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On the Function of Heresy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
One of the things which must count as Catholic doctrine is the affirmation that it is possible to get it seriously wrong. In this article I hope to offer some remarks on the function of heresy in the articulation of the Church’s faith. I would like to begin with a question, the possible answers to which have implications: how much do heretics sleep?
By 1843, John Henry Newman had come to believe that heretics were by nature sluggish creatures. In his fourteenth University Sermon, on ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, Newman spoke of the ‘ordinary torpor’ of heretics from which they ‘never wake up … but to exchange courtesies and meditate coalitions’.
That was in its own way a radical answer, a radical break with the age-old view that heretics were ever-active, ever-vigilant. This view had, in particular, been the answer of virtually the whole of that patristic tradition in which Newman’s thought had been so largely formed.
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- Copyright © 1989 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Newman, John Henry, Sermons. Chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief, Preached before the University of Oxford (London, 1843) p. 321Google Scholar.
2 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses I. xxviii. 1 (= I, 219 Harvey) and 111. xxiv. 2 (= 11, 1 Harvey).
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4 Socrates, Historia Ecclesiastica VII. 48 (= P.G. 67, 841).
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6 Newman, (University) Sermons. pp. 318–319.
7 Ibid. p. 316.
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