Here’s a nifty post from a blog I’d not seen before, Army of Martyrs.
It’s a commonplace of Roman Catholic theology that doctrine develops: that as time goes by and questions arise, new doctrines arise that answer the questions while remaining consistent with what was known before. Sometimes development is simply drawing out the implications of what is stated explicitly in Scripture; other times, it’s more like discovering that Newtonian physics is a special, approximate case of Einsteinian physics: there’s more going on than we realized. But either way, developed doctrine cannot contradict what went before.
The blogger at Army of Martyrs points out that heresy does not develop in the same way: being error, you can’t build a large structure on it that will stand of its own. Interesting thought.
The View from the Foothills 
Heresy – the losing side in a doctrinal argument. As the losing argument, it will be suppressed, not developed. After all, the winners get to write the history. In the case of heresy, not only the idea but also its proponents have been suppressed, often by extermination.
May you enjoy the illusion of certainty that you have (re)discovered.
LikeLike
You’re insulting, but as you’re otherwise polite, I’ll let your comment stand.
However, you are gravely mistaken if you think Christian heresies have generally been suppressed by force. It’s been tried on occasion, but it’s rarely been effective. Consider the Albigensians in Southern France, to whom St. Dominic preached. That heresy lasted for over a century, IIRC.
Further, so far from being suppressed we know perfectly well what most of the great heresies have been. It’s no secret: the great Christian heresies are perennial because they are obvious. No one’s invented a genuinely new one in ages.
LikeLike
A blunt statement of opinion – I hadn’t seen it as an insult.
St Dominic preached in an attempt to stem the “heresy”, and failed. There was then the Albigensian Crusade, which proceeded by massacre and execution, till there were no “heretics” of this sort to be found. In what way is this not violent supression?
I did not mean that knowledge of what they believed was suppressed, though I do not think we have an undistorted view. As I said, history is written by the victors.
Do you remember “Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny”? The same is true of a belief system (including, but not limited to, traditional religions). You have chosen yours, but it is one that has a long history of imposing itself on others by force.
LikeLike
As no insult was intended, I’ll take no offense: but calling my beliefs an “illusion” still rubs me the wrong way.
You’ll note, I never claimed that violent suppression was never tried. And it certainly broke the Albigensians as a political movement–which is one of the things they were, and one of the main reasons military force was eventually used. But it certainly didn’t kill their ideas. We know what the Marcionites believed, we know what the Arians believed, we know what the Monophysites believed (and, IIRC, the Copts in Egypt are still Monophysites to this day), we know what the Donatists believed, and so on. Heck, for that matter we know what the Calvinists believe. (With all due respect to my Reformed readers: where there’s doctrinal schism there’s at least one heretical party. I won’t take offense at your thinking that it’s me, if you don’t take offense at my thinking that it’s you.)
You can claim that Christianity has a long history of imposing itself on others by force; but in point of fact, Christianity has generally spread peacefully. There have been exceptions; as I recall, one of the first Scandanavian rulers to convert to Christianity then forced everyone else to do the same. But Christianity spread to the bounds of the Roman Empire without force–lots of martyrs, but no force used by the Church. That generally doesn’t occur except when Christianity is tied too closely to Government.
LikeLike
I might add, we’re getting rather far afield from the point of the initial post, which is that error, bearing the seeds of its own contradiction, cannot provide a foundation for a weighty philosophic/theological structure. Thus, it’s interesting that Catholic doctrine has developed in a consistent, coherent way, whereas heresies don’t seem to. (I won’t claim they never do; the original point wasn’t mine, after all, I was simply linking to it.) Take the Marcionites, for example. Nobody suppressed them with violence; the Church in that era had no power to suppress anybody, being rather a target for the Roman authorities. But the wider Church repudiated Marcionite theology, and (though the basic ideas pop up now and again) it never developed.
LikeLike