JURE ET HAERESI: A GENEALOGICAL ANALYSIS OF DUAL SANCTIONS IN LAW AND RELIGION
JURE ET HAERESI: A GENEALOGICAL ANALYSIS OF DUAL SANCTIONS IN LAW AND RELIGION

Summary/Abstract: Orthodoxy is constituted as a process of safeguarding against any addition or distortion that might compromise the unaltered transmission of the revealed truth. Since salvation presupposes adherence to this truth, and deviation entails exclusion from its soteriological logic, heresy—once qualified as such—necessarily incurs the gravest form of religious sanction. The Council of Nicaea (325 AD) marks, for the first time, the imposition of a dual sanction upon heresy: theological, through the condemnation of Arianism as doctrinal deviation, and legal, through the intervention of Emperor Constantine, who enforces exile and censorship. This article interprets this moment as the genesis of a hybrid regime where spiritual exclusion and sovereign coercion converge. Drawing on and extending Michel Foucault’s typology of power, it argues that this fusion destabilizes the autonomy of pastoral governance and reveals a structural inconsistency within Christian authority. Heresy is reframed as a stress test that exposes contradictions between theological and political rationalities and argues that the coexistence of transcendent and immanent sanctions undermines both: divine judgment is no longer trusted to compel truth on its own, and law forfeits its claim to neutrality by enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy. The article identifies four axes of contradiction—temporality, normativity, subjectivity, and logic of governance—through which it shows that the post-Nicene regime binds faith to coercion, and salvation to obedience, inaugurating a lasting internal instability in Christian governmentality.

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