. Term derived from the Greek word for “choice” (hairesis). In the early church, the term came to indicate leaders or groups who “chose” rather than “received” their teachings about Christ: heresy was associated with pride rather than the humility and submission of the true Christian. But what were the true teachings? In early Christianity, a charismatic messianic movement with a moral rather than theological message, variations in teaching abounded. The first Christian centuries are marked by constant, often vicious, mutual accusations between groups, as the emerging institutional church attempted to enforce discipline under the principles of “one shepherd one flock” (John 10:16) and “there is no salvation outside the church.” For the church, orthodoxy emerged victorious because of its direct links to the “apostolic tradition”; less partisan analyses suggest that orthodoxy was merely the most successful heresy (Bauer). Ultimately, the labels “orthodox” and “heretic” are political, applied by those with enough power to assert their will; rarely if ever would “heretics” call themselves that. Support of Christianity by the emperor Constantine (r. 307–37) transformed the situation: he demanded doctrinal and liturgical unity (hence the councils and creeds of the 4th century); and he introduced the use of state power to “discipline” dissidents. In the early 5th century, Augustine developed an ideology whereby errant Christians could be “compelled to enter the church” out of love for their souls, thus justifying official violence against heretics and schismatics.
Arianism alone of theological heresies survived the fall of Rome in the West, largely because the Goths and Burgundians had converted to it in earlier centuries. Thus, the Germanic kingdoms in southern Gaul, Spain, and Italy were ruled by an Arian and ethnic elite, while the native population remained either Catholic or pagan. After his conversion to Catholicism in the mid-490s, the Frankish king Clovis invoked Arian heresy as a pretext to invade the Visigothic south. But over the next five centuries, despite occasional cases of theological dispute (Adoptionism, Predestination), the church was more concerned with paganism than heresy. The only signs of genuinely Christian dissent come from popular millenarian or apostolic movements that rejected the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The leaders of these groups, like the “False Christ” of Bourges or the prophetess Thiota, arose during periods of need and crisis and used the utopian imagery of imminent salvation and social revolution to mobilize the most basic of urges for liberation from current suffering among the peasantry.
Starting in the early 11th century, documents report incidents of “heretical communities,” which, despite some purely elite (canons of Sainte-Croix at Orléans) or popular (peasant Leutard of Vertus) instances, most often seem to have united clergy and laity, aristocrat and commoner alike. The clerics who described these incidents, which range from Lombardy to Aquitaine to Orléans to Champagne and Arras, express alarm at a far-flung and deeply threatening movement. The execution of thirteen canons at Orléans in 1022 by order of King Robert the Pious marks the first time in the Latin church that someone had been executed specifically as a heretic. Despite the tenor of the sources, these earliest heresies are difficult to assess: they may be isolated idiosyncratic instances; they may be part of a larger movement with traveling “leaders.” Their prosecution may have been limited to the known case of Orléans; or there may have been widespread, often vigilante, attacks on heretics in which some were killed “merely on account of their pallor” (i.e., they fasted). They may have been influenced by Bogomil preachers from the East, thus expressing dualist tendencies. Many seem to be indigenous movements inspired by some combination of the apostolic life, a rejection of the ecclesiastical and social structures of the day, and a response to the failure of the Peace movement and to the passing of the year 1000. In any case, they all seem marked by strong ascetic tendencies (no meat, sex, or property), iconoclasm (no crucifixes, relic cults, or elaborate liturgies), and a rejection of the ecclesiastical means of salvation (baptism, eucharist).
After the mid-11th century, however, popular heresy all but disappeared for the next half-century. This is explained in part by the appeal of the Gregorian Reform movement within the church, which mobilized great popular support and inspired many potential “heretics” to join. Certainly, the case of the radical and violent Patarines in Italy and that of Ramirhardus, burned as a heretic by the clerics of Cambrai only to be proclaimed a martyr by Pope Gregory VII, illustrate the way in which behavior that would have been deemed heresy by early 11th-century clerics was encouraged by a church dangerously close to Donatism. Perhaps, as well, the more committed “heretical” communities went underground, or, in the case of the hermits, literally into the woods.
Whatever the case, this hiatus was temporary. Beginning in the early 12th century, “heresies” reappeared. These new expressions of religious zeal differ from earlier cases in that they are at once more aggressive and less radical in their rejections of the church. Inspired by a desire for the apostolic life, charismatic preachers, often “returning” hermits, invoked the values of the papally led Gregorian Reform movement—purification of the church and the life of its clergy. But now that the papacy had shifted from its radical reform program into an ongoing struggle with lay rulers over matters like investiture, these same ascetics, their criticism intensified by a sense of betrayal, found themselves outside the bounds of propriety. In some cases, apostolic preaching led to the formation of new religious orders; in others, the matter of heresy lay closer to hand (e.g., Robert d’Arbrissel); and in some, the criticism of lax clergy moved toward a rejection of the church as an institution (Henry of Lausanne, Peter de Bruys). Generally, the more “orthodox” movements tended to withdraw from society and live in cloistered apostolic communities; the more “heretical” tended to proclaim their criticisms of the church to large, agitated crowds.
The most dangerous and widespread of “heresies” in medieval France was that of the Cathars. Unlike earlier cases, the Cathars developed an independent ecclesiastical structure with bishops, cult, sacraments, and ranks of faithful—the latter divided into auditors, believers, and elect or cathari (“pure ones”). The first sign of this alternative church appeared in the Rhineland (1143) and rapidly spread throughout western Europe. Celibate, the elect refused any products of copulation, such as meat and milk. Influenced by Bogomil missionaries from Bulgaria, Cathar doctrine was at once apostolic and dualist, viewing the material world (and hence the God of the Old Testament, who created it) as part of the realm of evil. Jesus had a brother, the fallen angel Satan, with whom he was locked in a deadly battle.
The new sect’s absolute rejection of the Catholic church, and its facility at gaining not only actual converts but also a broad base of sympathizers among the population, posed a particularly grave threat. In response to persecution in northern France and Germany, Cathars migrated to the more tolerant south of France (site of open debates between Catholic and Cathar preachers), where they had great success among commoners and lay nobility alike. By the end of the 12th century, they constituted a majority in some regions, and the efforts of the papacy and Cistercian abbots to win back the faithful through preaching failed. Even St. Dominic, whose career began with bringing a Cathar back to the church, and who adopted poverty specifically to debate more effectively with Cathars, failed to bring about lasting results. The papacy was prompted to take extreme actions, including the launching of the Inquisition with the papal bull Ad abolendam in 1184 and the calling of a crusade in 1208. It was in the aftermath of this war that the papal Inquisition sought to root out the remaining Cathars systematically. In 1244, some 200 were captured at Montségur and burned; but as late as the 15th century, they were still to be found in the Pyrénées (Montaillou) and the western Mediterranean.
Despite the clear-cut doctrinal aberrations of Catharism (some analysts consider it another religion entirely), the basis of most “popular” heresy, where illiterate commoners play a significant but not exclusive role, in medieval France was the split between the egalitarian tendencies of apostolic Christianity and the hierarchical structure of a wealthy and powerful church tied politically and socially to the dominant aristocracy. This traditional configuration, when undermined by the economic changes of the high Middle Ages—rapid urbanization, monetization, commercialization, rise of an urban proletariat, spread of vernacular literacy—made an anticlerical, communitarian Christianity highly appealing to lay folk from the lower classes. The “textual communities” based on evangelical passages provided structure in a changing world and put forth a critique of the powerful, whether nobles, merchants, or prelates.
In the case of “popular heresies,” then, the real issue was not doctrinal but social: a generic Donatism (i.e., lay hostility to clergy deemed insufficiently “pure”) could, when rebuffed by a clergy intent on maintaining both its religious monopoly and its secular interests, drive the laity to reject sacraments altogether. The Waldensians illustrate both the dangers of lay preaching and the use of vernacular Bibles: doctrinally orthodox, their conflicts with secular clergy eventually led the church to view them as “heretics,” while they came to view the church as the “Whore of Babylon.” The béguines and Beghards illustrate how even a lay, quietistic movement, willing to submit to clerical supervision, could eventually become entangled in ecclesiastical rivalries (friars vs. regular clergy) and the internal logic of its own mysticism. Both groups, like the Franciscans, eventually split into orthodox and heretical sects.
The Capuciati exemplify the intimate mix of politics and religion, of lay religiosity and social revolution. In 1182, responding to an infestation of brigands in the wake of the Plantagenêt-Capetian wars, a carpenter from Le Puy named Durand Dujardin had a vision of the Virgin telling him to form a brotherhood of peace. This confraternity of humble men who wore white hoods (capuciati), rapidly grew in number and spread throughout the central and southern provinces of France. Monastic chroniclers praised the movement and admired the piety of these common laymen; and both lay and ecclesiastic nobles supported them. Within a year, the sworn Peace militias of the Capuciati had defeated several armies of brigands, slaughtering thousands. But flushed with success, the Capuciati extended their definition of plunder to include prelates and nobles who exploited their serfs: they served notice that no lord should demand any exaction beyond his legal due and eventually invoked Adam and Eve as proof that all men should be free and equal. The church rapidly turned against them; chroniclers denounced their raging madness and heresy; and the lay nobles allied with the remaining brigands to wipe them out. They did not survive long enough to be condemned officially by the church as heretics, although the papal bull Ad abolendam (1184) seems to allude to them.
Along with these popular heresies, the rebirth of intellectual life, particularly at the University of Paris, produced its own strain of learned heresies. The earliest such case may be the teachings of Berengar of Tours, a product of the school at Chartres who used grammar and dialectic to question the nature of the eucharist in the mid-11th century. Peter Abélard’s aggressive dialectical approach to Bible and Creed provoked the wrath of Bernard of Clairvaux, who had Abélard’s teachings condemned and burned at the Council of Sens (1140). With the absorption of Aristotle in the 13th century, conflicts between reason and revelation, or philosophy and theology, intensified. Siger de Brabant argued for the doctrine of “double truth” (something can be true in theology but false in philosophy) and articulated a dangerous cosmology: the eternity of the world and the unity of intellect of all humanity denied key church teachings on the Last Judgment and the eternity of the individual soul, which will be rewarded or punished according to its deeds.
The 13th century witnessed the great battle between heresy and orthodoxy on all levels. The Inquisition emerged in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade, promulgated by the pope and manned by the new preaching orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans (1229–33). Rapidly spreading and developing their techniques (e.g., torture in 1252), inquisitors sought out and persecuted “heresy” in the most remote places, as at Montaillou. Even a (future) pillar of orthodoxy like Thomas Aquinas had his work condemned and burned in 1277. The aggressive approach of the Inquisition seems to have eliminated the more extreme forms of religious dissent, or at least driven them into hiding. Nevertheless, Waldensian strongholds, particularly in the Massif Central, survived for centuries, providing a welcome soil for the spread of Protestantism in the 16th century.
According to R.I.Moore, the inquisitorial approach derived from “new” bureaucratic elites intent on expanding their power. By rallying society against groups branded impure and dangerous, officials created a sense of beleaguered community that they alone could protect. So successful was this technique that where no real groups existed it was convenient to invent them, targeting marginal groups like Jews, lepers, homosexuals, and single women. The impression that the sources give—that the clergy tried unsuccessfully to restrain rabid mobs infuriated by religious dissidents—may be a mirage. On the contrary, it was the sympathy that apostolic heresies (and even Jews) elicited among the populace that drove the clergy to action against them.
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