In this essay, I explore the conceptual and discursive ruminations of Epiphanius of Salamis as he struggles in his Panarion to survey and manage the ever-expanding heretical world.Footnote 1 Instead of reading this heresiological treatise as an attestation of theological, ecclesiastical, and intellectual authority established through totalizing discourse, I approach it as an expression of ancient ethnographic writing and the ethnographic disposition, an authorial orientation toward the world that describes, regulates, and classifies peoples with both macroscopic and microscopic knowledge.Footnote 2 Ethnography in the ancient world was a process of writing the world's people into texts, describing and classifying specific cultures and customs through the lens of the ethnographer's own culturally situated perspective. Frequently, the ethnographer used his text to elaborate his assumptions about the origins of human diversity. Customs and habits were explained as the products of larger macroscopic forces such as astrology, genealogy, climatology, universal history, and myth. In the process of translating the world into texts, ethnographic inquiry forced authors to confront their capacity to comprehend the world around them and ultimately to come to terms with the full scope of human diversity.Footnote 3 I argue that reading the Panarion as a manifestation of Christian ethnography usefully foregrounds an intractable tension between knowledge (known knowns) and self-conscious ignorance (known unknowns) about the depths of human heterogeneity: ethnography is as much an illustration of incomprehension as it is a repository of erudition, mastery, and discovery.Footnote 4
The ethnographic dimensions of heresiology attempt to make sense of a Christian world mired in the dilemma of heresy's sustained growth.Footnote 5 The Panarion—as the quintessential example of Christian heresiology in late antiquity—thus functions as an expression of a Christian ethnographic disposition, which, above all else, negotiates and performs the immensely difficult task of representing and classifying heretics in textual form. Moreover, heresiological ethnography is not simply a response to Christian diversity, but also a way to invent it. In his efforts to systematize and regularize the origins of heretical parties, Epiphanius articulates a Christian model of ethnographic organization: the heretics are the product of geographical, genealogical, demonogenic, and ethnogenic processes.Footnote 6 Reports about the customs and habits of heretics—as ways of schematizing and classifying the diversity of the Christian world and as representations of diverse ways of Christian life—become meditations on the seemingly limitless but severely limited capacity of Christian authors to comprehend and codify the history of sectarianism. But like ancient ethnographic writers who were caught up in a rhetoric of expansion that confronted its own inadequacies, Epiphanius's invocations of mastery and hegemony or discovery and conquest attest neither intellectual nor theological triumph. Rather, they reveal the epistemological and textual deficiencies of ethnographic classification.Footnote 7 In fashioning a discourse of territorial expansion and cultural exportation, the heresiological discovery of new peoples and places exhibits the fissures within ambitions of control and conquest. Epiphanius explicitly contemplates his inability to see, know, and regulate the world around him. His reflections on the limitations of his knowledge about heresy and the wider world encapsulates the epistemological limitations of ethnographic writing.
Ethnographic Effects: Discovery, Comprehension, and the Unknowable
In forging territorial models of their surroundings, ancient geographical writers, as Claude Nicolet has argued, used the language of science to represent the world in their own ideological and political terms.Footnote 8 Geographical and ethnographic discourse created a hierarchy of lands, peoples, and societies in which the world and its contents were not only ordered but also moralized.Footnote 9 The intellectual mapping of cultures by means of discovery magnified the world's diversity, wonderment, and mystery:
Like all sciences, it moves cumulatively: all sorts of progress, some empirical and others theoretical, slowly create a body of knowledge, more or less imperfect and more or less accepted by society. But concerning geography, the frontier between the known and the unknown is first of all traced on a territory, in a space: the world is still a partly unexplored piece of land. Whence the fundamental notions, according to the concepts of that time, of the known and unknown world, of the inhabited or inhabitable earth. Geography—knowledge and representation of the earth—is still at the stage of voyages and discoveries: “inaccessible” spaces still remain. As for what is known, or rather surveyed, the first stage of understanding passes through different descriptive methods: such and such a thing in such and such a location, before or after such and such a thing—which is little else than an imaginary voyage.Footnote 10
Just as geography mapped lands, ethnography mapped peoples: the two, taken together, organized the spatial and human contents of the world. Ancient travelogues and travel writing served as imaginative tools through which rhetoric and reality intertwined.Footnote 11 In traversing foreign and domestic environments, ancient authors described the world as they saw it, wished it, and even feared it to be. In creating intellectual and aspirational maps, ethnographers and geographers wrote the world in their own cultural, political, and religious vernaculars. And ethnography, like geography, displayed the exhilaration and fear of discovery and new knowledge. To trace this paradox of ethnography, I turn to a discussion of the Chorography of Pomponius Mela. Written in the first century, shortly after the death of Augustus Caesar, Mela's Chorography is a tripartite navigation (or periplus) of the known world:Footnote 12 it takes its readers on a tour of the world, accentuating “anthropological curiosities, natural phenomena, supernatural phenomena, and the lay of the land.”Footnote 13 Although Mela uses his literary map to display his ethnographical, mythological, and geographical knowledge, he also discovers the impassible and unknowable features of the natural world.Footnote 14
As the Chorography or Description of the World begins, Mela links the substantive focus of his inquiry—the study of ethnographic and geographic diversity—to the burdens of authorship and personal expenditure:
A description of the known world is what I set out to give, a difficult task and one hardly suited to eloquence, since it consists chiefly in names of peoples and places and in their fairly puzzling arrangement. To trace this arrangement completely is a time-consuming, rather than a welcome, subject, but nevertheless a very worthwhile thing to consider and understand. It repays the effort of those who give it attention—at least by the very act of contemplating it, if not by the richness of this supplicant's natural talent.Footnote 15
In bemoaning the drudgery involved in understanding the world's complexity, Mela underscores his ambition to fully comprehend the world “out there.”Footnote 16 His foray into topographical and geographical detail begins by defining the shape of the world and demarcating the three major continents—Asia, Europe, and Africa—by their territory and waterways. Broadly identifying the scope of his inquiry, Mela next ventures “to describe our world's coastlines and regions with greater precision.”Footnote 17 As he maps the various regions of the world, Mela juxtaposes his tour of rivers, oceans, and lands with brief but quintessentially ethnographical details. The emphasis on microcosm, at the expense of macroscopic theorization, reflects the preoccupation of the chorographers with regional details. Because “the goal of regional cartography (χωρογραϕικὸν),” according to the second-century Greek geographer Claudius Ptolemaeus (Ptolemy), “is an impression of a part, as when one makes an image of just an ear or an eye,” it dwells on particularities without devising an overarching coherence for the whole of the world.Footnote 18 Regional cartography “sets out individual localities, each one independently and by itself, registering practically everything down to the least thing therein (for example, harbors, towns, districts, branches of principal rivers, and so on),” but does not “show the known world as a single and continuous entity, its nature and how it is situated.”Footnote 19 The chorographical effect, then, is the presentation of a loose confederation of particularized data that follows a narrative journey, even if the narrative itself contains disparate and contradictory details.
To ponder the effects of prolonged exposure to foreign peoples, places, and customs is, as Mela's Chorography demonstrates, an opportunity to reify cultural and communal dissimilarities. In Book Three, for instance, discussing the lands off the coast of northern Europe, he arrives at the isle of Britain. The island, he reports, is a fertile and generous habitat for sheep, though its terrain is less suitable for human needs. The land does maintain people, “but they all are uncivilized” (sed sunt inculti omnes).Footnote 20 Removed as they are from the umbrella of civilization, the Britons lack knowledge of “other kinds of wealth, being wealthy only in sheep and land.”Footnote 21 Like many foreign peoples, they are a population defined by a “strong desire to rule and a strong drive to expand their holdings.”Footnote 22 Despite Mela's lack of affinity for the Britons, their incivility serves a critical rhetorical purpose for the Roman imperial project of conquest and domination.Footnote 23 The ever-growing sphere of Roman occupation—both literal and metaphorical—renders the disposition of these northern islanders both known and readily comprehensible. Mela explains:
Next, as to what kind of place Britain is and what kind of people it produces, information that is more certain and better established will be stated. The reason is that—lo and behold—the greatest princeps is opening the long-closed island, and as conqueror of previously unsubdued and previously unknown peoples, the princeps brings with him the proof of his own accomplishments, since he will reveal in his triumph as much as he has laid claim to in war.Footnote 24
The ignorance of the Britons—and their Irish neighbors—is no longer an object of speculation. As Rome expands its frontiers, ethnographic writing operates to stabilize the cultural periphery, including the monstrous peoples of the North, the British and Irish, and those from the South, in and around the Nile.Footnote 25 Textual recollections of exploration purport to identify and even to tame the once-unknown and savage. Increased knowledge of the Britons demystifies their savagery and demonstrates, according to Mela, Augustus's great triumph over the orbis terrarum. For Mela, the intellectual fruits of geographical expansion refine an ethnographic knowledge and rhetoric about the peoples and places of the οἰκουμένη (known world).Footnote 26
The Journey of Heresiology
As the seat of political and cultural power shifted from Greece and Rome and then to the Christian churches of the Mediterranean, heresiological literature translated the peoples at the geographical periphery into the peoples of the theological fringes. In that effort, ethnography proved an essential contribution to the discourse through which Christians likewise translated the world into the vernacular of Christian triumph and universalism.Footnote 27 Jeremy Schott has persuasively argued that the ethnographic and philosophical emphases in Christian apologetic literature served, alongside other textual ventures such as universal history, as a tool of literary control.Footnote 28 For Schott, Greek and Roman philosophers of the early empire harnessed the results of cross-cultural exchange (and exploitation) as demonstrations of a broader universal philosophy that strengthened the cultural asymmetry between the Greek and Roman philosophical tradition, on the one hand, and the peripheral intellectual pursuits of non-Greeks and non-Romans, on the other. Ancient ethnography, which Schott reads as a method of intellectual collection, discovery, and appropriation, served to schematize the diversity of the world into a single system of philosophical order. In this way, barbarian wisdom was given value and meaning through Greek and Roman interpretation.Footnote 29 Various Greek and Roman writers developed philosophical or historical narratives that recounted the history of all human diversity through their own ethnic beginnings.Footnote 30 These writers sought, as Greg Woolf has put it, to synchronize the history of barbarians within their own indigenous histories.Footnote 31
Following the philosophical, ethnographic, and geographic musings of various Greek authors, Christian apologists articulated an ecumenical system of thought by dismantling the dichotomy between Greeks and barbarians.Footnote 32 In their appeal to geography and ethnography, Christian apologetic authors positioned themselves at the center of a new homologous knowledge.Footnote 33 The creation of this Christian intellectual system, adapted but also distinguished from Greek and Roman quests to identify universal philosophy, bolstered Christianity's universalizing claims. Ethnic and cultural particularity were superseded by the universal truth (“they were arguing that Christianity was the only valid philosophy”Footnote 34 ) of Christian tradition. But, as Schott explains, the quest for a transcendent universalism served, in fact, to solidify difference. The juxtaposition of cultures, ethnicities, nations, and histories produced the effect of a thoroughgoing comprehension of the contents of the world, which ultimately magnified these differences:
Terms like Christianismos, Hellenismos, ethne, gentes, and nationes, as well as a host of heresiological appellatives, served as signifiers in a science of local and global control. Working within such a system of knowledge, bishops and imperial officials living well inside the borders of Roman territory could find themselves on the frontier between Christians and others. The discourse of apologetics provided a system of knowledge that structured contact between Christians and the ethne.Footnote 35
Just as apologetics refined the terms of imperial domination and comprehension, heresiologies embraced the same rhetoric of ethnographic writing and representation.Footnote 36 Through their parallel ethnographic investigations, the apologists and heresiologists clarified their knowledge of the world and its intellectual traditions. They took mountains of particularized knowledge and translated it into evidence of Christian triumph and supremacy.Footnote 37
Having painstakingly enumerated the eighty sects of his Panarion, Epiphanius of Salamis concludes his treatise with a theological exhortation to the exclusive truth of the catholic church. As this ecumenical epilogue, entitled De Fide, commences, Epiphanius recollects his experience writing the Panarion in order to proclaim his accomplishments. Imagining the classification of the heretics as an act of prolonged and treacherous discovery, Epiphanius expresses the ethnographic perspective of heresiology by casting the production of his text in the symbolic language of travel and return:
We have discussed the various, multiform, much divided, rash teachings of the crooked counsels of our opponents, have distinguished them by species and genus and, by God's power, have exposed them as stale and worthless. We have sailed across the shoreless sea of the blasphemies of each sect, with great difficulty crossed the ocean of their blasphemous, shameful, repulsive mysteries, given the solutions to their hosts of problems, and passed their wickedness by. And we have approached calm lands of the truth, after negotiating every rough place, enduring every squall, foaming, and tossing of billows, and, as it were, seeing the swell of the sea, and its whirlpools, its shallows none too small, and its place full of dangerous beasts, and experiencing them through words.Footnote 38
The taxonomic endeavor of the heresiologist, here articulated as a system of natural classification ordered by genus and species, is conceived as an ethnographic excursion born of theological necessity. Travel, as the metaphor of textual production, gives rise to an intellectual and spiritual exhaustion, but this is an altogether expected consequence of an ethnographic effort to stabilize the content of the Christian world. Having sailed across the sea of heresy and contended with “the perils of the deep,” Epiphanius and his metaphorical travel companions “recover from all our fear, distress, and illness, as we inhale the mainland breezes with the utmost relief, as we [have come to] safety and won our way to the calm harbor.”Footnote 39
The result of this theological journey, with all its uncertainty and injury, is a return to the safe refuge of orthodoxy. When Epiphanius reconnects with the orthodoxy symbolized in the city of Jerusalem—the journey into darkness has led inexorably to “the holy Jerusalem and Christ's virgin and bride, the firm foundation and rock, our holy mother”—he immediately cherishes the restorative power of the Lord's sanctuary, both for its physical and spiritual sustenance: “for we have always been in need of him and in every part of these Sects, in our continual encounters with their obscurities.”Footnote 40 Orthodoxy, figured as holy Jerusalem, blossoms into a vivid metropolis, the wonder and glory of which are made manifest to the faithful and concealed from the unbelievers.Footnote 41 And yet, while the settled comforts of Jerusalem rehabilitate the exhausted Epiphanius, the journey itself remains fixed in his mind; its disruptive effects do not end with his metaphorical rejuvenation. Indeed, just as Epiphanius celebrates his textual triumph and safe return, De Fide fully exposes the illusory control of heresiology's model of ethnographic classification. James Clifford has argued that dislocation engenders inquiry—“‘Theory’ is a product of displacement, comparison, a certain distance. To theorize, one leaves home.”Footnote 42 In precisely the same way, Epiphanius's voyage into the violent waters of heresy spurs reflection about the destabilizing effects of exploration. Theoria [looking at/contemplation], as Ian Rutherford notes, combines “vision and intellectual inquiry.”Footnote 43 For Mela and Epiphanius, to see the world is to contemplate its wonders, oddities, complexities, and mysteries.
While the language of rhetorical mastery substantiates certain authorial pretensions of the heresiologists, geographers, and ethnographers, it also unmasks the more profound conceptual perplexity endemic to ethnographic writing and research.Footnote 44 Scholars routinely identify Christian heresiology as a site of ecclesiastical or theological authority and imperial control. In my view, however, the genre of heresiology actually reveals the internal tensions and constraints embedded within claims of totalizing knowledge, rather than illustrating complete mastery. In comparing the works of Mela and Epiphanius, I am trying to draw attention to the ways in which certain ancient ethnographic texts articulate the constraints of writing and knowing peoples. As both a mode of writing and manner of thinking, ancient ethnography exists at the intellectual conjunction of epistemological ambition and constraint: how much can we know about the world and its inhabitants? The ethnographic disposition is oriented around dissociative binaries: triumph and failure, on the one hand, and control and disruption, on the other. Epiphanius and Mela, each in his own way, define the problem of textual comprehension and representation not through a distinction between objectivity and subjectivity, as much of contemporary anthropological discourse does, but by conveying the impression that the diversity of the world is unquantifiable, truly unknowable, and outside the realm of representation.Footnote 45 I call this the epistemological paradox of ethnography. The campaign for maximal knowledge not only amplifies the deep, pervasive cleavages within the textual conceit of ethnographic writing, but also exposes the authorial inability to manage this newfound cultural, ethnic, and religious knowledge. The discoveries from voyages do not simply produce invaluable knowledge; they become lasting evidence of the struggle, past, present, and future, to fix control over a diversifying world. Insofar as the world is simply beyond the command and control of texts, ethnography perpetuates this epistemological paradox.
To return to my opening example, as Mela's Chorography unfolds, the world he describes slowly exposes the fault lines in the ethnographic gaze.Footnote 46 It is in the Chorography's Africa, a site of profound cultural and anthropological tension, that the textual constraints of ethnographic analysis are most emphatically on display. Africa, Mela informs his readers, is highly fertile, yet largely uninhabited.Footnote 47 He reports that it is “inhabited by people socialized according to our custom,” while in the interior of the continent “the scarcely human and rather brutish Goat-Pans, Blemyes, Gamphasantes, and Satyrs possess, rather than inhabit, the land. They roam freely everywhere, with no houses and no fixed abode.”Footnote 48 The Romanized north of the country, which bears the marks of Roman civilization, slowly recedes as readers make their way inland, to the southern and western parts of the continent. The nomadic peoples of the interior are known for their “rather uncouth way of life.”Footnote 49 The people “beyond the desert” are further marked off from the norms of the Roman perspective.Footnote 50 The Trogodytae (cave-dwellers) “own no resources, and rather than speak, they make a high-pitched sound. They creep around deep in caves and are nurtured by serpents.”Footnote 51 The Augilae worship the spirits of the dead, while the Gamphasantes forswear clothing and weapons. And as Pomponius rounds out his description of the peoples of Africa, he introduces the most extreme illustrations of the periphery: “The Blemyes lack heads; their face is on their chest. The Satyrs have nothing human except their superficial appearance. The form of the Goat-Pans is celebrated in their name. So much for Africa.”Footnote 52 As Rhiannon Evans describes it, “as the least well-known part of the known world, Africa's interior functions especially well as a stage for playing out fears about the unexplored reaches of the third continent. It is the Counterworld in Our World, the mirror of the oikoumene.”Footnote 53 But by constructing this inverted realm in such jarringly oppositional terms, Mela inaugurates the first of a series of cracks in the structural integrity of his investigation. Africa becomes an ethnographic paradox precisely because these “freaks” of nature, in enticing and yet repelling the ethnographic gaze, unhinged the simplicity and coherence of Roman taxonomic discourse.Footnote 54 The chaos and disorder of the world itself is codified in Mela's text, as he too struggles to contain his subversive discoveries. Precisely because the Africans of the Chorography have become known, they have to be explained and contained.
While the uncivilized were dispersed throughout the world in Gaul, Britain, Ireland, Scythia, and India, the monstrous peoples of the Chorography are confined to the plains of inland Africa. In narrowing the territorial scope of his fascinations, Pomponius encloses or at least seeks to manage the temptations of his ethnographic curiosity. But Africa endures as a fixture of the ethnographic gaze insofar as it remains beyond the bounds of absolute understanding. Indeed, for all the talk of the Africans’ inhumanity, the region and its inhabitants, Pomponius reports, remained largely unknown: “nothing noteworthy meets those who follow the shores eastward. Everything is a wasteland. . .. After that, there is a huge tract without inhabitants. For quite a long time it was uncertain whether there was sea beyond and whether the earth had a periphery, or whether, with the seawaters eliminated, Africa extended without end.”Footnote 55 Strabo's description of Africa in his Geography similarly emphasizes the mystery of its interior regions: “since several deserts intervene, we do not know all these regions. Similarly the regions above Ammon and the oases as far as Ethiopia are likewise unknown. Neither can we tell the boundaries either of Ethiopia or of Libya, nor yet accurately even those of the country next to Egypt, much less of that which borders on the Ocean.”Footnote 56 And when Pliny, after describing numerous peoples and places throughout Africa, ventures into the desolate recesses of the country, his ethnographic imagination is awakened:
The rest of the country is uninhabited. Then come regions that are purely imaginary: towards the west are the Nigroi, whose king is said to have only one eye, in his forehead; the Wild-beast-eaters, who live chiefly on the flesh of panthers and lions; the Eatalls who devour everything; the Man-eaters, whose diet is human flesh; the Dog-milkers who have dogs’ heads; the Artabatitae, who have four legs, and rove about like wild animals; and then the Hesperioi, the Perosi and the people we have mentioned as inhabiting the border of Mauretania.Footnote 57
Ignorance prompts Pliny's imagination, which creates culture and peoplehood in order to complete the imperial ethnographic map. The desire for total comprehension breeds imaginative speculation. The opportunity to define what was previously unknown understandably held great ideological potential. Geographic, ethnographic, and encyclopedic contemplation serve the interests of imperial domination.Footnote 58 But lurking beneath the comforting illusion of mastery lie not only the unanticipated consequences of discovery, but also of theoretical miscalculation. In the struggle to contain troubling discoveries in his text, Mela codifies the disorder of the surrounding world. His ethnography creates an authorial certainty, which falters as the known world of his text denatures the fixity of cultural and geographic boundaries.
In point of fact, Mela's text, however fantastical, complicates the seemingly straightforward cycle by which discovery begat knowledge and knowledge facilitated certain rhetorical postures of mastery and imperialism. As the Chorography illustrates, there is an increasingly vivid sense that knowledge of the world beyond Rome and its territories is as likely to disrupt the narrative of texts as to support them. The periphery holds the very real potential to trap authors in an epistemological and rhetorical imbalance. The puzzling nature of the earth—with its various borders, coasts, interiors, inhabitants, and climates—is exacerbated at the very start of the treatise when Pomponius outlines his narrative plan. Describing the shape of the whole world, he reflects briefly on its grand divisions:
In the same way, the earth also is divided from east to west into two halves, which they term hemispheres, and it is differentiated by five horizontal zones. Heat makes the middle zone unlivable, and cold does so to the outermost seasons, but not at the same time. The Antichthones inhabit one zone, we the other. The chorography of the former zone is unknown because of the heat of the intervening expanse, and the chorography of the latter is now to be described.Footnote 59
Mela jettisons any consideration of this unknowable zone out of necessity, in an effort “to impose limits on the known world, to package the oikoumene in a readable and therefore knowable form.”Footnote 60 The sense of a radical disjuncture between the two worlds, the one firmly knowable (the οἰκουμένη) and the other altogether concealed, the counterworld or Antipodes, slowly recedes as the existence of an alternative hemisphere becomes too enticing and, indeed, too useful to resist.Footnote 61 Mela first marshals the notion of the counterworld to explain the otherwise inexplicable flooding of the Nile.Footnote 62 And when this counterworld arises again in Book Three, the reference only exacerbates its enigmatic character: “Taprobane is said to be either a very large island or the first part of the second world, but because it is inhabited, and because no one reportedly has circumnavigated it, the latter interpretation is as good as true.”Footnote 63 The intrusion of the counterworld into the realm of the inhabited world irrevocably disturbs the neatly delimited structure of the upper hemisphere. If the anti-world explains the natural laws of οἰκουμένη, the two regions are fundamentally inseparable domains. To the extent that the lower hemisphere remains unexplored, its explanatory potential is elusive. However, the counterworld's disruptive potential remains intact. Mela has created an immensely powerful yet powerfully unknowable tool of exposition. The imperial ambition of the Roman world is now defined by the struggle to contain and comprehend the counterworld. The distinction between the known world and the unknown world has been thoroughly disrupted, if not altogether obviated.
While Mela may tell us little about the actual geographical features of the ancient Roman world, his journey through the terrain of the known world illustrates the conjoined peril and opportunity of ethnographic discourse.Footnote 64 Like the hybrid peoples of inner Africa, the world as a mass of particularities and complexity defies tidy classification. Evans lucidly summarizes the matter:
For the Roman geographer, there is a tension between the attempts to close down, secure, and contain the world in text, and the intrusion of the so-called “outlandish”—the world outside those limits is always creeping in. This text emphasizes the disorientation of the Roman onlooker faced with the zones of the world which remain unseen, unmapped, and, more unnervingly, unmappable. . .. What Mela's world shows is a fear of boundaries dissolving, structures slipping and the Other World seeping into Our World.Footnote 65
As much as the discovery of previously unknown peoples and places bolsters Roman notions of cultural and military triumph, it indicates the conceptual problem of a world seemingly unknowable in scope, detail, and design. Ideological desires become conceptual impossibilities, and conceptual impossibilities accentuate practical possibilities, transforming the supposed power of ethnography into a self-deceiving trap of fascination. The Chorography displays Mela's inability to control the unpredictability of ethnographic investigation and knowledge acquisition.Footnote 66
The Ethnographic Bind of Heresiology
For early Christian authors, the heretics were the peoples that most persistently ensnare the Christian ethnographic gaze. Heresies challenged the pastoral expertise of the heresiologists and compelled explanations and refutations of their appearance, diversity, and proliferation. And while I have outlined the epistemological gymnastics underlying Mela's drive to explore and explain—the inability, conceptually speaking, to stabilize the world—I have only casually gestured at the parallel concerns within heresiology's conceptual framework. In this section, I wish to delineate the specific ways in which the textual apprehensions of heresiology mirror Mela's own quandaries of ethnographic fascination. The point of this comparison is to not to suggest literary dependence. Rather, it is to note the ways in which Christian heresiology poses many of the same ethnographic paradoxes as Mela's text and translates them into distinctly Christian terms. Although the ethnographic structure of the Panarion is clearly framed by scripture, a tension between the form and content of the text remains. The desire for an expansive and all-encompassing knowledge undermines the simplicity of scripture's ethnographic categorizations.
When, in his concluding paean to the holy catholic church, Epiphanius revisits his text's organizational paradigm—an allegorical reading of the Song of Songs—he offers a detailed account of its broader ethnographic implications.Footnote 67 His attempt to inventory the sectarian realm assumes scripture's infallibility as an organizational principle. And though Epiphanius prizes his investigative skills and techniques, his Panarion delimits heresy not by phenomenological or observational data but by textual fiat. Reiterating, first, his textual precedent, he then considers its broader ramifications for his ethnography:
“There are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and maidens without number, but one is my dove, my perfect one” (Song 6:8)—with the addition of “my” and “my.” For she is his “dove” and his “perfect one,” since the others are said to be and are not, while she herself is named twice. He did not say, “They are my eighty concubines,” of the others. He awarded the queens their honorable connection with him through the glorious name; but of the concubines he declared their complete foreignness. When I note their numbers I am obliged to investigate the passage by the anagogical method of spiritual interpretation, so as not to pass them by. . .. For [it is plain] that the number written of each thing in scripture is unalterable (ὅτι μὲν γὰρ καὶ ὁ ἀριθμὸς γεγραμμένος ἀπαράβατός ἐστιν ἑκάστης ὑποθέσεως), and that nothing which is assigned a number can be without value or reduced in number in the scripture for no good reason.Footnote 68
As a textual restraint upon the ethnographic gaze, scripture's power of foreclosure attests heresiology's new fixation: numbering the heretics. In contrast to the early heresiological treatises of Hippolytus and Irenaeus, which contemplated the philosophical, numerological, and astrological borrowings of the heretics in fairly haphazard structural narratives, later iterations of the genre were systematic and precisely enumerated catalogues of heretical parties.Footnote 69 The very fact that heresiology now fastidiously tallies heresies not only confirms the radically widened topography of the Christian world, but also points toward the genre's more rigid or formal organization. Like Pomponius Mela, who used the counterworld to explain the natural laws of the known world, Epiphanius ventures into the world of the youths (heretics), not only to magnify the grandiloquence of the truth housed within the church, but, more tellingly, to confirm the verisimilitude of Song 6:8.
The eighty concubines that the Panarion names and refutes comprise only a small portion of the total volume of known heresies. In an acknowledgement of his text's necessary limits, Epiphanius wonders, “who can count the variety of this world?”Footnote 70 There are, in fact, “young girls without number,” which denote “the further philosophies all over the world.”Footnote 71 Forty-four Greek philosophies are added to the Panarion's tally,Footnote 72 along with the seventy-two “repulsive philosophies of the Indian nation” (only the gymnosophists, Brahmans, Pseudo-brahmans, corpse-eaters, practitioners of obscenity, “and those who are past feeling” are named).Footnote 73 Media and Ethiopia are each reputed to have six distinct sects. Epiphanius further reports that in Parthia, Elamitis, Caspia, Germany, Sarmatia, and among the Dauni, Zickchi, Amazons, Lazi, Iberians, Bosporenes, Geli, and Chinese, “there are any number of different laws, philosophies and sects and a countless throng of varieties.”Footnote 74 Outlining his knowledge of the plenitude of cultic mysteries and rites among the Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians, and Indians, he pays them inconsistent attention, resigning himself to the opinion that “these people are hopelessly lost.”Footnote 75 Epiphanius's scholastic pursuits testify to his skills as an ethnographic compiler and, in turn, emphasize his textual achievement. His myriad additions to the heretical pantheon illustrate his active engagement with and knowledge of the world beyond the eighty; they accentuate his relentless push to consume and reveal as much knowledge as he can acquire.
Epiphanius, in fact, uses omissions to demonstrate further his role as shepherd of his readers. As he builds a wide-ranging knowledge of heresy through literary augmentations, he explains his excisions as the necessary result of limited time and space.Footnote 76 When he revisits the philosophical and theological topography of the Christian world in De Fide, he concedes the impossibility of a comprehensive investigation. He cites in support Heb 11:32: “And ‘what shall I say? For the time will fail me if I tell’ of the countless differences in people's various practices, as well as in their virtue and in their vice.”Footnote 77 Although Epiphanius openly confesses to the insufficiency of the scope of his text, he crafts this concession around a fundamental distinction between the practical and conceptual constraints of his text. He recasts the limitations of his heresiological venture as a justifiable redaction of the facts. But the excision of data, he claims, is a conscious choice, not an underlying failure of intellectual capacity: “But again, I omit the names of many other mysteries, heresiarchs and fomenters of schism whose leaders are called Magusaeans by the Persians but prophets by the Egyptians, and who preside over their shrines and temples.”Footnote 78 The Panarion, despite its omissions, is not a product of ignorance, but one of remarkable judgment and restraint. Its precise delineation communicates Epiphanius's firm grasp of an evolving heretical domain. The scope of his heresiological investigation, he implies, does not suffer from a lack of knowledge; instead, it is the fear of incompletion that curbs its grandeur.
While one could read—and, indeed, the heresiologists did read—excisions as evidence of comprehensiveness, the menace of the heresies derived from the fact that they disrupted the very notion of boundaries within the known world. The profound ethnographic paradox of heresy was that, on account of its geographical diffusion, it brought the unknown into the known world. Strategic ignorance could, theoretically, contain the counterworld of Mela, although he himself was unable to avoid the temptation of being there. For Epiphanius, however, there is no escaping heresy's transcendence of geographical difference. Any one heresy might exist in only one region or territory, but heresy, as a theological and ethnographic category, exists everywhere.Footnote 79 The eradication of theological borders creates the conceptual conditions by which heretical intransigence transforms the singular world of knowable Christian orthodoxy into a profusion of unknowable collections of heretical opinion. The ethnographic logic of the Panarion perpetuates the dangers of Christian universalism.Footnote 80 If the church was to act as the guarantor of a proper theological existence—just as Rome had conceived itself as the new protector of civilized values, succeeding Greece—comprehensive knowledge (and thus total control) of its domain was the sine qua non of the heresiologists’ argument for orthodoxy.Footnote 81 The world of heresy out there, reported and imagined in texts, holds seemingly limitless types of peoples. Epiphanius's scriptural prooftext, Song 6:8, instead of strengthening the text's force of closure, breaks the totalizing framework completely. The verse, as Epiphanius observes, in fact decrees the infinitude of heresy: “How many other sects have not [also] grown up among the Greeks after the four most famous ones which we have mentioned—and further, after those sects and the ones after them, how many individuals and ideas keep arising of themselves, with seeming youth, in accordance with the opinion of each?”Footnote 82 The heretics turn the so-called authority of Christian orthodox writers, garnered through scholastic due diligence, against them. If heresiology is to be measured by its comprehensiveness, it founders before it even begins.Footnote 83
The discursive effort to obtain textual comprehension over against the heretics evinces a highly unstable and indefinite grip on the depths of a rapidly evolving, expansive Christian milieu. As a phenomenological category with seemingly endless variations, the adaptability of heresy stymies production of Christian ethnography.Footnote 84 Epiphanius himself labors to comprehend the infinitude of the heretical parties. And by recasting the problem in terms of the unified orthodoxy versus the diversified plurality of heresy, he seeks to diminish the need for a complete textual catalogue. It is the contrast alone that sufficiently demonstrates his point. He writes:
And so, as I have said, the sects I have listed in succession are eighty concubines. But no one need be surprised if each of them is given different names in every country. What is more, we must observe that each sect in turn has frequently divided into many parts on its own and the names of them are different. This is no surprise; it is the way things are. But I find eighty-one in all—one more than eighty because of the one who is different from them all, but is the only one allotted to the bridegroom acknowledged by him with such a name as “One is my dove,” and again, “my perfect one.” In other words all the concubines are low-born and not reckoned as harmless, or pure and gentle.Footnote 85
Epiphanius addresses here the essential abnormality of the heretics, which differentiates them from virtually every other known ethnographic or geographic object. The heretics present a double challenge to their “orthodox” opponents: not only do they articulate alternative modes of being Christian—with distinct rituals, texts, interpretive strategies, cosmologies, and histories—but they also endlessly adapt and alter their alternative doctrines and habits. In contrast to the Roman and Greek ethnographers who had struggled to describe a world beyond complete comprehension, Epiphanius toils to define a sprawling miasma of theological variation that is mutating before his very eyes. There is no conceptual way to exclude an infinitely vast and forever evolving counterworld of heresy. Despite the fact that his list of “youths without number” proves scripture's veracity as the determinant of the natural order of the heresies, it undermines the heresiological strategies for containing heresy. Even though the path of heresy is shown to follow the letter of scripture, the proof is an altogether irreconcilable discovery.
Epiphanius's desire to expose the heretics—in the face of massive proliferation of the heretics—governed his textual effort. But lurking beneath the veneer of textual domination was the paradox of ethnographic obsession.Footnote 86 The cycle of discovery and decipherment was, on the one hand, the ceaseless power of ethnographic inquiry and, on the other, its very ruin. While the acquisition of new knowledge of heresy across the world served heresiological interests, it also held the potential to create new lacunae within the very same textual edifice. The customs and habits of the heretics not only disoriented the supposed norms of orthodox Christianity, they also enveloped the entire history of the church in a cloud of epistemological uncertainty, fear, and impossibility. Epiphanius's crafty reading of Song of Songs, while purporting to contain the world of heresy, infinitely multiplied its dominion. And it was not merely the case that some heresies remained unknown, obscure, or altogether unknowable; certain heresies had yet to come into existence. The history of heresy had not run its course, and its continual metamorphoses eluded textual efforts to comprehend it. As much as discovery begat knowledge, and knowledge buttressed existing models of human diversity (and/or engendered new ethnographic models), there came a recognition point at which the accrued information became too abundant, diverse, and fantastical for the authorial intellect and textual field to hold firm. Attempting to organize the infinitude of the heresies rendered Christian ethnography a monumental, if always partial, effort.Footnote 87
Writing of his own ambivalence as the author of an unsettling yet necessary treatise, Epiphanius contemplates the constraints upon his performance:
In any case may I, and all the entirety of the holy catholic church, and all the readers of this book, remain unharmed by such a suggestion of the devil and his mischief! For if I were to start [in] again on the other things they say and do—which are like these and as numerous, and still more grave and worse—and if, for a curative drug, I should also wish to match a remedy, like an antidote, with each thing they say, I would make a heavy task of composing this treatise.Footnote 88
Even if he had more time—or the wherewithal to begin anew—the epistemological and conceptual fissures remain firmly embedded within the genre itself. Precisely because there is no escaping, as it were, the endless iterations of heretical generation, the genre represents a failure of ambition and imagination. Its inabilities are its essence. Indeed, when Epiphanius tries to defend his text's unbridled potential for exhaustive comprehension, he only underscores the scriptural strictures undergirding its production:
But if I were to describe the woman ecstatics in Memphis and Heliopolis who bewitch themselves with drums and flutes, and the dancing girls, and the performers at the triennial festival—and the women at Bathys and in the temple of Menuthis who have abandoned shame and womanliness—to what burdens for the tongue, or what a long composition I could commit myself, by adding their countless number itself to the number I have already given! For even though I were to take on the enormous task I would leave our comprehension of these things incomplete, since scripture says that there are “young women without number.”Footnote 89
While there is, in the end, no circumventing the investigative and structural parameters set down by scripture, the infinitude of the heretics attests the overarching textual paradox of ethnographic inquiry. In the extreme case that is heresy, ethnographic objectification evolves into a vicious cycle of futile pursuit. Heresy's malleability upsets the hyper structured aim of ethnographic analysis. The diversity of the world does not yield to intellectual regulation born of careful research and investigation. Instead, it is illustrative of the inherent epistemological restraints on the human ability to theorize the world.Footnote 90
Despite the fact that exhaustive discovery is finally revealed to be an ethnographic mirage, Epiphanius concludes his epilogue with a reminder that these sects, though innumerable, are youths. That is, they are bound by a certain shared disposition and theological orientation, which perhaps renders them more alike than would seem:
And so, at the close of the entire work, I have said that those who are “young” in their own way, to suit their own tastes, are “without number”—by no means for good, to practice the various forms of wisdom, judgment, courage, prudence and righteousness. Others of these act “young” more arbitrarily, and perversely make themselves [strangers] to the truth, so that there is no number of them. But the one dove herself, the holy virgin, confesses that God is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, a perfect Father, a perfect Son, and a perfect Holy Spirit.Footnote 91
While Epiphanius expects heretical plurality, difference, and mutation, the binary between the plurality of heresy and the singularity of orthodoxy obviates the need for textual perfection. The heretics, he implies, can be refuted with reference to the condition they represent as the embodied contradistinction of the ever-stable church of Christ. If, as Epiphanius proposes, heresy follows a particular genealogy of error, which begins with Serug and Terah, the infinite numbers of heretics are simply additional symptoms of an already diagnosed disease.Footnote 92 The rhetorical escape hatch—the way around the problem of ethnographic peril—is to remind readers that heresies are a unity of diversity. They are all manifestations of the same hubristic condition. Their outward difference is superficial, while inwardly they are the same.
Conclusion: Knowability in Heresiological Discourse
Near the start of the second proem of his Panarion—before he unfurls his epic tale of the history of sectarianism—Epiphanius invokes the Lord and Holy Spirit, in a gesture explicitly reminiscent of the Greek author's invocation of the Muse, to strengthen his inadequate and feeble mind as he undertakes a systematic treatment of the heretics.Footnote 93 In making his plea to the Christian God, Epiphanius posits an essential distinction between that which is knowable and that which is not. He writes about the limits of his investigation in terms of temporality and eternality, humanity and divinity, knowability and unknowability:
To a person reading a work on any question the aim [of the treatise] ought to be [clear]—the discoveries which training enables my small mind to grasp lie in the temporal realm, and I certainly do not proclaim knowledge of everything in the world (πάντων τ
ν ἐν τ
κόσμῳ). There are things which cannot be uttered, and things which can. There are things untold (ἀμύθητά), beyond counting (ἐν ἀριθμ μὴ καθιστάμενα), inaccessible so far as man is concerned, and known only to the Lord of all. But we are dealing with variance of opinions and kinds of knowledge, with [proclaimed] faith in God and unbelief, with sects, and with heretical human opinion which misguided persons have been sowing in the world from man's formation on earth till our own day.Footnote 94
The dichotomy Epiphanius posits is clear: knowable and utterable things (ϕατά) belong to the human mind and the temporal realm, while unknowable and unutterable things (ἄϕατα) are the province of the divine alone. But the details of these epistemological categories are left unspecified, save for his insistence that sectarianism belongs to the temporal realm. These are heretical human opinions (κακοδόξου γνώμης ἀνθρωπείας), which have been sowed by misguided persons (πεπλανημένων ἀνδν). Although Epiphanius forthrightly acknowledges the limitations of his investigation—what we might call the known unknowns of divine matters—he is adamant that the heretics fall well within the category of knowability. And as he acknowledges himself, the seemingly incalculable proliferation of the heretics disrupts the coherence of his grander narrative. Epiphanius's insistence that those things which are beyond counting remain squarely outside the human realm of understanding undercuts the epistemological framework through which he navigates and combats the heretical plurality: the heretics are an elusive object of knowledge. That elusiveness, like the problem of Mela's counterworld, does not simply diminish the heresiologists’ textual control over their world, but it renders the very effort an ethnographic impossibility.
Defined though it is by the words of scripture, Epiphanius's numerical ordering of the heretics emanates from his own exhaustive yet still incomplete knowledge of the world of heresy: “I mean that I have composed a description and refutation of [eighty] sects, and at the same time, as far as my human frailty permitted, revealed what goes on in each. For this is the end of my full account of the origins and causes of the eighty sects I have been told of, and whose number and names I know, and the formularies, proof-texts and positions of some of them.”Footnote 95 Because heresiology is an attempt, above all else, to manage the unmanageable, its rigid codification produces a complex matrix of epistemological and textual limitations. A careful evaluation of the full rhetorical scope of the Panarion reveals less an unvarnished ideology of domination than it does a nuanced and, indeed, tenuous grasp of the burgeoning world of heresy. Heresiological ethnography is at once descriptive and aspirationally prescriptive.
As the form and content of the genre attract the heresiologist's scrutiny, fault lines of ethnographic representation and imposition readily emerge and harden. Epiphanius does not simply register (or feign) his nervousness about the protracted exposition and, by implication, promotion of heretical doctrine. Rather, he advances a far more striking realization: his heresiological work is as much an illustration of the chasms in Christian knowledge about the world as it is an instantiation of it. The point is not that Epiphanius's text is a failure, but rather that he expressly recognizes and reflects upon his ignorance and the limits of his text in decidedly ethnographic terms. And by evoking the fears and triumphs of the discovery and accumulation of knowledge, he situates his own discourse within that of the geographers and chorographers from across the centuries of Mediterranean history. And yet, by venturing into the water of heretical infinitude, Epiphanius succumbs to the very same impossible question that doomed Mela's Chorography: how does one organize the infinite and unknown, that which allures precisely because of its continually evolving—and thus elusive—nature?
