Church History as the History of Heretics

Abstract

The Catholic theologian Daniela Müller comments at the end of her book on the “importance of heresy” and substantiates this thought as follows: “‘Heretics’ are our sinister siblings without whom we would not be what we are today but with whom we fight nonetheless. They share such strong feelings with us because they have the same parents, the same origin, and the same goal: to belong to the family of God.” Because the church is the “guardian of the truth of belief,” it should include the “history of heresy […] in the perpetual process of searching for the truth” (233). The author wishes to intervene in this process with her study using the example of the Cathars. She reconstructs their history for the time period between 1143 and 1275. She follows the questionable goal of wanting to integrate the history of the Cathars into the mode of emotional and identificatory “appropriation” of “personal life, personal interpretation, personal treatment” (15).