Augustine’s Approach to Heresies as an Aid to Understanding His Ideas on Interaction between Christian Traditions

Abstract

Being understood as a phenomenon, World Christianity implicitly has a long tradition. It is true: the striving for a consensus partum (or consensus quinquesaecularis), already noticeable in the Decretum Gratiani (a synthesis of canon law which consist for about thirty percent of patristic texts), shows the need for certainty and convenient arrangement where matters of faith and church discipline are concerned in the Middle Ages. Little account was taken of 1) their attention for the multicultural pluriformity of Christian communities and their agents 2) the correlations and interference between their ‘theological’ expressions and the historical and philosophical mainstreams. In this contribution I am going to expound these attention for the multicultural pluriformity in the works of Augustine particularly by interpreting his definition of ‘heresia’. As will be shown his definition offers more room for the diversity of expressions of Christian life and faith than can be deduced from the synthesis of his works by later interpreters.