The English word “heresy” has an interesting history. The ancient Greek verb “hairein” meant “to take” and from this verb came the adjective “hairetos” meaning “able to choose” and the noun “hairesis” meaning “the act of choosing.” Over time the noun “hairesis” also acquired the meanings: “a choice;” “a course of action;” “a school of thought;” and “a philosophical or religious sect.”
Our modern English “heresy” stems from the use of “hairesis” in Judaism which simply referred to a religious faction, party, or sect. In this sense, the word was neutral and non-pejorative. Often the Greek “hairesis” in the New Testament of the Christian Bible is translated as “sect.”
In his entry on heresy in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, Bill Cooke writes:
“Defined as the crime of holding minority opinions in a closed society, heresy is not the same as blasphemy, which traditionally involved reviling the name of God or outraging fundamental religious sensibilities. Heresy is the profession of unacceptable doctrines while accepting the fundamental tenets of the faith. This means that heresy is always relative to whatever orthodoxy is being defended.”
Cooke points out that heresy requires an absolute pillar of belief and is, therefore, more likely to be associated with monotheistic religions, particularly Christianity. Heresy is not found in religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism.
In their book In Freedom We Trust: An Atheist Guide to Religious Liberty, Edward Buckner and Michael Buckner define “heresy” as
“…holding and especially publicly professing ideas that are contrary to those proclaimed as true by a particular order or sect.”
The pejorative sense of “heresy” came about with St. Paul who used it to refer to a splinter group within the Christian community that threatened the unity of his Church. In other words, those who disagreed with him were heretics. Some of today’s philosophers have pointed out that St. Paul made the dogmatic acceptance of his interpretations more important to religious practice than living a socially moral life.
Today the Catechism of the Catholic Church declares that:
“Heresy is the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith.”
In 385 CE, Priscillian became the first Christian heretic to be executed. In 1199, Pope Innocent II declared heresy to be high treason against God.
The Catholic Church vigorously suppressed heresy during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and in 1231 Pope Gregory IX established the Inquisition, an ecclesiastical tribunal charged with combating heresy. Bill Cooke writes:
“The papal concern with the extirpation of heresy fueled the development of what became the Inquisition.”
In a number of religious traditions, including Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant) and Islam, heresy can be a capital offense. In her book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, Karen Armstrong reports:
“It has been estimated that as many as eight thousand men and women were judicially executed as heretics in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”
Karen Armstrong also writes:
“Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists could all find biblical texts to justify the execution of heretics.”
Sam Harris, in his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, writes:
“A literal reading of the Old Testament not only permits but requires heretics to be put to death.”
One example of heresy is seen in the case of the fifteenth century polymath, Lorenzo of Valla. His contemporaries considered him to be arrogant, controversial, critical, and sacrilegious. Among other things, he was a philologist who studied classical Latin. He used his knowledge of Latin to expose a number of fraudulent historical documents. Carl Sagan, in his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, writes:
“After he concluded that the Apostles’ Creed could not on grammatical grounds have actually been written by the Twelve Apostles, the Inquisition declared him a heretic, and only the intervention of his patron, Alfonso, King of Naples, prevented his immolation.”
In 1400, English King Henry IV agreed to the demands of the bishops for greater powers to arrest and punish heresy. The last heretic was burned at the stake in England in 1610 and the statute against heresy was abolished in 1677. Bill Cooke writes:
“The Reformation fatally undermined the ideological foundation upon which the idea of heresy rested. Once Protestantism was established as a credible alternative to the hierarchy of Rome, it was no longer possible to argue that all civil and moral order could be thought to rest on one mode of belief.”