Heresy

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Heresy is a belief held to deviate from an established orthodoxy — and, in the strict sense, deviation by someone inside the community rather than outside it. The heretic is not the unbeliever or the follower of another faith; the heretic is one of us who has gone wrong. That is what makes the charge sharp, and what made it, for much of Christian history, a matter of life and death.

The word descends from the Greek hairesis, which began without the sting it later carried. It meant a choosing — and, by extension, a school of thought or a philosophical sect, the way one might speak of the Stoics or the Epicureans as a hairesis. Early Christian writers turned the neutral word into an accusation: to choose one’s own doctrine, rather than receive the apostolic teaching whole, was already the error. By the second century a body of literature existed for the sole purpose of cataloguing and refuting such choices. Its authors — Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Epiphanius — are known to scholarship as the heresiologists, and their works are arranged as lists: this group taught that, that group taught this, and here is why each is wrong.

Those lists are the trap the modern historian works around. For most of the groups they describe — the Valentinians and other currents later filed under “Gnosticism” above all — the heresiologists’ refutations were for centuries the only surviving witness, so that the heretics were known only in the words of the people determined to destroy them. The deeper point, pressed hard in twentieth-century scholarship, is that orthodoxy and heresy were not fixed positions with deviation measured against them. In many regions the form of Christianity later called heretical came first; “orthodoxy” was the party that eventually won, and named its rivals afterward. On this reading heresy is less a stable thing than a relation — the label the victorious doctrine applies to the losers, projected backward as though it had always been the deviation.

What the accused believed, they did not experience as deviation. They held themselves to possess the true teaching and regarded the emerging mainstream as the corruption; the line ran both ways, and only one side kept the power to enforce it. Out of that enforcement grew the machinery the word now summons — councils defining the faith in precise formulas, the anathema, the excommunication, and in the medieval West the inquisition and the stake.

The category did not stay confined to Christianity. Islamic thought developed its own vocabulary for innovation and error in matters of belief; rabbinic Judaism named those who set themselves apart from the community’s teaching. Wherever a tradition fixes a boundary around right belief, the figure of the one who crossed it from within takes shape on the far side of the line. The drawing of the line, the historian notes, tends to come after the quarrel, not before it.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Gnosis According to its Foes

→ Related: Gnosis · Excommunication · Idolatry · Neoplatonism