Wokism Is the New Face of an Old Heresy, and It Can Be Defeated Again...

Michie · Feb 29, 2024

Philosopher Ed Feser argues that the new “higher gnosis” of woke ideology, pseudo-religion and anti-politics is a lot like an older gnosticism which was once defeated — and can be again.

In the early thirteenth century, a fanatical religious movement known to history as Catharism or Albigensianism spread throughout southern France. Its fashionableness led self-interested local nobility to favor it. But so bizarre and subversive of social order were its doctrines that political and ecclesiastical authorities beyond the region judged its suppression to be urgent. At first the preferred methods were preaching and public disputation, with the new Dominican order taking the lead. But these appeals to reason proved inadequate, and after a papal legate was murdered by a Cathar, a military solution seemed unavoidable. Thus was launched the Albigensian Crusade – a venture notorious for excess and whose participants did not all have pure motives, but which did succeed in destroying the toxic movement.

What was the content of Catharism? It was grounded, first and foremost, in the conviction that the world is absolutely permeated by evil. This is not the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, but something much darker. For the Cathars, the natural order is not the creation of a benevolent deity from whose grace we have fallen. Rather, they held that it always was in the first place the product of an evil power. And they identified this evil power with the God of the Old Testament, the authority of which they rejected. On the Cathar conception of salvation, the imperative is not to redeem the natural order but to be altogether liberated from it, and thereby to be “Pure Ones” (the literal meaning of Cathari).

Those closest to achieving this were known as the Perfect, who took on the full weight of Catharist moral discipline. Its chief component was renunciation of marriage and children, which were regarded as wicked insofar as they perpetuated the evil natural order of things. Meat and dairy products were also eschewed, given their connection to procreation. Private property was rejected. Capital punishment and war were condemned as intrinsically immoral. Yet suicide was not only permitted but commended for those judged ready for it. Infanticide was sometimes practiced. And as the murder of the papal legate illustrates, the Cathars would sometimes resort to violence in order to protect the movement itself.

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