Heresy, within the depth-psychology corpus, functions less as a stable theological category than as a contested instrument of identity formation, boundary maintenance, and power. Karen L. King’s sustained analysis demonstrates that ‘heresy’ was never a neutral descriptive term but a rhetorical construction forged by the early Christian polemicists—Irenaeus, Tertullian, Justin Martyr—to exclude dissenting voices by equating apostolic lineage with truth and novelty with falsehood. The category thus performed antisyncretistic ideological labor, producing ‘Gnosticism’ as its primary target. Pascal offers a psychologically acute counter-reading: heresy arises not from wickedness but from the failure to hold opposing truths simultaneously, the exclusion of one pole of a paradox generating every doctrinal deviation. Campbell situates heresy within the broader history of institutional terror, tracing how Rome weaponized the charge—most famously against Galileo—to suppress both scientific and mystical competitors to its authority. John of Damascus and John of Hilary frame heresy as active doctrinal poison threatening the body of the Church from within, while Cassian illustrates how the charge could rebound upon orthodox bishops themselves. Miller provocatively inverts the valence entirely, celebrating polytheism as a ‘heresy’ against monotheist orthodoxy that more faithfully represents the plural actuality of psychic life. What unites these treatments is the recognition that the discourse of heresy is always simultaneously theological and political, a diagnosis of deviance serving the normalizing power of the center.
The source of all heresies is the exclusion of certain of these truths. And the source of all the objections levelled at us by heretics is their ignorance of certain of our truths.
Pascal argues that heresy is not simply error but the cognitive failure to sustain paradox — the exclusion of one side of a genuine doctrinal polarity generates every deviation from orthodoxy.
, Pensées, 1670thesis
My purpose in this book is to consider the ways in which the early Christian polemicists’ discourse of orthodoxy and heresy has been inter-twined with twentieth-century scholarship on Gnosticism in order to show where and how that involvement has distorted our analysis of the ancient texts.
King frames her entire project as a critique of how the ancient discourse of heresy has invisibly shaped — and distorted — modern scholarly categories for understanding Gnosticism.
, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003thesis
in both ancient and modern writings about heresy and Gnosticism, antisyncretism serves as a strategic discourse that produces ‘heresy’ or ‘Gnosticism’ primarily to function in the identity formation, boundary-setting, authorization, and defense of an authentic Christianity.
King’s central argument: ‘heresy’ is not discovered but produced by antisyncretistic discourse as a tool for constructing orthodox Christian identity.
, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003thesis
So these heresies may date their beginnings as they choose. The date makes no difference if they are not grounded in the truth. Certainly they did not exist in the apostles’ time; they cannot have done.
King exposes the tautological logic in Tertullian’s heresiological method: truth is defined as apostolic and ancient, falsity as later and therefore heretical, making the category unfalsifiable.
, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003thesis
an analysis of the discourse of defining Gnosticism nonetheless exposes structures common to all discussions of heresy in Christianity
King argues that examining how Gnosticism was labelled heretical reveals the universal structural logic underlying all Christian heresiological discourse, not merely one historical instance.
, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003supporting
the structural pattern Irenaeus set became the basis for the historical investigation of heresy well into the modern period: describing various texts and teachings, emphasizing their differences from one another, while at the same time…connecting them in a linear genealogy to a single origin and a single essential character.
King traces how Irenaeus’s genealogical method for classifying heresy was uncritically inherited by modern scholarship, perpetuating its rhetorical distortions.
, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003supporting
The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.
Campbell uses the Galileo condemnation as a paradigmatic case of how the charge of heresy was deployed to suppress empirical truth in defense of institutional scriptural authority.
, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting
with the rapid increase of heresy throughout Europe from 1250 to 1650, together with the knowledge and works of science, the guardians of the authority of Rome and the Scripture were seized with a passion of anxiety that released throughout the Christian world a reign of terror
Campbell links the intensification of heresy persecution to an institutional anxiety about the convergence of heterodox religion and nascent science, resulting in the Inquisition’s systematic terror.
, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting
A polemicist like Irenaeus of Lyons set out to exclude people he thought were heretics by emphasizing certain differences of theology and practice.
King demonstrates that the heresy-label was a tool of social exclusion, driven by the polemicist’s strategic emphasis on difference rather than by any objective theological criterion.
, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003supporting
Ancient philosophical and medical writers employed the term hairesis to denote a coherent doctrine or tendency, often applying it to the variety of ancient phi
King recovers the pre-polemical, value-neutral sense of hairesis — a philosophical school or tendency — to show how the term was subsequently weaponized by Christian apologists.
, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003supporting
The book is framed, not in terms of a description of previous historical practice in the study of Gnosticism, but in terms of an analysis and critique of discourse, in particular the discourse of orthodoxy and heresy.
King announces her Foucauldian methodological commitment: studying heresy means analyzing the discourse that produces the orthodoxy/heresy distinction, not adjudicating its claims.
, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003supporting
the majority of the older men among the brethren asserted that in fact the bishop was to be condemned as someone corrupted by the most serious heresy, someone opposing the ideas of holy Scripture
Cassian illustrates the instability of the heresy charge: Egyptian monks accused their own bishop of heresy for attacking the Anthropomorphite position, revealing how the label could be redirected against institutional authority itself.
, Conferences, 426supporting
I have ventured to attack this wild and godless heresy, which asserts that the Son of God is a creature. Multitudes of Churches, in almost every province of the Roman Empire, have already caught the plague of this deadly doctrine
John of Damascus deploys the medical metaphor of plague to characterize Arianism as heresy, framing doctrinal deviation as a contagious corruption spreading through the body of Christendom.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
I need mention no other heresies save one; all the world knows that they are alien from the Church…the Church, distracted by these rival faiths, is in danger of being led by means of truth into a rejection of truth.
John of Damascus diagnoses a paradox within heresiological conflict: doctrines that are individually true can, when deployed for partisan purposes, collectively lead the Church away from truth.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016supporting
the overwhelmingly dominant view still is that for the period of Christian origins, ecclesiastical doctrine…already represents what is primary, while heresies, on the other hand, somehow are a deviation from the genuine.
King quotes Bauer’s challenge to the assumption that orthodoxy is chronologically and substantively prior to heresy, an assumption that silently reproduces the polemicists’ own logic.
, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003supporting
he was executed for teaching heresy — according to his legend, crucified, like Christ. Following the death of Shapur, the Magian reaction to his broadly humanistic, Hellenistic point of view was enforced
Campbell presents Mani’s execution for heresy as a cross-cultural archetype of institutional religious power destroying the prophetic innovator, drawing an explicit parallel with Christ’s own fate.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
the meaning of the plea that Symmachus addressed to Saint Ambrose when defending the heresy of polytheism against the latter’s orthodoxy of monotheism: ‘The things of heaven and earth are such a wide realm that the organs of all being together only can provide comprehension.’
Miller rehabilitates ‘heresy’ as a creative theological resource, presenting polytheism’s charge of heresy against monotheist orthodoxy as a more adequate account of the plural depth of psychic and cosmic reality.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
a sometimes strong aversion to thinking that heresy had influenced anything of importance in the foundational development of what has become the normative canon of Christian literature.
King identifies a persistent scholarly bias: the affective resistance to acknowledging that ‘heretical’ movements may have shaped the foundational texts of normative Christianity.
, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003supporting
True miracles can never be performed by anyone, Catholic or heretic, holy or wicked, to confirm an error, because God would thereby be affirming and setting the stamp of his approval upon error like a false witness
Pascal employs a theological principle — that God cannot authenticate error — to construct a criterion distinguishing genuine miracle from the apparent wonders of declared heretics.
, Pensées, 1670supporting
Tertullian’s approach to Scripture was devised strategically to lessen the influence of his opponents: limiting who was allowed to interpret Scripture, reducing access to Scripture, establishing a rule of faith to regulate interpretation
King exposes Tertullian’s heresiological strategy as fundamentally a politics of scriptural access: controlling interpretation was the mechanism by which orthodoxy suppressed heretical alternatives.
, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003supporting
Certain Nag Hammadi works appear to be closely related to heresies described by the early Christian polemicists. There are, however, some significant discrepancies between the descriptions of the polemicists and the contents of Nag Hammadi works
King notes that the Nag Hammadi discoveries revealed discrepancies between polemicist descriptions of heresies and the actual texts, undermining the reliability of heresiological reportage.
, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003aside
Let heresy forthwith abandon these groundless fears, and refrain from claiming to be the protector of the Church’s faith on the score of a reputation for zeal earned so dishonestly.
John of Damascus ironically accuses the Arian heresy of appropriating the language of orthodox zeal while in fact subverting the Church’s Trinitarian faith.
, Saint John of Damascus Collection, 2016aside
Tertullian’s remark is a bit sarcastic in that he argues that they cannot really be the wisest, since ‘if heresy could pervert them, they cannot be counted wise or faithful or experienced.’
King observes Tertullian’s rhetorical strategy of undermining the credibility of those seduced by heresy by defining susceptibility to heresy itself as a disqualifying intellectual and moral failure.
, What Is Gnosticism?, 2003aside