The Heresy Founders

By now the churches throughout the world were shining like the most brilliant lights, and faith in our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ was flourishing among the whole human race. Then the demon who hates the good, the enemy of the truth and always the bitterest foe of human salvation, turned all his schemes against the Church. In former times he had armed himself against it with persecutions from outside. [a] But now that he was shut out from these, he made war on it by other methods, devising every means. He used wicked men and sorcerers as instruments of ruin for souls and servants of destruction, so that sorcerers and deceivers, slipping on the same name for their teaching that ours bears, might at once lead those of the faithful whom they caught into the depths of destruction, and by the things they did turn away those who did not know the faith from the road to the saving word. [b]

So from Menander, whom we have already described as the successor of Simon, there came forth a power like a serpent, with two mouths and two heads, and it set up the founders of two different heresies: Saturninus, an Antiochene by birth, and Basilides of Alexandria. The one in Syria, the other in Egypt, established schools of heresies hateful to God. [c] Irenaeus shows that Saturninus for the most part told the same lies as Menander, but that Basilides, under the pretext of still more secret teachings, stretched his inventions without limit, making up for himself monstrous myths of an impious heresy. [d] At that time a great many men of the Church were contending for the truth and defending the apostles’ and the Church’s teaching with reasoned argument, and some of them were already providing those who came after with written means of defense against these very heresies. [e] Of these there has come down to us a most competent refutation of Basilides by Agrippa Castor, a very well-known writer of that time, which lays bare the dreadful cunning of the man’s sorcery. [f] In exposing his secret teachings, he says that Basilides composed twenty-four books on the gospel; that he named as his prophets Barcabbas and Barcoph and set up for himself others who never existed, giving them barbarous names to astonish those who are awed by such things; that he taught that it made no difference whether one tasted food offered to idols, or carelessly forswore the faith in times of persecution; and that, like Pythagoras, he ordered those who came to him to keep silence for five years. The writer we have named lists other things of the same kind about Basilides, and he exposed the error of that heresy to plain view in no mean fashion.

Irenaeus also writes that Carpocrates lived at the same time as these men, the father of another heresy, called the heresy of the Gnostics. They saw fit to hand on the magic arts of Simon no longer in secret, as Basilides did, but now openly. They all but prided themselves, as on great achievements, on the love charms they performed with such curious care, on demons that sent dreams and demons that attended them as familiars, and on other spells of the same kind. In keeping with these things, they taught that those who meant to reach the perfection of their initiation, or rather of their abomination, must do all the most shameful things, since in no other way could they escape the “rulers of the world,” as they would call them, unless they paid all of them their dues by unspeakable acts. [g] So it came about that the demon who delights in evil, using these men as his servants, on the one hand enslaved to destruction those whom they so pitiably deceived, and on the other gave the unbelieving nations a wealth of material for slandering the divine word, since the report about these men poured over into a slander of the whole Christian people. In this way, above all, the impious and most absurd suspicion about us spread among the unbelievers of that time: that we practiced unlawful intercourse with mothers and sisters and ate unholy food.

But these things did not succeed for him for long, since the truth established itself, and as time went on shone out into a great light. For by its power the contrivances of its enemies were at once refuted and snuffed out. One new heresy was invented after another, and the earlier ones kept ebbing away and perishing, now in one way, now in another, into notions of every shape and form. But the splendor of the universal and only true Church, always the same and unchanged, went on growing in size and greatness, and shone out to every race of Greeks and barbarians the dignity, sincerity and freedom, the sobriety and purity, of its inspired way of life and philosophy. [i] Along with the passing of time, then, the slander against our whole doctrine died out too. Our teaching alone remained, prevailing among all and acknowledged to excel above all in dignity and sobriety and in divine and philosophical teachings, so that no one to this day dares to bring a shameful slander against our faith, or any such accusation as those who formerly banded together against us loved to use. [j] Nevertheless, in the times we are describing, the truth once again brought forward many champions of its own, who took the field against the godless heresies not only by spoken refutations but also by written proofs.