The Polemic of Individualized Appellation in Late Antiquity

Abstract

This article describes rhetorical innovations in late antique Christian polemic around the construction of orthodoxy/heresy and Christianity more broadly. Late antique Christian polemicists label groups as heretical by using their founders' names as eponymous proxies for an entire group and set of ideas: Marcionism/ites, Valentinianism/ites, and so forth. This type of group construction, which I term the polemic of individualized appellation due to the pejorative labeling of a group after an individual founder, is an intentional and often artificial type of elite, literary polemic put to service in the wider creative mythmaking and boundary/identity construction by heresiologists such as Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Eusebius, and Epiphanius. In identifying both precursor ingredients in various ancient Mediterranean comparanda and novel developments in the Christian heresiologists' discourse, I also engage with recent scholarship on heresy, orthodoxy, and identity constructions in Late Antiquity. I explain why the polemic of individualized appellation was especially effective in constructing difference, its role in this particular late antique context, and its function in effacing apparent similarities in widespread practices and beliefs. I conclude with a methodological discussion, arguing that scholars in religion and history should reject their sources' categories of group identity construction due to their inherent bias.

Constructing clandestine communities: oaths of collective secrecy and conceptual boundaries in the late antique Mediterranean

“…Christian narratives routinely represent adherents of doctrines with which the authors disagreed as uniform, cohesive communities aligned against 'orthodox' Christians, not least by naming such groups after prominent proponents of these doctrines. 91 Charges of clandestine oath-breaking fed into this rhetoric.…”

Eutychianorum furor! Heresiological Comparison and the Invention of Eutychians in Leo I’s Christological Polemic

“…37 The act of naming connected all of these positions to Arius and through Arius, to a succession of previous heresiarchs. Gradually, the names of heresiarchs and the sects they had purportedly founded became epithets that acted as a shorthand for a constellation of (bad) ideas and beliefs-what a recent study has called the "polemic of individualized appellation" (Robertson 2018). By the fifth and certainly by the sixth century, for instance, 'Manichaean' had little to do with the reality of the Manichaean religion and instead was being used principally as a term of abuse (Cohen 2015, 214-21).…”