Weeds Among the Wheat

The next thing is to answer the objections that Greeks and Jews bring against us. And since, in some of the questions already discussed, the sects that hold to other teaching lend those objections a hand, it will be best to clear away what stands in our path first, and then, prepared in that way for solving the difficulties, to move on to the Miscellany that follows. The first objection they make to us is this: that they ought not to believe, because the sects are at odds. For the truth is pulled out of shape, they say, when some teach one set of doctrines and others another. [a]

Our answer to them is this. Among you who are Jews, and among the most famous of the philosophers among the Greeks, a great many sects have sprung up. And yet you do not say that a man should hold back from taking up philosophy, or from living as a Jew, because the sects among you do not agree with each other. Besides, that sects would be sown among the truth, like “weeds among the wheat,” was foretold by the Lord; and what was predicted to happen could not fail to happen. The reason for it is that everything fine has an ugly stain following close behind it. So if a man breaks his engagements and abandons the confession he made in front of us, are we to let go of the truth because he has gone back on what he professed? No. Just as a good man must not turn out false, or fail to make good what he has promised, even though others break their engagements, so we are bound never to step outside the rule of the church. And it is we, above all, who keep our profession in the things that matter most, while they run clean against it.

The ones to be believed, then, are those who hold firmly to the truth. We can also use a broader answer and say to them that doctors hold opposite opinions, each according to his own school, and yet all of them in fact treat the sick. Does a man who is ill in body and needs treatment refuse to go to a doctor because the schools of medicine differ? Then neither may a man whose soul is sick and full of idols make an excuse out of the sects when it comes to recovering his health and turning to God. Further, it is said that the sects exist for the sake of “those who are approved.” By “approved” the apostle means either those who, on coming to faith, apply themselves to the Lord’s teaching with some power of discrimination — the sort of men who are called skilled money-changers, who tell counterfeit coin from genuine by the false stamp — or those who have already been proved both in life and in knowledge.

For this reason, then, we need greater attention and closer thought, in order to work out exactly how we ought to live and what true reverence for God is. For it is plain that, precisely because the truth is hard and laborious to reach, questions arise; and out of those questions spring the sects, smelling of the self-love and vanity of men who have not learned or grasped anything truly, but have only picked up a conceit of knowledge. So we must examine the real truth with all the more care, since it alone has the true God for its object. And the toil is followed by the sweetness of discovery and of remembering.

Because of the sects, then, the labor of discovery must be taken up; but the truth must not be abandoned at all. When fruit is set before us, some of it real and ripe and some made of wax and as like the real as it can be, we are not to keep away from both because of the resemblance. By exercising the grasp that comes of contemplation, and by reasoning of the most decisive kind, we must tell the true from what only seems so. And it is like this. There is one royal road, and there are many others besides — one leading to a cliff, another to a rushing river or to a deep sea — and no one refuses to travel because the roads are many; he uses the safe one, the royal one, the one everybody takes. In the same way, though some say this and some say that about the truth, we must not abandon it, but must search out the most exact knowledge of it. Weeds spring up among garden-grown vegetables too. Are the gardeners to give up gardening?

Since we have from nature ample means for testing the statements that are made, we ought to trace out the sequence of the truth. That is also why we are rightly condemned if we do not assent to what we ought to obey, and do not tell apart what is hostile and unfitting and unnatural and false from what is true and consistent and fitting and in keeping with nature. These are the means that must be used to arrive at the knowledge of the real truth. In the case of the Greeks, then, this pretext comes to nothing, since those who are willing can find the truth. But for those who put forward excuses that will not stand up to reason, there is no answer to their condemnation. For do they deny that there is such a thing as demonstration, or admit it? My opinion is that everyone will admit it, except those who do away with the senses. And if there is demonstration, then it is necessary to come down to the questions and to establish, by demonstration from the Scriptures themselves, how the sects went wrong, and how in the truth alone and in the ancient church lie both the most exact knowledge and the truly best choice.

Now of those who swerve away from the truth, some try to deceive only themselves, and some their neighbors as well. Those who are called wise in their own opinion — men who think they have found the truth but have no true demonstration for it — deceive themselves by supposing that they have reached a place to rest. And there is no small crowd of them: they avoid inquiry for fear of being refuted, and shun instruction for fear of being condemned. But the ones who deceive the people who come to them for access are very shrewd. They are perfectly aware that they know nothing, and still they darken the truth with plausible arguments. In my opinion, though, plausible arguments are one kind of thing and true arguments another. And we know that the very name of the sects has to be uttered as the opposite of the truth. It is out of the truth that the sophists draw certain things for men’s ruin, and then bury them in human arts of their own inventing — taking more pride in standing at the head of a school than in leading a church.