The Scriptures Decide

But the men who are ready to work hard at the finest pursuits will not stop searching for truth until they have the proof from the Scriptures themselves. Some standards of judgment are common to everyone — the senses, for instance. Others belong only to those who have put their will and their energy into what is true: the methods that mind and reason use to tell a true statement from a false one. [a]

It is a very great thing to let go of opinion, taking your stand between exact knowledge and the reckless wisdom of opinion, and to know that whoever hopes for the rest that never ends knows also that the way in is hard work, and “narrow.” And let the man who has once received the good news — in the very hour when he came to know his salvation — not “turn back, like Lot’s wife,” as the saying goes. Let him not go back to his old life, which clings to the things the senses handle, or to the sects. For they shape a man’s character without knowing the true God. “For whoever loves father or mother more than me” — more, that is, than the Father and Teacher of the truth, who gives new birth and makes new and feeds the chosen soul — “is not worthy of me.” He means: worthy to be a son of God and a disciple of God, and at the same time a friend, and of his own kind. “For no one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Now it seems that many people even in our own day think that Mary, because of the birth of her child, was left in the condition of a woman who has just given birth — though she was not. For some say that after she gave birth she was examined and found to be a virgin. That is exactly what the Scriptures of the Lord are to us. They gave birth to the truth and they remain virgin, keeping the mysteries of the truth hidden. “And she gave birth, and did not give birth,” the Scripture says, since she conceived of herself and not from intercourse. So the Scriptures have conceived and borne children to those who truly know; but the sects, never having learned them, sent them away as though they had never conceived at all.

All people have the same power of judgment. Some follow the Word as it speaks and frame proofs for themselves; others hand themselves over to pleasures and twist the Scriptures to suit their cravings. The lover of truth, I think, needs strength of soul. Men who attempt the greatest things are bound to fail in matters of the highest importance, unless they take the rule of truth from the truth itself and hold on to it. But such men, having fallen off the straight road, go wrong on most points of detail — as you would expect of people whose faculty for judging true from false has never been strictly trained to pick out what matters. If it had been, they would have obeyed the Scriptures. So then: as a man drugged the way Circe drugged her visitors turns into a beast, in the same way the man who has spurned the church’s tradition and darted off to the opinions of the men of the sects has stopped being a man of God and stopped staying true to the Lord. But the man who comes back from that deception, who hears the Scriptures and turns his life toward the truth, is — so to speak — made a god out of a man.

For we have the Lord as the source of our teaching, through the prophets, through the Gospel, and through the blessed apostles, “in many portions and in many ways,” leading us from the beginning of knowledge to its end. But if anyone should suppose that some other starting point is needed, then no starting point can truly be kept at all. So the man who on his own account believes the Scripture and the voice of the Lord — a voice that acts through the Lord for people’s good — is rightly counted faithful. We certainly use it as our criterion in finding things out. Whatever is put under examination is not believed until it has been examined; so what needs examining cannot be a first principle. And so, reasonably enough, we take hold by faith of the first principle that cannot be proved, and then, receiving in abundance from that first principle itself the proofs that bear on it, we are trained by the voice of the Lord toward the knowledge of the truth. For we may not attach ourselves to men on their bare word, when they could just as easily have said the opposite. If it is not enough to state an opinion, but what is stated has to be confirmed, then we do not wait for the testimony of men. We settle the question at issue by the voice of the Lord, which is the surest of all proofs — or rather, the only one. In that knowledge, those who have merely tasted the Scriptures are believers, while those who have gone further and become sound interpreters of the truth are the ones who truly know. In the working trades, too, the trained craftsman is better than the ordinary man and shapes something beyond common notions. In the same way we, setting out the Scriptures whole and complete from the Scriptures themselves, persuade by proof, starting from faith.

And if the men who follow the sects venture to make use of the prophetic Scriptures too, then in the first place they will not use all of them, and next they will not quote them entire, or as the body and weave of the prophecy requires. They pick out ambiguous phrases and wrench them around to their own opinions, gathering a few words here and a few there — not looking at the sense, but making use of the bare words. In almost every quotation they make you will find that they attend to the names alone while they alter the meanings. They neither know, as they claim to, nor use the passages they bring forward for what those passages actually are. But the truth is not found by changing meanings — that is how men overturn all sound teaching. It is found by considering what perfectly belongs to the sovereign God and befits him, and by establishing each of the points proved out of the Scriptures again from other Scriptures like them. So they do not want to turn to the truth, since they are ashamed to give up the claims of self-love; and they cannot manage their own opinions except by doing violence to the Scriptures. They first published false teachings among people; they plainly fight against almost the whole of Scripture; they are constantly refuted by us who contradict them. And so for the rest, part of the time they hold out against admitting the prophetic Scriptures at all, and part of the time they run us down as men of a different nature, incapable of understanding what belongs to them. And sometimes they even deny their own teachings when those teachings are refuted, ashamed to own in the open what they boast of teaching in private. You can see this in all the sects, when you examine how crooked their teachings are. For when they are overturned by our showing clearly that they stand against the Scriptures, one of two things can be seen in the men who defend the teaching. Either they hold the consistency of their own teachings in contempt, or they hold the prophecy itself in contempt — or rather, their own hope. And they invariably prefer whatever seems more obvious to them over what has been spoken by the Lord through the prophets and by the Gospel, and testified and confirmed besides by the apostles.

See the danger they are in, then — not over a single teaching, but over the keeping up of the sects as such — the danger of never finding the truth. The books lie ready at hand, and they read them and despise them as useless; and in their eagerness to outdo common faith they have swerved off the truth. They never learned the mysteries of the church’s knowledge; they have no capacity for the greatness of the truth; they are too lazy to go down to the bottom of things; they read on the surface, and so they have dismissed the Scriptures. Puffed up with empty opinion, they are forever wrangling, and they plainly care more about seeming to be philosophers than about being them. They lay down no foundation, none of the first principles a thing must have; they are swayed by human opinions and then force the conclusion to fit. And because they get refuted, they spar with the men who are pursuing the true philosophy, and they will endure anything, and — as the saying goes — pull at every oar, going as far as outright irreverence, disbelieving the Scriptures, rather than be shifted out of the honors of the sect and the boasted front seat in their own churches. That is also why they are so eager for the couch of honor at the banquet they call a love feast — falsely. Among us, the knowledge of the truth starts from what is already believed and produces faith in what is not yet believed; and that faith is, so to speak, the very substance of proof. But it seems no sect has ears at all for what is useful; their ears are open only to what leads to pleasure. If even one of them would obey the truth, he would be healed.

Now the cure for self-conceit, like the cure for any ailment, has three parts: finding out the cause; the way to remove it; and third, the training of the soul, getting it used to taking the right attitude toward the judgments it has reached. For a soul darkened by teachings against nature is like a diseased eye: it cannot see the light of truth clearly, and it even overlooks what is right in front of it. They say that in muddy water eels are caught by being blinded. And just as mischievous boys shut the teacher out of the schoolroom, so these men shut the prophecies out of their church, holding them under suspicion because of the rebuke and the warning in them. In fact they stitch together a mass of lies and inventions, so that they may look as if they had a reason for not admitting the Scriptures. So they are not reverent men, since they take no pleasure in God’s commands — that is, in the Holy Spirit. And just as those almonds are called empty whose contents are worthless, not those with nothing at all inside, so we call the men of the sects empty: they have nothing of the counsels of God and the traditions of Christ. Bitter, too, like the wild almond — their teachings start from themselves, apart from such truths as they could not throw away or hide, because the evidence for them was too plain.

As a soldier in war must not leave the post his commander assigned him, so neither must we desert the post assigned by the Word, whom we have received as our guide in knowledge and in life. But most people have not even asked whether there is someone we ought to follow, and who he is, and how he is to be followed. For as the Word is, so must the believer’s life be, if he is to be able to follow God, who brings all things to their end from the beginning by the straight road. But when a man has gone wrong against the Word, and so against God: if it happened because he was made powerless by some impression that struck him suddenly, then he must see to it that he has the impressions of reason ready at hand. And if he has become “common,” as the Scripture says, because he was overpowered by the habits that used to rule him, then the habits must be stopped altogether and the soul trained to fight them. And if it turns out that conflicting teachings are pulling some people away, then those must be cleared out of the road, and such people must go to the men who can reconcile teachings — men who can quiet the untaught and the timid by the charm of the Scriptures, explaining the truth by the way the two Testaments hang together.

But it seems we lean toward ideas built on opinion, even contradictory ones, rather than toward the truth; for the truth is austere and severe. Now there are three states of the soul: ignorance, opinion, knowledge. Those in ignorance are the nations; those in knowledge, the true church; those in opinion, the men of the sects. Nothing could be plainer than this: the ones who know make their statements about what they know, and the others about what they merely hold as opinion — bare assertion, with nothing proved. So they despise one another and laugh at one another. And it happens that the very same thought is held in the highest honor by some and condemned as madness by others. We have learned, in fact, that luxury in pleasure is one thing and belongs to the nations; that wrangling is another and is preferred among the sects; that joy is another and is to be claimed for the church; and that gladness is another again and belongs to the man who truly knows. And just as a man who gives himself to Ischomachus will be made a farmer, and to Lampis a sailor, and to Charidemus a commander, and to Simon a horseman, and to Perdices a trader, and to Crobylus a cook, and to Archelaus a dancer, and to Homer a poet, and to Pyrrho a quibbler, and to Demosthenes an orator, and to Chrysippus a logician, and to Aristotle a student of nature, and to Plato a philosopher — so the man who listens to the Lord and follows the prophecy given through him will be shaped completely into the likeness of his teacher: a god walking about in flesh.

So those who do not follow God where he leads fall from that height. And he leads us in the inspired Scriptures. Though men’s actions run to ten thousand, the sources of all sin are only two: ignorance and inability. Both of them depend on us, since we will not learn, and on the other hand will not hold our craving back. Because of the one, people do not judge well; because of the other, they cannot act on right judgments. A man deluded in his mind will not be able to act rightly, even if he is perfectly able to do what he knows; and a man able to judge what is needed will not keep himself free of blame if he has no power to act. And so two kinds of correction are assigned, one for each kind of sin: for the first, knowledge and clear proof from the testimony of the Scriptures; for the second, the training that goes by the Word, regulated by the discipline of faith and of fear. Both grow into complete love. For the end of the man who truly knows, here in this life, is in my judgment twofold: partly contemplation grounded in knowledge, partly action.

I could wish, then, that the men of these sects would learn from these notes and be set right, and turn to the sovereign God. But if, like the deaf snakes, they will not listen to the song called new, though it is very old, then may they be corrected by God, and undergo a father’s discipline before the Judgment, until they are ashamed and repent — rather than rush on through headlong unbelief and hurl themselves into judgment. For there are partial forms of discipline, which are called corrections, and many of us who have gone wrong incur them by falling away from the Lord’s people. But as children are disciplined by their teacher or their father, so are we by Providence. God does not punish, for punishment is paying back evil for evil. He corrects, but for the good of those he corrects, whether in groups or one by one. I have brought all this forward because I want to turn men who are eager to learn away from any liability to fall into the sects, and because I want to stop them from shallow ignorance, or dullness, or bad disposition, or whatever it ought to be called. And in trying to persuade and lead to the truth those who are not altogether beyond cure, I have used these words. For there are some who cannot bear to listen at all to men who urge them to turn to the truth. They try to make a joke of it, pouring out slander against the truth, claiming for themselves the knowledge of the greatest things in the universe — without having learned, or asked, or worked, or discovered how one idea follows from another. Men like that should be pitied rather than hated for such perversity.

But if a man is curable — able to bear, as one bears the hot iron or the knife, the plain speaking of the truth, which cuts away and burns out false opinions — then let him lend the ears of his soul. And so he will, unless through a leaning toward laziness they push the truth away, or through a desire for reputation try to invent novelties. The lazy are those who, having it in their power to provide themselves with proper proofs for the divine Scriptures out of the Scriptures themselves, pick out only what serves their own pleasures. And the men who crave glory are those who deliberately dodge, with arguments of every sort, the things handed down by the blessed apostles and teachers — things wedded to inspired words — setting human teachings against the divine tradition in order to establish the sect. For in truth, what was left to be said, in the church’s knowledge I mean, by such men as Marcion, say, or Prodicus, and their like, who did not walk the straight road? They could not have surpassed their predecessors in wisdom, so as to discover anything to add to what those men had already said. They would have been satisfied if they had been able to learn what had been laid down before them.

So the man among us who truly knows — he alone, grown old in the Scriptures, holding to the apostolic and churchly rule of teaching — lives most exactly according to the Gospel, and finds the proofs he went looking for, sent out to look for them as he is by the Lord, from the law and the prophets. For the life of the man who truly knows is, in my view, nothing but deeds and words that match the tradition of the Lord. But as the apostle says, “Not everyone has knowledge.” “For I do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, that all were under the cloud, and all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink” — saying plainly that not all who heard the word took in the greatness of knowledge in deed and in word. That is why he added, “But God was not pleased with most of them.” Who is this? The one who said, “Why do you call me Lord, and do not do the will of my Father?” That is the Savior’s teaching, which is spiritual food to us, and a drink that knows no thirst — the water of the life of knowledge. Further, knowledge is said “to puff up.” To which we say: what is said to puff up may be knowledge in appearance only, if a man takes the word to mean “to be swollen.” But if the apostle’s word means, as is rather the case, “to hold great and true thoughts,” the difficulty is solved. So let us follow the Scriptures and establish what has been said. Solomon says, “Wisdom has puffed up her children.” For the Lord did not work conceit by the particulars of his teaching. What he produces is confidence in the truth, and an enlarging of the mind in the knowledge that is handed on by the Scriptures, and contempt for the things that drag a man into sin — and that is what “puffed up” means here. The saying teaches the greatness of the wisdom that instruction plants in her children. Now the apostle says, “I will know not the speech of those who are puffed up, but the power” — if, that is, you understand the Scriptures greatly, which is to say truly, since nothing is greater than truth. For that is where the power of the puffed-up children of wisdom lies. He says, in effect: I shall find out whether you rightly hold great thoughts about knowledge. For God, as David has it, “is known in Judea” — that is, among those who are Israelites according to knowledge; for Judea means “Confession.” So the apostle rightly says, “This — you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not covet; and if there is any other command, it is summed up in this word: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

For we must never do what the men who follow the sects do: adulterate the truth, or steal the rule of the church, by gratifying our own cravings and our vanity and by defrauding our neighbors — when above everything else it is our duty, out of love for them, to teach them to hold to the truth. And so it is expressly said, “Declare his statutes among the nations,” so that they may not be judged, but that those who have listened beforehand may turn. But those who deal treacherously with their tongues have the penalties that stand on record.