The Great Heresies (Maps)

Historic international bestseller. Now available with custom maps, a beautiful book cover, and typesetting that you can actually read!

Belloc's starting point is that Christian faith is under attack, and cites six different heresies, some of which are historical, and some a real danger today.

Heresy has a very specifying meaning here for Belloc. It's when you take a basic idea, retain it, but twist one aspect of it. So all these attacks on Christianity started with Christianity itself, which is why the threats and attacks are so dangerous, but it is a perversion of the original idea.

Included as heretical attacks on Christianity are both Islam and Protestantism.

A heresy is when you take a basic idea, retain it, but twist an aspect of it. There are five heresies covered in this book which includes Islam and Protestantism.

"Mohammed insisted upon a whole group of ideas which were peculiar to the Catholic Church... the very foundation of his teaching was that prime Catholic doctrine, the unity and omnipotence of God," writes Belloc. And it is this proximity, this dangerous theft of Christian ideas, that marks Islam as so dangerous.

This book was written almost a hundred years ago when Islam was in a state of abeyance, but it clearly warns that at any time there could be a resurgence of Islam, which will mark danger for the west and for Christianity.

Robert Spencer, one of the premier experts and scholars on Islam in the world, has written an introduction for this book noting the importance of Belloc's work and noting the dangers that Islam poses.

Arianism and Albigensianism are two other heresies which are of more historic.

Finally Belloc goes over what he calls the "Modern Attack" which is his way of describing socialism and communism and warns it is, "a wholesale assault upon the fundamentals of the Faith--upon the very existence of the Faith... The forces now opposed to the Faith design to destroy."

This book deserves wide readership for its history and philosophy from the internationally renowned Belloc. Plus it includes two brand new original introductions, one from the excellent scholar of Islam, Robert Spencer, and the other from Belloc scholar Pearce.