The Notion of Heresy in Greek Literature in the Second and Third Centuries by Alain Le Boulluec (review)

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• The Notion of Heresy in Greek Literature in the Second and Third Centuries by Alain Le Boulluec
• Nicolò Sassi

Alain Le Boulluec The Notion of Heresy in Greek Literature in the Second and Third Centuries Edited by David Lincicum and Nicholas Moore Translated by A. K. M. Adam, Monique Cuany, Nicholas Moore, and Warren Campbell, with Jordan Daniel Wood Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022 Pp. 736. $205.00

It goes without saying that any attempt to discuss in 1,000 words an almost 700-page work, especially one as rich and complex as Le Boulluec's The Notion of Heresy in Greek Literature in the Second and Third Centuries, can hardly be illuminating. In addition, since the first publication of the volume in French in 1985, innumerable scholars have thought with and commented on the book from a historical and philological point of view, breaking down in sequence the author's treatment of his major early Christian sources: Justin Martyr, Hegesippus, Irenaeus of Lyon, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, etc. Therefore, in what follows I will limit myself to pointing out some key ideas that Le Boulluec's work contributes to the field of studies on heresy, in both early Christianity and, more importantly in my view, in any discussion of heresy tout court, whether historical or constructive. It is my claim that these key ideas are still relevant today, and we should therefore be thankful to the editors and translators for offering up Le Boulluec's work in a new, elegant English version to scholarly attention once again.

Building and expanding on the argument of a classic in the field, the 1934 study by Walter Bauer, Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum (lit. "Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity"), Le Boulluec demonstrates that the notion of heresy is rooted in a myth of original, unitary right doctrine. According to this myth, the imagined Ur-orthodoxy later becomes corrupted by the advent of deviant and/or polluting doctrines. Heresy, in this framework, is always secondary. Le Boulluec's work does not just bring to light this myth within heresiological representations in early Christianity, but illuminates as well an ironic curiosity in the sources: the same historical data that hands down to us this way of representing heresy also hands down the refutation of this very myth. There was no original unity, the sources show, but rather original diversity, for "the lack of any common pattern of exclusion demonstrates that the churches do not all have the same sense of their identity, and that norms of belonging change from one context to another" (588). For many scholars this might not [End Page 586] be too remarkable of a claim, but, surprisingly enough, this is still not a given in the field, so Le Boulluec's argument and analyses are a welcome addition to the conversation.

The invocation of the notion of heresy, Le Boulluec's argument demonstrates next, is tied to invective and the incapacity of handling a form of diversity that cannot be subsumed under any shared conceptual principle. It is in this situation of religious short circuit that the notion of heresy was born: in Rome, in the second century, the religious imagination of Justin Martyr created it as a system to deal with belonging and difference, foreignness and identity. Bringing together two conceptual inheritances of the ancient world (the Greek notion of αἵρεσις [hairesis], the "life choice" with which one followed one school of thought instead of another, and a more vague notion of διαδοχή [diadochē], the "succession" that determines both right and wrong belief based on the origin of said belief), Justin gave birth to the conceptual category of heresy. Because of these two constitutive elements, Le Boulluec shows, the concept of heresy is rooted in a will to disqualify instead of understand, to condemn instead of engage. In the later history of heresy in the second and third centuries, the conceptual dyad of deviant choice and right/wrong succession would resonate in the work of the major heresiologists, starting with Irenaeus (and one may add, although Le Boulluec does not analyze it, the influential Refutation of All Heresies by Pseudo-Hippolytus of Rome).

Yet if I...