Artigos: Heréticos da Semana. Eles Morreram, Mas as Heresias Não.

Charles Coulombe escreve semanalmente uma coluna chamada Heretic of the Week, no jornal The Catholic Herald. É muito interessante para conhecer o pensamento teológico herético de gente que influenciou e influencia muita gente. E assim a pregação herética deles continua a se alastrar. A morte deles não significou a morte de suas heresias.

Esta semana,  o herético é o ex-presidente dos Estados Unidos que era fiel da Igreja Anglicana, mas não acreditava em Cristo, nem na Trindade, nem em um Deus pessoal (era um deísta) e chegou a publicar sua própria Bíblia, excluindo as partes que não gostava.

Além de Thomas Jefferson, eu vou colocar aqui três heréticos famosos que Coulombe já descreveu no seu site: Arthur Conan Doyle (escritor famoso por Sherlock Holmes que virou um fanático espírita, crente em espírito e em médiuns, depois de ter sido maçom, apesar de ter sido criado católico); René Guénon (um espiritualista famoso que via o Islã como a religião ideal, depois de ter passado por muitas seitas e tendências, inclusive depois de ter trabalhado com católicos como Jacques Maritain, que quis incluir os livros de Guénon entre os livros proibidos); Maximilien Robespierre (um dos líderes da Revolução Francesa, que criou sua própria religião para afastar o cristianismo da França, o Culto do Ser Supremo, que era um aditivo do Culto da Razão, criado pelos radicais franceses, que tentava destruir tudo de católico e cristão na França).

Há muitos mais no site de Coloumbe, pesquisem.


1) Thomas Jefferson

Heretic of the week: Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) is a world-renowned figure. Founding Father, author of the Declaration of Independence, ambassador, first secretary of state, third president of the United States, founder of the University of Virginia, inventor, farmer – the list goes on. To this day, his Virginia plantation, Monticello, is a shrine of sorts. But what is less well known (and our current interest) are the religious beliefs of the famed statesman.

On one level, Jefferson was a conventional Anglican/Episcopalian, as was expected in the planter class into which he was born. Baptised, married, and buried with Anglican rites, he never belonged to any other denomination, and was a vestryman of his home parish. He was a regular worshipper at churches of that denomination in Charlottesville, Williamsburg, Philadelphia and Washington.

But that attendance was about as far as his adherence to the Church of England or its American daughter went. His theology was very different from that of either high church or low church in his day or ours.

Jefferson first began to doubt conventional Christianity while a student at Williamsburg’s William and Mary College. Deism, with its rejection of Christ’s divinity, the Trinity, miracles and indeed any kind of a personal God, was very much in the air.

In time Jefferson came to absorb all of these denials, save the last (to some degree).

He came to believe that most of Christianity was a sort of Platonism grafted on to what he considered the “primitive religion of Jesus” – primarily to benefit the priesthood; for this reason, he conceived a particular hatred of Catholicism and a suspicion of most clerics of any kind. In 1820 he published a Bible of his own, with all the miraculous elements of the Gospels excised, calling himself Unitarian (though he never joined a Unitarian church).

2) René Guénon

Heretic of the week: René Guénon

René Guénon (1886-1951) was a fallen-away Catholic and convert to Islam who is seen as father of the “Traditionalist” school – which in this context means that all existing religions are equally good and valid inheritors of a single primeval faith. This is more authentically reflected in some religions than in others – and for Guénon, at best in Islam.

Born in Blois to a Catholic family, Guénon went to Paris to study. There he fell in with members of the 19th and early 20th century Occult revival in that city, becoming (and falling out of favour with) successively a Martinist, Gnostic and Freemason.

Guénon then began to study Theosophy and Hinduism – writing several books on the latter, in one of which he critiqued the former, as well as modern materialism.

This led to a period in the 1920s of collaboration with such Catholics as Jacques Maritain and Louis Charbonneau-Lassay – going so far as to write articles for the
latter’s journal, Regnabit, based in Paray-le-Moniale.

Charbonneau-Lassay saw traces in other world religions of the original Revelation from whence Judaism and then Catholicism had sprung; but for him these were to be used to draw people to the One True Faith. For Guénon, however, Catholicism fell short of being a genuine conduit – which led not only to a break with his Catholic friends (Maritain tried to have his work put on the Index of Forbidden Books), but to his own conversion to Islam and subsequent emigration to Cairo. There he died.

René Guénon has been a controversial figure, exercising great influence on such scholars of comparative religion as Huston Smith and philosophers including Frithjof Schuon. The whole idea of being “spiritual, but not religious” might be seen as a result of his work, though he probably would have disapproved. 

3) Arthur Conan Doyle

Heretic of the week: Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a physician and writer, renowned for creating the immortal detective Sherlock Holmes. Less well known is his religious journey, which took him from Catholicism to some very odd places. Born in Edinburgh to a Catholic family (his father was English of Irish descent; his mother was a native of Ireland), his father’s alcoholism shadowed family life, and the senior Doyle would die in an asylum.

Wealthy uncles arranged for Arthur to be sent to Stonyhurst, the elite Jesuit public school; he had unpleasant memories of the place. He was then sent for the 1874-75 school year to the Stella Matutina school – likewise Jesuit – in Austria. From there he returned home to study at the University of Edinburgh medical school, graduating in 1881. He lost his faith soon after he was no longer under the influence of his mother.

In 1882, as his medical practice floundered, Doyle began fiction writing in earnest. Four years later – basing his creation on Joseph Bell, a professor under whom he had studied – he introduced Holmes to the world.

But while Holmes shared Bell’s profound scientific scepticism, Doyle most assuredly did not. In 1887, he became a Freemason and started on his own course of psychical research, investigating hauntings and séances – and coming away very much convinced. By 1893 he was a spiritualist, joining the Society of Psychical Research and later the Ghost Club – breaking with both later because of their refusal to accept spiritualism and their condemnation of certain mediums as frauds.

After World War I he became a missionary for his new creed, defended numerous spurious mediums, and broke with Harry Houdini over the issue. Doyle defended in particular the Cottingley Fairies, an egregious fraud involving faked photos of “fairies”.

4) Robespierre 

Heretic of the week: Maximilien Robespierre

Most people think of Robespierre (1758-1794) simply as a bloody-handed mass murderer. But there was another side to the master of the Terror.

Born in Arras to a family of the minor nobility, when he was 11 he received a scholarship from his bishop, Hilaire de Conzié, to study at the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris, followed by four years at the university there.

Upon his graduation in 1781, Robespierre’s episcopal benefactor made him a judge. What the reverend gentleman did not know was that his protégé’s admiration of classicism during his schooldays had turned him into an admirer of the Roman Republic; nor did he know that the young jurist had become a disciple of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Although the bishop appointed Robespierre a judge, the latter soon resigned to avoid giving death sentences, and became a defence attorney.

Robespierre’s subsequent rise and fall as leader of the Jacobins and then France is well known – along with his attacks on the Church. What is less well known, perhaps, is his attempt to create a cult to replace Catholicism. Already a Cult of Reason had been created, which sought to displace the Church with worship of the abstract principle. But Robespierre believed with Rousseau that a god of some sort was necessary to encourage the people on the path of virtue: the deity would be the mainstay of the state. So the Cult of the Supreme Being was inaugurated on June 8, 1794, with a huge ceremony in Paris. Robespierre presided over the proceedings, “with feathers on his hat, and fruit and flowers in his hands”.

Many witnesses at the time and historians since have speculated that this spectacle contributed to the subsequent overthrow and murder of the great man himself. In any case, his religion died with him, and Napoleon banned it; there have been no attempts to revive it.