The American Spectator

TAS Live

Heresy and History

By Angelo M. Codevilla on 5.14.04 @ 12:03AM

The war on terror will be won only when Islam's Wahabi heresy is defeated -- by orthodox Islam. Europe's own religious history shows why. From the latest American Spectator.

HAZILY, AMERICAN ELITES PERCEIVE that modern terrorism has something to do with the Wahabi sect of the Arabian Peninsula. But they lump that sect with "radical" or "fundamentalist" Islam, and throw up their hands over whether terrorism is a natural consequence of Muslim fervor or not. In fact, anti-Western terrorism results from a war within Islam that is more serious for Muslims than for the rest of us, because the Wahabis' ideas imply irreconcilable enmity against other Muslims first, and then against others. Western elites, religiously challenged as they are, don't understand the mixture of threat and temptation that the Wahabis pose to the Muslim world because they do not know how analogous Christian heresies have roiled Western civilization.

Between the 11th and the 17th centuries, Europe suffered arguably more from heresies than from plagues. In Islam as well, heresy has arisen out of moral outrage and matured into murderous political enterprises. The history of Christian and Muslim heresies teaches the combination of sword and sermon that is necessary to defeat them.

In the debates surrounding the great religions, charges and countercharges of heresy are motivated as often by secular motives as by religious differences. However, violence tends to follow only when religious differences become the basis of political quarrels. The wars in the 16th and 17th centuries between what came to be known as Catholics and Protestants turned on theological points that had coexisted peaceably until they were taken up by rivals for power. The wars between what became known as Sunni and Shi'a Muslims in the 18th century were strictly about power. The theological differences came later. Some religious differences, however, necessarily imply political violence. These are the ones that concern us.

Some ideas necessarily are political, and necessarily matrices of mass murder. Hence, statements such as Thomas Jefferson's that whether my neighbor believes that there is one God, many gods, or no god at all neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg, are applicable only to Jefferson's peculiar circumstances. If one's neighbor were a Thuggee, an adept of the Hindu sect that worships Kali, the goddess of death, by killing as many people as possible, one might work for his conversion to Unitarianism. Even those Americans most virulent against the Ten Commandments would be compelled to guard their pockets, legs, and more against neighbors whose commandments commanded them to reverse the Ten: Thou shall kill, steal, swear falsely, take thy neighbor's wife, etc.

Murderous heresies arise as revolutionary movements. They take one, or more, of the faith's central tenets and twist it into a warrant for overthrowing the norms and practices first of the ordinary faithful, then of mankind. This kind of heresy sets itself apart by entitling the heretics to do whatever they want. The premise of the University of Chicago's 1988 "Fundamentalism" project -- that there is danger in the tendency of many people around the world to adhere to the fundamentals of their faiths -- does not apply. What drives "fundamentalists" is the tendency to affirm orthodoxy. Fundamentalism binds the fundamentalist. By contrast, the heretics we are concerned with slip the bounds of orthodoxy and endow themselves with boundless, revolutionary discretion. For them, indulging their wrath, or indeed any of their passions, is the path to holiness.

Such heresies tend to strike Faustian bargains with rulers or would-be rulers. By these bargains, the politicians (who are as likely to use the heresy only as a tool as to believe in it) gain the heretics' support, the claim to absolute moral legitimacy vis-à-vis their other followers, plus leverage against their neighbors -- all in exchange for providing the heresy a base for war with the rest of the world. Sooner or later, however, the heresy makes more enemies than the host regime can handle, and the war ends with the destruction of both the heresy and the regime.

II.

"BE YE PERFECT, AS my father in heaven is perfect." "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." "Ye are not of this world." Teachings such as these, as well as the struggle between good and evil, are part of the bedrock of Christianity. The Book of Daniel is a legitimate part of the Old Testament, and the Book of Revelation a legitimate part of the New. Yet all these have been points of departure for horrid heresies. Why?

The poverty of some is always a ready pretext for indicting others. Always is it possible for one to claim that his alienation from the world, his enmity toward it, is the authoritative sign of a divine call to a death struggle to transform earth into heaven. And in fact, the Western world never lacks people who, in the name of God, point to the imperfections of others as warrant for their own claims to perfection, power, privilege, and the undoing of their enemies.

The movements had names such as Cathars, Free Spirits, Bogomils, Albigensians, Anabaptists, Ranters, Joachites. They arose in varied circumstances. But their ideas and practices followed a pattern: Denunciation of obvious inequities, proclamation of a unique divine message that absolute purity and purification would bring absolute remedy, establishment of a totalitarian regime within the movement. Then the movement's alliance with some regime, or its capture of power somewhere, led to terror against internal dissent, war with outsiders, and eventually the destruction of the movement.

Here is a brief sampler. In the 11th century, after Pope Gregory VII fought worldliness in the Church, and Pope Urban II proclaimed the Crusade to conquer the Holy Land, countless self-appointed Propheta preached a gospel of redemption: The poor, because of their purity, were to take the lead in the destruction of God's enemies. Those who followed these calls set about destroying Jews in Europe as well as bishops and clergy who got in their way, before streaming eastward to fall upon Eastern Christians. A small minority ever got to fight the Muslims. This was not lost on nobles, some of whom harnessed this frenzy, and one of whom made himself its king, living in luxury and feared by all.

The subsequent would-be Crusaders, fewer and fewer of whom expended less and less effort actually to get to the Holy Land, slaughtered Europe's rich because they were rich, expecting thereafter to live in plenty. In 1251 an eloquent Hungarian preached a crusade exclusively of the pure and poor. He surrounded himself with an armed guard, lived in luxury, and wreaked destruction on northern French and German towns -- the clergy, the rich, the Jews.

Other Propheta preached the same gospel unconnected to the Crusades, and followed the same pattern: having purified themselves by their opposition to the impure, they would then partake freely of their spoils. The leader would be revered, even unto drinking his bath water.

The popular side of these movements was summed up in a German book at the beginning of the 16th century. God had sent a message to a corrupt world: only the elect would escape his harsh judgment, on condition that they purify the earth. The clergy, the Jews, and others must be slaughtered for their sins. "Only the [former] victims will be spared." There would be "one shepherd, one sheepfold, one faith." But this ends up not being Christianity at all, because the god is the Germanic Thor. Not only is this book and the behavior of its followers reminiscent of Nazis, but Nazism's chief ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, devoted a chapter of his Myth of the Twentieth Century to it.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Business, Religion, Islam, Books, Law, Military, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Africa, Socialism, Oil