spanish bishops. Priscillian, Bishop of Ávila,
had been charged with witchcraft, although his real crime seems
to have been agreeing with Gnostic opinions. Along with his
companions he was tried and tortured. They confessed and were
executed. The Church now had precedents for both witch-hunting
and for persecuting heretics , with a moral unpinning provided
by St Augustine.
In theory heresy was the denial of some essential Christian
doctrine, publicly and obstinately.
In practice any deviation from the currently orthodox line could
be judged heretical. By the fifth century there were over 100
active statutes in the Empire concerning heresy. From St Augustine
onward, for well over 1,000 years, virtually all Christian theologians
agreed that heretics should be persecuted, and most agreed that
they should be killed. Heresy was explicitly identified as akin
to leprosy. It was a disease that threatened to destroy a healthy
body of believers if they strayed from the Church's view
of religious orthodoxy, just as leprosy was a disease that threatened
the healthy bodies of individuals if they strayed from the Church's view of sexual orthodoxy. Diseases like this had to be eradicated
at all costs. St Thomas Aquinas thought it virtuous to burn
heretics and favoured the option of burning them alive. From
around the turn of the millennium, executing heretics became
ever more common, and the grounds for doing so became ever more
absurd. A group of Christians at Goslar in Germany who declined
to kill chickens were executed for heresy in 1051.
A long series of popes supported the extirpation of those who
disagreed with the current papal line. Arnold of Brescia, a
pupil of Abélard, shared his master's critical views
of the Church, and also embraced the republican ideals of ancient
Rome. He held that papal authority was a usurpation and that
the wealth and power of the Church was unchristian. He led a
movement to re-establish a Roman republic and return the clergy
to apostolic poverty. He was hanged and then burned as a heretic
in 1155 by Pope Adrian IV.
The Waldensians, or Vaudois, followers
of Peter Waldo of Lyon, provided the next major target. They
gave their money to the poor and preached the Christian gospel.
Waldo attracted the hatred of the clergy when he commissioned
a translation of the Bible into Occitan, the language of what
is now southern France. The Waldensians started off as perfectly
orthodox Roman Catholics, but after reading the bible their
heresies mushroomed. They denied the temporal authority of priests
and objected to papal corruption. They rejected numerous accretions,
including the Mass, prayers for the dead, indulgences, confessions,
penance, church music, the reciting of prayers in Latin, the
adoration of saints, the adoration of the sacrament, killing,
and the swearing of oaths. They also allowed women to preach.
They were excommunicated as heretics in 1184 at the Council
of Verona, and persecuted with zeal for centuries. In a single
day in 1393, 150 Waldensians were burned at Grenoble. Survivors
fled to remote valleys in the Alps. Pope Innocent VIII organised
a crusade against them in an unsuccessful attempt to extirpate
them. They were still being persecuted centuries later. In Piedmont
in the middle of the seventeenth century, further attempts were
made to extirpate them. Anyone in Villaro who declined to go
to a Roman Catholic Mass was liable to be crucified upside down,
but there was some variation in the manner of killing in other
towns. Some were maimed and left to die of starvation, some
had strips of flesh cut off their bodies until they bled to
death, some were stoned, some impaled alive upon stakes or hooks.
Daniel Rambaut had his toes and fingers cut off in sections:
one joint being amputated each day in an attempt to make him
recant and accept the Roman faith. Some had their mouths stuffed
with gunpowder, which was then ignited. Paolo Garnier of Roras
was castrated, then skinned alive. Children were killed in various
ways before the eyes of their parents. Those few who escaped
to the mountains were mostly killed by exposure, starvation
or disease.
The term heresy covered ever more and more areas of belief.
Paschal II, who occupied the papal throne between 1099 and 1118,
claimed (quoting a forged document) that anyone who disagreed
with the apostolic see was a heretic. In 1199, Pope Innocent
III declared heresy to be high treason against God, having already
called for the execution of those who persisted in their heresies
after being excommunicated. He also said that those who interpret
literally Jesus" statements about limiting their statements
to a straight Yes or No were heretics worthy of death —
confirming that those who refused to swear in court should be
executed. In 1229 Pope Gregory IX declared that it is the duty
of every Roman Catholic to persecute heretics. He preached a
crusade against the Stedingers, a Germanic people living near
the River Weser, whose heresy amounted to no more than rejecting
the temporal authority of the Archbishop of Bremen. An army
of 40,000 was raised under the bishops of Ratzebourg, Lubeck,
Osnabrück, Münster and Minden. Of the 11,000 or so
Stedingers able to bear arms, most were slaughtered on the field
of battle. The rest were killed later, many of them being drowned
in the Weser along with women, children and old men.
Following the apostolic commands of Pope Innocent IV, the Archbishop
of Narbonne consigned 200 heretics to the flames in 1243. All
manner of activities constituted heresy. It was heretical to
eat meat on Friday, to read the Bible, to know Greek, to criticise
a cleric, to refuse to pay Church taxes, or to deny that money
lending was sinful. St Augustine's idea that error has
no rights became a favourite of persecutors, and the great saint
was often cited as authority for oppression of all sorts. Under
Pope John XXII and later fourteenth century popes, Franciscan
spirituals were burned at the stake for such behaviour as claiming
that Christ and the apostles had not owned property, preaching
absolute poverty, wearing traditional hoods and habits and refusing
to lay up stores of food. The Apostolicals, a sect founded in
1300, tried to live like the apostles. The luckier ones were
burned at the stake like the sect's founder, but others
suffered worse fates. Dulcino of Novara, the successor to the
founder, was publicly torn to pieces with hooks, as was his
wife.
The Knights Templar were accused of heresy in the early fourteenth
century. The charges are generally acknowledged to have been
trumped up by King Philip of France and inspired by his desire
to seize their wealth. A Church Council was summoned to consider
the question, but despite extensive torture, there was not enough
evidence to proceed against the Templars, let alone to condemn
them. When King Philip turned up with an army, Pope Clement
V, a puppet of the French monarchy, forced the unwilling council
to reconsider, and the Order was dissolved.
Clement had already permitted individual Templars throughout
Western Christendom to be tortured and burned as heretics to
appease the king. Under torture they had confirmed that they
rendered feudal homage to the Devil. This idea was largely responsible
for the belief that there existed organised groups of people
who worshipped Satan, much as Christians worshipped God —
and this belief was in turn largely responsible for making witches
into malignant agents of the Devil.
Cecco d"Ascoli, an Italian scientist, was burned at the
stake in 1327 for having calculated the date of Jesus"
birth using the stars. But there were more significant heresies
than astrology. Movements to reform the Church, based on the
teachings of John Wycliffe ( England), Jan Hus ( Bohemia) and
Gerard Groot ( Netherlands) were all condemned as heretical,
although their popularity guaranteed their survival. In time
these teachings would trigger the Reformation. Heresy still
covered everything from refusing to take oaths to refusal to
pay church tithes. Any deviation from Church norms was enough
to merit death: vegetarianism, the rejection of infant baptism,
even holding the (previously orthodox) view that people should
be given both bread and wine at Mass.
In 1482, under Pope Sixtus IV, 2,000 heretics were burned in
the tiny state of Andalusia alone. Pope Leo X condemned Martin
Luther in 1520 for daring to say that burning heretics was against
the will of God. Evidently he thought it presumptuous for an
ordinary human being to claim to know God's will. Perhaps
he was right, because Luther changed his mind in 1531 and started
advocating the death penalty for heretics and blasphemers. He
thought it should be a capital offence to deny the resurrection
of the dead or the reality of Heaven and Hell.
Translating the Bible into vernacular languages, or helping
with the printing of such versions of the Bible, was heresy
according to the Roman Church. Generally, in Europe, women were
buried alive for this offence. Men were burned alive. One printer
in Paris was burned on a pyre of his own books. In the sixteenth
century William Tyndale translated the Bible into English. In
danger of arrest and in fear for his life he fled the country.
He was arrested in the Netherlands, and in 1536 was executed
for heresy for agreeing with the Lutheran doctrine of justification
by faith.
Anabaptists, the precursors of modern Baptists, were persecuted
by Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists alike. The Anabaptists"
main crimes were to call for social reform, to favour adult
baptism over infant baptism, and to embrace pacifism —
they would not kill, condone capital punishment or serve in
armies. They also allegedly advocated ancient Antinomian views.Their
leaders died in various ways. Thomas Münzer was burned
at the stake in 1525. Feliz Manz drowned in 1526 (drowning was
a favourite way of executing Anabaptists because of their views
on baptism). Michael Sattler had his tongue cut out, was mutilated
by red-hot pincers, and was burned alive in 1527 for a range
of beliefs, none of which would now merit a criminal prosecution.
When a whole town, Münster, went over to the Anabaptists
in the 1530s, Roman Catholics and Protestants joined forces
to retake the city. The Anabaptist leaders were publicly tortured
to death with red-hot pincers and their bodies hung in cages
outside a church, where they remained for some years.
The range of offences that were considered heretical was flexible
and ever-expanding. It was still a crime to read the Bible or
cite inappropriate passages from it. A Protestant writing master
from Toledo was burned at the stake in 1676 for having decorated
a room with the full text of the Ten Commandments. (The Roman
Church has traditionally omitted the first part of the second
commandment — the one that forbids the worship of images.)
In England the persecution of heretics was less popular than
elsewhere in Europe, but not unknown. A group of refugees, probably
Cathars, who denied the necessity for baptism, matrimony and
the Mass, fled from the continent to England under Henry II
to escape persecution. In 1166, at Oxford, they were tried by
an ecclesiastical court with the King himself presiding, and
were found guilty of heresy. Since no statute or precedent existed
for sentencing, they were seared on the forehead with hot irons,
whipped through the streets, stripped to the waist, and sent
into the countryside to die of exposure in the winter snow.
No one would offer them food or shelter. To have done so would
have been to disobey the word of God (2 John 10) and to abet
heresy, and would therefore have been sinful and unchristian.
John Wycliffe, the proto-Protestant rector of Lutterworth in
Leicester, was the most eminent scholar at Oxford, giving him
a measure of protection during his lifetime, especially since
there was then still no official statute in England covering
the offence of heresy. On the other side of Europe, Jan Hus,
the Rector of Prague University, was heavily influenced by Wycliffe's ideas, and refused to surrender his books when ordered to do
so by the Pope. Supported by King Wenceslas he denounced the
practice of granting indulgences. His preaching spread Wycliffe's ideas far and wide. Then, travelling under a safe conduct from
the emperor Sigismund, he was arrested and tried by the Church
Council of Constance. The council disregarded his safe conduct
on the grounds that a Church Council did not need to keep faith
with a heretic. Hus was burned on 6 th July 1415, making him
a Czech national hero. Hussite ideas spread rapidly from Bohemia
to Austria, Silesia, Saxony, Brandenburg, Bavaria and Hungary.
Attempts at reconciliation with the Roman Church failed, and
the Reformation loomed another step closer.
Back in England the Church had no way to deal with Wycliffe
or his followers, who were called Lollards. The Archbishop of
Canterbury, William Courtney, and his bishops filled in the
omission by forging an Act of Parliament to deal with heresy.
But Parliament spotted the imposture and the House of Commons
petitioned the King in 1383 to annul this bogus statute "never
assented to nor granted by the Commons".
Genuine mild statutes were passed three years later, but the
Church was still not happy. Prelates insisted on the death penalty,
and a series of statutes, called de haeretico comburendo,
were passed in 1401, under King Henry IV, introducing the death
penalty for heresy. They failed to define the offence, so heresy
would continue to be whatever the Church said it was. Once convicted,
the heretic was handed over to the sheriff, who had no option
but to execute the Church's judgement. Unrepentant heretics
were to be publicly burned to death, as they were on the continent.
The statutes came too late to catch John Wycliffe himself, but
they caught many of his followers. Lollards continued to be
condemned to the stake up until the 1530s. Others were caught
too. Around 1520 the diocese of Lincoln alone was convicting
over 100 people a year for the crime of "not thinking catholickly".
Espousing unorthodox views, however trivial, could result in
death. In 1528 Patrick Hamilton was burned at St Andrews for
holding heretical opinions, notably a denial of the freedom
of the will. In 1546 Anne Askew was burned at Smithfield because
of her beliefs about the Eucharist. In 1592 Henry Barrow and
John Greenwood, who preached congregationalism,
were hanged at Tyburn for "obstinately refusing to come
to church". Unitarians were executed in 1612 in London
and Lichfield, and one in 1651 in Dumfries. William Prynne,
a Puritan lawyer, published criticisms of Archbishop Laud. For
this he had his ears hacked off by the public hangman in 1633.
Along with others he was charged again and tried by the Star
Chamber in 1637. The others charged had their ears cropped,
and as it was discovered that Prynne still had stumps left on
the side of his head, these were severed too. He was also branded
on the cheeks, and then imprisoned for life along with the others.
After Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) published his book Leviathan
in 1651 , the English bishops wanted to have him killed. They
used their influence in the House of Lords to sponsor a motion
to have him burned as a heretic soon after the Restoration.
The philosopher feared for his life when, in October 1666, Parliament
talked about reviving the old statutes De haeretico comburendo
of 1401, which had fallen into disuse. But nothing came of the
bishops" fulminations, and Hobbes escaped prosecution.
Leviathan was merely condemned by Parliament, and Hobbes
was ordered to stop writing controversial books. The old statutes
were repealed the following year. From that time on, no one
in England need live in fear of burning for heresy. In Ireland
the heresy law was repealed in 1696, and in most of Continental
Europe much later. A schoolmaster was hanged in Spain in 1826
for heresy. His heresy had been to substitute the words "Praise
be to God" in place of "Ave Maria" in school
prayers.
Because of secular laws the Churches now have more difficulty
in persecuting heretics, but persecution is still part of mainstream
Christian thought. The oath taken by Roman Catholic bishops
at their consecration includes the following undertaking "with
all my power I will persecute and make war upon heretics".
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