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This chapter examines fifth‐century ecclesiastical historians as evidence for the Christianisation of Roman politicatl ideas. These historians used heresiology as an extension of classical ethnography. For them, heretics, like barbarians, were irrational and divided. These ideas changed the rules for inclusion and exclusion in the empire: now that being orthodox was equated to being Roman; ‘provincial peoples’ could claim civilised virtues, such as self‐control, that had formerly been the preserve ofan educated elite.

This chapter argues that late Roman heresiology was not simply a discourse controlled by the ‘orthodox’ at the expense of the ‘heretic’ — all Christians were inscribed within it whether they wanted to be or not. Nor was the late Roman discourse of heresiology a ‘rhetorical construct’; rather it produced its own field. In other words, it created the very objects that previously it had been thought merely to explain or describe. Heresiological categories and classifications were part of late Roman lived experience. What was to be defined as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ belief, was constructed through argument; moreover, the very processes of theological and legal definition threw up new matters to be defined and categorized. Individuals, however, are not passive subjects of a given structure (such as ‘law’ or ‘orthodoxy’, for example), but rather active participants — constituting and reconstituting the structure itself by their constant negotiation of its rules and expectations.

This chapter examines German philosopher and political theorist Carl Schmitt's view on the Inquisition and his contribution to the emergence of modern totalitarianism. It provides background information on Schmitt's early career and his thoughts on early modern western esotericism and analyzes some of this most notable works. It suggests that his works offer valuable insights into the nature of modernity, into geopolitics and into politics and throw considerable light on the intellectual origins of modern ideocracies in early and medieval historicist, anti-heresiological Christianity.

Chapter 2 reassesses Augustine’s engagement in the Origenist controversy, to provide a new critical backdrop to his role in the Pelagian crisis. Comparing divergent, contemporary accounts of Pelagianism, it identifies the first synthetic condemnation of that heresy in Augustine’s De Natura et Gratia of 415. Augustine’s construction of Pelagianism is then read as a response to accusations of his own latent Origenism. Ultimately traceable to Jerome, these emerge first through his emissary, Rufinus of Syria, the inspiration for Caelestius’ denial of Original Sin (resulting in De Peccatorum Meritis et Remissione); and in Jerome’s implicit attack on Augustine’s moral theology in his Epistle 133 (resulting in De Natura et Gratia). Jerome’s vendetta is explained by situating Augustine within Rufinus of Aquileia’s pro-Origenist circle in the 390s, through which he had knowledge of Origen’s works; and by reading Augustine’s correspondence with Jerome as an attack on his alliance with Epiphanius against Origen.

This chapter argues that a sophisticated culture of Christian disputation continued in Vandal Africa. It explores an understudied cache of heresiological literature, written in all the genres that underpinned late-antique ecclesiastical controversies (letters, sermons, tractates, florilegia, question-and-answer texts, and dialogues). Their authors used familiar tropes to present their opponents as heretics and themselves as orthodox. Particularly significant are a (rather surreal) series of imaginary debate texts that presented Nicene church fathers like Athanasius and Augustine triumphing over historical Arian heretics like Arius and Pascentius. These virtual dialogues both mirrored and modeled various forms of real debate between Nicene and Homoian authority figures. The striking resemblance between these texts and those written by earlier Christian controversialists was not merely a continuity of literary form. These works suggest that the practical implications of controversy for Christian clerics remained the same.

This chapter examines the fundamental Nicene response to their opponents’ claim to Christian orthodoxy: they made them into Arians. It shows the intellectual effort this (deceptively difficult) move required. Nicene controversialists drew on the history and heresiology of both the Arian Controversy and the Donatist Schism to portray contemporary Homoians as heretics. To establish the link between their opponents and the Arians of the past, Nicene authors imaginatively rewrote fourth-century ecclesiastical history, reworking what they saw as an authoritative past to match the needs of the present. In so doing, they made the contemporary controversy into a reenactment of earlier conflicts—one from which they, as the heirs of Athanasius and Augustine, would inevitably emerge triumphant. Of course, Homoian clerics were exploiting the same histories of the church to support their own ecclesiological claims. For both sides, this controversy was not new, but rather an extension of fourth-century Trinitarian debates.

The genre of heresiology—catalogues of heretics and their supposed beliefs—flourished in late antiquity, especially from the late fourth century. This chapter forms part of a reappraisal of this underappreciated literary phenomenon by considering the rhetorical aspects of a number of heresiologies within the context of classical technical literature. Drawing on parallels from a range of ancient texts, especially medical and encyclopaedic writings, this chapter focuses on the prefaces of heresiologies by Epiphanius of Salamis, Filastrius of Brescia and Augustine of Hippo to illuminate how they employed recognized techniques for the construction of textual authority. Through such close analysis, it is possible to trace the development of heresiology as technē, with each author drawing on both established classical tropes and also the writings of their predecessors in the genre to create their own distinctive rhetoric that advertised the reliable orthodoxy and intellectual supremacy of both writer and text.

This chapter analyzes the forms and functions of ancient ethnography to provide the analytical foundation for the discussion of Christian heresiology as a mode of ethnographic writing. Through analysis of the works of Herodotus, Pliny, Josephus, Tacitus, Diodorus Siculus, and others, the chapter identifies the methodological, theoretical, and descriptive contours of classical ethnography. It proposes the idea of an ethnographic disposition, which captures the process and effects of writing people and defining cultural systems. The chapter also shows the bipartite scope of ethnographic writing about the ancient world: microscopic ethnography, which consists of descriptions of the customs and habits of peoples; and macroscopic ethnography, which uses grand paradigms such as genealogy, typology, and astrology to explain habits, customs, phenotypes, and behaviors.

This chapter studies heresiological theorizations of social discourse and exchange—the lifeblood of ethnography. Tertullian's Rule against the Heretics insists on the theological futility of investigating heresy. He cautions against inquiry born of curiosity—in which heresy serves as the epitome of curiosity—because it leads the mind astray. Heresiology thus becomes a meditation on the nature and limitations of Christian knowledge. The heresiologists' fear of delving too deeply into the abyss of heresy ran up against their self-described effort to serve the greater Christian world as its polemical ethnographers. To counteract the corruption of the heretics, the heresiologists deployed a rhetoric of antiethnographic ethnography. They expressed their disdain for engaging with and collecting knowledge about the heretics just as they heralded their triumph over these blasphemous peoples.

This chapter turns to Augustine's De haeresibus to examine how he confronts not only the textual possibilities and limitations of epistemological representation, but also the theoretical capacity to comprehend his heretical environs. Through intertextual reading, research, and personal experience, Augustine edited the work of his predecessors and contemporaries into a limited heresiological handbook. By explicitly adding and subtracting heretics, Augustine presented his text as a polemical palimpsest of ethnographic knowledge. But although Augustine insisted on his vast knowledge of the heretics, he readily admitted to falling short. What is particularly revealing about Augustine and his text is the precise manner in which he framed his limitations, not simply as a collector of abstract knowledge but as a living, practicing heresiologist. For Augustine, the limitations of heresiology were insurmountable because they were fundamentally ethnographic.

This concluding chapter explains that heresiology was an endeavor created not simply through competition—as much between heretics and heresiologists as among the heresiologists themselves—but through contradiction and limitation. Since the foundation on which heresiology rested was never secure, it unwittingly contained and created the seeds of its own obsolescence and destruction. The history of heresy, as understood by the heresiologists, was perpetuated by heresiological inquiry: heresy was an inescapable aspect of a now-theologically defined world. To study heresy was, at best, to destroy orthodoxy and, at worst, to reveal heresy and orthodoxy to be one and the same. The chapter reiterates that to describe heresiology is to identify a form of theological ethnography marked by competing rhetoric. Reading heresiology as ethnography emphasizes the epistemological fractures and self-reflection within the genre, and among those who viewed themselves as its practitioners.

Byzantine reactions to Latin Christianity in the tenth century were shaped by tenth-century imperial advances on the eastern frontier, and especially by the incorporation of Armenians into the empire. Some Byzantines accused the Armenians of Judaizing because of their use of unleavened bread (azymes) in the Eucharist. This imagined link between Jews and heresy allowed centuries of heresiology (the description and cataloguing of heresy) to be exploited, as well, placing Armenians within quasi-genealogical tables of heretics. Threatened by imperial tolerance of Armenian Christians, especially under Nikephoros II Phokas (963-969) and Basil II (976-1025), Byzantine churchmen redoubled their efforts to demonize Armenians. This anti-Armenian heresiological reasoning is crucial for understanding the centrality of anti-azyme arguments in eleventh-century attacks on the Latin church. More generally, the body of heresiology that equates an ethnic group with heresy exemplifies a Byzantine conflation of religious and ethnic identity and is crucial to understanding Byzantine self-definition.

Chapter 1 takes up the question of the origins of the early Christian heresy catalogue. If the earliest followers of Jesus did not make use of this polemical genre, where then did it come from? Scholars often point to the Greek doxographic or “tenet writing” tradition as the literary forerunner of the Christian heresy catalogue. Yet although heresy catalogues resemble lists of philosophers and philosophical views in form, they function quite differently. Therefore, this chapter directs attention away from doxographies, to an earlier group of Christian writings composed in the name of the apostle Paul. The anonymous authors who produced texts like the Pastoral Epistles, the Epistle to the Laodiceans, and the Apocryphal Correspondence between Paul and the Corinthians initiated important shifts in the ways that Christians conceived of their opponents and thus paved the way for the introduction of the heresy catalogue a generation later.

This chapter revisits a topic that has received much attention in scholarship: Justin’s role in the emergence of the heresiological tradition. Since Justin is often thought to have authored the earliest known heresy catalogue, the Syntagma against All the Heresies, he is credited with the “invention” of heresiology. This chapter, however, reevaluates Justin’s status as the founder of heresiology by arguing that he likely did not compose the Syntagma against All the Heresies. When he mentions the treatise in 1Apology 26, he uses the language of advertisement, not of authorship. Despite the likelihood that Justin did not compose this earliest known heresy catalogue, he nonetheless plays an important role in the early heresiological tradition by promoting the treatise and making it available to a wide audience. Justin may not be the progenitor of the Christian heresiological tradition, but he certainly lent stability to it by popularizing one particular catalogue over and above others.

The martyrdom accounts of Peter and Paul display variety on many details, but all include descriptions of their primary antagonists. This chapter explores the two primary characters described in this way in various texts: the Emperor Nero and Simon the sorcerer (Simon Magus). Both are presented as hostile not just toward the apostles but toward their master, Jesus Christ, for in nearly every martyrdom account one or the other is presented as an antichrist figure. The analysis shows that both Nero and Simon are presented as making divine claims that are ontological and functional, and both suffer their ultimate fates as acts of divine judgment. Thus, the earthly conflicts with Peter and Paul are mere reflections of the true battle between Christ and antichrists.

While Lutheran authors transformed Jan Hus from a forerunner to prophet of their movement, Catholic polemicists forwarded their own interpretations of the Bohemian reformation. At the forefront of Counter-Reformation efforts to do so was Johannes Cochlaeus, the prolific and acerbic court chaplain of Duke George of Saxony. Throughout the 1520s and 1530s, Cochlaeus presented a historical view that was both opposed to the Lutherans’ and subversive vis-à-vis Catholic heresiology. In short, Cochlaeus argued that Jan Hus had been a misguided, if basically orthodox, Catholic, while Luther represented a truly heretical threat to the Catholic Church. This chapter therefore traces Cochlaeus’s evolution towards this position, analyzing his publication of pamphlets, learned treatises, new editions of older texts, and a Fastnachtspiel-style sex comedy about Luther and his followers in order to understand how he deployed multiple media to promulgate his arguments about the Lutherans’ discontinuity with their claimed forebears.