Introduction

All orthodoxies need heresies, all political regimes need dissenters, not only to jail or burn them, but also to co-opt them. For as marginal figures, they hold the secret of creative transformations. If anomalies can be plowed back into the system—“composted,” as Mary Douglas puts it—the system becomes stronger; if you eat your enemy, you absorb his power. If, on the other hand, you insist on purity, you become like a body without orifices, which means you die very quickly. (Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses) ¹

The five papers collected in this collection shared a common stage for their performance at the University of British Columbia’s Twenty-Fourth Medieval Workshop, held at Green College in November of 1994, with the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It was perhaps peculiarly appropriate that the topic of “Heresies and Heretics” provided the occasion on which a long-standing gathering of medievalists opened its borders to absorb interlopers from the field of late antiquity. The papers, however, shared more than a common stage and common Vancouver hospitality. As our varied and idiosyncratic texts jostled with one another, multiple sites of dialogic overlap and intersection emerged, some perhaps predictable, others entirely unforeseen. All of the essays, for example, exhibit interest in the social and discursive processes of “demarcation” by which orthodoxies define, and thereby in some sense create, heresies—not only as the inevitable cartographic by-products of the impulse to draw boundaries or locate centers, but also (paradoxically, and in multiple ways) as necessary sources of “nourishment” for orthodoxies themselves. All of the essays likewise exhibit interest in the particularity of late Roman contributions to the long trajectory of western constructions of orthodoxy and heresy. If it is now generally acknowledged that the second-century gnostic controversy provided the context for the earliest crystallization of a Christian orthodoxy, these papers join other recent voices pressing the claim that the period from the mid-fourth to the mid-fifth centuries has left equally significant marks on the history of the articulation of a normative Christianity. Finally, these essays collectively attest to the importance of the notions of “body” and “text” for current interpretations of late ancient orthodoxy and heresy. Through these two densely interrelated concepts, a generation of “late modern” or even “postmodern” scholars is able to view itself as the heir (however unlikely, reluctant, or even rebellious) of Fathers likewise perched precariously at the end of an era. Bearing the multiple markings of such ancestry, we too have learned the arts of reading bodies and writing desire; we too are familiar with the lure of a textual corpus that seems to promise the transcendent purity of the closed, the autonomous, and the unchanging, as well as the fecund messiness of the transgressive, the enmeshed, and the ever-shifting.

The first of the papers grounds us most concretely in the realm of the bodily, as Susanna Elm explores a novel emergence in mid-fourth-century anti-Montanist polemics, namely the charges that the Phrygian heretics engage in ritual child-murder, killing their victims by piercing their flesh with bronze needles. Through a dense analysis of a variety of interrelated ancient Mediterranean practices, Elm demonstrates the complex cultural associations of “stigmata” that mark the human body as dominated or possessed by another. She notes in particular the multiple religious adaptations of such practices of bodily marking: in a context in which the claim to “serve” or be “possessed” by an all-powerful divinity represents a paradoxical elevation of social status, the slave’s brand or tattoo (whether literal or figurative) becomes a mark of special sanctity or priesthood. Calling for an examination of the relation between fourth-century textual practices that invoke negative images of the visibly marked (priestly?) body and contemporaneous struggles to define ecclesiastical leadership in the catholic community, Elm hints at the complex apologetic functions of the orthodox Fathers’ textual representation of the heretical body. Most explicitly, the heretical body was marked with the sign of the demonic: carnal, alien, perverse, the brand inscribed not true Christian priesthood but its opposite. Yet, at the...