A Brief History of Heresy G. R. EVANS
A Brief History of Heresy
BLACKWELL BRIEF HISTORIES OF RELIGION SERIES This series offers brief, accessible and lively accounts of key topics within theology and religion. Each volume presents both academic and general readers with a selected history of topics which have had a profound effect on religious and cultural life. The word history is, therefore, understood in its broadest cultural and social sense. The volumes are based on serious scholarship but they are written engagingly and in terms readily understood by general readers. Published Alister E. McGrath A Brief History of Heaven G. R. Evans A Brief History of Heresy Forthcoming Carter Lindberg A Brief History of Love Douglas Davies A Brief History of Death Dana Robert A Brief History of Mission Tamara Sonn A Brief History of Islam
A Brief History of Heresy G. R. EVANS
2003 by G. R. Evans 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5018, USA 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton South, Victoria 3053, Australia Kurfürstendamm 57, 10707 Berlin, Germany The right of G. R. Evans to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. First published 2003 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Evans, G. R. (Gillian Rosemary) A brief history of heresy / G. R. Evans. p. cm. (Blackwell brief histories of religion) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-631-23525-6 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-631-23526-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Heresy History. I. Title. II. Series. BT1315.3.E93 2002 273 dc21 2002007334 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 9.5/12pt Meridian by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com
Contents List of Illustrations Preface viii x 1 The Importance of Being United 1 Forming Consensus 5 The Papacy 10 The Bible in the Hands of Heretics 13 Areas Where Disagreement May be Allowed 20 2 The Boundaries of Orthodoxy: Faith 23 The Apostles Creed 24 The Nicene Creed 29 Catechesis 34 Misdirected Worship and Taking the Name of God in Vain 38 Does the Faith Develop Through History? 41 The Content of the Creeds and the Question of Orthodoxy 45 3 The Boundaries of Orthodoxy: Order 47 Disorder at the Wild Fringes 47
Orderliness 53 Ministry and Order 55 The Rigorist Dispute 57 Schismatics 59 Diaspora 61 Orthopraxis 62 4 Classifying Heresies 65 What Could be Imported from Ancient Philosophy? 66 Incarnation and Christology 67 The Augustinian Trio 70 The Easter Controversy 71 The Doctrine of Transubstantiation 72 1054 and the Schism of East and West 73 From Sect to Confessional Identity 76 The Power of a Name 80 Categories of Unbelief 83 Pinning Accusations to Suspected Heretics 86 The Creation of a Critical Literature 88 5 Heresy and Social Challenge 90 Popular Heresy: The Anti-establishment Dissidents Speak up for Themselves 93 The Road to Dissent 98 The Waldensians 99 John Wyclif and the Lollard Movement 106 Jan Hus 110 The Hussite Movement 117 Social Consequences After the Middle Ages 119 6 Good and Evil 123 The Mediaeval Dualists 126 vi Contents
7 Dealing with Heresy 134 University Sermons 136 The Preaching of the Heretics Themselves 138 Crusade 141 Inquisition 142 The Change in the Balance of Power 149 Living with Difference 151 Conclusion 157 Notes 166 Further reading 180 Index 186 Contents vii
List of Illustrations Picture research by Charlotte Morris. Plate 1 Communion of the Apostles, fresco by Fra Angelico (1387 1455). Museo di San Marco, Florence/photo SCALA. 25 Plate 2 St Augustine teaching in Rome, fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli, 1464 5. Sant Agostino, San Gimignano/photo. SCALA. 36 Plate 3 John Henry Newman, portrait bust by Thomas Woolner, 1867. By permission of the Warden and Fellows of Keble College, Oxford. 43 Plate 4 Waldensian community of Dormillouse in the French Alps, engraving from William Beattie, The Waldenses, or Protestant valleys of Piedmont, Dauphiny and the Ban de la Roche (London, 1838). British Library, London. 100 Plate 5 John Wycliffe. Private collection. 107 Plate 6 Jan Hus, woodcut portrait, Photo AKG London. 111
Plate 7 William Tyndale being burnt at the stake, woodcut from Foxes s Acts and Monuments of Martyrs, 1684. Private collection. 143 Plate 8 Galileo before the Inquisition, Rome, 1633, painting by J. N. R. Fleury. Musée du Louvre, Paris/photo AKG London, Erich Lessing. 144 List of Illustrations ix
Preface The extreme fundamentalism which has manifested itself so disquietingly in other religions in recent years with devastating global effect, has had its counterparts throughout Christian history, in religious wars and the persecution of individuals and groups of dissidents. This is a book about heresy in Christianity, where the issues are distinctive because it is of the essence of Christianity that there be agreement in a common faith. Or so everyone thought for many centuries. The modern opening up of that fundamental assumption to active questioning makes a book like this topical, and perhaps a useful aid to those engaged in inter-faith and ecumenical conversations as well as those conscious of living in a predominantly secular society where Christians are one of a number of faith communities. The Christian presumption has always been that life is lived in search of salvation. Some have thought that should be an active search, involving a positive effort; others have seen it as a gift of grace which cannot be deserved by trying. But both viewpoints take true faith to be central. The Christian who is striving to be good needs to be clear
what being good means. The Christian who simply trusts in Christ, as an act of justifying faith, must still have the true faith. What is required, then? Is the test what the individual Christian believes? Is the test a justifying faith in Christ, not in the sense of the content of what is believed but in the sense of trust in him? That was what Luther argued, pointing out that even devils have a knowledge of Christ. Is personal faith enough, or must the individual be a member of a community of faith? Or are neither necessary if God can act directly (by grace ), choosing to save some individuals to be with him in eternity, perhaps even without regard to their beliefs or their membership of the visible Church? The extreme fear of anything which seemed to undermine the unity and integrity of the faith manifested throughout most of the events described in this book is therefore a recognition of the immense significance of what is at stake. The unity brought into question by the challenge of heresy has not only been of faith in one Christ, involving a particular set of beliefs about him. It has also involved questions of order. It has frequently been asserted that there is no salvation outside the Church : nulla salus extra ecclesiam. Yet order in the Church is something much deeper than structural unity. When the Church is visibly divided, with one worshipping community set against another, it is suffering a breakdown of unity in its order just as much as when there is an invisible loss of the sense of community and common purpose. We shall see throughout this book the two threads of heresy (where some persist in choosing to believe differently from others) and schism (where there is division on a point of order), intertwined at almost every point. When Augustine of Hippo (354 430) said that not every error is heresy, he was saying something almost universally Preface xi
agreed in Christian history. 1 The Spanish theologian Isidore of Seville (c.560 636) explains that the Greek haeresis carries the sense of making a choice. Heretics are those who holding perverse dogma, draw apart from the Church of their own free will. 2 He includes similar themes in his On Heresies, though it covers fewer heresies than the Etymologies and discusses them more briefly. 3 In On Heresies, Isidore stresses that heretics are those who not only think wrongly, but persist with determined wickedness (pertinaci pravitate) in thinking wrongly. 4 It is important that they are exercising free choice when they opt for the wrong opinions; their fault is moral as well as intellectual. By contrast, an orthodoxus is a man upright in faith who is also living a good Christian life. 5 Isidore tried to explain the difference between the Church and the sects. He explains that it is a mark of the true Church that it is not, like the conventicles of the heretics, in huddles in different regions, but spread throughout all the world, 6 so that the same Church is to be found in every place. Huddles are exactly what we shall see, in succeeding centuries, as groups of outlaws from the faith meet secretly in one another s houses. There is no heresy which is not attacked by other heretics, says Bede (c.673 735). 7 Historically, as well as theologically, this has proved to be true. For once a group has set itself apart, or been officially cast off by the Church, it has often fragmented in its turn. Yet the fragments fall into patterns. These patterns and the favourite themes of heresy which we shall see repeating in the following pages give this book its natural shape. Clusters of heretical beliefs aggregate in every century, or it seems to contemporaries that they do. The controversial Bohemian Jan Hus in the early fifteenth century tried to give the picture in outline. xii Preface
There are three kinds of heresy according to the most famous doctors: namely, simony, blasphemy, and apostasy which, though not in reality distinguishable as opposites, yet are nevertheless distinguished as to cause. Apostasy consists generally... of man s deviation from the religion of God; blasphemy is... man s calumny of God s power; but simony consists, according to reason, in man s destroying altogether God s ordinances. 8 For all these reasons it is not an easy task to give a tidy account now of the ways in which heretical opinions clustered together in reality. The considerable surviving literature is mostly the work of those trying to change the minds of heretics. They had their own agendas about the ways in which they presented the ideas they were challenging. The heretics and schismatics themselves would not necessarily recognize themselves in the descriptions of their critics. There has been great nervousness about novelty throughout the history of the Church. This has been taken to an extreme in the Orthodox Churches of the Eastern half of the ancient Roman Empire, which became divided from the Western Church in stages, first (in the case of the Oriental Orthodox Churches) at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and then (in the case of the Orthodox Church) with the schism which began in 1054, and which still divides the Orthodox Churches from the rest of the Christian world. The division was originally as much about politics as theology, but central to it was the accusation that the West had been adding things to the Creed. The Orthodox held with determination to the positions articulated in the first few centuries and they resisted any departure from, or development of, what could be said then, on the grounds that if it was new it could not be authentically part of the true faith. By the iconoclast era of Preface xiii