A Counterfeit Key

So then, those who cling to godless words and dictate them to others put the divine words to a twisted use rather than a right one. They do not go into the kingdom of heaven themselves, and they do not let the people they have deceived reach the truth either. They do not hold the key that opens the door. What they hold is a false one — a counterfeit key, as people commonly call it — and with it they do not come in the way we come in, through the tradition of the Lord, by drawing the curtain aside. They break in at a side door instead, tunneling secretly through the wall of the church and stepping over the truth, and so they set themselves up as the men who lead the godless soul into the mysteries. [a]

That the human gatherings they held came later than the universal church takes very few words to show. Our Lord’s teaching, at his coming, began under Augustus and Tiberius Caesar and was finished in the middle of Tiberius’s reign. The apostles’ teaching, taking in Paul’s ministry, ends with Nero. It was later, under the emperor Hadrian, that the men who invented the sects appeared, and they went on into the time of Antoninus the Elder — Basilides, for one, though he claims, as his followers boast, that his teacher was Glaucias, the interpreter of Peter. In the same way they allege that Valentinus was a hearer of Theudas, and that Theudas was Paul’s pupil. As for Marcion, who belongs to the same period as these men, he lived as an old man alongside younger ones. And after him Simon listened for a short time to Peter’s preaching. That being so, it is plain, from the church’s great age and its perfect truth, that these later sects, and the ones that came after them in time, were new inventions, counterfeited from the truth.

From what has been said, then, it is my judgment that the true church — the one that is really ancient — is one, and that in it those who are righteous according to God’s purpose are enrolled. For from the very fact that God is one and the Lord is one, what is honorable in the highest degree is praised precisely for being single, since it is an imitation of the one first principle. So the one church is joined to the nature of the One and shares its lot — the church these men are straining to cut apart into many sects. So we say that the ancient and universal church stands alone: in what it is, in how it is conceived, in its origin, in its pre-eminence. It gathers into the unity of the one faith — the faith that comes out of the covenants proper to each time, or rather out of the one covenant given at different times by the will of the one God, through one Lord — those who have already been appointed, whom God marked out beforehand, knowing before the world was founded that they would be righteous. But the pre-eminence of the church, as the principle that makes one out of many, lies in its oneness. In this it surpasses everything else and has nothing like it or equal to it. Of that, though, later.

Some of the sects take their name from a person — the one called after Valentinus, the one after Marcion, the one after Basilides, although these last boast of putting forward the opinion of Matthias; for as the teaching of the apostles was one, so was their tradition. Some take their label from a place, like the Peratae; some from a nation, like the sect of the Phrygians; some from a practice, like the Encratites; some from particular doctrines, like the Docetists and the Haematites; some from a notion of theirs, or from individuals they have honored, like those called Cainites and Ophites; and some from criminal practices and outrages, like the Simonians who are called Entychites.

Let me open a small peep-hole for those who love to contemplate the church, taking it from the law of sacrifices about clean and unclean animals — since that is where ordinary Jews and the sects are marked off, in a hidden way, from the divine church — and then bring this discussion to a close. Scripture presents as clean, and acceptable to God, the animals that have a split hoof and chew the cud, since it is by faith that the righteous gain access to the Father and to the Son. This is the firm footing of those that have the split hoof: they study God’s sayings night and day and chew them over in the soul’s storehouse for what it has been taught. That is the exercise of the man who truly knows, and the Law puts it under the figure of the clean animal chewing its cud. But the animals that have neither of the two marks it sets apart as unclean. [m]

Now the ones that chew the cud but do not have a split hoof stand for the majority of the Jews, who do have God’s sayings but do not have faith, and do not have the step that rests on the truth and carries a man to the Father through the Son. That is also why this kind of cattle is apt to slip: there is no division in the foot, and it is not resting on the twofold support of faith. For it is said, “No one knows the Father except the one to whom the Son reveals him.”

And in the same way the animals that have the split hoof but do not chew the cud are unclean too. These point to the sects, which do walk on the name of the Father and of the Son, but cannot grind and pulverize the plain declaration of God’s sayings; and besides, they do the works of righteousness roughly and without exactness, if they do them at all. To such people the Lord says, “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and not do the things I say?” And the ones that neither have a split hoof nor chew the cud are entirely unclean. As Theognis says,

they are rather “like chaff that the wind drives from the face of the earth,” and like a drop from a bucket.

These matters, then, have now been worked through thoroughly, and the department of ethics has been sketched summarily and in scattered pieces, as I promised. And I have planted here and there through it the teachings that are the seeds of true knowledge, so that finding the sacred traditions would not be easy for anyone who is uninitiated. So let me go on to what I promised. The Stromata are not like plots of ground laid out and planted in regular rows for the delight of the eye. They are more like a shady, shaggy hill planted with laurel and ivy, with apple trees and olives and figs — where the planting deliberately mixes fruit trees with barren ones, because the composition aims at concealment, on account of the men who have the nerve to filch and steal the ripe fruit. Out of it, though, the gardeners will take slips and young plants and transplant them, and so lay out a beautiful park and a delightful grove.

The Stromata, then, take no trouble over arrangement or over style, since there are even cases in which the Greeks deliberately want ornate style to be absent, and quietly drop in the seed of their teachings — teachings not in accordance with the truth — so that a reader has to work hard and be quick at making discoveries. For the baits are many and various, to match the many kinds of fish. And now, after this seventh book of the Stromata, we shall give the account of what comes next in order, beginning again from another starting point.