Heathen, Infidel, and Pagan

Most religions, especially those with proselytizing, recruiting, or militant characteristics, make a sharp distinction between “true believers” or “keepers of the faith” and “unbelievers,” namely outsiders, opponents, and holders of rival religions. In the course of the Middle Ages, when Christianity was in the ascendancy in Europe, various terms developed to denote and stigmatize those who were not followers of the Christian faith. These were, in order of historical appearance, heathen, pagan , and infidel . Although there were originally distinctions between the meanings of these three terms, these have tended to be lost in their somewhat indiscriminate use in subsequent centuries. Heathen is first recorded in its Anglo-Saxon form hæðeen , often denoting the Viking marauders, for example, in the entry for the year 793 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: “in the same year the harrying of the heathen destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne.” This became quite a common use. However, hæðeen could be used less emotively to mean “gentile” (as opposed to “Jew”) and is applied to the Good Samaritan.

By the early twelfth century it was being used (in the Middle English form hethen ) to mean “not Christian or Jewish, thus pagan,” ignoring other religions. The term is assumed to derive ultimately from Gothic haithi meaning “dwelling on the heath,” in the translation of the Bible into Gothic by Ulfilas, the Bishop of the Goths in the sixth century (Mark 7:26). Cognate forms of heathen are found in all the ancient Germanic languages and are taken to be a translation of Latin paganus , a rustic villager, the root of pagan . The assumption behind both heathen and pagan is that the old idolatry lingered longest in rural areas. Pagan was taken into English in the late fourteenth century, originally in the sense of "heathen"—that is, one unconverted to the Christian religion. In Middle English it developed two related forms payens and paynim , both of which were widely used and developed considerable emotive force, especially in the context of religious wars.

The origin of infidel lies in Latin in (not) and fidelis “faithful,” the term originally denoting a non-Christian, especially a Muslim. The word is defined with rather dry wit in the Oxford English Dictionary as “One who does not believe in (what the speaker holds to be) the true religion; an ‘unbeliever.’” In its early stages it denoted “an adherent of a religion opposed to Christianity, especially a Mahommedan,” being so used in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1485) in a reference to “two honderd sarasyns or infydels” (Curiously, saracen is actually the older term.) It became common in the Middle Ages to denote these outsiders impersonally as “the infidel” or “the heathen,” used of both Muslims and Jews, as if these religions were of no validity, so that the Crusades were commonly styled “the war against the infidel or heathen.” In the Canterbury Tales , Chaucer’s exemplary Knight had “foughten for oure faith” extensively against the “hethen” (ll. 62-66). Yet two of Chaucer’s most respectable pilgrims, the Man of Law and the Prioress, tell tales charged with religious animosity, the first against heathens and pagans, the second against “the cursed Jews.”

Subsequently infidel was applied to followers of other religions in general. In William Tyndale’s translation of 2 Corinthians 6:15 (ca. 1526), the term has the stronger sense of a person of no religion, an atheist. In The Merchant of Venice (1596), a play dealing directly with anti-Semitic attitudes, Gratiano says in a tense moment of legal tussling to Shylock, “Now, infidel, I have thee on the hip” (IV i 344). However, in the same play the curious character Launcelot Gobbo, “clown and servant to Shylock,” says a poignant farewell to Jessica: “Most beautiful pagan, most sweet Jew!” (II iii 11). In the post-Renaissance period, both pagan and heathen started to be used in a more secular fashion. Shakespeare extended the sense of pagan to mean “a prostitute” ( Henry IV Part II , II ii 68) while Alexander Pope satirized the sexual promiscuity of a society lady styled Narcissa for being “a very heathen in the carnal part” (“Of the Characters of Women,” I, l.67).

With the general secularization of Western society and the consequent decline of religion as a social force, all these terms have declined in currency and potency in the West. However, with the rise of militant Muslim sects, such as Al Qaeda, infidel is being brought back into currency as a propagandist term against the West, especially America. (Interestingly, similar chauvinist assumptions lie behind the original use of kaffir , which is rooted in Arabic kafir , an infidel.)