Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Bibliography of Henry Chadwick
- Does it make sense to speak of pre-Nicene orthodoxy?
- ‘And I have other sheep’ – John 10:16
- Reason and the rule of faith in the second century ad
- Adam in Origen
- Panegyric, history and hagiography in Eusebius' Life of Constantine
- Matthew 28:19, Eusebius, and the lex orandi
- The achievement of orthodoxy in the fourth century ad
- Eunomius: hair-splitting dialectician or defender of the accessibility of salvation?
- Some sources used in the De Trinitate ascribed to Didymus the Blind
- The rhetorical schools and their influence on patristic exegesis
- Pelagianism in the East
- The legacy of Pelagius: orthodoxy, heresy and conciliation
- Augustine and millenarianism
- Divine simplicity as a problem for orthodoxy
- The origins of monasticism
- Artistic idiom and doctrinal development
- Index of modern names
- Index of ancient and medieval names
- Index of sources
The legacy of Pelagius: orthodoxy, heresy and conciliation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Bibliography of Henry Chadwick
- Does it make sense to speak of pre-Nicene orthodoxy?
- ‘And I have other sheep’ – John 10:16
- Reason and the rule of faith in the second century ad
- Adam in Origen
- Panegyric, history and hagiography in Eusebius' Life of Constantine
- Matthew 28:19, Eusebius, and the lex orandi
- The achievement of orthodoxy in the fourth century ad
- Eunomius: hair-splitting dialectician or defender of the accessibility of salvation?
- Some sources used in the De Trinitate ascribed to Didymus the Blind
- The rhetorical schools and their influence on patristic exegesis
- Pelagianism in the East
- The legacy of Pelagius: orthodoxy, heresy and conciliation
- Augustine and millenarianism
- Divine simplicity as a problem for orthodoxy
- The origins of monasticism
- Artistic idiom and doctrinal development
- Index of modern names
- Index of ancient and medieval names
- Index of sources
Summary
Two images of heresy and orthodoxy prevailed in Christian antiquity. One had been canonized by Eusebius and was generally accepted until the seventeenth century, that orthodoxy is primary and heresies are deviations, corruptions of a previously pure, virgin orthodoxy. Its echo is distinctly audible in the edict issued by the court of Ravenna in 418 condemning the teaching of Pelagius, Celestius and their followers: they were confounding the ‘light of catholic simplicity shining forth with permanent radiance’. This image represented orthodoxy as a given constant: a rock buffeted by the waves, the light of the sun hidden by the clouds. Held often alongside it, there is another, equally common, belief with an even more venerable ancestry (1 Corinthians 11:19): that heresy serves to bring orthodoxy to light. Compared with the first model, this treats heresy as creative: orthodoxy is the product of faithful response to heresy. Both models invite us to see the conflict of heresy and orthodoxy in the perspective imposed on it by the ‘orthodox’. The besetting temptation for any historian is to take the past at the valuation of those who emerged as the victors; and nowhere more so than in the study of what councils, theologians and ecclesiastical historians have come to label as ‘heresy’ and ‘orthodoxy’. What is ‘heresy’, what is ‘orthodoxy’, and what constitutes ‘progress’, are all determined by the victors, that is to say by those who were, by their own definition, the ‘orthodox’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Making of OrthodoxyEssays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, pp. 214 - 234Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989
- 3
- Cited by