Prescription against Heretics 23–42

To accuse the apostles of some ignorance, then, they put forward the fact that Peter and those with him were rebuked by Paul. “So something was lacking in them,” they say; and from this they also build the claim that fuller knowledge could have come later, such as came to Paul when he rebuked his predecessors. Here too I can say to those who reject the Acts of the Apostles: first you must show who this Paul is, and what he was before he was an apostle, and how he became an apostle, since they make great use of him for their other questions as well. For if he declares himself an apostle, turned from a persecutor, that does not suffice for everyone who believes with examination, since not even the Lord bore witness of himself. But let them believe without the Scriptures, so that they may believe against the Scriptures; still, let them show, from their claim that Peter was rebuked by Paul, that another form of the gospel was brought in by Paul besides the one Peter and the rest had already proclaimed. On the contrary, changed from persecutor into preacher, he is brought to the brothers by brothers, as one of the brothers, and to them by those who had put on the faith from the apostles. Then, as he himself relates, he went up to Jerusalem to get to know Peter, as the duty and right of the same faith and preaching required. For they would not have marveled that the persecutor had become a preacher if he preached something contrary, nor would they have glorified the Lord because Paul, his adversary, had come over to them. So they even gave him the right hand, the sign of concord and agreement, and arranged among themselves a division of labor, not a separation of the gospel, not that each should preach something different, but that each should preach to different people, Peter to the circumcision, Paul to the nations. Further, if Peter was rebuked because, having lived with Gentiles, he afterwards separated himself from their company out of regard for persons, that was certainly a fault of conduct, not of preaching. For it did not result in proclaiming another God than the Creator, another Christ than the one born of Mary, or another hope than the resurrection.

I am not so well off, or rather not so badly off, as to set the apostles against each other. But since these most perverse people put forward that rebuke in order to make the earlier teaching suspect, I will answer as if for Peter: Paul himself said that he had become all things to all, a Jew to the Jews, not a Jew to those who were not Jews, in order to win all. So they rebuked certain things according to times, persons, and circumstances, which they themselves likewise did according to times, persons, and circumstances; just as if Peter had also rebuked Paul because, while forbidding circumcision, he himself circumcised Timothy. Let those look to it who sit in judgment on the apostles. It is well that Peter is made Paul's equal in martyrdom too. But even though Paul, caught up to the third heaven and carried into paradise, heard certain things there, they cannot be thought to have been things that would equip him for another, better-instructed doctrine, since their character was such that they were not to be disclosed to any man. And if that something, whatever it was, leaked out to someone's knowledge, and some heresy claims to follow it, either Paul is guilty of betraying a secret, or someone else must be shown to have been caught up into paradise later, who was allowed to speak out what Paul was not permitted even to mutter.

But, as we said, it is the same madness when they admit that the apostles were ignorant of nothing and did not preach different things from one another, yet will not have it that they revealed everything to everyone: some things, they say, they delivered openly and to all, others in secret and to a few, because Paul used this word to Timothy: “O Timothy, guard the deposit,” and again, “Keep the good deposit.” What is this deposit, so secret that it is to be reckoned another doctrine? Is it that charge of which he says, “This charge I commit to you, my son Timothy”? Or that command of which he says, “I charge you before God, who gives life to all things, and Jesus Christ, who witnessed the good confession under Pontius Pilate, that you keep the command”? What command, and what charge? From what is written before and after, it will be understood that this saying does not hint at some more remote doctrine, but rather presses that no other be admitted besides the one he had heard from Paul himself, and, I think, openly: “before many witnesses,” he says. If they do not want these many witnesses understood as the church, it makes no difference, since nothing could have been secret that was brought forward before many witnesses. Nor, because he wanted him to entrust these things to faithful men who would be able to teach others also, is that to be interpreted as evidence of some hidden gospel. For when he says “these things,” he speaks of the things he was writing about at the time. Of hidden things, as of things absent, known only in his mind, he would have said not “these things” but “those things.”

Further, it followed naturally that when he entrusted to Timothy the administration of the gospel, not to be administered indiscriminately or thoughtlessly, he should add, according to the Lord's saying, that he should not throw a pearl to swine or what is holy to dogs. The Lord spoke openly, without any hint of a hidden mystery. He himself had commanded that whatever they had heard in darkness and in secret they should preach in the light and on the housetops. He himself had prefigured by a parable that they should not keep a single mina, that is, a single word of his, hidden away without fruit. He himself taught that a lamp is not usually hidden under a bushel but set on a lampstand, to give light to all who are in the house. These things the apostles either neglected or did not understand at all, if they did not fulfill them by hiding something of the Light, that is, of the word of God and the mystery of Christ. They feared no one, as far as I know, neither the violence of the Jews nor of the heathen; all the more, then, did they preach freely in the church, who did not keep silent in synagogues and public places. Indeed they could neither have converted Jews nor brought in heathen unless they set out in order what they wanted them to believe. Much less would they have withheld anything from churches that already believed, to entrust it privately to a few others. Even if they discussed certain things among intimates, so to speak, it is still not to be believed that these were things that would bring in another rule of faith, different from and contrary to the one they set forth publicly to all, so that they spoke of one God in the church and another at home, described one substance of Christ in the open and another in secret, announced one hope of resurrection before all and another before a few; since they themselves implored in their letters that all should speak one and the same thing, and that there should be no schisms and dissensions in the church, because whether Paul or others, they preached the same things. Besides, they remembered, “Let your word be: yes, yes; no, no; for whatever is more than this is from the evil one,” so that they should not handle the gospel in contradictions.

If, then, it is incredible either that the apostles were ignorant of the fullness of the preaching or that they did not set out the whole order of the rule to all, let us see whether perhaps the apostles did indeed proclaim it simply and fully, but the churches, by their own fault, received it otherwise than the apostles delivered it. You will find all these incitements to scruple put forward by the heretics. They seize on the churches rebuked by the apostle: “O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?” and “You were running so well; who hindered you?” and the very opening, “I am astonished that you are so quickly being transferred from him who called you in grace to another gospel.” Likewise what was written to the Corinthians, that they were still carnal, to be brought up on milk, not yet fit for solid food; that they thought they knew something, when they did not yet know as they ought to know. When they bring up the rebuked churches, let them believe that they were corrected. But let them also acknowledge those churches in whose faith and knowledge and conduct the apostle rejoices and gives thanks to God, and which today share the rights of one institution with those that were rebuked.

Suppose now that all have erred; that the apostle too was mistaken in giving his testimony; that the Holy Spirit had regard to no church so as to lead it into truth, though he was sent by Christ for this, and asked of the Father for this, to be the teacher of truth; that the steward of God, the vicar of Christ, neglected his office, letting the churches for a time understand otherwise and believe otherwise than what he himself was preaching through the apostles: is it likely that so many churches, and so great, should have erred into one faith? Among many, no outcome is one and the same. The error of the churches' doctrine would have had to vary in its results. But what is found as one among many is not error but tradition. Will anyone dare to say, then, that those who handed it down erred?

However the error came about, error reigned for as long as there were no heresies. Truth was waiting for some Marcionites and Valentinians to set it free. In the meantime the gospel was preached wrongly, believed wrongly; so many thousands of thousands were baptized wrongly, so many works of faith performed wrongly, so many miracles, so many spiritual gifts worked wrongly, so many priesthoods, so many ministries exercised wrongly, so many martyrdoms, in short, crowned wrongly. Or, if not wrongly nor in vain, how could it be that the things of God were in progress before it was known which God they belonged to? That there were Christians before Christ was found? Heresies before true doctrine? But in all things the truth precedes the image; the likeness follows after. Besides, it is quite absurd that heresy should be held to be the earlier doctrine, if only because it is that very doctrine which foretold that heresies to come must be guarded against. To the church of that doctrine it was written, or rather that doctrine itself writes to the church: “Even if an angel from heaven preaches a gospel other than we have, let him be anathema.”

Where was Marcion then, the shipmaster of Pontus, the devotee of Stoicism? Where was Valentinus then, the follower of Platonism? For it is well known that they lived not so very long ago, about the reign of Antoninus, and that at first they believed the catholic doctrine in the church of Rome under the episcopate of the blessed Eleutherus, until, because of their ever restless curiosity, with which they corrupted the brothers too, they were expelled once and again (Marcion, indeed, with the two hundred sesterces he had brought to the church), and at last, banished to permanent separation, they spread the poisons of their doctrines. Afterwards Marcion professed repentance and accepted the condition set him, that he would receive peace if he restored to the church the others whom he had trained for perdition; but he was overtaken by death. For there had to be heresies. Yet heresies are not good because there had to be heresies; as if there did not also have to be evil! For the Lord too had to be betrayed, but woe to the betrayer; so let no one defend heresies on this ground either. If the pedigree of Apelles also must be traced, he too is no more ancient than Marcion, his founder and model; but, having fallen with a woman, a deserter from Marcionite continence, he withdrew from the sight of his most holy master to Alexandria. Returning from there years later no better, except that he was no longer a Marcionite, he ran into another woman, that virgin Philumene whom we mentioned above, who afterwards became a monstrous prostitute herself; ensnared by her energy, he wrote down what he learned from her as “Revelations.” There are still people in the world who remember them, even their own disciples and successors, so that the later ones cannot deny it. Besides, they are convicted by their own works, as the Lord said. For if Marcion separated the New Testament from the Old, he is later than what he separated, since he could not separate what had not been united. What was united before it was separated, being afterwards made separate, shows that the separator is later. Likewise Valentinus, by expounding differently and without doubt correcting, proves by this very name that whatever he corrects, as faulty before, belonged to another. We name these as the more notable and more frequent adulterers of the truth. But also a certain Nigidius, and Hermogenes, and many others still walk about perverting the ways of the Lord. Let them show me by what authority they came forth! If they preach another God, how do they use the things and writings and names of the God against whom they preach? If the same, why differently? Let them prove that they are new apostles; let them say that Christ has come down again, taught again in person, been crucified again, died again, been raised again. For so the apostle has described him; for so is he accustomed to make apostles, giving them besides the power to perform the same signs as he himself. I want their miracles, then, to be produced too; except that I recognize their greatest miracle, by which they imitate the apostles in reverse: those made the dead alive; these make the living dead.

But let me return from this digression to argue the priority of truth and the lateness of falsehood, with the support also of that parable which puts first the good seed of wheat sown by the Lord, and brings in afterwards, from the enemy, the devil, the adulteration of barren wild oats. For it properly represents the distinction of doctrines, since elsewhere too the word of God is likened to seed. So from the very order it is made plain that what was handed down first is of the Lord and true, and what was brought in later is foreign and false. This judgment will stand against all later heresies, which have no settled consciousness of their own by which to defend the truth for themselves.

Further, if any heresies dare to plant themselves in the apostolic age, so that they may seem to have been handed down by the apostles because they existed under the apostles, we can say: let them produce the origins of their churches; let them unroll the list of their bishops, running down in succession from the beginning in such a way that their first bishop had as his founder and predecessor one of the apostles or of the apostolic men who nevertheless continued with the apostles. For this is how the apostolic churches present their records: as the church of the Smyrnaeans reports that Polycarp was placed there by John, as the church of the Romans reports that Clement was likewise ordained by Peter. In just the same way the other churches, too, show those whom they have as shoots of the apostolic seed, appointed to the episcopate by the apostles. Let the heretics invent something of the kind. For after blasphemy, what is forbidden to them? But even if they invent it, they will gain nothing. For their doctrine itself, compared with the apostolic, will declare by its difference and contrariety that it has no apostle or apostolic man as its author; because as the apostles would not have taught things differing among themselves, so the apostolic men would not have put forth things contrary to the apostles, unless those who learned from the apostles preached otherwise. To this test, then, they will be summoned by those churches which, though they cannot produce any apostle or apostolic man as their founder, being much later (indeed they are being founded every day), yet, agreeing in the same faith, are reckoned no less apostolic because of the kinship of their doctrine. So let all the heresies, challenged by our churches to both tests, prove themselves apostolic in whatever way they think. But in fact they neither are, nor can they prove what they are not; nor are they received into peace and communion by churches that are in any way apostolic, clearly because, owing to the difference of their sacrament, they are in no way apostolic.

In addition to this I bring forward a review of the very doctrines that existed then, under the apostles, and were both pointed out and denounced by those same apostles. For in this way they will be exposed more easily, when they are found either to have existed already then or to have taken their seeds from those that existed already then. Paul, in the first letter to the Corinthians, censures those who deny and doubt the resurrection. This opinion was the Sadducees' own. Part of it is taken up by Marcion and Apelles and Valentinus, and whoever else undermines the resurrection of the flesh. And writing to the Galatians he inveighs against those who observe and defend circumcision and the law. Such is the heresy of Ebion. Instructing Timothy, he also rebukes those who forbid marriage. So teach Marcion and Apelles, his follower. He likewise touches those who said that the resurrection had already taken place. The Valentinians assert this of themselves. And when he names endless genealogies, Valentinus is recognized, in whose system that Aeon, whoever he is, of a new and more than one name, begets from his own Grace Mind and Truth; and these likewise procreate from themselves Word and Life; then these beget Man and Church; and from this first ogdoad of Aeons ten others, and the twelve remaining Aeons, arise with marvelous names, in the pure fable of thirty Aeons. The same apostle, when he condemns those who serve the elements, points to something of Hermogenes, who, introducing matter as unborn, makes it the equal of the unborn God, and so, making the mother of the elements a goddess, can serve what he makes equal to God. John, in the Apocalypse, is ordered to rebuke those who eat things sacrificed to idols and commit fornication. There are Nicolaitans of another kind even now; it is called the Gaian heresy. And in his letter he calls antichrists above all those who denied that Christ had come in the flesh and those who did not think that Jesus was the Son of God. Marcion claimed the first; Ebion the second. The teaching of Simon's magic, which serves angels, was itself reckoned among idolatries and was condemned by the apostle Peter in Simon himself.

These, I think, are the kinds of adulterous doctrines that we learn from the apostles themselves existed under the apostles. And yet among so many varieties of perversity we find no system that raised a dispute about God, the Creator of all things. No one dared to imagine a second God. There was more hesitation about the Son than about the Father, until Marcion brought in, besides the Creator, another God of goodness alone; until Apelles made the Creator some glorious angel of the higher God, the God of the law and of Israel, declaring him fiery; until Valentinus scattered his Aeons and traced the origin of the Creator God to the fault of one Aeon. To these alone and to these first has the truth of the Godhead been revealed! They have obtained, no doubt, a greater favor and fuller grace from the devil, who wished to rival God in this way too, by making, through doctrines of poison, disciples above their master, which the Lord denied. Let all the heresies, then, choose for themselves the times when they existed, since it makes no difference which existed when, so long as they are not of the truth; and certainly those that did not exist under the apostles cannot have existed. If they had existed, they too would have been named, so that they too might be restrained. Those that did exist under the apostles are condemned in being named. So if the same heresies now exist, somewhat more polished, that were crude under the apostles, they have their condemnation from that time; or if there were some then and others arose later that took over certain opinions from them, then by sharing their preaching they must share their condemnation too, since the rule of lateness stated above comes first: even if they had no share in the condemned doctrines, they would be judged in advance by their date alone, all the more adulterous for not having been named even by the apostles. Hence it is all the more firmly established that these are the ones that were then being announced as coming.

Challenged and refuted by us on these definitions, let all the heresies, whether later than the apostles or contemporary with them, provided they differ from us, whether censured by them in general or in particular, provided they were condemned beforehand, dare to answer with some prescriptions of this kind against our teaching. For if they deny its truth, they must prove that it too is a heresy, refuted by the same test by which they are refuted, and at the same time show where the truth is to be sought, since it is now clear that it is not with them. Our position is not later; rather it is earlier than all; and this will be the testimony of truth, which everywhere holds first place. By the apostles it is nowhere condemned, but rather defended; this will be the proof that it is their own. For the doctrine that those do not condemn who condemned every foreign one, they show to be their own, and so they defend it.

Come now, you who would exercise your curiosity better in the business of your salvation: run through the apostolic churches, in which the very chairs of the apostles still preside in their places, in which their own authentic letters are read aloud, sounding the voice and bringing before us the face of each one. Achaia is very near you: you have Corinth. If you are not far from Macedonia, you have Philippi, you have the Thessalonians. If you can travel to Asia, you have Ephesus. And if you are near Italy, you have Rome, from which authority is ready at hand for us too. How happy is that church, into which the apostles poured out their whole teaching together with their blood; where Peter is made equal to the Lord's passion; where Paul is crowned with the death of John; where the apostle John, after being plunged into burning oil and suffering nothing, is banished to an island! Let us see what it learned, what it taught, what fellowship it shares with the churches of Africa too. It knows one God, the Lord, the Creator of the universe, and Christ Jesus, born of the virgin Mary, the Son of God the Creator, and the resurrection of the flesh. It joins the law and the prophets with the writings of the evangelists and apostles; from there it drinks in its faith. This faith it seals with water, clothes with the Holy Spirit, feeds with the Eucharist; it urges martyrdom; and against this institution it receives no one. This is the institution, I do not now say which foretold the heresies to come, but from which the heresies went out. But they are not of it, from the time they were made against it. Even from the kernel of the olive, mild, rich, and needful, the rough wild olive springs; even from the seed of the fig, most pleasant and sweet, the empty and worthless wild fig rises. So too the heresies come from our shrub, not of our kind: from a grain of the truth, but made wild by falsehood.

If this is so, so that the truth is adjudged to us, as many as walk by that rule which the church has handed down from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, Christ from God, then the reasoning of our proposition stands, which lays down that heretics are not to be admitted to a challenge concerning the Scriptures, since we prove, without the Scriptures, that they have nothing to do with the Scriptures. For if they are heretics, they cannot be Christians, since they do not have from Christ what, having pursued it by their own choice, they accept the name of heretics for. So, not being Christians, they acquire no right to Christian writings, and to them it may rightly be said: Who are you? When and from where did you come? What are you doing on my property, since you are not mine? By what right, Marcion, are you cutting down my wood? By what license, Valentinus, are you diverting my springs? By what authority, Apelles, are you moving my boundary markers? The possession is mine. Why are the rest of you sowing and grazing here at your own pleasure? The possession is mine; I have possessed it long; I possessed it first; I have firm title deeds from the very owners whose property it was. I am the heir of the apostles. As they provided in their will, as they committed it in trust, as they adjured, so I hold it. You, certainly, they have always disinherited and disowned as strangers, as enemies. And why are heretics strangers and enemies to the apostles, if not from the difference of doctrine, which each one has either brought forth or received by his own choice against the apostles?

There, then, must the adulteration of the Scriptures and of their interpretation be reckoned to be, where difference of doctrine is found. Those who purposed to teach otherwise were forced by necessity to arrange the instruments of doctrine otherwise. For they could not have taught otherwise unless they had otherwise that by which to teach. Just as the corruption of doctrine could not have succeeded for them without the corruption of its instruments, so for us the integrity of doctrine would not have been possible without the integrity of those means by which doctrine is handled. For what is there in our Scriptures contrary to us? What have we brought in of our own, so as to remedy by subtraction or addition or alteration something found contrary to it even in the Scriptures? What we are, the Scriptures are, from their beginning. We are from them, before anything was otherwise, before they were interpolated by you. And since every interpolation must be believed to be later, coming as it does from rivalry, which is never earlier than, nor at home with, what it rivals, it is as incredible to any wise man that we, who are from the beginning and first, should seem to have brought an adulterous pen to the Scriptures, as that they, who are both later and hostile, should not have done so. One perverts the Scriptures with his hand, another their sense by his interpretation. For even if Valentinus seems to use the whole instrument, he has nonetheless laid hands on the truth with a craftier mind than Marcion. Marcion openly and plainly used the knife, not the pen, since he made a slaughter of the Scriptures to suit his own material. Valentinus spared them, since he did not devise the Scriptures to suit his material, but his material to suit the Scriptures; and yet he took away more and added more, taking away the proper meanings of individual words and adding arrangements of things that do not appear.

These were the contrivances of the spiritual forces of wickedness with whom we wrestle, brothers: rightly to be considered, necessary to faith, so that the elect may be made manifest and the reprobate exposed. And so they have strength and facility in devising and equipping errors; not so much to be wondered at, as if it were difficult and inexplicable, since an example of such facility is at hand in secular writings too. You see today a wholly different story composed out of Virgil, the material fitted to the verses and the verses to the material. Hosidius Geta, for instance, sucked out a complete tragedy, Medea, from Virgil. A certain relative of mine, among other leisure products of his pen, unfolded the Tablet of Cebes from the same poet. Those too are usually called Homerocentones who, out of the poems of Homer, patch together works of their own into one body, in the manner of a patchwork, from many pieces taken here and there. And the divine writings are certainly more fertile for furnishing any material. Nor am I afraid to say that the Scriptures themselves were so arranged by the will of God as to supply material for heretics, since I read that there must be heresies, which cannot exist without the Scriptures.

It will be asked from whom comes the interpretation of the sense of the passages that serve heresies. From the devil, of course, whose part it is to pervert the truth, who rivals even the very things of the divine sacraments in the mysteries of idols. He too baptizes some, his own believers and faithful, of course; he promises the putting away of sins from a washing; and, if I still remember, Mithras there signs his soldiers on their foreheads; he celebrates also an offering of bread, and brings in an image of resurrection, and under the sword wins a crown. What of the fact that he also appoints a high priest who has married only once? He also has his virgins; he also has his continent. Further, if we unroll the superstitions of Numa Pompilius, if we consider the priestly offices, insignia, and privileges, the sacrificial services and instruments and vessels of the sacrifices themselves, and the elaborate rules of expiations and vows, has not the devil plainly imitated that meticulousness of the Jewish law? He who so jealously set out to copy, in the business of idolatry, the very things by which the sacraments of Christ are administered, surely, with the same mind, also desired and was able to adapt the instruments of divine things and of Christian holy things, sense from sense, words from words, parables from parables, to a profane and rival faith. So no one ought to doubt either that the spiritual forces of wickedness from which heresies too come were sent in by the devil, or that heresies are not far removed from idolatry, since they are of the same author and work as idolatry. They either invent another God opposed to the Creator, or, if they confess the one Creator, they describe him otherwise than he truly is. So every lie that they tell about God is in some way a kind of idolatry.

I will not omit a description of the heretics' way of life too: how futile, how earthly, how merely human it is, without seriousness, without authority, without discipline, as befits their faith. To begin with, it is uncertain who is a catechumen and who a believer; they come in alike, listen alike, pray alike, even heathen, if any happen to come in; they will throw what is holy to the dogs, and pearls, though not real ones, to the swine. They want the overthrow of discipline to be simplicity, and our care for it they call pandering. They make peace indiscriminately with everyone. For it makes no difference to them, though they hold different views, provided they conspire together to storm the one truth. All are puffed up; all promise knowledge. Their catechumens are perfect before they are taught. And the heretical women themselves, how forward they are! They dare to teach, to dispute, to perform exorcisms, to promise cures, perhaps even to baptize. Their ordinations are rash, careless, inconstant. Now they appoint novices, now men bound to the world, now our apostates, to bind them by honor, since they cannot by truth. Nowhere is promotion easier than in the camp of rebels, where merely to be there is a merit. So one man is bishop today, another tomorrow; he is a deacon today who is a reader tomorrow; he is a presbyter today who is a layman tomorrow. For they impose priestly functions even on laymen.

And what shall I say about their ministry of the word, since their business is not to convert the heathen but to overturn our people? They seek the greater glory in bringing about the fall of those who stand rather than the raising of those who lie fallen. Since their very work comes not from building anything of their own but from destroying the truth, they undermine our buildings in order to build their own. Take away from them the law of Moses and the prophets and God the Creator, and they have nothing to accuse. So it happens that they bring about the ruin of standing buildings more easily than the raising of fallen ruins. Only for these works do they act humble, smooth, and submissive. Otherwise they know no reverence even for their own leaders. And this is why there are hardly any schisms among heretics: because when there are, they do not show. For schism is their very unity. I am lying if they do not even differ among themselves from their own rules, since each one adjusts what he has received to his own choice, just as the one who handed it down composed it by his own choice. The development of the thing recognizes its nature and the character of its origin. What was permitted to Valentinus was permitted to the Valentinians, what to Marcion to the Marcionites: to innovate the faith by their own choice. In short, all the heresies, examined thoroughly, are found to disagree with their own founders in many points. Most of them do not even have churches: without mother, without see, bereft of faith, exiles, they wander in their own worthlessness.