Hell is Real

painting depicting hell in the

Church of Debra Berhan Selassie

Gondar Ethiopia

 The Cathars were members of a medieval heretical movement that fell into the same errors as the Gnostics.  The name “Cathar” comes from the Greek ƙάθάρί or “the pure ones.”  Like the Gnostics before them and the English Puritans after them they believed that because of their religious perfectionism they were the true faithful, set apart from the rank and file of sinful humankind.  The Gnostics, the Cathars, and the Puritans all believed that most people, sinful as they are, stand outside the love of God and are damned.  This sort of heresy has plagued the Church from the very beginning.  Many of the early Christian sects that separated from “the Great Church” (the term used to designate the Christian Church before the great divide between the Churches of the East and the Catholic Church of the West) were marked by this conviction that the Church of Christ consisted of those who were sinless.  The Montanists, the Meletians, the Priscillians, the Donatists were among early Christian sects that taught to some extent such puritanism.  Some of the groups that espoused this puritanism were Christian, others were not.  The Manicheans were a non-Christian Gnostic sect to which Saint Augustine briefly adhered before his conversion to Christianity and that fell into this same error.  The Cathar movement which took root especially in southern France in the 12^th and 13^th centuries claimed to be Christian but severely distorted biblical teaching to adjust to their Gnostic convictions and were actually very similar to the Manicheans.  The Puritan movement in late 16^th century England remained Christian and orthodox but drew on Calvin’s understanding of Saint Augustine to teach that the “true Church” of Christ was a community of the elect who, by God’s grace, were preserved from the damnation to which most had been eternally condemned by God.  The mark of the “elect” in each of these systems was personal righteousness, separation from sinners, and a rigid “orthodoxy” as the particular movement defined such orthodoxy. 
This morning I was fortunate to hear a homily by a very impressive young Augustinian friar whose youth belies his spiritual perspicacity.  He drew our attention to the approaching finality of the Christmas season and called us to remember that Jesus was born “on the margins” of his society and that he spent his life with those who lived on the margins.   Jesus came not for those in the establishment but for those who had been pushed to the edges—to the lepers, to the prostitutes, to those who “didn’t belong.”  In other words, he did not come for the ƙάθάρί but for those very ones on whom the spiritually elite look down.
Recently Michael Voris has been pushing the reality of Hell and his certainty that it is filled with people who are not like him.  The usual chorus of Super-Catholic Gnostics has taken up this cry.  I believe in hell.  Saint Thérèse of Lisieux—one of my favorite saints—seemed confident that the Mercy of God would always prevail.   I appreciate her optimism, but I believe we need Hell to preserve the freedom of our human will.  I know that God loves me and will love me eternally and I think the Love of God would eventually wear me down and I would finally surrender to his love, but then I am a pretty weak man when it comes to being loved.  Just say you like me and I give in to whatever you want--love me and I become your pet dachshund. Nevertheless, I claim my freedom to resist—eternally resist if I so choose—yielding to the Love of God. If I want to remain eternally estranged from God, I have that freedom: God gave it to me.   God will love me whatever my eternal destiny--Saint Thomas assures us that God loves even those in hell.  Saved or damned our destiny is to be eternally loved by God.  For some that is a blesing; for others a soul-wracking curse.   I suspect that those who will find themselves in Hell will be those who like the older brother of the Prodigal Son will refuse to come into the banquet because the wrong sort of the people are there.  They will want their heaven to be a reception at Buckingham Palace and be appalled to find that God's heaven  is more "dive chic."   But then i think most people who will find themselves in God's eternal company are those who have spent plenty of time in seedy bars and will be right at home.   

Ecclesia Semper Reformans--Back to the theme of Reform

A freso in the Basilica of San Martino in Rome

of Saint John Lateran Basilica as it appeared in

the Middle Ages.  In the eleventh century three

Councils met in this Church. 

I mentioned in my last entry about the need for Church leadership who can “think outside the box” to meet the crises in which the Catholic Church—and I think organized religion in general—finds itself in today’s secularizing and increasingly hostile society.  “Outside the box” thinking is a natural segue into our next Reformation—that of Innocent III, probably the most creative and innovative in the Church’s two millennia. 
     We left off our saga of the Ecclesia semper reformans  semper reformanda (The Church, always reforming, always in need of reform) with Gregory VII.  Gregory died in defeat, an exile from Rome where his nemesis, the Emperor Henry IV, had declared Gregory deposed and had installed  Guibert of Ravenna as (anti)Pope Clement III.  History,  however, doesn’t give the laurels to the winner of a battle but only to the winner of the war and Gregory’s cause of making the papacy independent of (and to some extent superior to) the Empire would prevail.  Had Gregory not succeeded, posthumously of course, the Catholic Church would have been no different than the Orthodox Churches of Constantinople and Russia—a pawn of their respective imperial crowns.   This victory of the papacy over empire has implications far beyond Catholicism.  An imperial Church would never have tolerated a Luther and perhaps even Calvin and Zwingli may not have been able to escape the clutch of the crown.  Who knows?  The What-ifs are great fun to play but since any one variable opens up dozens of alternative doors for history to have gone through, one really cannot trace a new path for humankind should any one factor have been different.  Anyway, let’s move on towards Innocent. It will take us long enough as it is to get there because while there is a natural progression from the Gregorian Reform to the Reforms of Innocent III, there is a good deal of historical development to span.
       One of the effects of the Gregorian Reform was a renewed interest in canon law—actually almost an obsession with canon law.  There was at the time no unified code of canon law (that would come only in 1917 and again in 1983).  A canonist had to know the decrees of a wide spectrum of councils and synods ranging from the great Ecumenical Councils to numerous local synods that spanned a thousand years of European history.  The same canonist would also have to know countless papal decrees, unwritten traditions from Rome and elsewhere, and have familiarity with the Church Father’s whose teachings bore great authority.  As all these sources were often in contradiction with one another, they had to be balanced out and weighted with regard to the relative authority they bore.  Canon law was not unlike the rabbinic arguing over the Talmudic tradition in medieval Judaism and like rabbinic authority among orthodox Judaism, canon law came to have more and more bearing on the daily lives of everyday Catholics in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  
      The twelfth century saw a procession of canon-lawyer popes and ecumenical councils.  Callistus III convoked the First Lateran Council in 1123 to solidify the gains of the Gregorian Reform, particularly in regards to the independence of the Church from Imperial and Royal control in the naming and investing of prelates.  In 1139 Pope Innocent II convoked the Second Lateran Council. Over a thousand churchmen—bishops, abbots, theologians—clerical and lay—attended.  It called on the clergy to dress simply and modestly and it reinforced the requirements of celibacy.  Forty years later in 1179 Pope Alexander III summoned the third Lateran Council which reaffirmed the exclusive right of the College of Cardinals to elect the pope and introduced a wide variety of reforms.  (We will have to do a separate entry just on Lateran III  because its legislation is so extensive and so important).  Lateran III also tried to deal with some current dissent in the Church that was rooted in the widespread financial excesses and moral failures of clergy and religious.  There were devout laity who were genuinely shocked and distressed by the condition of the Church and many bishops lacked the moral credibility for effective leadership.    It was a dangerous situation and we will talk about it in our next posting. 

The Roots of the Reformation III: Long before Luther

Howden Minster, an English
pre-Reformation Chuch

John Wycliffe is another proto-Protestant—one of those religious leaders who anticipated Luther in calling for a reform of the Church and whose preaching and teaching led to the formation, not of an alternative Church or community of believers, as with Peter Waldo and his Waldensians, but of groups of followers who existed as a dissenting movement that technically remained within the Catholic Church but without subscribing to many of its doctrines. 

Wycliffe, born 1328, was a Yorkshire man from the North of England which always had a different religious tradition than London and the southern counties, a tradition that looked less to Rome for leadership and a stronger sense of both Englishness and of the distinctive “Ecclesia Anglicana” heritage.  He was a scholar at Baliol College, Oxford where he studied mathematics, natural philosophy (the physical sciences), English and Roman Law, English history, theology and Philosophy.   This was an amazing spectrum of studies and he could well be called a Renaissance man although there was as yet no Renaissance, at least in England. Philosophically, he was a disciple of Ockham and the Nominalists and as such he was what we would call today, a deconstructionist.   He rejected “realism” and thus such doctrines as “transubstantion” did not sit easy with him.  Indeed, the one source of authority he recognized was The Bible—to which he had great devotion and which he managed to have translated in its entirety to English (from the Latin Vulgate) so as to be accessible to the common people.  His study of scripture convinced him that many of the doctrines of the Church—such as papal supremacy—were unsubstantiated by Scripture or even contrary to it.  Moreover, he differed from Catholic orthodoxy on several other points.  Influenced by the ancient Donatist doctrines, for example, he believed that the efficacy of the sacraments depended on the worthiness of the minister.

Despite his lack of strict religious orthodoxy, he was recognized for his academic brilliance and Archbishop Simon Islip appointed him head of Canterbury Hall—an Oxford foundation which was meant to provide education for twelve priests or candidates for priesthood from the Archdiocese of Canterbury.  Islip’s successor, Simon Langham, replaced Wycliffe with a monk, however, and while Wycliffe appealed his case to the papal court the appeal was unsuccessful.  This may account in part for Wycliffe’s turning against both monasticism and the papacy.  

Like many of the Oxbridge dons, Wycliffe was supported by being given “a living” or “a rectory” which meant he was pastor of a parish which paid a handsome salary—handsome enough both to support him in his academic work and to pay for a “vicar” to actually live in the parish and tend to its pastoral needs.  Wycliffe held a number of rectories in his life but probably actually ministered only in the last two-- Ludgershall, Buckinghamshire and Lutterworth in Leistershire.  But from these rectories, when he was no longer teaching at Oxford, he issued a series of pamphlets and other materials that attacked corruption in the Church.  His Donatism shown through in his affirming that the “real” Church was not the represented  by the hierarchy and the visible society of baptized believers, but the association of those believers, known only to God, who were to be saved.  This naturally led him to a doctrine of predestination in which God not only knew but determined who would  be saved and who was to be lost.

Wycliffe not only undermined traditional Catholic Doctrines, but he directly assailed the papacy.  Remember that through most of this time the papacy was located at Avignon, just across the Rhone River from the realms of the King of France but very much under his influence.  The popes were mostly French at this time, as were the majority of the cardinals.  And the French were the enemies of the English.  This was not only the time of the Avignon papacy but of the Hundred Years War between France and England.  Wycliffe’s anti-papal polemics found a patriotic ear among the English. Wycliffe assailed the papacy for its wealth and claimed that various practices such as annates were simply simony.  Annates were the practice by which a man elevated to an ecclesiastical post—bishop, Archbishop, Abbot, even a canon or somewhat minor official—paid the pope the first year’s revenues of his new position.  We will hear much about them in this series.  Simony is the crime/sin of buying and selling Church office.   

As much as Wycliffe hated the papacy he hated monasticism even more.  He was a secular priest and he resented to claims to holiness that the monks made when often they were not only no better than himself and other parish priests, but when in fact they led lives far more indolent.  Initially supported by the Mendicant Orders—who themselves were often in mutual hatred with the Monastic Orders—Wycliffe soon turned on them too for their lack of holiness.  Read the medieval literature, Chaucer, Boccacio and others, and you will see that monks were seen to be lazy gluttonous characters more given to sleep and drink than to prayer, and friars (the mendicants) were womanizers and cheats.  These caricatures did not come out of thin air.  Not all monks were lazy and not all friars were lechers, but there was a need—a serious need—for reform in the clergy. 

The English Church, like the Church most place sin Europe, had great wealth in the centuries before the Reformation.  Bishops and Abbots, by virtue of their office, were great landowners and peers of the Realm.  Generations of bequests, donations, endowments, and monastic dowries—all usually made in grants of income-producing land and properties—made abbeys, cathedrals, and even parish churches very wealthy.  Great Lords and simple yeoman farmers alike were constrained in giving a tenth of the produce of their fields and orchards to the clergy in tithes.  The clergy had other customary charges that brought them revenue—the burial cloths and candles from funerals, wedding and christening fees, stipends for the blessing of fields and vineyards and orchards, and mass offerings.  While parish vicars were often underpaid, rectors of churches—often absentee—could usually count on a handsome income and as for canons, bishops, and other prelates, want was not at their doors.  Wycliffe—himself the holder of comfortable benefices—proposed the sending out of “poor priests” who would preach the gospel to the poor and evangelize the ordinary English man or woman. It would have been a brave step because the Church was losing its credibility fast among the middling sort of folk.   

Wycliffe’s rants were popular for a variety of reasons.  The popes were unpopular due to their alliances with England’s enemies; the Church did control great wealth and vast lands in a society where many were, or perceived themselves to be, on the margins of survival; the clergy needed reform; the English bible nourished people spiritually and rendered the ministrations of the clergy somewhat superficial.    Wycliffe also had a protector in the King’s uncle John of Gaunt who was extremely influential, especially during King Richard’s minority. 

Wycliffe’s ideas were condemned by a synod of English bishops in 1382 but he was not deprived of his living and no action was taken against him in his life time.  He suffered a stroke while attending mass on the Feast of the Holy Innocents in 1384 and died three days later.  But that is not the end of the story. 

We will see that many of his themes—especially the authority of scripture,  popular religion and the role of the Bible, and the wealth of the Church,  will continue to surface and threaten the hegemony of the hierarchical Church.  The failure of the Church to heed the calls to Reform will eventually lead to the struggle of the Reformation.  Hus’ doctrinal ideas on the Eucharist, on the nature of the Church as a “spiritual reality,” on the need for ministers to be men of integrity in order to minister effectively, on scripture alone, and on predestination will survive and later even return with a vengeance.  We will see what happens when the Church fails to “read the signs of the Times” as John XXIII called it to do when he called a Council in our own times.