Wokism is the New Face of An Old Heresy, And It Can Be Defeated Again
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.
Most adherents of the Cathar movement (the “Believers” rather than the Perfect) were not expected immediately to adopt its austere ethic in its entirety, though. Hence, while complete abstinence from sex was considered the ideal, sexual indulgence was tolerated among Believers as long as it did not lead to procreation. Indeed, sexual practices of the kind that carried no risk of pregnancy were judged permissible, and extreme debauchery was frequently a part of Cathar life. Whereas the Church favored sex when it was procreative, the Cathars favored it only when it was not procreative.
Since the God of the Old Testament was identified with the devil, biblical heroes like Abraham and Moses were dismissed as diabolical agents, and divine acts of judgment like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah were condemned as murderous. While the Cathars regarded themselves as the Children of Light, they judged those who approved of living as human beings have always lived – marrying and having children, practicing sexual restraint outside of that context, owning property, using animals for food, resorting to war and the death penalty when justice and order made it necessary – as the Children of Darkness. Since these things are just commonsense preconditions of the social order, it is no surprise that ecclesiastical and political authorities judged Catharism to be radically subversive of that order and in need of suppression.
Precursors and successors
The basic ideas of the Cathars were neither original with them nor died with them. As Steven Runciman recounts in his classic work The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy, similar themes were to be found in earlier heresies like Gnosticism, Manicheanism, and Paulicianism. And as Eric Voegelin argued in The New Science of Politics, they have in the post-Enlightenment period taken on new, secularized and political forms in ideologies like Marxism and Nazism. The key difference is that these modern political forms of Gnosticism and Manicheanism “immanentize” or reconceive in naturalistic terms what had, in the Middle Ages, been understood in religious and metaphysical terms. For example, whereas the source of all evil is taken by Catharism to be the God of the Old Testament, for Marxism it is capitalism and for Nazism it is world Jewry. Whereas for Catharism, salvation involves liberation of spirits from the material world, for Marxism it involves the overthrow of capitalism and the achievement of communism, and for Nazism it is the Final Solution and the Thousand-Year Reich. And so on.
It is also important to note that none of the medieval or modern variations on Gnosticism and Manicheanism constitutes a tight, well-defined system, nor do they all contain exactly the same theses. But certain themes and a general frame of mind recur, such as: the conviction that the existing order of things is evil to the core; a revelatory gnosis that uncovers this purported truth and the radical means of remedying it; and a Manichean division of mankind into the good and enlightened, who accept this gnosis, and the wicked, who resist it.
As Runciman indicates, variations on this Gnostic-Manichean fanaticism tend to arise when some among the powerful and wealthy find it useful to promote it and the Church has fallen into too corrupt a state to offer an attractive alternative. But these are at best necessary rather than sufficient conditions, and the deeper, psychological root appears to be an unwillingness to accept reality as it is, a morbid obsession with its defects, and a paranoid tendency to exaggerate them. When all the conditions are in place, the result can be quite virulent. In his book The Great Heresies, Hilaire Belloc observes: “The Manichean business, whenever it appears in history, appears as do certain epidemic diseases of the human body. It comes, you hardly know whence. It is found cropping up in various centers, increases in power and becomes at last a sort of devastating plague” (p. 86).
In a Catholic World Report essay not too long ago, I argued that the so-called “woke” phenomenon, which has in recent years suddenly risen to enormous influence in Western politics and culture , is best understood as a new riff on the Gnostic-Manichean style of politics identified by Voegelin. There is the characteristic thesis that the everyday world is utterly suffused with evil – “systemic racism,” “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “heteronormativity,” “transphobia,” and the like, all interlocked to form a suffocating structure of “intersectional” oppression. There is the appeal to various forms of gnosis (Critical Race Theory, feminist theory, gender studies, etc.) that purportedlyallow the adept to perceive this oppression in a way others cannot. There is the Manichean divide between those who are enlightened by this gnosis and the wicked who resist it.
But attention to the details reveals disturbing further parallels with Catharism in particular, even if they manifest in secular rather than theological terms. For example, the “transgender”phenomenon evinces an alienation from the body and from the natural end of sex no less radical than that of the Cathars, and with comparable intellectual incoherence and moral disorder as its sequel. For the Cathar, the body is like a dark prison from which the spark of light that is the true self seeks release. For a “trans” person, his male body (for example) belies his true self as a “trans woman,” or as “non-binary,” or as having some other “gender identity.” For the Cathar not ready to advance to the status of the Perfect, the body’s appetites may nevertheless be freely indulged, even to the point of extreme debauchery, so long as procreation is avoided. For the trans person, the body’s sexual organs might be destroyed and refashioned so as to reflect his true gender identity, but they might instead be preserved and deployed in a manner that gratifies his governingsexual fetish. Thus do we have the bizarre claim that a “trans woman” is simply a “woman” full stop, even if “she” has male genitalia.
The Cathar hatred of corporeal life and its procreation also finds parallels in the extreme environmentalist component of the wokemovement, which regards the human race as a “cancer on the planet,” and in the normalization of abortion, euthanasia, and childlessness. The Cathar condemnation of state violence for the sake of upholding law and order finds a parallel in woke calls to “defund the police” and end the “carceral state.” The Cathar eschewal of meat and dairy products finds a parallel in the contemporary vogue for moralistic veganism (in the name of animal rights or sustainability or the like). The Cathar rejection of private property finds a parallel in woke refusal to enforce laws against vagrancy and shoplifting.
Like that of the Cathars, woke rhetoric often sounds superficially peaceful. But also like the Cathars, the wokenevertheless practice coercion and even violence when they judge it useful for advancing their cause. This includes doxxingand other forms of intimidation; rioting, looting, and even occupying large areas (as in 2020’s CHAZ protest in Seattle and the siege of the federal courthouse in Portland); the shutting down of roadways and the vandalism of paintings, public statuary, and the like as routine protest tactics; the mutilation of bodies in the name of “gender identity”; and the promotion of “gender transition” even among children, along with the imposition of extreme ideological curricula, against the wishesof parents.
In general, wokeness, like Catharism, is essentially about the radical subversion of normal human life in the name of a paranoid metaphysical delusion. Like Catharism, its fashionableness has nevertheless found it support among a large segment of the wealthy and powerful. And like Catharism, its rise has been facilitated by the Church’s being in such a low state that it is unable to provide an effective counterbalance.
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