Heresy

• 1. Introduction

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  Heresy is a word that has sent people to the stake, into exile, and before courts across centuries and continents. Its power lies not in what it describes but in who gets to use it. To call something heresy is to claim authority over truth itself. The original Greek word, haíresis, meant simply "choice" or "thing chosen." A young person examining philosophies to determine how to live would be engaged in a perfectly reasonable act. Yet that same word hardened, over centuries, into one of the most charged accusations in human history. Who defined heresy? Who enforced it? And what happened to the people caught on the wrong side of those definitions? Those are the questions this documentary will pursue.

• 2. A Word Transformed

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  Ancient Greek gave the word haíresis to the world with a meaning almost entirely benign. It described the process of choosing a school of thought, a philosophy, a way of living. The earliest Christian writers inherited the term and began to charge it with danger. Writing in the 2nd century, Irenaeus used it in his tract Contra Haereses, which translates as Against Heresies, to name and discredit opponents of the emerging Christian community. Irenaeus described his own community's doctrines as orthodox, drawing on the Greek words for "straight" and "correct", and labeled the teachings of the Gnostics heretical. He also leaned on the idea of apostolic succession to bolster his case. That move, attaching authority to lineage, would prove durable. The technical vocabulary of orthodoxy and heresy was taking shape, and Irenaeus was one of its primary architects. Writing around the same period, Tertullian, who lived approximately from 155 to 240 AD, connected the origins of heresy in Christianity to Jewish critique of the messianic claims of Jesus. Tertullian did not see Christianity as an independent religion but as a continuation of Judaism with its messianic dimension fulfilled. What these early writers shared was the conviction that correct teaching was not a matter of opinion but of faithfulness to a line of authority.

• 3. Law, Empire, and the Stake

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  Constantine the Great changed the stakes entirely. As the first Roman Emperor to be baptized, he ended persecution of Christians through what came to be known as the Edict of Milan, which he issued alongside Licinius. Under Roman law, the Emperor held the title Pontifex Maximus, the high priest of all recognized religions. Constantine summoned the first ecumenical council specifically to resolve the theological controversy sparked by Arius, then used imperial authority to enforce the resulting orthodoxy. The legal criminalisation of heresy followed in 380 AD, when the Edict of Thessalonica, issued by Theodosius I, made Christianity the official state church of the Roman Empire. Before that edict, the Church had no state machinery to pursue those it regarded as heretics. Afterward, church and state authority began to overlap. Within six years of that criminalisation, the first known Christian execution for heresy took place. The figure was Priscillian, condemned in 386 by Roman secular officials on a charge of sorcery, and put to death along with four or five followers. The outcome was controversial even at the time. Both Ambrose of Milan and Pope Siricius, who considered Priscillian a heretic, excommunicated his accusers, holding that capital punishment was at best inappropriate and usually unequivocally evil. Later imperial legislation moved further. The edict of Theodosius II, issued in 435, prescribed severe penalties for those who possessed or spread the writings of Nestorius. Those found with writings of Arius faced a sentence of death.

• 4. Crusades, Inquisitions, Galileo

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  Jesuit historian David Collins observed that in roughly the seven centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire, only a single known execution of heretics can be documented. That relative quiet did not last. The spread westward of the Paulicians, a sect with near-Manichaean characteristics, seeded the famous heresies of the 11th and 12th centuries. The Bogomils emerged first in what is now Bulgaria, occupying a kind of geographic and theological borderland between Eastern and Western Christianity. By the 11th century, more organised groups had appeared across the towns and cities of northern Italy, southern France, and Flanders: the Patarini, the Dulcinians, the Waldensians, and the Cathars. In France, the Cathars grew into a mass popular movement. The Catholic Church responded by launching the Cathar Crusade against the Languedoc region. Heresy also became the central justification for the Inquisition, formally called the Inquisitio Haereticae Pravitatis, which translates as Inquiry on Heretical Perversity. Galileo Galilei was among its most famous targets. He was found "vehemently suspect of heresy" for asserting that the Sun lies motionless at the centre of the universe and that the Earth moves. He was required to "abjure, curse and detest" those opinions, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Most historians of science today regard the Galileo case as an exception rather than a pattern in the broader relationship between science and Christianity.

• 5. Reformation and Protestant Enforcement

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  The Reformation did not end the practice of executing heretics; it multiplied the parties doing the executing. Michael Servetus was declared a heretic by both the Reformed Church and the Catholic Church for rejecting the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Protestant England under Henry VIII executed around sixty heretics, most of them Protestants, across the thirty-eight years of his reign. Under Mary I, after the heresy laws repealed in 1547 were reintroduced in 1554, approximately two hundred and ninety people were burned at the stake between 1555 and 1558. The last known person executed by sentence of the Catholic Church was Cayetano Ripoll, a Spanish schoolmaster put to death in 1826. In England, the final execution of a heretic came under James VI and I in 1612, though the technical charge on that occasion was blasphemy. Scotland, then an entirely independent kingdom, held its own last execution on such grounds in 1697, when Thomas Aikenhead was accused of denying the doctrine of the Trinity, among other things. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritan leaders who controlled both political and ecclesiastical life in the 1650s and 1660s perceived the Quaker sect as heretical. The Boston martyrs were executed in 1659, 1660, and 1661. The colony's leaders were described as pursuing a vision of what they called a "purer absolute theocracy." Martin Luther himself condemned Johannes Agricola's doctrine of antinomianism, the belief that Christians were free from the moral law of the Ten Commandments, as a heresy.

• 6. Islam, Judaism, Other Traditions

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  Medieval Muslim writers developed the Arabic term zindiq to describe heretics and those who antagonised Islam, a charge punishable by death. Ottoman Sultan Selim the Grim regarded the Shia Qizilbash as heretics. Sunni Muslims, particularly in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, have historically considered Shiites heretics. To the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, Sikhs were heretics. In 1989, Ruhollah Khomeini, supreme religious leader of Iran, issued a fatwa declaring the writing of Salman Rushdie heretical, and a bounty was offered for anyone who killed him. In Iran today, the Bahai Faith is treated as an Islamic heresy, and its followers face systematic persecution. Orthodox Judaism regards Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism as heretical movements and considers most of Conservative Judaism heretical as well, though the liberal wing of Modern Orthodoxy is more tolerant of the Conservative right wing given some theological overlap. In medieval China, Buddhist and Taoist monks called each other heretics and competed for favour at the royal court. Zoroastrianism, despite a historical reputation for tolerance toward other faiths, considered sects like Zurvanism and Mazdakism heretical and persecuted them violently. In one recorded practice, Mazdakians were buried with their feet pointing upward, described as human gardens. The 7th-century writer Saint John of Damascus named Islam itself as a Christological heresy, calling it the "heresy of the Ishmaelites", a position that remained current in Christian theological circles well into the 20th century.

• 7. Heresy Beyond Religion

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  Isaac Asimov treated heresy as a concept that extended well beyond religion, covering political, socioeconomic, and scientific domains. He drew a distinction between endoheretics, those who challenge a discipline from within it, and exoheretics, those who do so from outside. His conclusion was that scientific orthodoxy defends itself effectively against insiders, through control of education, grants, and publication, but is nearly powerless against outsiders. Immanuel Velikovsky, who lacked appropriate scientific credentials and published outside the scientific literature, is the example Asimov placed in the exoheretic category. Paleontologist Robert T. Bakker published his challenge to mainstream dinosaur orthodoxy under the deliberately provocative title The Dinosaur Heresies. Bakker wrote that the field had not tested dinosaur orthodoxy severely enough over the prior fifty years, and that most taxonomists viewed new terminology as dangerously destabilizing to the traditional scheme. His book showed dinosaurs in active poses, a direct challenge to the prevailing picture of sluggish animals. In contemporary political language, the term heresy appears in phrases like "Wall Street heresy" or "Democratic heresy", used with at least a degree of irony. These usages, as one analysis notes, always retain a subtext connecting orthodoxies in fields like geology or biology back to their religious origin. The charge of heresy, in all its contexts, marks the boundary between what a community treats as settled truth and what it regards as dangerous dissent.