Orthodoxy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The concept of orthodoxy is variously used as: (1) a historically specifically located term; (2) a descriptive-analytic term to describe traditions or writers that may not describe themselves by that term; and (3) a titular self-description in various religious communities (e.g., Modern Orthodox Judaism, Greek Orthodox Church). Often, orthodoxy is juxtaposed with orthopraxy, whereby orthodoxy would apply more appropriately to cognitivist traditions, such as Christianity and its emphasis on faith and theology, rather than to traditions that define themselves along behavioral lines, such as Judaism and Islam with their emphases on religious law. This juxtaposition is artificial, however, since Judaism and Islam, as well as Christianity, develop discourses of orthodoxy and authenticity.

The historical origin of the concept of orthodoxy (from the Greek word for correct or normative faith) as the antonym of heresy (Greek, “faction”) can be traced back to early Christian literature. Conceptually, orthodoxy emerges as a by-product of the early Christian practice of heresiography, whereby the two antonyms were aligned with other oppositional pairs, such as, importantly, truth and its perversions. To a large degree, the heresiographers opted to define orthodoxy by what it was not—namely, the aberrant heresies—rather than to formulate what orthodoxy actually entailed. First-century writers such as Josephus (37–c. 100 CE) could still employ the term heresy in the sense of “school of thought,” as in his description of the various schools of thought in first-century Judaism (Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and potentially Zealots). Hence, this first-century phenomenon is most often described as sectarianism rather than as a struggle for orthodoxy. To Josephus, none of these groups constituted an orthodox versus a heretical version of Judaism, or an exclusionary normative Judaism from which the others were to be excluded as deviant marginal groups. What distinguishes the heresiographical texts of the second half of the second century and onward from first-century writers such as Josephus is precisely this shift in meaning from heresy as a school of thought, still subsumed under the umbrella of the larger category term of Judaism (in Josephus’s case), to heresy as a deviant aberration from the true religion, hence to be excluded from its boundaries of identity. Only the latter allows a notion of orthodoxy as the true, authentic version of Christianity (and subsequently Judaism) to emerge.

It may be debatable as to the degree to which the early Christian leader Paul already engaged in a heresiographical practice in his epistles without resorting to the concept of heresy when in his Epistle to the Galatians (1:6–7) he denounced his opponents as those preaching “another gospel” and thereby “perverting the gospel of Christ.” However, it appears that the first author of what turned into the genre of Christian heresiography was Justin Martyr (100–165 CE) with his Refutation of all Heresies, a text that is no longer preserved. Subsequently, Irenaeus’s treatise Adversus omnes haereses (Against All Heresies, 185 CE) drew on Justin’s work, and from then on heresiographies present a distinct genre of Christian literature and theology. Around the same time, Jewish writers, such as the authors of the earliest Rabbinic text, known as the Mishnah (c. 200 CE), began to adopt heresiographical practices.

The early Jewish and Christian debates were carried out in a context in which the writers lacked the support of institutional or political authority. A case may be made that these strategies of self-representation contributed to, if not entirely caused, the institutional consolidation of the Catholic Church, ultimately backed by the political authority of the Roman Empire, and the rabbinical leadership of the Jewish community at the end of the late antique period.

The heresiographers employed a number of strategies to render persuasive their notion of the true and therefore authoritative or normative version of theology and practice. One strategy to establish authenticity was to attribute historical or chronological priority to their norms. For example, the early rabbis claim that their traditions or their “oral Torah” was already given to Moses on Sinai (Mishnah Avot 1:1), and the Christian heresiographers attribute their teachings to the first apostles and ultimately Jesus himself. The historical priority of authentic traditions is subsequently secured by chains of traditions that lead from the source to each respective heresiographical author. Heresies then are represented as groups (“them”) that split off from the normative tradition and perverted it, versus the projected “us” who continue the authentic and original tradition. This classic strategy of self-representation is employed in various other religious contexts, often in order to disguise innovative practices and beliefs. In the case of early Judaism and Christianity, this strategy was so successful that modern historians have often assumed such claims to be descriptive rather than recognizing them for their rhetorical work.

Another strategy of the heresiographers was to adduce and at the same time reduce the origin of what they wished to portray as false belief to a founding figure whose name would give the denounced faith its name. Paul juxtaposes the idea of following Christ with merely following Paul, Apollo, or Cephas (Peter) in his argument against divisions in the early church communities (1 Cor. 1:12). Subsequently, heresiographers provide lists of named and supposedly nameable groups who may not have described themselves by those names, as Justin Martyr does in his Dialogue with Trypho : “Some are called Marcionites, some Valentinians, some Basilideans and some Saturnalians, and some others by other names” (Martyr 1930, p. 70), just not the name Christians. This strategy allows for contrasting these marginalized categories of groups with the universal unnamed category employed to promote the appearance of authenticity, whether that is represented by terms like orthodox and catholic (Greek, “universal”) in the Christian case, or “Israel” versus groups such as Sadduceans and Boethusians in the early Rabbinic case. Both these strategies—the attribution of historical priority to that which is promoted as authentic, and the reduction of opponents to marginal movements contrasted to one’s own universality—are repeated in numerous other conflicts, mostly of a religious nature.

While the concepts of orthodoxy and heresy have specific historical origins, and are mostly used in the contexts of religious practices and religious studies as well as in sociology of religion, they have come to be used more broadly in various other disciplines and subject matters. Any established tradition or symbolic order perceived as truth, as the law, or as political consensus can be described as orthodoxy, and anyone diverging therefrom as heterodox or heretic. A discipline of study may be legitimated by one normative methodology, leading to a perception of innovative approaches as heterodox or heretic.

In the social sciences, Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) elevated the concepts of orthodoxy and heresy to methodological principle in his analysis of social behavior, accompanied by a third concept, doxa. In his classic work Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), he defines orthodoxy as “a system of euphemisms, of acceptable ways of thinking and speaking the natural and social world, which rejects heretical remarks as blasphemies” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 169). Hence, orthodoxy is always a social fiction, a socially established convention in the realm of discourse. Doxa, on the other hand, refers to the “preverbal taking-for-granted of the world that flows from practical sense” (Bourdieu 1990, p. 68). At times, Bourdieu maps all three terms on class distinctions in that doxa is the product of a system of domination. Accordingly, he defines doxa as the viewpoint of the dominant, which disguises itself as universal, neutral, or objective, and which the dominant classes have an interest in defending, whereas the dominated have “an interest in pushing back the limits of doxa and exposing the arbitrariness of the taken for granted” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 169). Doxa is a stronger tool of domination because it is “an ensemble of fundamental beliefs which do not even need to affirm themselves in the guise of an explicit dogma, conscious of itself” (Berlinerblau 2001, p. 346), that is, orthodoxy. Hegemony and orthodoxy are interchangeable. The heretic then is the person, a prophet or homo academicus, who discovers some unrecognized belief about the world that supplies the means of thinking the unthinkable.

Bourdieu is not the first to translate the concepts of orthodoxy and heresy or heterodoxy, originally coined in a religious context, into analytic vocabulary for sociological and political analysis, but his is the most influential to date.

SEE ALSO Bourdieu, Pierre; Christianity; Galbraith, John Kenneth; Hegemony; Judaism; Kuhn, Thomas; Religion; Revolutions, Scientific; Roman Catholic Church; Science

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bauer, Walter. 1971. Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, eds. Robert Kraft and Gerhard Krodel. Trans. Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins. Philadelphia: Fortress.

Berlinerblau, Jacques. 2001. Toward a Sociology of Heresy, Orthodoxy, and Doxa. History of Religions 40 (4): 327–351.

Bourdieu, Pierre. [1971] 1988. Vive la Crise!: For Heterodoxy in Social Science. Theory and Society 17 (5): 773–787.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. [1980] 1990. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Boyarin, Daniel. 2004. Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Brooke, John, and Ian Maclean, eds. 2005. Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cohen, Shaye J. D. 1998. The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Henderson, John B. 1998. The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heresy: Neo-Confucian, Islamic, Jewish, and Early Christian Patterns. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Katz. Jacob. 1998. A House Divided: Orthodoxy and Schism in Nineteenth-Century Central European Jewry. Trans. Ziporah Brody. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.

Kurtz, Lester. 1983. The Politics of Heresy. American Journal of Sociology 88 (6): 1085–1115.

Le Boulluec, Alain. 1985. La notion d’hérésie dans la littérature grecque II-II siècles. 2 vols. Paris: Études Augustiniennes.

Martyr, Justin. 1930. Justin Martyr: The Dialogue with Trypho, ed. and trans. A. Lukyn Williams. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK).

Zito, George. 1983. Toward a Sociology of Heresy. Sociological Analysis 44: 123–130.

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert

or·tho·dox·y / ˈôr[unvoicedth]əˌdäksē/ • n. (pl. -dox·ies) 1. authorized or generally accepted theory, doctrine, or practice: monetarist orthodoxy | he challenged many of the established orthodoxies. ∎  the quality of conforming to such theories, doctrines, or practices: writings of unimpeachable orthodoxy. 2. the whole community of Orthodox Jews or Orthodox Christians.

orthodoxy ‘Right thinking’; used of mainstream Christian thought as opposed to heresy; thus, the gospel of John is orthodox if it maintains that Jesus was truly human while also being Son of God, whereas docetism is heretical. However, in a narrower sense, Orthodoxy has come to be used particularly of those autonomous Churches of the East who are in communion with the See of Constantinople.

Orthodoxy. As a religious system, right belief as contrasted with heresy. The word is used especially in connection with those Churches of the E. which are in communion with Constantinople, collectively described as ‘Eastern Orthodox’ to distinguish them from the ‘Oriental Orthodox Churches’. See also previous and following entries.

orthodoxy •Chrissie, Cissy, kissy, missy, prissy, sissy •dixie, pixie, tricksy, Trixie •chintzy, De Quincey, wincey •efficiency, proficiency, sufficiency •Gypsy, tipsy •ditzy, glitzy, itsy-bitsy, Mitzi, ritzy, Uffizi •Eurydice •odyssey, theodicy •sub judice • prophecy • anglice •chaplaincy • policy • baronetcy •governessy • Pharisee • actressy •clerisy, heresy •secrecy • statice • captaincy •courtesy •dicey, icy, pricey, spicy, vice •stridency • sightsee •bossy, Flossie, flossy, glossy, mossy, posse •boxy, doxy, epoxy, foxy, moxie, poxy, proxy •bonxie •poncey, sonsy •dropsy, popsy •biopsy • heterodoxy • orthodoxy •autopsy