too tired to think of the right search keywords

[zwol]

What is the name of the heresy that proclaims that while God created the wide universe, the Earth was built by the Devil?

Comments

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

Mannicheanism.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

That's close but not quite what I was thinking of. Manichaeism holds that there are equally powerful evil and good 'principles' whose battlefield is the universe; but both of them had a hand in all of it. Gnosticism (chasing links) is closer -- the idea there being that the material universe is the work of an imperfect (not always evil) being, but there is a greater spiritual universe which is the true God's work.

What I'm looking for, though, is the notion that most of the material universe is God's doing, but this one world we happen to live on isn't. Like the setup in Out of the Silent Planet, if you've read that (although, again, not quite an exact match).

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

Alas, no I haven't read it.

And you're right. Technically the heresy of Mannicheanism is that it grants Satan the power of creation, not that it says the world was made by him, only corrupted by.

Are you perhaps thinking of Melek Taus?

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

Hrm. On further investigation, it looks like the technical name for the heresy you're after is -- in fact -- Manicheanism. Largely because Medieval Christians tossed the term around like candy and used it to cover anything that had a faint whiff of dualism.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Bah, humbug.

Oh well, all I wanted it for was a snarky comment in a creationism rant that probably never will get written anyway. It doesn't work if there isn't a specific term that means this and nothing else.

I think what I was originally thinking of was the "evil genie" Descartes uses at some point in his argument for the existence of a universe outside the self, so it's not that surprising that it's not a specific heresy.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's one of those religions that no one would believe if you put it in fiction. Definitely not what I had in mind though.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Tangenting, if you haven't read Out of the Silent Planet I don't think you're missing that much. It's got a bunch of extreme awesome, but it's also got horrible gaping flaws, both as fiction and as religion. I don't regret having read it, but I do regret having read its sequels (Perelandra and That Hideous Strength) in which the flaws get much worse and the good bits are insufficiently awesome.

[madmanatw.livejournal.com]

That's a good way to put it. I read them back in high school and liked them; I tried to reread them in college and made it to about halfway through Strength before putting it back down.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I read them in high school and only got through Strength on a feeble hope that the ending would make up for the rest of it. But instead it made it all so much worse. Gah.

[kirizal.livejournal.com]

Sounds suspiciously Gnostic to me, although there may well be a more specific heresy you're thinking of.

have some lists?

[tkil.livejournal.com]

http://www.religion-cults.com/heresies/outlook.htm
http://www.carm.org/heresy.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_heresy

The latter had a link to Marcionism, which sounds close (and is related to Manichaeism):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism

The Catholic Encyclopedia is good for putting yourself to sleep...
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07256b.htm

But sometimes it comes through:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04707b.htm

In this sense, i.e. that of a world-maker distinct from the Supreme God, Demiurge became a common term in Gnosticism. The Gnostics, however, were not satisfied merely to emphasize the distinction between the Supreme God, or God the Father, and the Demiurge, but in many of their systems they conceived the relation of the Demiurge to the Supreme God as one of actual antagonism, and the Demiurge became the personification of the power of evil, the Satan of Gnosticism, with whom the faithful had to wage war to the end that they might be pleasing to the Good God. The Gnostic Demiurge then assumes a surprising likeness to Ahriman, the evil counter-creator of Ormuzd in Mazdean philosophy. The character of the Gnostic Demiurge became still more complicated when in some systems he was identified with Jehovah, the God of the Jews or of the Old Testament, and was brought in opposition to Christ of the New Testament, the Only-Begotten Son of the Supreme and Good God. The purpose of Christ's coming as Saviour and Redeemer was to rescue us from the power of the Demiurge, the lord of the world of this darkness, and bring us to the light of the Good God, His Father in heaven. The last development in the character of the Demiurge was due to Jehovah being primarily considered as he who gave the Law on Sinai, and hence as the originator of all restraint on the human will. As the Demiurge was essentially evil, all his work was such; in consequence all law was intrinsically evil and the duty of the children of the Good God was to transgress this law and to trample upon its precepts. This led to the wildest orgies of Antinomian Gnosticism.

maybe Catharism?

[tkil.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathar

The dualist theology was the most prominent, however, and held that the physical world was evil and created by Satan, who was taken to be identical with the God of the Old Testament; and that men underwent a series of reincarnations before reaching the pure realm of spirit, the presence of the God of Love described in the New Testament and his messenger Jesus.

The Roman Catholic Church regarded the sect as heretical; faced with the rapid spread of the movement across the Languedoc and the failure of peaceful attempts at conversion, the Church launched the Albigensian Crusade to crush the movement.

(Found it via google search for: christian heresies "satan created earth", which pointed me at a review for Kate Mosse's Labyrinth.)

Catharism does seem to be another in the Marcionism-style heresies:

Although there are certainly similarities in theology and practice between Gnostic/dualist groups of Late Antiquity (such as the Marcionites, Manichaeans and Ebionites) and the Cathars, there was not a direct link between the two; Manichaeanism died out in the West by the seventh century. The Cathars were largely a homegrown, Western European/Latin Christian phenomenon, springing up in the Rhineland cities (particularly Cologne) in the mid-twelfth century, northern France around the same time, and particularly southern France- the Languedoc- and the northern Italian cities in the mid-late twelfth century.

From the Wikipedia write-up, at least, it seems to be what you're looking for.

Re: maybe Catharism?

[zwol.livejournal.com]

The thing with Catharism and Marcionism and some of the things that go under the Gnostic umbrella is that they ascribe the entire material universe to the evil sub-creator, with the hidden, benevolent God only responsible for the spiritual world beyond. Last night that didn't seem like it fit, but on further reflection, it works just fine. (The creationism rant digests to 'if you claim that all the physical evidence from which science deduces evolution, an old universe, etc. was faked by God, then you are this species of heretic.' And a lot of that evidence has to do with the stars, so...)