The Heresy Of Heresies

"The heresy of heresies was common sense." --George Orwell, 1984. This book is a defense of common-sense realism, which is the greatest heresy of our time. Following common-sense philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Dallas Willard, and J. P. Moreland, this book defends a common-sense vision of reality within the Christian tradition. Mosteller shows how common-sense realism is more reasonable than the materialist, idealist, pragmatist, existentialist, and relativist spirits of our age. It maintains that we can know the nature of reality through common-sense experience and that this knowledge has profound implication for living the good life and being a good person.

“The heresy of heresies was common sense.” —George Orwell, 1984. This book is a defense of common-sense realism, which is the greatest heresy of our time. Following common-sense philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, Dallas Willard, and J. P. Moreland, this book defends a common-sense vision of reality within the Christian tradition. Mosteller shows how common-sense realism is more reasonable than the materialist, idealist, pragmatist, existentialist, and relativist spirits of our age. It maintains that we can know the nature of reality through common-sense experience and that this knowledge has profound implication for living the good life and being a good person.

A lively examination of the heretics who helped Christianity become the world’s most powerful religion. From Arius, a fourth-century Libyan cleric who doubted the very divinity of Christ, to more successful heretics like Martin Luther and John Calvin, this book charts the history of dissent in the Christian Church. As the author traces the Church’s attempts at enforcing orthodoxy, from the days of Constantine to the modern Catholic Church’s lingering conflicts, he argues that heresy—by forcing the Church to continually refine and impose its beliefs—actually helped Christianity to blossom into one of the world’s most formidable religions. Today, all believers owe it to themselves to grapple with the questions raised by heresy. Can you be a Christian without denouncing heretics? Is it possible that new ideas challenging Church doctrine are destined to become as popular as Luther’s once-outrageous suggestions of clerical marriage and a priesthood of all believers? A delightfully readable and deeply learned new history, Heretics overturns our assumptions about the role of heresy in a faith that still shapes the world. “Wright emphasizes the ‘extraordinarily creative role’ that heresy has played in the evolution of Christianity by helping to ‘define, enliven, and complicate’ it in dialectical fashion. Among the world’s great religions, Christianity has been uniquely rich in dissent, Wright argues—especially in its early days, when there was so little agreement among its adherents that one critic compared them to a marsh full of frogs croaking in discord.” —The New Yorker

The first book to deal with all the principal treatments of heresy and anti-heretical writings during their heyday in the thirteenth century. Heresy is always relative; the traces that it leaves to us are distorted and one-sided. In the last few decades, historians have responded to these problems by developing increasingly sophisticated methodologies that help to unravel and illuminate the tangled layers from which the texts that describe heresy are built, but in the process have made our reading of heresy fractured and disconnected. Heresy and Heretics seeks to redress this by reading the different types of anti-heretical writing as part of a wider, connected tradition, considering all the principal orthodox treatments of heresy for the first time. Drawn from the mid-thirteenth century, a time when both medieval heresy and the church's response to it were at their zenith, they describe a spectrum of material that ranges from the theological arguments of some of the greatest thinkers of the age to the homely sermons of the wanderingpreachers. In considering the whole scope of anti-heretical writing from this period, it becomes apparent that, far from being an artificial construct isolated from reality, the church's treatment of heresy in fact had a far morecomplex relationship with its subject matter. Dr L.J. Sackville teaches in the Department of History, University of York.

What don't Christians believe? Is Jesus really divine? Is Jesus really human? Can God suffer? Can people be saved by their own efforts? The early church puzzled over these questions, ruling in some beliefs and ruling out others. Heresies and How to Avoid Them explains the principal ancient heresies and shows why contemporary Christians still need to know about them. These famous detours in Christian believing seemed plausible and attractive to many people in the past, and most can still be found in modern-day guises. By learning what it is that Christians don't believe--and why--believers today can gain a deeper, truer understanding of their faith. --! From back cover.

In Modernist Heresies, Damon Franke presents the discourse of heresy as central to the intellectual history of the origins of British modernism. The book examines heretical discourses from literature and culture of the fin de siècle and the Edwardian period in order to establish continuities between Victorian blasphemy and modernist obscenity by tracing the dialectic of heresy and orthodoxy, and the pragmatic shifting of both heterodox and authoritative discourses. Franke documents the untold history of the Cambridge Heretics Society and places the concerns of this discussion society in dialogue with contemporaneous literature by such authors as Pater, Hardy, Shaw, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, and Orwell. Since several highly influential figures of the modernist literati were members of the Heretics or in dialogue with the group, heresy and its relation to synthesis now become crucial to an understanding of modernist aesthetics and ethics. From the 1880s through the 1920s, heresy commonly appears in literature as a discursive trope, and the literary mode of heresy shifts over the course of this time from one of syncretism to one based on the construction of modernist artificial or "synthetic" wholes. In Franke's work, the discourse of heresy comes forth as a forgotten dimension of the origins of modernism, one deeply entrenched in Victorian blasphemy and the crisis in faith, and one pointing to the censorship of modernist literature and some of the first doctrines of literary criticism.