medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Diana Wright asked:
> How would you distinguish between schismatics and heretics?
The _ODCC3_ article s.v. "schism" states:
Schism is distinguished from heresy in that the separation involved is
not at basis doctrinal; whereas heresy is opposed to faith, schism is
opposed to charity, though in the early Church this distinction was not
at all clear-cut.
(end quote)
The "at basis" qualification is of course rather slippery and leads to
the sorts of complications of which Frank Morgret wrote.
The Novatians and Donatists are cited as examples, and T. A. Lacey's
_Unity and Schism_ (1917) and S. L. Greenslade's _Schism in the Early
Church_ (2nd ed., 1964) are listed in the bibliography.
My personal pre-looking-it-up answer was that schismatics are separated
structurally and in deliberate opposition to one another and have their
own distinct hierarchy (I include the "deliberate opposition" to
exclude, e.g., the various parallel Eastern Orthodox jurisdictions found
in the diaspora) and that heretics are separated by doctrine; how much
disagreement counts as heresy and who's to decide are other slippery points.
John
--
*** John McChesney-Young ** panis~at~pacbell.net ** Berkeley,
California, U.S.A. ***
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