While it’s strange to think of myself as a heretic, Rev. David Cole had no problem imagining all of us UUs in that role. In Springtime 1961, Rev. Cole preached on Our Heritage of Heresy. As I have come to recognize in his sermons, his pattern was to begin with an historical review. 

Beginning in 325 C.E. (or A.D., as he knew it) he gave us a highlight reel of Arius, Constantine, Athanasius, Augustine, Pelegius, Theodosius, Frederick II, assorted Popes, Waldensians, Albigensians, the Spanish Inquisition (no one expects the Spanish Inquisition), John Calvin, Michael Servetus, Sebastian Castellio, and the Socinians. Some were heretics, some were conformists. All, Rev. Cole believed, formed a through-line of Christian doctrine and the lengths men would go through to advance or retard spiritual freedom.

His thesis was that the heretics were the “normal people.” “The heretics have been the gentle, sweet, noble souls; they were the well balanced and mature people. Their adversaries have been the demented, neurotic souls of history.” Rev. Cole tells how Constantine wanted Arius, with his views of Jesus as a created being, not present from the very beginning as was God, defeated for political not religious reasons. Constantine stacked the deck at the Council of Nicaea with Western, Trinitarian bishops because he needed military and financial support in the West more than in the East. Hence the trinitarian Nicene Creed, which I recited every Sunday while I was an Episcopalian. 

Another opponent of Arius was Athanasius, who Rev. Cole described as “an angry man who wanted vengeance.” The telling breaks down a bit here, because while Rev. Cole says Athanasius “spent fifty years hounding and persecuting Arius and his followers”, Athanasius was 8 years old when Arius died. Still, it is possible that, “Arius was the gentle and reasonable man. He was the more sane and normal of these two.”

Going on: “Augustine was a tortured and ill-balanced man.” “Pelegius was a monk … a saintly man. He maintained that man was not morally disabled. He denied original sin.” “Augustine hounded Pelegius and had him rejected by the hierarchy, condemned as a heretic, and banished. “Augustine, with his intense power-drives and his somewhat insane theology survived.” 

Moving into the medieval period, Rev. Cole continues to build his theory, with edicts, punishments, recanting, and crusades. Even King Frederick II, who had a reputation as a Renaissance man and visionary statesman and was, Rev. Cole said, “a free thinker in his time,” “issued an edict that all heretics in Germany and Italy would be burned. If they recanted they would only receive punishment, but then if they relapsed into their heresy, their houses would be destroyed and their children unto the second generation would be ineligible for paid jobs.”

Next up, Popes and the crusades. First, the crusades were not limited to the Holy Land. In the 12th and 13th Centuries, the church – and its income – was threatened by groups of people who wanted to read the bible for themselves, like the Waldensians and the Albigensians in France, who Rev. Cole described as “harmless, pious folk and not dangerous people at all.” Religious and political leaders, however, “announced that anyone who would go on a crusade against these people for forty consecutive days would thus be excused from paying interest on their debts, exempt from the jurisdiction of the courts, and absolved from all past and future sins.” Powerful motivations. When someone asked one of the Pope’s delegates how they could tell who the heretics were, the delegate said, “Kill them all. The Lord will know his own people.”

Before moving on to the Protestant Reformation and Calvin, Rev. Cole hammered home the idea that the heretics were the good people and the supporters of unquestioned/unquestionable doctrine were the villains. Speaking of the crusades and the Inquisition, he said, “Yet, these extreme measures to insure conformity suggest a pathological cause. Church leaders must have been very unsure of themselves, for only intensely paranoid people can inflict such sadism upon thousands of other people. The church’s leadership must have been emotionally sick.”