Eleven Tractates 3.56–4.81

… condemn, since novelty of mind is the mother of contention, the teacher of offence, the food of schism, the nourishment of heresy, the shape of the sin of transgression. For everything that appears to have been said or done by God or by the apostles, or approved to be done, is that of which it is written: "Yes, yes; no, no"; but whatever is devised anew from cleverness and slander—on this the testimony of the divine power is shown, which says: "Whatever is more than this comes from evil." Let us see, then, whether the apostles of Christ Jesus, the teachers of our way of life, read nothing outside the canon. The apostle Judas cries out—that twin of the Lord, the one who, when he is thought to have tested Christ, God, after the marks of the passion, believed the more, the one who both saw and touched the pressed traces of the bonds and the glories of the divine cross: "Enoch, the seventh from Adam," he says, "prophesied of these, saying: Behold, the Lord comes with his holy thousands to execute judgment and to convict everyone concerning all the harsh things that sinners have spoken against him." Who is this Enoch whom the apostle Judas took up in testimony of prophecy? Did he, wishing to prophesy of God, have no other to cite than the prophecy of this man—whom, if what is said is true, he would himself have condemned by the ordering of the canon?

Or perhaps Enoch did not deserve to be a prophet—he whom Paul, in the letter to the Hebrews, testifies had received the testimony before his translation, or whom, at the beginning of the race, when the form of the world and the nature of the age were still rough, holding the sin of deceived man, and when man would not believe in a future conversion to God after sins, God preferred to translate among his own rather than let perish? If there is no doubt about him, and the apostles are believed that he is a prophet, how can it be called consultation rather than uproar, counsel rather than rashness, faith rather than faithlessness, when, while a sentence is aimed at the avenging of grudges, a prophet who preaches God is condemned? Or are we dealing with trivial matters, or have we dice and knucklebones in our hands, or are we handling the farces of the stage, that, while we follow men of this world, we condemn the sayings of the apostles? Or what grace of establishing peace is it to believe what men like and not to hold to the apostles' words? But perhaps someone may boast of his cleverness in these matters, so that, although even one testimony is enough to confirm the saints' faith in God,

he may still say that one should not believe a single witness, but that the account of every word stands on two or three witnesses. Let whoever is of this kind turn round, then, and let him, as a diligent searcher of the Scriptures, inquire whether we speak the truth. What does it mean that holy Tobit, setting out precepts of the life to come for his son, when he declared what he should keep, said: "We are sons of the prophets: Noah was a prophet, and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all our fathers who prophesied from the beginning of the world"? When was a book of the prophet Noah read in the canon? Who has read a book of Abraham among the prophets of the established canon? Who has taught that Isaac once prophesied? Who has heard of a prophecy of Jacob placed in the canon? If Tobit read them and earned the testimony of prophecy in the canon, how is it that what is given to him as a testimony of proven virtue is ascribed to others as an occasion for just condemnation? Amid these things, let each one forgive us if we prefer to be condemned with the prophets of God rather than, with those who rashly presume, to condemn things that are religious. For who would not fear, with Noah as his accuser, the trial of the divine judgment? Of him the apostle says:

"He preserved Noah, a righteous man, a herald of righteousness, bringing a flood upon the world of the ungodly." Who would not seek the bosom of the prophet Abraham as a testimony of rest? Who would not want to be reckoned in the seed of Isaac? Who would not love Jacob, called by God the god of Pharaoh? Or who, rejecting the memory of the saints, would not tremble, since it is written: "Truly I say to you, whoever offends one of the least of these who have believed in my name, it is better for him that a millstone be tied to him and that he be thrown into the depth of the sea"? If this is said of the least, I want to know what is pronounced about those who are first in the faith. Yet in all these books there is no fear in deleting whatever may have been inserted by wretched heretics, and in rejecting whatever is not found to agree with the prophets or the gospels. For the saints themselves do not embrace, for God, falsehood among truths, or sacrilegious and detestable things in place of holy ones; and it is better to take the tares out of the grain than to have lost the hope of good fruit because of the tares—which the devil sowed among holy things for this very reason, so that, unless under a careful reaper, the grain would perish with the tares, and he would make good things die with the worst,

binding with one sentence both him who joins the worst with the good and him who destroys the good with the bad. Indeed, in the gospel according to Luke, the evangelist speaking, God testifies, saying: "The blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the foundation of the world will be required, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary"; and Elijah says in Kingdoms: "They have dug down your altars, they have killed your prophets, and I alone am left, and they seek my life." Who is this prophet Abel, with whom the blood of the prophets began, and whose beginning ends in Zechariah? Who are those in between who appear to have been killed? For if everything that is said is sought in the books of the canon, and to have read more is a sin, we read of no prophet killed among those set in the canon; and if nothing outside the authority of the canon is either to be taken up or held, we cannot believe mere tales and not keep the history of what was written by the proof of the deeds. For perhaps someone will jump up and say that Isaiah was sawn in two; if anyone among those of this kind who

condemn these things is of that kind, let him shut his mouth, or certainly, producing the history of the event, let him say that he believes paintings or poets—since they now more easily admit what the studies of the philosophers falsely tell—so that at least for testimony of such a thing the blood of the prophets killed since the foundation of the world may be required. If the evangelist, reading these things, rightly brought them forward as testimony, saying: "Search the Scriptures," he has drawn me too to read what he had read. Nor can I say what I would be forced to say, that following the apostle was for me not the instruction of faith but the trap of someone deceived. For again in the gospel according to Matthew it is written: "Joseph rose and took the child and his mother by night and went away into Egypt, and he was there until the death of Herod, so that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet might be fulfilled, saying: Out of Egypt I called my son." Who is this prophet, whom we do not read in the canon, the faith of whose prophecy the Lord fulfilled as guarantor of a promised gift? Certainly it is no small greatness of the work granted, to believe that God would suffer, and by the testimonies of prophecy, as it were,

to prepare the (road) of the divine journey, from which God would not turn aside, so as to prove that he had spoken in him who had prophesied. Certainly a book cannot be condemned whose testimony fulfils the faith of a canonical statement; nor, as among the choices of mortal banquets, can one thing be chosen and another rejected; nor is the question about sophistries, where each follows what he has taken up and, while they want a dialectical work of cleverness, they have made sects out of persuasion. The Scripture of God is a solid thing, a true thing, not chosen by man but handed down to man from God; if its firstfruits are holy, the lump also is holy. From this, in short, comes heresy, when each one serves his own cleverness rather than God and arranges not to follow the creed but to dispute about the creed, whereas, if they knew the faith, they would hold nothing outside the creed. For the creed is the seal of the true thing, and to deface the creed is to prefer to dispute about the creed rather than to believe it. The creed is the work of the Lord in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, the faith of one God, from whom Christ, God, the Son of God, the Saviour, born in the flesh, suffered and rose again for love of man; who, handing the creed to his apostles—what was, is, and was to come—showing in himself and in his creed the name of the Father, the Son, and likewise of the Son, the Father,

taught it, so that the error of the Binionites might not prevail; for he who, when the apostles asked, showed that he was all that was named, wished himself to be believed as one, not divided, as the prophet says: "This is our God, and no other will be reckoned beside him, who showed the way of discipline and gave it to Jacob his servant and to Israel his beloved; afterward he was seen on earth and lived among men; the Lord God is his name." But lest we be said to have turned, led by love of the faith, to other things than we had proposed—although from this abundance there lies open a place for conquering various heresies—we wish the work undertaken to be specifically about this: that we may conquer faithless falsehood with a cloud of testimonies. Now we must return to those points, so that, if we are found acceptable in that for which we are blamed, we may be seen to have argued rightly about the rest too. For thus Paul too says that God said: "It is more blessed to give than to receive," and we do not read in the canon that God said this. And Daniel testifies that God had spoken, saying: "For iniquity will come out of Babylon from the elders who seemed to govern the people."

And whereas we believed these things that were done, said, or written, in the words of the evangelist and in the speech of the apostle and in the divine words, behold, now a time has come when, while a dispute about superfluous things is sought, bewilderment is put into the faithful. For we cannot say that God did not say what the apostle said he said, or that what Scripture testifies a prophet said was not prophesied. And while we rightly believe these things for faith, we do not see them written in the canon; and therefore, if everything outside the canon must be condemned, how is either the testimony of condemned writings received, or, in what is written, is the writer's authority not kept? So too the prophet Ezekiel says: "Thus says the Lord to Gog: You are he of whom I spoke in ancient days by the hands of my servants the prophets." I believe that he said it, and I am not so faithless as to affirm either that the prophet invented what God said or that God lied; yet who that prophet is through whom God said this, I do not see in the canon; and while we have faith in the sayings, we do not find their writer in the canon.

So too in the books of Chronicles we find Nathan the prophet, Ahijah the Shilonite, the visions of Iddo, the words of Jehu son of Hanani, declared as warrant for the truth and for the authority of what they did, Scripture saying: "And the rest of the words of Jehoshaphat, first and last, behold, they are written in the words of Jehu son of Hanani, who wrote them in the book of the kings of Israel"; and we do not read these things written in the books of the canon, but we confirm that they are received by the canon. As it says there too: "And the rest of the words of Solomon, first and last, behold, they are written in the words of Nathan the prophet and in the words of Ahijah the Shilonite and in the visions of Iddo, which he saw concerning Jeroboam son of Nebat"; and likewise there: "And the rest of the words of Rehoboam, first and last, are they not written in the words of Shemaiah the prophet and of Iddo the seer, and all his acts?"; and likewise there: "And the rest of the words of Abijah, and his acts and his words, are written in the book of the prophet Iddo"; and likewise there: "And the rest of the words of Amaziah, first and last, behold, are they not written in the book of the days of the kings of Judah and Israel?"; likewise there: "Are these not written in the book of the days of the kings of Judah?"; likewise there: "And the rest of the words

of Manasseh and his prayer which he prayed to the Lord in the name of the God of Israel, behold, they are written in the words of his prayer and in the words of the seers." Who, then, would patiently accept such waves? On one side unlearned madness presses, ignorant fury demands, saying nothing but: "Are the things you say catholic or not? Condemn what I do not know; condemn what I do not read; condemn what, from zeal for lazy idleness, I do not look into." On the other side the divine word presses: "Search the Scriptures," it says, warning in particular that the words of those whose blood is required in testimony should not be denied. Placed between these, we now necessarily wish to be confidence what we earlier called caution. I have the testimony of God, I have that of the apostles, I have that of the prophets: if I seek what belongs to a Christian man, what belongs to the order of the church, what belongs to Christ, God, I find it in those who preach God, I find it in those who prophesy. It is not fear but faith that we love the better and reject the worse, keeping this one thing among them: that since in books of this kind,

which diligence retained, beyond the number of the canonical books, for the labour of reading, and which were taken up to confirm what we read written in the canon, the mind of heretics, invading many of them and preparing battle for the catholics, preferred to falsify rather than keep them, let us rightly bear that apostolic judgment: that every spirit that denies Jesus is not from God, and every spirit that confesses Christ Jesus is from God, as it is written: "For no one says in the Holy Spirit 'Jesus is anathema,' and no one except in the Holy Spirit says 'Lord Jesus.'" Indeed, in the ancient records of books, when the devil envied the testament of the Scriptures, it was not enough for him that, Jerusalem being captured and the altar of the Lord polluted, the temple was destroyed; for because it was easy for man to restore with handmade things what had been made by hand, the ark of the testament was burned, the devil knowing that human nature, bound to the world, would easily lose faith if it did not have the testimonies of the Scriptures for proclaiming the divine name. But the nature of the divine mystery is shrewder than the devil's: to show what God could do in a man, it willed that Ezra be preserved, who rewrote what had been burned. If we believe that they were truly burned and truly rewritten—although the burning of the testament is read in the canon,

its rewriting by Ezra is not read in the canon—yet because, after the testament had been burned, it could not have been restored unless this had been written, we rightly give faith to that book which, brought forth with Ezra as its author, even though it is not placed in the canon, is kept with due reverence as a record of the restoration of the divine testament. In it we read written that the Holy Spirit, keeping the deeds of men and of things from the beginning of the world, entered the heart of a chosen man, and that—what the form of writing could scarcely keep for human memory—repeated in order, number, and reckoning, when he wrote speaking by day and not silent by night, he composed for human memory all things that appear to have been done or that we read written. Here one may well exclaim: Is it so? Is it allowed? How, I ask, are we guilty for reading a few of these, when we are rather guilty for not reading all that has been prophesied of God? I do not doubt that one of those who love slanders more than faith will say: "Seek nothing further! It is enough for you to read what is written in the canon." To his words I would easily rise, by the bent of human nature, which seeks rest rather than labour,

were not the testimony of Luke the evangelist pressing me, who says in the Acts of the Apostles: "The disciples together compared the Scriptures among themselves, whether it was so, as Paul had spoken to them"; and I recognize that the things I wish to know have received the testimony of prophecy in the canon. For although it is a crime not to have believed the apostles' words, it is no damnable fault to build the foundation of faith by the proof of the writings and to keep nothing in which the devil's rebuke could make us weak. The divine word could have—since all that it had said was its own—spoken as if from itself, not saying that it was written by another, but bringing it forth from itself; but by saying that it is written, necessarily setting before us the care of reading, it did not omit either its own glory, of which there had been prophecy, or the gratitude owed by posterity to him who had prophesied. I, certainly, between both am debtor to both, so that I both read him who prophesied for the memory of God and believe God. For who would not delight that Christ was prophesied before the ages, not by a few but by all? Or who is so barren a judge of the divine greatness and of so incredible a miracle—God to be born and to have flesh, and the virgin womb to have opened for the ministry of the divine Word as the dwelling of a body for conceiving and bearing—

as to think that the secrets of the divine mind did not cry out into all the earth and to every man, when it is written: "Let every tongue confess that the Lord Jesus is in the glory of God the Father"? And therefore, whoever it is that denies these things, I certainly know that he will receive the reward of that Pharisee who, when the Lord came and the whole crowd together with the apostles cried out, "Hosanna, hosanna in the heavens; blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord," said that they ought to be rebuked who so unhesitatingly did not keep silent about the glories of God present. But let one who is of this kind see that the Lord said: "Even if these keep silent, the stones will cry out," and let him understand that, if the hardness of rocks, naturally dead, is brought to life into the use of human speech to give testimony to God, how is the tongue of the saints shut, which is urged to confess both by its own nature and by divine grace? For if pagan souls, entangled in the forms and ceremonies of idols, speak of the swift passages of birds and the paths of wings given to the winds as if for foreknowledge of a future outcome, and of the veins of entrails throbbing with the animation of an earthly

spirit, while they give faith to demons, they assert that the entrails of animals, about to die a moment later, foretell the future, and they ask the dead about life, saying to the stone "Rise" and to the wood "Awake"; and so sacrilege is called devotion by them, and ignorance is called wisdom, while they do not know that they sacrifice not to God but to a demon. If such people have glory among themselves in this, how can we reject the divine prophecies of the saints and, obeying our own wishes, envy those who have prophesied God, abandoning the apostolic precepts that say: "Do not quench the Spirit; do not despise prophecies"? And therefore, because where there is liberty there is Christ, I wish to cry out, one for all, because I too have the Spirit of the Lord: let the envy of the devil cease! The Lord has been announced by all, Christ has been prophesied by all—by Adam, Seth, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and by the others who have prophesied from the beginning of the world; and I say fearlessly what the devil envies: every man knew that God would come in the flesh—not to speak of those whom God placed in the gospel in the order of his genealogy, who were to supply both faith in the divine nature and the number for the canon. As for those who know and deny, the punishment is greater,

so too it is perfect glory not only to believe in the heart but also not to deny the glory of confession with the mouth, as David says: "I believed, therefore I have spoken." In this the apostle Peter too, knowing the principle of number in the canonical books, and loosening the liberty of reading what was written of Christ, when he sent a letter to the Colossians, said: "When this letter has been read among you, see that it is read also in the church of the Laodiceans, and that you read the one that is the Laodiceans'." Or was the apostle damnable in your eyes, who permitted his disciples to read a letter that was not in the canon? Or have we greater care for Christ, and do you so act on your wishes that you aim an unjust judgment even at what was decreed before you? For to all of us who believe in Christ as God, the fullness of faith is the day of the Lord, and the law of life is the form of the apostolic precept; since, if faith comes from hearing, and hearing stands through faith, how is the hope of things to come set before us, if what was taught before, written or said of Christ and kept in memory, never rejected by the apostles but read, is not only rejected by us but condemned as sacrilegious, when it is written in the gospel:

"Whoever has done a mighty work in my name cannot speak evil of me"? In this, however, I do not refuse or reject the view that these things are not to be entrusted to unskilled ears, lest, since many of them have been falsified by heretics, while under the prefixed name of the prophets they seek a divine work in the words of the saints, they fall into the pit of heretical falsehood, not keeping fully the discipline of the apostolic word. But neither is the prophecy of the saints to be condemned because of the wickedness of the worst; for in all heresies they have made the institutions of wretched sects out of persuasion by a perverse interpretation of all the Scriptures, and all of them affirm that they believe Christ is God and that they are Christians. Nor for that reason is divine Scripture to be condemned, or faith in Christ repudiated, or the name of Christian shunned, if, while they wish to assert their sacrileges, they dare to usurp a share in the catholic name.

For if we wish to condemn everything they read, we certainly condemn even what is recorded in the canon; hence it is better to condemn the deadly interpretation and the sacrilegious teaching than divine Scripture, since it is written: "To you it has been given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God, but to the rest I will speak in parables, so that seeing they may not see and hearing they may not hear." For me, certainly, a servant of the Lord, considering these things, this is the one conviction: that whoever does not love Christ, let him be anathema, maranatha.

Although nature itself teaches us that, amid the unexplored ways of human life and the measurable battles of the world unworthy of God, nothing is more useful to man than every day to reject what is friendly to the world and to keep the precepts of the divine ordinance—as the apostle says: "All friendship with the world is enmity with God," and again the prophet says: "Do not delay to turn to the Lord, and do not put it off from day to day"—yet the minds of mortals, held captive by familiarity with worldly things, are shut within the error of human weakness, and always the divine mercy, amid so many ill-considered courses, meets those in danger of shipwreck as an anchorage and a longed-for harbour. Grasping in the prophetic voices the single measure of the divine sentence, God appointed the glorious day of the Pasch, so that—although God wished his people to serve him every day, yet, because the whole world lies in the evil one, and while there is no end to things endless we set no measure with a foot planted on slippery ground among uncertainties—

exhorting us to the commemoration of the passion he endured for us, he might compel us, at least once a year, to obey the faith—us whom he remembered owe all that we live to him alone, as the apostle says: "Whether death or life or things present or things to come, all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's." And therefore, beloved in God, since we have been placed for this, to release your minds, besieged within the narrow straits of human weakness, as into a new light by the religious exhortation of teaching, necessarily, as the forty days begin in preparation for receiving the Pasch, as it is written, like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, we command one thing by authority and beg another by concession; for in this season both he who already abstains from evil, accustoming himself to good, ought to want better things, and he who is still bound by the undisciplined error of the world is urged to be called back from what is foreign, at least by observing the solemn days, so that, when the Lord's Pasch comes, both the faithful may rejoice

that he has kept the faith of the commandments once received, and the penitent may seek salvation again, and the catechumen may not lose confidence in the forgiveness to come, so that what is written may be fulfilled: "Behold the day of the Lord and his salvation! Open the gates, that a people may enter that keeps righteousness and truth, for, embracing understanding, they have received peace, hoping in the Lord." For this reason, beloved, sharers in the heavenly calling, purify your souls for God, and, as it is written, abstaining from bodily desires which war against you in your members, fasting for God, do not fast in shameful gains, nor in the uncertainty of avarice, nor in quarrels and strifes; for though the divine work in these days seeks abstinence from delicacies and the hardening of the body, it does not seek such a fast; but, as it is written, purified in body and spirit, show love simple in affection from a true heart, and show yourselves rich in good works for the divine glories, and, as the prophet says, loose every bond of injustice and reject the obligation of oppressive dealings,

rescue the one who receives injury, judge for the orphan, vindicate the widow, set free the broken, tear up every unjust contract; break your bread for the hungry, bring the needy and homeless into your houses; if you see the naked, cover them, and do not despise those who toil; for so it is written: "If you give your bread to the hungry from the heart and satisfy the humbled soul, your light will rise in the darkness, and your God will be with you, and you will be satisfied with all good things in all that your soul desires." For consider what the Lord's Pasch is, as the apostle says: "Christ our Pasch has been sacrificed," showing that the endurance of present things leads to the reward of blessed immortality; in which the almighty God, born of a virgin and taking a body, not refusing the shame of a human beginning, while bearing in himself manifold proofs of the truth of human birth, chastises the faults of human nature,

he passed through all the indignities of our nature—conception, birth, wailing, cradle—so that, coming in the flesh, he might overturn the order of the earlier decree, and, fastening to the gibbet of the glorious cross the curses of earthly dominion, he, immortal and not to be conquered by death, might die for the eternity of the dying. Since, with him, some of us have been buried into death in baptism, and others long to die and be buried with him, we ought to come to the day of the Pasch in such a way that—because his shame is our honour—imitating the forty days' desert of the Lord fasting in the gospel, walking in the flesh we may not live according to the flesh, so that, even if we have been overcome a little, we may still be restored by the divine light of the commandments into the framework of the body of Christ; for, as one who has obtained mercy, I am counsellor, I am witness, that we cannot be free from sins unless we are saved by the forgiveness of baptism and the redemption of the divine cross.

For these are the days in which Moses, fasting for the number forty, merited the utterance of the divine word to receive the law, when the sea feared the announced Pasch of the Lord, and the mightiest element on earth, whose very nature is storm, divided its waters and gave the people a dusty road, and the barren sand, about to give the world a miracle against its usual uses, produced pasture of grass. These are the days in which Joshua son of Nun, likewise spending them in fasting, entered the land of promise, when, clad in the armour of faith, with the ark of the Lord standing in the midst of the waters, the Jordan, full to all its banks, gave the people a dry road, and, running forward and flowing back on itself, it feared lest nature oppose the divine command. These are the days in which God, coming in the flesh, after enriching the font of baptism, stationed in the desert and fasting days and nights, conquered, and was tempted by the devil, now by the need of the fast, now by the ambition of mortals, now by fear; in which, although God could not be tempted,

yet, preparing the passion of our salvation and fulfilling in himself the decrees of the Pasch, not abolishing them, by being willing to be tempted he showed what we ought to reject in these days; and what we read that he answered the tempting devil for our faith, let us use for the destruction of the devil's temptation.