Heresy

Heresy is not a property a belief can have on its own. It is a relation between a belief and an authority that has rejected it, and any sentence using the word is incomplete until the authority is named.

Consider what is actually being said. To call a doctrine heretical is to report that some body has condemned it. The same doctrine is orthodox somewhere else, held in good conscience by people whose own authorities have examined it and approved it. Miaphysite christology is heresy by the standard of Chalcedon and is the faith of the Coptic and Armenian churches. Arminianism is error by the Canons of Dort and is the ordinary teaching of world Methodism.

There is no view from nowhere available here, and writing as though there were is a way of adopting one party's judgement while appearing to state a fact.

The word did not start out hostile

The Greek meant a choice, then a school or faction, with no pejorative force, it is used neutrally of the Pharisees and Sadducees. It acquires its later sense only as Christianity develops the idea of a single deposit of faith from which one can deviate.

That structure is not universal. It requires a body competent to define the deposit and a boundary that can be crossed, and a great many religious traditions have neither.

The technical distinctions do real work

Catholic canon law defines heresy narrowly: the obstinate denial or doubt, after baptism, of a truth to be held with divine and catholic faith. Obstinacy is required. This separates formal heresy, which is culpable, from material heresy, which is error held in good faith, and it is what allows the tradition to call a proposition heretical without condemning everyone who holds it.

Heresy is further distinguished from apostasy, the total repudiation of the faith, and from schism, the refusal of communion. The three are regularly confused in ordinary usage.

Traditions that do not have it

Judaism has terms of censure but has policed practice far more than assent, and holds that a Jew who has sinned, or converted out, remains a Jew. Hinduism has no body competent to define orthodoxy across the tradition; schools that flatly contradict each other on the nature of the self coexist as schools. Jainism's doctrine of many-sidedness treats a one-sided assertion as a partial view rather than an offence.

These absences are not gaps waiting to be filled. They are structural facts about how those traditions are organised, and they are a reason to be careful with a word that assumes the opposite.

Heresy as a working category was built case by case, and four early disputes did most of the building.

Gnosticism, a diverse second-century movement holding that the material world is the flawed product of a lesser being and that salvation comes through secret knowledge (gnosis) of one's true divine origin, prompted Irenaeus of Lyons to write Against Heresies (about 180), one of the first sustained efforts to define orthodoxy by cataloguing what it excluded, anchored in apostolic succession and a rule of faith.

Arianism, the position of the Alexandrian priest Arius that the Son was created by the Father and therefore not co-eternal with him, was condemned at the Council of Nicaea in 325, which produced the creed's homoousios, "of one substance," precisely to close the loophole Arius had used. The controversy did not end there; Arian and pro-Nicene parties contended for decades afterward, including among ruling emperors.

Pelagianism, associated with the British theologian Pelagius, held that human beings can achieve righteousness by will and effort without a strict necessity of grace; Augustine's opposition, and the doctrine's condemnation at councils in the early fifth century, shaped Western teaching on original sin and grace for the rest of its history.

Catharism, a dualist movement in medieval southern France holding matter to be evil, drew a different institutional response: the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229), a military campaign rather than a theological refutation, and the establishment of the papal Inquisition afterward specifically to detect and try surviving Cathars, the first standing institution built for that purpose.