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A Heresy You Need to Know About

A Heresy You Need to Know About

Last updated on: February 4, 2025 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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A Heresy You Need to Know About 2025-01-27T20:05:04-05:00 Gene Veith

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I quite randomly stumbled upon a fascinating and illuminating essay by Catholic philosopher Edward Feser, who argues, in the words of the title of his article, that Wokism is the New Face of An Old Heresy, And It Can Be Defeated Again.

The heresy is Catharism, named after its adherents who called themselves Cathars, which is Greek for “the pure ones.” They are also known as Albigensians, from the French city of Albi, where the movement had its beginning. In the Middle Ages, from 1143 through 1350, the Cathars attracted thousands of adherents in southern France, northern Italy, and western Germany.

Catharism was a particularly toxic Gnostic cult, believing that the physical realm is intrinsically evil. Thus, they rejected the elements of Christianity that have to do with the physical realm–creation, the incarnation, the resurrection, and the sacraments–which is to say pretty much everything about it. They also believed in reincarnation. Their rejection of marriage and their exaltation of the “feminine” principle is thought to have been influential in the medieval cult of courtly love. Here is Feser’s explanation:

What was the content of Catharism? It was grounded, first and foremost, in the conviction that the world is absolutely permeated by evil. This is not the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, but something much darker. For the Cathars, the natural order is not the creation of a benevolent deity from whose grace we have fallen. Rather, they held that it always was in the first place the product of an evil power. And they identified this evil power with the God of the Old Testament, the authority of which they rejected. On the Cathar conception of salvation, the imperative is not to redeem the natural order but to be altogether liberated from it, and thereby to be “Pure Ones” (the literal meaning of Cathari).

Those closest to achieving this were known as the Perfect, who took on the full weight of Catharist moral discipline. Its chief component was renunciation of marriage and children, which were regarded as wicked insofar as they perpetuated the evil natural order of things. Meat and dairy products were also eschewed, given their connection to procreation. Private property was rejected. Capital punishment and war were condemned as intrinsically immoral. Yet suicide was not only permitted but commended for those judged ready for it. Infanticide was sometimes practiced. And as the murder of the papal legate illustrates, the Cathars would sometimes resort to violence in order to protect the movement itself.

Most adherents of the Cathar movement (the “Believers” rather than the Perfect) were not expected immediately to adopt its austere ethic in its entirety, though. Hence, while complete abstinence from sex was considered the ideal, sexual indulgence was tolerated among Believers as long as it did not lead to procreation. Indeed, sexual practices of the kind that carried no risk of pregnancy were judged permissible, and extreme debauchery was frequently a part of Cathar life. Whereas the Church favored sex when it was procreative, the Cathars favored it only when it was not procreative.

Sound familiar?

Today’s common view of sex is all for sexual indulgence, as long as it doesn’t lead to the purpose of sex, namely, to conceive a child. And if the elaborate means devised to prevent that from happening fail and a child is conceived, he or she may be killed by abortion.

That can be rationalized by the same line of thought that held by many of the 47% of Americans aged 18-49 who say they are unlikely to have children. A major reason given by 38% of that group is that the world is such a bad place that it would be wrong to bring a child into it.

The commonly-expressed notions that existence is meaningless, life is absurd, and “reality sucks” reflect that Gnostic, Albigensian worldview.

Feser also sees it in the environmentalists who believe the human race should just die out and in the critical theorists who see intrinsic systemic oppression everywhere. He also sees transgenderism, with its claim that a person can be “born in the wrong body,” as a version of the Cathars’ belief that the body is only a prison from which the true self of the soul seeks release. Also in euthanasia, which the Cathars reportedly sometimes practiced.

I would also note that the Cathars were mostly members of the nobility, just as the wokists are mostly members of today’s cultural elite. And both groups were and are highly self-righteous, even when they defy the ordinary canons of righteousness, considering themselves to be the “pure ones.”

Behind both Catharism and the woke sensibility is “the conviction that the existing order of things is evil to the core; a revelatory gnosis that uncovers this purported truth and the radical means of remedying it; and a Manichean division of mankind into the good and enlightened, who accept this gnosis, and the wicked, who resist it.” Feser concludes, “In general, wokeness, like Catharism, is essentially about the radical subversion of normal human life in the name of a paranoid metaphysical delusion.”

The medieval church tried to deal with the Cathars by trying to persuade and convert them. A leader in that effort was the cleric who would become St. Dominic, who would found the preaching and teaching order known as the Dominicans. But when those efforts bore little fruit, the Pope proclaimed the Albigensian Crusade, which lasted 20 years (from 1209-1229), which brutally slaughtered thousands, followed by the Inquisition, which finished the extermination by 1350.

Feser doesn’t advocate anything like that, he is quick to say, but he says that persuasion might not be enough to extirpate today’s woke mind virus. He says that the state should do what it can to actively oppose it. As an anti-social, hateful, militant, pathological ideology, he says, it should “be treated the way we treat Nazism, segregationism, and other ideas that are inherently destructive of basic social cohesion – as something to be purged altogether from school curricula, government, and other institutions, as well as from respectable discourse. ”

Illustration: The Albigensian Crusade by Chroniques de Saint-Denis – http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=43733, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13305991

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