A History of Heresy

This is a fascinating study of the shifting boundaries between required and banned religious expression. Naturally, those who condemned others had a tendency to violate their own rules. For example, Christie-Murray explores what happened when the Western Church moved toward reversing its rule on marriage for priests -- from forbidding divorce for priests (as ruled at the Council of Nicaea), to denouncing marriage for priests as a sin. While upholders of the new doctrine expressed dismay at the married clergy's moral depravity, the Eastern Church took an opposite view. In 867, Patriarch Photius of Constantinople accused the Roman Church of heresy for repeatedly ordering celibacy in church families. For Photius, the Western Church was succumbing to a Manichaean belief that matter and flesh were evil.

An extremely readable, engaging, and yet thoroughly scholarly examination of doctrinal issues facing the early church. An excellent choice as a primer for beginners not familiar with the details fo the issues involved.

When I used to work at the Whole Earth Catalog, whenever a truly great book was out of print we used to thunder in bold faced type, "Get this book back in print!" That's how I feel about A History of Heresy. It is probably the most complete overview of the undertow to the Christian church available (or, well, formerly available). It is a Baedeker of everyone who challenged the ideas of the church from within through the centuries, and it is wonderfully well written. I learned enough here to "fake it" for the passages on Medieval heretics in my own book, The Age of Heretics.