Heresy

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HERESY

The words "schism" (σχίσμα) and "heresy" (αἵρεσις) both appear in the NT, but neither is a technical term in the modern canonico-theological sense. While the NT term "schism" remains quite undifferentiated and undeveloped, the term "heresy" shows the remote beginnings of its later technical orientation.

In Hellenism, heresy (from Gr. αἱρέομαι, to choose) meant (1) a teaching and (2) a school, e.g., a philosophical school such as the Stoics. In Hellenic and rabbinic Jewry heresy designated a religious party within Judaism (e.g., the Pharisees or Sadducees). In these instances the word has a neutral, nonpejorative sense.

This neutral sense of the word appears in Acts, where St. Paul calls the Pharisees "the strictest sect [heresy] of our religion" (Acts 26.5; see 5.17; 15.5). Nevertheless, when the Jewish lawyer Tertullus referred to Christianity

as "the Nazarene sect" (Acts 24.5), making it simply another party within Judaism (cf. Acts 28.22), St. Paul disavowed this sectarian appellation, saying: "I admit that in serving the God of my forefathers I follow the Way [ὁδóς: see W. Michaelis, Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament 5:93], which they call a heresy" (Acts 24.14). For St. Paul Christianity could not be a heresy, or party, in any sense, much less a heretical enclave within Judaism.

When St. Paul uses the term "heresy" in a Christian context, the meaning is pejorative, standing for splinter groupings or movements within the Christian community that threaten Church unity (Gal 5.20; 1 Cor 11.19). Paul speaks also of the "heretical man" (Ti 3.10), or the sectarian-minded man, in a similar reproving way.

2 Pt 2.1 warns of "lying teachers who will bring in destructive sects," thus marking the start of a sharper delineation of the word "heresy" in the direction of the later technical term. Here the heresy, burdened with heterodoxy, seemingly becomes a centrifugal movement dividing the Church.

Patristic Era. From the late 2d century onward the Fathers usually discriminated between heresy and schism. Both were understood not as abstract errors or as individual attitudes but rather as organized bodies or sects outside the Catholic Church. Heresy involved doctrinal error, whereas schism meant orthodox dissent. St. Augustine wrote: "you are a schismatic by your sacrilegious separation and a heretic by your sacrilegious doctrine" (C. Gaud. 2.9.10; Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum 53:267). "Heretics violate the faith by thinking falsely about God, while schismatics break away from fraternal love by their wicked separations, although they believe as we do" (Fid. et symb. 8.21; Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum 41:27). The Fathers, however, frequently used the two terms more or less interchangeably. Thus Cyprian called the Novatians schismatics and heretics without any distinction; and the first Council of Toledo (400) spoke of a man returning to the Church "de haereticorum schismate" (cap. 12; Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, 3:1000). To many Fathers it seemed otiose to make a nice distinction between heresy and schism, when, pastorally and religiously, the crucial fact was that both were impious counterfeit communions living outside the true Church (see Cyprian, Epist. 69.1; Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum 3.2:749–750). As both issued in corporate separation from the common life of the Church, it did not much matter whether that alienation came from an obdurate persistence in false doctrine or from a crooked desire to live apart from the disciplined life and ordered worship established by the Church.

Some Fathers saw in protracted schism an inbuilt bias toward heresy; there is in schism a latent theological problem that will work its way to the surface, or else some theological ground will be elaborated to bolster up the schism. St. Jerome wrote: "There is no schism which does not invent some heresy for itself in order to justify its departure from the Church" (In Titum 3.10–11; Patrologia Latina 26:598). St. Augustine also tended to look on heresy as "a long-standing schism" (C. Cresc. 2.7.9; Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum 52:367).

But "not all error is heresy" (St. Augustine, Haer.; Patrologia Latina 42:19); and "not every error betrays godlessness" (Pope Celestine I, Epist. 25.3; Patrologia Latina 50:550). Wherever there is simple error or misunderstanding as to the faith, there is no heresy, provided there is fundamental docility to the teaching of the Church. In order to have heresy there must be the stubborn inflexible will, once the falsity of the doctrine in question has become clear to the Church and has been made clear to the erring Christian, to persist in denying the doctrine taught and received by the Catholic Church. Such a willfully obdurate posture, which turns its face against the whole Church and which swarms to form its own conventicle, is the mark of true heresy, which the Fathers reprobated as gravely sinful. Although the presumption of bad faith, wherever heresy was present, strongly influenced the judgment of the Fathers (see J. Korbacher, Ausserhalb der Kirche kein Heil? [Munich 1963] 155–164), still St. Augustine held that those who have not fathered the error but received it from others, who do not cling to it pertinaciously but seek the truth, "are by no means to be reckoned among the heretics" (Epist. 43.1; Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum 34.2:85).

The Fathers emphasized the religio-moral side of heresy, with its causes and consequences under this aspect; they stressed also its corporate divisive stance.

Middle Ages and After. Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory dominated the thinking of the medieval scholastics on the theme of heresy. Like the Fathers, so too the scholastics delineated only in a very generic way what is, objectively speaking, the heterodox teaching required to constitute heresy; they laid much more stress on the moral aspect of heresy, i.e., on the sin of heresy with its willful, proud isolation from the communion of the faithful, its contemptuous rejection of Church discipline, and its tragic religious consequences for the life of the believer. It was not so much abstract heresy that was cataloged, as the guilty heretic rebuked.

Notwithstanding the scholastics' efforts to systematize the concept of heresy, the term exhibits a notable elasticity in its use. From the Middle Ages until well beyond the time of Trent, the basic correlative concepts, faith and heresy, were often used, both theologically (see St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 2a2ae, 11.2; 1a, 32.4; In 1 sent. 33.1.5) and in Church documents (Enchiridion symbolorum 902, 906, 1800) with a less precise content and a wider application than is customary today. Faith was often taken globally to comprise everything of vital significance for a truly Christian and ecclesial way of thinking and for a sound life of faith—everything, therefore, falling within the competence of the Church's discipline of faith. Correspondingly, a heretic was one willfully guilty of a stubborn antagonism to this docile faith-attitude, one whose conduct jeopardized the trueness and soundness of his life of faith. Intractability and pertinacity, coupled with a practical contempt for the teaching authority of the Church, played a decisive role in heresy so conceived. Such a vital and pastoral view of heresy takes in a wider range of reprehensible conduct than the denial of formally revealed truths taught by the Church. It includes every serious threat to the integrity of the life of faith and every stubborn contemptuous rejection of Church discipline.

The medieval scholastics, with their optimistic view of the powers of human reason to achieve the truth, took a correspondingly poor view, morally speaking, of any error, especially heresy. Hence the conviction, long dominant, that heresy's fellow was bad faith; and it was a long while before heresy was reckoned as falling within the ambit of inculpable error.

Since the 17th and 18th centuries, concomitantly with the fuller development of the treatise of theological criteriology, heresy became much more predominantly a doctrinal censure, designating objectively heterodox doctrine as that which contravenes a truth of divine and Catholic faith. In this orientation the religio-moral subjective aspects of heresy are not particularly attended to, although there are indications today that the factor of personal guilt is being reintegrated into the concept of heresy. See Codex iuris canonici c. 751 for the modern concept of heresy.

See Also: censure, theological; rule of faith; thinking with the church, rules for; unity of faith; unity of the church.

Bibliography: j. brosch, Das Wesen der Häresie (Bonn 1936). h. e. w. turner, The Pattern of Christian Truth (London 1954). k. rahner, On Heresy (New York 1964). m. meinertz, "σχίσμα und αἵρεσις im N.T.," Biblische Zeitschrift 1 (1957) 114–118. j. de guibert, "La Notion d'hérésie chez Saint Augustin," Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 11 (1920) 368–382. g.w. h. lampe, ed., A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford 1961–) fasc. 1, p. 51. a. lang, "Der Bedeutungswandel der Begriffe 'fides' und 'haeresis' und die dogmatische Wertung der Konzilsentscheidungen von Vienne und Trient," Münchener theologische Zeitschrift 4 (1953) 133–146.