HERESY

HERESY. This word derives from the Greek verb haireo/haireomai, “to take” or “to choose.” In ecclesiastical use it signifies a conscious “choice,” taken on a matter of defined doctrine in disagreement with the faith. This faith or “mind” of the Church is determined by Scripture, by an Ecumenical Council (qq.v.), or by universal and longstanding consensus. The author of such a choice, the heresiarch, will, in the conventions of church historians, usually have given his name to the opinion and party deriving from it.

The history of the Church and its teaching is in great part a history of Christian heresies. In New Testament times intense struggles went on between Paul and the “Judaizers,” between the author of 1 Jn and people claiming that Christ had only “appeared” to take on flesh (docetists), and between the author of the Pastoral Epistles (1, 2 Tim, Titus) and people preaching that the Resurrection (q.v.) had never happened, or had occurred “spiritually.”

The 2nd c. saw an expanded front against gnosticism, replied to by Irenaeus of Lyons (qq.v.) whose Adversus Haereses laid the foundations for much of patristic theology, and against Montanism, an ancient world equivalent (with qualifications) to modern Pentecostalism. The former’s denial of the Old Testament Scriptures and the latter’s claim to an ongoing revelation of the Spirit on the same level as the New Testament led Church leaders to insist on the once-and-for-all character of the revelation in Christ. The canon of the New Testament emerged from these debates.

In the 3rd c., arguments over the nature (q.v.) of the Godhead took center stage. Modalism, led by the priests Praxeas and Sabellius in Rome, argued that the divinity was one Person appearing in three different forms. Tertullian replied for the Latins, and Origen (qq.v.) and Dionysius of Alexandria for the Greeks, insisting that the three persons of the Trinity are indeed one, though always three persons. Adoptionists, such as Paul of Samosata, held that Christ was merely a man gifted at baptism with the Spirit. Finally, in Persia the preacher Mani began a new religion, Manichaeism, an amalgam of Iranian dualism, Christianity, and gnosticism (q.v.). It enjoyed a long life on the fringes of Byzantium (q.v.) and within the Empire as far abroad as 5th-c. North Africa; and drew responses from generations of churchmen seeking to defend the goodness of the created world.

The 4th c. was the great age of Trinitarian debate, sparked by Arius (q.v.) and carried on by such as Eusebius of Nicomedia, Aetius, and Eunomius of Cyzicus, all of whom refused to acknowledge the divinity of Christ and the Spirit. Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers (qq.v.) in the Greek-speaking world, Hilary of Poitiers, Popes Silvester and Damasus, and Ambrose of Milan (q.v.) among the Latins, led to the articulation of the dogma framed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (qq.v.). Latin-speaking Christianity also saw a fierce debate at the beginning of the 5th c. over the relation between freedom and grace (q.v.) in the human person. The monk Pelagius’s extreme assertion of human liberty (q.v.) drew from Augustine of Hippo his distinctive teaching concerning original sin (qq.v.) and predestination, which would do much to shape subsequent Western Christianity.

Debate in the East in the 5th c. moved to the person of Christ and the opposing doctrinal poles of Nestorius (q.v.) and Eutychius, who drew respectively the attention of Cyril of Alexandria and Leo the Great of Rome (qq.v.), and the doctrinal formulations of the Ecumenical Councils of Chalcedon and Ephesus (qq.v.). The 6th c. and 7th c. carried on arguments over the decrees of Chalcedon and resulted in the convocations of the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553), which condemned the “Three Chapters” and the anthropology of Origen (qq.v.), and the Sixth (681), which condemned the imperially sponsored doctrine of monothelitism (one will in Christ). The last great doctrinal debate of Byzantium (q.v.), prior to Hesychasm, was the crisis of Iconoclasm (qq.v.) in the 8th c. and 9th c., which prompted the replies of Germanos of Constantinople, Joh n of Damascus, and Theodore of Studion (qq.v.), and the decrees of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, Nicaea II (787).

The last great doctrinal debate to occur in the Byzantine era (q.v.) revolved around the Athonite monks and the writings of Gregory Palamas (q.v.). The latter represented the side declared Orthodox by a series of local councils. The heresiarch, if one may use that term, was Barlaam of Calabria (q.v.), though his heresy was less any one formula than the general argument that deification, theosis (q.v.), is no more than a metaphor and the light associated with it a symbol.

Later Orthodox history does not offer any doctrinal debates on the scale of those occurring during the ancient and medieval periods. The Church was compelled to struggle with the competing Christian notions, imported from Western Europe, associated with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Local councils such as those at Jassy in 1642 and Bethlehem in 1672 issued doctrinal statements against particular Protestant formulations, while others in Greece and Russia debated Roman Catholic (q.v.) attempts at reunion (see Uniate). Within Orthodoxy the one great disturbance of the past millennium was the schism, the raskol, in the Russian Church following the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow (qq.v.) in the 1660s. Here it would be wrong to speak so much of heresy-at least in the earlier phases of the Old Believer (q.v.) movement-as of a ferociously conservative turn of mind, a fatal want of perspective.

At the beginning of the 20th c. the Russian Church did produce one serious candidate for a heresy, the imyaslavtsi or imyabozhniki (“Glorifiers” or “Worshipers of the Name”). The adherents held that the divinity of Jesus resided substantially in the very name of the Lord. Serious discussion of this thesis, sustained by significant numbers of Russian monks on Mt. Athos (q.v.), failed to engage the Church as a whole. The movement was quickly dealt with by the intervention of the Russian imperial navy.