Heresy Hysteria, Medieval and Modern
Heresy hysteria, medieval and modern
How have historic attempts to control heresy and enforce orthodoxy mirrored the ‘cancel culture’ of our times, and what can we learn from their methods and consequences?
In 1409, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Arundel published a series of thirteen constitutions in response to the perceived threat of heresy.1 The heresy in question was ‘Lollardy’ or ‘Wycliffism’, those influenced by the leading Oxford scholar John Wyclif (or Wiclif, or Wycliffe) to question many practices of medieval Christianity and advocate a return to what they felt was a more simple, personal, Biblical faith on a patristic model. Wyclif had never been officially declared a heretic, the papacy had tried to get Oxford to take action against him in the 1370s, but the university had stood on its academic freedoms and refused. By 1409, however, the climate had changed, and with the power of the new Lancastrian dynasty largely behind him, Arundel was ready to bring the recalcitrant scholars to heel.
The ‘Constitutions of Arundel’ limited preaching to officially licensed individuals, restricted what could be taught, preached, or read, banned bible translation, and required officials of the universities to make monthly investigations to see if any scholar had ‘in any wise proposed any conclusion or proposition that carries a sound contrary to the Catholic faith or good manners’. Furthermore, certain topics were entirely banned from discussion, and books from Wyclif’s time were forbidden to be read until approved by a duly appointed council of experts. The aim was to protect people from exposure to any heresy whereby they might be ‘perturbed’ or ‘corrupted’. Ideas were dangerous, and the text appeals to what it regards as Augustine’s willingness to ‘revoke true conclusions which were offensive to pious ears’ to justify silencing any discussions ‘that carry a sound contrary to the catholic faith, or good manners,’ ‘even though they may be defended by subtlety of words’. His successor, Henry Chichele, would go further, expecting each parish to report at visitation anyone acting oddly or saying anything that sounded wrong.
The impact of this new regime has been much debated, but it seems clear that it was deleterious. Nicholas Watson, writing in 1995 suggested that in this scorched-earth approach of stringent regulation the church was lobotomising itself intellectually in its suppression of independent thought and emasculating itself spiritually in its refusal to engage with the full potential of emerging lay devotion.2 In his provocative phrase, the result of attempting to ‘censor out of existence’ the substance of Lollardy was that ‘original theological writing in English was, for a century, almost extinct’.3 While more recent writers have sought to qualify this, pointing to new creativity in liturgy and ceremonial, it seems clear that the academy, so creative and flourishing in the 14th century, was in the 15th a pale shadow of itself, warily regurgitating approved orthodoxies, with one eye on the episcopal power.4 Conscious that their career could be destroyed by anything that even ‘had a sound’ contrary to a hearer’s conception of the faith, writers and teachers tended to self-censor and play things faith. Contemporary books are not uncommonly woven through with desperate protestations that anything they say will of course be revoked at the command of the ecclesiastical authorities. Those who transgressed these boundaries could be forced into humiliating public recantations, like that of the bishop of Chichester, Reginald Pecock, condemned to publicly burn his books and dismiss his life’s work. Actual executions were rare, but a public penance could be an elaborate theatre that shattered an individual’s standing in the community. For most, that was a sufficient deterrent to make them toe the line.
In the end, all these efforts would be questionable effective. Lollardy survived, albeit decapitated, in covert networks of readers, smuggling and discussing books. Many of those networks would later bring Lutheran books to England and furnish some leading reformers, and the objections of Wyclif and the Lollards, forced underground in their own time, would emerge with more force in the Reformation, changing the country far beyond the fears of Arundel or Chichele.
Perhaps the comparison to our own times is already clear. Freedom of speech in the academy has long been a contested thing, and that has spread to the wider society. Statements too often are judged, not by their intent, or even their content, but by their impression on the casual hearer – what Arundel called their ‘sound’. The infamous pictures of British police standing around a billboard declaring ‘being offensive is an offence’ encapsulated all too well the modern attitude that a statement is judged not by what it says, but by how it is heard.5 If it causes offence, it is offensive. If it sounds bad, it is. The onus is on the speaker to avoid saying anything that might be construed as offensive, not on the hearer to eschew unnecessary offence. Any attempt to defend provocative statements by suggesting we listen to what they actually said is impatiently dismissed as ‘subtlety of words’ and false intellectualism. Books, or ideas, from a suspect source are condemned en masse, unless specifically approved – have you noticed how we suddenly stopped quoting Churchill – and we are again concerned to protect ‘pious ears’, or in our case ‘sensitive ears’ from hearing anything by which they may be perturbed. If we are not yet asking deans to do monthly examinations of their colleges and universities for anyone holding unorthodox views, we are asking them to police halloween costumes and the like. The new orthodoxy is not enforced with the fires of the stake, only of Twitter, but humiliating public recantations and penances, presented as ‘apologies’, are a standard punishment for those who are perceived as having transgressed, however much they may initially try and defend what they actually said with ‘subtlety of words’. Incautious speech, however swiftly recanted, can still check or crash a public career.
The result is enough to cow most of us into self-censorship. In US legal discussions the term ‘chilling effect’ is used for the way that people edit their expressed views when they fear being overheard and sanctioned. Initially used in the 50s in a context of fear of communism, now it is a fear of a social media mob that leads us to think twice before saying anything controversial.6 For the modern West, as for the medieval English church, the result may well be an intellectual lobotomy that leads us unprepared for the storms ahead. As a brain thinks by communication between neurons, a society thinks by communication between individuals. Chill and inhibit our ability to communicate, and you slow and eventually suffocate our ability to collectively think and respond.
Worse, perhaps, what your repress can emerge more strongly and less nuanced if you push it out of the light of general discourse. There are certainly places on the internet where the kind of ideas that can no longer be exposed to the light of day have taken on dark and disturbing forms, more extreme than they ever were under mainstream expression.7 This, indeed, is often the justification for the modern censorship regime, for who would want to be associated with those? Yet the cure for darkness is light, not more darkness. The cure for distorted, hateful, or false ideas is to expose them to truth and love, not to lock them away until, repressed into the most resentful and unthinking parts of the culture, they fester into something worse.
We have seen, I think, a positive example of that in the UK over the past ten years. Much of Europe has large nationalist parties, whose steady growth in strength over the last twenty years occasionally makes for worried news articles and stressful elections. Britain does not. When I was growing up, the British Nationalist party was a growing force, and even some of my peers joined. Where is it now? At the time of writing, it does not have a single elected representative, and in 2019 won just over 500 votes, from a peak of over 500, 000 earlier in the century, doing significantly worse than the Monster Raving Loony Party. As far as I can make out, its niche in the political world was taken by UKIP, and UKIP in turn was largely disarmed by the referendum on Europe. Bringing debates about national borders into mainstream political discourse appears to have largely demolished the momentum of traditional nationalist parties. While xenophobia remains real, and individual racist incidents continue to occur, political nationalism appears to have been demolished, not by suppression but by engagement.
Medieval heresy laws are not normally considered the most relevant and exciting area of study. Perhaps I prejudiced, but I think they offer us in this age a warning and an example. They offer us as a society a warning, because they point to the cost a society pays when it restricts the freedom of speech, especially when it places the onus of avoiding conflict entirely on the speaker not the hearer. The corollary is this encouragement: the very ‘heresies’ the medieval church sought to eradicate survived, and in some ways triumphed. As an evangelical Anglican, I trace my spiritual ancestry in part through the Lollards. They survived in small, tight communities, where everyone knew each other, smuggling texts from group to group and investing heavily in each other’s literacy and education. So good a job did they do, indeed, of passing on their distinctive faith in the face of persecution, that those families that produced Lollards in the fifteenth century often continued to produce reformers in the sixteenth, Calvinists and eventually puritans in the seventeenth.8 The ideas and ideals in danger of being suppressed as heresy by today’s new progressive orthodoxy will survive. The challenge will be to ensure that, surviving and then re-emerging, they do not return in too extreme a form. We are still dealing with the problematic legacy of Reformation conflicts in the church. We do not need a secular counterpart.
1Interested readers can find an English text here: http://www.bible-researcher.com/arundel.html
2Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late Medieval England: Vernacular theology, the Oxford translation debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum, 70:4 (1995), pp. 822-864.
3Ibid., pp. 826, 835.
4Compare for example J. I. Catto ‘Theology After Wycliffe’, in History of the University of Oxford, Vol II, ed. J. I. Catto and T. A. Ralph (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), and Andrew Larsen, The School of Heretics: Academic condemnation at the University of Oxford 1277-1409 (Leiden, Brill, 2011), to the more cautious assessments of Vincent Gillespie, ‘Chichele’s Church, Vernacular Theology in England after Thomas Arundel’ and Michael G. Sargent ‘Censorship or Cultural Change? Reformation and Renaissance in the Spirituality of Late Medieval England’ both in Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh, eds, After Arundel: Religious writing in fifteenth-century England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). In this volume see also Catto’s ‘After Arundel: The closing or opening of the English mind,’ which nuances this position.
5https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-56154542
6https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050222 for one modern discussion of how controversy effects researchers.
7Consider for example some assessment of the ‘involuntary celibate’ movement: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/25/raw-hatred-why-incel-movement-targets-terrorises-women
8See in particular the work of Robert Lutton on late medieval Kent.
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