Heresy

If the problem of dissent and heresy initially preoccupied only the small, individual Church communities of the first and second centuries, after the fourth century it constituted a social problem on a wide scale. The later history of heresy, too, touches upon far more aspects of life than the question of theological affirmation or dissent. Although it is a part of religious history, heresy is a part of social history as well, for the Christian community, like other communities, lives in time. The very concepts of consensus, authority, tradition, and heterodoxy that were hammered out by heretics and churchmen from the first century on continued to influence ecclesiastical, social, and civil thought long after individual heretics and heretical movements had disappeared, the last heretics been reduced to ashes, and the doors of the Inquisitions finally locked or broken. Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern European history, theological uniformity was synonymous with social cohesion in societies that regarded themselves as bound together at their most fundamental levels by a religion.

It is no accident of historiography that successful dissenting movements -first during the Beformation of the sixteenth century, and later, in civil communities, during the struggles for toleration and political liberty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - looked back to the heretics of the early Church and medieval Europe as the precursors of later ideas of freedom of conscience and civil liberty. Nor is it an accident of historical temperament that the history of heresy has only in the twentieth century managed to free itself from the confessional and ideological debates of the centuries until the nineteenth and claimed for itself a place with other kinds of study as a legitimate part of the history of both theology and society as a whole.

The pathbreaking studies of Henry Charles Lea and Paul Fridericq in the second half of the nineteenth century have found eloquent and profound successors in our own century. If the history of heresy is no longer a particularly nasty weapon in confessional or ideological conflict, it is something much more useful - a legitimate and disciplined means of understanding the behavior and beliefs of human beings in time, or at least some of the most important and widest-ranging aspects of behavior and belief, and some of the most complex and interesting of those human beings.

From the seventh to the eleventh centuries in western Europe, the structure of society and the primarily monastic character of religious culture did not foster widespread dissenting beliefs with a popular, lay base, nor did it allow for the range of intellectual inquiry that later led to the growth of intellectual, philosophical heresy.