Why Were the Seekers Excluded and Called Heretics?

A major component of the Christian concepts of orthodoxy ("right teaching") or catholicity ("universality") as hammered out by early Church Fathers from Iranaeus to Athanasius has to do with a fundamental distrust of those who would go beyond the clerical guidance meted out to the mass undifferentiated congregations of the faith, specifically those who wanted to ask deeper questions, and find a more intimate union or communion with the divine. It is interesting that, even when such Christian seekers honored all the basic orthodox tenets, and took comfort and joy in belonging to a catholic community, that this was not enough to satsify clerical leaders, especially administrative leaders. Beginning with the legalization of Christianity by Emperor Constantine, we see a schism form between those who were interested in enforcing an authoritarian hierarchical political grounding for the Church, and those who wanted the freedom to pursue a mystical (and ascetic) quest for personal epiphany, either through an isolated community of study and collective meditative devotion (cenobitism) or through a journey of individual isolation (anchoritism). Christianity alone went against this natural aspect of the broad continuum of religious impulse. Christian political leadership ended up compromising by allowing those who wanted to lead a more wholly spiritual life to have isolationist communities, but they could only study canonical books (i.e., those which lacked any content of pursuing a mystical understanding of God, self or the universe) and had to knuckle under episcopal censure. In short, hermits and monks were reduced to leading lives of simple mechanistic routinized devotion, not being permitted to read or write inwardly-inspired texts, or intentionally teach disciplines which could result in profound mystical union or direct contact with the divine dimension of reality. In every other world faith, room was made for those who wanted to take this further step into spirituality, and the communities that pursued this deeper entry into the dimension of spirit were not regulated in the form of their meditative and visionary disciplines. Each of the other world faiths were capable of supporting a peaceful and inter-dynamic parity: Buddhism (Tantra), Hinduism (Yoga), Islam (Sufism), Taoism (Sagehood), Judaism (Kabbalah). Why did religious authorities in Christianity feel threatened by that inevitable element in their own congregations, which sought to go beyond the basic understandings of faith? There is nothing wrong with having a simple faith, but there are those who want to pursue things more deeply: the nature of their relationship to God, the universe, and to eternal soul dwelling within them. The two paths can belong to a greater whole without threatening each other. The other global religions mentioned are quite stable with having both forms coexistent. It is strange that the Christian clergy felt threatened by this alternative but wholly natural impulse. There are such a variety of people who come into any given religious faith, all having varied needs and degrees of commitment to the spiritual. It is unfortunate for Christianity that this rift happened, because the mystical can (re)enrich the mundane, just as surely as mundane spirituality can remind the mystical of how to communicate with the material world we all must inevitably negotiate. To exclude one over the other is create an imbalance. Christianity's tendencies through time to lapse into various forms of extremist (and therefore repressive) control over daily life could have been remedied by an acceptance of mysticism receptiveness to the fruits it bears for all. Mystic outlooks loosen up and deepen spiritual perspectives, keeping them from falling into petty, superficial, reflexive (and unreflective) dogmatism. A strictly "what-is-what-oriented" form of religion destroys the possible suppleness the spiritual mind can acquire, thereby creating artificial blind-spots in one's faith. Even for those who need only simple answers, grief is the result of forbidding the heartfelt question "why" that must emerge from time to time even among the general congregation, which is an element that most needs the compassion, understanding and cognitive openness of its clerical leadership. To this day, we have Protestant and Catholic thinkers and leaders who are terribly upset that the scrolls found in a buried jar at the Nag Hammadi Oasis in Egypt have reopened the case for unregulated mysticism in Christianity, works that the influential Bishop Iranaeus of Lyons and Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria almost succeeded in extirpating many centuries ago through their succession of anathematizing pronouncements. However, those copies from a Coptic Egyptian monastery escaped the book-burnings, and I think not by mere mortal accident. They are here for us today to read and potentially rescue our faith from becoming one of political, moral and ritual shallowness.