Saintly Saturday: St. Paul the Confessor

Today is the Feast of St. Paul the Confessor. The title Confessor refers to those Christians who were jailed and/or tortured for the faith but were not martyred. St. Paul live during the second phase of iconoclasm during the eighth and ninth centuries. He was bishop of the city Prusa in Bithynia. He was harassed, persecuted and exiled for his zealous defense of the icons. He died in A.D. 850.

In recent weeks, there have been several saints from Bithynia popping up here on Saturdays. This only adds another layer of detail to the slowly developing Sea of Mamara campaign setting. It seems that the rebel monks are fighting against heretical rulers. One now only needs to decide whether those rulers are in Nicomedia or Byzantium...

Having a despot who champions heresy, imprisoning bishops while rebel monks try to protect both the faith and the people or conversely, a group of heretical rebel monks wrecking havoc are both great backgrounds upon which to build a campaign. The question must be asked, however: what does heresy look like?

As St. Paul demonstrates, heresy can be as esoteric as whether or not icons should be used during worship. I suppose one could find a copy of the Panarion by St. Epiphanius which details eighty different heresies, but that is more of a scholarly exercise than I am willing to undertake at the moment.

Rather, I am going to try to boil down all of the various historical heresies into a few broad categories. I will then assign to each a general behavior pattern that follows from the internal logic of the heresy as well as the type of NPC most likely to adhere to those beliefs.

Man Saves Himself

These heresies remove God from the salvific equation in some way fashion or form. While atheism falls under this category, God doesn’t need to be completely ignored. Any heresy that minimized the divinity of Christ falls under this generalization.

The ultimate logical outcome of these heresies is Might Makes Right. Generally speaking, what is good and ethical derives from humanity, not from God. Thus, what is good and ethical is determined by those who are willing to use force to coerce everyone else into agreeing with them.

Those in power or those seeking power are the most likely to adhere to these kinds of heresies.

Dualism

These heresies attribute equal power to an evil entity or god that opposes the true god. Most commonly, this is found in the various gnostic heresies. Generally, the evil god is responsible for the creation of matter while the good god is responsible for the soul.

Thus, the material world is irredeemable. This leads to extreme forms of asceticism, where the fleshly body is seen as a foreign entity that needs to be conquered. Destruction of material things deemed too tempting or distracting would be understood as normal and beneficial.

Monastics, as well as intellectual and social elites are the most likely candidates for this kind of heresy.

Monarchianism

This is a fancy way of saying that god is one and only one. This includes those heresies that opposed to the Orthodox belief that God is not only one, but trinity. It also includes all of the various heresies which over-emphasize the divinity of Christ.

Chauvinism and fatalism are the two most common practical outcomes of these heresies. If god is one and he looks and talks like me, then he must not look and talk like them. If salvation is completely in the hands of god, then my fate has already been decided. Thus, violent acts towards outsiders are completely justifiable, as are suicide attacks.

The most likely adherents of these kinds of heresies are suppressed minorities, people with very strong ethnic or national identities or just those who are afraid of people different from them.

Thus, in the example above of the Sea of Mamara campaign, the heretical rulers are most likely adherents of Man Saves Himself although one could justify the rulers of Nicomedia believing in Monarchiamism...

Green Lantern Movie: A Primer on Arianism

This weekend, I finally got around to seeing the 2011 Green Lantern movie. I had been avoiding this due to the bad reviews it received and my own immense distrust of everything Hollywood. Green Lantern has a special place in my heart because my first real exposure to the medium of the comic book came through a bunch of Hal Jordan stories.

I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised, but for a completely unexpected reason, because the reviews were right — this was a deeply flawed movie. The reason (unsurprisingly) is theological: The Green Lantern Movie is an excellent primer on the Christian heresy of Arianism. It beautifully illustrates the basic tenets of its beliefs, what those beliefs look like and, ultimately, its fatal flaw.

Arius famously stated that there was a time when the Son was not. Rather than uniting humanity to the being of God, Christ merely united us to His Will. Now, take a listen to the opening sequence to the GL movie:

The Guardians of Oa are described as immortal — they are the Arian Christ figures of this story. They created Oa as a means to allow access to the most powerful energy in the universe: Will. The rings can be seen as a stand-in for ordination: the GL corp is the clergy of the Arian Church. They go about ensuring that the universe bends to the Will of the GL corp creed:

In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight.
Let those who worship evil's might,
Beware my power, Green Lantern's light!

There are two fatal flaws with this cosmology:

The first is magnificently illustrated by the fascistic overtones of the GL Corp led by the charismatic Sinestro: What is evil? In a world where the Guardians are willing to make a weapon like the Yellow Ring and the leader of the GL Corp is willing to use it, evil devolves into the relativism of whoever owns the biggest baddest weapon and is willing to use it gets to determine what is good and what is evil. Historically, the biggest proponents of Arianism were the Emperors for exactly this reason.

The second is wonderfully embodied by the movie’s main villain Paralax. According to the movie, Paralax is one of the Guardians who became overwhelmed by the yellow energy of fear and subsequently became a threat to Oa and the the Guardians themselves. I hope I won’t spoil anything for those who have yet to see the movie, but Paralax is ultimately destroyed by being lured into the sun.

All of this demonstrates the ultimate problem of Arianism. Though they are immortal and grant access to Will, both the Guardians of Oa and the Arian Christ are created beings. Ultimately, this means that they have a beginning and an end. Therefore, we gain nothing by uniting ourselves to them, other than a very temporary access to power. In the end, we all end.

This is why the Church fought so vigorously against Arianism in the fourth century. It completely undermines the true Gospel — God Himself became a human being in the person of Jesus Christ so that we might overcome our end and share in Christ’s eternity.

Therefore, I really liked this movie (despite the fact that in just about every other aspect is was barely average). It goes to show that the politically correct assumption that all religions are basically the same and that those of us who believe in some kind of divine being are all just going to end up in the same place by different paths is itself fundamentally flawed.

Cults of Averoigne Part 1

Among the various wilderness encounter areas that I have for my version of Averoigne are several cultists. I included them on my Random Wilderness Encounter Tables because not only do I want an interesting and insidious group of human adversaries but because there is an historical precedence in 13th century France for such a group.

From 1209-1229 nobles of northern France were encouraged to wipe out the Catharism abundant in southern France in what is known as the Albigensian Crusade. It all started when a papal legate was murdered while trying to negotiate with Cathar nobles. Lands held by Cathars were offered up as rewards for those nobles willing to take up arms. There were a couple of interesting consequences from this crusade.

1. Southern France had a distinct culture and language. In the wake of the crusade, both of these were greatly reduced under stronger influence of the French crown over the area.
2. The crusade played a role in the establishment and institutionalization of the Inquisition.

Both of these suggest some very interesting background noise for an Averoigne campaign. First, the language and culture of Averoigne is distinct from the rest of the region. Secondly, Inquisitors tend to be outsiders who have a nationalistic agenda rather than a purely religious one.

Catharism is a dualistic gnostic Christian heresy. Dualism is a belief system that holds that there are two equally powerful deities — one good and one evil. Gnosticism takes on various forms, but there are several characteristics which can be identified as gnostic. In the case of Catharism, they identify the god of the Old Testament as a demiurge — what they term the Rex Mundi — that is in actuality the evil god in their dualistic pantheon. This results in another typical gnostic characteristic — the belief that creation and all matter are fundamentally evil, having been created by the Rex Mundi. As a result, Catharism understands the person of Jesus to be a manifestation of spirit unbound by matter who in no way shape or form became human or died on the Cross.

Of course, these beliefs run counter to Christian orthodoxy which holds that the Trinitarian God is the only God who even has dominion over the devil and his angels; creation was declared very good by God; and Christ definitively became a human being and died on the Cross.

Cathari religious texts included parts of the New Testament (especially the Gospel of John), The Gospel of the Secret Supper (sometimes called John’s Interrogation) and The Book of Two Principles. There is some question as to whether or not the name Cathar was used by the heretical group. More certainly, they referred to themselves as Bons Hommes or Good Men.

Despite this moniker, gnostic theology has some nasty consequences. Since all matter is considered evil, how one treats matter is of little consequence. Thus, extreme asceticism and hedonism are both frequent expressions of gnostic practice. Taking this understanding of material as evil to a logical conclusion, it is possible for gaming purposes to justify torture as a legitimate tool of religious conversion and discipline — to remove dependence upon evil matter.

Therefore, the analogous group for the Cathari (which I am thinking of calling the Oamenbun) would practice extreme asceticism (horse hair shirts being considered mild) who would think nothing of kidnapping and torture as a means of furthering their own agenda. The inner circle of leaders would have secret dens of inequity where all kinds of heinous and hedonistic practices can be found. Most intriguingly, this group would be fervently nationalistic — resisting the influence of non-Averoigne culture and language. This nationalism would earn them wide support among the locals.