Mammertus was one of those pestilential Christians who see in every disaster–natural, such as earthquakes, or human-created, such as war–God’s judgment. It helped (him!) that he survived a number of these so that he could proclaim to other survivors that God was punishing them out of a Divine wish for the people (who were in crisis, who were mourning, who were scared, who were maimed) to repent and turn to this loving deity.

Here’s how Butler describes Mammertus’ theology of disasters:

Almighty God, to punish the sins of the people, visited them with wars and other public calamities, and awaked them from their spiritual lethargy by the terrors of earthquakes, fires, and ravenous beasts, which last were seen in the very market-place of cities; such was the desolate state to which the country was reduced. These evils the impious ascribed to blind chance; but religious and prudent persons considered them as tokens of the divine anger, which threatened them with entire destruction, unless they strove to avert it by sincere repentance.

Mammertus spread his poison in the late 5th century in Gaul (present-day France). He is credited with helping introduce special days of fasting and prayer, accompanied with litanies, so that people might beseech God to forgive their evil and to spare them from further disasters (which of course would be merited by their miserable and sinful actions).

This is ambulance-chasing theology of the lowest sort–going out to people in crisis at their most vulnerable, offering them a way to make some sense of what happened by means of simultaneously blaming them and offering the insupportable illusion that they actually have the power to prevent these horrors from happening again (if they walk the straight and narrow, as prescribed by the theologian).

Mammertus is evidence that interpreting suffering as divine judgment has a very long, very wretched history. His spiritual descendants include those who have proclaimed that AIDS is God’s’ judgment against gay men, Hurricane Katrina a judgment against the Southern Decadence of New Orleans, and 9/11 against America’s secular humanism.

What’s that? The victims? Oh–well, sinners being used to teach sinners not to sin. By the God of Love.