Prescription against Heretics 7

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.