Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe

Introduction: Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe

INTRODUCTION: HERESY AND AUTHORITY IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE The debates about the nature of Christian belief and the sources of legitimate authority in the Christian community that began to trouble the peace of the early churches two thousand years ago had both immediate and longer-lasting effects. From the epistles of st. Paul to the great age of church councils in the fifth and sixth centuries, the twin concepts of orthodoxy and heterodoxy were constituted as the third of the divisions that defined a true Christian, following the distinctions between Christianity and paganism on the one hand, and Christianity and Judaism on the other. The substance of Christian belief was articulated in apostolic and patristic literature, based upon an increasingly homogeneous scriptural canon and selected traditions, circulated widely, and finally, from the fourth century on, given juridical form by councils and prelates. Those against whom the early Fathers wrote and the early councils legislated were first described (as they are in the epistles of st. Paul) as factious, sectarian, and schismatic; that is, they were regarded as attempting to divide the indivisible community of the Church. From the second century on, they were increasingly described as heretics-that is, as people who chose (from the Greek word hairesein) a belief that the representatives of orthodox Christian communities defined as heterodox and therefore untenable by a true Christian. st. Paul had written his letters to particular communities of Christians in the cities of the central and eastern Mediterranean world of the Roman Empire. Some of the earliest treatises against heterodoxy were written by individual [ 1 1 [ 2 1 Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe laymen and clerics and supported by their personal authority as respected Christians. Sometimes, particular communities themselves were held up as models of Christian orthodoxy, as in the case of the community at Rome long before the bishop of Rome was acknowledged as an arbiter of orthodoxy both as an individual and as successor to St. Peter. From the fourth century on, however, the institutional and sociological circumstances of heterodoxy and orthodoxy changed. Christianity became the favored, and by the end of the century the only legal religion of the Roman Empire. Religious affairs acquired a civil, juridical dimension which they did not begin to lose in Europe until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus, the experience of heterodox and orthodox beliefs created structures of authority and dissent that affected both spiritual and temporal life in all spheres of activity through the first thirteen centuries of European history. After the fourth century the heretic was at odds, not merely with a part of one of the Christian communities within the Roman Empire, but with the empire itself, conceived and self-proclaimed as a Christian community. An organized, articulated, hierarchical Church now defined orthodoxy in conciliar canons and papal decrees which were read and recognized throughout the Roman-Christian world. Civil sanctions were added to individual and institutional condemnations of particular heretics and heretical and schismatic movements. Even with the passing of the power of the Roman Empire in western Europe and the Mediterranean, the new Germanic kingdoms which succeeded it defined themselves as no less thoroughly Christian and regarded the societies they organized and ruled as bound by the same conceptions of heterodoxy and orthodoxy as had been those of the late empire. The Roman laws against heretics and schismatics were among the first Roman laws to be adopted by later European societies. The concepts of orthodoxy and heterodoxy constituted one of the many links between Mediterranean antiquity and the early medieval world that followed it. 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 Introduction: Heresy and Authority [3 1 thought long after individual heretics and heretical movements had disappeared , the last heretics been reduced to ashes, and the doors of the Inquisitions finally...