Is it necessarily wrong to say that heretics should be given capital punishment? Aquinas argued that the danger is so great that they will corrupt the innocent and lead people into the danger of hell. If that is true, the heresy is deadly to a country.
Yes, although I don’t think Church leaders and theologians were thinking primarily in terms of “countries” but of Christendom.
So is there a chance that our own permissiveness of heresy is based on a kind of relativistic view that whatever one believes is just fine and doesn’t have real consequences?
Certainly such a view is held in secular culture. However, I don’t think that’s the reason why the Catholic Church today believes in religious freedom. On the contrary, the Church’s support for religious freedom (see Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae) is rooted in the Christian understanding of human dignity. It’s not that our choices don’t have consequences, but that human freedom must be respected.
A further complicating issue is that the Church today recognizes that many material heretics may be acting in good faith. While a murderer may think that he has good reasons for his actions, he can’t disguise from himself the fact that he is in fact physically destroying another human being. A heretic, on the other hand, generally doesn’t intend to destroy another human being spiritually. (If there were any way of sorting out the relatively small number of people who
are heretics in that sense, I would agree that it would be right to punish them–but there isn’t such a way, practically speaking.) Therefore, analogies with civil crimes don’t apply. This isn’t relativism–it’s a recognition of the mystery of the human heart, which is not the same thing.
One of the cruel aspects of the medieval Church’s policy was that it bore hardest on those who were most sincerely seeking the truth. A frivolous blasphemer who threw around heretical notions for the heck of it would quickly recant and probably be more careful in the future. But someone genuinely convinced that the Church was wrong would be most likely to persevere in heresy, forcing the Church court to hand him or her over (with great and usually sincere reluctance) to the civil authorities for execution. There’s something intrinsically wrong with this kind of approach, as Tertullian pointed out to the Romans in his
Apology (though admittedly the pagan Romans had less of an ideological basis for seeking recantation rather than retributive punishment). Furthermore, over time it hurts the Church far more than it helps (though this shouldn’t be the primary consideration). When people see that some of their most sincere and devout neighbors are the ones getting into the most serious trouble, they begin to wonder about the Church’s moral credibility.
In short, it’s not relativism to recognize (as Aquinas did) that matters of faith are not susceptible of demonstrative proof, and to draw ethical and practical consequences from this that Aquinas himself did not draw.
What I really want to get at is that if the Church taught this, how is the Church not heretical? Did it misinterpret the application of the principle that heresy is mortally dangerous, by the application of capital punishment. Was it just a too extreme application of this principle?
Not just too extreme, but mistaken in a lack of recognition of other factors.
Edwin, you brought out a good point that there are several places that point to this idea. That may not be infallible, but it certainly has a lot of magesterial weight behind it.
Yes. This is a point I have sometimes found it difficult to get Catholics on this forum to accept, in part because they’re worried about the questions you go on to ask.
Could the Church have pushed that far into something immoral and still be the Church?
Practically and emotionally, I find this a very difficult question. It’s one of the reasons I’m still not Catholic–intellectually I don’t think the Church’s record disproves its claims (because those claims are carefully phrased and narrower than many people realize), but it’s hard for me to summon up the necessary
trust in the Church.
However, it’s important to recognize that the alternative isn’t a better Church but no Church at all (or an equally flawed church that makes lesser claims for itself, which arguably amounts to “no Church at all,” though that’s the reality with which I presently live).
Or is it not as immoral as we think.
I think that’s a very bad road to go down. The recognition of the immorality of executing heretics has come, I firmly believe, from the work of the Holy Spirit guiding the Church into all truth. It represents a clearer understanding of the principles the Church has maintained all along.
The person I’m talking to says that it is heresy because it is so clearly a divergence from the biblical injunction to send away the heretic from among you.
I think that’s a bogus argument. That NT injunction is clearly in continuity with the OT concept of being “cut off from one’s people,” which seems to have involved the death penalty. It makes sense, given that continuity, that Aquinas would interpret the NT injunctions as also (in the context of Christendom) implying the death penalty. The basic question is whether the nonviolence of the NT is a fundamental principle perfecting the OT or purely situational. I think the former, but I understand why medieval Christians thought the latter. I think they were wrong, but I don’t think they were obviously going against Scripture. Obviously a major issue here is how we interpret the Sermon on the Mount.
Am I muddying the question?
If anything, I think you’re trying to make it less muddy than it is
I really respect where you’re coming from and appreciate your honesty in tackling this issue.
In Christ,
Edwin
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