Heretics and Heresies in the Ancient Church and in Eastern Christianity. Studies in Honour of Adelbert Davids (review)

Recent scholarship has been fertile both in the study of heretics and in studies of heresy. Commonly the former show more evidence of reading than of reflection, whereas in the latter there is more reflection than evidence of reading. The first type, better though not the best conceivable, predominates in this collection in honor of the Dutch scholar Adelbert Davids. Boudewijn Dehandschutter justly observes, in “Heresy and the Early Christian Notion of Tradition,” that Irenaeus, Clement, and Tertullian entertained different notions of the rule of faith, but the bias that he professes to be correcting on page 8 is already obsolete in the English-speaking world. When Anthony Hilhorst (“Christian Martyrs outside the Catholic Church”) concludes that “the prestige of the martyr’s status may have been fatal to the survival of Gnosticism” (p. 36), he casts some old stones and leaves the rest unturned. In “Heracleon and the Hermeneutics of Prepositions” Annewies Van den Hoek hints at a more skeptical appraisal of conventional taxonomies when she finds that Origen and his interlocutor used “similar linguistic tools” (p. 49) in the service of a shared conception of hermeneutic activity. Fred Ledegang’s “The Ophites and the ‘Ophite’ Diagram in Celsus and Origen” is genuinely critical in its parsing of the impenetrable documents that remain to us. Jan van Amersfoot supplies enough evidence to justify the title of his offering, “The Ebionites as Depicted in the Pseudo-Clementine Novel”; on the other hand, he cites no ancient witness in support of his claim that Valentinus “taught freely in the Church of Alexandria” (p. 86). Kristoffel Demoen, in “Incomprehensibility, Ineffability and Untranslatability,” adds little of his own to a catena of excerpts from St. Gregory of Nyssa; in a subtle essay on “Preaching and the Arian Controversy” Johan Leemans shows that Gregory is winnowing orthodoxy from heresy even when dispensing praise and consolation to his own partisans. Joseph Verheyden’s “Epiphanius of Salamis on Beasts and Heretics” bring to light an imaginative strain in the herpetology of the fourth century’s Grand Inquisitor. Daniela Müller, in “Aspekte der Ketzerverfolgung,” corroborates the well-known fact that heresies were defined in Byzantium by imperial law and in the West by bishops under Roman hegemony. Peter van Deun’s edition of ten short Chapters on the Double Will of the Lord will put scholars in his debt, although Maximus’s intimation that theology should deal in facts, not words (p. 212), would make it impossible to formulate either dogma or a history of doctrine. Antoon Bastiaensen on “Les vocables perfidus et perfidia” shows that these perennial terms of vilification signify the failure of the Jews to keep faith with God. Martin Parmentier offers an edition of a Latin text, whose “Rules of Interpretation” include the incorporeality of the Godhead, the discreteness of the three persons, and their common possession of divine attributes. Gerard Bartelink’s “Die Invektiven gegen Nestorius” is an inventory of opprobrious terms in Cassian, also taking note of the tropes that he fails to employ. In a study of the Syriac prelate Gîwargis of Kaphră, Dietmar Winkler decides that the terms Nestorian and Monophysite are blunt tools for historians of Christology, whereas Hubert Kaufhold, in “Häresie, Schisma und Apostasie,” argues that these concepts are not differentiated in Georgian and Armenian histories. Once again, however, it would be anachronistic to assume that they are in common use today. While Herman Teule investigates the sources of a compendium by Bar-Hebraeus, Fedor Poljakov professes to have discovered “Gnostiken Reminiszenzen” in the Russian liturgy, and Bert Groen deprecates passages in the “modern Byzantine liturgy” that appear to countenance “anti-Judaism.”