One sort of heresies stands apart from the rest. It is infinitely the
most various sort. It includes all those heresies which result from
wrong-headed mental elaboration, as distinguished from those which are
the result of hasty and imperfect apprehension, the heresies of the
clever rather than the heresies of the obtuse. The former are of endless
variety and complexity; the latter are in comparison natural, simple
confusions. The former are the errors of the study, the latter the
superstitions that spring by the wayside, or are brought down to us in
our social structure out of a barbaric past.
To the heresies of thought and speculation belong the elaborate
doctrine of the Trinity, dogmas about God’s absolute qualities, such odd
deductions as the accepted Christian teachings about the virginity of
Mary and Joseph, and the like. All these things are parts of orthodox
Christianity. Yet none of them did Christ, even by the Christian
account, expound or recommend. He treated them as negligible. It was
left for the Alexandrians, for Alexander, for little, red-haired,
busy, wire-pulling Athanasius to find out exactly what their Master was
driving at, three centuries after their Master was dead. . . .
Men still sit at little desks remote from God or life, and rack their
inadequate brains to meet fancied difficulties and state unnecessary
perfections. They seek God by logic, ignoring the marginal error
that creeps into every syllogism. Their conceit blinds them to the
limitations upon their thinking. They weave spider-like webs of muddle
and disputation across the path by which men come to God. It would not
matter very much if it were not that simpler souls are caught in these
webs. Every great religious system in the world is choked by such webs;
each system has its own. Of all the blood-stained tangled heresies which
make up doctrinal Christianity and imprison the mind of the western
world to-day, not one seems to have been known to the nominal founder
of Christianity. Jesus Christ never certainly claimed to be the Messiah;
never spoke clearly of the Trinity; was vague upon the scheme of
salvation and the significance of his martyrdom. We are asked to suppose
that he left his apostles without instructions, that were necessary to
their eternal happiness, that he could give them the Lord’s Prayer but
leave them to guess at the all-important Creed,* and that the Church
staggered along blindly, putting its foot in and out of damnation,
until the “experts” of Nicaea, that “garland of priests,” marshalled by
Constantine’s officials, came to its rescue. . . . From the conversion
of Paul onward, the heresies of the intellect multiplied about Christ’s
memory and hid him from the sight of men. We are no longer clear about
the doctrine he taught nor about the things he said and did. . . .
* Even the “Apostles’ Creed” is not traceable earlier than
the fourth century. It is manifestly an old, patched
formulary. Rutinius explains that it was not written down
for a long time, but transmitted orally, kept secret, and
used as a sort of password among the elect.
We are all so weary of this theology of the Christians, we are all at
heart so sceptical about their Triune God, that it is needless here to
spend any time or space upon the twenty thousand different formulae in
which the orthodox have attempted to believe in something of the sort.
There are several useful encyclopaedias of sects and heresies, compact,
but still bulky, to which the curious may go. There are ten thousand
different expositions of orthodoxy. No one who really seeks God thinks
of the Trinity, either the Trinity of the Trinitarian or the Trinity of
the Sabellian or the Trinity of the Arian, any more than one thinks of
those theories made stone, those gods with three heads and seven hands,
who sit on lotus leaves and flourish lingams and what not, in the
temples of India. Let us leave, therefore, these morbid elaborations of
the human intelligence to drift to limbo, and come rather to the natural
heresies that spring from fundamental weaknesses of the human character,
and which are common to all religions. Against these it is necessary to
keep constant watch. They return very insidiously.