Autor: Bellco, Hilaire

Buch: The Great Heresies

Titel: The Great Heresies

Stichwort: Häresie allgemein, Definition; Beispiel: Geometrie, Textkritik (Wunder); Zerstörung einer Sinneinheit durch Überbetonung oder Verneinung eines Teiles davon; soziale Folgen

Kurzinhalt: Heresy is the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein... The denial of a scheme wholesale is not heresy, and has not the creative power of a heresy. It is of the ...

Textausschnitt: 5c We must begin by a definition, although definition involves a mental effort and therefore repels. (Fs)

Heresy is the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein. (Fs) (notabene)

We mean by "a complete and self-supporting scheme" any system of affirmation in physics or mathematics or philosophy or what-not, the various parts of which are coherent and sustain each other. (Fs)

5d For instance, the old scheme of physics, often called in England "Newtonian" as having been best defined by Newton, is a scheme of this kind. The various things asserted therein about the behaviour of matter, notably the law will without disarranging the rest; they are all the parts of one conception, or unity, such that if you but modify a part the whole scheme is put out of gear. (Fs)

6a Another example of a similar system is our plane geometry, inherited through the Greeks and called by those who think (or hope) they have got hold of a new geometry "Euclidean." Every proposition in our plane geometry that the internal angles of a plane triangle equal two right angles, that the angle contained in a semi-circle is a right angle, and so forth is not only sustained by every other proposition in the scheme, but in its turn supports each other individual part of the whole. (Fs)

6b Heresy means, then, the warping of a system by "Exception": by "Picking out" one part of the structure and implies that the scheme is marred by taking away one part of it, denying one part of it, and either leaving the void unfilled or filling it with some new affirmation. For instance, the nineteenth century completed a scheme of textual criticism for establishing the date of an ancient document. One of the principles in this scheme is this that any statement of the marvellous is necessarily false. "When you find in any document a marvel, youched for by the supposed author of that document, you have a right to conclude" (say the textual critics of the nineteenth century, all talking like one man) "that the document was not contemporary was not of the date which it is claimed to be." There comes along a new and original critic who says, "I don't agree. I think that marvels happen and I also think that people tell lies." A man thus butting in is a heretic in relation to that particular orthodox system. Once you grant this exception a number of secure negatives become insecure. (Fs)

You were certain, for instance, that the life of St. Martin of Tours, which professed to be by a contemporary witness, was not by a contemporary witness because of the marvels it recited. But if the new principle be admitted, it might be contemporary after all, and therefore something to which it bore witness, in no way marvellous but not found in any other document, may be accepted as historical. (Fs)

6c You read in the life of a Thaumaturge that he raised a man from the dead in the basilica of Vienna in A.D. 500. The orthodox school of criticism would say that the whole story being obviously false, because marvellous, it is no evidence for the existence of a basilica in Vienna at that date. But your heretic, who disputes the orthodox canon of criticism, says, "It seems to me that the biographer of the Thaumaturge may have been telling lies, but that he would not have mentioned the basilica and the date unless contemporaries knew, as well as he did, that there was a basilica in Vienna at that date. One falsehood does not presuppose universal falsehood in a narrator." There might even come along a still bolder heretic who should say, "Not only is this passage perfectly good evidence for the existence of a basilica at Vienna in A.D. 500, but I think it possible that the man was raised from the dead." If you follow either of these critics you are upsetting a whole scheme of tests, whereby true history was sifted from false in the textual criticism of recent times. (Fs)

7a The denial of a scheme wholesale is not heresy, and has not the creative power of a heresy. It is of the essence of heresy that it leaves standing a great part of the structure it attacks. On this account it can appeal to believers and continues to affect their lives through deflecting them from their original characters. Wherefore, it is said of heresies that "they survive by the truths they retain." (Fs)

We must note that whether the complete scheme thus attacked be true or false is indifferent to the value of heresy as a department of historical study. What we are concerned with is the highly interesting truth that heresy originates a new life of its own and vitally affects the society it attacks. The reason that men combat heresy is not only, or principally, conservatism a devotion to routine, a dislike of disturbance in their habits of thought it is much more a perception that the heresy, in so far as it gains ground, will produce a way of living and a social character at issue with, irritating, and perhaps mortal to, the way of living and the social character produced by the old orthodox scheme. (Fs)
So much for the general meaning and interest of that most pregnant word "Heresy."