It a series of 13 episodes and the one you saw was episode 5. The story (entitled "The Serpent and the Comforter") is about the serpent of reason and the comfort of Christ's church in this world and the next. The story may not be completely accurate according to history. During Henry VII's reign 14 heretics were arrested and executed. The script for the drama gives a snapshot that may match historical reality to a degree.
I think the East used banishment for those fallen in heresy... Chrysostom was sent into exile, and his treatment there was so harsh to an old man that he died enroute to somewhere - I think his last words were "Glory to god in all things..."
We had a Romanian Priest in Wisconsin who suffered under the Communists at one of their torture hospitals... They wanted to know if they could alter human nature - Holding them stressed for days... Anyone who failed was shot immediately... And did a lot of indoctrination and on and on... He died a couple of years ago... And he said a remarkable thing: Whenever you are tortured, you WILL love your torturer... I never heard him say why... We have a carnal explanation for the Stockholm Syndrome, but he was way past that...
I liked the heretic and so much of his thinking is so natural and so obvious to human reason that his arguments cannot fail to be persuasive to many. "I need no priests to pray to God, no sacraments, the bible is the same for all and having it makes God accessible equally to all. And Christ did not intend for the church to have great cathedrals and beautiful art work fine vestments and plentiful food for her ministers. Nor celibacy nor bread and wine that becomes anything but bread and wine. Reason cannot accept these mysteries." I felt so sorry for him, and shared the tears of the young soldier guard when he died.
Well, the movie made every effort to present him sympthetically - Watching it made him to be the hero and the Church to be the toad... And make no mistake - The Churchmen were toads - With a conscience, at least some, and Henry VII... The whole issue of conjoining temporal power with atemporal authority is a big problem for politics... God permitted Constantinople to fall after a thousand years of restraining Satan... And Moscow fell faster than that... The USA could well end up being the last bastion of Christian rule, because the rest of the world has defaulted - Islam believes in worldly rulership - Christians do not... Except for the RCC, which had her earthly power pretty much taken from Her...
And Henry VII seemed so much like a serpent insinuating his mysteries into the troubled and fearful mind of the heretic. The story left one wondering if maybe the serpent was Henry VII and the comforter the young soldier. But the script says it is serpent reason and comforter church.
The Church, with all Her issues, is still the Church... Ideally, Her Clergy should be able to guide the faithful to God... But they cannot do so unless they are themselves wedded to Him themselves... And so many are not... None in the movie...
I think the story is instructive because if you listen to Henry VII's words with care and forget from whom they come it is evident that he is right. The heretic thought he had grasped the great mystery of God himself and that his interpretations were better by far than any other man's unless the other agreed with him. He was humble in countenance and voice but in the content of his words was a pride almost infinite.
The final hour his words came to the heretic - "What if you are wrong?" I have to think the heretic would be excused if he rejected the teachings of flagrant sinners, which was most of the clergy... We do not see him encountering a charismatic Father of the Church - He only knew the sinful priests which his idealism could not abide... Pitting integrity against Authority is not Christian... Christian integrity is not praticularly receptive to imposed secular authority that violates Christian norms... Or at least it should not be...
I am very glad indeed that men are generally not killed for their faith in the lands in which we live and that no heretic faces the torch today nor imprisonment nor torture of body and mind in our lands. Violence like that was accepted as just back then when Henry VII was still young as king and still fighting to establish his dynasty (the Tudors) having just overthrown Richard III (a Plantagenet king).
Well, the Faith of Christ IS voluntary and willful... To impose the Faith with secular authority by burning at the stake those not in agreement is not Christian... It is a test which we see now in the land of the free here in the USA... If man is free and prosporous, will he embrace the Apostolic Faith, or will he simply turn carnal? The non-Apostolic Faiths are pretty much on the decline here, not holding their own children... But the Apostolic ones are struggling to hold theirs too... The draw of the secular world, and how to live in it as a Christian, is one of our great challenges in post-modern America...
The rest of the series has some important lessons in it too, it is interesting that a script writing team in the 1970s touched on such issues.
They had to be conscience driven Roman Catholics...
The holy scriptures cannot be properly grasped without the church because the church is the context of holy scripture and within the church God speaks more clearly than in scripture alone.
They were written from within the PRAXIS of the Faith, and outside of this praxis of the Faith they simply have no frame of reference other than words on pages in Bibles by which to understand the meanings... Reading John for the first time as a non-Christian who knew God, I KNEW right away that even though I had great insights into the meanings of words therein, that I had no BASIS for understanding it - I had to know a LOT more than I did in order to GET the meaning of the Text... I knew I needed a frame of reference from which it had been written, and for which it had been written, and it turns out that all the intellectual scholastic criteria established for such determination, while interesting and useful and important, are not sufficient... I had to enter into the Life of the Church, through Baptism, and through the Praxis of the Faith as discipled, in order to extablish a matrix of undeerstanding in my person for understanding the Written... And THEN is ALL started making a ton of sense... Similarly, one can read the play-book of NFL football teams and get them totally computerized and accessible in one's mind, but until you actually PLAY in games, you do not KNOW what they mean - They are only X's and O's on paper with arrows and blocks added...
Arsenios
