The Church and 'Auctoritas' - The Heart of the Problem

In Trier (Germany) in 1231, the local Archbishop, a significant temporal power in his own right, convened a Synod to consider how to implement a particular papal order - Pope Gregory IX's institution of an Inquisition to crush heresy. His concern was with dissident or aberrant religious views - that meant people who did not conform to a system of thought imposed by authority from above.

The local Church answerable to Rome had discovered that in a prosperous part of Germany (Trier, Mainz and Cologne) a counter-Church was developing with its own hierarchy of authority very similar to that of the Catholic Church itself. We know little of their true beliefs. The dissidents may have been close to the Cathars or derivative from them, or not connected at all, but what we do know is that they were (literally) 'demonised', positioned publicly as 'Luciferian' or 'Satanic'.

Key figures were isolated and burned at the stake over the next three years. Women were noted as part of the cult and accusations of sexual perversity were made. Whatever the truth of the matter, in 1231 in Germany, the Church crushed a group whose only crimes were almost certainly limited to not accepting the authority of Rome and flouting norms dictated by that Church and perhaps, though not proven, to have developed a sexual code different from the standards of a sterile priesthood.

But, of course, you might believe the Church. The Papal Bull of 1233 was to advise us that the Luciferians kissed the back side of a cat and that Lucifer appeared in the form of a cat. The accusation was much the same as that against the Cathars a century earlier. It is perhaps why, even today, black cats are regarded as unlucky and as the familars of witches.

Yet there is an intelligent argument that the Inquisition was a relatively progressive organisation. It bureaucratised mob rule. In the long run of history, Catholic areas under the Inquisition were generally less murderous in the Early Modern era than Protestant areas. It replaced lynch mobs with some form of due process, albeit one with scant justice in it. More mercy than we think perhaps but one only granted from above without any voice for the judged.

Most killings of dissidents in primitive societies are folk-based. Old women and gay men are certainly safer today in the modern West than they would be in any rural past or present and the Church has played a relatively civilising role in that respect. The Inquisition may square up better than we might think. Catholic justice was undoubtedly to be preferred to the brute volkish moral enforcements of Indo-European paganism. But this incident in Trier strikes us differently. This is not a central police force coming in to clean up an area but a local churchlord dictating terms. It smacks of an opportunity to deal with a rival faction through selective murder, commanding the heights of propaganda in a deliberate and calculated way.

This was, in short, gangsterdom covered by religion. It is the cover given by religion to moral warlordism that interests us here because it shows only one case amongst very many of special interests making use of the cover of the whole to do their dirty deeds. There is nothing spiritual going on in Trier - it was murder and oppression and there's an end of it.

When the Catholic Church looks into its own soul and recognises that what it has done over the centuries to ensure its own institutional survival and to preserve its ideology and vows never to do such things again, then and only then should it have the right to be consulted as a moral force in a modern liberal democracy. This has not yet happened even under the latest in a long line of charismatic hero figures for different Catholic factions.

The fashion today is for the Left to fall at the feet of Pope Francis because he speaks of the rights of the poor as once Las Casas spoke against the exploitation of the indigenous Indians of the Americas but we should not be too easily seduced by this. This is still the Church whose most significant philosophical father Augustine introduced persecution of rivals as an act of policy (in the case of the Donatists). There are no signs of such persecution policies in place today - quite the contrary, it is Christians who are persecuted in the Middle East - but that is merely a function of powerlessness: what happens when power is restored to the Vatican is another matter.

The Church is an organisation whose primary purpose (once the saving of souls is taken as a given) is to establish its 'auctoritas' over the human universe, pragmatically expanding and withdrawing with the resources at its disposal but always seeking total control of the human condition - literally, it is totalitarian in instinct and it becomes more liberal only when it is on the defensive.

Two thousand years onwards from Christ, it was not the Church that exposed endemic child abuse in society and within its own ranks. Instead it tried to close ranks and then quietly and inadequately reform itself without further external scrutiny - not because it believed something was fundamentally and existentially wrong but because society, secular and liberal society, had developed the ability to point out that it was wrong and the Church was eventually forced to respond.

Within the doctrine of 'hate the sin but not the sinner', ironically, human judgements on complex evil cannot be made easily but must often be left to God. Coercing a child into sex acts is a question of coercion as much it is one of sex yet coercion is the lifeblood of the historical Church. The problem for the Church is that it had got use to condemning sexual acts but had only a limited vocabulary for dealing with coercion - its approach to coercion was deived from a medieval moderation and mollification of warlord abuse rather than one involving a fundamental critique of the very fact of coercion as an intrument of policy.

The Church was accidentally complicit in the mental map of the adult who saw a child as the subject of his authority. The adult's claims on the child could even be seen as a sort of delegated power from God, the simple matter of taking ancient pagan Roman attitudes to children and absorbing them into a new and apparently more compassionate religious order directed at helping women and the adult masses. The child got abandoned in the process.

The first instinct of the Church was thus, like the State, to protect itself (as guardian of higher values in its own eyes) and not the child. This defensive and self-protective way of thinking, in both Church and State and elsewhere in society, needs to be called out. The central doctrines of the Church are 'taught', from above to below. The essence of the Church lies in Authority and the protection of the claims of Authority becomes axiomatically good. It is certainly not a question of consent for and by the governed.

It is above all not a question of encouraging consent or at least some balance in social, let alone economic, power relations. The only claim Pope Francis is making now is that Authority can be switched in a new direction, towards selective support for the aspirations of the poor, towards a shift in economic power relations, but there is no awareness here that all power relations are worthy of the same critical position. There is no critique, in other words, of the very fact of Authority. What can be switched in one direction can be switched back again in a puff of white smoke.

The Church is a complex creature with many genuinely decent and good people within it but one suspects that the Communist Party and even the National Socialist Party in Germany had some good and kind people within it. The Church can be selectively compassionate to people who obey its value commands but it is imbued with a model of 'the greater and the lesser evil' where what is higher and what is lesser is dictated by a very few whose traditionalism is based on institutional loyalty within a closed ideology. But it is Authority itself which must be challenged and at every opportunity - above all, the Church should not claim to speak for the poor and abused, it should be engaged with the poor and the abused in enabling them to speak for themselves. 

A Note on the Heretical & the Political

In the last posting, I referred in passing to Versluis' The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism (2008) and we should dwell a little on its insights.

By taking the most extreme form of the heretical (from a post-Nicaean standpoint), that point where sexuality and spirituality commingle, he highlights what it is that, in practice, caused the authorities to engage in murder and torture, to destroy people whose role in society was otherwise relatively marginal.

Of course, there were moments when perhaps heresy might actually have overturned established order but these are very rare - in the confusion leading up to the Council of Nicaea perhaps, in the seizure of tracts of Southern France during the period of the Cathars, in the marginal lands where competing Christianities, Judaism and Islam fought for dominance.

But, for most of history right up until the fundamentalist onslaught on different sexualities across the world today, the amount of effort placed by authority in extirpating heretics is analogous only to that of homeland security loons in dealing with 'terrorists' and political dissidents and communist purgation.

When a real threat appeared, as in the case of Cathars, the Church had no compunction in turning genocidal. From whence does this appalling fear of what hurts no other derive?

Of course, there may be psycho-sexual motives behind all this. After all, many conventional religious were rutting away like mad despite their claims to celibacy. But there are also cultural and sociological reasons that are worth considering as having parallels even today.

Buddhism and left hand path Hinduism did construct a form of accomodation between sexuality and 'spirituality' but usually only on very exploitative terms towards minors. I have covered this in a review of Faure's Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality elsewhere. The West proved much more rigid.

First, the dissidents actively rejected Church bureaucracy and hierarchy. In so doing, they implicitly (though there is no real evidence of any explicit intention) rejected the alliance between Church and the magisterium.

The threat of dissent was political - secular authority might well do to conventional catholicism what the Catholic Church had done to paganism viz. stuff it to cut a deal. Any rival operations had to be cut out of the game as ruthlessly as Al Capone wanted Bugs Moran dealt with.

Since condemnation of pagan sexuality was central to the Church's claim that only it could restore order in the febrile atmosphere in and following the third century AD, then any bunch of dissidents who had an alternative plan involving the maintenance of order through expression of that same suppressed sexuality could be a material threat to its institutional power.

Second, they embraced the 'natural' (meaning what men do naturally and the wildness of territory beyond the reach of the bureaucracy of the day). This too had political implications. The christian, like the communist and the late-imperial victorian, model was totalitarian and this ultimately meant it must be about sex.

It was no accident that the members of a Gnostic sect were referred to as being 'brigands' (though they stole from no-one) and that the vicious polemicist Clement of Alexandria declined to give further details of the beliefs of Carpocrates lest he 'oufit a pirate ship'.

They were literally 'outlaws' ... or 'terrorists' perhaps. But since they were not a threat to property (the main concern of secular authority), what was the brigandage and piracy directed at?

Why, self-evidently, a threat that would 'thieve' ideological control from the aggressive elite group, the spiritual New Labour-like coup d'esprit of the Catholic intellectual leadership based on a class of priests and bishops who did not care for another round of martydoms.

Like Bolsheviks in 1918, the struggle was won and the wanderings and exiles must now cease. They had gambled at the table and won and were not going to risk their winnings again.

Third, the dissidents accepted the spiritual equality of women, not just as able to attain 'gnosis' through the intermediation of priests but as direct and equal communicants with the divine.

Note that this is not the rivalling of some mythic patriarchy with some countervailing matriarchy as some more dim-witted modern feminists have asserted but a far more profound sense of anti-authoritian 'gnosis'. It was not act an act of feminism but of personism or of autonomism within a community of the like-minded.

The essence of the rebellion against the Church was individualist and so egalitarian in a wholly different way from the slave-religion of the Catholic Church which treated all souls as equal under its leadership, much like the Party in the Soviet Union.

Political and spritual universalisms always contain the seeds of totalitarian social terror as we see today in the universalism of a degenerate liberal enlightenment.

Finally, the heretics' antinomianism, not libertinism but that sense that a 'gnosis' had created an internal moral authority that was higher than any law or regulation dictated from above by Church or State - or indeed community, presented a bridge over which the Church could march its ideological troops into the secular castle and demand action and thereby assert its ability to 'cut deals'.

After all, the alliance between Church and magisterium was always contingent on delivery of order at low cost through ideology (as the Lutheran revolt was to show in its relation to peasant revolts). The communism, terrorism and heresy of the Munster Anabaptists was a 'gift from heaven' in that respect.

The ideological brigandage was of no intrinsic concern to property (since most of these mystics most of the time were rarely communistic in the expropriatory sense) and European aristocratic society was often perfectly happy with strong women in positions of influence and power ...

... no, the secret to the murder and torture which, if the secular authorities did not do themselves then they permitted to be done on their territory despite public order risks, came down to the shared interest of both Church and property in holding down the individual and ensuring that he or she remained unthreatening and submissive.

It was the antinomianism that did for the the heretics of the past much as it does for today's heretics. The relationship between sexual mysticism and mainstream culture is thus highly political and parallels the relationship between radical political dissent, radical sexual freedom and the State today.

The modern political dissenter rejects the self-serving structures of liberal constitutionalism, operates outside the institutional structures of the elite and is egalitarian across gender and class but none of this is important when set against his or her growing 'antinomian' tendency - against the possibility that the State no longer has 'legitimacy', the right to make and enforce laws. And resentment of bad laws is growing ...

It is the crisis of our time now that anyone can be a sexual mystic without a knock on the door at five in the morning from a Dominican friar - but that economic failure, uncertainty, unending apparently inexplicable and murderous small wars and loss of identity are creating a potent brew in which the political dissident is always going to be one sentence from being classed a 'terrorist' ...

... and always at the edge of things is the system's longing for some all-encompassing ideology that will set boundaries. In the West, it is a manipulative NGO-led universalism that is now required to clean up the mess left by globalisation and it is this ideology that is discovering sexuality as a problem and not an opportunity.