In a programmatic essay entitled ‘How to read heresiology’, Averil Cameron suggested that a pervasive discomfort with the genre was responsible for modern scholarship's almost complete indifference to heresiology as literature.Footnote ¹ Apart from the highly slanted information that it contained about otherwise undocumented groups, what could possibly be interesting about literature scorned for superficiality, intolerance and a dry and uncreative scholasticism? But, as Cameron pointed out, there is more originality in treatises on heresy than scholars generally assume. Attention to the literary and rhetorical features of heresiology might also illuminate the means by which the authors of these works managed to bring clarity and structure to something as unwieldy and nebulous as ‘heresy’.

In his own exploration of this subject, Berzon identified what he calls a ‘discursive consonance’ between heresiology and ethnographic writing (p. 252). For one thing, heresiologists tended to treat heresies as well-defined groups identifiable by distinctive names, beliefs and customs. In their quest for complete control of their subject matter, heresiologists, like ethnographers, struggled to strike the right balance between the ‘microscopic’ and the ‘macroscopic’. Doing so required more than simple description. The heresiologist also had to uncover the origins of heresies and their mutual connections. Dogmatic and pastoral constraints further complicated their task. In the hands of the heresiologists, theology was the chief determinant by which heresies were sorted and classified. Nor was it enough simply to describe the distinctive religious beliefs of each heresy; they also required refutation. To counter the competing theories of heretics, heresiologists had to offer an explanation of religious diversity that both satisfied the requirements of ethnography and conformed to their own vision of sacred history. While absolute mastery of the subject was the theoretical ideal, achieving that goal was undermined by the seemingly endless multiplication of heresies whose heterogeneity defied systematic analysis. Heresiologists also worried that too much information would be counter-productive, even threatening to poison the minds of their readers. Warnings against unrestrained curiosity and appeals to forgive deficiencies in their work reflect the heresiologists’ own concerns that, as a system of classification, ethnographic description was ultimately self-defeating.

Because ethnography in the ancient world did not constitute a separate literary genre, Berzon prefers to speak more loosely of an ‘ethnographic disposition’ or an ‘ethnographic gaze’. But even that terminology is problematic. Descriptions of nations and peoples typically formed only one part of some larger project (for example, geographical treatises, and universal and natural histories). To distill from this source material anything approaching an ethnographic method, or even a disposition, would be an imposing, if not fruitless, task. For that reason, Berzon's selective appeal to the primary sources tends to be governed by analytical categories derived from modern critical theory. Whether they accurately reflect the mindset of the ancient ethnographer is another question.

Of all the heresiologists, Berzon's approach works best with Epiphanius, especially in his description of how heresy began. In his Panarion, Epiphanius traces the origins of heresy to five proto-heresies, the names of which reflect the character of the age in which they arose. ‘Scythianism’, for example, is the name that Epiphanius assigns to the heresy arising in the aftermath of the confusion of tongues. Any reader familiar with Hellenistic ethnography would have had little difficulty understanding why Epiphanius chose that name for a stage in world history marked by dispersion and migration. The one thing about the Scythians that captured the attention of Greek observers was their nomadic and stateless existence. In this way, Epiphanius folded his exposition of heresy into a larger history of world culture. The idea that the world's heresies – eighty altogether – were traceable to five ur-types was also an elegant way to resolve the tension between the microscopic and macroscopic. Behind the profusion of outwardly disconnected heresies lay a shared and ancient ancestry – what Berzon calls ‘unity in disunity’.

All of this makes Epiphanius a good candidate for ethnographic analysis. But in seeking for ways to control their subject matter, heresiologists, including Epiphanius himself, were not bound to a single paradigm. Epiphanius’ own narrative of the succession of the five pre-Christian mother heresies is structured in the form of a compressed universal history. And his description of his work as a collection of remedies against the toxins of heresy calls to mind the scientific and technical handbooks that proliferated in late antiquity. While acknowledging the variety of literary forms available to the heresiologist (p. 16), Berzon commits himself to the ethnographic paradigm even when its influence on the discourse of Christian heresiology is attentuated. Theodoret, for example, departs from the genealogical method favoured by Epiphanius and Hellenistic ethnographers and classifies heresies according to type. In composing his own unfinished work on heresies, Augustine says that he used Epiphanius. But does Berzon's description of his De haeresibus as ‘fundamentally ethnographic’ (p. 26) really add much to our understanding of what amounts to little more than a simple and unadorned list? As Berzon himself admits (p. 219), there is nothing in a list of eighty-eight heresies and the barest descriptions of them suggestive of an ethnographic disposition.

Modern critics have expressed disappointment that the only thing a man of Augustine's genius could do with the subject was make a list. But Berzon is probably correct in arguing that Augustine settled on this system because he understood that anything more would be counter-productive. Exposition of the ways in which Augustine and the other heresiologists dealt with the contradictions, tensions and limitations built into the whole system is one of the most impressive achievements of his study. Berzon also offers many perceptive observations about the similarities between Christian heresiology and the essentialising systems of religious classification used by Victorian anthropologists. If any one thing comes across in his study, it is the inventiveness of Christian writers in adapting ethnographic classification to their own ends. Beginning already in the second century, apologists appealed to ethnic categories to make Christianity understandable to the larger Greco-Roman world. In his account of Christianity's restoration of the primordial religion of the ‘Hebrews’, Eusebius imported the universalising rhetoric of ethnography into his own narrative of the descent of humankind into idolatry and paganism. This was an ambitious project, but no more so than the one undertaken by the heresiologists. We owe a great debt to Berzon for demonstrating how they succeeded in imposing order on what he rightly calls an ‘unruly and chaotic field of inquiry’ (p. 223).