Asad Medieval Heresy

Medieval Heresy: An Anthropological ViewAuthor(s): Talal AsadSource: Social History, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Oct., 1986), pp. 345-362Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4285543Accessed: 09/11/2010 11:04

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ARGUMENT

Talal Asad

Medieval heresy: an anthropological

view

INTRODUCTION

As an anthropologist exploring connections between religion and power from a comparative perspective (Asad, I980, I983a, i983b), I find 'heresy' to be a subject of great theoretical interest. For heresy (together with the inquisition, the sacrament of penance and the monastic programme) is uniquely central to Christian history. This is not to say, of course, that intolerance of dissent is unique to Christian society, but that its forms of intolerance are. Because heresy is a category that brings moral, intellectual and political disciplines together in a distinctive way, its analysis should promote a clearer understanding of the ideological differences between Christian and Muslim societies. Consider, for example, the fact that there is nothing in Christian writing equivalent to the famous Islamic legal dictum, ikhtilaf al-umma rahma ('Disagreement within the Muslim community is a sign of God's mercy') (see Schacht, I964:67). Why is this so? The answer cannot be that only Christian societies are concerned to impose religious conformity. Rather, I would suggest that what we have here is one clue to the different structures of discipline which obtain in the two contexts.

Any anthropologist who wishes to understand medieval heresy must naturally turn to the work of professional historians. Such a move is not without its risks, as we have frequently been reminded, since it is always possible for the anthropologist to miss the significance of evidence produced by historians. However, I would urge that the risk comes not from the mutual foreignness of two academic disciplines, but from something more pedestrian: the comparative ignorance of the non-specialist. Perhaps if historians and anthropologists talk to each other, each may stimulate the other to become somewhat less of a non- specialist. So in what follows I do not intend to appropriate historical evidence for a non-historical purpose, but to reorganize some of that evidence with reference to anthropological questions embedded in existing historical narratives. I propose to do this through an examination of the explanations that historians themselves have offered of the nature and cause of medieval heresy.

In this paper I want to concentrate on one such explanation, Janet Nelson's 'Society, theodicy and the origins of heresy: towards a reassessment of the medieval evidence' (1972), which is certainly the most sophisticated sociological

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statement on medieval heresy I have come across. Her plea for a theoretically

informed understanding of medieval heresy should be welcomed by historians, not

only by those who are willing to reassess the evidence but also by those who are

prepared to reconsider the forms of explanation currently employed. I shall

therefore try to do two things: (i) to evaluate Nelson's arguments, and (2) to

propose the value of employing in a systematic way the anthropological concept

of 'danger' for the understanding of medieval heresy. I refer to the type of

analysis that was inaugurated by Franz Steiner (1956), and made widely known

by Mary Douglas in her book Purity and Danger (I966). According to this conception, dangers presuppose rules for proper social and cognitive activity, and procedures for making dangerous conditions safe, or at any rate less dangerous. It is this latter approach that enables one to formulate questions about the

structures and purposes of institutionalized discipline, and the ideologically defined dangers which the discipline locates and deals with. For, as Steiner

pointed out, 'danger' is a form of inimical power, which is socially defined and

dealt with by disciplined techniques. Before examining Nelson's arguments in detail, it may be useful to have an

overall idea of the explanation she provides. In the early middle ages - so her account goes - there existed a stable society

served by a coherent ideology (religious beliefs and rituals); then far-reaching

changes in political-economic structures led to a discordance between the older

religious ideology and the newer, more unstable society. In the new society,

marginal men (of whom there were increasing numbers) faced 'a crisis of

theodicy'. To begin with, the social response was to reaffirm or elaborate older

beliefs and customs (more relics, new monastic orders, greater pilgrimages, some

ecclesiastical reforms, etc.); but this merely resulted in increasing institutional

rigidity, and hence in 'a build up of pressure', which eventually broke through

in the form of heretical movements. These may be classified into two main kinds:

the one involving a self-conscious search for communion with the divine through

evangelism and principled poverty (the Waldensians, for example); the other

involving an affirmation of purity within the sect, and a corresponding attribution

of total corruption to the dominant, official Church (as among the Cathars). Heresies in the middle ages are thus to be seen as social resolutions of 'the problem

of theodicy' in a less stable, less communal and more competitive Christian

society, and the Church's response as the attempt by a dominant religio-political authority to suppress dissent.

It should be evident from this summary that Nelson's account has points of

contact with several historical studies, ranging from Norman Cohn (I957) to

R. I. Moore (I977). But she has a distinctive overall position -described by Lambert (1977: xiv) as 'an anthropological approach' - which is expounded with clarity and persuasiveness. I now want to look at her arguments carefully.

October 1r986 Medieval heresy 347

'THEODICY', EXPERIENCE AND LANGUAGE

As the title of her essay indicates, a key concept employed by Nelson to structure her explanation is that of theodicy, 'the problem that arises within a belief system when the individual's experience involves suffering which the system fails to accommodate' (66). This concept is translated directly into another which some modern psychologists have called cognitive dissonance:

It is important to stress the cognitive basis of the theodicy problem: that is to say, it arises, not directly or automatically from experience, but from dissonance between that experience and received knowledge or belief. So, to the extent that a given cosmology is adapted to certain types of social experience, it is likely to be felt to be inapposite or outmoded in situations of social change. (66)

Thus Nelson makes it quite clear that it is the experience of disorientation rather than that of deprivation that creates a crisis of theodicy:

So there is no necessary connection between theodicy and material suffering. Disorientation arising from a failure of actual experience to tally with learned perception and classification, can obviously arise as readily for the nouveau riche as for the dispossessed. Mobility in any dimension - horizontally in space as well as vertically in a social hierarchy -will tend to raise new problems of adaptation for the 'displaced person'. Therefore any significant increase in such mobility will increase the likelihood of a crisis of theodicy within the framework of a given religious organization, belief and practice. (66)

In these initial statements there seems to be a questionable equation between two quite distinct ideas, 'theodicy' and ' cognitive' dissonance'. The first of these relates surely to a moral-theological problem: how can God, who is at once all-merciful, all-good and all-powerful, permit evil and suffering among his creatures? The problem here is not strictly one of reconciling 'experience' with 'belief', as in the psychologist's notion of cognitive dissonance, but one of reconciling several autonomous moral concepts as attributes of 'God's creation'. It is a matter of finding a theologically viable way of talking about the 'experience of evil' in a Christian world. From St Augustine onwards a range of theories was propounded to exonerate God from any responsibility for the moral and natural suffering that occurs in his world. It is clear that at this level the problem of theodicy does not presuppose an individual experience of suffering, but only an intellectual identification of suffering as evil. It is therefore rooted in a theological tradition, and the language which that tradition makes available, not in any particular kind of individual consciousness. On the other hand, it is not at all evident that Christians who experience pain in a changing world are therefore pushed into a crisis of theodicy. They may construe such suffering as a divine test to be endured, much as the early Christian martyrs did.

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The anthropologist Obeyesekere, whom Nelson cites, is underlining an important point when he writes that:

when a religion fails logically to explain human suffering or fortune in terms of its system of beliefs, we can say that a theodicy exists. A resolution of a theodicy would then be a matter of logic rather than of psychology, i.e. in order to achieve a resolution the idea or ideas that fail to explain suffering or that pose logically untenable contradictions would have to be excised from the system of religious beliefs, or new ideas would have to be invented to counter the contradiction. (I968: I I-I2; emphasis in original)

I have called Obeyesekere's point important - although I would prefer not to formulate it in terms of an abstract notion of 'logic' - because it tries to distinguish, as Nelson's account does not quite do, between undergoing a painful experience and producing a theory about suffering. For 'suffering' is a moral concept, not an unmediated sensation of pain. The sense in which physical or mental pain endured by penitents, ascetics and martyrs constitutes 'suffering' is obviously quite different from the sense in which suffering belongs to the problem of theodicy. For the Christian theologian, theodicy articulates an abstract intellectual problem requiring an intellectual solution. For the individual Christian sufferer, as opposed to the theologian, theodicy emerges only when the experience of pain is no longer organized by authoritative disciplines, when it becomes literally insufferable. The problem for him/her is not that 'experience' (or rather, the language in which individual consciousness is expressed) contradicts 'belief' (i.e. the official statements of Catholic faith), because the mere existence of contradictions does not necessarily occasion anguish in every mind. What matters is that s/he wants to find a way of making an insufferable experience into one that is not. This may be done by restructuring the experience in such a way that s/he can be reconciled to the pain as a faithful Christian, making it thereby a means for defending oneself against 'evil'.

But it may also be done by trying to alter those conditions of life which appear to constitute insufferable pain, pain which can therefore be defined as a consequence and expression of 'evil'. If we assume for the moment that these are both possible moral resolutions of the 'crisis of theodicy', then we can suggest that theodicy relates not so much to an unchanging 'logical' problem (the need to eliminate contradiction between beliefs), or to a periodic 'social-psychological' problem (the need to replace an outmoded cosmology by one that is better adapted to contemporary experience), but to moral problems which are historically specific (within the options of reorganizing suffering or seeking to eliminate it). These moral problems are themselves always rooted in determinate political-economic conditions, in so far as it is the latter that define the realm in which moral choices and behaviours take place. But from this it does not follow that 'theodicy' in any of its senses is the direct product of a society dislocated by change. What does follow is that the attempt to reorganize aspects of social life, because the 'evil' they represent is intolerable (or dangerous) - as opposed to the theologian's verbal exercise in explaining 'evil' away - is in principle a constructive act. I shall take up this point again below.

October I986 Medieval heresy 349

FROM 'STABLE SOCIETY' TO 'SOCIAL CHANGE'

Having looked briefly at the concept of theodicy as employed by Nelson, I want to examine her account of the social transformation which is supposed to have generated the religious crisis eventuating in heresy. She writes:

Turning now to the problem of the origins of medieval heresy, I want to outline the way in which religious and social structures interlocked in the relatively stable society of the early middle ages, which, though subject to external attack and natural catastrophe, possessed a resilient and perduring internal structure. (68)

There then follows a generalized sketch of 'a western European kingdom of the ninth or tenth century', and in a footnote mention is made of the work of scholars to which her survey is most indebted: three by medieval historians (Bloch, I96I;

Duby, I968; Southern, 1970), and two by anthropologists (Wolf, 1966; Fried, I 967).

To what extent is this representation of early medieval society as 'relatively stable' influenced by somewhat outmoded anthropological narrative devices? I shall return to this question, but want to note here that the 'historical evidence' does not seem to be as unequivocal as Nelson's account might suggest. Take, for instance, this passage from White (I962: 78) at the conclusion of his chapter on agricultural changes in the early middle ages:

By the early ninth century all the major interlocking elements of this [agricultural] revolution had been developed: the heavy plough, the open fields, the modern harness, the triennial rotation - everything except the nailed horse-shoe, which appears a hundred years later. To be sure, the transition to the three-field system made such an assault on existing peasant properties that its diffusion beyond the Frankish heartland was slow; but Charlemagne's renaming of the months indicates how large the new agricultural cycle loomed in his thinking. We may assume safely that its increased productivity was a major stimulus to the north even in his day.

How are we to read such 'evidence' in the context of our present concern? More precisely, can we describe a society in which the basic mode of production (agricultural implements, cultivating activities, property forms) is undergoing major change, and in which consequently social relations between people are being altered, as a 'stable' society, a society with 'a resilient and perduring' structure? Nelson might claim that our knowledge of such change in the ninth or tenth century does not undermine her picture of a relatively stable society which subsequently undergoes the continuous and more rapid change which is indicated by her term 'social instability'. But the problem here is primarily conceptual, as anthropologists concerned with writing about 'traditional' societies have for some time been aware (e.g. Fortes, 1949; Leach, 1954; Gluckman, I 968). What is meant by saying that 'a society', or 'a social structure ', is stable? There is the question, on the one hand, of the duration of a set of social institutions and, on the other, of their overall integration. A network of institutions may endure for a considerable

13 ASH I I


period, but do so precariously. Or it may be transformed rapidly in an integrated and relatively predictable way. In such matters there is always the problem of having to assess how some social conditions depend on others - that is, to assess the social consequences of particular changes. Medieval historians will no doubt be aware of the old debate about 'the transition from feudalism to capitalism' in which such questions were discussed from within the tradition of Marxist historiography (Hilton (ed.), I976). Here I am simply concerned to remind the historian that the idea of 'a stable society' is fraught with theoretical problems which impinge directly on any attempt to explain the social origins of religious consciousness.

At this point some historians might insist that it is enough for Nelson's argument about the social causes of heresy to point to the clear and indisputable difference in the speed of social change as between the early and the later middle ages, and to the need to be precise about the chronology and location of changes (including outbreaks of heresy), and that the concepts can take care of themselves. Such a response would be very mistaken, because it is of great importance for arguments like Nelson's that we be clear about precisely which social arrangements are or are not to be represented as 'stable', in which sense and with what consequences.

Thus it is worth recalling that in broad political terms, people in the ninth and tenth centuries were subjected to considerable 'instability' over large parts of western Europe. This is, after all, the period of widespread Viking raids, sometimes leading to new settlements by the invaders (Bloch, 196I), which must have led to frequent disruption of established social life. And in the tenth century, particularly after the disintegration of the Carolingian empire, military campaigns conducted by ambitious warlords (such as the counts of Anjou - see Southern, 1953) must have added greatly to the general condition of disorder. Clearly, events which rupture the pattern of daily life in so brutal a manner are 'changes', directly affecting the consciousness of those subjected to them, even though they are not 'changes' in the sense that medieval historians refer to when they employ such terms as 'development', 'birth', 'take-off', etc. (cf. Fossier, I982: 67-84).

Nelson's account of early medieval Christianity and its role in maintaining 'stability' is remarkably reminiscent of older anthropological conceptions of primitive religion:

Early medieval religion fitted into this [stable] society, both ideologically and institutionally, by promoting and affirming the values of stability and tradition, by sanctioning the established structures of political and economic control especially in its support of kingship and development of theocratic doctrine, by enjoining on individuals the fulfilment of ascribed roles, by asserting the efficacy of ritual practice in coping with nature and super-nature. It is a religion of emphasis on shame rather than sin, atonement rather than

repentance, orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy .... The life hereafter is believed to be continuous with arrangements on earth: dead kings reign in heaven, where they, together with the clergy, continue to be answerable for


the shortcomings of their earthly flock. Suffering in this world is regarded as an effect of divine displeasure or revenge, punishing human interference with ordo rather than any moral offence .... The confident manipulation of recognized symbols by ritual specialists is believed to restore equilibrium between natural and super-natural worlds: the divinity is appeased or swayed by correctly performed sacrifice or the penance by proxy of monks. Humbler folk use christian or pagan magic for self-protection. (69-70)

Any anthropologist who is familiar with late Victorian ideas about 'magical' beliefs underlying the ritual practices of non-literate societies (e.g. Tylor, Robert- son Smith and Frazer), and with the early functionalist ideas about the socially integrative role of 'primitive religion' (e.g. Radcliffe-Brown), will probably recognize and may be made uncomfortable - as I was - by this summary account. Is this attribution of motives and functions a case of the historian drawing uncritically on explanations provided by discredited anthropological theories? Or are these theories being confirmed here by self-evident 'facts' from the history of early medieval Europe? These questions have not, so far as I am aware, been directly addressed. In any case, what we have here is clearly not a purely historical narrative, but one which is strongly anthropological. And its fascination, for some readers at least, will be heightened precisely because it conceals a tension between some of the dominant assumptions in two intersecting narrative traditions -

historiography and ethnography. Thus the old anthropological concept of 'magic', which most medieval his-

torians continue to deplov with confidence, has increasingly become highly problematical for many anthropologists (see, for example, Levi-Strauss, I960;

Horton and Finnegan (eds), i973; Geertz, 1975). A full history of this notion remains to be written, showing how specific beliefs and practices in the history of Christian Europe, being disparaged or proscribed by Authority, came to be conceptually separated from and opposed to such positive categories as 'true' religion and 'legitimate' science, and then to be attributed to 'pagan' or 'primitive' minds. (A useful contribution to such a history by a medievalist is Peters, 1978.) Nelson is certainly not alone among historians in ascribing to the more 'primitive' religion of the early middle ages a set of allegedly typical features: magic, ritualism, tradition, an absence of self-awareness, an incapacity for remorse, etc.

Nevertheless, there are many anthropologists even today who would find Nelson's account highly plausible, not because they possess any great knowledge of early medieval Christianity, but because they take it as axiomatic that all religion is fundamentally concerned to 'promote and affirm the values of stability and tradition'. For them, religion tends normally to sanction the 'established structures of political and economic control'. Normal religion (ideology) therefore has a good functional fit with society, either by ratifying the status of those who are privileged, or by sublimating the misery of the deprived (see, for example, Gellner, I982, whose earlier writing on Islam Nelson quotes approvingly). In this well-known functionalist statement about the normal integration between religion

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and social structure, we can already detect the outlines of Nelson's argument about the origins of heresy: it is only at the margins of social life, where the 'time' of one society merges into the 'time' of another, or where the formal 'places' of an established social hierarchy do not hold new types of individual, that religion might become subversive.

The difficulties with such a functionalist thesis do not derive directly from 'the facts', but from its assumption of society as an integrated totality, within which

cosmology and social structure support and reflect each other. I shall not repeat here the abstract criticisms levelled over the last two decades at this assumption by social theorists. Instead, I want to approach the problem from a direction that historians may find more useful.

It is well known that in the context of early medieval religion, whose pre- eminent form was monasticism, 'stability' (stabilitas) was indeed a central value. The three canonical vows taken by all monks and nuns were those of stability, obedience and chastity. Stability was therefore a central value for those dedicated to the religious life, a life which demanded, at least in an ideological sense, 'withdrawal from the world', a world in which change, indiscipline and spiritual dangers were endemic. There is no reason to suppose that in those 'Benedictine Centuries' (Knowles, 1940: 3) stability was confirmed as a value in the world outside the cloisters. If people in that world remained relatively stable compared to a later age, then this was because of political, economic or physical constraints and not because stability had for them a religious value. Monastic stability was

the precondition of a Christian discipline that was never intended for warriors or

peasants. This is partly what Southern (1 970: 29) means when he writes, somewhat picturesquely, that the 'monasteries were living symbols of immut-

ability in the midst of flux'. They were more than mere symbols, of course, for monastic property had a durability usually unparalleled in the secular world. I

refer to these well-known facts to stress the point that religious ideologies and

institutions are not to be conceived as 'reflecting' or 'affirming' society, as

though they stood outside it, but as forming a distinctive part of society. If

ecclesiastical discourses affirmed the value of stability for the religious life, it does

not follow that structures of 'political and economic control' were thereby invariably confirmed. Indeed, the strategic requirements of effective control do

not always include stability. On the contrary, the ability to move sections of the

population (whether as armies or as settlers on the land) has been a primary condition of power since ancient times.

The sharp juxtaposition of 'stability' and 'change' in Nelson's account is

essential to her sociological explanation of heresy:

What confronts the historian from c. iooo onwards is a series of far-reaching changes in economic and political organization. The underlying dynamic seems to have been demographic growth, probably attributable to techno-

logical improvements, in turn setting up new pressures at every social level, stimulating both intra-rural migration and even more significant, rural-urban

migration and the growth of towns .... The keynote - in limited but crucial


areas of this society - is competition: an increasing number of individuals, possibly deprived of former kin or communal supports, face the need to prove themselves to achieve status rather than to play out ascribed roles.

But the social impact of this increased mobility and competition depends upon a further key variable in the social system: namely the extent to which an over-arching political authority survives to co-ordinate and control some of the effects of these developments....

But, all the more where strong political authority is absent, certain individuals are exposed to new types of social experience for which their religion offers no meaningful patterning. What relevance has a religion of stability to a life of mobility, competition and uncertainty? Will a God who reinforces social order and conformity, integrating political with religious structures, have regard for the 'marginal man' in the chinks of the social structures or in physical or social transition? Here is the genesis of a new problem of theodicy: and just as the occurrence of social change is highly differential, so are religious crisis and its resolution. (69-72)

This is clearly a nuanced explanation, incorporating rather than glossing over important empirical variation, as befits a scrupulous historian in command of her facts. Nelson's suggestion that an absence of strong political authority has something to do with outbreaks of heresy is interesting, but not, I would argue, for the reasons she gives. Thus her remark that over-arching political authority served to control the social conditions determining individual experience seems to me to attribute a far more pervasive and effective control to medieval government than is plausible. Lay medieval governments did not fashion 'experience', they sought to rule an increasingly heterogeneous, affluent and mobile population, with the primary aim of maintaining themselves in power. Ecclesiastical government was different, as we know, in that its ultimate concern was to define, teach and defend Universal Truth. Yet, in the middle ages, the Church lacked the institutional means to do this thoroughly. Recent scholarship on the Counter- Reformation indicates just how feeble in this respect the medieval Church was by arguing that the 'Christianization' of the rural population in western Europe was not effectively undertaken until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Delumeau, 1977: 154-202).

The reason for the negative correlation between over-arching political authority and heresy may thus be very different from the one given by Nelson. Since powerful princes had greater control over their local churches, and were able to use them more thoroughly for reasons of state than little princes, seigniors and burghers could ever do, their vigorous defence of the Church in their own realms was a prudent defence of their own resources and authority, irrespective of what their religious convictions might have been (Mundy, I973: 549).

The presence of heretical movements in the Low Countries, the Rhineland, south-western France, and northern and central Italy can therefore be explained without recourse to ideas of social disorientation. These were regions divided into petty principalities, city republics and small seigniories. In them the Church was


especially weak and vulnerable. Here, any determined evangelical movement seeking to create the conditions for a 'truly' Christian life for lay men and women would find little resistance. Thus urban evangelical movements, both those that were regularized and those that were condemned, constituted a new space for the operation of ecclesiastical power. They indicate, I would argue, not the disintegration of a 'stable' society or the 'crisis' of religious authority, but the simultaneous creation of new social forms and the extension of ecclesiastical authority.

In an important paper, Bynum (1980: 2) has recently emphasized the former process:

The concentration of scholars on the discovery and intense scrutiny of self in twelfth-century religious thought has sometimes implied that this 'indivi- dualism' meant a loss of community - both community support and community control. Yet current research on the twelfth-century religious revival in fact underlines nothing else so clearly as its institutional creativity and depicts a burgeoning throughout Europe of new forms of communities, with new rules and custumals providing new self-definitions and articulating new values.

The question of 'theodicy' thus appears in a very different light if the historian focuses on people's attempts to restructure the social conditions of proper conduct instead of seeking the experiential causes of their 'abnormal' psychological response.

However, what seems to me to be much less clearly analysed by medievalists than 'institutional creativity' are the specific ways in which the phenomenon of heresy was rooted in the extension of ecclesiastical authority.

HERESY AND THE VINDICATION OF TRUTH

It is essential, above all, to recognize that in talking about heretical 'outbreaks' we are dealing with movements which cannot be reduced to the motives and experiences of its members. The chances of growth of such social movements were determined by the structural conditions in which they and their opponents operated. The relative absence of heretical 'outbreaks' between 105o and I iOO

(Brooke, 1971: 143) should therefore be explained in these terms. Obviously heretics did not see themselves as 'heretical' but as authentic Christians who were reclaiming, through the vita apostolica, the true teaching of the gospels. The temptation to explain such movements in terms of the consciousness of their members is understandable because it is urged by common sense, but it is in my view misguided (cf. Veyne, I984). Nelson is by no means unique in this regard, although her theoretical concerns have enabled her to develop an argument of rare clarity among medieval historians. For example, it has been proposed by specialists on Catharism that its success in Languedoc, prior to its military suppression, was due to (i) the absence of outstanding Catholic personalities, such as those who emerged in twelfth-century Rhineland, (2) the use of the vernacular in place of Latin for worship, the performance of impressive rituals, etc. and (3) the evident


moral and religious superiority of the Perfects over the local Catholic clergy (Manselli, I968: I67-9). For all these reasons, so the argument goes, heresy proved attractive to the population of Languedoc. However, in practice, the motives that impel individuals towards a 'heretical' sect are very various, often ill defined or ambiguous, and sometimes the consequence of gradual drift rather than of clear-cut choice, as an examination of the cases contained in inquisitorial registers of the period shows (Duvernoy, 1978). Such facts alone should give us pause before we leap to explain the origins of religious movements by constructing ideal-typical consciousnesses.

The heresiologist Grundmann (I968: 213) has pointed out that the concepts 'heresy' and 'heretic' are essentially negative, that they are constituted by the mere contrast with and contradiction to the Faith of the Church, to its dogma and cult, to the morals of its clergy or to the attitude of its hierarchy. The only thing all heretics had in common, he observes, was their conviction that they understood and practised Christianity better than the Church which condemned them. Their origins, their intentions, the aims they pursued and the effects they achieved were all so diverse that it is impossible - so Grundmann concludes - to generalize about the profound cause or the social role of heresy. This statement seems to me right in its emphasis on the variety of motives and conditions of heretics. But it underestimates the analytical importance of what was common to them all - not simply the conviction of their own religious rightness, but the Church's classification and treatment of them as heretics. In spite of the undeniable differences which characterize heretics, there is after all a fundamental generalization one can make about them. For heresy expresses an asymmetrical power relationship between the Church and the souls in her care.

Heresy clearly does not represent dissatisfaction with traditional beliefs and practices (from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries the Church itself undertook far-reaching reforms) nor does it signify active dissent (the Church always contained a measure of disagreement and novelty). Heresy does, however, constitute for ecclesiastical authority a dangerous departure from objective Truth. For heresy is the stubborn denial that the practices which guarantee universal Truth do in fact do so, a denial from which grave danger results - to the soul of the heretic, to other Christian souls, to ordo itself (cf. Duby, 1978: 31). What is immediately at stake in any specific incident of heresy is the authority to judge the Truth, and something else too: the disciplines (behavioural and intellectual) by which that authority is secured. Heresy is only contingently related to 'cognitive dissonance', or to a refusal to acquiesce in meaningless suffering, so that the historian's attempt to marshall evidence of such experiences does not really serve to explain heresy.

If this is correct, then we can modify Nelson's observation about the importance of 'political' authority roughly as follows. It is in its attempt to extend and secure its authority that the Church comes to define and deal with heresy as a danger to Truth. The beliefs and practices of an incompletely Christianized population are not in themselves the subject of Church anxiety. Indeed, most of the early cases of medieval 'heresy', in which scattered individuals were denounced and

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persecuted for their 'unChristian' ideas and behaviour, were the outcome of initiative on the part not of ecclesiastics but of lay people (Lambert, I977: 36). It is only when evangelical Christian movements, drawing their authority from an independent reading of the gospels, begin to attract converts and to create a space for a religion of instability (thus contradicting the monastic religion of stability) that the Church recognizes a danger. For instability, following from the ideological commitment to preaching and poverty, was precisely what the vita apostolica demanded, and it brought into question the concept and practice of religious discipline as hitherto established (Chenu, I968: 202-69).

My suggestion is that the problem of medieval heresy should not be approached in terms of the socio-economic origins of heretical psychology, or even in terms of the Church's 'repression of monastic and lay religious passion' (Mundy, 1973:

538). Instead, it should be thought out in terms of the social and ideological dangers encountered and dealt with by a developing, empire-building Church. It cannot be stressed too often that 'heresy' is an ecclesiastical category, a distinctive ecclesiastical event that is constructed by ecclesiastical judgement. That judgement and its objects and effects, the asymmetrical dialogue they set up particularly in and through the inquisitorial process, are all very real. But they are not to be reduced to a particular kind of subjective experience. 'Heresy' is first and foremost the product of a power process in which Truth is authorized and Error anathematized. That process is central to the Church's strategy for dealing with the dangers (moral, intellectual, political) which threaten it.

The danger of heresy is very different from the danger of ordinary sin - to which, of course, it is related - and its treatment accordingly poses very special problems. The medieval definition of heresy, following Aquinas, distinguished two essential elements: an intellectual function, by which the authoritative statement of faith is denied or doubted, and a function of the will, by which this denial or doubt is stubbornly maintained (Eymerich/Pefia, 1973: 5 I-3). According to the scholastic conception of the self, belief or unbelief is an act of will, not a helpless mental condition. The heretic's attachment to error is thus a wilful act, dangerous to his or her own soul and the souls of other Christians. In order to be identified and dealt with properly, heresy must therefore be (i) capable of being externalized in the form of words, signs, behaviour, etc. and (2) actually confronted and pursued by an authoritative inquisitor. One can be a sinner, and know it in one's heart; but one cannot be a heretic in one's heart alone. A heretic, properly speaking, is someone who wilfully chooses to resist the virtuous will of the guardians of Truth, refusing to take part, with due humility, in the sacrament of confession. So a battle of wills is an essential feature of heresy: an objective relationship, not a subjective experience. It is not by destroying the heretic that the Church can win this battle, but only if it can first overcome his or her will by using whatever means are available. Yet undermining the heretic's will to resist is merely a necessary pre-condition of victory, not the victory itself. The danger of heresy to the Christian soul is truly removed only when the heretic makes the Church's will his or her own as the will of Truth. There must be, in other words, a willing acceptance of the Church's authority. (It is worth noting that institutionalized techniques for securing this aim are foreign to Islamic history.)


Every time a Christian suspect is tried by the inquisitorial process, and sentenced, or cleared (for most suspects were cleared), the authority of the Church is affirmed. Every time heretical beliefs and practices are defined or identified as error, the single Truth is maintained. Every time the Church establishes a new rule, elaborates an existing doctrine or allocates a fresh responsibility, the forms and consequences of transgression are multiplied. Every time a transgression is properly dealt with, a danger is successfully overcome and the authority of the Church confirmed. These institutional processes are not to be explained by the experience of individuals, whether heretics or orthodox Christians.

Yet Nelson is essentially concerned with the experiential causes of heretical behaviour and belief:

The most important point, however, is that heresy meant opting out: a deliberate rejection of the 'standard cosmology' and the religious organization with which it was identified. It seems to me, leaving aside ephemeral outbursts of chiliasm which have been a recurrent feature of western Christendom, that there were broadly two types of heresy: one involving not only a new belief-system but also a new life-style, the vita apostolica. This meant resolution of theodicy by renewed search for communion, even identification, with the divine through personal commitment to asceticism .... The second type of heresy afforded a different resolution of theodicy: Cathar dualism may be seen as a typically sectarian response, combining affirmation of the purity and internal solidarity of a new group with rejection of corrupt external institutions; the gulf between them is mirrored in the cosmic polarity. (75)

This typology of heresy (an emotional desire for communitas on the one hand, and an intolerant obsession with purity on the other) draws explicitly on the work of two Catholic anthropologists who have discussed selected aspects of Christian history: Victor Turner's The Ritual Process (1969) and Mary Douglas's Natural Symbols (1970). There are difficulties with the notion of communitas as employed by the former, and of sectarianism as employed by the latter, but this is not the place to rehearse them. I wish merely to suggest that something very important is being missed in this attempt to typify the psychology of heretics, which appears to assume that it is here we shall find the proximate cause of a phenomenon to which the Church was obliged to respond. From this kind of explanation we do not understand why the Church was not content to respond to the appearance of heretics, but actively sought to discover and convert them. (In this respect, by the way, the Church's strategy for dealing with danger was utterly unlike that of most 'traditional' societies studied by anthropologists: in these, danger is typically not sought out but responded to, and it is dealt with by techniques of neutralization, confinement and avoidance, not of radical transformation. Thus in Evans- Pritchard's (1937) classic account of Zande witchcraft, we read only of attempts to deal with the effects of witchcraft - never of attempts to transform witches.) Furthermore, we would not easily guess from Nelson's typology that the Church's discourse on heretics is itself preoccupied with purity, as being mortally en- dangered by heresy. For example, Pope Innocent III in his famous letter to Simon


de Montfort commends him for his bloody campaigns against the Cathars in Languedoc in these words:

The hand of God, beginning at last to destroy [destruere] the mighty who gloried in their malice and iniquity, hath now made them migrate from their tabernacles in wondrous wise. For God hath mercifully purged his people's land; and the pest of heretical wickedness, which had grown like a cancer and infested almost the whole of Provence, is being deadened and driven away - mortificata depellitur. ... [U]rge your flocks by zealous and sedulous preaching and exhortation, to give devout obedience to God and timely help to the Church both personally and through what is theirs, in order to extirpate the remnants of this pest; since like that hydra which is said to have multiplied its heads by their very loss, these also, if neglected, might revive the more grievously. (Quoted in Coulton, I924: II)

In similar vein Aquinas, in his influential discourse on heresy (1975: 89-9I) draws on the authority of St Jerome:

Cut off the decayed flesh, expel the mangy sheep from the fold, lest the whole house, the whole paste, the whole body, the whole flock burn, perish, rot, die. Arius was but a single spark in Alexandria, but as it was not at once put out, the whole world was laid waste by his flame.

And there is much more of the same in the ecclesiastical literature on heresy and heretics (see Moore, I976). A most striking feature of this literature is its classification of lepers with heretics, and its conception of the threat, at once physical and spiritual, which both represent to Christian purity (Brody, I974). In other words, the concern with pollution as a threat to purity and integrity is no less characteristic of the Church's discourse on heretics than it is said by Nelson (and Douglas) to be characteristic of heretical discourse on the Church. If anything, the sustained violence of the Church's language is the greater - as is its ability to deploy physical violence against its sinful children (Lea, I955). Should historians explain this preoccupation by the abnormal psychology of orthodox churchmen? Or should they - as I have been arguing - look instead to the emergence of ideologically defined dangers confronting the Church, and to its attempts to consolidate and extend its authority?

CONCLUSION

Towards the end of her article Nelson formulates an argument very close to the one I have been putting forward. Commenting on the familiar contrast which many histories of heresy make between a relatively lenient Church prior to the eleventh century and one that is increasingly intolerant from that time on (e.g. Russell, I965: 250-I), Nelson writes:

It seems to me misleading to characterize [the Church's] earlier attitude as 'relatively liberal'. Without adequate central co-ordination, internal organ-


ization or infrastructure, the early medieval Church had no alternative but to accommodate with regard to what our French colleagues term phenomenes folkloriques. It was only with the organization of rural parishes, in few areas effective before the tenth century, that the Church really got to grips with pagan survivals in the countryside. One significant index of a new offensive can be seen in the Church's attitude to witchcraft and sorcery, which I suspect were very widely-used instruments of social control in the early middle ages. The Church now asserted a monopoly of such instruments, identified witchcraft with heresy and later mobilized the Inquisition against both. (75-6)

This focus on the developing structure of ecclesiastical institutions seems to me more fruitful than the commoner preoccupation with reconstructing experiences of social disorientation. But I want to set aside the question of 'tolerance versus repression of dissent', and note that the contrast may be represented in another way. For, in the later middle ages, Christians were no longer content that dangers to the soul were met solely by the exercise of monastic discipline. It was not enough for the religious to learn to recognize and avoid dangers; it now appeared increasingly necessary for 'true Christians' to discover, locate and attack them. In order to do this, Church reformers began to build new institutions or to adapt existing ones (the preaching orders, Roman law, the Inquisition, the parish system, the universities, etc.), to promulgate administrative regulations, and to develop religious doctrine in the form of codified knowledge - by classifying areas of ambiguity, resolving points of contradiction, making logical connections and devising plausible answers to new problems. This proliferation of administrative and intellectual practices was the context within which heresies were defined and dealt with. (Some of the religious literature in which this development is reflected, and its implications for Christian discipline, are splendidly described in Pantin, 1955: I89-262.)

By way of conclusion, I outline a story that I think can be told. As the Church becomes more centralized and more actively concerned with empowering Truth, so its institutional practices become more elaborate, its rules and regulations more differentiated, and its doctrinal discourses more refined and methodical. Together with these differentiating processes goes the proliferation of authorized Christian selves: monastic discipline is no longer the only locus for perfecting the Christian self, for learning to avoid danger. With the diversification of the medieval economy, now increasingly urban and commercial, a multitude of social roles emerge as the possible bearers of Christian virtues - roles which the Church has to confront, assess and place discursively in relation to a single transcendent Truth. The increasing authority of the Catholic Church means that there is now more to distinguish, judge and protect. It means that there are greater practical and ideological domains than ever before exposed to the danger of transgression and confusion - in different Christian countries and among different social classes, regarding different matters of thought, feeling and behaviour. The Church regards differences as potential negations. It is therefore not the instability of socio-economic conditions allegedly producing disoriented psyches that I would include in my


narrative, but the unpredictability of dangers to the Church's task of defining and maintaining Universal Truth ('catholic' truth) in conditions of increasing variation. For growing precision in the Church's doctrines does not automatically ensure the decline of heretical error. On the contrary, the concern for precision merely enlarges the corpus of relevant texts for argument, interpretation and indifference in relation to Christian practice and belief. The need for discipline is greater than ever before, but discipline has to be secured by devising new strategies.

Thus I would emphasize that medieval movements inspired by the vita apostolica (ranging from the Cistercian reformers of the monastic life to the Cathar dualists who rejected the Roman clergy) did not seek a fitting cosmology for a new society already in being - as though religious ideology were a dress for a naked social structure. They sought, with varying degrees of success, to create new forms of social life. Their members were not disoriented by 'a changed society': their new way of living was part of the social conditions represented by that term. What separated heretical from non-heretical movements was not the social experience of its members, but the function of the Church in authorizing Truth and anathematizing Error. For it was this process, realized through shifting networks of power, which determined who were rightly oriented and who were not.

In his comprehensive survey of medieval heresies, Malcolm Lambert has recently written:

The Church, confronted from the twelfth century onwards with a challenge from hostile sects, was forced, step by step, to recognize how these sects differed from those of late antiquity, and to take new measures to deal with them. A machinery was created both for defining doctrine and for uncovering and putting down those who refused to accept the decisions of authority. Not all these developments have been fully studied by medievalists, for, although we have known much since Lea of the origins and workings of one of the instruments of repression, the inquisition, much more needs to be known about the doctrinal decision-making of ecclesiastical authority and the way in which the medieval concept of heresy was built up. (1977: 4-5)

To this plea for more historical research I would add another: that theoretically informed analyses are needed of the ways in which the formation of orthodoxy and of heresy were dependent on the institutional processes of judging, teaching and administering Christian subjects. It was, after all, these processes that identified and dealt with moral, political and intellectual dangers to the Truth - whether by avoidance, or by separation and confinement, or by destruction - in particular material conditions. For anthropologists concerned with comparative work, such analyses will make possible a better understanding of the similarities and differences in the disciplinary strategies of Christian and Muslim societies.

University of Hull

October I986 Medieval heresy 36I

* Acknowledgements An earlier version of this paper was read to the social anthropology seminar at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and to a combined anthropology-history seminar at St Andrews University. I wish to thank members of both groups who commented on it, especially Mark Hobart, Ladislav Holy, Richard de Lavigne, David Parkin and Andrew Turton. To Richard de Lavigne I am most grateful for stimulating discussion and written criticism: I have benefited much from his professional command of the literature on medieval heresy and his interest in anthropological questions.

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