(printed p. 2 — Book I)
Among the Greeks the word hairesis is so called from choosing, because a person chooses for himself a definite manner of thinking or living, where other choices are available. The word is a neutral one, used both in a good sense and in a bad one.
In a good sense Cicero says in the preface to the Paradoxes: “Cato, in my judgment a perfect Stoic, belongs to that school which follows no flower of oratory.” So too Saint Paul, in Acts 26, says: “According to the most exact sect of our religion I lived as a Pharisee.”
[margin: Title. Ausonius, Epistle 4 to Theon. Division. Good heresy.]
(printed p. 3)
In this same way Galen wrote a book on heresies, and Hippobotus another; Diogenes Laertius also has his own preface, in which he counts ten heresies of the philosophers. And in that same author it was once reckoned among distinguished things if someone belonged to a particular heresy, so much so that certain philosophers maintained that the Pyrrhonians did not have a heresy, while the Pyrrhonians themselves insisted, on the contrary, that they did have one.
Among Christians, however, from Saint Paul in Galatians 5:20 and from 2 Peter 2:1, the name is usually taken in a bad sense. It may mean some false and impious doctrine, condemned as such by the Church; or the fault of a person who stubbornly defends and retains that doctrine; or finally the very multitude of people who stubbornly adhere to such a doctrine. These are called heretics, and sometimes, even in Saint Epiphanius, haeresiotae and haeretistae, although those same terms are also sometimes taken in a good sense, as is clear from Josephus.
Among the Latins the same principle applies to the word sect. There is a good sect, about which our Apostle speaks in the cited passage of Acts 26, and about which Cicero says in the fifth Verrine: “We follow the sect and institution of these men.” In Brutus, or On Famous Orators, he likewise says: “Brutus followed the philosophical sect of the Old Academy.” He uses the word often in this way elsewhere too. There is also a bad sect, of which Galatians 5:20 says: “The works of the flesh are manifest: fornication,” and, after many other things, “strife, dissensions, sects.”
[margin: Evil heresy. Good sect. Evil sect.]
(printed p. 4)
Second Peter 2:1 speaks of “lying teachers who introduce destructive sects.” Cicero writes in the third letter to Brutus: “All were judged enemies who followed the sect of Mark Antony.”
The usage of the Hebrews’ own words chelakim and chelakoth is not unlike this; these names designate parts, divisions, and sections, as may be understood from Zephaniah 3:9 and from Hebrew writers. Yet the worse kind of heresy is always signified by minuth, and the adherents of it by the word minim.
When, therefore, I call the work Trihaeresium, or when I pursue the number of Jewish sects in general, I include not one meaning or the other, but both. Later, when I come to the individual sects, I shall discuss whether they are bad ones, or whether, in our present manner of speaking, they are truly heresies.