From Ethnography to List
From Ethnography to List
Transcribing and Traversing Heresy
This chapter turns to Augustine's De haeresibus to examine how he confronts not only the textual possibilities and limitations of epistemological representation, but also the theoretical capacity to comprehend his heretical environs. Through intertextual reading, research, and personal experience, Augustine edited the work of his predecessors and contemporaries into a limited heresiological handbook. By explicitly adding and subtracting heretics, Augustine presented his text as a polemical palimpsest of ethnographic knowledge. But although Augustine insisted on his vast knowledge of the heretics, he readily admitted to falling short. What is particularly revealing about Augustine and his text is the precise manner in which he framed his limitations, not simply as a collector of abstract knowledge but as a living, practicing heresiologist. For Augustine, the limitations of heresiology were insurmountable because they were fundamentally ethnographic.
Keywords: Augustine, De haeresibus, heresiology, heretical environs, ethnographic knowledge, heretics
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