To try and address this, I must first issue a couple of clarifications.
The first of these being that a lot of these things assume a background rooted in Western - primarily Abrahamic - religiosity, and the Church of the Flame isn’t like that, for all its name translates as “church”.
If one must make Earth analogies, it’s more like ancient paganism spot-welded to Shinto for Platonists, with a dash of Zoroastrianesque dualism in which the role of cosmic evil is played by a spiritually generalized Second Law of Thermodynamics.
(“It is the first duty of all sophont beings to be suckage-minimizers. It is the second duty of all sophont beings to be awesomeness-maximizers. On these two things is the whole of the law based.”)
The other one is that the Empire didn’t have anything resembling a medieval period.
Which is really important in thinking about history and religion, because so much of it in the Western world is still wrapped around the great post-Roman hangover.
(If one simplifies dramatically - and I know I’m doing it, don’t write letters - it was the near-complete collapse of anything resembling civilization across most of Europe and then spending the next ten centuries scrabbling around trying to resurrect the ghost of what once was out of the wreckage. Everyone kept speaking degenerated Latin dialects and awarded themselves titles resembling “Caesar” because if they pretended really hard…
And the Church in Rome got to shape everything in its image because by preserving knowledge and offering at least some continuity with Roman civil institutions it was pretty much the only points of light in an Age that was, modern historians’ distaste for the term aside, pretty damn Dark.)
But if you look at the grand sweep of Imperial history (see this FAQ page for the overview), they progressed directly from the (equivalent of) the Classical period into the (equivalents of) the Renaissance[1], and then the Industrial Revolution, without bothering with the rather inconvenient collapse in the middle.
…okay, there’s one more.
The Flamics are much more interested in orthopraxy than orthodoxy[2], relately focus on emulation rather than worship as the key element in how one should relate to deities, and are explicitly anti-dogmatic inasmuch as you’re - individually and collectively - supposed to seek to learn more about the divine principles, a vast and potentially endless task, not rely on some age-old infallible and complete dictation of them.
So heresy, unlike the way Western religiosity would think of it on Earth, is not a matter of theological wrongthought. (If you are antidogmatic/discovery-focused in the way the Flamics are, you are going to spend a lot of time arguing over theological and practical differences in the Way, and you don’t get to suppress them by declaring them heresy. To do, in fact, would be - well, heretical[3].)
The Antithetical Heresies, those being the ones that the Church would be inclined to call heresy and come down on you for, are the ones that aren’t only heteroprax, but unenlightenedly heteroprax in ways that are specifically Entropy-serving. Wrongdo, if you will.
(As for, specifically, witch-finders, if anyone was looking for women living in cottages in the woods who knew an awful lot about herbalism, midwifery, and the like, it would have been the order of Gaëlenén, who would be very interested in persuading any such to join up and share their knowledge with the rest of the team.
To be fair, the Compassionate Order of Gaëlenén did have a templar - militant order - counterpart, whose motto wasn’t literally “If You Mess With The Healers, We’ll Make Sure You Need One”, but you get the idea.)
Also, for that matter, that the boundary between the secular and spiritual worlds is much thinner than it is in most Earth religions. To use my existing example, Gaëlenén is the god of health and healing, medicine, etc. The entire healthcare profession are, by definition, emulators of Gaëlenén, ergo all doctors, nurses, paramedics, et. al. are de facto at least lay members of the Compassionate Order. Similarly, Saravoné is the deity of law and justice, and the same could be said of every judge, deemster, arbitrator, and constable.
Indeed, if you work in any profession that has eikonic patronage, and it’s quite hard to think of one that doesn’t, you’re literally doing gods’ work all the time.
Urgh. That’s long enough for now. When I get back to this next and am somewhat less tired, I’ll talk about what specifics I have established in my notes, some historical goings-on, and what became of some of the better-known templar orders in the modern era.
More of a gradual continued “Naissance”, really, insofar as no-one needed to rediscover what was still right there. ↩︎
It is generally considered doctrine that the eikones care much more about whether you are acting in accordance with their will than whether or not you believe in them, or have even heard of them; to steal a quotation, “Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.” ↩︎
Technically, that’s probably the Antithetical Heresy of the Thoughtless Churl. ↩︎