Domhnall

This is such a damned reasonable survey of heresy in the Christian religion, from ancient to modern times, that it would be impolite and perhaps self defeating to express irritation. It has an awful lot of ground to cover and, in closing, it addresses and acknowledges the extent of the material it has had to neglect, which is huge. At the close it has successfully name checked diverse major and lesser heresies and examined their impact on the unfolding history of Western Christianity, incorporating an interesting chapter on religious intolerance in the USA. It does so without anger or even much in the way of passion.

For the most part, the attitude taken is that heretics have played a constructive role, obliging religious leaders to define orthodoxy in the teeth of attack, and in at least a proportion of cases it is arguable that the choice might reasonably have gone either way, so long as a decision was taken. This quality of Christian thinking might invite more critical attention. The author himself notes how opponents of Christianity have, from the earliest times, seen its plasticity, its fecundity, its lack of clarity, as an obvious indicator that it is a human invention. It is worryingly easy to suggest alternative interpretations at too many points of its teachings, which is why Christians have invested so much in the construction and the violent defence of “orthodoxy.” The author notes this and dismisses it rather too lightly. He implies instead that this flexibility has enabled Christianity to remain relevant as circumstances changed – which is certainly the case but not a direct answer to the challenge. [Perhaps he is just too well aware of the catch all defence – that revelation unfolds over time, that the Christians have worked slowly and painfully towards understanding the truth. You can’t argue with that so why bother?]

He recognises that, after a period of being persecuted by state authorities (and the author agrees without exploring the topic that this has been greatly exaggerated), the alliance of Church and state (or altar and throne) placed the Church itself in the position of persecuting its rivals, a role adopted with enthusiasm. He notices (another aside) the thesis that persecution itself played a big part in the politics of Western Europe and he points out periods in which the active seeking out of heretics served a useful function in the way power was exercised. He finally explores the emergence of the concepts of tolerance (which is in itself provisional and retains the implication of a power relationship) and then religious freedom, primarily in the American context, though his suggestion that this was a miracle seems is, of course, just plain unsatisfactory.

All this is good and useful history, well worth reading, but I have the impression that it is a mill without sufficient grist, a blade without a sharp enough edge. To take a single example, I suggest that both the extreme barbarity of the Thirty Years War in Europe and the resolution in the Treaty of Westphalia, at its conclusion, to avoid any future wars of religion was a major landmark – not the overnight conversion of Europeans to religious toleration at all, but a major, tangible step in that direction which should be given due weight. In other words, the emergence of tolerance was not a miracle, but rather a product of history and available for study. The book mentions these things, but it deals with too many serious issues in the same way, by name checking it without paying due attention.

Part of the point of heresy is certainly that people died and were killed – typically in horrible ways - for their opinions. Part of the point about tolerance and freedom of worship, from which too many modern day extremists wish to distract us, is not merely that it is bad to kill people over opinions in a world without certainty, but that the attack on heresy very often served a disreputable part in the corrupt exercise of power. Heresy does have its own internal dynamics but it also serves a political role. When the attention of the crowd is [mis]directed towards heresy, there is something more material from which they are being distracted.

After all, when we read ...
Even without Christianity, people would have found things to fight about, and even without Christianity, the convenient (perhaps even necessary) concepts of heresy and orthodoxy would have carved out an existence. [p300]
.. then surely we are entitled to ask if heresy really ever was entirely a matter of Christian theology in the first place, rather than human politics. After all, the author does remind us several times that heresy only becomes a problem when someone decides to make it one. Other sources have mentioned that most Christians today continue to hold at least some and often many beliefs that have been ruled heretical in the past. So we need to give more time to examining its context and sometimes give more weight to that rather than the obscurity of the theological debate itself.

One conclusion the book does reach is worth preserving; there is always a place for strong opinions. Yet this author does not seem to suffer from strong opinions – he is fanatically moderate. It’s difficult to be offended by anything in particular [especially when it closes with a coy reference to a song “Bring in the Clowns” which my mother loved] but even he concedes that some people will decide to be offended anyway. I am an example. I am even irritated by the calm acceptance that there can be no “stable truth in a moral universe”. Some things are certainly wrong and burning heretics is high on that list.

Heresy and orthodoxy ... are flawed concepts, because they orbit around the notion of stable truth in a moral universe that is often defined by flux. They are however also very useful ideas ... We might accept that most of our choices and assumptions are dictated by accidents of time and place, and we might feel a little hard done by because of all the determinism in our lives, but we still have to live them as if they were the best possible reflection of our chosen beliefs. That’s far less choice than we’d like ... but even if there’s a little intellectual dishonesty and sleight of hand involved, we have to be able to say “I’m right” and “you’re wrong”, even if neither of us is really sure. Else what’s the point?” [p301]