As an introduction of sorts, I will begin by saying that I have come to some painful realizations. I have proven once more that I lack the discipline to deliver the quality content of a regular basis that you, dear reader, deserve. I apologize for that. It is also clear that I am not that passionate about health or homeopathy in particular to fuel the determination to make a good blog. Curiously enough, I am passionate about religion, the Roman Catholic religion, which is odd because I never saw myself as much of a mystic. But it is what it is, so I will continue to write about things that interest me. Hope you like the journey.
Last January 31th there was an exchange in JMG’s Magic Monday forum, which discussed a project by another reader (greetings
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
open_space) to construct an occult practice that would be comfortable for Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and maybe other Traditional Christians. The original poster made a passing remarked that his book may be “a sacrilege”, and this caused some comments from myself and another anonymous reader. I am trying to get that discussion restarted, if not for other reason to clarify my own thoughts about that.
Leaving aside the issue of whether any spiritual practice being an actual sacrilege or not (I’m itching to get to that part, believe me), what I assume
open_space tried to say was that his book would be heretical. That is a proposition that I would worry about, as I indeed do because even if I lack the will power to write such books I am not just capable but drawn to read them.
Let us talk, then, of Heresy: “a belief or an opinion that is against the principles of a particular religion; the fact of holding such beliefs” (
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 2022). I will point out that my original comment was inspired in the fact that merely holding a belief, no matter how grievous, is insufficient to qualify as Sacrilege: “an act of treating a holy thing or place without respect” (Oxford…). What you think in the privacy of your mind cannot be sacrilegious because that would require a positive action, though it might lead you to commit a sacrilegious act down the road. To complete the unholy triad; Blaspheme is a “behavior or language that is offensive or shows lack of respect for God or religion” (Oxford…).
Now there will be people, not all of them in the clergy, that will claim that any heterodox doctrine in inherently sacrilegious because it “offends the Creator”. As we all have seen in the SJW charade of the last few years, nothing good can come from giving a say to such people; take them seriously and you’ll end up choking yourself to death because they will claim to feel offended by your breath. God on the other hand does not get offended, mere creatures cannot harm him, or even tarnish his image. He demands us not to throw tantrums for our sakes, not his.
This makes me remember of Ft. Fortea’s sermon on
the Sinodality in the Church. You may always ask, there is no sin in trying to better understand. You may receive an answer you do not like to hear, - and if you are invested in ideas that go against the timeless teachings of the Church it will be painful, - but you can always ask for clarification in good faith. I (your host, nor Fortea) think our clergy is too used to use the threat of heresy as a thought stopper. It makes their job easier, not having to answer doubts, but there is no merit in remaining ignorant and compliant. There is also true the clergy is only human, and some of them are proud to the point of sinfulness: they do not like when other people think, might them come with some idea not coming from his own.
Now, if we are going to say that “each is free to think as they want…” is complicated. It is not to say that is false, but if we go that route we cannot keep calling ourselves Catholic anymore. There is a reason why we have orthodoxy, and why we must preserve it from the error (heterodoxy). But the point is not that of blind obedience, but from the conservative realization that we know little and are not that smart.
You see. We have come to use the word “Catholic” as a noun, but it started as an adjective meaning “universal”. It would be preposterous and haughty to go around saying “we are the truly, truly ones” (though of course we do that), but the origin of the term is much more technical. IMHO, it has to do with a Mystery called
the Communion of the Saints, which can be understood as a “fellowship of the children of God”. We have a bequests and a network of mutual rights and obligations, not only towards other Christians living in the world, but also towards the Faithful Departed and, by divine grace, the (Holy) Angelic Beings. We are “universal” because we are in this fellowship together with everyone that was and everyone that will be a Child of God.
The argument for orthodoxy is: one such obligation is to believe (and pass down) everything everyone in the fellowship has (and will have) always believed. But we don’t know for sure what those saints believed two millennia (or even two centuries) ago, because they did not think from the very beginning of leaving everything in paper. This poses a problem that many people smarter and more faithful than me has devoted a lot of time thinking about, so I will do my best and try to not hack it too much. Please remember my opinion here is no doctrine, just a pointer towards something worth exploring.
From a purely human perspective, dogma is a technique and a protocol devised to find and preserve a number of statements (information) that is probably accurate and mutually consistent with all the evidence know about what those people in the past (probably) held as true. By its very limitations, it cannot be complete (there was simply too much information passed down mouth to mouth in the first centuries) but it aims to be correct. We happen to believe that with the help of God, the result of this protocol is not only probably correct but actually correct.
This means that what is actually dogma, what is actually required to be believed by every child of God, is a subset of all the teachings of the Catholic Church. There are many valuable things that have been accumulated by the shared experiences of mystics, theologians, clergy and laics alike but not all of this is marked as uncontrovertibly true. On the other hand, beliefs that directly contradict one or more of the stated dogmas are held as false; even more, as heresy.
When one of those heresies is explicitly addressed and forbidden by the Church, it is declared anathema, and the penalty for continuing to hold such belief is excommunication; which, according to the idea of the Communion of the Saints, is merely the act of formalizing what in truth already happened: the excommunicated pushed themselves out of the fellowship by failing to fulfill at least one of the important clauses of the covenant.
Why did I insist last Monday, then, that “Sacrilege [actually, Heresy] is… not failing to parrot back whatever some random clergyman told you once”? Because most of what the Church teaches is no dogma. Most of the Church’s doctrine is our best human effort to come up with ideas that are consistent with all the doctrine of the past, but that we lack the certainty that are actually vetoed by divine fiat. The Church knows better that to around declaring every belief as dogma, only the cornerstones of the faith are deemed important enough to carry that weight.
Let’s look at an example. Why there are no female priests? Our popes and cardinals and archbishops are, for the most part, in agreement that this is not a direction they want to take the Church towards, and yet nobody has thought about making it a dogma that all priests are to be men. But the truth is we don’t know! We know that from the very first records, we do find evidence of there being female diakonos, but not female presbyteros. Is it because they were just a bunch of racist shepherds? We don’t know! Is there some mystical reason why women cannot perform the duties of a priest? We cannot tell! All we observe is that the ones that came before us did things that way and didn’t explain why; therefore, we thread very carefully and try not to change anything we don’t understand because we don’t know if we might break it.
Please notice that modern women rights carry little, if any, weight in this argument. The wishes and expectations of the present are overruled by the obligations towards those who came centuries before. If you want to update to a more modern way of thinking you may certainly do that, but you cannot keep calling yourself a Catholic because you are not universal anymore. If you want to remain part of the fellowship of times past and future, you must accept one of two options. The easiest one is to err in the side of caution and keep an all male priesthood. Or you could argue from the point of view of the fellowship and try to find past evidence that the male priesthood was the product of either practical considerations or the culture of those first Christians.
My personal take is that male priesthood was established because most physical males have female etheric bodies and male astral bodies. The nature of Yang is to project and fertilize, which is what a preacher does when he is putting all those lively images in the minds of parish goers. On the other hand, Yin’s nature is to receive and transform, just like the priest receives the prayers and emotions of laity during the Mass, in order to transform it into an offer to God. Of course, this argument will gain no traction in today’s Church hierarchy, because they no longer believe in etheric or astral bodies. AFAIK, however, this does not hold true for the medieval Church, so I am relatively confident that this particular opinion is not heretic.
Back to the original problem of putting together a system for occult practice in a form that is acceptable for a devote Traditional Trinitarian Christian, much work lays ahead. Great care must be taken to not go directly against any of the dogmas of the Church. It is even harder because most of us, lay faithful, don’t know what those dogmas are. We are too used of taking the clergy’s word for it, which is convenient for everyone involved… until you want to do something slightly different than everyone else.
