The Violence of Orthodoxy

AVERIL CAMERON

Not so long ago it was possible to write about heresy as though it was
something that really existed and to debate whether "it" was a social or a
religious phenomenon. A.H.M. Jones's famous article, "Were Ancient
Heresies National and Social Movements in Disguise?" springs to mind -
though indeed that was written over half a century ago now. 1 But so much
has changed since Jones's article and the debate surrounding William
Frend's work on the Donatists,2 that it now seems a contradiction in terms
to give a book a title such as A History of Heresy, 3 as several authors have
done recently. In contrast, the conference on which this volume is based
defined itself in terms of discourses and construction, or self-definition,
and in the description of its scope the words "heresy" and "heresies" were
surrounded by quotation marks. What has happened? Have discourse

1 A.H.M. Jones, "Were Ancient Heresies National or Social Movements in Disguise?"

JTS 10 (1959): 280-298, now available in Orthodoxy, Heresy, and Schism in Early
Christianity: A Collection of Scholarly Essays, Studies in Early Christianity (ed. Everett
Ferguson; New York: Garland, 1993), 314-332; see also W.H.C. Frend, "Heresy and
Schism as Social and National Movements," in Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest (ed.
D. Baker; Cambridge: CUP, 1972), 37-56; R.A. Markus, "Christianity and Dissent in
Roman North Africa: Changing Perspectives," ibid., 21-36. See also the notion of
"popular" heresy in the bibliography on medieval heresy, e.g. J. Nelson, "Society,
Theodicy and the Origins of Medieval Heresy," ibid., 65-77; Jeffrey B. Russell, Dissent
and Reform in the Early Middle Ages (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1965); Malcolm
Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus (New York:
Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1977).
2 W.H.C. Frend, The Donatist Church (Oxford: OUP, 1952), on which see Peter
Brown, "Religious Dissent in the Later Roman Empire: the Case of North Africa,"
History 46 (1961): 83-101, repr. in his Religion and Society in the Age of Saint
Augustine (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 237-59. The Donatists and North Africa
tend to be left out of the large bibliography on heresy and identity in the early Christian
period (for which see below), but for similar approaches in this field and for a successful
deconstruction of the "circumcellions," frequently viewed as leaders of social and
economic protest, see Brent Shaw, "Who Were the Circumcellions?" in Vandals, Romans
and Berbers: New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa (ed. A. H. Merrills;
Aldershot; Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004), 227-58, with ample bibliography.
3 David Christie-Murray, A History of Heresy (Oxford: OUP, 1989); G.R. Evans, A
Brief History of Heresy (Oxford: OUP, 2001); cf. G. Liidemann, Heretics: The Other
Side of Early Christianity (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1996).
 The Violence of Orthodoxy 103

theory, postcolonialism and other such rhetorical tropes between them

made heresy the great unmentionable? In a world in which we no longer
speak of Christianity but of Christianities, the forging of identity and the
processes of self-definition have become the key topics of discussion. 4 It is
the new orthodoxy to point out that heretics are made, not born; that the
"genealogies of heresy" traced in early Christian authors such as Clement
of Alexandria and others are devices by which the prevailing group can
contrast the supposed pedigrees of their rivals with their own. 5 Apologetic
techniques in early Christian literature also incorporated not only defensive
explanations but also strategies of separation whereby Jews and heretics
were labeled as "other."6 As for Late Antiquity, to quote only from a
recent paper by Fergus Millar, no postmodernist himself: "It perhaps
hardly needs to be stated that the characterization, and naming, of groups
within Christianity as 'heretical' represents a process of construction by
others, and, as expressed by contemporaries (and indeed by modems), can
never be taken as constituting simple reports on observable realities."7
The extent to which early Christian heresy can be objectified in modern
scholarship is limited indeed. Only, it would seem, if the central orthodoxy
- the "dominant ideology" - is capable of being formulated, can "heresy"
be defined; yet the identification of heresy by early Christian authors was
part and parcel of their own attempts to formulate Christian orthodoxy, a

4 See for example Rebecca Lyman, "The Politics of Passing: Justin Martyr's
Conversion as a Problem of 'Hellenization, '" in Conversion in Late Antiquity and the
Early Middles Ages. Seeing and Believing (ed. Kenneth Miles and Anthony Grafton;
Rochester, NY: U. of Rochester Press, 2003), 36-60, with extensive bibliography on
theoretical approaches.
5 From many examples see Virginia Burrus, The Making of a Heretic: Gender,
Authority, and the Priscillianist Controversy (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1995); D.
Kimber Buell, Making Christians: Clement of Alexandria and the Rhetoric of Legitimacy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); eadem, Why This New Race? Ethnic
Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
6 See for instance Judith M. Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the
Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T &T Clark, 1996); idem, Neither Jew nor
Greek? Constructing Early Christianity (Edinburgh: T &T Clark, 2002); eadem, Christian
Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (Oxford: OUP, 2004); M. Edwards, M.
Goodman, S. Price, eds., in association with C. Rowland, Apologetics in the Roman
Empire: Pagans, Jews and Christians (Oxford: OUP, 1999).
7 Fergus Millar, "Repentant Heretics in Fifth-Century Lydia: Identity and Literacy,"
Scripta Classica Israelica 23 (2004): 111-30; cf. also idem, "Christian Emperors,
Christian Church and the Jews of the Diaspora in the Greek East, CE 379-450," JJS 55
(2004): 1-24. For Late Antiquity see also for example the papers in section two of W. E.
Klingshim and M. Vessey, eds., The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late
Antique '{hought and Culture in Honour of R.A. Markus (Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan
Press, 1999), and on identity, R. Miles, ed., Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity
(London: Routledge, 1999).
104 Averil Cameron

pedagogic device which at the same time signaled both a real struggle and
a dynamic and interactive process. Christian orthodoxy is still fought over.
If it is "something" at all, it took time and effort to develop in Late
Antiquity and after, and this development was part of a complex cultural
process. In our own day traditionalist Christians and true believers might
look to an unchanging core of Christian belief, but most scholars will
reject that as a satisfactory methodology, and even were it to be accepted,
the problem remains of agreeing what that core actually is or on what it is
based.
In Late Antiquity, both before and after the reign of Constantine,
orthodoxy was highly contested, as is shown by the numerous synods,
church councils, depositions and polemical writings by Christians. It is
now amply apparent from the deluge of modem work on the subject that
the struggle over orthodoxy which was given impetus by the Christian
empire was already well underway in the earlier period. Lyman writes of
the multiple identities and necessary negotiation of a figure such as Justin,
and scholars such as Judith Lieu have drawn attention to similar issues in
relation to Christians and Jews in the second century. 8 Tessa Rajak
memorably renamed Justin's "dialogue" with Trypho as "Talking at
Trypho."9 The so-called dialogues written by Christians and purporting to
record discussions between Christians and Jews were very far from being
innocent or inclusive; their outcome was predetermined, and their tone
often enough normative and even harsh. Writing of Paul, Daniel Boyarin
asks why it was that Paul's "universalism," the desire to unite everyone in
the faith of Christ, in fact has seemed to be "conducive to coercive
politico-cultural systems that engage in more or less violent projections of
the absorption of cultural specificities into the dominant one," and of the
effect of "coercive discourses of sameness" to deny difference. 10 The logic
is inexorable: if faith in Christ is necessary for all, then all must be
converted, brought to believe. 11 There is no room here for difference.
There is a good deal at stake here for today's world. This paper
approaches the question from the point of view of early Christianity.
Boyarin comes to it in a further book from the perspective of Judaism, in
which he writes movingly in the preface about the personal cost to him of

8 In addition to the works cited at n. 6 see Judith M. Lieu, "The Forging of Christian
Identity," Mediterranean Archaeology 11 (1998): 71-82.
9 Tessa Rajak, "Talking at Trypho, Apologetics as anti-Judaism in Justin's Dialogue
with Trypho the Jew," in Edwards, Goodman and Price, eds., Apologetics in the Roman
Empire, 59-80.
10 Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: U. of
California Press, 1994), esp. 228,233.
11 Ibid., 232.
 The Violence of Orthodoxy 105

adopting a constructivist view of Jewish orthodoxy.12 He has much to say

on the techniques of heresiology, and is right to see the latter's usefulness
for this process of construction, controlled by '~religion police" and
"border-guards" (p. 14), but his argument is about the (late) separation
which produced "Judaism" and "Christianity," with the theme that it was
the latter which in fact stimulated the former to become "orthodox
Judaism." My paper is confined to early Christianity, and is therefore open
to challenge from those who, like Boyarin, would put early "Christianity"
and "Judaism" on a continuum from Marcionites at one end to Jews for
whom Jesus meant nothing on the other.13 It is salutary therefore to be
reminded of this wider context in which the concept of "orthodoxy"
operates.
In tracing the development of what Boyarin calls "the discursive
institution of orthodoxy" (p. 29), the study of labeling and naming is
enormously fruitful. I would want to stress the important role of lists and
classification in the process of developing a Christian knowledge which
would indeed be all-embracing; that is, one way in which the other is
defined as unacceptable is by imposing a name on it. This process is
brought out extremely well by Herve Inglebert in his book Interpretatio
Christiana. 14 He traces the many different ways in which Christians in
Late Antiquity developed an all-embracing scheme of knowledge which
could subsume every branch of intellectual activity, and at the heart of
which was redefinition, or renaming. Within all this strenuous intellectual
effort the labeling of "heresies" was only one element, but it was a key
one. The listing and naming, or name-calling, of heresies, formed part of
every Christian writer's repertoire, whether it was to trace th,e genealogy of
heresies, or their inter-relationships, or to collect them like Epiphanius of
Salamis in an artfully contrived and elaborate calling-to mind of biblical
numbers. Writing was a central technique. I have elsewhere called
heresiology, the literary form which resulted from this impetus, "the
Cinderella of early Christian literature."15 However, Cinderella it is no
longer. Great strides forward have been made in a very short period to
understand what often seems to be an unpleasant and indeed tedious body

12 Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia:

U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), xii-xv.
13 Ibid., 17.
14 H. Inglebert, interpretatio Christiana. Les mutations des savoirs (cosmographie,
geographie, ethnographie, histoire) dans l'Antiquite chretienne 30-630 apres J.-c.
Collection des etudes augustiniennes (Paris: Institut d'etudes augustiniennes, 2001).
15 Averil Cameron, "How to Read Heresiology," JMEMS 33.3 (2003): 471-492 (repr.
in Dale Martin and Patricia Cox Miller, eds., The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies:
Gender, Asceticism and Historiography, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
106 Averil Cameron

of material,16 and the existence of this volume bringing together the work
of scholars not just of early Christianity but also of Judaism and of late
antique religion more generally, is an indication of that heightened
consciousness.
So the study of "heresy" has moved, like so much else, from social
history into the study of discourse. 17 But one cannot have heresy without
orthodoxy. It is indeed to mark something which is held to contrast with
generally received views that the word "heresy" is generally used today,
for instance in a lively book of essays by the political scientist John Gray,
which is simply entitled Heresies. 18 Science has also advanced through the
gradual acceptance of theories that were when first put forward regarded as
heresies, in the process called paradigm change. In contrast, religious
orthodoxy of its nature seeks to suppress or deny difference, and the
religious orthodox, today's fundamentalists no less than the orthodox
Christians of Late Antiquity, take their stand on tradition, literalism and
continuity; their stance is thus diametrically opposed to the prevailing
intellectual currents which emphasize postcolonialism, hybridity and
difference. More recently therefore I have been turning my mind from
heresy to the concept of orthodoxy,19 and to the related topics of
promotion, enforcement and repression. 2o Seen from this perspective, the
discourses of orthodoxy in early Christianity would count as

16 See the discussion of heresiology in relation to late antique North Africa by Shaw,
"Who Were the Circumcellions?" 232-50, an excellent discussion of the corpus of
material and its success in constructing heresy and blackening the record of the supposed
enemies of orthodoxy. This material is making things difficult for historians by doing
violence to the real situation and Shaw has some trouble with it, as can be seen from his
description of Augustine's De haeresibus as "a turgid list" and "a re-canned work
quickly put together from other existing sources" with "a few supernumerary heresies"
added to the earlier list by Filastrius (p. 238); but Shaw's main argument is that the
heresy lists "are not an innocent phenomenon. They are linked to the specific power aims
of the central Church" (238).
17 At any rate for historians, though more is at stake for theologians. Cf. Rowan
Williams, "Does It Make Sense to Speak of pre-Nicene Orthodoxy?" in The Making of
Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (ed. Rowan Williams; Cambridge:
CUP, 1989), 1-23.
18 John Gray, Heresies (London: Granta Books, 2004).
19 Boyarin's argument in Border Lines is that in Late Antiquity Christianity, but not
Judaism, became a "religion," defined as "an orthodoxy whereby heterodox views, even
very strange opinions, would make one an outsider" (13). This orthodoxy is about belief;
he does not allow that like Judaism, orthodox Christianity as a "religion" included a
bundle of practices as well as a set of beliefs. In fact Christian heresiology was very
interested in differences of practice, some of them seemingly rather trivial.
20 See Averil Cameron, "Enforcing Orthodoxy in Byzantium," in Discipline and
Diversity in the Church, Studies in Church History (ed. Kate Cooper and Jeremy
Gregory; forthcoming).
 The Violence of Orthodoxy 107

"deformations," in the language of Edward Said, moves in "border wars,"

denials of difference and "expressions of essentializations. "21 What
therefore was this "orthodoxy" which was so contested in early
Christianity, and why did identifying orthodoxy seem to matter so much?
In Late Antiquity all Christians who asked themselves the question
called themselves orthodox, no matter what their position; indeed the
aspiration to universalism was not given up even when the reality of
division seems to us to have been undeniable. To describe oneself as a
heretic is in essence a logical contradiction. Late antique Christians shared
the belief that there was indeed such a thing as a "true" faith, and believed
that their version corresponded to it. The bottom line must be that our
academic talk of constructing "the other," or defining heresy and so on,
bypasses the problem that orthodoxy mattered in Late Antiquity because
the question was seen as a matter of truth.
Some methodological questions are therefore in point. Triumphalist
explanations of the rise of Christianity are certainly out of fashion in
academic history, and sectarian interpretations are frowned upon in secular
educational contexts. It is not difficult to offer instead a materialist
explanation of the importance placed on the definition of orthodoxy in
early Christianity, or an explanation of particular forms of alternative
beliefs in terms of social history. Yet this seems ultimately inadequate to
the issues. Peter Berger seems to be coming nearer to it when he says in
The Sacred Canopy that if late antique Christianity had not been able to
provide a formula which accounted for both the divine and the human
natures of Christ it could not have fulfilled the requirement of providing an
adequate explanation of the Incarnation in terms of theodicy.22 However
this line of argument also fails when one takes into account the non-
Chalcedonians at both ends of the christo logical spectrum. Weare still left
wondering why orthodoxy - even an orthodoxy defined in doctrinal terms
- mattered so much. Living as we now do in an age of religious
fundamentalism, is there not an imperative to ask what was really going on
in all this late antique argument? I hope to extend the same questions in
another study to the study of Byzantium, a society in which orthodoxy
somehow grew into Orthodoxy, and in relation to which social or
reductionist explanations of "heresy" seem particularly unhelpful. And I
want to ask how attitudes to heresy in Late Antiquity differed from, or

21 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf 1993), 310-11; cf.
Boyarin, Border Lines, 13-22; for hybridity see Romi Bhabha, The Location of Culture
(London; New York: Routledge, 1994); against this prevailing ambivalence and
diversity,. orthodoxy inserts itself as a "fact-stating discourse," ibid., 239.
22 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967),67.
108 Averil Cameron

resembled, the ways in which the issue was approached in the late
medieval and Reformation West. In their attitudes to heresy and heretics,
did people in Late Antiquity place most emphasis on converting the
heterodox, or on developing their own self-understanding? And did they
think, like their later successors, that recantations must be obtained at all
costs, in order to save souls that would otherwise be damned? Or that they
would be doing God's will in putting unrepentant heretics to death? At
what point, if at all, did Late Antiquity become a persecuting society (to
use the well-known term),23 and if it did not, why didn't it?
Meanwhile I suggest that we need to change tack somewhat and think
harder about what was meant by orthodoxy and why and how it was
developed and maintained in late antique Christianity. Though it had much
to do with hermeneutics, it was not about Scriptural fundamentalism. Its
development started long before there could be any question of biblical
literalism; indeed, when the canon was eventually established, even the
most "literal" late antique exegesis was willing to preserve the integrity of
the Scriptural text by imaginative sleights of hand which modern
fundamentalists would hardly accept.
It has been tempting to say that the process really got going only once
the state entered the scene, since more was clearly now at stake in terms of
which groups would gain in the competition for power and influence. But
that does not account for early writers like Justin, or Irenaeus or Clement,
each of whom had a well-developed taxonomy of heresy. 24 I still want to
ask, therefore, why did the concept of orthodoxy matter so much? What
really hung on it? It seems important not to lose sight of the fact that
orthodoxy (despite its appropriation of the Greek word for "opinion") was
felt to be about truth. This is a problem for modern scholarship. Historians
of Late Antiquity currently tend to think of heresy not as a deviation from
the truth but as something constructed for the sake of identity, or for
branding the "other" in a one-way relationship because truth, after all,
became problematic quite a long time ago; many scholars writing today
have now grown up, as it were, with the idea that truth is not an absolute.
Late antique studies have drawn on the constructivism which has also
taken over in other disciplines and periods, from anthropology to history.25
Thus the search for identities and construction is both an expression of late

23 R.1. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in

Western Europe, 950-1250 (London: Blackwell, 1987; repr., 2007); see for Late
Antiquity, S. Elm, E. Rebillard, E., and A. Romano, eds., Orthodoxie, christianisme,
histoire (Rome: Ecole Fran~aise de Rome, 2000).
24 The classic account is by A. Ie Boulluec, La notion d'heresie dans fa litterature
grecque Ir-IIr siecles 2 vols. (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1985).
25 For history, see Elizabeth Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the
Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
 The Violence of Orthodoxy 109

twentieth-century postmodernism and an obvious tactical move in some-

thing as awkward and unpalatable for modern historians as the study of
heresy.
But to collapse heresy into the search for identity risks losing sight of
orthodoxy altogether. This is a problem for academic theologians as much
as for historians, and faced with this dilemma, some Anglican theologians
in Cambridge have initiated a movement known as Radical Orthodoxy,
which represents an attempt to rescue orthodoxy and get round their
dissatisfaction with the relativism of philosophy in its postmodem state. 26
The solution they have found is to return to a pre-modern and pre-
Reformation world-view, presented as Augustinian or even Platonist,
which is comprehensive and unifying, and harmonizing rather than
agonistic for the very reason that (in their eyes) it is based on certainties. It
is "orthodox," and at the same time "radical," because it literally goes back
to roots. It engages directly with political liberalism, from whence it has
naturally provoked a hostile reaction. 27 In a complete reversal, Radical
Orthodoxy even turns things on their head and calls the arguments of
secular (post-Enlightenment) rationalism "heresy."
The agendas here are religious ones. Nevertheless, one of the more
arresting aspects of Radical Orthodoxy is its claim that orthodoxy in this
sense brings peace, against what its advocates see as the violence and
power politics inherent in postmodemism. This is an extraordinarily
paradoxical claim. While the scholars in question may assert an
Augustinian vision of heavenly peace or order, historians know that the
search for orthodoxy in Late Antiquity brought anything but peace, indeed
quite the contrary. Christians attacked each other, in words and
competition, and even literally in outbreaks of physical violence. 28 When
the arm of the law was added to the mix, it brought both real and
metaphorical violence in its train.29 The voices of Radical Orthodoxy want

26 See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford:
OUP, 1990); Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of
Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 1997); John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward,
eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999).
27 See Christopher. J. Insole, "Against Radical Orthodoxy: the Dangers of
Overcoming Political Liberalism," Modern Theology 20.2 (2004): 213-241.
28 See Richard Lim, Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity
(Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1995); Brent Shaw, "War and Violence," and Richard
Lim, "Christian Triumph and Controversy," in Late Antiquity: A Guide to the
Postclassical World (ed. G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar; Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) 130-69; 196-218.
29 Cf. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 256: "The judicial process is an institution
integral to every kind of state, and it is always based on coercion .... it punishes
transgressions (of commission and omission) by the exercise of violence."
110 Averil Cameron

to see orthodoxy as a unifying force. 3o Yet they are themselves far from
displaying peaceful toleration of their critics, who must after all, in their
view, qualify as heretics and are even described as such by them.
There is a logical as well as a commonsense problem with the notion of
orthodoxy as bringing peace. It can seem inevitable that a religion based
on revelation, with sacred books in need of exegesis, and with an overt
philosophical terminology for describing the deity, should develop the
notion of correct and incorrect doctrine. 31 But if the revelation is held to be
true, and Christians are enjoined to "believe," to have faith, how then can
they be tolerant of others who disagree? This is a problem with which
fundamentalist Christians are still struggling.
Alongside questions of orthodoxy and heresy in early Christianity, the
subject of religious toleration has also been receiving attention. 32 Some
have argued for toleration, for instance Harold Drake writing on
Constantine. 33 But toleration is not the natural accompaniment of a belief
in the absolute rightness of one's beliefs, neither does it sit easily with a
developing theory of heresy. To quote from Graeme Clarke, what remained
after the apparently tolerant Edict of Milan was "an unresolvable factor -
the exclusivity of Christianity."34 According to Wolfgang Liebeschuetz,
intolerance was one of the chief contributions of Christianity to the Roman
Empire. 35
It is necessary to work quite hard to dismiss the superficially very
intolerant statements of late antique Christian writers when faced with
heretics or indeed Jews, and to maintain an argument for tolerance on their
part. One of the most striking kinds of Christian writing, though the least
attractive to modern sensibilities, is the very large body of polemical
works, or even casual asides, addressed in Late Antiquity towards hetero-
dox Christians, or towards Jews, with whom the former are often

30 See R.R. Reno, "The Radical Orthodoxy Project," First Things 100 (2000): 37--44.
31 On the violence inherent in the Christian appropriation of Jewish and orthodox
Scriptures see G. Stroumsa, "The Christian Hermeneutical Revolution and Its Double
Helix," in The Use of Sacred Books in the Ancient World (ed. L.V. Rutgers, P.W. van der
Horst, H.W. Havelaar, and L. Teugels; Leuven: Peeters, 1998),9-28.
32 See for example Graham N. Stanton and Guy G. Stroumsa, eds., Tolerance and
Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity, (Cambridge: CUP, 1998); Lellia Cracco
Ruggini, 'Tolleranza e intolleranza nella societa tardoantica: il caso degli ebrei', Ric. di
St. Soc. eRe!' 23 (1983): 27--44; P.F. Beatrice, ed., L 'Intolleranza cristiana nei confronti
dei pagani (Bologna: EDB, Edizioni Dehoniane Bologna, 1993).
33 H.A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University, 2000).
34 Graeme Clarke, "Third-Century Christianity," Cambridge Ancient History XII
(Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 587-669, esp. 661.
35 J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, Continuity and Change in Roman Religion (Oxford: OUP,
1979),293.
 The Violence of Orthodoxy 111

conflated. 36 If we move into later periods, this trait becomes even clearer:
the heresiological literature of the Byzantines is an abusive literature
which developed a highly stylized and technologized repertoire of
vituperation, caricature and polemic. This was of course a strategy of
separation, but "textual wars" were hard fought, and orthodoxy was the
territory fought over. 37 The notion of tolerance as a late antique Christian
virtue is counter-intuitive, not to mention anachronistic, arising from
liberal academic agendas, and indeed the discourse of heresy became more
abusive the more highly developed it became. Christian disagreement
could indeed at times also produce actual violence or rioting. 38 As Peter
Brown has written, "religious toleration was, at best, a fragile notion. "39 It
is indeed ironic to find the proponents of Radical Orthodoxy arguing in
favor of orthodoxy against the violence that they see as basic to
postmodernism.
My suggestion in this paper, therefore, is that instead of assuming
orthodoxy and reading heresy as a discourse of the "other," it could be
useful to start from the concept of orthodoxy itself. What makes orthodoxy
orthodox, and how is orthodoxy violent?
First, words. The very concept, "orthodoxy," is verbal; it recalls
Platonic philosophical debate about truth and falsehood, and insofar as
doxa implies "belief," it also implies that that belief can be stated in words.
But the first part of the word "orthodoxy" also implies drawing a line,
between true and false, between correct and wrong. In other words,
"orthodoxy" claims to be true, and condemns everything else to the realm
of falsehood. It is not benign; it entails demarcation and condemnation.
The words in which orthodoxy is expressed impose themselves on and
condemn all else to the realm of falsehood.
Words were also inherent in early Christian and late antique techniques
of confirming and stating orthodoxy. Why else did early Christians and

36 For the latter cf. e.g. Averil Cameron, "Blaming the Jews: the Seventh-Century
Invasions of Palestine in Context," Travaux et Memoires (Melanges Gilbert Dagron) 14
(2002): 57-78.
37 Averil Cameron, "Texts as Weapons: Polemic in the Byzantine Dark Ages," in
Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (ed. Alan Bowman and Greg Woolf;
Cambridge: CUP, 1994), 198-215; Rajak, "Talking at Trypho," 80, makes a similar point
about religious identity in an earlier period.
38 See H.A. Drake, ed., Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices
(Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006); there was certainly an element of
wishful thinking about some of the more violent prescriptions in the legal sources: see
Peter Brown, "Christianity and Religious Conflict," in The Cambridge Ancient History
XIII (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), 632-664, esp. 638-641; trouble could easily happen, cf.
p. 646 on "the decade of violence" (the 380s-390s).
39 Ibid., 643.
112 Averil Cameron

Christians in Late Antiquity feel impelled to write so much? Books and

books, on every conceivable theme, letters and homilies, treatises,
commentaries. The books were not innocent; they were written to
persuade, to castigate, to reprove, to chasten. While seemingly scholarly in
its approach, exegesis served similar purposes. Elizabeth Clark has shown
just how powerfully exegesis could be put to the service of a religious
agenda. 40 Christian writers used exegesis to promote their own versions of
orthodox belief, and visual art was used in the same way. The Christian art
of Late Antiquity and Byzantium is exegetical and doctrinal; it does not
reflect the spiritual creativity of the artist, so much as the concept of
orthodoxy as understood by the artist or patron. At times it did so overtly,
by depicting, from the eighth century onwards, the sequence of councils at
which orthodox doctrine was laid down.41 During the arguments about
Byzantine iconoclasm, the respective merits of words and images were
debated precisely in terms of how closely either came to expressing
orthodox doctrine. Contemporaries were uneasily aware that both texts and
images could mislead - that is, either might fail in their attempt to convey
orthodoxy. No uncertainty could be allowed, no room for doubt or
disagreement must remain. But this means that the words or images must
IMPOSE the message of orthodoxy on a recalcitrant and dangerous
pluralism.
The fact that Christianity had sacred texts which were often obscure or
contradictory necessitated the search for orthodox interpretation. Late
antique Christians were not like modem fundamentalists: they were only
too well aware that the Scriptures were often obscure and contradictory.
But they shared with modern fundamentalists the idea that everything must
be there, if only it was expounded correctly. To preach or expound
orthodoxy in this sense was as much of an imperative as to promote
asceticism; in fact orthodoxy WAS asceticism, the asceticism of words and
belief whose imperative was the rejection of all else. 42
It is only too clear from the sheer effort involved in trying to expound
it, and to condemn the alternatives, that the search for orthodoxy did
violence to the varieties of religious expression and experience that
actually existed. Thus the concept of orthodoxy itself becomes an
instrument which does violence to actual pluralism. It then engendered

40 E.A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
41 C. Walter, L'iconographie des conciles dans la tradition byzantine (Paris: Institut
Fran9ais d'etudes byzantines, 1970).
42 G. Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago: U. of
Chicago Press, 1987); see also Derek Krueger, Writing and Holiness: The Practice of
Authorship in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
 The Violence of Orthodoxy 113

more violence as generations of later Christian writers struggled to

expound, explain and promote this elusive central concept.
The violence of the verbal struggle could also be turned on its head.
Several emperors tried to command silence - which is itself a violent
infringement of speech and writing. Constantine himself started off by
exhorting Arius and Alexander to keep their disagreement to themselves
and stop arguing. 43 Zeno attempted to quell discussion with his Henotikon
of 482. Actual imposition of silence was tried, for example, by the
seventh-century emperors who tried to impose Monotheletism as the new
orthodoxy. The so-called Ekthesis promulgated by Heraclius in 638
forbade talk of "energies" and decreed the doctrine of one will; it was
followed by threats of deposition and excommunication for clergy who
disobeyed. Ten years later his successor issued a Typos which forbade all
debates about energies or wills, again with sanctions. 44 These attempts may
seem like desperation, but were in fact dictatorial interventions, the verbal
equivalent of the book-burning practiced for the same reasons by the same
emperors.
The more obvious kind of violence is of course the violence of
enforcement,45 or at times, of persecution. A well-known unpublished
paper by Geoffrey de Ste Croix which is soon to appear in print, claims
that more Christians were persecuted by other Christians in Late Antiquity
than ever Christians by the pagan state. 46 I would not want to go so far, but
it is nevertheless true both that the concept of orthodoxy gave rise to a kind
of discourse that was authoritarian and intolerant in the extreme, that
emperors in Late Antiquity resorted at times to actual persecution and that
heresy became a crime, just like paganism. 47 The rise of the

43 Eusebius, Vita Constantini II.71; this letter has attracted attention recently, and is
discussed by Boyarin, Border Lines, 44. Like him I see it as preventing discussion, which
is to be confined to Arius and Alexander themselves, not opening it up.
44 See the discussion by W. Brandes, "Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Seventh Century:
Prosopographical Observations on Monotheletism," in Fifty Years of Prosopography:
Rome, Byzantium and Beyond (ed. Averil Cameron; Oxford: OUP, 2003), 103-18, esp.
106-8, 114.
45 See for the later part of the period Pauline Allen, "The Definition and Enforcement
of Orthodoxy," Cambridge Ancient History XIV (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), 811-854.
46 See J. Streeter and M. Whitby, eds., Christian Persecution, Martyrdom and
Orthodoxy (Oxford), forthcoming, chapter five.
47 For Constantine, see Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief The Secret Gospel of Thomas
(New York 2005), chapter five, "Constantine and the Catholic Church," 143-185; also
Millar, "Christian Emperors, Christian Church." It is also relevant, though often
forgotten, that Gibbon's Constantine is a Christian tyrant. For the legislation against
heresy see Caroline Humfress, "Citizens and Heretics: Late Roman Lawyers on Christian
Heresy," in this volume.
114 Averil Cameron

institutionalized church certainly fostered the process, but I think it is too

simplistic to make that the whole explanation.
To conclude, then, the concept of orthodoxy implies not only
intolerance but also violence. Given the current tendency to define
"heresy" as a construct, how can one fail to do the same with "orthodoxy,"
or to place the word "orthodoxy" in the same inverted commas? But then
orthodoxy falls prey to just the ontological doubts which assail the notion
of truth. Historians of our period face a dilemma. Neither orthodoxy nor
heresy can any longer be treated as objects of study in themselves, that is,
essentialized. If it is an effect of postmodernism that "heresy" is now a
contested term, then the same must be true of "orthodoxy." But any view,
such as that of Radical Orthodoxy, which wants to return to orthodoxy as
an essence must fall into the trap that such a concept is itself inherently
violent. Such views are not "radical," but reactionary, and Christians
through the centuries have indeed harried, tortured, and burned others in
the name of this elusive orthodoxy. The dilemma, I would contend, leaves
historians with a challenge: not how to read "heresy," but how to
understand the mirage of "orthodoxy."