Rewriting history

I recently discovered this little piece of trash, after discovering http://www.saylor.org, a project aimed at creating material for full university education available online and free for distribution.

The piece of trash I refer to is the text of a lecture entitled "Heresies, heretics, and the Church" made public by Stephen Kreis, Professor of History at American Public University.

He starts off quite fairly giving both Gratian and Thomas Aquinas's definitions of 'heresy'. (For those unfamiliar, heresy is, in essence, a willful and obstinate rejection of a dogma by a Catholic.)

First we get a false etymology:

Heresy (from the Latin, secte) meant treason to God,

This is just wrong: English 'heresy' is from Latin, 'haeresis' (via Old French) which was just a transliteration of Greek 'hairesis' derived from the Gk. verb 'haerein', literally "to choose". See a discussion of it here and the basic etymology here. The mediaevals developed this into the idea that a heretic is a Catholic who picks and chooses what he will believe rather than accepting the faith as it is handed down to him.

I just need to take a moment here to point out the utter stupidity of his folk etymology. A quick google search does not turn up any testimony to an alternative etymology of 'haeresis' from 'secte'. Not only is the etymology I give the one that one will find in dictionaries, it is bloody obvious as anyone who looks at it will quickly see. How one would derive 'heresy' from 'secte' is not at all clear (although it must be admitted that the Greek noun 'hairesis' was sometimes translated to Latin as 'secte', but this is by no means an etymology of either the English or Latin words).

I should point out that there is an English work that comes from Latin 'secte', not 'heresy' but 'sect'.

Then we are treated to this non-sequitur:

Women became heretics because they were denied entrance into the clergy.

I'm honestly not entirely sure what the meaning of the preceding sentence is. The only half-plausible meaning I can find is that he means by "heretics" something like second-class citizens. I suppose rewriting history is a lot easier when you get to make up the meanings of the words. Let me try: All history professors are queer (Did I mention that by 'queer' I mean someone who has read at least 5, unillustrated books?). Actually, I should recast my assertion, Dr. Kreis may in fact be the only straight history professor who has ever lived.

For the moment I will ignore the fact that he indirectly describes the Cathars as placing an "emphesis on chastity . . . and moral purity". I will also ignore his wandering into areas he has no buisness in, where he makes cheap shots at the Church, e.g., "What [the heretics] were rejecting was the way the Church hierarchy had interpreted and manipulated Christian dogma."

The piece that shows just how desperate he is to tear down the Church comes when he treats the Dominicans and Franciscans:

The Church sends out Dominic to convert heretics back to Rome. Instead, Dominic created the Dominicans, in essence, a rival sect. Although the Dominicans were not heretics, they were serving a role that ought to have been served by the Church itself. What this tells me, and what it must have told 13th century men and women, was that the Church was just not doing its job.

Hold everything. How is the Dominican Order "in essence, a rival sect?" Is there anything from the pope or from the Dominicans suggesting that either side considered itself a rival to the other? Were the Dominicans not more directly united to the Pope than any Benedictine monastery? Did they not continuously maintain papal authority and teach in accordance with the Pope and councils? What possible foundation is there for labeling the Dominicans a "rival sect?"

Similarly the Franciscans:

St. Francis, like Dominic, was no heretic. But, and here is the irony, the strength of his movement is that people were appealing to his order and not the Church, for spiritual guidance. All this clearly shows that first, the Church was clearly losing ground in providing its flock with necessary spirituality.

Were not the Franciscans part of the Church? How can one call an appeal to the Franciscans anything but an appeal to the Church? Where is this "church" that the Franciscans were cannibalizing?

I must conclude that this particular professor of history is utterly ignorant of both the middle ages and the Church, and that he has no business talking about either one as a layman, let alone as a professional historian.

But then again the evidence of his want of education was scattered all over the text in his consistent use of the singular "they" (the surest mark of pandering, illiterate vulgarity), as well as in such peculiarities as an inability to form a comparative sentence: ". . . heretical groups from Milan preferred burning at the stake than recant their beliefs." Please. Aside from a handful of exceptional cases, 'than ' demands two conjuncts in parallel grammatical form; No mixing of gerunds and infinitives. Not even a schoolboy would write a sentence so offensive to the ear.