Only two heresies - or maybe one?greenspun.com : LUSENET : Catholic : One Thread |
The obvious thing to say here is that the only heresy is the definition of heresy:St. Thomas (II-II:11:1) defines heresy: "a species of infidelity in men who, having professed the faith of Christ, corrupt its dogmas". "The right Christian faith consists in giving one's voluntary assent to Christ in all that truly belongs to His teaching. There are,therefore,two ways of deviating from Christianity: the one by refusing to believe in Christ Himself, which is the way of infidelity, common to Pagans and Jews; the other by restricting belief to certain points of Christ's doctrine selected and fashioned at pleasure, which is the way of heretics. The subject-matter of both faith and heresy is, therefore, the deposit of the faith, that is, the sum total of truths revealed in Scripture and Tradition as proposed to our belief by the Church. The believer accepts the whole deposit as proposed by the Church; the heretic accepts only such parts of it as commend themselves to his own approval. The heretical tenets may be ignorance of the true creed, erroneous judgment, imperfect apprehension and comprehension of dogmas: in none of these does the will play an appreciable part, wherefore one of the necessary conditions of sinfulness--free choice--is wanting and such heresy is merely objective, or material. On the other hand the will may freely incline the intellect to adhere to tenets declared false by the Divine teaching authority of the Church. The impelling motives are many: intellectual pride or exaggerated reliance on one's own insight; the illusions of religious zeal; the allurements of political or ecclesiastical power; the ties of material interests and personal status; and perhaps others more dishonourable. Heresy thus willed is imputable to the subject and carries with it a varying degree of guilt; it is called formal, because to the material error it adds the informative element of "freely willed". (Arianism, and on the other, Gnosticism. The former involves the denial of the divinity of Jesus Christ; the latter denies his humanity.
It might be too blunt to reduce all heresies to these two, but one cannot help but to see a pattern. For example, Modernism, Liberal Catholicism, and other less obvious heresies (like that which holds that Christ actually dies again at every Mass, or that his body is rent by our teeth if we chew) have a common root in Arianism. Islam is there, too. Thus these heresies can have as much potential to be ultra-pious as well as secular.
neo-Gnostic heresies are there too. For example, Jansenism apparently holds that some commandments are impossible for men to keep, which would be an impossible belief if Christ's humanity is unambiguously held. Martin Luther also denied that any person could follow the Commandments; in particular he denied that any man or woman could actually resist lust, regardless of grace or their state in life.
Oops, got to go. What do you think? For more heresies, this is a good catalogue.
-- Skoobouy (skoobouy@hotmail.com), December 09, 2002
Thanks, Skoobouy. JFG
-- J. F. Gecik (jfgecik@hotmail.com), December 09, 2002.
I just felt the need to repost this:"The impelling motives are many: intellectual pride or exaggerated reliance on one's own insight; the illusions of religious zeal; the allurements of political or ecclesiastical power; the ties of material interests and personal status; and perhaps others more dishonourable." = Heresy
In Christ.
-- Jake Huether (jake_huether@yahoo.com), December 09, 2002.