Prescription against Heretics 1–22

The character of the present times prompts this warning of ours as well: that we ought not to be astonished at these heresies, either because they exist, for they were foretold as coming, or because they overturn the faith of some, for they exist for this very purpose, that faith, by having temptation, might also have its testing. Idly, then, and thoughtlessly are many scandalized by this very fact, that heresies are so strong. How strong would they be if they had not existed? When something has been allotted to exist by all means, it receives the cause for which it exists. This secures for it the power by which it exists, so that it cannot fail to exist.

Fever, for example, is assigned among the other deadly and tormenting ends for the destruction of man, and we are not astonished that it exists, for it does exist, nor that it destroys a man, for that is what it exists for. Likewise, if we are terrified that heresies, produced for the weakening and death of faith, have this power, we should first be terrified that they exist at all; for while they exist they have the power, and while they have the power they exist. But fever, as an evil both in its cause and in its power, as is well known, we loathe rather than admire, and, so far as we can, we guard against it, since its removal is not in our power. Yet heresies, which bring eternal death and the burning of a greater fire, some prefer to admire for having this power rather than to avoid, so that they may not have it, though they do have the power to avoid them. Otherwise they will have no strength, if people are not astonished that they are so strong. For either people are led on into stumbling while they admire them, or because they stumble, they admire them, as though their great strength came from some truth. A marvel, of course, that evil should have its own strength! Except that heresies are very strong among those who are not strong in faith. In a fight of boxers and gladiators, a man often wins not because he is strong or because he cannot be beaten, but because the one who was beaten had no strength at all; so true is this that the same victor, matched afterwards against a truly strong man, even goes away defeated. In the same way heresies have their strength from the weaknesses of some, and have no strength if they run up against a faith that is truly strong.

These weaker ones are commonly built up to their ruin even by certain persons captured by heresy. Why did this woman or that man, most faithful, most prudent, most experienced in the church, cross over to that side? Who says this without answering himself that those whom heresies could change should not be reckoned prudent or faithful or experienced? And is it a marvel, I suppose, that someone formerly approved should afterwards fall away? Saul, good above the rest, is afterwards overthrown by envy. David, a good man after the Lord's heart, is afterwards guilty of murder and debauchery. Solomon, endowed by the Lord with every grace and wisdom, is led into idolatry by women. For to remain without sin was reserved for the Son of God alone. What then? If a bishop, a deacon, a widow, a virgin, a teacher, even a martyr, has fallen from the rule, will heresies therefore seem to possess the truth? Do we test the faith by persons, or persons by the faith? No one is wise, no one faithful, no one greater, except the Christian; and no one is a Christian except him who has persevered to the end. You, as a man, know each person from the outside. You think what you see; and you see only as far as you have eyes. But “the eyes of the Lord,” it says, “are lofty.” “Man looks on the face, God on the heart.” And so “the Lord” sees, and so he “knows those who are his,” and “the plant which he has not planted he uproots,” and he shows the last from among the first, and he carries “the winnowing fork in his hand to clear his threshing floor.” Let the chaff of light faith fly off as far as it will at every gust of temptation; so much the purer will the heap of wheat be stored in the Lord's granaries. Did not certain disciples, scandalized, turn away from the Lord himself? Yet the rest did not therefore think that they too must leave his footsteps; but those who knew that he was the Word of life and had come from God persevered in his company to the end, although he had gently offered them the chance to leave too, if they wished. It is a lesser thing if a Phygelus, a Hermogenes, a Philetus, and a Hymenaeus deserted his apostle: the betrayer of Christ was himself one of the apostles. We are astonished about his churches if they are deserted by some, when the things we suffer after the example of Christ himself are what show us to be Christians. “They went out from us,” it says, “but they were not of us. If they had been of us, they would surely have remained with us.”

Rather let us remember both the sayings of the Lord and the letters of the apostles, which both foretold to us that heresies would come and laid down in advance that they must be shunned; and as we are not terrified that they exist, so let us not be astonished that they have the power on account of which they must be shunned. The Lord teaches that many ravening wolves will come in sheep's clothing. What are these sheep's clothes but the outward surface of the Christian name? Who are the ravening wolves but deceitful thoughts and spirits lurking within to harass the flock of Christ? Who are the false prophets but false preachers? Who the false apostles but adulterous evangelists? Who are the antichrists, both now and always, but the rebels against Christ? Such will heresies be, assailing the church by the perversity of their doctrines no less than the Antichrist will then persecute it by the savagery of persecution; except that persecution makes even martyrs, heresy only apostates. And so “there had to be heresies too, so that those who are approved might be made manifest,” both those who stood firm in persecutions and those who did not swerve into heresies. For it does not help to regard as approved those who change their faith into heresy, though they interpret it the other way for themselves, because he said elsewhere, “Test all things; hold fast what is good.” As if it were not possible, when everything is tested badly, to stumble by error into choosing something bad.

Further, if he rebukes dissensions and schisms, which are without doubt evils, he immediately adds heresies too. What he joins to evils he certainly declares to be an evil, and indeed a greater one, since he says he believed what he had heard about schisms and dissensions because he knew that there must also be heresies. For he shows that, in view of the graver evil, he readily believed the lighter ones; not, surely, that he believed the evils because heresies were good, but to warn beforehand that one should not be astonished even at temptations of a worse kind, which he said served to make manifest all who are approved, that is, those whom they had not been able to corrupt. In short, if the whole passage is aimed at keeping unity and curbing separations, and heresies tear men away from unity no less than schisms and dissensions, without doubt he places heresies under the same condemnation as schisms and dissensions. And so he does not make those approved who have turned aside into heresies, since he rebukes above all turning aside to such things, teaching that all should speak one thing and think the same, which heresies do not allow.

No more on this, if it is the same Paul who elsewhere, writing to the Galatians, counts heresies among the sins of the flesh, and who advises Titus that a heretical man should be refused after a first rebuke, because such a man is perverted and sins, being self-condemned. Indeed, in almost every letter, pressing that adulterous doctrines be shunned, he censures heresies. Their works are adulterous doctrines, called heresies by a Greek word, in the sense of the choice that a person makes either in founding them or in taking them up. That is why he called the heretic self-condemned: because he has chosen for himself that in which he is condemned. For us, however, it is not lawful to indulge anything of our own choosing, nor to choose what someone else has introduced of his own choosing. We have the apostles of the Lord as our authorities, who did not themselves choose anything of their own will to introduce, but faithfully delivered to the nations the teaching they had received from Christ. So even if an angel from heaven preached a different gospel, he would be called anathema by us. The Holy Spirit had already foreseen that there would be, in a certain virgin Philumene, an angel of seduction transforming himself into an angel of light, led by whose signs and illusions Apelles introduced a new heresy.

These are the doctrines of men and of demons, born for itching ears from the cleverness of worldly wisdom, which the Lord called foolishness, choosing the foolish things of the world to confound even philosophy itself. For this is the stuff of worldly wisdom, a rash interpreter of the divine nature and arrangement. In short, heresies themselves are equipped by philosophy. From there come the aeons, and I know not what infinite forms, and the trinity of man in Valentinus: he had been a Platonist. From there comes Marcion's better god, praised for his tranquillity: he had come from the Stoics. And when the soul is said to perish, the Epicureans are followed; and when the restoration of the flesh is denied, it is taken from the single school of all the philosophers; and where matter is made equal with God, it is the teaching of Zeno; and where something is alleged about a fiery god, Heraclitus comes in. The same subject matter is turned over among heretics and philosophers; the same inquiries are entangled: Whence is evil, and why? And whence is man, and how? And, what Valentinus lately proposed: Whence is God? From “enthymesis” and “ectroma,” no doubt! Wretched Aristotle, who devised dialectic for them, an art of building up and pulling down, shifty in its propositions, forced in its conjectures, harsh in its arguments, a laborer of contentions, troublesome even to itself, reconsidering everything so as never to have treated anything at all. Hence those fables and endless genealogies and fruitless questions and words that creep like a cancer, from which the apostle, restraining us, testifies by name that philosophy must be guarded against, writing to the Colossians, “See that no one circumvents you through philosophy and empty seduction, according to the tradition of men,” beside the providence of the Holy Spirit. He had been at Athens and had come to know from his encounters this human wisdom, which apes and corrupts the truth, itself divided into many parts by the variety of its mutually hostile sects. What then has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What has the Academy to do with the church? What have heretics to do with Christians? Our instruction comes from the porch of Solomon, who had himself taught that the Lord must be sought in simplicity of heart. Let those see to it who have brought forth a Stoic and Platonic and dialectical Christianity. We have no need of curiosity after Christ Jesus, nor of inquiry after the gospel. When we believe, we desire nothing further to believe. For this we believe first: that there is nothing further that we ought to believe.

I come, then, to that point which our own people put forward as a license for curiosity and the heretics press to import scrupulosity. It is written, they say, “Seek, and you will find.” Let us remember when the Lord uttered this saying. I think it was at the very beginning of his teaching, when all still doubted whether he was the Christ, when not even Peter had yet declared him the Son of God, when even John had ceased to be sure of him. Rightly, then, was it said, “Seek, and you will find,” when he who was not yet recognized still had to be sought. And this as regards the Jews. For the whole word of this reproach belongs to them, who had somewhere to seek Christ. “They have,” he says, “Moses and Elijah,” that is, the law and the prophets, which proclaim Christ, as he says openly elsewhere: “Search the Scriptures, in which you hope for salvation; for they speak of me.” This is what “Seek, and you will find” means. For it is clear that what follows also applies to the Jews: “Knock, and it will be opened to you.” The Jews had formerly been with God; afterwards, cast out for their sins, they began to be outside God. But the nations were never with God, except as “a drop from a bucket” and “dust from the threshing floor,” and always outside. How then shall one who was always outside knock at a place where he never was? What door does he know, through which he was never either received or cast out? Is it not rather he who knows he was once inside and was driven out who knocks and knows the door? “Ask, and you will receive” likewise suits him who knew from whom he must ask, and by whom something had been promised him, namely the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whom the nations knew no more than any promise of his. And so he spoke to Israel: “I was not sent,” he says, “except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” He had not yet thrown the children's bread to the dogs; he did not yet command them to go into the way of the nations. Only at the end does he command them to go and teach and baptize the nations, since they would soon receive the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, who would lead them into all truth. And this too tends to the same point. If the apostles, the appointed teachers of the nations, were themselves to receive the Paraclete as their teacher, much more was “Seek, and you will find” idle for us, to whom the teaching was to come freely through the apostles, and to the apostles themselves through the Holy Spirit. All the Lord's words, indeed, are set down for all; through the ears of the Jews they have passed to us. But many of them, being directed to particular persons, have established for us not a warning that is ours in its own right, but an example.

I now yield this point of my own accord. Let it be said to all, “Seek, and you will find”; still, even here the sense must be settled under the helm of interpretation. No divine saying is so loose and diffuse that the words alone are defended while their meaning is not established. But first I lay this down: that there is some one and definite thing taught by Christ which the nations must by all means believe, and for that reason must seek, so that when they have found it they may believe. Now of one and definite teaching there cannot be endless inquiry. You must seek until you find, and believe when you have found; and nothing more, except to keep what you have believed, while you believe this besides: that nothing else is to be believed, and therefore nothing else sought, once you have found and believed what was taught by him who bids you seek nothing other than what he has taught. If anyone doubts about this, it will be shown that what was taught by Christ is with us. Meanwhile, trusting in the proof, I anticipate it, warning some that nothing is to be sought beyond what they have believed, which is what they ought to have sought, lest they interpret “Seek, and you will find” without the discipline of reason.

Now the meaning of this saying consists in three points: in the matter, in the time, in the measure. In the matter, that you consider what is to be sought; in the time, when; in the measure, how long. What must be sought, then, is what Christ taught, of course as long as you do not find it, of course until you find it. And you have found it when you have believed. For you would not have believed if you had not found, just as you would not have sought except to find. So you seek in order to find, and you find in order to believe. By believing you have fixed a limit to all prolonging of seeking and finding. The very fruit of seeking has set you this measure. He himself has marked out this boundary for you who does not want you to believe anything other than what he taught, and so not to seek anything else either. Otherwise, if, because so many other things have been taught by others, we must therefore seek as long as we can find, we shall always be seeking and never believe at all. For where will be the end of seeking? Where the resting place of believing? Where the completion of finding? With Marcion? But Valentinus too puts forward “Seek, and you will find.” With Valentinus? But Apelles too will knock at my door with this saying, and Ebion and Simon and all of them in turn have no other way to worm their way into my favor and win me over to themselves. So I shall be nowhere, while I meet everywhere “Seek, and you will find,” and as good as nowhere, as one who has never grasped what Christ taught, what ought to be sought, what must be believed.

One errs without penalty, if one does not sin; although to err is also to sin. He wanders without penalty, I say, who deserts nothing. But if I have believed what I ought to have believed, and think that something else must be sought afresh, I certainly hope that something else is to be found; and I would in no way hope so unless either I had not believed, though I seemed to have believed, or I had ceased to believe. So, deserting my faith, I am found a denier. Let me say it once for all: no one seeks except one who either did not have or has lost. That old woman had lost one of her ten drachmas, and so she was seeking; but when she found it, she stopped seeking. The neighbor had no bread, and so he knocked; but when the door was opened to him and he received, he stopped knocking. The widow asked the judge to be heard, because she was not admitted; but when she was heard, she pressed no further. So there is an end to seeking and knocking and asking. “For to him who asks,” it says, “it will be given, and to him who knocks it will be opened, and by him who seeks it will be found.” Let him look to it who always seeks, because he does not find; for he seeks where it will not be found. Let him look to it who always knocks, because it will never be opened; for he knocks where no one is. Let him look to it who always asks, because he will never be heard; for he asks of one who does not hear.

Even if we must still seek, and always, where ought the seeking to be done? Among the heretics, where everything is foreign and hostile to our truth, and whom we are forbidden to approach? What slave expects his rations from a stranger, not to say from his master's enemy? What soldier looks for a bounty and pay from kings who are not allies, not to say enemies, unless he is plainly a deserter, a turncoat, and a rebel? Even that old woman searched for her drachma inside her own house; even that man who knocked beat on his neighbor's door; even that widow appealed to a judge who was harsh, but not an enemy. No one can be built up from the source that tears him down; no one is enlightened by the one who darkens him. Let us seek, then, in what is our own, and from our own people, and concerning what is our own, and only that which can come into question without harm to the rule of faith.

Now the rule of faith (so that we may state here and now what we defend) is that by which it is believed: that there is one God only, and no other besides the maker of the world, who brought forth all things out of nothing through his Word, sent forth first of all; that this Word, called his Son, was seen in various ways in the name of God by the patriarchs, was always heard in the prophets, and at last was brought down by the Spirit and power of God the Father into the virgin Mary, was made flesh in her womb, and, born of her, came forth as Jesus Christ; that he then preached a new law and a new promise of the kingdom of heaven, worked miracles, was crucified, rose again on the third day, was caught up into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of the Father; that he sent in his place the power of the Holy Spirit to guide believers; that he will come with glory to take the saints into the enjoyment of eternal life and of the heavenly promises, and to judge the profane with everlasting fire, after the raising of both groups has taken place, with the restoration of the flesh. This rule, taught by Christ, as will be proved, raises no questions among us except those which heresies bring in and which make heretics.

For the rest, as long as its form remains in its proper order, you may seek and discuss as much as you like and pour out all your appetite for curiosity, if anything seems to you either to hang in ambiguity or to be overshadowed by obscurity. There is surely some brother, a teacher endowed with the grace of knowledge; there is someone among the well practiced; someone who has lived with you, curious like you, yet, though seeking with you, he will know in the end that it is better for you not to know, lest you come to know what you ought not, since you know what you ought. “Your faith,” it says, “has saved you,” not your practice in the Scriptures. Faith is set in the rule; it has a law, and salvation from keeping the law. Practice, however, consists in curiosity and has its only glory from zeal for skill. Let curiosity give way to faith; let glory give way to salvation. At least let them not make a din, or let them be quiet. To know nothing against the rule is to know everything. Even if the heretics were not enemies of the truth, even if we had not been warned beforehand to shun them, what is the use of conferring with men who themselves admit that they are still seeking? For if they are still truly seeking, they have not yet found anything certain; and so whatever they seem to hold for the time being shows their doubt, as long as they seek. So you, seeking in the same way, looking to those who are themselves seeking, doubtful to the doubtful, uncertain to the uncertain, must necessarily be led, blind by the blind, into the pit. But since, in order to deceive, they pretend that they are still seeking, so as to slip their treatises into us by injecting anxiety, and in the end, once they have gained access to us, at once defend what they said was to be sought, we must refute them in such a way that they know that we deny, not Christ, but them. For when they are still seeking, they do not yet hold anything; and when they do not hold, they have not yet believed; and when they have not yet believed, they are not Christians. But when they do hold and believe, they still say that one must seek, in order to defend it. Before they defend it, they deny it, confessing that they have not yet believed while they are seeking. Those who are not Christians even in their own eyes, how much less in ours? Those who come by deceit, what faith do they argue for? What truth do they champion, who introduce it by a lie? But they deal with the Scriptures and argue from the Scriptures! Of course: from what other source could they speak about matters of faith, except from the writings of faith?

We come, then, to the point at issue. This is what we were aiming at, and what we were preparing for in the preface of our address, so that we may now join battle on the ground to which our adversaries challenge us. They put forward the Scriptures, and by this boldness of theirs they at once move some people. In the actual encounter they wear out the strong, catch the weak, and send away the wavering with a scruple. So we block this position above all: they are not to be admitted to any dispute about the Scriptures. If these are their strength, then before they can use them it must be examined to whom the possession of the Scriptures belongs, so that no one may be admitted to them to whom they in no way belong.

I might seem to have brought this in from a lack of confidence or from a desire to enter on the case some other way, were it not that reason first of all establishes that our faith owes obedience to the apostle, who forbids us to enter into questions, to lend our ears to novel words, and to meet with a heretic after one rebuke, not after a dispute. So thoroughly did he forbid disputing that he names rebuke as the reason for meeting a heretic, and that only once, because he is not a Christian, so that he might not seem to deserve correction, like a Christian, once and again and under two or three witnesses, since he is to be corrected for the very reason that one must not dispute with him; and then, because a contest over the Scriptures achieves nothing, unless it be to upset one's stomach or one's brain.

This heresy does not accept certain Scriptures; and if it accepts some, it perverts them by additions and subtractions to fit the plan of its own system; and if it accepts them, it does not accept them whole; and if it does present them whole to some extent, it nevertheless twists them by devising different interpretations. An adulterated sense is as much opposed to the truth as a corrupting pen. Empty presumptions inevitably refuse to acknowledge the means by which they are refuted. They rely on what they have composed falsely and what they have seized from ambiguity. What will you gain, you who are most practiced in the Scriptures, when whatever you affirm is denied by the other side, and whatever you deny is affirmed? You will lose nothing, indeed, but your voice in the quarrel, and you will gain nothing but bile at the blasphemy.

And as for the person, if there is one, for whose sake you go down into a contest over the Scriptures, to strengthen him in his doubt: will he incline to the truth, or rather to the heresies? Moved by this very fact, that he sees you have gained nothing, since the other side denies and affirms with equal footing and certainly on an equal standing, he will go away from the wrangling more uncertain than before, not knowing which he should judge to be heresy. For they too can of course turn these same things back on us. They must say that it is rather we who introduce adulterations of the Scriptures and false interpretations, since they defend the truth for themselves just as we do.

So appeal must not be made to the Scriptures, nor the contest set on ground where victory is either impossible or uncertain or not certain enough. For even if a comparison of Scriptures did not turn out so as to leave both sides equal, the order of things would require that this question be put first, which is now the only one to be disputed: to whom does the faith itself belong? Whose are the Scriptures? By whom, and through whom, and when, and to whom was the teaching handed down by which people become Christians? For wherever it appears that the truth of the Christian teaching and faith is, there will be the truth of the Scriptures and of their interpretation and of all Christian traditions.

Christ Jesus our Lord (let him permit me to speak so for the moment), whoever he is, of whatever God the Son, of whatever substance man and God, of whatever faith the teacher, of whatever reward the promiser, declared himself, while he lived on earth, what he was, what he had been, what will of the Father he was carrying out, what he laid down that man must do; he declared it either to the people openly or to his disciples privately, of whom he had chosen twelve chief ones to be at his side, appointed as teachers for the nations. So, when one of them had been struck off, he commanded the remaining eleven, as he was departing to the Father after the resurrection, to go and teach the nations, baptizing them into the Father and into the Son and into the Holy Spirit. At once, then, the apostles (whom this name interprets as “sent”), having taken Matthias by lot as the twelfth in place of Judas, on the authority of the prophecy in David's psalm, and having received the promised power of the Holy Spirit for miracles and speech, first bore witness to faith in Jesus Christ throughout Judea and founded churches there; then, going out into the world, they proclaimed the same teaching of the same faith to the nations. And likewise they founded churches in every city, from which the other churches have since borrowed, and borrow every day, the shoot of faith and the seeds of doctrine, so that they may become churches. And for this reason they too will be counted apostolic, as the offspring of apostolic churches. Every kind must be reckoned by its origin. So the churches, many and great as they are, are that one first church from the apostles, from which all come. Thus all are first and all are apostolic, while all together prove their unity: the fellowship of peace, the title of brotherhood, and the token of hospitality; and these rights are governed by no other principle than the one tradition of the same sacrament.

From here, then, we draw up our prescription: if the Lord Christ Jesus sent the apostles to preach, no preachers other than those Christ appointed are to be received, because “no one knows the Father except the Son and him to whom the Son has revealed him,” and the Son is not seen to have revealed him to any others than the apostles, whom he sent to preach, of course what he revealed to them. And what they preached, that is, what Christ revealed to them, I will here also prescribe must be proved in no other way than through those same churches which the apostles themselves founded, preaching to them themselves, both by the living voice, as they say, and afterwards by letters. If this is so, it is equally clear that every doctrine which agrees with those apostolic churches, the wombs and origins of the faith, must be reckoned as truth, as holding without doubt what the churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from God; and that every doctrine must be judged beforehand to be falsehood which savors of what is contrary to the truth of the churches and of the apostles of Christ and of God. It remains, then, for us to show whether this doctrine of ours, whose rule we set out above, is to be reckoned as coming from the tradition of the apostles, and by that very fact whether the others come from falsehood. We are in communion with the apostolic churches, because our doctrine differs in nothing from theirs. This is the testimony of truth.

But since the proof is so ready to hand that, if it is brought forward at once, nothing further needs discussion, let us for the moment give place to the other side, as if we had not brought it forward, in case they think they can do anything to weaken this prescription. They are accustomed to say that the apostles did not know everything; and, driven by the same madness, they turn the matter upside down again and say that the apostles did know everything, but did not hand everything on to everyone. In either case they expose Christ to reproach, for having sent apostles either too little instructed or too little straightforward. Who of sound mind, then, can believe that those were ignorant of anything whom the Lord gave as teachers, keeping them inseparable in his company, his discipleship, and his daily life, to whom he explained privately whatever was obscure, telling them that it had been given to them to know the secrets which the people were not permitted to understand? Was anything hidden from Peter, who was called the rock on which the church was to be built, who received the keys of the kingdom of heaven and the power of loosing and binding in heaven and on earth? Was anything hidden from John, most beloved of the Lord, who leaned on his breast, to whom alone the Lord pointed out Judas the betrayer beforehand, whom he entrusted to Mary as a son in his own place? What did he mean them not to know, to whom he even displayed his glory, and Moses and Elijah, and besides that the Father's voice from heaven? Not that he rejected the others, but because “every word shall stand on three witnesses.” So, then, those were ignorant too, to whom after the resurrection he deigned, on the road, to expound all the Scriptures! He had indeed once said, “I have many things still to say to you, but you cannot bear them now”; yet he added, “When that Spirit of truth has come, he will lead you into all truth.” He shows that those were ignorant of nothing whom he had promised would attain all truth through the Spirit of truth. And he certainly fulfilled the promise, as the Acts of the Apostles prove by the descent of the Holy Spirit. Those who do not accept this Scripture can neither belong to the Holy Spirit, since they cannot yet acknowledge that the Holy Spirit was sent to the disciples, nor claim to defend the church, since they have no means of proving when and in what cradle this body was founded. So important is it to them to have no proofs of what they defend, lest proofs be admitted too that expose what they falsely assert.