Doxa to Orthodoxy

Pierre Bourdieu defined ” doxa ” (originally, “opinion” or in the NT, “glory”) in a variety of ways, but a couple are illuminating.   Doxa is “the world of tradition experienced as a ‘natural world’ and taken for granted,” the set of practices and beliefs that “goes without saying because it comes without saying,” and, more formally, “a particular point of view, the point of view of the dominant, which presents and imposes itself as a universal point of view – the point of view of those who dominate by dominating the state and who have constituted their point of view as universal by constituting the state.”

Heresy, by contrast, is what challenges doxa and thus provokes an “epistemological rupture”: “The dominated classes have an interest in pushing back the limits of doxa and exposing the arbitrariness of the taken for granted; the dominant classes have an interest in defending the integrity of doxa or, short of this, of establishing in its place the necessarily imperfect substitute, orthodoxy .”

Leaving aside the overly simplistic dominant/dominated framework, this gives some illumination into the history of Christian heresy.  Early heresies did not oppose articulated creeds, because there were none (or at least no universal, thoroughly elaborated creeds).  They challenges “the taken for granted,” which is why the orthodox who battled heresy so often appeal to liturgical forms, words, rites.  We all baptized in the Name of Father, Son, and Spirit; Arius says the Son is not eternal God; he is subverting a rite that we have all accepted as going without saying.

But this also means that orthodoxy is not simply a restoration of doxa , but doxa forced by heresy into conscious reflection and ultimately into creedal speech.  Glossing Athanasius: The history of redemption is that the Word became flesh; the history of heresy is that unquestioned doxa becomes Word.