When the followers or practitioners of a particular religion express beliefs and ideas or engage in actions that are different than the orthodox beliefs, ideas, and actions, they commit a religious crime known as heresy.
Let us start by looking at the etymology of heresy to help understand its meaning. 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.” Early Christian writers often used hairesis to describe an unorthodox doctrine or 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.
Christianity began as a Jewish sect and from a Jewish perspective, the early Christians can be viewed as Jewish heretics. Some Christians, on the other hand, view Jews as heretics. In his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Sam Harris writes:
“From the perspective of Christian teaching, Jews are even worse than run-of-the-mill heretics; they are heretics who explicitly repudiate the divinity of Jesus Christ.”
One of the earliest Christian heretics was the monk Montanus who announced about 156 CE that he was a prophet, the helper that Christ had promised to send. His followers, known as Montanists, emphasized a personal connection to God, rather than relying on an official priest to make contact with God. This contact often involved speaking in tongues. In his book The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, Nicholas Wade reports:
“Montanus was declared a heretic around A.D. 170 and his sect was suppressed by the church. His doctrines were not heretical but too much enthusiasm—the original Greek word enthousiasmos means to be possessed by a god—was regarded with suspicion by church authorities.”
During the Crusades, it was not uncommon for the Christian soldiers to begin by killing European Jews. In 1096, for example, German Crusaders killed 4-8,000 Jews in Speyer, Worms, and Mainz. In her book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, Karen Armstrong writes:
“The Crusades made anti-Semitic violence a chronic disease in Europe: every time a Crusade was summoned, Christians would first attack Jews at home. This persecution was certainly inspired by religious conviction, but social, political, and economic elements were involved.”
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. Priscillian, a wealthy Roman nobleman living in what is now Spain, promoted a strict form of Christian asceticism. His practice of meeting with his followers in country villas instead of attending church was denounced at the Council of Zaragoza. In addition to heresy, he was also convicted of witchcraft and sorcery.
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 formally 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.”
The inquisitors were from the Dominican and Franciscan orders. In his book The Handy Religion Answer Book, John Renard writes:
“Those accused of heresy had a month to recant before undergoing a formal trial with at least two witnesses. Unrepentant persons found guilty could be jailed and tortured. The most serious offenders could be turned over to civil authorities and executed, typically by being burned at the stake.”
With regard to the impact of the Inquisition in Spain, Arthur Pennington, in his 1901 book The Counter-Reformation in Europe, reports:
“The total number of heretics—chiefly Jews and Moors—condemned between 1481 and 1525 was 234,526, who were burnt alive, or banished from the country, or doomed to perpetual imprisonment.”
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.”
With regard to heresy in Islam, John Renard reports:
“A mulhid is someone who deliberately strays from the broadly accepted tenets of the faith, introducing innovations to the extent that one can no longer readily recognize basic Islamic teachings in the new formulation.”
Religion 101/201
Religion 101/201 is a series of topics on religion in which the concept of religion is not restricted to the Abrahamic religions but views religion as a human universal, found in all cultures. Religion 201 is an expansion of an earlier essay. More from this series:
Religion 201: Apostasy
Religion 201: Deism
Religion 201: Blasphemy
Religion 101: The Evolution of Morality
Religion 101: Religion and Ancient Civilizations
Religion 101: Shamanistic Ceremonies
Religion 101: Zoroaster's Vision
Religion 101: Revealed Religions
Religion 101: Fundamentalism
