Analyzing the issue of the origins of Islam is necessary to understand the historical consequences of the advent of this doctrine.
Here you can read the first installment of this analysis.
San Juan Damasceno (about 676 - 749), Doctor of the Church, was one of the first Christian theologians to have contact with Islam (as a young man he was even advisor to the Umayyad caliph of Damascus) and defined it as Christian heresy, as others later did, especially the Italian poet Dante.
In the era in which Islam was born and spread, the presence of heretical sects was quite common, as it had been at the time of Jesus, in which Judaism knew different schools and currents (Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, etc.). For this reason, at the beginning, the emergence of a new seduced prophet, or rather heresiarch, was not considered at all unusual.
Before continuing, therefore, it is necessary to frame in more detail what lies behind the term "heresy," which derives from the Latin noun haerĕsis, itself derived from the Greek αἵρεσις, meaning "choice." The main verb, in Greek, is αἱρέω, "to choose", "to separate", "to gather" or even "to take away".
So we can affirm that a heretic is not one who espouses a truth totally different from that proclaimed by the official doctrine against which he is against, but one who questions only a part of that truth. In fact, the great English historian, author and intellectual Hilaire Belloc, in his 1936 book The great heresies [1], (The great heresies), defined heresy as a phenomenon that has the characteristic of destroying not the whole structure of a truth, but only a part of it and, by extrapolating a component of the same truth, leaves a void or replaces it with another axiom.
The author identifies five great heresies, whose importance is fundamental not only in the history of Christianity, but of the whole of Western civilization, and of the world as a whole. It does not seem excessive, in fact, to state that the misinterpretation of Christian truth, or of certain parts of it, has produced some of the worst evils in the history of mankind.
The first is Arianism, which consists in the rationalization and simplification of the fundamental mystery of the Church: the Incarnation and divinity of Christ (Jesus, true man and true God) and, therefore, questions the authority on which the Church itself is founded.
It is essentially an attack on the "mystery" itself, carried out by attacking what is considered the mystery of mysteries. The heresy in question seeks to bring down to the level of the human intellect what, on the other hand, is far beyond man's limited comprehension and vision.
The Council of Nicea (325) elaborated a "symbol", i.e. a dogmatic definition related to faith in God, in which appears the term ὁμοοούσιος (homooùsios = consubstantial with the Father, literally "of the same substance"), which is attributed to Christ.
This definition constitutes the dogmatic basis of official Christianity. The "Nicene Symbol" contrasted sharply with the thought of Arius, who instead preached the creation of the Son by the Father and therefore denied the divinity of Christ and the transmission of the divine attributes of the Father to the Son and the mystical body of the latter, that is, the Church and its members.
Identified by Belloc, it is Manichaeism, fundamentally an attack on matter and everything that concerns the body (the Albigensians are an example of this heresy): the flesh is seen as something impure and whose desires must always be fought against.
The Protestant Reformation: an attack against the unity and authority of the Church, rather than against doctrine per se, which produces a series of other heresies.
The effect of the Protestant Reformation in Europe is the destruction of the unity of the continent, a very serious fact, especially if we consider that the very concept of modern Europe stems from the roots of our civilization, founded on the harmonious combination of Christian spiritual principles and the Greco-Roman system of thought.
With the Reformation, however, every reference to universality, to catholicity, is replaced by the criterion of nation and ethnicity, with obvious and catastrophic consequences.
It is the most complex. According to Belloc, it can be called modernism, but the term alogos may be another possible definition of it, since it clarifies the heart of this heresy: there is no absolute truth, unless it is empirically demonstrable and measurable.
The starting point, like Arianism, is always the denial of the divinity of Christ, precisely because of the inability to understand or define him empirically, but modernism goes further, and in this it can also be called positivism: only scientifically proven concepts are identified as positive or real, taking for granted the non-existence or unreality of everything that cannot be demonstrated.
The heresy in question is essentially based on a fundamental assumption: only what can be seen, understood and measured can be accepted. It is a materialistic and atheistic attack not only on Christianity, but also on the very basis of Western civilization, which is a derivation of it, an attack on the Trinitarian roots of the West.
We are not speaking here only of the Holy Trinity, but of that inseparable Trinitarian bond that the Greeks had already identified between truth, beauty and goodness. And as it is not possible to make an attack against one of the Persons of the Trinity without attacking the others, in the same way it is not possible to think of questioning the concept of truth without disturbing even those of beauty and goodness.
Hilaire Belloc (La Celle, 1870 - Guildford, 1953) British essayist, novelist, humorist and poet. He studied at Oxford, served for some time in the artillery of France and later, in 1902, took British citizenship. He was a member of Parliament from 1906 to 1910, when, dissatisfied with British politics, he retired to private life.
The four heresies listed so far all have some common factors: they come from the Catholic Church; their heresiarchs were baptized Catholics; almost all of them have become extinct, from a doctrinal point of view, in a few centuries (the Protestant Churches, born of the Reformation, although still in existence, are nevertheless experiencing an unprecedented crisis and, with the exception of the Pentecostal Church, are expected to decline within a few years.) but its effects persist over time, in a subtle way, contaminating the system of thought of a civilization, the mentality, the social and economic policies, the very vision of man and his social relations.
The effects of Arianism and Manichaeism, for example, still poison Catholic theology and those of the Protestant Reformation (although the Reformation itself has already been accepted by many Catholics, or even considered a good and just thing and its heretics almost saints.) are before our eyes: from the attack on the central authority and universality of the Church, we have come to affirm that man is self-sufficient, only to build idols everywhere to worship and sacrifice.
The extreme consequence of Calvin's ideas, then, in the matter of the denial of free will and of the responsibility of human actions before God, has made man the slave of two main entities: the State in the first place and private supranational corporations in the second.
And here Belloc goes so far as to speak of Islam, which he defines as the most particular and formidable Christian heresy, completely similar to Docetism and Arianism, in wanting to simplify and rationalize to the maximum, according to human criteria, the unfathomable mystery of the Incarnation (producing an ever-increasing degradation of human nature, which is no longer linked in any way with the divine), and with Calvinism, by giving a predetermined character of God to human actions.
However, if the "revelation" preached by Muhammad began as a Christian heresy, its inexplicable vitality and durability soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, a kind of "post-heretic". In fact, Islam differs from other heresies in that it was not born in the Christian world and its heresiarch was not a baptized Christian, but a pagan who suddenly made monotheistic ideas his own (a mixture of heterodox Jewish and Christian doctrine with a few pagan elements present since time immemorial in Arabia) and has begun to disseminate them.
The fundamental basis of Muhammad's teaching is, at bottom, what the Church has always professed: there is only one God, the Almighty. From Judeo-Christian thought, the "prophet" of Islam has also extrapolated the attributes of God, personal nature, supreme goodness, timelessness, providence, creative power as the origin of all things; the existence of good spirits and angels, as well as demons rebellious to God headed by Satan; the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the flesh, eternal life, punishment and retribution after death.
Many of our Catholic contemporaries, especially after the Second Vatican Council and the Declaration "Nostra Aetate", have begun to consider only the points in common with Islam, so much so that Muhammad almost seems to be a missionary who preached and spread, thanks to his undeniable charisma, the fundamental principles of Christianity among the pagan nomads of the desert.
They insist that in Islam the one God is the object of supreme worship, and that great reverence is reserved for Mary and her virgin birth; and again that, for Muslims, on the day of judgment (another Christian idea recycled by the founder of Islam) it will be Jesus, not Mohammed, who will judge humanity.
However, they do not consider that the God of the Muslims is not the God of the Christians; Mary of the Koran is not the same Mary of the Bible; and, above all, the Islamic Jesus is not our Jesus, he is not God incarnate, he did not die on the cross, he did not resurrect, which, on the contrary, Muhammad unequivocally affirmed.
With the denial of the Incarnation, the whole sacramental structure has collapsed: M. stigmatized the Eucharist and the real presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the bread and wine within the rite of the Mass and, consequently, rejected any idea of priesthood.
In other words, he, like many other perhaps less charismatic heresiarchs, based his heresy on an extreme simplification of Christian doctrine, freeing it from those, in his opinion, false additions and innovations that had made it excessively complex; he created, in practice, a perfectly natural religion, in which man is man and God is God, with teachings more within the reach of his followers, who, let us remember, were simple and uncouth nomads of the desert.
It is sufficient to consider the Islamic doctrine on marriage, which for Muslims is not a sacrament, monogamous and indissoluble, but a contract that can be rescinded by repudiation, with the possibility for men to have up to four wives and countless concubines.
Therefore, the success of this heresy born from Muhammad can be explained through some key elements:
The above are just a few, albeit the main, elements that explain why Islam has been spreading so rapidly and vigorously throughout the world.
However, in these few pages we do not intend to address this question, since the object of our work is more the analysis of the origins of the phenomenon and the life of its initiator.
However, it is curious to note how, being an excellent analyzer of history, Belloc foresaw, as early as 1936, a powerful return of Islam on the international scene, in opposition to the decadent civilization of a West already only nominally Christian:
"Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world which shall shake off the domination of Europeans still nominally Christian and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization? [-] In the place of the old Christian enthusiasms of Europe there came, for a time, the enthusiasm for nationality, the religion of patriotism. But self-worship is not enough (2)"
Among other things, it particularly considers the fact that Islam, as can be seen in its history, tends to weaken when its political and economic power diminishes (given the essential link between faith and politics, and therefore economics, within the Islamic system of thought), but, vice versa, it is cyclically awakened by the impulse of a charismatic leader.
Also very important are the considerations of the great Russian thinker Soloviev on Muhammad and Islam, in particular in the work Russia and the universal Church (3) 1889. Here are some excerpts:
"Islam is consistent and sincere Byzantinism, free from all internal contradiction. It is the frank and complete reaction of the Eastern spirit against Christianity, it is a system in which dogma is intimately bound up with the laws of life, in which individual belief is in perfect accord with the social and political state.
We know that the anti-Christian movement manifested in the imperial heresies had culminated in two doctrines during the seventh and eighth centuries: that of the Monothelites, which indirectly denied human freedom, and that of the Iconoclasts, which implicitly rejected divine phenomenality. The direct and explicit affirmation of these two errors constituted the religious essence of Islam, which sees in man only a finite form without any freedom and in God an infinite freedom without any form.
Thus fixed, God and man, at the two poles of existence, all filiation between them, all descending realization of the divine and all ascending spiritualization of the human are excluded, and religion is reduced to a purely external relationship between the omnipotent creator and the creature deprived of all freedom, which owes its master nothing more than a simple act of blind performance (that is the meaning of the word Islam) [---].
To such simplicity of the religious idea corresponds a no less simple concept of the social and political problem: man and mankind have no further progress to make; there is no moral regeneration for the individual nor, a fortiori, for society; everything is reduced to the level of purely natural existence; the ideal is reduced to proportions which assure its immediate realization.
The Muslim society could have no other object than the expansion of its material force and the enjoyment of the goods of the earth. The work of the Muslim state (a work which it would cost it much not to execute successfully), is reduced to propagate Islam by arms, and to govern the faithful with absolute power and according to the rules of elementary justice fixed in the Koran. [---]
But Byzantinism, which was hostile in principle to Christian progress, which wanted to reduce all religion to a fait accompli, to a dogmatic formula and a liturgical ceremony, this anti-Christianity disguised under an orthodox mask, must have succumbed in its moral impotence before the frank and honest anti-Christianity of Islam. [-]
Five years were enough to reduce three great patriarchates of the Eastern Church to archaeological existence. No conversions had to be made; nothing more than tearing away an old veil. History has judged and condemned the Lower Empire. Not only did it fail to fulfill its mission (to found the Christian state), but it also devoted itself to the failure of the historical work of Jesus Christ. Having failed to falsify the orthodox dogma, he reduced it to a dead letter; he wanted to sap the edifice of Christian peace by attacking the central government of the Universal Church; he replaced in public life the law of the Gospel by the traditions of the pagan state.
The Byzantines believed that, to be truly Christian, it was enough to conserve the dogmas and sacred rites of orthodoxy without taking care to Christianize social and political life; they thought it licit and praiseworthy to enclose Christianity in the temple and to abandon the public square to pagan principles. They could not complain about their fate. They have had what they wanted: dogma and rite remained to them, and only the social and political power fell into the hands of the Moslems, legitimate heirs of paganism." (4)
We believe that Belloc and Soloviev, as capable and refined thinkers, have been able to clearly explain the phenomenology of Islam and foresee its return to the international scene well in advance.
He who writes has often humbly wondered what is the meaning of Islam and of its existence; he has wondered for years, leaning over books, while reading and meditating on the deeds and sayings of Muhammad, the alleged "messenger of God", and compared, from time to time, the life of the founder of Islam with that of Jesus, to whom earthly life has not reserved honors and riches, much less divine privileges, although he proclaimed himself Master, God incarnate and Lord.
Many times he who writes has wondered who was right, Muhammad or Christ, and whether Islam could be considered the true religion or an admonition to Christianity, which has reduced and trivialized the gift given to it, denying its own roots and the basis of its values. And one day his heart, though restless by nature, was calmed by reading a passage taken from the chronicle of Ṭabarī, biographer of the "prophet of Islam" (vol. I, pp. 1460-62) about the episode where Muhammad went to the house of his adopted son Zayd and found only his wife, lightly dressed
"...And the Prophet looked away from her. She said to him: [Zaid] is not here, O Allah's envoy, but come in; you are to me as my father and mother. Allah's envoy would not go in. And she pleased Allah's envoy who went away muttering something that could only be understood: Glory be to Allah the Supreme! Glory be to Allah who overturns hearts! When Zaid returned home, his wife told him what had happened. Zaid hurried to Muhammad and said to him, "O Allah's messenger! I heard that you came to my house. Why didn't you come in? Did you like Zainab?
In this case he divorced her. Allah's envoy said to him: Stay with your wife! Some time later, Zaid divorced his wife, and then, while Muhammad was talking to ‛Āʼisha, he fell into a trance and a weight was lifted from his mind, he smiled and said: who will go to Zainab to tell her the good news? To tell her that Allah marries me to her?". (5)
It was on that occasion that Muhammad promulgated verse 37 of the sūra 33. (6)This caused a great impression also among his followers, who were still Arabs, and for them adoptive filiation had always been completely equivalent to natural filiation (and therefore it was not legal to marry the wife of a son or a father, as natural as adoptive). Obviously, there came other verses, from the same sūra, in which it is stated that adoptive filiation does not have the same value as natural filiation (33/4 (7)) and that M., by personal privilege, can take as many wives as he wishes, in addition to the concubines (33/50 (8)). It was then that the same ‛ĀĀʼisha, his favorite wife, exclaimed, "I see that Allah hastens to please you!".
What a great difference between a man who, while proclaiming himself mortal, does not disdain to be treated better than others, to have more women than others, more gold, more power, more success, prestige, fame, and another man who proclaims himself to be God but does not hesitate to give his life and end his earthly existence with the most atrocious and cruel death, so that mankind may be redeemed and participate in the very life of God!
Muhammad preached the existence of a unique, noble and omnipotent God who only asks obedience and submission from man; Christ, on the other hand, called that same God "Our Father", because for him God was essentially the Father. (9)as well as Amor (1John 4:8).
Muhammad proclaimed himself "Messenger of God" and seal of the prophets; Jesus was above all "Son" of God in a way that no one could imagine before him, so that God was for him "the Father" in the most rigorous sense of the term, with the participation of the unique divine nature not only of the Son, but also of all men who are united to him by baptism.
For Muhammad, the fullness of the moral life consisted in respecting the precepts; for Christ it consists in being perfect as the Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48), because "God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying out: 'Abba, Father! So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and because you are a son, God has also made you an heir" (Galatians 4: 6).
He preached total submission to the immutable decrees of God; Christ announced that the Father wanted to establish a new relationship that would unite men with God, completely supernatural, the théosis, the elevation of human nature that becomes divine through the incarnation of his Son, for which the Christian is not only a follower of Christ: he is Christ.
We would like to conclude by quoting Soloviev once again:
"The fundamental limit in Muḥammad's conception of the world and in the religion he founded is the absence of the ideal of human perfection or of the perfect union of man with God: the ideal of authentic divine humanity. Islam does not demand an infinite perfection of the believer, but only an act of absolute submission to God. It is evident that even from the Christian point of view, without such an act it is impossible for man to attain perfection; but in itself this act of submission still does not constitute perfection. And instead, the faith of Muḥammad places the act of submission as a condition for an authentic spiritual life rather than this life itself.
Islam does not say to men: be ye perfect, as your Father which is in heaven is perfect, that is, perfect in everything; it only requires a general submission to God and the observance in one's own natural life of those external limits which have been set by the divine commandments. Religion remains only the unshakable foundation and ever identical framework of human existence and never becomes its inner content, meaning and purpose.
If there is no perfect ideal for man and mankind to achieve in their lives by their own strength, this means that for these forces there is no precise task, and if there is no task or end to achieve, it is clear that there can be no forward movement. This is the very reason why the idea of progress and its very fact remain alien to the Muslim peoples. Their culture retains a particular purely local character and soon fades away leaving no further development." (10)
Belloc, H., The great heresies, Cavalier Books, Londra, 2015 (e-book version).
Carmignac, J., A l'écoute du Notre Père, Ed. de Paris, Paris, 1971.
Pareja, F.M., Islamologia, Rome, Orbis Catholicus, 1951.
Soloviev, V., Rusia y la Iglesia universal, Ediciones y Publicaciones Españolas S.A., Madrid, 1946.
Soloviev, V., Maometto. Vita e dottrina religiosa, capitolo XVIII, "La morte di Muhammad. Valutazione del suo carattere morale", in "Bisanzio fu distrutta in un giorno. La conquista islamica secondo il grande Solov'ëv".
Gerardo Ferrara
BA in History and Political Science, specializing in the Middle East.
Responsible for students at the University of the Holy Cross in Rome.
