Those times are these times: Reflections on the Feast of the Holy Innocents

According to the Gospel of Matthew, in the immediate aftermath of Jesus’ birth, King Herod was visited by wise men, who had followed a star to find the newborn king of the Jews, the Messiah. After ascertaining that he was in the vicinity of Bethlehem, Herod dispatched these wise men to find Jesus. When they found him, they gave him their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, then returned to their own country having been warned in a dream that Herod would betray them.

Then, when Herod, who feared Jesus as a threat to his power, realized their deception, “he was infuriated and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years or under.” In the interim, Matthew’s account tells us, Joseph had been warned by an angel to flee to Egypt, thus escaping Herod’s scheme.

Today is the feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorating the victims of Herod’s attempt to murder the newborn Jesus before he could grow up and challenge Herod’s authority. It's been celebrated since the fifth century, and in some places involved into a feast of social inversion, much as Christmas became in the English-speaking world, to the point that even today there are places where it serves as a kind of April Fool's Day, with pranksters tormenting "Innocents."

I'm not religious, but the Feast of the Holy Innocents matters to me for several reasons. First and most immediately relevant is that if I am a historian at all, it's because reading about an event that took place on this date in 1022 stoked the fires of scholarship. It is an event that resonates in the current moment, not just for the ties invoked between the flight of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus into Egypt and the current immigration debate, but because it is a step along the path to becoming the sort of society we are.

“In those times," the Limousin monk Adémar of Chabannes wrote some five years after the event, "then among the canons of the Church of the Holy Cross at Orléans, who appeared to be more religious than others, were shown to be Manichaeans. Whom King Robert [r. 987-1031], when they would not be reverted to the faith, ordered defrocked, removed from the church, and thrown to the flames."

The clergy in question (their number and beliefs vary according to the five or six accounts) were wrong believers, heretics, obstinate in their heterodoxy, and were executed for it. At most, they seemed part of an illuminist group with some secret knowledge, or gnosis, as their core tenet. More likely they were would-be reformers, whose views provided a preview of the coming reform movements.

Big deal, right? If there's a stock image of the Middle Ages, burning heretics is part of it.  But here's the thing, in 1022 no heretic had been executed in the West for over 600 years. This was a new thing and a big deal. The last heretic to be executed in the West had been Priscillian of Avila, executed in Trier, Germany around 385, not for heresy, but for sorcery (maleficium). Under Roman law this was a capital offense and the punishment was...burning.

The Orleannais heretics were, then, executed as witches would be on the Continent for centuries to come (in the English-speaking world, such as Salem, the punishment was hanging). Indeed, this was justified in some of the accounts by reference to diabolical orgies and a magic powder made from the ashes of babies born of them. These seem to be later inventions. The further away, in time and distance, one gets from the event, the more lurid the descriptions, even from a supposed infiltrator who helped reveal the heretics. Before Adémar wrote his version of events, a version which incudes the witchcraft libel, there were two others, written probably by eyewitnesses to the trial, and neither mentions magical aspects.

But here's the thing: the problem of heresy was less important than the problem of politics. When we think of the King of France, we think of someone like Louis XIV, whose dominion extended beyond the territory we think of as France. Robert the Pious was nominally king of pretty much that same era, but his practical authority didn't extend much past the Île-de-France. Orléans was a place Robert was trying to extend his power, competing with the Count of Blois, Odo, whose animus was both political and personal, since Robert had divorced Odo's stepmother for a more politically advantageous match. At this point they were competing to see who would install the bishop of Orléans.

According to one account, supposedly based on the account of a participant who happens to be the hero of the story, the heretics were unmasked by a knight named Aréfast, who was a favorite of Robert's. Surprise, surprise, though, the heretics (or were they? that's a barrel with no bottom) were clerics close to the king. In Aréfast’s telling, one of the heresiarchs is the queen's confessor. She is so angry in the story that she puts his eye out with a staff! Whatever the case, the events were definitely not a good look for the king in this ongoing struggle, explaining his decisive action.

The heretics themselves were sacrificed on the altar of Robert's political ambition. From this point, burning becomes the standard execution method for heretics, and fodder for a million bad "when the Church ruled it was called the Dark Ages" takes. No time for that right now, though.

In the following few decades we hear more accounts of heretics being unmasked and executed. Then, in the 1050s, they stop as the Church enters the so-called "Gregorian reform," which suggests all sorts of interesting things (had I finished my PhD, this is the sandbox 'd have been playing in). Then around 1100 the accounts resume and by the end of the twelfth century the Cathars were around (or maybe not) and on and on.

R.I. Moore pegs this as the time Europe became a "Persecuting Society," when ruling elites used persecution as a tool against potential rivals, creating out-groups (heretics, Jews, lepers, witches, prostitutes, etc) and subjecting them to various types of segregation and degradation. Glimpses of the future are possible.

It's hard NOT to see the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 that Jews identify themselves by some kind of special dress, in some places a patch shaped like the Eucharistic wafer, as a forerunner of the Star of David patch forced on Jewish people in the Third Reich, as well as of the atrocities that followed. The categorizing impulse plays out in limpieza de sangre rules concerning Jewish and Muslim ancestry during the Reconquista, which provides a theoretical basis for the creation of race as we think of it and so on.

All of this is in the future, mind you, but the .impulse is there and if we think of those long-term effects as ripples spreading across a pond, then maybe the events at Orléans are the pebble. Or maybe not.

Still, for me, it's impossible not to think of them right now. I thought of them all throughout the 2016 campaign, and the persecutory rhetoric and incitements to violence Donald Trump hurled at Mexicans or at Syrian refugees, or at Muslims in general. I could go on. And, of course, in the treatment of the innocents. Jakelin Caal Makin and the and the 8-year-old Guatemalan boy who died in our custody (abolish ICE, y'all...it's a descendant of the Inquisition) are innocents sacrificed on the altar of Trump's ambition. As are the thousands separated from their parents and imprisoned at camps in states along the border. I'm not the first to make the Herod connection in this regard.

In this Christmas season, the comparison is frequently drawn to the family of Jesus fleeing for their lives in Egypt and to the unnamed thousands fleeing violence and poverty in Latin America. Often these get caught up in pedantry over who was and was not subject to Rome during the time of Herod, but these arguments deliberately obscure more than they illuminate.

I guess the other takeaway is that this fight is never over for those of us who prize pluralism and diversity. This is at least a thousand-year-old struggle. It's seen peaks and valleys, the battleground has shifted, but the battle is the same. There are people who will sacrifice the innocent for their own power and aggrandizement, as we see in the current contest over the wall Trump wants built along the Mexican border and the accompanying government shutdown. The lesson of the Gospel, regardless of whether you are a believer, is that power can be overcome. It can be overcome today, as well, but only if we choose not to surrender to it.

The heretics of Orléans were offered the choice to renounce their beliefs. According to the account of Aréfast, two among them did. The rest willingly chose the flames. I'm not advocating for self-immolation, only that we look to their example. Perhaps on that feast day of the Holy Innocents, they saw themselves in that story, with Robert playing the part of Herod. In choosing the flames, they chose to continue the battle for their truth. 

If nothing else, their resolution in the face of overwhelming repression calls us to do better as we face the oppression of our own times, and as we seek to act on behalf of others who need our help, so that no innocent need die to serve another’s purposes.