Chapter 6: The Orthodoxy
In which we begin the story of Christianity's decline
This is the sixth chapter of a book that currently has the working title Cataspectral. You can find the introduction and table of contents here.
Defining “Orthodoxy” and Related Terms
In his 1972 essay, “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization”, the sociologist Colin Campbell introduced a groundbreaking theory of the growth of new religious movements. He termed such new movements ‘cults’, as differentiated from ‘sects’, ‘churches’ and ‘denominations’. This sense is different from the general modern usage involving high-control groups with charismatic leaders. By ‘cult’, Campbell only means to refer to any group with ideas that are heterodox with respect to the surrounding culture. This can include groups like modern high-control cults, but these groups are actually outside the norm of the cultic milieu and more resemble sects (which are defined as having relatively developed belief systems and organizational structures). Think more “cult of Aphrodite” than “Jonestown.”
At the time of Campbell’s essay, previous scholarship had largely focused on each new cult as an entity in itself, either rapidly succeeding and becoming sect-like or fading away equally quickly. Campbell’s innovation was instead to see each cult as an outgrowth of a deep “cultural underground” in which new belief systems are generated through recombination of the scraps of old ones. For example, the traditional view would see “the cult of deep underground military bases,” “the cult of adrenochrome” and “the cult of chemtrails” as being independent entities, while Campbell would see them as fragments that can be mixed and matched with an infinite menu of others. The cultic milieu is a churning mélange of ephemeral, disorganized ideas, groups and subcultures, with individuals constantly flitting between different areas of investigation. Given the by-definition heterodox nature of idea shards swirling around the cultic milieu, it is highly ideologically tolerant and syncretic. Since the cultic milieu has no generally recognized arbiters of truth, no person or institution in the cultic milieu who thinks someone else is wrong will be sufficiently strong to debunk or remove that belief from circulation. Occasionally, groups will become more well-defined and perhaps charismatic leaders will emerge, at which point a new sect (something more like a “cult” in the contemporary sense) begins to branch off from the cultic milieu. As that sect becomes more powerful, it may eventually be recognized by mainstream culture, at which point it will become a religion.
The crux of our contemporary culture war is not actually one party, religion or theory versus another. It is the most ardent denizens of the cultic milieu, which I will call ‘Bunkers’, leaping out of the maelstrom to attack the defenders of the orthodoxy, which I will call ‘Debunkers’. Part II will be a historical trip from the Middle Ages to now, following the conflict between Bunkers and Debunkers and demonstrating how it has led to our current era of epistemic crisis.
According to Wikipedia, which I have no reason to doubt, the word ‘debunk’ derives from the word ‘bunk’, which comes from ‘bunkum’, which in turn is “apparently related to a poorly received “speech for Buncomb County, North Carolina” given by North Carolina representative Felix Walker during the 16th United States Congress (1819-1821).” The word ‘bunk’ is also included in the word ‘Bunker’, and although not etymologically related, capital-b Bunkers and bunkers in the underground fortification sense often go together. What makes a Bunker or a Debunker is the tendency for people to defend or reject the orthodoxy while, respectively, either not being willing seriously to entertain conflicting views or being willing to do so. Those who refuse to be swayed from the orthodoxy are ‘closed Debunkers’ and those who reject it in a similar fashion are ‘closed Bunkers’. Naturally, those who defend or reject on the basis of genuine consideration are ‘open Debunkers/Bunkers’.
By ‘orthodoxy’, I mean the prevailing procedure for obtaining knowledge at any given time and the worldview entailed by the use of such procedure. The term ‘orthodoxy’ is different from the notion of the ‘paradigm’ as the philosopher Thomas Kuhn explored it in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His ‘paradigm’ is the reigning fad within the scientific establishment at a given time, dictating the process Kuhn calls ‘normal science’, which works out the problems following directly from the paradigm. Kuhn contrasts normal science with ‘revolutionary science’, when the paradigm shifts and a whole new set of concepts and problems comes to the fore. A canonical example of a paradigm shift is the transition from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics in the early 20th century.
The orthodoxy is a more fundamental layer of epistemology than the paradigm, roughly congruent with Foucault’s notion of the ‘episteme’, which he defines as “the epistemological field…in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms, grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its conditions of possibility.”1 While the paradigm may set out the projects and concepts of any academic discipline at a given time, the orthodoxy is the condition for the possibility of any such disciplines. You could think of it as a kind of “meta-paradigm.” The orthodoxy at any given time is that with which all paradigms must be consistent in order to be taken seriously. Catholicism, various forms of Protestantism, Marxism-Leninism, Nazism (and other totalitarian nationalisms) and physicalism are the major orthodoxies that have existed in the West since the fall of Rome. Each of these orthodoxies is embodied by an apparatus that seeks to obtain knowledge on the basis of some underlying epistemology: the Roman Catholic Church; various Protestant churches; the Communist Party; the Nazi Party and the modern research university.
Galileo’s methods of science were incompatible with Aristotelian philosophy and thus Catholic orthodoxy, and so they were debunked. Similarly, a claim running counter to the Marxist doctrine of historical materialism would not have been allowed in the Soviet Union. In the contemporary West, physicalism exerts the same type of authority. Physicalism has many possible definitions, but it is generally taken to mean something like “all mental events supervene on physical events” or “only the stuff properly described by physics has causal power.” Here, I will take a slightly different approach.
Rather than try to delimit some set of things or processes that are uniquely “physical,” which strikes me as too arbitrary to be useful, I will set out from the side of epistemology instead, asking what sorts of claims can be considered to be true rather than what sorts of things can be considered to be real. The philosophers James Ladyman and Don Ross provide an excellent formulation of an epistemological approach that they call the Primacy of Physics Constraint, or the PPC: “Special science hypotheses that conflict with fundamental physics, or such consensus as there is in fundamental physics, should be rejected for that reason alone. Fundamental physical hypotheses are not symmetrically hostage to the conclusions of the special sciences.”2 Elsewhere, Ladyman defines this as a “methodological form of physicalism” that permits the physicalist to accept laws of biology and economics, for example, as being just as real as those of fundamental physics.3 In this book, I will define physicalism on the basis of a slightly reworked form of the PPC: no claim can, if it is to be considered true, contravene the laws of physics as currently understood without providing predictive power superior to such laws.
Physicalism as we know it today would not have been possible without the rise of science and the modern research university. These, in turn, arose from a specific set of historical circumstances, an understanding of which is critical in explaining the current state of physicalism and what we should expect in its future. Before there was physicalism, there was Christianity. Most apropos for the current discussion is the particular orthodoxy of Catholicism, which was the first to give way to physicalism in the modern period. Here, we begin the story of its decline in the only place such a story can begin: higher ground.
The Albigensian Crusade: Catholicism as an Orthodoxy
On January 14, 1208, a Papal legate was stabbed to death.4 This was certainly no ordinary event, but its consequences would far outstrip anything that could have been predicted even regarding such a shocking murder. When Pope Innocent III heard of this outrage, he saw war as the only proper response. The Pope was convinced that Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, had sent the knight that had murdered his legate. After all, Raymond had spent his tenure protecting heretics, or at least doing nothing to help the Church to cleanse heresy from his lands. The latest furor had been Raymond’s refusal to submit to Papal power when the legate had excommunicated him for his continued failure to assist in persecuting heretics. Instead of making a statement of contrition and humbly requesting readmission to the ranks of the faithful, Raymond continued to push back on Papal requests during negotiations, and even warned the Pope’s legates that the authorities in Toulouse would be keeping them under watch. It was in this tense atmosphere that the legate was killed (likely by a lone-wolf actor rather than at Raymond’s instruction, though nobody knows for sure).
But the legate’s murder was only the most recent episode in a long history of headaches for the Church in the lands surrounding Toulouse, between the Garonne and the Rhône, known as Occitania or Languedoc (from “language of Oc”). This had been known as a hotbed of heresy dating back at least to the early eleventh century, when anxieties related to the turning of the second millennium drove contemporary writers to decry the depraved acts of its inhabitants, from uncouth dress to improper burial practices, as harbingers of the apocalypse (the turning of the third millennium was thankfully spared this sort of paranoia).
In 1145, about half a century before the Albigensian Crusade, a man named Henri was known to traverse the land. He had once been a monk but now slept in the streets, preaching that the intercession of priests between believers and God was unnecessary for salvation. By the following year, he was captured by the bishop of Toulouse and quietly dispatched. A similar fate befell the followers of a man named Valdes or Waldo, a prosperous merchant in Lyon who decided in 1173 to give away all he possessed and sing the gospel in the streets, clad in rags and sandals. The Waldensians (as his followers were known) were anathematized in 1184 for preaching without the permission of Catholic authorities. Many fled into the countryside to escape persecution, which ran the gamut from sneering and laughing to burning at the stake. For the next fifty years, the Church would engage in futile attempts to debate, cajole, punish and prod the heretics of Occitania to reconvert to orthodox doctrine. It was only after this prolonged and increasingly frustrating saga, in the context of over a century of the crusading, militant Christianity that wreaked destruction on the Muslim kingdoms of the Holy Land, that Innocent III made the decision to turn the sword of the spirit upon Christendom itself.
The Albigensian Crusade lasted for two decades, laying waste throughout Languedoc. The cities of Béziers, Carcassone and Toulouse were besieged and captured, and despite a number of setbacks and reversals of fortune, the Church was eventually successful at eliminating most of the heretics, leaving behind Inquisitors to deal with the stragglers. An apocryphal saying by Arnau Amalric, leader of the Crusade, gives a good sense of the philosophy with which the Crusade approached the civilians they encountered, whether heretic or not: “Kill them all. The Lord will know his own.”
The traditional view of the Albigensian heretics (also known as the Cathars or the “purified”) is that they were part of an institutional Cathar Church, which presented a direct rival to the Catholic Church. Others maintain that there was no Cathar Church, but rather a decentralized culture populated here and there by “good men” or “good women,” spiritual leaders who served as exemplars of moral rectitude to their communities, whom the Crusaders incorrectly assumed to be priests of a rival religion like Islam from previous Crusades. Whatever the truth, what is generally agreed upon is that the Cathars practiced self-denial as a central aspect of their faith, ranging from everyday moderation to stricter asceticism among good men and good women, and eventually to absolute renunciation of all earthly pleasures among the “perfect” (a status usually only obtained on one’s deathbed, as it was difficult to keep up for long).
This focus on asceticism came from perhaps the core theological notion of the Cathars: that the life of Christ was to be interpreted as an example of perfect renunciation of matter, which they took to be evil, in favor of spirit, which was good. This was connected with the idea that the material world was created by some evil force – perhaps Satan, maybe a separate evil god (called the ‘Demiurge’ by other gnostic Christians). Some may have been dualists, seeing matter and spirit as irreconcilable and distinct, though many likely just saw humans as having material and spiritual aspects, and the task of the good man or good woman as exemplifying the purging of the material in favor of the spiritual undertaken by Jesus. Cathars took a relatively dim view of the Old Testament, if they even recognized its authority at all, seeing it as either fully the work of the material, evil god or as highly influenced by that force. They also refused the doctrine of the crucifixion as the method by which humanity was saved from sin; instead, they saw this as a material illusion created by Satan, since the real Jesus was pure spirit and could not be killed, a fact proven by His later return in a spiritual form. Since matter was evil, the bodily resurrection of the dead made no sense, and Hell of course wouldn’t exist separately from the world; after all, it was torture enough merely to be alive in a body.
Naturally, the Catholic Church had a lot of problems with this cultic milieu (or potentially more institutionally defined cult or religion). The Cathars believed female priests should be allowed, did not recognize the authority of the Pope, did not believe in salvation via the resurrection and rejected the Old Testament, among many other affronts. But disagreeing with the veracity of these doctrines as a practical matter isn’t enough to make the agents of the Church closed Debunkers. To be closed Debunkers, they would have to defend Catholic doctrine irrationally, that is, they would have to refuse to give competing arguments a fair hearing.
In the eyes of Catholic authorities, heresy was something that by definition must never be taken as even possibly true. These beliefs were so manifestly untrue that no heretic could seriously entertain them unless they were deceived by the forces of Satan, or knew them to be untrue and were purposefully doing the work of Hell. Having heretical beliefs was less a matter of personal judgment and more like a kind of possession, as if the person were taken over by the evil miasma of heresy. This attitude is apparent in the language with which Church authorities discussed heresy, constantly referring to it as a “plague” or an “infection.” Historian Mark Gregory Pegg describes it thus:5
“Almost half a century of ecclesiastical admonitions warned, over and over, that most persons who lived in and around the county of Toulouse were wholly or partially diseased with heresy and did not know it. A plea of ignorance was no more than a sign of willful complacency and, in all probability, a symptom of infection. What appeared Catholic and correct on the surface was, so very often, so very cleverly, a facade hiding rampant heretical pestilence. Unless men and women ostentatiously announced themselves opposed to heresy… then by default they were either heretics or supporters of heretics… What added to [the crusaders’] ardor and so their murderousness was the conviction that if heresy were not erased root and branch, then, sooner or later, they too would be surreptitiously corrupted by this plague.”
This attitude is what makes the Church officials who were sent before the advent of the Crusade just as much closed Debunkers as the crusaders themselves. The conviction of the obvious truth of Catholic doctrine did not prevent Church authorities from engaging in public debates with heretics, nor did it prevent learned treatises being written in order to refute heresies point by point. An open Debunker would of course also engage in debates in person and in writing, but they would do so while being open to the possibility that they were incorrect and would be happy to revise their confidence levels in their model should better hypotheses be presented. The closed Debunker has no such attitude. The priests’ and legates’ intention was the same as that of the crusaders: suppress views that disagreed with the orthodoxy. Whether incorrect views – those deviating from Catholic doctrine – were suppressed through debate, ridicule or violence was a difference in method alone.
The Albigensian Crusade can be seen as an immensely violent episode of debunking. Luckily for the Catholic authorities, the outbreak of Catharism was localized to southern France and was all but extirpated through the use of what could be described as genocide or ethnic cleansing in modern terms. Across recorded history until about 1450, localized suppression had commonly been successful when an incumbent ideological system needed to confront an internal challenger. If the suppression failed, it would create a schism, with the new sect breaking off from the original religion to form a rival one such as Christianity from Judaism or Buddhism from Hinduism. Since it took a long time for ideas to spread across great distances, sects usually radiated gradually from one central location or a cluster of strongholds, making them easier for authorities to suppress or to geopolitically divorce if the suppression failed. In this context, it may make more sense to talk about countless separate cultic milieux than one all-encompassing cultic milieu.
All of this was about to change. The invention of the printing press would radically reduce the time and effort necessary to transmit ideas, with the effect of combining all of the tiny separate cultic milieux into a single mega-milieu. For the Debunkers, this was a catastrophe; for Bunkers, it was a grand opportunity. But before the printing press could revolutionize Europe, revolutionary ideas had to be born.
The Order of Things. Vintage, 1994, pp. xxiiii-xxiv.
Every Thing Must Go. Oxford, 2007, p. 44.
“Weak Physicalism and Special Science Ontology.” Reduction - Abstraction - Analysis, edited by Alexander Hieke and Hannes Leitgeb, De Gruyter, 2009, p. 117.
I have generally referred to Mark Gregory Pegg’s A Most Holy War (cited below) and The Albigensian Crusades by Joseph R. Strayer (Ann Arbor, 1992) for background on the Albigensian Crusade.
A Most Holy War. Oxford, 2008, p. 78.