The Knife and the Pen

Where you find a difference in teaching, there you must reckon that both the Scriptures and the explanations of them have been corrupted. Men whose whole purpose was to teach something different were under the necessity of arranging differently the documents that teaching rests on. They could not have produced their different teaching in any other way than by having different means of teaching it. Just as, in their case, a corrupt teaching could not have succeeded without a corruption of its documents too, so in ours a sound teaching could not have come down to us without soundness in the documents by which teaching is handled. [a]

Now what is there in our Scriptures that is against us? What have we brought in of our own, that we should have to take something out again, or add to it, or shift it around, in order to cure some contradiction of ours that stands in the Scriptures? What we are, the Scriptures have been from the beginning. It is from them that we are what we are — from before there was any other version of them, before you tampered with them. And since every insertion has to be believed a later thing, for the plain reason that it comes out of rivalry, and rivalry never comes before the thing it competes with, nor is native to it — then it is exactly as incredible to any sensible man that we put a corrupt reading into the Scriptures, we who have been here from the very first and were the first, as it is that they did not put it in, who came later and set themselves against them.

One man perverts the Scriptures with his hand, another their meaning by his exposition. Valentinus appears to use the whole volume, uncut, and yet he laid violent hands on the truth just as much as Marcion did — only with a subtler mind and a subtler skill. Marcion openly and plainly used the knife and not the pen: he cut the Scriptures down to fit the subject he wanted. Valentinus kept off the knife, because he did not invent Scriptures to suit his subject but fitted his subject to the Scriptures; and yet he took away more and added more, since he stripped every single word of its proper meaning and put in its place elaborate arrangements of things that do not exist at all.

These were the ingenious devices of the “spiritual forces of wickedness” that we too, brothers, may fairly expect to have to “wrestle” with — necessary for faith, so that those who hold good may be shown for what they are, and those who do not may be found out. So the influence they have, and their readiness at thinking up and constructing errors, ought not to be wondered at as though it were some difficult and unaccountable business, since in secular writing too an example of the same readiness is ready to hand. [e]

In our own day you can see a story of an entirely different character put together out of Virgil, the subject matter arranged to fit the lines and the lines to fit the subject matter. Hosidius Geta, for one, lifted his whole tragedy of Medea out of Virgil. A relative of my own, in some idle work of his pen, composed The Tablet of Cebes out of the same poet. On the same principle those verse-makers are commonly called Homerocentones, “stitchers of Homeric scraps,” who sew together, patchwork fashion, works of their own out of lines of Homer, made of many pieces gathered from here and from there and jumbled up. Now the divine Scriptures are unquestionably richer in material of every kind for that sort of work. And I run no risk of being contradicted when I say that the Scriptures themselves were arranged by the will of God in a way that would supply heretics with their materials, since I read that “there must be heresies” — and there cannot be heresies without the Scriptures.

The question will come up: who is it that gives those passages the sense that makes for heresies? The devil, of course. The tricks that twist the truth belong to him, and by the secret rites of his idols he competes even with the very substance of God’s sacred rites. He too baptizes some — his own believers, his own faithful. He promises that sins will be put away by a washing of his own. And if my memory still serves me, Mithras there sets his mark on the foreheads of his soldiers; he celebrates an offering of bread as well, and brings in an image of a resurrection, and under a sword he wins back a crown. And what are we to say about his limiting his own chief priest to a single marriage? He has his virgins too; he too has those who make a profession of abstaining from sex. [h]

Suppose we turn over in our minds the superstitions of Numa Pompilius — his priestly offices and badges and privileges, his sacrificial services, and the instruments and vessels of the sacrifices themselves, and the elaborate rites of expiation and of vows: is it not obvious to us that the devil was imitating that well-known fussiness of the Jewish law? So then, since he has shown such eagerness to express, in the business of his idolatry, the very things that make up the conduct of Christ’s sacred rites, it follows that the same being, with the same genius still, both set his heart on adapting the actual documents of divine things and of Christ’s holy people to his own profane and rival creed, and succeeded in doing it: his interpretation out of their interpretations, his words out of their words, his parables out of their parables.

For this reason no one ought to doubt that the “spiritual forces of wickedness,” from which heresies also come, were brought in by the devil; and no one ought to suppose that there is any real difference between heresy and idolatry, since heresy belongs to the same author and the same work that idolatry does. Either they invent another god set against the Creator, or, even when they admit that the Creator is the one and only God, they treat him as a different being from what he truly is. The result is that every lie they tell about God is, in a way, a kind of idolatry.

I must not leave out an account of the heretics’ conduct as well — how frivolous it is, how worldly, how merely human, without seriousness, without authority, without discipline, exactly as their beliefs would lead you to expect. To begin with, it is not clear who is a catechumen and who is a believer. They come in alike, they listen alike, they pray alike — pagans too, if any happen to wander in. “What is holy they will throw to the dogs, and their pearls” (not that they are real ones) “to the pigs.” Simplicity, to them, means the overthrow of discipline; our attention to it they call pandering. Peace they patch up with all comers, no matter who; it makes no difference to them that they handle their subjects quite differently, so long as they can band together to storm the citadel of the one and only truth. Every one of them is puffed up; every one of them offers you knowledge. Their catechumens are perfect before they have finished being taught. [l]

And how forward the women of these heretics are! They are bold enough to teach, to argue, to perform exorcisms, to promise cures — perhaps even to baptize. Their ordinations are careless, arbitrary, unsettled. At one time they put new converts in office; at another, men tied to some secular employment; at another, people who have deserted us, hoping to bind them by vanity since they cannot by the truth. Nowhere is promotion easier than in a rebel camp, where merely being there counts as distinguished service. And so it comes about that today one man is their overseer and tomorrow another; today a man is a deacon who tomorrow is a reader; today he is an elder who tomorrow is a layman. For they lay the duties of a priest even on laymen.

But what am I to say about their ministry of the word, when their business is not to convert pagans but to overturn our people? This is the glory they are grasping at: to bring down those who are standing, not to raise up those who are down. Since the very work they set themselves comes not from building up a body of their own but from demolishing the truth, they undermine our buildings so that they can put up their own. Only take away from them the law of Moses, and the prophets, and the Creator’s divinity, and they have nothing left to raise an objection about. The result is that they manage the ruin of houses that are standing more easily than the raising of houses in ruins. It is only when they have that in view that they show themselves humble and smooth and respectful. Otherwise they know no respect even for their own leaders. [q]

That is why splits are supposed to be rare among heretics: even when they exist, they do not show. Their very unity is a split. I am much mistaken if they do not depart, among themselves, even from their own rules, since every man modifies the traditions he received to suit his own temper, exactly as the man who handed them down shaped them to suit his own will. The way the thing develops is an admission of what it is and of how it was born. What was allowable to Valentinus was allowable to the Valentinians; what Marcion did was fair for the Marcionites — even to make innovations in the faith as it suited their own pleasure. In short, every heresy, thoroughly looked into, is caught disagreeing on many points even with its own founder. Most of them have not even churches. With no mother, no home, no faith of their own, exiles, they wander about in their own worthlessness.

It has been remarked, too, how extremely often heretics keep company with magicians, with quacks, with astrologers, with philosophers — and the reason is that they are men who give themselves to curious questions. “Seek, and you will find” is always on their minds. So from the very way they behave you can estimate the quality of their faith. Their discipline is an index of their teaching. They say God is not to be feared; and so, in their view, everything is loose and unchecked. But where is God not feared, except where he is not? And where God is not, truth is not either. Where there is no truth, then naturally there is discipline like theirs. But where God is, there is “the fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom.” And where the fear of God is, there is seriousness; there is diligence that is honorable and yet on edge; there is anxious carefulness, and a well-weighed admission to office, and a communion granted only after deliberation, and promotion that follows good service, and scrupulous submission, and dutiful attendance, and a modest way of walking, and a united church, and God in everything. [s]

These marks of a stricter discipline among us are one more proof of the truth, and no man can safely turn away from it who bears in mind the judgment to come, when “we must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ” to render an account, before everything else, of our faith itself. What, then, will they say who have defiled it — the virgin Christ entrusted to them — with the adultery of the heretics? They will plead, I suppose, that no instruction was ever given them by him or by his apostles about crooked and twisted teachings that would come at them, or about avoiding such things and loathing them. He and his apostles, no doubt, will acknowledge that the fault is rather their own, and their pupils’, for not having warned us and taught us in advance! [u]

They will add a good deal, besides, about the great authority of each teacher of heresy — how these men powerfully confirmed belief in their own teaching; how they raised the dead, made the sick well, foretold the future, so that they might deservedly be counted apostles. As though this warning were not also in the written record: that many would come who would work even the greatest miracles in defense of the deceit of their corrupt preaching. So of course they will deserve to be pardoned!

If, however, any have remembered the writings and the warnings of the Lord and the apostles and have stood firm in the soundness of the faith, then they, I suppose, are the ones who will run a great risk of missing pardon — when the Lord answers:

“I plainly warned you beforehand that there would be teachers of false doctrine coming in my name, and in the name of the prophets and the apostles as well; and I gave my own disciples a charge to preach the same things to you. But of course it was not to be expected that you would believe me! I once gave the good news and the teaching of that rule to my apostles; but afterwards it was my pleasure to make considerable changes in it. I had promised a resurrection, even of the flesh; but on second thoughts it struck me that I might not be able to keep the promise. I had shown that I was born of a virgin; but afterwards this seemed to me a disgraceful thing. I had said that my Father was the one who makes the sun and the rain; but another and better father has adopted me. I had forbidden you to lend an ear to heretics; but in that I was wrong.”

Such blasphemies, it is quite possible, do get into the minds of people who wander off the road and do not guard the true faith against the danger that besets it. On this occasion our treatise has taken up a general position against heresies: that they must all be refuted on fixed, fair, and necessary rules, and without any comparison with the Scriptures. For the rest, if God in his grace permits, we will prepare answers to particular heresies in separate treatises. To those who spend their leisure reading through these pages in the belief of the truth: peace, and the grace of our God Jesus Christ forever.