Derived from the Greek word for choice, heresy came to be defined by the medieval Church as ‘an opinion chosen by human perception, founded on the scriptures, contrary to the teaching of the Church, publicly avowed and obstinately defended’. Since disputes as to what was unorthodox were a prime means of stimulating the Church to clarify its teaching, efforts were made to distinguish heretics from proponents of views later declared to be heretical, a distinction that tended to shield academic theologians from opprobrium. But once a teaching had been accepted as part of the Church's tradition, those who continued to oppose it could legitimately be required to abandon their opinion. Detection and persecution of heresy was, therefore, common in periods of intellectual ferment. And since in practice schism or refusal to accept ecclesiastical discipline was also often punished as heretical, the offence was found at most times. But the Church in the early Medieval West was in general too preoccupied with diocesan organization and missionary work to notice deviant opinions.
The early 11th-c. intellectual awakening in western Europe was accompanied by sporadic outbreaks of heresy in French towns, which sent ecclesiastics scurrying back to patristic sources both to identify and to deal with the new problem. By the end of the century popular heresy threatened to become endemic in Flanders, the Rhineland, and parts of northern France, where it was often associated with weavers. To some extent heterodoxy grew from a sceptical reaction against the Church's sharper definition of the sacraments, particularly the mass, but also baptism and marriage. At the same time it developed rapidly under the impact of the general call for ecclesiastical reform and for the suppression of simony and clerical marriage, which encouraged charismatic leaders to lambast the clergy and attracted crowds to their cause.
The tough response of northern bishops and counts to the tumultuous mobs collected by anticlerical preachers such as Tanchelm of Antwerp or Henry of Lausanne led their sympathizers to drift southwards to areas of weaker political control in the first half of the 12th c. Their numbers were swelled by critics of the now wealthy and aristocratic Church, who called for its rejection in favour of sects practising apostolic poverty, among which the Waldensians or Vaudois were outstanding. Admiration for apostolic poverty intensified under the impact of dualist ideas imported from the Eastern empire around 1140, after which Catharism became a major force in southern France and Lombardy. The swelling tide of anticlericalism merging into heresy caused lay rulers to introduce the death penalty for adherents of sects, and forced ecclesiastics to concentrate on their extirpation. In 1208 Innocent III proclaimed the Albigensian Crusade; in 1231 Pope Gregory IX instituted the Inquisition, which, though it aimed to induce penitence, was prepared to invoke state aid and capital punishment when necessary.
Unsurprisingly, repression, while not unsuccessful, could induce obstinacy, especially when dissidents like the Fraticelli were fortified by prophecies of the imminent destruction of the Roman Church. And the papal authority that authorized repression was automatically called into question—both Boniface VIII and John XXII were accused of heresy. Furthermore, the widespread exploitation of repressive processes for political ends (e.g. in the crushing of the French Templars) encouraged cynicism, which the Great Schism did nothing to still. The Conciliar Movement's attempt to define the means whereby the Church's traditions could be authoritatively stated came to grief on the rock of national interests. Meanwhile, as literacy and private devotion grew, Lollardy in England, Hussitism in Bohemia, and the Brethren of the Free Spirit in the Low Countries testified to the importance of vernacular writings, local conditions, and sometimes incipient nationalism in framing doctrinal views. Uniformity began to seem Utopian.
The Reformation altered the scale of the problem without changing its nature—each religious community now had its own dogmas to defend by repression. In most of Europe the 16th and 17th c. saw the continued involvement of state power in the maintenance of doctrinal purity. The toleration briefly extended to the French Huguenots by Henri IV in 1598 was withdrawn by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Only gradually did state power recede, leaving the individual Churches to deal with their own dissidents as they thought best. Thereafter excommunication became, and remains, the standard punishment for heresy.
[Jean Dunbabin]
Bibliography
- C. Thouzellier, Catharisme et valdéisme en Languedoc (2nd edn., 1969)
- R. I. Moore, The Origins of European Dissent (1977)
- B. Hamilton, The Medieval Inquisition (1981)
